Page 16

Cristy was driving as Connor read aloud the email she’d typed into her laptop.

‘ Dear Marley, My apologies for not getting back to you sooner, and huge congratulations on the safe arrival of the baby. ’

He turned to her, confused. ‘Is that it?’ he asked incredulously. ‘After the two-page cry-from-the-heart she wrote you, this is all you’re sending back?’

Wincing, Cristy said, ‘I haven’t finished it yet.’

He remained incredulous. ‘Remind me how long it’s been since she emailed you?’

‘Will you just stop! I was hoping for some support over this. I mean, what am I supposed to say when I kind of wish the child had never been born, and I wouldn’t mind never seeing her again in my life? Please don’t quote me on any of that.’

‘Well, at least it would be honest – and even go a bit further towards filling up a page.’

She rolled her eyes and indicated to join the A38 heading out of Bristol. ‘Matthew would never forgive me if I was that cruel,’ she pointed out. ‘Not that I care what he thinks, but then I’d have to deal with him as well as her and I’m already struggling with that, thank you very much.’

‘Have you seen him since he turned up for the drop-party?’

‘You mean since he gatecrashed the party. No, thank God. He’s gone suspiciously quiet on me, and how wonderful if it would stay that way, but I’m not fooled. He’ll be planning some sort of ambush, I’m sure of it, or something will happen that he’ll need to share with me, or get me to sort out … Honestly, it’s like having another child and I’m not even married to him any more.’

‘So feeling needed isn’t really working for you?’

She laughed, and came to a stop at a red light. ‘He has to deal with the situation in LA: whether he’s going to stay married to Marley, be a father to Baby Bear, work out some kind of long-distance relationship if she decides to stay put over there …’

‘Do you think she will?’

‘God knows. And frankly, I don’t care. He chose the path he’s on, and contrary to what both he and Marley seem to think it has nothing to do with me. I can’t even get my head around why they want me as part of their world. I’m the ex-wife, for God’s sake …’

‘You’re also you , so I get why they want you in their lives. I wouldn’t want to let you go either if I was Matthew …’

‘But he did …’

‘And he’s regretting it. And Marley can see how wonderful it would be if you two were friends. And she’s right, because we all love having you as a friend …’

‘Stop winding me up. I need some help deciding how to answer Marley’s email and you are proving about as useful as …’ She struggled. ‘I’ll come up with something and it won’t be good.’

Grinning, he closed her laptop and hit the car’s display screen to take a call from Clover and Jacks. ‘Hey, guys!’ he cried. ‘How’s your day at the beach going?’

‘Just got here,’ Clover replied. ‘Pissing down with rain and blowing a hooley so good job we brought the sunscreen. Anyway, just wanted to let you know that Sadie and Jasper are running late, ferry was delayed, but they should arrive in the next half an hour. Robert’s here, and his mother, obvs, given we’re in her residential village, and what a doll she is. If my flat was bigger I’d try to take her home with me.

‘So, is there anything in particular you’d like us to try to get from this?’ Clover continued. ‘I know we’ve been over everything already and we’re just here to eavesdrop, so to speak, but Jacks had a thought in the night—’

‘… that we ought to capture some video of the reunion,’ Jacks interrupted. ‘Provided everyone’s happy to go along with it, natch.’

‘Great idea,’ Cristy told him. ‘It could be quite an emotional moment for the old lady seeing Sadie all grown up and still bearing a sweet resemblance to the child she once was. Have you checked it with her and Robert?’

‘Yeah, they’re cool with it. He wants me to tell you he’s just nipping out to buy popcorn and Kleenex.’

Laughing, Cristy said, ‘Please thank him again for doing this and make sure he knows he can call any time if he’s worried about anything.’

‘Will do.’

‘See,’ Connor said, as they rang off, ‘you’re even a good friend to people you don’t really know. Although I’ve got to admire how neatly you worked that in. Tell him to call any time …’

‘You’re starting to get on my nerves,’ Cristy interrupted, and pressed her foot down to speed away from the lights. ‘Where are we heading, again?’

‘Chew Magna, and as we’ve already missed the turn to go up over Dundry, take the next to go through Winford. We could, of course, have gone via Hartcliffe …’

‘What did I just say about getting on my nerves? I take it you’ve got Catherine Shilling’s actual address with you?’

He went silent. ‘Maybe we need to call Clover back.’

Cristy glanced at him.

‘Joke!’ he cried. ‘Of course I’ve got it, and if you don’t slow down right now we’re going to end up at the airport.’

Hitting the brakes she indicated to make a sharp left turn onto Barrow Lane, narrowly missing a van waiting to exit onto the main road.

‘No offence,’ Connor said, as she straightened the car, ‘but would you like me to take over the driving?’

‘I’m fine,’ she assured him, ‘just a little …’ She could have said distracted, but if she did he’d be sure to ask what was on her mind and she wasn’t keen to tell him.

Keen or not, it came out anyway. ‘I had a text from David last night,’ she said, keeping her eyes straight ahead.

Connor turned to look at her. ‘And?’

She shrugged. ‘No big deal. He was just adding his apology to Anna’s for what happened with Sadie.’

‘OK. That’s good.’

‘I guess he was just being a concerned father, taking responsibility for the actions of his daughter. Parents do that. You’ll find out soon enough.’

He returned to his scrutiny of the road ahead. ‘Did he say anything else?’ he asked after a while.

‘No, that was it.’

‘So you told him it was all forgiven and forgotten and you didn’t blame him for anything so there was no need for him …’

‘I didn’t reply.’

He looked at her again. ‘So he’s someone else who’s getting your silent treatment? Marley, Matthew, David … I’m sensing a theme here.’

‘Well, what was I supposed to say?’ Cristy cried irritably. The truth was she really hadn’t known what to write back that felt right, and she hadn’t wanted it to seem as though she was using Anna’s mistake as a way for them to stay in touch. ‘I will reply,’ she said, meaning it, ‘but FYI I’m still feeling a bit raw over the way things ended between us, so cut me a break, OK?’

His hands went up. ‘No more from me about your love life, but just saying, wouldn’t a fling with Robert Brinkley be …’

‘For God’s sake!’ she cried, banging the steering wheel. ‘Apart from anything else he’s married! And you can’t seriously think I’d do to another woman what was done to me.’

‘No, no, engaged mouth before brain. Sorry. Change of subject coming … Actually, saved by the bell!’ And clicking on quickly he said, ‘Hey, Jacks. Great timing!’

‘Cool,’ Jacks responded. ‘Also great news. Just heard from my new best friend at Butlin’s HR, she’s only come through with a surname for Lukas. It’s Andris. I’ll put it in an email, but spelled the way it sounds. She can’t give me any more than that, such as an address for where Lukas was before Butlin’s, or after – not sure if that’s data protection or she just doesn’t know. But she did give me the name of an assistant manager who was Lukas’s boss for the time he was working at the Minehead camp. Hilary Stokes. Could be male or female. No contact details, but I’ll get onto it as soon as we’re back at the office.’

‘Genius,’ Connor declared. ‘And whatever charm you used to get your Butlin’s babe talking, send some this way to help me with Cristy, because I’m really getting on her nerves.’

*

Half an hour later they were all set up in the cosy living room of ex-Detective Sergeant Catherine Shilling’s quirky house in Chew Magna, an eclectic sort of village at the heart of the Chew Valley, with pubs and cafés, lots of narrow streets and a reputation for being a great place to live. Their knees were pressed up against a bamboo coffee table where a small pile of old files was sitting beside a tray of hot tea and scrumptious-looking biscuits. Catherine Shilling herself, who had to be in her early sixties, was her own kind of ex-detective, with a mauve spiky hair-do, nose and eyebrow piercings and a fluorescent pink crushed velvet kaftan that, either by design or chance, matched the cushions behind her.

Wondering if she did some sort of readings these days, given all the crystals and candles dotted about the place, Cristy said, ‘What you’ve just outlined for us is extremely interesting and is going to be a valuable addition to our series. So thanks for agreeing to record before we go any further.’

‘No problem,’ Catherine smiled, her pearly teeth making her as pleasing to look at as her slight lisp was entrancing to listen to. ‘I did some digging around after Clover got in touch, more to refresh my memory than to find answers to your questions – although they’re one and the same, I suppose. I just want to be clear from the start that anything I say for your podcast can’t be categorized as an official statement from Avon and Somerset Police. I mean, they know I’m talking to you and that I’m giving you sight of these files. They just want it understood that I am fifteen years retired from the force and while I was involved in certain investigations concerning the presence of Eastern European gangs in our area back in 1998 through 2001, the overall operation was being conducted by the Met Police. The Serious Organized Crime Agency as it’s known today.’

Nodding her understanding, Cristy noted this down and, receiving a thumbs up from Connor, asked Catherine to identify herself for the recording and to add what she’d just told them about the SOCA.

With the formalities out of the way the interview began.

CRISTY: ‘So what can you tell us about gang activity in the Minehead area at the time Janina and Lukas Andris were known to be there?’

CATHERINE: ‘Well, it first came to our attention via social services. They were concerned about the occupants of a house near Kylve. Do you know the beach there? It’s famous for its fossils. Anyway, the house in question, Mannycott Farm, turned out to belong to a distant relative of a prominent aristocrat and landowner – think Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Wiltshire rather than Somerset. Not that said highfalutin’ aristo had any involvement in what was happening at the house, or none that I ever knew about. I simply tell you that as part of the background we had on the main resident.’

CRISTY: ‘And what was happening at the house?’

CATHERINE: ‘If you’d listened to the neighbours you’d have thought all sorts of terrible things – slavery, trafficking, prostitution, drugs … All on the edge of this sleepy west Somerset village. They claimed he – George Symmonds-Browne, Lord Mannycott as some called him – had a constant procession of Russian brides being supplied by his very dubious foreign cohorts. They had it – the locals – that these “brides” were tested out by Symmonds-Browne and his cronies before being passed on to the highest bidder.’

CRISTY: ‘You’re sounding sceptical?’

CATHERINE: ‘No, I think in part that bit might have been true, but our surveillance of the property soon told us that local reports were … exaggerated. Girls were living there, no doubt about that, but not in numbers. In fact there only ever appeared to be three or four there at any given time, and whoever they were they seemed free to come and go as they pleased. Sometimes they went out with men, other times on their own.’

CRISTY: ‘So you don’t think they were being held against their will?’

CATHERINE: ‘It didn’t look like it, but I’m sure you know as well as I do, trafficking gangs hold leverage over their victims by threatening to harm the families they’ve left behind. So running away wouldn’t have been an option for those girls.’

CRISTY: ‘Did you ever speak with any of them?’

CATHERINE: ‘No, our instructions were simply to observe and report back.’

CRISTY: ‘Do you know what nationality they were?’

CATHERINE: ‘Not specifically, but I’m not sure they were actually Russian, the way the locals claimed. Definitely not English though.’

CRISTY: ‘How long did they stay at the farm before being moved on?’

CATHERINE: ‘That’s hard to answer, because the surveillance wasn’t constant, no twenty-four-seven or anything like that. More a couple of times a month for a two-to-three-day period. We soon learned that our little stake-out was small fry in comparison to what was going on with the op in the rest of the country. The big boys in London weren’t particularly interested in what we had going in Kylve unless we could report sightings of certain individuals, or vehicles, they had a special interest in.’

CRISTY: ‘And could you?’

CATHERINE: ‘Not at first, no. You’ll find more details in those files there on the table, along with the identities of some of the key gang members. Not people to be messed with, that’s for sure, and I can tell you we wouldn’t have wanted to give it a go. More than one officer lost his life during that particular op. None of ours, the unlucky were London- or Midlands-based, but none of us was keen to add to the number.

‘Anyway, the risk of that was removed as soon as we reported the sighting of one Matis Albescu. That would have been late 1999, I think. We’d been on the case for a good year by then, and he’d been one of their top POIs – persons of interest – long before we were brought into the picture. Then, suddenly one night, there he was, right in front of us. A tall, wiry bloke with a lot of facial hair, and a gammy left leg – meaning he walked with a limp. We knew it was him right away, and got plenty of shots of him entering the house, and coming out again a couple of hours later. That’s when the London boys took over and we, of course, were mushroomed … Kept in the dark about whatever went down from there. However, I can tell you that Albescu is no longer with us. He was shot and killed during a dawn raid in Birmingham a year or more after we laid eyes on him.’

CRISTY: ‘So that would have been sometime in 2001?’

CATHERINE: ‘Could have been early 2002. It’ll be in the file.’

CRISTY: ‘And what happened to the resident of Mannycott Farm?’

CATHERINE: ‘Symmonds-Browne? Nothing as far as we knew. Everything calmed down after the sighting of Albescu in late ’99 – at least for us it did. There were still the occasional reports from neighbours of girls at the farm, but nothing that got anyone excited enough to send us back there. Then one day, I guess it was in the late spring/early summer of 2000, we got a call from a local vicar expressing concern about the disappearance of a young woman. He referred to her as “one of the Russian brides” who, he said, had been living at the farm for the past couple of years. Years. Not months, which was how long most of them seemed to stay. This one, apparently, had been there the whole time since the surveillance was called off, maybe even longer. Obviously the vicar didn’t know anything about the Met operation that had targeted the house, but he was able to tell us that the young woman – he didn’t know her name – had a child and no one had seen them for the past several weeks.’

CRISTY: ‘Did he say why he was concerned about her?’

CATHERINE: ‘I think mainly because of the child, and how long the young woman had been there – and then suddenly she wasn’t.’

CRISTY: ‘So what happened after you received the vicar’s call?’

CATHERINE: ‘We went to have a chat with Symmonds-Browne, asked about the mother and child and, would you believe it, he started to cry. Proper threw us, that did. Sobbed and blubbered like a great big kid saying she’d gone back to wherever she’d come from and she’d never got in touch with him again. It was all an act, of course, but it worked, because it got rid of us well enough.’

CRISTY: ‘Was any follow-up done on it? No, first, did he tell you the names of the woman and child?’

CATHERINE: ‘I wouldn’t have remembered, but it’s in the file. She was Janina Andris and the child was Sasha.’

Cristy broke off for a moment, the surprise of hearing the names resonating deeply and almost electrifyingly through her. She glanced at Connor and saw it had affected him too. It was all real, this confirmed it, not that they’d seriously doubted it – Robert and Gita’s interviews didn’t allow for that – but even if they’d continued to have concerns they were dispelled by this. Janina and Sasha had lived at Mannycott Farm in Kylve. She had almost definitely been a so-called Russian bride, even if it wasn’t her true nationality. Sasha’s father … could have been anyone.

After making several quick notes for herself, she continued.

CRISTY: ‘Was the mother and child’s disappearance investigated?’

CATHERINE: ‘Not that I ever knew about. Our higher-ups got in touch with the Met and we were told no further action was necessary. Whether that was because the mother and child really had returned to their homeland, or because they didn’t want to waste resources trying to find illegals, I can’t say.’

CRISTY: ‘And you knew they were illegals?’

CATHERINE: ‘They would have been then, if they were from one of the Eastern European countries, and the vicar seemed to think they were.’

Cristy turned to Connor to see if there was anything he wanted to add.

CONNOR: ‘Do you have any idea where George Symmonds-Browne could be now?’

CATHERINE: ‘For all I know he’s still at the same address. If not, you’ll find the names of his blue-blood family in the file, maybe they can put you in touch with him.’

CONNOR: ‘Does the name Lukas Andris ring any bells for you?’

CATHERINE: ‘No, I don’t think so. What was he, a relative of the mother and child?’

CONNOR: ‘Brother and uncle.’

After the recording was over and Connor was packing up the equipment, Catherine said to Cristy, ‘I heard the first episode of your new series, so I’m going to assume that Sadie Winters is the Sasha I just mentioned?’

‘It’s looking very likely,’ Cristy replied. Then, ‘Do you happen to recall anything about the Winters sisters being on Exmoor back in 2000?’

Catherine wrinkled her nose as she thought. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of them. Who are they? Oh, hang on, were they a couple of wealthy Londoners who holidayed at Hilltop Lodge … That’s right, I remember them getting a few tongues wagging for a while, something to do with them being there one day and gone the next.’ Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘If I’m reading this correctly, you’re thinking they took the child with them when they left?’

Meeting the direct question with a slightly less direct answer, Cristy said, ‘It’s looking that way.’

‘And now what you’re trying to find out is if they had some sort of arrangement with Symmonds-Browne or one of his … suppliers, to make the child theirs?’

‘Do you think it’s possible?’ Connor asked.

The detective gave a mirthless laugh. ‘I never put anything past anyone, not after the things I saw when I was with the police. In this instance … Well, let’s say, there’s certainly a coincidence of events and times that warrants further enquiries, which is of course what you’re doing.’ She went further. ‘My best guess is that someone made your girl Janina disappear so your sisters could have the child they wanted.’

Wishing they could have got that on tape, while also knowing they’d be unable to air it, or certainly not at this stage, Cristy thanked her warmly and followed Connor out to the car.

As they drove away, she said, ‘So where do you think Janina’s knowledge of the sisters fits in with this? I’m thinking of Robert’s interview now.’

‘God knows,’ Connor replied. ‘But it’s looking increasingly likely that Lottie’s beach story is nonsense. And if that is, what about everything else?’

As neither of them had an answer several minutes passed with the Chew Valley and its winter-sunlit lakes falling away behind them until a sprawling vista of Bristol opened up ahead. ‘Let’s call Clove and Jacks,’ Cristy said, taking out her phone. ‘If they’re still in Minehead they can swing by Kylve on their way back to find out if Symmonds-Browne is still at Mannycott Farm.’

‘And if he is?’

‘They should leave it to us to go talk to him. If he’s no longer there, maybe they can start work on where he might be now. Also, we need to check the files Catherine Shilling just gave us for the vicar’s name. If he’s still around he could be worth a few words. They can handle that themselves once we’ve briefed them.’

Fifteen minutes later, with Clove and Jacks on their way to Kylve, and all sorts of scenarios still flashing through their minds, Connor said pensively, ‘I can’t stop wondering, given the suddenness of Lottie’s death and the fact that no more extracts have yet come to light … I’m asking myself, did someone get to her before she could write any more?’

Cristy frowned. ‘Talk me through that.’

‘Frankly, I don’t know where to go with it, apart from the obvious place.’

She glanced at him, her hands tightening on the wheel. ‘You mean Mia?’

He nodded soberly.

‘That doesn’t make any sense when the story is designed to cast them as rescuers of a child from social services, rather than anything more … sinister. She surely wouldn’t have had a problem with that.’

‘It was still illegal to hold onto the child, and maybe Mia found the rest of the story and … destroyed it? She wouldn’t want any of it getting out for the very reason she’s facing now: Sadie is looking into it and wants to know more.’

Slowing as they reached the Ashton Gate traffic lights, Cristy said, ‘And we know that Lottie’s computers were disposed of quite soon after her death. Was that Mia’s way of making sure nothing more came to light?’

‘Seems a reasonable conclusion to me.’

‘There must have been a post mortem following Lottie’s death. We’ll get Jacks onto it.’ She thought about it some more and added, ‘I think we should keep this to ourselves for now, at least until we’ve got something a bit more substantial to work with.’

‘Clove and Jacks?’

‘Obviously we’ll share with them, but at this stage it’s absolutely not something to share with Sadie.’