it suddenly speeded up. Everything happened so quickly that it was difficult later to piece it back together.
It began when one of the girls gasped loudly and wobbled unsteadily to her feet. She looked like someone waking from a long, long sleep. She was tiny – shorter even than Reggie – and was sporting two black eyes and a bloodied nose. Small animals only. Having levered herself to her feet, she stared fixedly at Stephen Mellors before pointing at him and saying, ‘Mark Price. You’re Mark Price.’
She leant down and shook the girl who was slumped on the floor next to her. They were so alike they had to be sisters. ‘Nadja,’ she said, trying to rouse her. Reggie could make out the words ‘It’s Mark Price,’ but the rest of the conversation was in what she was pretty sure was Polish. Reggie turned round, looking for Ronnie to translate, but Ronnie, she realized, had disappeared. She must have gone to try and get help.
The other girl – Nadja – rose up from the floor and, in a surprisingly energetic move for someone who had appeared to be half-comatose moments before, she grabbed the gun out of Vince’s hand. Stephen Mellors, who seemed to recognize the girl, twisted round, trying to scrabble away from her, but there was nowhere to go. He was already up against the wall in more ways than one and there was no mousehole for the rat to take shelter in. Nadja raised the Browning, her arm steady, her aim true, and shot Stephen Mellors in the back with it. Then she raised her arm again and said, ‘For my sister,’ and shot him a second time.
The sound was deafening, ricocheting around the room for what seemed forever. It was followed by a moment of profound silence. Time, which had been moving so quickly, was suddenly suspended, and in that space the two girls stood silently with their arms around each other, staring at Stephen Mellors’ lifeless body. Then Nadja, the girl who had just shot a man in the back in cold blood, turned and looked straight at Reggie and nodded to her as if they were members of some secret sisterhood. Reggie couldn’t help herself, she nodded back.
‘Reggie Chase,’ Jackson Brodie mused.
‘Yes. Detective Constable Chase, actually.’
‘You’re a detective? In Yorkshire?’
‘Jeeso. You don’t own the county. Could you stop being amazed by everything, Mr Brodie?’
They were sitting in a major incident van waiting for someone to take a statement from them. They’d been given tea and biscuits by a PCSO. Clearly the whole situation was going to take hours to unravel. When the dust had settled, Stephen Mellors was dead and Vincent Ives had disappeared. Andrew Bragg had been carted off in an ambulance. (‘That was our Mr Bragg?’ Ronnie said. ‘We looked everywhere for him.’)
The trafficked women were handed over to the MSHTU and a place of safety. ‘Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Unit,’ Reggie said, explaining the acronym to Jackson in case he didn’t know. But there was nothing modern about any of it, was there? Reggie thought. From the pyramids to the sugar plantations to the brothels of the world, exploitation was the name of the game. Plus ça change.
‘You became a detective? In Yorkshire?’
‘Again, answered, yes and yes. And don’t flatter yourself that you had any influence over either of those things.’
‘And who is he exactly?’ Ronnie asked, staring rather belligerently at Jackson.
‘Just someone I used to know,’ Reggie said crossly, answering on Jackson’s behalf before he had a chance to explain himself. ‘Used to be a policeman. Used to be from Yorkshire,’ she added. Used to be my friend, she thought. ‘I saved his life once.’
‘She did,’ Jackson affirmed to Ronnie. ‘I remain indebted,’ he added to Reggie.
Ronnie had managed to escape and alert the authorities and thus missed the details of the denouement.
‘It was pandemonium,’ Reggie reported to Ronnie, dunking a digestive in her mug of tea. ‘And over in seconds. Vincent Ives dropped the gun and Andrew Bragg managed to grab it off the floor and shoot Stephen Mellors with it.’
‘He didn’t look capable of grabbing anything,’ Ronnie puzzled. ‘He seemed ready for the Last Rites. And why would he shoot his friend?’
‘Who’s to say?’ Jackson said. ‘Criminals, they’re a law unto themselves. They turn on each other all the time. In my experience.’
‘He’s seen a lot,’ Reggie added helpfully. ‘He’s very old.’
‘Thanks. Thanks, Reggie.’
‘You’re welcome, Mr B.’
Fake News
‘A detective?’ He was having trouble getting his head round