Ursula Mardna stood up with them, leaning over the desk to shake hands. ‘You would never waste your time in Tallinn, Hr Banks. Especially as we have such wonderful weather this week. Goodbye. Enjoy yourselves.’
That, Banks thought, was what Rätsepp had wanted them to do, too. Have a holiday, don’t bother chasing ghosts. But it only made Banks all the more suspicious.
‘Since when have we been arresting people for begging in the street?’ Annie asked PC Geordie Lyttleton, who had just nipped into the Major Crimes office to report an incident.
‘Well we don’t usually,’ said Lyttleton, ‘but she was getting quite aggressive, ma’am. She scared the living daylights out of one old lady, following her down the street shouting some sort of gibberish after her.’
‘And what sort of gibberish did it turn out to be?’
‘Polish gibberish, ma’am. She can’t speak English. Jan from Traffic speaks a bit of Polish, though. His mum’s family’s from Warsaw. Anyway, he got it out of her that she has hardly eaten since last Wednesday. She lost her home and left her job. She was in a bit of a state. What she actually meant was that she was squatting up at some ruined farm and—’
‘Garskill Farm?’
‘She didn’t know what it was called. I just thought, with the murder and all... well, there might be a link of some sort.’
‘Excellent thinking, PC Lyttleton. Good work. We’ll make a detective of you yet. Where is she now?’
‘Well, ma’am,’ said Lyttleton, scratching his head. ‘She was bit, erm, aromatic, if you catch my drift, rather ripe, so I took her down to the custody suite and got WPC Bosworth to show her to the showers and fix her up with one of those disposable Elvis suits.’
Annie smiled. He meant the coveralls they gave to prisoners while their clothes were being examined for trace evidence. A bit of embroidery in the right places and they might look a bit like the jumpsuits Elvis Presley wore in his Las Vegas shows. The basement had been modernised recently, and there were decent shower facilities for the use of anyone being held there. Letting the girl use them was stretching it a bit, but if Lyttleton was right, it beat sitting in a small warm room with her as she was. ‘Did you arrest her? Charge her?’
‘No. Not yet. I thought I—’
‘Well done, lad.’ She thought of the starving girl, set the vestiges of her vegetarianism aside, put some money on the table and said, ‘Go and get her a Big Mac, large fries and a Coke, will you, and get someone to send DS Stefan Nowak over from next door, if he’s not too busy. I know he speaks Polish.’
‘Yes, ma’am. What shall I—’
‘When she’s finished with the shower, take her up to interview room two and let her eat there. Try to put her at ease. Tell her she’s nothing to be frightened of.’
‘She doesn’t understand English, ma’am.’
‘Do your best, Constable. A kind smile and gentle tone go a long way.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Interview room two was no different from any of the others, except that it had a viewing room beside it, with a one-way mirror. Annie wanted to see what sort of shape the girl was in before Stefan arrived, so she installed herself in the tiny room and waited there.
The girl was shown into the interview room. A lost, pathetic figure in the overlarge jumpsuit, small and frail, skinny as a rail, clearly scared, wide-eyed, starving and exhausted, damp brown hair clinging to her cheeks and neck, she seemed no older than fourteen, though Annie estimated she was probably eighteen or more. When the door closed and the girl thought she was alone, she flicked her eyes around the room as if checking for monsters in the corners, and then just sat there and started to cry. It made Annie want to cry herself, it was so bloody heartbreaking. Just a frightened, hungry kid, and there was no one here to comfort her, to hold her and tell her that she was loved and everything would be all right. You didn’t have to be a Guardian reader to raise a tear or two for that predicament.
Lyttleton entered the interview room and handed over a McDonald’s package. Before Annie even had the chance to feel guilty and wish she’d sent her a salad sandwich or a tofu burger instead, the girl fell on it and ripped off the wrapping paper. Annie had never seen anything quite like it, but it reminded her of one of those nature shows on BBC with David Attenborough. In a matter of moments, burger, fries and Coke were gone. Lyttleton had been decent enough to leave her alone to eat — he must have suspected it would not be a pretty sight — and Annie now felt guilty that she had been riveted to the spot by such a personal degradation as someone eating like there’s no tomorrow. She felt like a voyeur, or a participant in a sick reality TV show.
When the girl had finished, she carefully picked up all the scattered wrapping paper and put it in the wastepaper basket, then she used one of the serviettes to wipe the table where it was stained with grease or ketchup. Christ, Annie thought.
A few moments later, DS Stefan Nowak arrived in the viewing room. Annie explained the situation. ‘Can you help?’ she asked him.
Nowak looked through the one-way mirror at the girl. ‘I can speak the language, if that’s what you mean. I’m not a translator, though. It’s a special skill I don’t have.’
‘This isn’t official,’ Annie said. ‘We’ll get a statement and all the rest the correct way later. Right now, I need information.’
‘Does AC Gervaise know?’
‘I’m sure she would agree if she were here.’
Stefan grinned and held up his hands. ‘OK, OK. Only asking. Come on, then. Let’s have at it.’
The room still smelled of McDonald’s, and it made Annie feel slightly queasy. Fish and chicken she could handle, but she always avoided red meat. The girl jumped up when they entered, but she stopped short of running away and curling up in the corner. Instead, she regarded them sullenly and fearfully and sat down again slowly. She had a sulky, downturned mouth, lips quivering on the verge of tears and dark chocolate eyes. Her fingernails were badly bitten down, some showing traces of blood around the edges. All in all, she was probably a very pretty girl under normal circumstances, Annie thought, whenever she was lucky enough to experience them.
‘Could you ask her name, please, Stefan?’ Annie said.
A brief conversation followed. ‘She says it’s Krystyna,’ Nowak said. ‘After her grandmother. She wants to know when you are going to let her go and what she is accused of doing.’
‘Tell her she’s got nothing to be afraid of,’ Annie said. ‘I just want to ask her a few questions, and then we’ll see what we can do to help her.’
Nowak translated. Lyttleton came in with a pot of hot coffee and three styrofoam cups, powdered milk and artificial sweetener. Annie guessed the girl might crave real sugar, but then she’d just had a large Coke. It was a wonder she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.
‘Ask her how old she is,’ Annie said.
Stefan talked with Krystyna and said, ‘Nineteen in July.’
She’s of age, then, Annie thought. Though of age for what, she didn’t know. For the life she had been leading? ‘Where does she come from?’
Nowak spoke to Krystyna, and the answer came slowly, hesitantly.
‘She from a small town in Silesia,’ he said. ‘Pyskowice. Industrial. Coal mining.’ He paused. ‘She... I mean, she doesn’t speak very good... Her Polish is very... provincial. She’s not well educated.’
‘Spare us the Polish class distinctions, Stefan. Just do the best you can, OK?’
Nowak’s eyes narrowed. ‘OK.’
Annie had always thought Stefan could be a bit of a stuck-up elitist prick at times. He was well educated and probably descended from some Polish royal family. Maybe he was a prince. She’d heard there were a lot of Polish princes about. Maybe it was a good line for getting laid. Stefan did all right in that department, she’d heard. She wondered if a line like that would have worked on Rachel, with her dreams of wealth and opulence. Then she got back to the matter at hand. ‘Ask her why she came here.’