The second victim was Mirka Bratova, aged eighteen. She was originally from the Czech Republic, and was found eight months after her disappearance, in November 2013. One of the park wardens in the Serpentine Lido discovered her body floating in the water amongst leaves and rubbish by the sluice gate. In the press photo, she was also dark-haired and very beautiful, and pictured holding a black kitten on a sunny balcony. Behind her, blocks of flats stretched away in the distance.
The third victim was Karolina Todorova, again aged just eighteen. Her body was discovered in February 2014. A man was out walking early in the morning and his dog found her body by the edge of one of the lakes in Regent’s Park. Karolina was originally from Bulgaria. The press had used a photo taken in an automatic photo booth. She was dressed up for a night out, in a white low-cut top, and she had a streak of pink in her dark hair. Another girl was hugging her in the picture, presumably a friend, but her face had been blurred out.
It frustrated Erika that she couldn’t see more; details were sketchy and almost dismissive in the press reports of the deaths.
One other thing mentioned about all the girls was that they had come to England to work as au pairs, and that they had then “fallen into” prostitution. Erika wondered if it had been that gradual. Had the girls been lured to the UK on the pretence of a better life, of a good job? The chance to learn English?
Erika looked up from where she sat in the window of the café. Outside, it was raining hard. It hammered on the awning out front, where several people had gathered to shelter. She took a sip of her coffee, but it was cold.
Erika had left Slovakia when she was just eighteen, for the same reason, to be an au pair. She’d left the bus station in Bratislava on a bleak November morning, travelling to Manchester in England with little knowledge of English.
The family she’d worked for had been okay. The kids had been sweet, but the mother had had a cold attitude towards Erika, as if somehow Eastern Europeans were worth a bit less as human beings. Erika had found the suburban street where they lived to be sinister, and the atmosphere in the house was always tense between husband and wife. They’d refused to let her return home early that first Christmas, when Erika’s mother had fallen ill with cirrhosis of the liver, and eighteen months later, when they had decided they no longer needed an au pair, they had given Erika three days’ notice to leave. They hadn’t asked if she had anywhere to go.
Erika realised she was lucky, though, and blessed in comparison. Had Tatiana, Mirka, and Karolina said goodbye to family just like she had? Erika remembered the crumbling bus terminal in Bratislava: rows and rows of bus platforms. Each platform had rusting metal poles holding up an enormous long shelter, and it had been so damp. She had wondered if it was damp from the tears of all those teenagers who had to say goodbye, to leave a beautiful country where the only way to succeed is to get out.
Did the parents of the three dead girls cry? They had not known that their girls would never return. And what had happened when the girls arrived in London? How had they ended up working as prostitutes?
Tears rolled down Erika’s face, and when the waiter came to take her coffee cup, she turned her head away and angrily dried her eyes.
She had cried enough tears to last a lifetime. Now it was time for action.
36
The next afternoon, Erika felt like she had exhausted all the options she could take as a civilian. She was making another cup of coffee and weighing up her options, when she heard a bell ringing. It took her a few moments to realise it was the front door. She left her flat and went down to the communal front entrance. When she opened the door, Moss was waiting on the front step, her face giving nothing away.
‘Are you making home visits?’ asked Erika.
‘You make me sound like a bloody Avon lady,’ said Moss with a wry grin.
Erika stood aside to let her in. She hadn’t expected to ever receive visitors in the flat, and had to clear off the sofa for Moss. She grabbed several days’ dirty plates off the coffee table, and the teacup overflowing with cigarette butts. Moss didn’t comment and sat down, shrugging off a backpack she was carrying.
‘Do you want some tea?’ asked Erika.
‘Yes please, boss.’
‘I’m not your boss anymore. Call me Erika,’ she said, tipping the dirty plates into the sink.
‘Let’s stick with boss. First names would be weird. I wouldn’t want you to call me Kate.’
Erika stopped, her hand hovering over a box of teabags, ‘Your name is Kate Moss?’ She turned to see if she was joking, but Moss nodded ruefully. ‘Your mother called you Kate Moss?’
‘When I was given the name Kate, the other, slightly thinner . . .’
‘Slightly!’ laughed Erika, despite herself.
‘Yes, the slightly thinner Kate Moss wasn’t a famous supermodel.’
‘Milk?’ said Erika, grinning.
‘Yes, and two sugars.’
She finished making the tea whilst Moss busied herself pulling paperwork from her backpack. Erika came over with mugs and biscuits.
‘That’s a good cup,’ said Moss, taking a sip. ‘How did you learn to make such a good tea? Not in Slovakia?’
‘No, Mark, my husband. He ingrained in me the tea ritual, and so did my father-in-law . . .’
Moss looked uncomfortable that she’d led the conversation down this path. ‘Shit, sorry, boss. Look, none of the team at the station enjoyed reading about . . . about, well, you know. And we didn’t know about . . .’
‘Mark. I’ve got to start talking about him sometime. When you lose someone, not only are they gone, but everyone around you doesn’t want to talk about them. It drove me slightly crazy. It was like he’d been deleted . . . Anyway, why are you here, Moss?’
‘I think you’re on to something, boss. Isaac Strong sent some case files over. DCI Sparks is refusing to see the link, but there were three young girls killed in similar circumstances to Andrea and Ivy. All three found in water with their hands bound, hair missing from their scalp. They’d been strangled. There was evidence of rape, but they were sex workers.’
‘Yeah, I know about those,’ said Erika.
‘Okay, well, there’s more. The phone box we found under Andrea’s bed. Crane requested a trace on the IMEI number written on the box. It matches the IMEI number of Andrea’s old iPhone, the one she reported missing. Crane then got in contact with network providers and gave them the IMEI number. They’ve confirmed that the handset is still active.’
‘I knew it! So Andrea reported the phone missing, but kept it and bought a new SIM card,’ said Erika, triumphantly.
‘Yes. A signal was last traced for that handset near to London Road on the 12th of January,’ said Moss.
‘Someone’s nicked it and they’re using it?’
‘No,’ said Moss, pulling out a large ordinance survey map and starting to unfold it. ‘The signal came from a storm drain running twenty feet below ground. It runs off London Road, beside the train track to Forest Hill Station, and then on towards the next station on the line, Honor Oak Park.’
Erika peered at the map.
‘The storm drain is a major tributary,’ Moss went on, ‘and over the past few days an enormous amount of meltwater from the snow and rain has seeped into the ground and will have rushed through the storm drain.’
‘Pushing anything with it, including a phone,’ finished Erika.
‘Yeah.’
‘So the phone battery is now dead, obviously?’
‘Nothing has been detected. It’s an iPhone 5S, and the network tells us that it will still broadcast its location to phone masts for five days after the battery has discharged – of course, that’s now passed.’
Erika looked at the map; she saw Moss had drawn a red line from London Road along to Honor Oak Park. It covered just over a mile and a half.
‘So, what? The theory is that the phone was chucked or dropped into a drain when Andrea was taken?’
‘Yeah. But it’s not a theory that DCI Sparks or Chief Superintendent Marsh want to hear. They’re convinced they have their man in Marco Frost, and they’re under pressure from Oakley et al to make a conviction. They’ve been through his laptop and there’s a lot of Andrea on there. Photos, letters he’d written to her, Google search history about places she’d been, and was going to . . .’