‘Boss, we have a reliable sighting in the Grapes in Church Street, from half-nine, and then the Monk’s Head, ten-nish.’
‘Lovely. Get Elly to put out an appeal for anybody who saw them in either. Karen, me and Darth’s off to Goldie’s on the Plas. If you could tell Brian Wilton, it looks like we’ll need forensics. And when the pictures come in from the morgue, could you get them sent to me phone?’
Known, inevitably, as the Plascarreg Hilton.
It had once been a row of 1930s brick-built terraced houses, here before there was an estate. Goldie had got the first for peanuts, renting out the bedrooms to working girls, buying out the neighbours one by one as the new estate got developed at the bottom of their backyards and the value of the houses sank. The sign outside said Abbey View, possibly referring to Belmont Abbey, which you were unlikely to see from anywhere on the Plascarreg without a platform crane, although on a clear day you could spot the Tesco tower.
Bliss let Goldie weep for a while. Two weeks’ rent she’d never see, that wasn’t funny. Eventually she looked up, over her lace hanky with the border of red flowers like little blood spots.
‘Shoulda knowed. Soon’s I seen it was you at the door.’
‘Nothing’s set in stone yet, Goldie.’
‘You’s the angel of death, you are, boy.’
Couple of years now since two teenage boys in a stolen Transit had booked in for the night, paying in advance with hot cash from an armed robbery at a petrol station in the Forest of Dean. Two boys, one seventeen, one fifteen, and a bottle of Gordon’s. Oh, and an old. 38 revolver with which they’d played Russian roulette and, at just after three in the morning, one had lost.
‘I never said you wasn’t understanding, mind,’ Goldie said.
‘How long the girls been with you, Goldie?’
‘Four, five months.’ Goldie set light to a roll-up. ‘We connected straight off, see… The Roma?’
‘What? Oh, yeh…’
Romany, Romania? Who knew? Goldie’s origins were obscure. She’d come down from a caravan in the Black Mountains. Before that, it was a caravan somewhere in the South Wales valleys. Some element of gypsy back there – you could see it all over the living room, the brass ornaments and the illustrated plates and the gilt pendulum clocks.
‘We had a…’ Goldie mouthed the ciggy, touched forefingers in the air. ‘Like that, we was.’ The cig waggling. ‘Movin’ in yere, it was like comin’ home. Her kept sayin’ that, her did.’
‘Who?’
‘Maria, was it?’ Goldie pulled out the ciggy, ruby and emerald rings winking. Breathed out some suspiciously herbal smoke. ‘She’ve got the best English. She do’s the talking.’
‘So they were here for the winter, yeh?’
In summer Goldie did B amp; B. Difficult to imagine anybody wanting to spend a holiday on the Plascarreg. But then, there were holidays and holidays. In winter, it was long-stay guests, cheap deals, all meals out.
Bliss watched the skin around Goldie’s eyes crinkling like bits of old bath sponge.
‘Lord above, Mr Francis, this can’t be right. They’s good girls.’
‘Of course.’
A liberal of the old school. All Goldie’s girls were good girls. Bliss’s iPhone was buzzing.
‘Gissa sec, Goldie.’
No message, just the pictures which somehow, when viewed on his phone, made him feel like a sick voyeur. Snuff-porn.
‘Goldie, I’m gonna have to ask you to take a look at a couple of photos.’
‘I en’t their ma.’
‘You’re all right, we’ve had them, you know, prettied up a bit.’
‘Oh, dear Lord.’
Goldie breathed in, slow and phlegmy, then pulled her glasses from their electric-blue plastic case. Bliss flicked from one pic to the other a couple of times and chose the least horrible. Goldie pushed her unlikely blonde ringlets behind her ears, and he handed her the iPhone.
‘Take your time.’
Sitting next to her on the old studio couch, slabs of polished wood, somehow coffin-coloured, set into the armrests. Waiting for her nod and then flicking to the other picture, which was not so nice because of the eye. Given time, they’d’ve found a glass eye.
Bliss counted five clocks ticking before Goldie leaned back and crossed herself.
‘Which is which, Goldie?’
‘The one with the eye… that’s Maria. The one with the English. Lord above, what’s happenin’ to this town?’
‘When d’you last see them?’
‘I’m not sure. Yesterday morning? They left… I dunno, about ten?’
‘To go where? Where’d they go when they left here?’
‘Town. Where’s anybody go?’
‘They say where in town?’
‘Just town. Was they interfered with?’
‘Where would they go at night?’
‘Pubs? Clubs? I don’t know. They only goes out one night a week. Safer yere. We all knows each other on the Plas.’
‘They got any family… anywhere in this country?’
Goldie shook her head.
‘None?’
‘Come over to work on the strawberries, ennit?’
Figured. Thousands of them came across from Eastern Europe to work in the polytunnels.
‘Last year?’
Goldie nodded.
‘And didn’t go back?’
‘A lot don’t.’
‘What did they do after that? Did they get more work?’
‘This and that.’
‘They work for you, Goldie?’
‘Bit of housework.’
‘I mean outside work.’
Goldie’s eyes were narrowing.
‘I’ve always tried to help you, Mr Francis.’
‘And I think it’s been mutual. If not more than mutual. And, in case you forget, this is a mairder investigation.’ Bliss leaning on his accent. ‘We’re nor’all that interested in lifting anybody for minor stuff.’
‘They never done no outside work for me.’
‘Never? Not even when they ran out of cash and couldn’t pay the rent? You never suggested how they might pick up a few quick twenties apiece?’
‘I’m tellin’ you they done cleaning work, an’ that was it.’
‘Where?’
‘Used to be at one of the stores, on the Barnchurch. The factory-outlet place, you know? Wasn’t full-time, and then they got let go.’
‘When was that?’
‘When it closed down.’
‘Yeh, that would figure. When? ’
‘’Bout a month ago?’
‘All right, I’ll ask yer again. Any reason to think they might’ve been doing night work, freelance?’
‘They wouldn’t. I’m tellin’ you. They was religious girls.’
‘What about friends? They have friends among other East Europeans?’
‘Not many, far’s I know.’
‘Boyfriends?’
‘No.’
‘Attractive girls, Goldie.’
‘No boyfriend I knows of. They went around together. They looked out for each other.’
‘All right.’ Bliss stood up. ‘Let’s see their rooms.’
‘Room. They had one room between them.’
He followed her into the hallway. Two neighbouring hallways once, the dividing wall turned into an archway. A reception desk in one corner had a steel grille to the ceiling – well, this was the Plascarreg. One staircase had been taken out, so the other was isolated in the middle, Hollywood baronial.
‘Anybody else in residence just now, Goldie?’
‘It’s quiet, it is. We got a few comin’ in for Easter.’
‘Anybody staying here in the past week?’
‘Occasional one-nighter.’
‘And the odd one-hourer?’
Goldie was like she hadn’t heard. The bedroom doors had big plastic numbers. They went from Room Three to Room Five, Bliss noticed. Room Four was where they’d had to scrape teenage brain cells off the ceiling. Superstitious old girl, Goldie.
She led him along a corridor with three different carpets, stopped at Room Seven, unlocked the door with her master. Bliss put out an arm.
‘We’re gonna stay in the doorway, Goldie. Nobody goes in till crime-scene gets here.’
‘This en’t no crime scene, Mr Francis! I objects to that!’
‘It’s just that we’ll need to examine all their things very carefully. Yeh, it’s likely whoever attacked them it was a random thing, but it may not be. We also need the passports, papers, all that sort of stuff. We need to find the relatives.’