Page 65 of Don't Believe A Word

*

Half an hour later they were all set up in the cosy living room of ex-Detective Sergeant Catherine Shilling’s quirky house in Chew Magna, an eclectic sort of village at the heart of the Chew Valley, with pubs and cafés, lots of narrow streets and a reputation for being a great place to live. Their knees were pressed up against a bamboo coffee table where a small pile of old files was sitting beside a tray of hot tea and scrumptious-looking biscuits. Catherine Shilling herself, who had to be in her early sixties, was her own kind of ex-detective, with a mauve spiky hair-do, nose and eyebrow piercings and a fluorescent pink crushed velvet kaftan that, either by design or chance, matched the cushions behind her.

Wondering if she did some sort of readings these days, given all the crystals and candles dotted about the place, Cristy said, ‘What you’ve just outlined for us is extremely interesting and is going to be a valuable addition to our series. So thanks for agreeing to record before we go any further.’

‘No problem,’ Catherine smiled, her pearly teeth making her as pleasing to look at as her slight lisp was entrancing to listen to. ‘I did some digging around after Clover got in touch, more to refresh my memory than to find answers to your questions – although they’re one and the same, I suppose. I just want to be clear from the start that anything I say for your podcast can’t be categorized as an official statement from Avon and Somerset Police. I mean, they know I’m talking to you and that I’m giving you sight of these files. They just want it understood that I am fifteen years retired from the force and while I was involved in certain investigations concerning the presence of Eastern European gangs in our area back in 1998 through 2001, the overall operation was being conducted by the Met Police. The Serious Organized Crime Agency as it’s known today.’

Nodding her understanding, Cristy noted this down and, receiving a thumbs up from Connor, asked Catherine to identifyherself for the recording and to add what she’d just told them about the SOCA.

With the formalities out of the way the interview began.

CRISTY: ‘So what can you tell us about gang activity in the Minehead area at the time Janina and Lukas Andris were known to be there?’

CATHERINE: ‘Well, it first came to our attention via social services. They were concerned about the occupants of a house near Kylve. Do you know the beach there? It’s famous for its fossils. Anyway, the house in question, Mannycott Farm, turned out to belong to a distant relative of a prominent aristocrat and landowner – think Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Wiltshire rather than Somerset. Not that said highfalutin’ aristo had any involvement in what was happening at the house, or none that I ever knew about. I simply tell you that as part of the background we had on the main resident.’

CRISTY: ‘And what was happening at the house?’

CATHERINE: ‘If you’d listened to the neighbours you’d have thought all sorts of terrible things – slavery, trafficking, prostitution, drugs … All on the edge of this sleepy west Somerset village. They claimed he – George Symmonds-Browne, Lord Mannycott as some called him – had a constant procession of Russian brides being supplied by his very dubious foreign cohorts. They had it – the locals – that these “brides” were tested out by Symmonds-Browne and his cronies before being passed on to the highest bidder.’

CRISTY: ‘You’re sounding sceptical?’

CATHERINE: ‘No, I think in part that bit might have been true, but our surveillance of the property soon told us that local reports were … exaggerated. Girls were living there, no doubt about that, but not in numbers. In fact there only ever appeared to be three or four there at any given time,and whoever they were they seemed free to come and go as they pleased. Sometimes they went out with men, other times on their own.’

CRISTY: ‘So you don’t think they were being held against their will?’

CATHERINE: ‘It didn’t look like it, but I’m sure you know as well as I do, trafficking gangs hold leverage over their victims by threatening to harm the families they’ve left behind. So running away wouldn’t have been an option for those girls.’

CRISTY: ‘Did you ever speak with any of them?’

CATHERINE: ‘No, our instructions were simply to observe and report back.’

CRISTY: ‘Do you know what nationality they were?’

CATHERINE: ‘Not specifically, but I’m not sure they were actually Russian, the way the locals claimed. Definitely not English though.’

CRISTY: ‘How long did they stay at the farm before being moved on?’

CATHERINE: ‘That’s hard to answer, because the surveillance wasn’t constant, no twenty-four-seven or anything like that. More a couple of times a month for a two-to-three-day period. We soon learned that our little stake-out was small fry in comparison to what was going on with the op in the rest of the country. The big boys in London weren’t particularly interested in what we had going in Kylve unless we could report sightings of certain individuals, or vehicles, they had a special interest in.’

CRISTY: ‘And could you?’

CATHERINE: ‘Not at first, no. You’ll find more details in those files there on the table, along with the identities of some of the key gang members. Not people to be messed with, that’s for sure, and I can tell you we wouldn’t havewanted to give it a go. More than one officer lost his life during that particular op. None of ours, the unlucky were London- or Midlands-based, but none of us was keen to add to the number.

‘Anyway, the risk of that was removed as soon as we reported the sighting of one Matis Albescu. That would have been late 1999, I think. We’d been on the case for a good year by then, and he’d been one of their top POIs – persons of interest – long before we were brought into the picture. Then, suddenly one night, there he was, right in front of us. A tall, wiry bloke with a lot of facial hair, and a gammy left leg – meaning he walked with a limp. We knew it was him right away, and got plenty of shots of him entering the house, and coming out again a couple of hours later. That’s when the London boys took over and we, of course, were mushroomed … Kept in the dark about whatever went down from there. However, I can tell you that Albescu is no longer with us. He was shot and killed during a dawn raid in Birmingham a year or more after we laid eyes on him.’

CRISTY: ‘So that would have been sometime in 2001?’

CATHERINE: ‘Could have been early 2002. It’ll be in the file.’

CRISTY: ‘And what happened to the resident of Mannycott Farm?’

CATHERINE: ‘Symmonds-Browne? Nothing as far as we knew. Everything calmed down after the sighting of Albescu in late ’99 – at least for us it did. There were still the occasional reports from neighbours of girls at the farm, but nothing that got anyone excited enough to send us back there. Then one day, I guess it was in the late spring/early summer of 2000, we got a call from a local vicar expressing concern about the disappearance of a young woman. He referred to her as “one of the Russian brides” who, he said, had been living at the farm for the past couple of years.Years.Not months, which was how long most of themseemed to stay. This one, apparently, had been there the whole time since the surveillance was called off, maybe even longer. Obviously the vicar didn’t know anything about the Met operation that had targeted the house, but he was able to tell us that the young woman – he didn’t know her name – had a child and no one had seen them for the past several weeks.’

CRISTY: ‘Did he say why he was concerned about her?’

CATHERINE: ‘I think mainly because of the child, and how long the young woman had been there – and then suddenly she wasn’t.’

CRISTY: ‘So what happened after you received the vicar’s call?’

---