Vlad Cosmescu stood in the arrivals hall of Gatwick Airport, along with the usual assortment of relatives, drivers and tour operators, holding a small placard. The Bucharest flight had landed just over an hour ago and the girls had not come through yet.
Good.
From the tags he had managed to read on the bags of the steady stream of passengers emerging through Customs, everyone from that flight had now gone. He saw Al Italia tags, which he reckoned must be from a flight that had come in from Turin a good thirty minutes later. And Easyjet tags, too, probably from the Nice flight. Then SAS tags, mingled with some KLM ones.
His watch told him it was 11.35 a.m. He popped a tab of Nicorette gum in his mouth and chewed. The two girls he was meeting had been given strict instructions what to do once they had disembarked and entered the passport area, and it seemed they were obeying them.
They were to hang back for an hour, let other flights land and their passengers go through, before they entered the passport queues. Although Romania was now a member of the EU, Cosmescu was well aware that it was internationally regarded as a hot zone for human trafficking. Romanian passports automatically raised a flag for the Border and Immigration Agency.
Which was why all those he came here to meet, sometimes weekly and sometimes more frequently than that, were instructed to tear their Romanian passports up and flush them down the aeroplane toilets, wait for one hour after landing and then arrive at passport control with the false Italian passports they had been given. In that way, if the agency was keeping a lookout for arrivals from the Romanian flight, they would have stopped looking by the time the girls came through.
Two girls were coming now. Good-looking young things in their late teens, cheaply dressed and towing cheap luggage. Could be them. He held up his placard with the innocuous words JACKSON PARTY on it.
One of the girls – really very sexy-looking, slender with long dark hair – raised a hand and waved at him.
‘You had a good flight?’ he asked in Romanian, as a greeting.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Great!’
‘Welcome to England.’
‘Yeah,’ she said again. ‘Great.’
‘Great!’ her companion added.
The relief on their faces was palpable.
Twenty minutes later, Cosmescu sat in the front passenger seat of the tired, brown E-Class Mercedes. Grubby little buck-toothed Grigore drove. He didn’t actually have a hunchback, but he looked like a hunchback. He squatted over the wheel, in one of his cheap beige suits, with his greasy hair, beaky nose and eyes more on the mirror than the road ahead, shooting quick, lascivious glances at every opportunity at the two girls who were seated in the back.
Cosmescu had worked with Grigore for five years and still he knew virtually nothing about the weirdo little creature. The man always turned up on time, did the pick-ups and the drop-offs, but rarely spoke – and that was fine with Cosmescu. If you got into conversation, then you had at some point to talk about yourself. He did not want to talk about himself to anyone. That wasn’t smart. The less anyone knew about you, the more anonymous you could be. And the more anonymous you were, the safer you were. The sef had instilled that in him.
Grigore was good at fixing things. He could turn his hand to just about anything, from plumbing to electrics to damp-proofing, which meant he could deal with all the shit, all the leaking pipes and blocked toilets and loose floorboards and busted blinds, and everything else that could go wrong in the four brothels Cosmescu looked after in the city. Which meant that Cosmescu did not have to worry about gossiping tradesmen. Once a week he allowed Grigore to take his pick of any girl, for an hour. That and the generous pay packet were more than enough to secure Grigore’s undying loyalty.
Which meant there was one less headache for him. He was still thinking about the bodies. About the fuck-up. About Jim Towers. It had been stupid, killing him. But it would have been a lot more stupid to have let him live, all cosied up to the police, with the knowledge he had. Towers had been up to something – maybe he just had a bad conscience, but he could have been planning blackmail. Like in gambling, you had to balance your risks. A small one against a larger one.
He turned and looked at the girls. The one on the left, Anca, she was nice. Her companion, Nusha, had a harder face, her nose was a little big. But both of them were young, seventeen, eighteen maximum. They were OK, they would do fine. He wouldn’t kick either of them out of bed.
And he didn’t intend to.
Cosmescu turned the privacy key and the lift ascended non-stop from the underground car park of his apartment block, behind the Metropole Hotel. The two girls stood with him, with their cheap luggage, in silence.
Then Anca asked, ‘When do we start work?’
‘You start now,’ he said.
She raised a finger. ‘We go to the bar?’
He looked at her sparkly necklace. Smelled her sweet perfume, and her companion’s, which was even sweeter. He stared down her neckline. Good tits. Her friend had even better ones, which made up for her face. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes, knowing that almost certainly they would both smoke. He was right. Each accepted one.
Before he had a chance to click his lighter – his timing, as ever, perfect – the lift stopped and the doors opened.
Now they would be focusing on their unlit cigarettes more than anything else. Keeping them tantalized, he stepped forward into his apartment, then held the door until they had pulled their suitcases, containing their life’s possessions, clear.
As they walked along the carpeted landing, he showed each her room. Single rooms. Divide and rule. That strategy always worked. Then he went into Anca’s room and picked up her plastic handbag.
‘Hey!’ she said.
Ignoring her, he removed her passport and then all the cash from her purse.
‘What you do?’ she demanded angrily.
He produced his lighter and finally lit her cigarette. ‘You know how much money you owe? How many thousands, for your journey and your passport? When you have repaid my boss, then you may have your passport.’
He went out and repeated the scenario with Nusha.
A few minutes later, the two girls walked sullenly into the large, modern living room. It had fine views of the Palace Pier and the blackened remains of the West Pier, the Marina, over to the east, and far out across the English Channel.
Cosmescu was sure they would never have seen anything like this place in their lives. He knew the kind of background they would have come from. And that Marlene would have cleaned them up, in preparation for their new lives.
All the girls that came here were debt-bonded, which meant they had signed up in Romania to an impossibly large loan – although they never actually saw the cash – agreeing to work off in England their one-way passage to what they thought was freedom. They would start here in Brighton. If they settled into their work, fine. But the vigilant Brighton and Hove police, along with care workers, visited the local brothels from time to time, talking to the girls, trying to find ones that were there against their will.
If either of these looked as if she might start giving out signals that she wanted help from the police, he would move her away from Brighton and up to a brothel in London, where less interest would be taken in her, by anyone.
‘We go to the bar tonight?’ Anca said.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he said. ‘Both of you.’
The two girls looked at each other in surprise. ‘Clothes?’
‘I want to see you naked.’
‘We – we did not come to be strippers,’ Nusha said.
‘You are not strippers,’ he said. ‘You are here to pleasure men with your bodies.’
‘No! That’s not the deal!’ Anca protested.
‘You know how much it cost to bring you here?’ he said harshly. ‘You want to go home? I will take you to the airport tomorrow. But Mr Bojin will not be pleased to see you. He will want his money back. Or would you rather I call the police? In this country false passports is a bad offence.’
Both girls fell silent.
‘So tell me, which do you want? Shall I phone Mr Bojin now?’
Anca shook her head, looking terrified suddenly. Nusha bowed hers, looking ashen.
‘OK.’ He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and stabbed a button on the dial pad. ‘I call the police.’
‘No!’ Anca shouted. ‘No police!’
He put the phone back in his pocket. ‘So, take your clothes off. I will teach you how to pleasure a man in this country.’
Staring sullenly at the black carpet, as dark as the void of their new lives, both girls began to undress.