followed Kevin.
The carpet warehouse was as cheerless as Christmas for one. The shutters were down over the big display windows at the front, but they eventually found a small door tucked away round the side. The light that should have illuminated it had burned out, which was probably a blessing in disguise. Kevin hammered on the locked door and eventually it was opened by a skinny woman with the blue-black skin of equatorial Africa. ‘What?’ she said.
‘We’re here to talk to Buket,’ Paula said.
‘Nobody here,’ the black woman said, shaking her head for emphasis.
‘Buket works here. She’s not in any trouble. We just need to talk to her.’
The woman half-turned her head. ‘Not here.’
‘We’re from the police,’ Paula said. ‘No trouble, I promise. But I need to talk to her. You have to let us in.’ Little white lies, the kind that just trip from a copper’s tongue after enough time in the job.
The woman stepped back suddenly and let the door swing open. ‘No trouble,’ she said, disappearing round an array of carpets on a giant metal frame. In the distance, they could hear the motor of a vacuum cleaner. The echoing vastness of the prefabricated metal warehouse competed with the sound absorbency of so much carpet to make it hard to figure out where the noise was coming from. They did their best to follow it and finally emerged in an open area where carpet samples mounted on boards were stacked in wooden holders. A small plump woman with a hijab was wielding an industrial cleaner with surprising energy.
Paula walked round into her eyeline and waved at her. The woman literally jumped in surprise, then fumbled with the power switch. The motor’s note died away, leaving a faint resonance. ‘Are you Buket?’ Paula asked.
The woman’s dark eyes widened and darted to each side as if seeking an escape. Kevin let her see him and gave what he hoped was a reassuring smile. ‘We’re not from Immigration,’ he said.
‘We don’t care if you’re here legally or if you’re being paid cash in hand,’ Paula said. ‘We are police officers, but there’s no reason to be afraid of us. Come on, let’s sit down.’ She pointed to a desk with a couple of customer chairs in front of it. Buket’s shoulders slumped and she let herself be led to a chair. Kevin had no idea how Paula did it, but it impressed him every time she led an unwilling witness to communication.
‘Are you Buket?’ Paula asked gently.
‘That is my name,’ the woman said.
‘And you also work at the Sunset Strip motel?’
Again, the darting eyes. Her olive skin seemed paler and she bit her lower lip. ‘I not want trouble.’
‘We’re not going to cause you trouble. We want to ask you about something that happened a little while ago at the motel. OK?’
‘I don’t know anything,’ Buket said immediately.
Paula pressed on regardless. ‘One of the rooms you clean was very wet.’
Buket’s face cleared, as if she’d been given the all-clear after some hideous medical procedure. ‘The room was wet, yes. This is what you want to know?’
‘That’s right. Can you tell me about it?’
‘So much water. Towels are heavy and drip everywhere. Bathroom floor is wet, big puddles. Carpet near bathroom is so wet it goes—’ she made a liquid, sucking sound – ‘under feet. I tell manager, I not want trouble.’
‘Did it look like the bath had overflowed?’
Buket frowned. ‘Over …?’
‘Too much water from the bath?’
She nodded vigorously. ‘From the bath, yes. Water is clean, not dirty. Not from toilet. Nice smell.’
‘Can you remember which room it was?’
‘Five. I am sure.’
‘And did you see the people in room five at all? Did you perhaps see them leave in the morning?’
Buket shook her head. ‘I saw nobody from five. I see other people, but not from five. I leave it till last room in case sleep late, but when I go in, nobody is there.’
Paula looked at Kevin. ‘Can you think of anything else to ask Buket?’
‘Just her surname and address,’ he said, smiling at Buket but talking soft and fast. ‘We’ll need to get fingerprints and DNA to eliminate her when the forensics team get stuck in to room five. Good luck with that.’
There was something about working late on a Friday night that pissed off Detective Sergeant Alvin Ambrose more than any other. It was the end of the school week, the night when the kids could stay up a bit later. He liked to take them swimming on a Friday night. It made him feel like a normal dad, the kind of bloke who did things with his kids that didn’t get interrupted because of the stupid, the addicted and the drunk.
He was even more pissed off because he was stuck on his own in the CID room. Whatever Patterson’s agenda was right now, it still didn’t seem to include taking responsibility for the CID team he was supposed to lead. He’d walked away mid-afternoon, telling Ambrose to get on with it. Because there was so little doing, Ambrose had sent most of the team home, but on standby. Nobody knew where Vance would be spotted next or when. They had to be ready to roll at short notice when they had something definite to go at. He had officers out talking to prison staff who had been off-duty at the time of the escape, but other than that he couldn’t actually think of anything constructive to do.
The worst irony of all was that, in Ambrose’s experience, nothing worth working late for had ever happened on a Friday. He’d had great results over the years, spectacular arrests backed up with genuine confessions. But never on a Friday, for some reason. So there was a double resentment for Ambrose. That was before he even added on the bitterness of being at the beck and call of a bunch of mad bloody Geordies who couldn’t even speak proper
