Though Annie had been to Tallinn for a dirty weekend with a DI from Newcastle four years ago, she knew very little about the place. They had done some sightseeing, but not much, sat at tables outside bars in an old part of the city drinking beer — A. Le Coq, as it happened — and eating pasta. The rest of the time they had spent in the hotel room having sweaty sex.
To Annie, that whole part of the world was tainted with the old Soviet curse, and she assumed that the Baltic states were an extension of Russia when it came to crime and Russian Mafia activity. Drugs, people-trafficking and illegal labour scams would be right up there. Perhaps Quinn got involved in something like that, and the Russians were behind it? Weren’t they behind almost everything illegal these days? The girl herself could be Russian. There was no way of telling from the photographs, but she did have that certain sad and tragic aspect to her beauty that Annie had associated with Russian women ever since she saw Doctor Zhivago on late-night television. It was one of Banks’s favourite movies, she knew, but that was because of Julie Christie.
Anyway, there was no point in speculating further. Whatever his motive, and whoever he was, Quinn’s killer had been in the woods at St Peter’s four days ago. They had a few solid leads to him now — the forensics on the tyre tracks and fibres, Quinn’s involvement in the Rachel Hewitt case, and now the blown-up part of one of the blackmail photos showing an A. Le Coq beer mat. She had Haig and Lombard checking if it was sold in other Baltic countries, too, or anywhere else in such quantities as to justify handing out free beer mats to bars — she wasn’t going to make the mistake of assuming too much at this point — but given that Rachel Hewitt had disappeared in Tallinn, and that Quinn had spent a week there working on the case there with the locals, she felt pretty certain about it.
There was very little about the Rachel Hewitt case in DC Gerry Masterston’s research so far, or in Quinn’s old files, which had arrived in the early afternoon. It was hardly surprising, really, Annie thought, as he had been only marginally connected with it. The real stuff would be in Tallinn. In Estonian. Whether it would be possible to get hold of those files if she needed to, she had no idea. In the meantime, she could at least start digging a bit into the background of what happened on that night six years ago.
Rachel Hewitt was to be maid of honour to her best friend Pauline Boyars at her wedding at St Paul’s Church in Drighlington on 5 August 2006. Before that, from 21 to 24 July they were going to Tallinn with four other close female friends for a hen weekend. The girls, all about nineteen years of age, were excited about the trip. They booked their cheap EasyJet flight early, and made sure they all got rooms at the Meriton Old Town Hotel, which someone told them was very comfortable and very close to lots of bars and clubs. To save money, the girls asked for twin beds and doubled up; Rachel shared with Pauline.
On the Friday they arrived, the girls met up in the hotel bar for a drink at six o’clock, then walked into town to find somewhere to eat. It was a hot evening, but they were early enough to get a table outside and enjoy some ‘authentic’ Estonian cuisine of pork in beer, and elk sausage. The idea was to have a relatively civilised and sedate Friday night out, which is exactly what they did, returning to the hotel around 11 p.m.
Saturday was for sightseeing and shopping, then came Saturday night, the big night itself, party time. They all got dolled up in their micro-skirts, spangly tops and fishnets, put on a bit of war paint and headed for the bars and clubs. At least they weren’t wearing bunny ears and tails, or little whiskers painted on their cheeks, as far as Annie could gather from the reports. They started with a few drinks in the hotel bar, then hit the town. After stopping at a few other bars, they ate steak and frites and drank wine outside at a restaurant, and after that things started to get a bit hazy.
Annie realised that she would have to go through the individual statements made by each of the girls before she could build up a clear picture of the order of events, but according to the newspaper and Internet reports, the girls went on to a couple of dance clubs, getting rowdier as the evening wore on. They were seen talking and dancing with various groups of boys over the course of the evening. Pauline was sick in the street, but soon recovered enough to go on with her friends to another bar on the main square.
Naturally, the boys flocked around them, their predatory instincts sensing the lack of inhibitions that comes with drunkenness, expecting easy pickings. According to all the accounts, though, there was no trouble. At least all the girls agreed on that. They moved on to yet another bar with a group of German youngsters they had befriended earlier at a nightclub, and it was maybe twenty minutes or so after that when Pauline began to wonder where Rachel had got to.
They checked all the rooms and toilets of the bar they had just arrived at, but she was nowhere to be seen. One of the others thought she might have been in the toilet when they left the previous bar, and may have missed their leaving, but she was equally sure that they’d told her where they were going. Pauline argued that they can’t have done, as they didn’t decide where they were going until they got outside, and it was the Germans’ idea, anyway.
Somehow, Rachel had become detached from her group.
Pauline asked one of the German boys to accompany her back to the previous bar, but in the winding streets of the Old Town they couldn’t remember exactly where it was, so they eventually gave up. They tried Rachel’s mobile, but all they got was her answering service. The police discovered later that Rachel had forgotten her mobile, left it in her hotel room.
At this point, Pauline said she assumed that Rachel would find her way back to the hotel, or get a taxi to take her there. They didn’t know the city well, having been there only a day, but although it was winding and confusing, the Old Town wasn’t very big, and Pauline thought that anyone wandering around for long enough was bound to return to the place they started from eventually. Besides, Rachel marched to the beat of her own drummer, and whatever she was up to, she would come back when she was ready.
Even so, Rachel’s defection put a bit of a damper on the night, so they all returned to the hotel, disappointing the German boys. They expected to find Rachel slumped in the bar, or passed out in her room, but when Pauline went back to her room to lie down, she wasn’t there. She said the room started spinning, and she was sick again. Then she fell asleep, or passed out, and when she awoke it was daylight. There was still no sign of Rachel. She felt awful; her head ached; her stomach churned, but despite the ravages of the hangover, concern for her friend gnawed away at her. It wasn’t like her to stay away all night. Pauline started to think that Rachel must have got lost somewhere and maybe ended up at another hotel, or maybe got caught up in a group and gone to a party. At worst, she worried that her friend had hurt herself, got hit by a car or something, and was in hospital. She went down to the hotel reception and asked to speak to the manager. The young assistant manager who came out to talk to her was concerned enough to bring in the police, and thus the whole nightmare began. Of course, the girls had drunk so much and visited so many bars and clubs that it took the police close to two days to get any sense of where they had been and what they had done, and by then, anyone who might have been there on the night in question was long gone.
Rachel Hewitt was never seen again, and no clues to her whereabouts were ever discovered.