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The SO19 officers searched the place as A
Other rooms in the house were equipped with beds and washbasins, but this seemed to be a general sitting room. The four men the SO19 team had found had all been handcuffed and bundled out into the van. The girls had been checked for weapons as a matter of routine, then left alone, a guard on the door.
“Ma’am?” One of the team stood at the door and beckoned to A
He led A
“Get an ambulance,” A
“Can you speak English?” A
The girl nodded. “A little.”
“What happened to her?”
“She’s new,” the girl told her in heavily accented English, still stroking her friend’s hair. “She would not do what they tell her so they lock her up and beat her. She has not eaten for three days.”
Brooke was trying to talk to the other girls, but it didn’t appear they spoke English. Whatever the reason, they all seemed afraid of him and no one would say a word. Most of them wouldn’t even look at him. A
Pale, Brooke nodded. “You’ll be okay?”
“I’ll manage,” said A
“What will happen to us?” asked the girl on the chair arm, who seemed to have taken charge. She had dark hair down to her shoulders, thin arms and a pale complexion.
It was a good question and A
“You’ll all be taken good care of,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Veronika.”
“Right, Veronika. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I can’t tell you anything. He will kill me.”
“No, he won’t,” said A
“You don’t understand. He wasn’t here, only his stupid guard. Those other men are here for…” She made an obscene gesture with her hips.
“Where is Hadeon Mazuryk?”
She flinched at the sound of his name. “I don’t know.”
“Okay,” said A
They all shook their heads. One started crying. A
Veronika nodded.
“Where is she?”
“She is not here. Carmen is one of the special girls.”
“What do you mean?”
“She is very beautiful. She speaks very good English. She does not have to go out to the street. Men come to her. Pay more.”
This was what A
Veronika turned to the girl in the sheet and stroked her hair again, then she looked back at A
Banks didn’t regret too much being barred from the King’s Cross raid. He had been on such operations before and generally found the paramilitary elements quite tedious. He did, however, want to know the results, which was why he was sitting anxiously at the kitchen table early with his morning coffee and newspaper, mobile beside him at the ready.
He was still puzzling over what had happened between Roy and Lambert at the Albion Club that Friday, and the best he could come up with was that Lambert had proposed something Roy didn’t approve of and became worried he’d give the game away. Their friendship went back to university days and they had got up to all sorts of things together. They had been out of touch for a long time, though, and Lambert probably didn’t know that Roy had redrawn his moral lines.
If Lambert wanted Roy to come in on importing abducted teenage girls for the sex trade, as A
Banks guessed that when Roy left the bar for the casino, Lambert went into the toilet and phoned someone – maybe Max Broda – and told him the situation was critical. After that, Broda took control and had a car ready to pick Roy up outside the club and take him to the abandoned factory in Battersea. Ponytail and his crony must also have been working for Broda, and they had been assigned to watch Je
As Banks thought about it all, a number of things came together in his mind, the way it sometimes happened when he felt most lost. A
Was that it, then, the new thing that Roy had discovered? Was Lambert himself adopting Carmen’s baby, buying it, and was that why it was so important for him to stop Roy from blowing the whistle? There was one way to find out, one person he could ask.
Banks went up to Roy’s office, where he thought he had seen an atlas. He pulled it down and found that Quainton was in Buckinghamshire, not too far from Aylesbury. It was a nice day for a drive in the country, he thought, and it would be interesting to meet the elusive Mrs. Lambert. He grabbed his jacket and his mobile and set off for the car.