The Black Shepherd Read online

  Some nameless hour in the night Frankie startled awake to an unexpected sound. She looked up into the gurning face of a drunk looming over her. It took her a moment to realize it was piss splashing over her sleeping bag.

  She was up in an instant, forgetting all about the character she was playing.

  The movement panicked the pissing man. He tried to turn, flaccid cock still in hand, a ribbon of urine still flowing, and tripped over his own feet. He went sprawling to the ground, the urine soaking into his trousers.

  The smile was gone from his face.

  Frankie saw three other young men standing nearby, delighting at the misfortune of their friend, and realized what was going on.

  ‘You bastards!’ Frankie snarled, lashing out wildly at the man on the ground as he tried to put his dick away and zip himself up at the same time as he splashed around trying to stand. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so disgusting.

  The others just laughed at him.

  The man got to his feet and staggered away without looking back.

  On the other side of the street a gaggle of girls had stopped and stood watching. Frankie ignored them. She turned her back on the drunks, surprised to see the generosity of coins that had been dropped onto her cardboard sign. There was more than enough for a decent breakfast when morning came, though some of the coins were wet.

  Most of the piss had missed her sleeping bag. Even from close range the drunk’s aim had been piss-poor. Most of it soaked into his designer-label trousers.

  She swallowed down her disgust, knowing that it only added to the authenticity of her bag. You lived rough, this was what happened to you.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ one of the young men said, taking a ten-euro note from his pocket. He pushed it into her hand and set off after his friends. Frankie took it without a word. It would keep her alive for two more days. That was how little it took to make a difference.

  She waited until they’d all gone, then sat down with her back to the doorway and gathered up the coins.

  She was more angry than upset, and she’d had to bite down on her instinct, otherwise she would have hospitalized the drunk, which whilst being satisfying would have been a mistake, all things considered.

  She was on her guard when the next figure approached.

  ‘You OK?’ the young woman asked as she crouched down in front of her. She offered Frankie a paper cup of coffee, which she accepted with gratitude, savouring the warmth that immediately bled into her skin even before she took a sip.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, letting the steam warm her face. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of shit.’ Unlike most of the young people who had walked along the street, she wasn’t dressed for a night out, which marked her out as a do-gooder. There were always a few on the lookout for people to help.

  The coffee tasted half decent.

  ‘My name’s Tasha,’ the woman said.

  ‘Ceska.’

  ‘Russian?’

  Frankie shook her head. ‘Czech.’ It sounded like a Czech name rather than an affectionate nickname her grandmother had given her.

  ‘Long way from home.’

  Frankie shrugged. ‘Not sure I have a home any more.’

  ‘Ah,’ Tasha said, then took a sip of her own coffee, and fell into a comfortable silence.

  ‘Thank you,’ Frankie said eventually. ‘Not just for the coffee. For the company. It gets pretty lonely out here.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Tasha said.

  ‘You do this a lot?’ She’d seen them a couple of times over the last week. They set up a table and offered coffee in paper cups and badly buttered cheese sandwiches to people who lined up for the handouts.

  ‘There are a few of us out most nights. There are too many kids living rough. Not enough shelters. We try to help. We run a soup kitchen, down by the docks. You might want to come and find us if you get hungry. The food’s not fancy, but it’s hot and filling.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘Ha, well, you might want to reserve judgement until you’ve tasted it, but it’s better than nothing.’

  First contact.

  Frankie had to resist the temptation to ask questions. She wasn’t a cop here. She was a vulnerable young woman. She needed to think like one. That meant not looking a gift horse in the mouth. How many soup kitchens could there be in a city the size of Tallinn? Two, three?

  ‘Hope to see you in the morning,’ Tasha said, pushing herself back up to her feet. ‘Look after yourself, Ceska.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I say this to all the kids I meet out here, so even though you aren’t a kid, don’t be offended: if you can go home, you really should. This life is hard enough without putting yourself through this. And if you can’t go home, well … just be careful.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘See you in the morning.’ This time it wasn’t a question.

  Frankie settled herself back down a doorway along from the faint lingering smell of urine.

  FIVE

  The next flight out was at five thirty in the morning, which meant being through customs by four thirty, which meant trying to sleep was a pointless exercise with the journey to Cologne-Bonn airport taking thirty minutes door-to-door. Four in the morning was a strange time. A mortician had once told him that more people died in the hour between three and four a.m. than any other time of the day. That little factoid had stuck with him, and he found himself thinking about it as the taxi drove him through the deserted streets. He got it. It made sense. Four a.m. was a lonely time. It wasn’t about ghosts or things that went bump in the night. It was about being alone and not wanting to carry on. It didn’t matter if you were sick or lost, it was just harder at four a.m.

  He read through the dossier Laura had put together for him, including more details about his excuse for being in Estonia. As with everything she did, it was beyond thorough. He knew they were deliberately grasping at straws, but the more he read the more it felt like it might actually be possible that there was a link between this dead body in the forest fire and more young women from the old Eastern Bloc who were being trafficked to the West. Young, in this case, meant kids as well as seventeen-, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. One name he saw was thirteen when she’d gone missing.

  His blood ran cold.

  He hated shit like this, when kids were involved.

  He knew logically it went back to his father. Those guilt trips around children’s homes and orphanages come Christmastime, and rooted deeper, the horrors the old man had fled as a child. Peter had learned about his father’s second life when he was hunting Karius. That had cast a different light on his own childhood. It was all just so flimsy. Even so, it was a massive leap from the burned body to the rest of it, and any cop worth their salt would call him out on it, so he worked up a whole ‘You know what the bosses are like, wanting to cover their backs’ speech.

  He woke her up. The phone only made it to the third ring before she answered. He didn’t bother saying hello. She knew who it was.

  ‘OK, fess up, what’s your secret?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, but then it is nearly four in the morning and I was in the middle of a very hot Gerald Butler dream, so that’s hardly surprising.’

  ‘This stuff in the file.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s convincing. I mean seriously convincing.’

  ‘That’s because it’s true,’ she said. ‘Girls are being trafficked through Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Tallinn is a logical staging post, it opens the way into Scandinavia via Sweden and Helsinki, and there are direct ferries into St Petersburg. It’s a gateway to Europe with good road and rail links. You can drive to Berlin in seventeen hours, and thanks to the Eurozone you’re not getting your cargo checked by customs once it’s loaded up. Frictionless borders.’

  ‘I can hear the Brexiteers’ mocking laughter from here.’

  ‘There’s nothing to link the d
ead girl to the human railway, but frankly, that’s a detail. You need an excuse, this is an excuse.’

  ‘Ah, Law, you little subversive. You’ve only been the boss for five minutes and you’re already screwing with the system.’

  ‘No choice. If we told the truth we’d have to flag One World in the system, and worst case, if they do have someone on the inside, then all sorts of alarm bells will start ringing somewhere. Maybe not inside Division, maybe not even in Bonn, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be heard somewhere. Who knows what kind of influence those bastards have got. Put it this way, better to get a slap on the wrist for sending you on a wild-goose chase than getting Frankie cut up and dissolved in a vat of lye.’

  ‘When you put it like that, I can see just how much hanging around me has damaged you.’

  ‘Is that supposed to be a compliment?’

  ‘Of course. You’re one of us.’

  ‘One of us, one of us,’ she said, in an eerie monotone like something out of an old horror movie. That made him smile.

  ‘When is Frankie meant to check in?’

  ‘She isn’t. She’s got a burner phone for emergencies.’

  ‘But you’re tracking her?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got eyes on her most of the time.’

  ‘I don’t like the way you say “most”. You going to let me have her number?’

  ‘Only if you promise not to use it.’

  ‘Well, that’s a promise I won’t be able to keep.’

  ‘I’m serious. No calls on that number unless we are desperate. I’m your point of contact out there, Pete. I’ll direct you to her once you touch down. Keep the burner I gave you on at all times.’

  It looked like it was at least a decade behind the technology curve, barely capable of stringing together multiple texts, with no MMS functionality, because that was exactly what it was meant to look like. The brains trust inside Division had modified the unit so that it could do everything a modern smart phone could, and work as an independent tracker which relayed its GPS signal back to the Galileo satellite system run by the EU. The tracker had its own four-week battery which would continue to function even if the main battery and SIM card were removed. The device was paired with Frankie’s and would work like a homing beacon, allowing them to find each other. Laura had set up a three-digit activation code.

  Zero. Zero. Seven.

  It was as close as he was ever going to get to feeling like James Bond.

  SIX

  The call from Frankie Varg weighed on Annja Rosen’s mind far more than she thought it would in the week that followed it.

  On one level she still felt sad that she’d lost her friend, but on another she was pissed off that Irma had done something so utterly stupid.

  Annja felt like she’d been abandoned.

  What stuck in her mind was the note of surprise in Frankie’s voice when Annja told her she’d already given a statement to the police. It jarred with her because surely if she’d been a cop she’d have known that? But Annja was beginning to think she’d been played. She’d taken the woman at her word. But what if she wasn’t a cop? What if she was some sort of muck-raking journalist? The kind that hacked the phones of dead girls trying to get a story?

  Annja played the conversation over and over in her head.

  Had she told the woman anything she shouldn’t?

  Did she even know something worth knowing?

  She couldn’t think of anything.

  Sure, she knew some of Irma’s secrets, but nothing of any worth. She knew friend stuff, like the name of her dog, her secret crush, her best friend when she was growing up and just how badly she’d screwed things up there, the first boy she had kissed, and just how much of a disaster that had been. She knew about the first time she’d kissed a girl and how different it had been, and how hard Irma had struggled to work out who she was and who she wanted to be. But apart from a few photographs on her phone it was if Irma had never existed. And that was what haunted her: just how easy it was for someone to completely disappear.

  Annja’s first thought was to tell the police about the call; it couldn’t hurt. If they already knew someone was investigating Irma’s disappearance, then great, she really, really hoped this Frankie woman would find a way to bring her home; and if they didn’t, well then they would now, either way there was no need for it to weigh on her mind.

  The problem was, since Irma had left, Annja had lost touch with their shared friends. It hadn’t taken her long to realize they weren’t really shared at all. They were Irma’s friends.

  But then she’d found the slip of paper and that had taken the indecision out of it.

  She knew what the right thing to do was.

  Annja stood outside the police station for a good ten minutes staring at the word stencilled on the glass before she mustered the courage to go inside. She’d spent most of the morning convincing herself she was making a fool of herself. But it was also the right thing to do.

  And she owed it to Irma to do everything she could. Maybe then she could move on?

  Annja took a deep breath and walked inside.

  A couple of people sat in the cheap plastic chairs, waiting. A sad-faced woman clutched a shopping basket on her lap. A small dog peered out of the opening. Annja gave her a nervous smile before going up to the glass screen.

  The desk officer didn’t look up.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked, still fascinated by something else.

  ‘I need to speak to Detective Kask,’ Annja said, a little too softly for her words to carry. She repeated herself.

  ‘What’s it concerning?’

  ‘He came to see me a few months ago. My friend disappeared. He said to get in touch with him if I remembered anything that might help find her.’

  The desk officer nodded. ‘What’s the name of your friend?’

  ‘Irma Lutz.’

  He made her spell it out.

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Annja Rosen.’

  ‘Take a seat. I’ll see if he’s available.’

  Ten minutes later she was being ushered into an empty interview room.

  Kask was older than she remembered, nearer to the grizzled desk officer’s age than her own. He still had that roguish smile she remembered though.

  ‘OK, Annja, how can I help?’ He leaned towards her across the wooden table. It was all about body language. He was telling her he was one of the good guys, here to fix her problems. He was interested. And for a moment at least she was the centre of his entire universe.

  Which didn’t make it any easier for Annja to find the right words. Face to face with Kask, it felt like such a waste of time. ‘It might be nothing,’ she said. ‘It probably is. But you said to get in touch … so … I’m not really sure where to start.’

  ‘That’s OK. Take your time.’

  Slowly, Annja explained about the call she’d received from Frankie, and the special European police agency she supposedly represented.

  She produced the slip of paper from her handbag and slid it across the table.

  ‘I thought you might want this. I started to worry that maybe she wasn’t a cop, you know?’

  He reached out and placed a finger on the paper, drawing it the last few centimetres towards him. ‘Frankie Varg,’ he said, reading the name written on it.

  ‘You know her?’ He inclined his head slightly. She took that as an answer. ‘That’s a relief. But now I’m beginning to think that I’m wasting your time. I’m sorry.’ She closed her bag and started to get to her feet.

  Kask held up his hand to stop her.

  ‘You’re not wasting my time. Believe me. It’s always better to let us know about your concerns. Keeping this to yourself won’t help Irma. So, tell me why you’re worried.’

  Annja slumped back down into the seat. ‘I can’t really explain it, it was just that she seemed surprised that you’d already spoken to me.’

  Kask leaned back this time, inclining his head slightly. ‘We’ve sent
her a copy of our files.’

  Annja nodded. ‘That’s what she said. I guess she missed my statement.’

  ‘It’s possible. Pages stick together, or maybe we missed something when we mailed them over – it happens, we’re only human,’ he said with that warm smile of his. ‘But thank you.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. That’s why I didn’t think there was any harm in telling them just what I’d told you in my original statement.’

  Something changed in the man’s face, just the slightest shift in the set of the muscles under the skin. He didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘It’s fine. You didn’t do anything wrong, Annja. All you’ve done is save me the trouble of digging up your original statement and sending it over. Don’t worry.’ He got to his feet and opened the door for her, offering his hand as he thanked her again, and repeated the promise that if she thought of anything else, no matter how insignificant she might think it, to get in touch. Annja promised she would. She left with the distinct impression that he couldn’t get her out of there fast enough.

  The woman with the small dog still waited, offering her own uncertain smile to Kask this time.

  Annja felt a curious sense of unease as she stepped outside again, and looked back over her shoulder to see Kask watching her through the glass door.

  SEVEN

  Maksim Kask watched the woman leave.

  He was glad to see the back of her.

  With luck he’d never see her again.

  He’d known that she was going to be a pain in the arse from the first moment he’d met her. He took no pleasure in being proved right.

  A woman in the plastic seats gave him a hopeful smile, but he ignored her and headed back towards his office. He exchanged a nod and a grimace with the desk sergeant.

  The other man understood.

  Back in the office he shared with three other members of the team, Kask unfolded the slip of paper the girl had given him. It took all of a second to decide what he was going to do with it. He screwed the paper into a ball and threw it into the trash. That was where it belonged.

  What were the chances that Frankie Varg would realize the significance of the girl’s statement? The absolute last thing he needed was her digging too deep. He reached for the phone on his desk then changed his mind. Another officer sank into the battered leather chair at a neighbouring desk. The man nodded then drew his computer keyboard a fraction closer and began to type.