‘I’ve seen it,’ said Banks. ‘I know.’
‘Then you will understand. Did you also know that not all the workers were men? There were three young women also, and two couples, all together in the same damp, cold dormitory. Sometimes some of the men tried to touch the women. There were fights. Mihkel said he tried to help. He spoke to a girl from Poland and another from Lithuania. The third girl never talked to anybody. Mihkel didn’t know where she was from, but her skin was darker. He thought Kazakhstan, or Georgia, perhaps. For the privilege of living there, they had to pay Rod’s Staff Ltd. Sixty euros each week in rent. This was deducted from their pay.’
‘Where did they work?’
‘All over the north, from Carlisle to Teesside. Darlington. Middlesbrough. Stockton.’
‘What sort of work?’
‘The worst. Slaughterhouses, chemical packaging plants, fertiliser factories. You name it. The work was hard and the hours long. Mihkel’s first job was at a mushroom farm, picking mushrooms, but that was only for one shift. He never saw any money from that. Then he was sent to a frozen-food factory on day shifts, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, picking any bad beans or peas from the conveyor belt after they had been frozen and before they were packaged.’
‘A lot more than fifty hours,’ Banks said.
‘Yes. After two weeks he had worked a hundred and sixty-eight hours and he received his first payslip. It was for sixty-five euros.’
‘How did they explain that?’
‘There were many discrepancies. He was not paid minimum wage to start with, but only five euros for each hour. Would this be easier in pounds?’
‘No, it’s OK,’ said Banks. ‘I can keep track. Besides, there’s not a hell of a lot of difference these days.’
‘Too true,’ Erik agreed. ‘Perhaps we should have kept the kroon. Anyway, Mihkel was also told that Rod’s Staff Ltd withhold two weeks’ wages and pay... what is the word?’
‘In arrears?’ Banks suggested.
‘Yes. Two weeks in arrears. Of course, one hundred and twenty euros for two weeks’ rent had also been deducted, but had not been included in the deductions on his payslip. By then, he also owed money to people, and when he had paid them back, he had almost nothing left. This was when someone from Rod’s Staff Ltd, perhaps even Mr Flinders himself, approached him and told him he knew someone who lent money to people in Mihkel’s situation and asked if he was interested. Mihkel said yes, he was, as he had no money left for cigarettes or food. Anyway, this was the stage of the investigation he had reached when he was killed. It was on Tuesday evening he told me about the payslip and the errors on it.’
‘How did he get to work and back?’
‘Someone with a van picked them up in the morning and dropped them off at night. They got weak coffee and stale bread for breakfast. If they were lucky and had enough money, they could just make a dash to the nearest fast-food outlet before the van arrived to take them back, and buy a burger or fried chicken.’
‘Are you sure he never mentioned someone called Corrigan?’
‘No. I will check my notes, but I would remember. I have a very good memory.’
It was too much of a coincidence, Banks thought, for someone else to be in the same business in the same general area. Corrigan must have used his minions to reach out to operations like Flinders’, while he remained at the business centre in Leeds. The two men knew each other, had drinks together, so it seemed obvious to Banks that they were in cahoots over this. Flinders created and supplied the victims, not only on city housing estates, but also in remote dormitories like Garskill Farm, which cost him nothing and netted him about a grand a week in rents. To say nothing of the kickbacks he was getting from the employers.
On Wednesday morning, more than likely, the killer had arrived at Garskill Farm and Mihkel had been kept back from work that day. He was tortured, at which time he had probably agreed to the mobile call to Quinn to set him up, arrange to meet in the woods later that night, which had set off the detective’s alarm bells, though they had not rung loudly enough to keep him away from the rendezvous completely and save his life. Quinn had, however, kept the photographs in his room, and perhaps had planned, if all turned out to be above board, to go back and get them for Mihkel. But it wasn’t Mihkel who turned up in the woods at St Peter’s that night.
‘Who knew of Bill Quinn’s friendship with Mihkel?’ he asked Erik.
‘I don’t know. It was not something they hid. Anyone could know. Sometimes Mihkel wrote updates on the Rachel Hewitt case, and he often mentioned his connection with the English policeman.’
‘In the newspaper?’
‘Yes.’
‘So anyone at all could know?’
‘It would surely not be of much interest to anyone. What are you thinking?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Banks. ‘But someone wanted Bill Quinn out of the way, and that same person also wanted Mihkel out of the way. Can you think of anyone who would want that?’
‘No.’
‘I’m missing something,’ Banks went on. ‘There has to be some connection between Rachel Hewitt and the illegal worker scam.’
‘Why? How?’
‘Because we believe someone sent the same killer to get rid of both Bill Quinn and Mihkel.’
‘But why bring up Rachel Hewitt? You have already said that Bill Quinn was also involved in investigating the workers.’
‘That’s true. Maybe he was working both sides.’
‘And perhaps with Mihkel’s help he was about to become a danger to them, and they knew that? Perhaps they were both killed for the same reason. The Rachel Hewitt case was simply what brought them together in the first place, not the reason for either of the murders.’
Banks had always been aware of that possibility, that he could be wandering way off target by taking Rachel Hewitt into consideration. But there was something about her disappearance that bothered him, and something had obviously been gnawing away at Bill Quinn ever since his trip to Tallinn six years ago. There were the photographs with the unknown girl, too. Banks knew, however, that he had to try to keep an open mind on this, that he was in danger of allowing one set of facts to obscure or distort another. Maybe the two events weren’t connected, but that didn’t mean Banks shouldn’t try to find out what had happened to Rachel as well as solve Quinn’s and Mihkel’s murders. He didn’t think he could go through the rest of his days not knowing what happened, the way Bill Quinn had. Look what it had done to him. And her parents deserved better.
Banks took out copies of Bill Quinn’s photographs, including the blow-ups and the cropped version showing only the girl. He laid them before Erik on the table. ‘We believe that these photographs were taken here in July 2006, when Bill Quinn was over at the start of the Rachel Hewitt case. This is the only real evidence that convinces me that what happened to Bill Quinn was connected with Rachel’s disappearance, otherwise I’d accept that he and Mihkel were both killed because of the migrant worker scam. The rest is simply copper’s instinct. But the photographs are important. Trust me on that. We believe that someone set him up with this girl. It’s possible that she drugged him or got him so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing, then got him up to his hotel room so these photographs could be taken. Are you with me so far?’
Erik looked puzzled, but he said, ‘Yes.’
‘We don’t know why, but one good guess is that he had somehow or other got close to whoever it was abducted Rachel. Everyone said he was haunted by the case right up until his death. I wonder. One thing that would explain it is that he found out what happened to Rachel and was unable to do anything about it, that he was blackmailed into silence. Bill Quinn was devoted to his wife, but he stumbled this once, and it came back on him in a very big way. When his wife died a month ago, that silence was no longer so important. What he had to do was find a way of making his knowledge public without revealing that he had hidden the truth for six years.’