Laughing again, Wexford said he could, making a mental note to find out what and where The Bishop’s Avenue was. ‘And did Ms Baird have any luck?’
‘She went to the Kilburn address and saw Vladlena. But Vladlena wouldn’t talk to her. Not then. She seemed to be terrified to say anything while she was indoors. I mean inside a house. She and Sophie arranged to meet in a café in Kilburn next day, but when Sophie went there she had disappeared. Mrs Kataev said the same thing. She’d disappeared.’
‘When was this?’
‘Let me think. Two years ago or a bit more. It was summer. I remember Vladlena had a big thick coat, very shabby, and she wore it every day through the winter and spring. She wasn’t wearing it. When she came into the house that day with the shopping after old Mrs MD had accosted her she was wearing a dress, a cotton dress. Her arms were bare.’
Wexford thanked David Goldberg, took Mrs Kataev’s address and phone number from him and said he might want to see him again, but gave him no explanation for his questions and none was asked for. Leaving, he noticed that while Goldberg seemed happy to open the front door he stood back from it, a full yard from the daylight and the fresh air.
John Scott-McGregor, on the other hand, marched out of his house in Hall Road, forcing Wexford to take a step backwards.
‘You again,’ are not pleasant words to be greeted with, but Wexford was used to worse.
‘I was hoping to have a word with Ms Baird.’
‘You hope in vain. She’s not here. She’s at work.’
Wexford didn’t pursue it. Instead he walked back across Hamilton Terrace and Abercorn Place to the Edgware Road. There he got on the Number 16 bus for Kilburn and Brondesbury Villas where Mrs Kataev lived. The street surprised him. Kilburn High Road might be run down in some parts and blatantly gaudy in others, but Brondesbury Villas was staid and dignified. Two words seldom heard these days came to mind, ‘select’ and ‘respectable’. And Irina Kataev herself seemed both those things, a thin, upright, elderly woman who spoke precise English with a slight and attractive accent. The hallway of her house and the living room into which she took him, were hygienically clean and airy. Mrs Kataev herself wore a black dress with a red cardigan over it.
‘I wish I could help you,’ she said. ‘I have worried about her. She gave me no notice that she would be leaving. One day she came home as usual from Mr Goldberg and went up to her room. She was in her room alone all evening. She was a quiet girl. She kept herself to herself, as I believe you say. Next day she was in her room all day. I think now that she was afraid to go out – like that poor Mr Goldberg.’
‘When did she go?’
‘I heard her on her phone many times. I listened because I was worried about her. She was only just nineteen, you know. Next day, very early in the morning – it must have been early because it was before I got up at six – she left and had with her the one suitcase she came with. She owed me some rent and she left the correct sum for me in an envelope.’
‘How long had she lived with you, Mrs Kataev?’
‘For about two years. Before that she had had a room in a flat in Kensal, very dirty and nasty, she said. She came here from the Ukraine in two thousand and six and all this you are asking about is two years ago and more.’
‘How did she come from the Ukraine to this country?’
‘Like they all do. In a minibus. She and her sister who was with her, they had to pay quite a lot of money to come. She told me there was some sea on the way, the last part – she meant the Channel – and when they were in England they were taken from the minibus and were put into a trailer. She and her sister had been told by one of the other girls that they were not to be trained as models like they expected, but to become servants to rich people. They would be paid, but for a while everything they earned would be to pay the people who had brought them here. She thought she had already paid them, so she ran away. She ran away that night, but her sister was afraid to go with her. For my part, I think they were to be something else to rich men. You understand me?’
Wexford nodded. ‘When she ran away, where did she go?’
‘She had a cousin here, in London. She is married to an Englishman who found her through a – I don’t know how to say it – an agency? For dating? For looking for wives?’
‘I understand.’
‘Vladlena had no money. She hitch-hiked to London and she walked, she slept on the street, she begged. At last she found this woman, but she would let her stay only two nights. Her husband was not a nice man. He was old, forty years older than Vladlena’s cousin and this woman worked for him like a servant. It was not a happy situation. But the cousin helped her find a room and told her how she could be a cleaner.’
Such stories were not uncommon. Wexford found himself wishing that David Goldberg had obeyed his instinct, taken the plunge and offered to marry Vladlena. But he hadn’t and now it was too late. Should he advise Mrs Kataev to report Vladlena as a missing person? Probably not. Vladlena herself would be too frightened of the authorities to answer such a call.
‘Do you know the cousin’s name and address?’
‘I don’t,’ said Irina Kataev. ‘Even if I did it would be no use. Vladlena wouldn’t go back there. The husband, the old man, made a – I don’t know how to say it …’
‘An unwelcome advance to her?’
‘That is it exactly. An unwelcome advance.’
‘Can you remember her sister’s name?’
‘Vladlena called her Alyona.’
‘Would you spell that, please?’
‘A-L-Y-O-N-A.’
He walked back up the High Road, looking for a street which would cut through to West Hampstead. Someone had told him that in days gone by Irish immigrants had settled in Kilburn and in the name ‘Biddy Mulligan’s’ on a pub there was evidence of that, but now it seemed that people from the Middle East and Asia had overtaken them. Women in burkas and some in the all-obscuring niqab from which only the wearer’s eyes were visible, shopped alongside an indigenous population almost universally in anoraks, hoods and padded coats. A small establishment – that was the appropriate word for it, he thought – advertised beauty treatments and various types of massage, hair extensions, waxing and nail enhancement. Its name, Doll-up, though quite possibly referring to a woman’s preparing herself to go out on a date, had a less innocent ring to it, implying that whatever blameless activities went on at street level, the true purpose of the place was concentrated upstairs. The poster filling most of its window showed a very beautiful young woman of South-east Asian origin, wearing a white overall which left most of her long bare brown legs uncovered, administering a ‘Taiwanese’ massage to an ancient wrinkled man of about ninety. Shoppers passed it by indifferently without so much as a glance.
Wexford thought of the story of Tithonus, the shepherd boy whom Eos, goddess of the dawn fell in love with. She asked the gods to make him immortal and her wish was granted, but she failed to ask them to give him eternal youth. Tithonus grew old while she remained ever-young, he grew bent and wrinkled, shrivelled like the man in the poster. At last Eos took pity on him and turned him into the cicada he now so closely resembled. No reinvigorating massages in those days, Wexford reflected as he turned into Iverson Road.
At police headquarters Tom Ede suggested to him that they have lunch together. Not in the canteen, if Wexford didn’t mind, but in a small French restaurant in West End Lane. It was the first invitation as such Wexford had received from Tom and he felt gratified.
‘It won’t turn out to be La Punaise, will it?’ he said, but Tom had forgotten all about the disguised pin number.
Lunch, though French, was to be abstemious. Tom didn’t drink and though he offered Wexford a glass of wine, he made it plain that to see a companion drinking alcohol while he had to abstain put him under too much of a strain. ‘I wasn’t exactly an alcoholic,’ Tom said, ‘but I was heading that way. The quack said my liver wasn’t all it ought to be so I took the plunge and gave up altogether. I had my faith, of course, and that helped. It always does.’