Hit and Run - [18]

At Easter, Rosa seemed much better. She was dancing at the club by then and that made all the difference. She was allowed to get the shopping too. That weekend she had brought a packet of cheap felt-tip pens and fresh eggs back from the mini-market. She hard-boiled them and handed them round when the others appeared for breakfast. The girls teased her, groaning at the sentimentality, joshing her for being old-fashioned. Petra drew a face on her egg rather than a pattern but they soon fell into reminiscing and the talk turned to food. Here all they ever ate – oven chips, pizzas, ready meals – was plastic food: ready in ten minutes and hungry again ten minutes later. But at home…

Soon they were inventing favourite menus, boasting about the sweetest cakes, the spiciest sausage, the most perfect pieroji. ‘Thick and glossy,’ Marta had said, ‘meat soft as butter and every vegetable you can imagine.’

How often did we actually eat like that, Marta thought; how often did we go hungry or put up with cabbage and potato day after day? Their daydreams were a far reach from the reality of life back home. But dreams didn’t cost anything.

After they had eaten the eggs, Rosa had pulled a bag from the drawer where she had hidden it; spilled the bars onto the table.

‘Chocolate!’ They chorused.

‘With tea, proper tea,’ Marta decided. Shunning the instant coffee and the milk, she found glasses, made drinks with sliced lemon and sugar.

Marta climbed quickly out of bed. The air was nippy and goose pimples rashed her arms. Rosa had been happy then, she thought, that Easter morning. I could write maybe, tell her family about that. Her kindness, buying us treats and recreating a little piece of home.

*****

Richard tried not to be distracted by the skimpily dressed girl giving it her all on the pole. The rest of the club was deserted, plunged into gloom but the girl swayed in an isolated pool of light. Harper was watching from a table nearby. The place was chilly and the cold seemed to intensify the aroma of stale beer and cigarette smoke that the soft furnishings soaked up.

‘Bit early, isn’t it?’ Richard drew up a chair beside Harper.

‘Audition – we’re one girl down.’

Richard gave him a look.

‘The show goes on.’ He was unapologetic.

‘Lee Stone, your doorman – were you aware he had a criminal record?’

Harper shrugged.

‘Car theft amongst other things. He’s helping us now with our enquiries into the hit and run accident.’

Harper’s attention shifted sharpish from the dancer to Richard. He frowned. ‘You think Stone nicked my car?’ Surprise was replaced by outrage as the full meaning hit home. ‘I’ll bloody have him… The bastard!’ He ran a finger round the collar of his shirt.

‘Any trouble between you?’

‘Nothing that I was aware of. And I think I’d have known; he’s not exactly subtle.’

‘So why would he steal your car?’

The girl hooked one knee round the pole, arched backwards, her hair almost sweeping the floor, one hand running slowly from her collarbone, over her breasts and down to her thigh. Richard wrenched his gaze back to Harper.

‘Search me. But if you do find out let me know, won’t you?’ He shook his head with disbelief. ‘Bloody idiot.’ He gestured to the dancer to stop. Moved to turn off the music. ‘Thanks, love, I’ll give you a bell.’

The girl nodded, wandered off to get dressed.

‘I’d book her,’ Richard muttered. He leafed back a couple of pages in his daybook, to the notes of Harper’s first statement. ‘Rosa didn’t turn up for work on Monday. What about Stone?’

‘It’s his day off.’

‘But they both worked Sunday?’ Harper nodded.

‘Anything going on between him and Rosa?’

‘No, I’d have noticed. I don’t like him round the girls.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Bit rough round the edges, nasty mouth on him. They shouldn’t have to put up with that.’

‘Anything physical?’

‘Once or twice, harassment, copping a feel. I made it plain to him, any more of it and he’d be out.’

Richard nodded, wondering whether Stone’s harassment had involved Rosa this time and whether it had got out of hand. Whether sexual assault had led to murder?

*****

At the police station, introductions had been made for the tape and Janine and Butchers faced Stone and a duty solicitor across the table in interview room one.

Janine took in the truculent expression on Stone’s face, the insolence in his watery blue eyes. He was a big man, solidly built, with the look of someone who could ‘handle himself’. No match for a slender girl like Rosa.

‘You work for Mr Harper,’ Janine began. ‘Why did you steal his car?’

‘What car?’ Playing innocent. His eyes mocking her. Janine changed tack. ‘Tell me about Rosa Milicz?’

‘What about her?’

‘You like her?’

‘Not especially.’

‘Why’s that? She turn you down?’

Stone sneered. ‘No.’

Janine sensed the question rankled. She could feel the anger not far below the surface. Like many of the violent men she had dealt with, Stone had a short fuse and his aggression belied an insecurity that made him quick to respond to imagined slights or insults.

‘Mr Harper doesn’t trust you with the girls.’

‘What! A gentleman like me!’ He swung his neck this way and that as he mocked offence. The gesture reminded Janine of the dances of the rap artists Michael used to like; that male posturing, the come and get me pose.