Stolen Souls (4 page)

But Lennon had some stored in a locked box back in his apartment. Not enough to bring Hewitt down, but certainly sufficient to raise some awkward questions for him if push ever came to shove.

Perhaps nothing more than coincidence caused so many late-night shifts to come along at short notice. It could be by chance that so few of Lennon’s old informants were still willing to talk to him. Evidence was mislaid all the time, of course, but two of Lennon’s cases had fallen through when he brought them to the Public Prosecution Service and couldn’t back them up because items had disappeared from storage.

Or it could be that DCI Dan Hewitt had whispered in certain ears, had nudged certain elbows, had forced certain hands. Lennon guessed that Hewitt wanted to make life at Ladas Drive Station as difficult as possible for him in the hope that he’d transfer away.

But Lennon would not oblige. Instead, he would continue to come in on nights like this when he’d rather be at home with his daughter. It was the same stubborn streak that made him resist the McKenna family’s desire to bring Ellen into their fold, and he knew there was no logic to it.

He lifted the phone and began making the necessary calls.

* * *

W
HEN
L
ENNON ARRIVED
, the paramedics were loading the injured harbor cop into the ambulance. Only his mouth was visible through the dressings and neck brace. Another uniformed harbor officer watched them close the doors. Lennon noted the markings on his epaulet.

“You’re the injured man’s superior?” he asked.

The sergeant looked at him for a moment, confusion on his face, before he answered. “Sorry, yes. I’m Bobby Watts. I was on the desk when it happened. It was me called the PSNI patrol after Smithy radioed in. Jesus, he sounded worried, but I didn’t think it would be anything like this.”

“Detective Inspector Jack Lennon.” He extended his hand to Watts. “I’ll be the senior investigating officer until the ACC sets up a team in the morning. What happened?”

Watts told him about Constable Wayne Smith’s nervous call, how he fully expected it to be some drunk who’d wandered in front of the patrol car, and that as he made his way to the scene of the accident he cursed the prospect of the paperwork and the substantial claim that would surely result. He arrived a few minutes before the Police Service of Northern Ireland car to find something altogether different. “I never saw the like of it,” Watts said, shaking his head. His eyes watered and his breath misted. “Harbor work is quiet, you know? The odd bit of thieving, some traffic stuff, that’s about the height of it. Nothing like this, even when the Troubles was going full scud. They took his weapon, too.”

“Shit,” Lennon said. Whoever was crazy enough to put a cop in the hospital was now also wandering the city with a Glock 17 in his pocket. He wrapped his overcoat tight around himself as the cold bit hard. Connolly approached from the direction of the water, his fluorescent yellow jacket buttoned up tight.

Lennon tugged the paramedic’s sleeve as he went to get back into the ambulance’s cabin. “How is he?” he asked.

“Not great,” the paramedic said. “But I’ve seen worse. Apart from the cuts to his scalp, I don’t see any sign of damage to the skull, but we won’t know much until he has a scan. His vitals are good, though. We’re taking him to the Royal. Call A&E in an hour or so, they’ll have a better idea then.”

“Thanks,” Lennon said. He turned to Connolly. “Well?”

“The dead man’s mid-thirties or thereabouts. Going by the tattoos and the clothes, I’d guess Eastern European. Looks like a stab wound to the throat did for him.”

“All right,” Lennon said. “Let’s take a look.”

They moved toward the body, but Watts called after them. “What do you want me to do?”

Lennon considered telling him to go back to his office, he couldn’t be any help here, but he didn’t have the heart. Instead, he said, “Why don’t you stay with Constable Smith’s car? Make sure no one interferes with it before it gets cordoned off.”

Watts looked up and down the darkened road. Even though there wasn’t a sinner to be seen, let alone threaten interference with the car, he said, “Aye, right, good thinking.”

“Thanks,” Lennon said, grateful Watts hadn’t taken offense at the condescension. There was nothing useful the harbor cop could do here, but to send him away would be a greater insult than allocating a nonsense task.

Lennon and Connolly made for the water again, their footsteps crisp on the frost.

“It’s a cold one,” Connolly said to break the quiet.

“Yep,” Lennon said.

“How’s your wee girl?”

“She’s fine.”

“Good.”

“Looking forward to Santa coming?”

“Yes.”

That thin trickle of conversation took them to the water’s edge, and the corpse wrapped in black plastic. The covering had torn away where the bundle had been dragged over the stones, and more had been pulled back to reveal the face and torso.

“Did you open it up?”

“Yeah,” Connolly said, “just so I could confirm no sign of life.”

“Okay. But make sure it doesn’t get disturbed any more than it has been. The medical officer should be here soon. Aside from that, no one else touches him, right?”

“Right,” Connolly said.

“Torch,” Lennon said, holding his hand out.

Connolly pulled a flashlight from his belt and gave it to him. Lennon shone the light on the ground so he could choose his footing without trampling any evidence. The beam found the length of electrical cord and a wad of material—what looked like a piece of torn bed sheet—that lay a few feet away.

‘What about these?’

‘They haven’t been touched,’ Connolly said. ‘Could be litter, there’s plenty of it lying about, but I don’t think so.’

‘Neither do I.’

Lennon hunkered down beside the body. The face was round and blunt-featured, the hair cropped short, the mouth open to the night. Already frost formed on the lips. A deep gash beneath the chin spread into what resembled a dark red bib. “Doesn’t look like a knife,” Lennon said.

“No?” Connolly asked.

“Not clean enough.” Lennon held the torch beam close, light finding the recesses of the wound. “See how it’s torn, rather than cut? Something more jagged did this.”

Lennon quietly hoped the case would not be assigned to Thompson’s MIT. The senior officer, or his deputy, would be required to attend the post mortem. Knowing Thompson, he would assign Lennon the duty of standing there while they cut this poor bastard up.

“There’s tire tracks over there,” Connolly said.

Lennon moved the torch’s beam over the loose stones and earth. They were faint, the ground frozen hard, but they were there all right. A car had been parked here tonight.

He scanned the patch between the tracks and the body for footprints. All he saw were the slightest of impressions, nothing useful.

“Care to amaze me with some logical deduction?” Lennon asked.

Connolly shuffled his feet. “Well, I suppose someone maybe drove here to dump the body. The harbor cop disturbed them before they could get it in the water, he got a beating for his troubles, and they ran.”

“I think that’s some pretty good supposing,” Lennon said.

“There’s one thing, though,” Connolly said.

Lennon stood. “What’s that, then?”

“I think I know his face,” Connolly said.

7

A
RTURAS
S
TRAZDAS OPENED
his laptop on the hotel suite’s desk and powered it up. He sat down in the leatherbound chair, a luxurious sofa to one side of the room. A few seconds later, he had connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi network. He called up the website for European People Management, a labor agency that was jointly owned by him, his brother, and his mother. Half a dozen such agencies operated in the British Isles and throughout the rest of the EU, and all of them were owned by some combination of his closest family members. But only he knew their inner workings.

He logged in to the website’s secure admin area with a username and password he changed every seven days and followed the links until he found a list of migrants registered as having been assigned work within Northern Ireland. They were all listed as Polish, Czech, Lithuanian or Latvian nationals. He filtered the list down to females who had left employment in the last three weeks.

One listing.

It said she was Lithuanian and gave her name as Niele Gimbutiené. Strazdas knew this to be false. He clicked on the link to see her full profile. There were two images, one a scan of a Lithuanian passport, the other a head-andshoulders shot of the girl. A casual examination, such as a tired immigration official might give, would suggest the photographs matched, that this girl was indeed a Lithuanian national with every entitlement as an EU citizen to live and work legally in the United Kingdom.

But if you looked closely at the eyes, the height of the cheekbones, the set of the mouth, you might suspect this girl was not the one pictured on the passport. And you’d be right. The notes said this girl had left her job at a mushroom farm in County Monaghan just over a week ago and was no longer associated with the agency. Strazdas knew this was not untrue, strictly speaking, but the reality was a little harder. If the notes were entirely accurate, they would say she had been purchased from the agency by another party, along with the passport on which she had travelled. Perhaps the passport would be used to gain passage for some other pretty young woman with blonde hair, blue eyes, and Slavic features. But this girl was still somewhere in Belfast.

Strazdas knew in his gut that Tomas was in trouble. Did this skinny girl have something to do with it? He had no reason to suspect so, but he had learned over many years in business to be mindful of all possibilities.

His mobile phone rang. He lifted it from the desktop, checked the display, and answered.

“There’s no answer at the apartment,” Herkus said. “I can’t see any lights from outside. I don’t think they’re here. I’d break in, but all of these places have reinforced doors. I’d need a battering ram to get through.”

“All right,” Strazdas said. “Check whatever bars Tomas and Darius drink in. Get more men if you have to. I want them found tonight.”

He did not wait for Herkus’s response before hanging up. Strazdas returned his attention to the picture of the girl.

“What did you do with my brother?” he asked.

His cheeks warmed as the sound of his own voice reverberated in the empty room. Talking to himself. His mother had lectured him earlier that day, saying he was working too hard, putting himself under too much stress and strain, not sleeping. A man’s mind could only take so much, even a man as strong as Arturas Strazdas.

Strazdas did not argue with his mother. No one argued with Laima Strazdiené.

His father certainly hadn’t. As a teenager, Arturas had sat at the table in the two-room apartment the family shared in Kaunas, Tomas facing him at the opposite side, their father between them. The fourth place often remained empty when they ate. They would talk to drown out the grunts from the other room as their mother took care of another visitor.

At night, Arturas and Tomas would share the foldout bed in the same room while their parents talked on the other side of the wall. Or rather their mother talked, and their father listened.

To feed us, she would say, to keep us warm.

Once, Strazdas had asked her about the visitors that came and went at all hours. She threw hot coffee in his lap. His father took him to the university hospital, told him to keep his questions to himself.

His father left their home not long after the Soviets released their hold on Lithuania. He said nothing, left no note, was simply no longer at the table. Strazdas’s mother would not discuss it, as if he’d never existed.

Soon, men were not the only visitors. Often there were young women, and they would take the men into the other room while Arturas and Tomas ate with their mother at the table.

Three months later, they moved to an apartment that had two bedrooms. The brothers hoped this would mean a room of their own, but instead it allowed two girls to receive visitors at any one time. But there was money for Tomas to go to a good school, and for the older brother to attend university.

As a student, Arturas took an apartment of his own. Under his mother’s guidance, he also allowed a room to be used for the entertainment of lonely men. He discovered that he liked having money in his pocket and good clothes to wear. The other students were jealous when he acquired a car, albeit a used one.

Then there was an incident with Tomas and a teacher at his school, and they had to move away to Vilnius.

Laima had always indulged her younger son, fool that he was. For every soft kiss on Tomas’s cheek, it seemed Arturas received a hard slap. Still, looking back, he did not hate her for it. Not really. After all, she had taught him how to make a good living from the weaknesses of others.

Arturas Strazdas stood and crossed the room to the elegant glass-topped sideboard. Herkus had left a small package there, a cellophane bag containing an amount of white powder. Good stuff, Herkus had said, straight from the source. Go easy on it, he had said. Maybe get some rest before taking any.

Strazdas opened the bag’s seal and poured a little of the powder onto the glass. Using the hotel’s key card, he divided and shaped the powder into three lines. He took a fifty-euro note from his pocket, rolled it into a tube, inserted one end into his left nostril, and inhaled.

The world snapped into focus.

He shivered as he exhaled, moved the rolled-up note to his other nostril, and inhaled the second line.

His head lightened.

Strazdas switched the note back to his left nostril and took the last line. He threw the note aside and bent down, licked the last of the powder from the glass. As his tongue slipped across the glossy surface, tingling from the cocaine, he opened his eyes and saw their reflection. He stood upright and stared at himself for a moment.

“Fuck you,” he said.

His wits sharpened, his heart beating harder, the air sweeter than it had been before. He grinned at the powderstreaked face in the glass. His phone chimed, and somewhere inside himself, he thought he might have sensed the coming call seconds before it sounded. Some might dismiss that as nonsense, but Arturas Strazdas was not an ordinary man. He was a great man. He could do anything.