Carlyle placed the key card on the desk. ‘Thanks for that.’
‘If you’ve been using the porno channels,’ Miles smirked, ‘I’m gonna have to bill you.’
‘Genuinely, I fell asleep. What did you think of the girl?’
‘Nice.’ The grin on Miles’s face crumpled into a leer. ‘Can you let me have her number?’
‘Seen her before?’
Miles carefully folded the newspaper and dropped it onto the floor beside his chair. ‘I don’t think so. What’s the story?’
Carlyle thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘There isn’t one yet. Have you got her on CCTV?’
‘Of course.’ Miles pulled open a drawer and took out a couple of sharp A5 images that had been run off on a computer printer. He handed one to Carlyle and kept the other for himself. Carlyle recognised the back of his own head. The shot had been taken while they were waiting for the lift to take them up to the penthouse. The image didn’t do Olga full justice but it was a fair likeness.
‘One for you,’ Miles said, ‘and one for me. I will ask around.’
Carlyle folded the sheet of paper and placed it in his pocket. ‘Thank you.’
‘And now, I’ll go and check the CCTV up in the penthouse suite.’
‘What?’ Despite his complete and utter innocence, Carlyle felt himself blush.
‘Don’t worry,’ Miles laughed, ‘only joking. People don’t pay two grand so we can spy on them — more’s the pity.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Carlyle said stiffly. ‘Thanks again for your help with this. Let me know if you hear anything.’ Without waiting for Alex Miles to embarrass him any further, he then turned and headed for the street.
TEN
‘And we would like to thank our British guests who are here today, from the Anglo-Ukrainian Friendship Society delegation in London. .’
Shivering inside his black cashmere Ede amp; Ravenscroft overcoat, Gordon Elstree-Ullick stifled a yawn and tried to tune out the heavily accented drone of the Director of the Sandokan International Children’s Camp. Sitting on a low podium at the front of the assembly room, he watched a grey cloud drift across the dirty sky outside the windows. Feeling his eyelids dropping, he dug a fingernail into the loose flesh by the thumb of his left hand in order to stay awake. His mind began to wander. . somewhere out there, not all that far from where they were sitting, the Light Brigade charged into the pages of history during the Crimean War. Elstree-Ullick smiled to himself at the thought. According to family lore, his great-great-great-grandfather had his left bollock shot off during the Battle of Balaclava.
Balaclava had been a typical British cock-up: the cavalry charging up a valley strongly held on three sides by Russians with heavy guns. End result: 250 men dead (not to mention 400-plus horses) lost for no gain whatsoever. By comparison, Great-greatgreat-grandpa had got off lightly. Elstree-Ullick shuddered at the thought of what might have happened if the old bugger had lost both his balls. Balaclava — that was what? About 150 years or so ago. Did we win? He had no bloody idea.
‘. . our bonds of friendship shall never be cut asunder. .’
Cut asunder? What was the old fool talking about now? The combination of last night’s vodka and the strain of keeping a constant smile on his face threatened to overwhelm him. The director’s farewell speech had already been going on for more than twenty minutes and, if past experience was anything to go by, it would drone on a while longer yet.
Elstree-Ullick had heard it all so many times before. This latest trip had lasted three days; in that time he must have listened to almost a dozen speeches from camp workers and local dignitaries. All of them followed the same pattern: they would bemoan, at length, the fate of their country, quickly thank the Brits for the aid that they’d brought from London, and then launch into an impassioned plea for yet more of the same.
‘The need now is greater than ever. .’
Why didn’t any of these bastards get off their backsides and do something for themselves? All they seemed capable of was sitting around waiting for handouts.
Finally, there came a smattering of applause. Elstree-Ullick nodded politely as he scanned the young audience. Sandokan was not international. And it was not a camp. All the kids came from inside a 100-mile radius. Their parents were dead, or they had abandoned their offspring. It was an orphanage straight out of a Dickens novel, housing almost four hundred children between the ages of six months and eighteen years. More than a hundred of the older ones were gathered here today. Scrubbed and dutifully silent, they were being closely watched by staff who were more like security guards than teachers.
Elstree-Ullick knew well enough that the children were given no education or training for the outside world. And what an outside world! Ukraine was your standard post-Soviet nightmare, with no jobs and no hope. Things would never change here, except to get worse — which was why he kept coming back.
Scanning the room, he looked at the blank faces waiting to be told when to start clapping again. He watched a boy on the front row stubbornly pick his nose with his index finger. On this trip, the children seemed even more introspective and sullen than usual, which was saying something. Finding a couple of ‘special cases’ to take back with them had been harder than ever. Nor was it clear that he would find a buyer back in London. Elstree-Ullick was only too well aware that he was on the cusp of falling out of step with the zeitgeist. The ‘Eastern European’ was no longer a badge of quality. The Ukrainian market was moving out of fashion. He could easily end up losing money on this trip. It was time to move on.
Market forces were not the only consideration. The fact that a dossier concerning alleged child sex abuse at Sandokan had recently been transferred to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office was another compelling reason to seek pastures new. The very night that Elstree-Ullick had arrived in the country, a Regions Party MP called Roman Popov had claimed on national television that children as young as six had been raped at this centre. Rumours were already circulating about children being sold as sex slaves to Western countries. Elstree-Ullick was pretty sure that the Deputy Prosecutor, General Dmytro Gazizulin, a local Robocop determined to make a name for himself, would quickly and painfully get to the truth. A Presidential election was looming, and this investigation supplied local politicians with quantities of mud to throw at each other. If the truth — or anything approximating it — came out, the best that his friend the Director here could hope for would be a long and brutal prison sentence. Elstree-Ullick had no intention of joining him in a Ukrainian cell. He did not want to be within a thousand miles of Kiev when General Gazizulin came calling. It was only due to the fact that the State Security Service was so totally corrupt, that they were not all in jail already, himself included.
‘God bless you all!. .’
The sudden applause woke him from his reverie. Groggily, he got to his feet and stepped across the podium to shake the Director by the hand. A bell sounded and the children quickly filed out through the exits. Within a minute, the room was cleared apart from four girls sitting silently in the back row, gazing into space. The Director eyed the girls thoughtfully for a moment before turning to face Elstree-Ullick. Without saying anything, the Englishman pulled a small white envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it over. Grasping the envelope tightly, the Director bowed his head and disappeared through a back door.
‘I really need a stiff drink,’ Elstree-Ullick muttered to himself. Stepping down from the podium, he walked slowly towards the rear of the hall under the suspicious gaze of his four new employees.
Alexa Matthews stood in front of the chief super’s desk, waiting for the smug little bastard to invite her to sit down. Outside, she could see a couple of gardeners trimming the lowest branches of an oak tree. She idly wondered what it would be like to wield one of their chainsaws on Tommy Dolan and his chums.
After a few more seconds scribbling notes on a pad for effect, Charlie Adam looked up at her with his solemn face on. ‘Well?’
Well, what? she thought angrily, concentrating hard as she tried to stop herself swaying in time to the throbbing in her head. Her whole body ached and she was acutely aware that, even in uniform, she looked a complete mess, with a bust lip and a peach of a shiner around her left eye. Even before you considered the bruises all over her body, the bruised ribs and the broken hand, Alexa looked like she’d been on the wrong end of a beating. Which, of course, she had.
