Fifty-Eight

Two months had passed. Under further questioning, Alan revealed that the name of the girl in the woods at Sandringham was Ioana Sala. She’d been living at the caravan site, where she was known as Joanna Sale. That she had the same name as Kevan de Vries’ wife was an irony not lost on Tim Yates. When the police visited the caravan, they discovered two other girls living there. They took away Joanna’s hairbrush and some items of clothing, as well as a passport in her name. DNA tests on hairs from the hairbrush confirmed that the body in the woods was Joanna’s. The two girls, who were both very young, were taken into care by social services. Further enquiries and searches produced about twenty other girls, some living in caravans, some lodging with de Vries employees. All were in their teens or early twenties. Tim continued to hope that Sentance had devised some kind of repatriation scheme for the girls as they grew too old to be commercially useful, but Sentance had covered his tracks with almost preternatural efficiency. The police could find no trace of evidence relating to the girls or their clients, either at his house or at any of the de Vries plants. Margaret Nugent’s files held records only for the girls they had discovered. There was no folder for Joanna Sale.

Professor Salkeld had managed to detect fingerprints on the skin of both Joanna and Dulcie Wharton. They were an exact match with Harry Briggs’, which the police already had on record from minor crimes that he’d committed in the past. Briggs was charged with the two murders. Tony Sentance had still not been found: he seemed to have vanished into thin air. Tim spent many hours interrogating Briggs and told him repeatedly that he believed that Tony Sentance had masterminded the whole project. He pointed out that Sentance had deserted him and asked him why he was being loyal to the man who had betrayed him. If Briggs would help the police, they would ensure that his co-operation worked to his own advantage. On more than one occasion Briggs grew very agitated, but he continued to refuse to say a single word about Sentance. Finally Briggs’ solicitor stepped in and asked Tim not to harass his client.

Tim and his colleagues began to prepare a case against the supervisors, but they knew it was flimsy. There was no evidence that they had kept a brothel. Although Tim was certain that they must have been in it for financial gain and therefore had been profiting from immoral earnings, he could find no evidence of unusual payments into their bank accounts. Sentance had taken money from several of the de Vries accounts and presumably used some of this to pay Harry Briggs, but Sentance’s own account also revealed no payments that couldn’t be explained. As for Margaret Nugent, on the face of it she was as clean as a whistle. It came as no surprise to Tim that her bank account, although containing substantial savings, was fed solely by her salary and unless he could prove that she had falsified or destroyed staff records, she was in the clear.

The police had been stymied by a conspiracy of silence. The girls refused to testify against anyone. They didn’t seem to be afraid of the de Vries supervisors; their demeanour towards them was rather one of gratitude to the people who had helped them. They seemed not to understand that they had been exploited, degraded and their lives put in danger by these same people. Conversely, conditioned perhaps by their experiences in their mother country, they showed to the police nothing but implacable hostility and defiance. Tim knew that he would have to prosecute them for travelling on false passports and that this would probably mean that they’d be deported, but that in itself seemed a very hollow victory. He would be forced to turn the victims into criminals.

He had no proof that the supervisors were involved in the passport forgeries and indeed he believed them when they said that they weren’t. He was convinced that Sentance alone had engineered the forgeries, probably assisted by a professional forger who had long since melted back into London or one of the world’s other great anonymising metropolises.

They had to arrest Sentance in order to make further progress. But where was he? In the whole of his career, Tim had rarely felt so frustrated.