asked, nodding at Jasmine. She sounded sympathetic, Reggie gave her Brownie points for that. Not that she’d ever been a Brownie, something she regretted now, she would have made a good one. (‘You are a Brownie, Reggie,’ Ronnie said. ‘Right down to your fingertips.’)
‘Where’s she from?’ Marriot asked.
‘The Philippines,’ Reggie said. ‘She speaks hardly any English.’
‘Fresh off the boat and straight into a massage parlour?’
‘I don’t know. This lady, Angel, is translating for us.’
‘Well, it so happens we’ve got another dead Asian lass on our hands,’ Marriot said, ignoring Angel. ‘Found last night. Dumped at sea, I’m afraid. No ID. Looks like she was strangled, still waiting on the autopsy. It’s like buses, you wait ages for one dead foreign sex worker and then …’
Reggie took back the Brownie points, ‘Ours isn’t dead,’ she said, ‘and you don’t know she’s a sex worker.’
‘She’s a woman,’ Ronnie added. ‘And she needs help.’
‘Yeah, hashtag MeToo,’ Marriot said. ‘Anyway, dead or alive, she’s not yours any more, we’re taking her. You can get back to your sleuthing.’
They said goodbye to Jasmine. She clung on to Reggie’s hand and said something that Reggie thought must be goodbye in Tagalog, but Angel said, ‘No, she said thank you.’
‘Oh, by the way,’ Ronnie said to Marriot as they were leaving the ward, ‘you might find your “dead Asian lass” is called Maria.’
‘Wow. Gender and racial stereotyping all in one go,’ Ronnie murmured as they left the ward.
‘Yeah, bonanza,’ Reggie said.
Just before Marriot had appeared and ejected them, Jasmine had paused for a drink of water. She had to sip it through a straw because of her split lip and they used the brief hiatus to ask Angel if Jasmine had said anything useful yet about what had happened to her.
‘She say same things again and again.’
‘I know,’ Reggie said. ‘Maria and Mr Price.’
‘Yes, and something else. I don’t know what. Sound like “sillerburtches”?’
‘Angel,’ Ronnie said.
‘It’s a popular name in the Philippines,’ Reggie said. ‘It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if it wasn’t her name – if it was her job. Perhaps after you’ve earned your first angel badge you work your way up, rise through the nine ranks of angels and retire at the top of your profession as one of the seraphim. I like the idea of having a badge that says “Angel”. Or a warrant card. “DC Ronnie Dibicki and Angel Reggie Chase. We’d just like to ask you a few questions. Nothing to worry about.” Of course, you can be an angel as well. Angel Ronnie Dibicki.’
‘You’ve had too much coffee, sunshine. You need to lie down in a dark room. Hang on.’ Ronnie put a hand on Reggie’s arm and held her back. ‘Look. Isn’t that the drag act from the Palace?’
A man was standing at the reception desk filling out some paperwork. Dressed in jeans and a grey sweatshirt and a pair of moccasin shoes that had seen better days, he was virtually unrecognizable from the grotesque parody of a woman from yesterday. He looked as if he ought to be mowing his lawn and discussing the best route to Leeds over the garden fence.
‘Wonder what he’s doing here?’
‘Sillerburtches? Silver birches, do you think?’ Reggie puzzled as they made their way back to the car.
‘As in trees?’
Ronnie trawled through the more abstruse outer circles of the internet on her iPhone. ‘All I can find is something in the Scarborough News from years ago. Silver Birches was a nursing home, closed after some kind of scandal – followed by a court case, I think. Mistreatment of residents, inadequate facilities, blah, blah, blah. It had a long local history, apparently, started life as a mental hospital, a showcase of Victorian reform. There’s a suggestion that it was the model for the mental asylum where the character Renfield was incarcerated. Renfield?’
‘He’s a character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ Reggie said.
‘Oh, yeah, it says that next. “Bram Stoker’s visit to Whitby was the inspiration for …” blah-blah-blahdy-blah. It’s not far from here – shall we swing by? Even though it’s absolutely nothing to do with us and Marriot would give us a right bollocking if she thought we’d gone rogue.’
‘No harm in a quick shufti though,’ Reggie said.
‘No, no harm at all. It’ll just take five minutes.’
Be the Wolf
Vince was dry-eyed with sleeplessness by the time the first light seeped through his thin curtains. The dawn chorus had cranked up before it was even dawn. Someone should have a word with the birds about their timing.