twenty-seven

It was halfway through the next morning before Nancy was discharged from hospital after undergoing a battery of tests. They were all clear, but the duty doctor had recommended bed rest and no excitement, and agreed that she would be better at home in familiar surroundings rather than in a busy ward. If he had any questions about the presence of three people who were clearly not family members, he was discreet enough not to ask.

Gina shepherded Nancy upstairs into her bedroom and made sure she was settled, then closed the door and joined the others downstairs.

“She’s groggy,” she reported, entering the kitchen. The kettle was roaring, the button held down by Vaslik to prevent it switching off. “Thankfully she’ll be out for a while and I can crash.” She helped herself to coffee and checked the CCTV monitors, then gave a questioning look at Vaslik and Ruth. They had warned her about the bugs they’d found, and that others might be present. “So what do we do? Act like we didn’t find them or go outside each time we need to talk?”

“Act normally,” Vaslik suggested quietly. “They know we’re here now, so there’s no point pretending. They’ll also know we’ve found some of the bugs. What we don’t want to do is let them in on everything we know.”

“Jesus, how much is that?”

“Not a lot, yet,” said Ruth. “But Slik’s right: they don’t know what we’ve discovered yet. If we can keep them guessing, they might make a mistake.”

“So we wait for them to make the next move?”

“Pretty much—at least, outwardly. It’s all we can do.”

“That sounds like you have a plan.”

“Maybe I do.” She had been thinking about what other avenues they could explore instead of sitting on their hands and letting the kidnappers dictate the game; any link they could follow up that might lead to the people behind the abduction. Since Michael Hardman seemed to be beyond anybody’s immediate reach, it left few options to work on. But there was one they hadn’t yet touched on.

Tiggi Sgornik. The nanny.

The house Tiggi had given as her address was in the middle of a Victorian terrace on a quiet street fronting a large cemetery. A low and rusted iron gate made a show of shielding two wheelie bins in a tight front yard with broken paving, and mismatched curtains and a peeling fascia showed the presence of renters, not residents.

Ruth drove past without stopping and hung a left at the end of the street and stopped. They were between two rows of houses at a point where the gardens at the back of each row butted up against each other. Some of the buildings had been extended into the gardens, giving a lot more room inside than a first look might indicate.

“How many residents, I wonder?” she pondered.

Vaslik assessed the size of the properties. “I’m not familiar with these places, but at a guess, could be anything up to a dozen.”

She agreed. From what Nancy had said the house sounded like a base for a shifting population of visitors and transients from the homeland, ever changing, staying for a short while to fuel up and find another job before moving on. The same pattern could be found almost anywhere in London, the only difference being language and colour, each drawn to their own like magnets.

They left the car and walked round to the front door. The street was quiet, the row of houses silent and uniformly neat and uncommunicative. There was no sound coming from behind the door. Sleeping off late shifts, probably.

Vaslik leaned on the bell-push.

A movement behind coloured glass. The door swung back to reveal a dishevelled youth of about eighteen in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt, scratching his chest.

“Yeah, what?” Even in two words, his accent came out as if he were chewing on ground glass.

“Is Tiggi in?” Ruth tried to ignore the smell of over-heated and humid air drifting around the youth’s shoulders like sour gas. With it came the smell of spices. A voice called out from the depths of the building but he didn’t respond, busy trying to process the question and formulate a reply.

“Who wants her?” he said finally, eyes flicking coolly from Ruth to Vaslik. They stayed longer on the American, assessing the clothes and face, apparently not liking what they saw.

Wrong answer, thought Ruth. You’re no great actor. Now we know we’ve got the right place. “She didn’t turn up for work. We’re worried about her.”

The gears ground slowly for a few seconds, then the youth said, “She not here anymore.” He began to close the door.

Vaslik’s hand shot out and stopped it. The youth pushed harder but it was no contest.

“Hey—you can not do this—”

“Too late. We’re in.” Vaslik moved him aside without effort, pinning him against the wall with his forearm. The youth struggled but got nowhere.

Ruth checked the surroundings. They were in a narrow hallway running the length of the house, with a stairway to their left and two doors opening to the right. The atmosphere was close and dark, not helped by dark wallpaper and a scrubby brown carpet. A low hum of music was coming from the first door, which was either a living room or doubling as a spare bedroom, and voices rumbled from the end of the hallway, followed by a burst of laughter.

Vaslik said something to the youth. He spoke quietly and quickly, their faces no more than six inches apart. Ruth didn’t understand a word but the threat was as clear as a bell.

Whatever he’d said had an immediate impact on the youth. He stopped struggling and went quite still. Only his eyes continued moving like marbles in a pinball machine.

Vaslik dropped his hand, allowing the youth to go free, and stepped back.

They followed the youth to the back of the house, and found three men in a large kitchen area. Two, dressed in jeans and tracksuit tops, were drinking coffee. They looked tired, their faces drawn and unshaven. The third, a large man with a bald head and hands like clamps, was stirring something in a large pot on the stove. It smelled of tomatoes and onions, and spices Ruth couldn’t place. The place was surprisingly tidy and clean, and clearly somebody had control over what happened in this room at least.

The two coffee drinkers froze before putting down their mugs, while the cook stopped stirring and raised his chin in query at the newcomers.

“Who is this?” His voice was another surprise; it was soft, the accent obvious but the words precise, as if he had practiced his speech with great care.

The youth said something and all three men stared at Vaslik, who smiled without comment. Then the cook said something to the youth, who turned and left the room, throwing a quick sneer at Vaslik as he went.

“Care to fill me in?” Ruth murmured. She could feel the atmosphere in the room like a heavy fog, and wondered how long it would be before one of these men made a run for the door. He wouldn’t get very far; the back door was blocked by a dustbin, which left the only way out down the hallway to the front. She figured they could already bid goodbye to the youth, who’d been given a head start.

“I explained who we are,” Vaslik replied. “That we are from Immigration and need to speak to Miss Sgornik. Nobody else, just her.” He nodded at the three men. “They’re now trying to decide if it’s worth telling us to go screw ourselves or whether we might bring down the ceiling on their status if they don’t cooperate.”

Ruth understood their reaction. It was very likely that there were some illegals in the house, and at least two of these three might be without papers. She could hear voices and footsteps coming down the stairs as the building woke up to the presence of newcomers, no doubt alerted by the youth, and somebody called out from the front room.

They didn’t have much time before a crowd gathered, and she fixed her attention on the cook, who seemed to be top dog here.

“We’ve already had a long day,” she said quietly. “All we want is to know where Miss Sgornik is.” She gestured over her shoulder as somebody shouted from the stairs. “Tell your friends to go back to bed or whatever they were doing; we’re not interested in them.” She held her phone close to her mouth, like a radio. “Or we call in back-up and go to town on this place. Your call.”

“Wait.” The cook raised a hand and gave instructions to one of the coffee drinkers, who turned and disappeared back up the hallway. He said something to the men gathered at the bottom of the stairs which had them retreating fast, two of them out the front door and the others back up the way they had come.

Great weeding-out process, Ruth thought, and turned back to baldy, the cook.

He was looking at Vaslik. “You’re American?”

“Yes, I am. Problem?”

“Why are you here, dealing with this … stuff.” He gestured at the house with his spoon, flicking a gob of tomato sauce onto the floor. He cursed under his breath and grabbed a cloth and bent to clean it up.

“I’m on an exchange program,” Vaslik explained. “Not that it concerns you. What’s your name, by the way? I’m Andrei.”

“They call me Aron. This is my house.”

“OK, Aron. Where’s Miss Sgornik?”

The cook dropped his spoon in the pot and slid it off the heat. “OK. We don’t want trouble, all right? If I help you, you’ll go and leave everything as it is?”

“Yes.”

“And you?” He looked at Ruth.

“Of course. Guides’ promise.”

He looked sceptical, but nodded. “Tiggi didn’t come back. We don’t know where she is. Probably on a yacht somewhere with her boyfriend.”

“Does this boyfriend have a name?”

“Must do. But I don’t know it. She never said. All I know is, she started talking about going away soon, when she had more money. Somewhere warm and nice, not like this place or home.” His mouth took a sour twist. “I think she has ambition, our Tiggi. Trouble is, her brains don’t match her looks, you know?” He snapped his fingers in thought. “She’s like a fine racehorse but can’t run for shit, you know what I mean?”

“You sound bitter,” said Vaslik. “Did she leave you for this boyfriend?”

Aron gave a rueful smile. “No, not me. I am not in her class. I am too settled for her. I work in a restaurant and that’s where I’m happy. Tiggi, though, she wants the world.” He spread his arms wide. “Trouble is, she don’t know the dangers out there.”

“Why do you say that?” said Ruth.

“Because she’s innocent—is that right—innocent?”

“Naïve.”

“OK. Better. Naïve. She think money is everything, will bring happiness and a good life.” He shrugged. “Maybe it will. But I don’t think so. Last time she came home, it was very late and she had a mark here.” He pointed at his face, just beneath one eye.

“What happened?”

“I ask her but she won’t say. I tell her if it’s her boyfriend, I’ll go round and deal with him but she goes mad and tells me to mind my business. She looked real scared. I tell you, there’s something not good going on there.”

“You’re worried about her.”

“Yes, I guess so. She’s a sweet girl, you know?” He blushed, the colour spreading across his crown as he revealed his true feelings. “But so damned naïve.”

Love-struck, thought Ruth. She felt sorry for him. “We’d like to see her room.”

Aron nodded. “Sure. I take you.” He adjusted the heat on the cooker, then gave rapid instructions to the other man, pointing at the pot and making a stirring gesture. “But slow, understand?” he said in English, for the visitors’ benefit. “Not like digging ditch. Slow. Or you don’t eat.”

He led the way upstairs to the top of the house at the rear, where a dormer window looked out over the back gardens. The room was small, neat and tidy, plainly decorated but with a few frilly items showing that the owner was a girl with a taste for colour.

“Nice,” said Ruth. “Are all the rooms like this?”

He snorted. “You kidding, lady? The others, they live like rats, all together and lazy. Tiggi is the only woman and she pay more rent, so she get the best room.”

“Doesn’t that pose problems, all those men and one woman?”

He shook his head. “Never. They respect women or they have me to deal with.” He ducked his head. “Anyway, Tiggi has this look, you know?”

“Look?” Vaslik.

“Yeah. She a girl but she has a look like everyone know not to mess with her. I don’t know how she does that.”

“It’s called confidence,” Ruth murmured, and moved over to check the wardrobe. “Trouble is, it shares room with being naïve, too. How long had she been here?”

“About two months. She got my name from someone in the community and call round. Lucky I had the room empty, so she moved right in. What you look for exactly?”

“Whatever will tell us,” said Vaslik, “where she might be. That’s all.”

“Why is she in trouble with Immigration? She got papers, I know that. All legal.”

“She’s not in trouble,” Ruth interjected. “But we think she’s mixed up with some bad people.” She dug out a card containing her number and handed it to him. “If you think of anything else or you hear from Tiggi, call me.”

“Serious?”

“Very.”

He seemed to deflate, the air going out of him in a long sigh. “I knew it. I could have done more. I should have.” He said something at length in Polish, and looked sick.

“What you’re already doing is plenty,” Vaslik murmured, and moved into the room. “Believe me. We’ll do our best to track her down.”

It was Aron’s signal to leave. He nodded and walked back downstairs.