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IT TOOK A FEW DAYS for the DNA confirmation to come through, but then Bill found himself driving over to Walsall with Ray to speak to Marissa Costa. As Ray expertly navigated his way through the heavy traffic, even Bill was aghast when they pulled up outside a substantial detached house on the main Birmingham Road.
“They live here?” he asked Ray, not quite able to believe his eyes.
Ray gave a bitter laugh. “Oh yes, that’s why I’ve pulled up a bit short of the drive.”
“But these houses must date to the era when they were built by prosperous Victorian businessmen. What are a bunch of rogues doing living here? What’s the value of a house like this?”
“Ah, well that’s a good question,” Ray said with a look of disgust. “Being in Walsall, these kinds of properties don’t command the sort of prices they would in Worcester, for instance. But you’re still looking at the best part of three hundred and fifty thousand – which is amazing for a family that has no discernible income. ...Get out and come and have a look at it a bit closer before we turn into the drive, gov’, because the moment we pull up, Mrs Costa will be out and demanding to know what we’re here for.”
For a moment Bill didn’t quite know how to take that, but after he’d got out and wandered along the opposite side of the road with Ray until they could see most of the drive, although not yet being in view from the windows thanks to a neighbour’s very large bush, he began to see why. The house was a masterpiece in dreadful taste, making him wonder what on earth their unlucky neighbours thought of them – certainly moving would be difficult with such a monstrosity next door, even by a couple of houses’ distance. A false portico had been added to the front door, but was painted in a lurid shade of pink, the drapery at the windows was so brightly coloured it looked awful even from the road, and Bill thought he’d never seen such a collection of dreadful garden gnomes and tasteless statues in all of his life. There were mooning gnomes, gnomes making rude gestures, a couple of gnomes ‘artistically’ placed as if copulating, and several other oddities which Bill was rather glad he couldn’t see in detail.
“Bloody hell!” was all he could say in a stunned voice.
“Exactly,” Ray agreed. “Once you’ve seen that lot, you’ve got a fair idea of what you’re in for. If you don’t mind, I’ll let you lead with the questions. Mrs Costa is nothing if not a rabid racist – which is pretty rich coming from someone with such a mixed pedigree as her – and she has no hesitation is speaking her mind, running sewer that that is.”
“Wonderful!” Bill breathed. “Okay, let’s go and get this over with.”
As Ray had predicted, they hadn’t even got the car doors closed before Mrs Costa was coming out of the front door, bawling at them,
“If you ain’t got a warrant, you aint’ comin’ in!”
“Mrs Costa,” Bill began, struggling to put his calmest voice on, “we really do need to speak to you, and I can assure you that we have no intention of trying to search your property.”
“Well you still ain’t comin’ in!” Marissa Costa snapped, hoisting her ample bosom in the heavily frilled tangerine-coloured housecoat, which was rapidly losing the fight to keep her covered respectably.
Bill sighed. “Very well, then I’m afraid we have to break the bad news to you here.”
“What bad news? You can’t trick me! What you goin’ to suggest now? That our Caesar’s been sellin’ stuff again? Go on, on your bike!”
Ray’s respect for Bill rose to new levels as his boss stepped a little closer – certainly close enough to be gasping on the multi-layers of various perfumes which Mrs Costa had been dousing herself with – and said quietly,
“No, I’m afraid it’s bad news about Sanay.”
“Oh yeah?” Marissa Costa’s head came back as she did her best to look down her heavily made-up nose at Bill, something that was never going to work when he stood nearly a foot taller than her. “What you tryin’ to say he’s done?”
Bill grunted. “Mrs Costa, will you please listen to what I’m saying. It’s not what Sanay has done. It’s about what’s happened to him.”
“To him?” she demanded belligerently. “Who’s hurt him? Who’s hurt my boy?”
Bill sighed. “I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that Mrs Costa, but I’m very sorry to have to tell you that Sanay is dead.”
Whatever reaction he was anticipating, Mrs Costa’s high-pitched scream and her vanishing from view into the house, still screaming at the top of her voice, wasn’t it. From behind him he heard Ray saying something in whichever Indian subcontinental language was native to his family, but Bill didn’t have to understand the words to guess that it was an echo of his own, “God help us!” And she was still screaming somewhere deep in the back of the house, leaving them standing on the doorstep until a young man came storming out to them.
“What you said to upset our Mum like dat?” he demanded furiously. “Who are you, filff?”
Feeling able to be considerably sterner with this incarnation of the family, Bill said firmly, “I’ll thank you to remain, polite, please. I’m DI Scathlock and this is my colleague, acting DI Villavarayan, and we’ve come to tell you that we’ve found a body which we have very good reason to believe is that of Sanay Costa.”
He saw all the bounce briefly fall from the young man as he said, horrified, “A body? Sanay’s dead?” Then the cockiness was back. “Nah! You’re pullin’ my pisser. Our Sanay ain’t dead.”
With his patience running out, Bill produced a photograph of the head and shoulders of the body. “So you’re saying that this is not Sanay Costa?”
This time the deflation was permanent, and the younger Costa was backing away from them in horror when an older version of him appeared behind him.
“Romeo? What’s goin’ on here? Why’s our mum screamin’ her head off like that?”
Ray immediately said, “Caesar Costa, you know me, and this is DI Scathlock.”
“He’s dead,” the one they now knew was called Romeo said to his brother in a choked voice, “our Sanay’s dead.”
Caesar was clearly made of tougher stuff, because he hardly flinched before saying, “It was her wasn’t it? That fuckin’ bitch he’s been seein’? I knew she was no good for him. I told him, I did. I said to him, leave her be, man, she ain’t what she seems,’ but he was all loved up.”
“Could we please come inside to talk about this?” Bill asked, wanting to get off the doorstep, because several people were coming out of their doors and staring in undisguised curiosity, probably wanting to know what on earth it could be that would rattle a gang of ruffians like the Costas so much.
For a moment Caesar stood blocking the way, but then he must have caught sight of the two houses across the road, where there were people in their doorways trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on around the traffic. Without a word, Caesar turned on his heels and led them into the house, although only as far as the front room. Either Marissa Costa was considerably more scrupulous about her house than herself, or this room was kept for best and hardly used, because at least it was spotlessly clean. That was about all you could say for it, though. It was a big room, but the whole of it looked for all the world as though a candyfloss factory had exploded in it. If it could have frills on, it did, there was lace and satin everywhere, and it came in every range of vivid pink, yellow and peach fabric that manufacturers could produce.
Just in time, Bill managed to close his mouth from where his jaw had dropped at the sight before Caesar turned around. With an arrogant wave of his hand, Caesar gestured them to the tangerine sofa against the back wall, but Bill was too fast for him, striding to the opposite cerise seating-unit which dominated the large bay window. He wasn’t having some petty hoodlum pulling that one on him, because if he’d sat where Caesar had wanted, Caesar would have seen them clearly, but his face would have been in shadow. Now it was Caesar who had to sit where Bill and Ray could see his every twitch and facial tick.
“Now then,” Bill said, sitting as far back as the multitude of scatter cushions would allow. “What’s this about a woman? Who is she?”
“Is it his ex-wife?” Ray added.
Caesar snorted derisively. “Chantal? Don’t make me laugh! That thick cow could never get anything on our Sanay.”
However Ray said pointedly, but in part for Bill’s benefit, “That thick cow, as you call her, got a restraining order against him, though, didn’t she? Not that daft. So in light of that, would you answer the question: were you referring to Chantal Costa?”
“No, I fuckin’ wasn’t. And she ain’t Chantal Costa anymore, either. She done married Winston Jackson last month – best o’ luck to him with that. That woman don’t know when to shut up, not ever!”
“Right,” Bill said, smothering a sigh of despair, “so we’re not talking about the new Mrs Jackson. But you definitely had somebody in mind out in the hall, so who is she? What’s her name?”
“Dunno,” Caesar said sulkily. “He never told us.”
Bill saw Ray lean forwards in surprise from out of the corner of his eye as he responded, “He never told you? This woman he was all ‘loved up’ with, and yet he never even told his brothers what her name was? I find that hard to believe.”
“Not as bleedin’ hard as we did,” Caesar snapped back. “He met her after the last...” He just about stopped himself in time, but Bill was sure he’d nearly said, ‘the last job’ or something equally incriminating. Instead Caesar recovered with, “...he split up with his last girlfriend.”
Ray’s soft, “Hmmm,” told Bill that it was more likely that the previous girl had left when she’d realised how free Sanay was with his fists – something which Ray had already briefed Bill about on the way over.
Keeping his tone mild, Bill pressed, “But surely you must have known something about her? What did she look like, for instance?”
Caesar shrugged. “All I know is that she’s got long dark hair. ‘Hair like midnight and eyes like stars,’ was how Sanay put it. Thought he’d been at the weed, we did, when he said that. But he got right het up when we took the piss out of him for it. That’s how we knew it was serious. He ain’t never been like that over a woman before. And I tell you sommat else, she wasn’t his normal type. Sanay likes ’em blond with a decent rack on ’em,” this accompanied by him cupping his hands around invisible breasts, “but this one sounded like she was skinny – not that he said much about her looks, but that was the impression we got.”
“And how long had he known her?” Bill prompted.
“Best as we could tell, about three months. And it seemed to get serious straight away. After he met her he was always drivin’ off to go and see her. He d’ain’t show any interest in any other girls after that.”
“So she doesn’t live locally, then?”
Caesar shrugged and this time Bill got the impression it was more in frustration than anything else. “I dunno. No idea where she lives. And that was weird too! He seemed to be going’ out into the countryside to meet her. I sez to him, ‘Where d’you go clubbin’, then?’ and he just laughed, like it was the funniest thing ever. So then I sez, ‘She ain’t some pikey, is she?’ and he carries on laughin’ and sez, no. ‘Is she some farmer, then?’ I asks, and he says no to that too. But I never did get it out of him where or what she was.
“And the other thing was, she could only see him at certain times, and I don’t just mean like in the week, as if she had an old man and our Sanay was pokin’ her behind his back while he was workin’ away, but him back at the weekend. Sometimes he’d see her in the week, sometimes at weekends. But if it was a Saturday and he was around, and I sez to him, ‘Aren’t you goin’ to meet her?’ he’d say, ‘The time ain’t right.’ What does that mean, eh? And it was always the same words. Not, ‘she’s out with her mates,’ or ‘she’s on the blob so there ain’t no point,’ just that.”
Even as he was mentally wincing at Caesar’s crude assessment of whether it was worth seeing a woman, Bill had to admit that this wasn’t sounding like the normal kind of woman who would give a thug like Sanay the time of day. If anything, she sounded considerably classier.
“Do you know where they met?”
However that was the point when Caesar got a lot more coy. That probably meant that they were out and up to no good at the time, and the oldest of the Costa lads wasn’t about to drop himself and his brothers in the shit with the police, not even if it was to help catch whoever had killed his brother. It was only after they’d danced around the subject for a few minutes that Caesar finally got around to asking,
“So how did our Sanay die? Is you gonna be able to match up any bullets?”
That, Bill thought, said a lot about the world in which the Costas moved. The presumption that he would have been shot, or possibly knifed.
“I’m afraid it’s not as straightforward as that,” Bill had to say. “Can you tell me, did your brother have any health problems? Only it looks as though he died of a heart-attack.”
Caesar’s jaw dropped. “A heart attack? Our Sanay was as fit as a flea! There weren’t nothin’ wrong with him! Why’d you say such a thing?”
Bill found himself sighing again. “I said ‘looks like’ a heart-attack, but the truth is, Mr Costa, that all the evidence points towards your brother having been frightened to death.”
“Don’t be so bleedin’ daft. Our Sanay weren’t scared of anythin’!”
Reluctantly, Bill produced the photo of Sanay again, handing it over to his brother for him to see Sanay’s horror-stricken expression for himself. “He was found in an orchard on the edge of Shropshire.”
“In an orchard?”
“Specifically, an apple orchard on a farm,” Bill clarified, briefly wondering whether someone like Caesar even knew what an orchard was, when he probably had never seen fruit coming from anywhere other than off a supermarket shelf.
“What was he doin’ there?”
“Well that was what we were hoping you could shed some light on, Mr Costa. If it hadn’t been for DI Villavarayan, here, recognising the family resemblance, it might have taken us a lot longer to identify him than it did, because Sanay was a very long way from where anyone might have expected him to be. And you were lucky that he got spotted as fast as he did. It was only the farmer going back to check that he didn’t need to spray his crop again that meant he was found within the day. It was a pretty isolated spot, and even on the farm it was in a fairly invisible part.”
For the first time Caesar was looking genuinely upset. “How long was he out there for?”
“Oh, probably only overnight, luckily,” Bill consoled him. “Whatever happened seems to have taken place the night before he was found.”
“But what was he doin’ out there?” Caesar asked again plaintively. “Was there some rave goin’ on? I thought Sanay had grown out o’ them, but I suppose if he saw some business opportunity...?”
That Bill took to mean, ‘if there was a chance to move some drugs’, but made no further comment on that. The local lads no doubt had the Costas under surveillance for such illicit trading, and didn’t need any prompting from him.
“No, there’s no evidence at all that there was anyone with him. Certainly there was no gathering of several people there, let alone anything like a rave.”
Caesar was just sitting shaking his head, at which point the two younger brothers, Romeo and Darius, came in and had to be told the details. Yet both of them remained as perplexed as Caesar, and for once in their lives, Bill thought that they were telling the truth. This had them as baffled as the police. And so with a promise from Caesar that he would come and formally identify the body, Bill and Ray left the Costas to their grief.
On the drive back across into Shropshire, though, they found themselves returning to the subject of the mystery woman.
“That’s got me totally flummoxed, gov’,” Ray confessed. “All four of the Costa lads have a nasty reputation with women, and they don’t exactly keep it hidden, if you know what I mean. I can’t imagine any woman with a bit of brains and personality would hang around long. She’d be more likely to be running hard in the opposite direction.”
“Yet she’s the only clue we’ve got,” Bill sighed, tutting as a truck driver changed lanes with little warning in front of him on the motorway. “Let’s show Sanay’s photo around in the villages closest to the farm. Ask and see if anyone has heard of a woman who’s suddenly got a bit of rough on the side – or as decorously as we can. ...What’s your take on why Sanay, and maybe his brothers were out that way in the first place?”
Ray pulled a face. “That’s a bit easier to guess, but just as hard to prove. You know I said their cousin is chief suspect in running a grooming ring? Well we have our suspicions that if the girls put up a fight, then they don’t last long after that. What’s been holding us up is that we’ve not found any bodies yet. Doesn’t help that half of the girls they target are under the radar in the first place. Kids who’ve been kept cloistered at home by immigrant families who don’t see the value in educating girls, and who finally manage to escape only to end up in the clutches of Vijay Bose and the Costas, or actual illegal immigrants.”
“God, that’s a grim thought,” declared Bill with a wrinkle of his nose. “Poor little buggers. To escape one prison and find yourself in another one. I really hate traffickers.”
“Me too,” confessed Ray. “I’ve got two little girls of five and two, and the thought of anyone hurting them like that is the stuff of my worst nightmares. But one of the reasons we’ve been watching the Costas has been that my DCI, in Walsall, is convinced that they’re the ones who are getting rid of the bodies. Or it might be that the girls are still alive when they get taken out of the city, and that’s why we haven’t been able to pin anything on these bastards. But we were becoming increasingly certain that if a girl outlived her usefulness, then she was being disposed of, not being sold on. However, this is this first hint as to which way they might have been taking them, because until now we’d been thinking more of them using the motorway network to get far from here.
“You know that the Serious Crime lads are hot on picking up hints of people being sold, and they’ve never had so much as the faintest whiff of that leading back to the Costas. Nothing’s coming up in their bank accounts, and even if it’s cash transactions, they’re not getting a hint of it from the more usual places where other girls have been sold on to. So that’s why we’re convinced that these poor kids are dead. Where they’re putting them, though, has been another matter.”
Bill thought on that for a while, then asked, “You don’t suppose that one of these girls could have fought back? I know I’m grasping at straws here, because there’s not a shred of forensic evidence that Sanay was in any sort of a fight.”
However Ray was shaking his head. “The kind of girls they target are too cowed to do anything like that. They’re scared to death of the Costas and the rest of Bose’s gang.”
“Then who the hell has killed Sanay?” Bill mused. “Because I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that he didn’t die of natural causes. If his heart gave out, it was because he’d been given a serious push to the brink of what terrified him the most. But what was that piece of garbage that frightened of that it would have affected him so badly?”
