by S Williams
The woman stood and offered Jay her hand.
‘And you’ll need to stop calling me “ma’am”. My name is Inspector Slane.’
Jay didn’t know what to say, so instead, she shook the inspector’s hand.
8
August
The training Jay was given wasn’t hard; it was really just like being at school.
What had been hard was not being able to tell her colleagues. Getting the formal suspension. But Slane had said it was necessary.
‘It’s the way we work, I’m afraid. Nobody must know that you’re being employed by F-branch. We have to occasionally investigate the police force itself, so anonymity is paramount. The only contacts you’ll have with us are myself, Grant and Collins. Your Head of Command knows, of course, but he and I go back a long way. When this is over he’ll be able to debrief his team and you can go back to your old role.’
‘Cool.’
Jay was relieved that her altercation with Charmers would be downgraded. That she would be able to return. She thought about what Slane had said. ‘What do you mean, investigate the police force? Like if there is an official complaint or something?’
Slane had shaken her head. ‘No. More systemic than that. Why do you think I believed you when you told me what DI Charmers had called you, rather than take his side? We look beyond any individual complaint and seek the root. Which is why our work is so dirty.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Put it this way. If you want to catch a racist in the act you need to infiltrate a racist network.’
Later Jay had looked up F-branch. She was right. The organisation had infiltrated all sorts. The government. Police forces. The IRA. Militant environmental movements.
‘I wonder if you ever came across my mother?’ she had muttered as she searched.
‘So what’s this Daisy done?’ Jay asked on her first day.
‘Nothing yet, as far as we know,’ said Slane. ‘She has only just come back on our radar. When she was younger she was part of an organisation. No longer active, but nevertheless someone we were very keen to track down.’
‘What kind of organisation? Like a terrorist cell or something?’
‘No, nothing like that. It would be called a cult, back in the day. It no longer exists, but we are still keen to gather as much information about it as we can. The controlling members are all dead, but we have been given information that an aspect of it might still be active. If that is the case then they may wish to get in contact with Daisy.’
‘What, and re-recruit her?’
‘Perhaps.’
Jay frowned. Slane seemed to be being deliberately vague, but then perhaps she had to be. F-branch was a very secretive part of the police force. As far as Jay had been able to research, it wasn’t even supposed to be active anymore. When she had mentioned this to Grant he’d grinned at her, tapping his nose.
‘Exactly. But nothing ever stops. Not really.’
‘You needn’t worry about that side of the operation,’ Slane had said. ‘All you need to do is befriend Daisy. Keep tabs on her. Make sure she doesn’t run or get taken. Find out what she knows. We’ve arranged a simple backstory for you. Close to your own so you don’t get caught out. Anger issues. Problems with establishment. That sort of thing.’
Jay had grinned at them.
‘Fucking doddle.’
9
September
Daisy kept finding her gaze sliding to the new woman in the group. She didn’t seem the same as the rest of them.
More concrete somehow. Like the stuff she was made of was more substantial.
Or maybe that was the anger.
You could see it behind her eyes. Like little fires burning, ready to be stoked by whatever fuel supplied them. Whatever the woman was kicking against.
Daisy had seen it before. Not in this group, but in others. Other cities. Women who felt the only way to cope was to not bend. Beat up the world to suit their shape, rather than trying to find a way of fitting in.
Hiding.
Daisy hadn’t been in Leeds long, and this was one of the first groups she had managed to find. It was difficult. She couldn’t go to any of the regular programmes that were run by the NHS, or one of the charities. There would be too much chance of her being noticed. Too much of an opportunity for her to be spotted. Too many questions.
Same with the meds. She couldn’t get them from a doctor; she had to obtain them from the grey economy. The network of socially excluded people who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, engage with the official medical community. Or any official community.
She had to live on the fringes. In the shadows. Off the radar of anyone who might be looking for her.
Daisy realised she was paranoid. That no one was looking for her. She understood that anyone who might have once had an interest in her was dead, but that didn’t matter. Because even though they were dead, long gone and buried, there were always others.
That was the thing about monsters. Even if you thought they were in your past they never were. There was always more. Under the bed. In the closet. Waiting behind a smile with a rope and sack. A van and a plan.
Whispering inside your head, telling you to shut down. Stop fighting. Close the door forever.
But the thing was, Daisy was a fighter too.
Not like this new girl, with her couldn’t-give-a-toss-hair and her run-away boots. With her combat trousers like she was ready for war. But deep inside, where she had to live to cope with the world. Where she kept her little boxes of secrets, all locked away so they couldn’t come out and eat her.
That was why she came to the sessions. Why she tried so many different ones. Slowly, year by year, she hoped she could open the box and let the monsters out. Let them out, catch them, and throw them away forever.
Daisy smiled.
The new woman, she suspected, would let them out, then kick them to death.
She gave a shy glance over and was shocked to see that the woman was staring straight back. Daisy felt panic rise inside her. She couldn’t cope with people looking directly at her. Found it almost impossible to maintain eye contact. She always thought that whoever was looking could see into her. See the mess she was.
‘Hi.’
The woman with the hair was standing in front of her, smiling.
‘My name’s Jay; I think we live in the same block. Do you fancy coming for a coffee?’
10
23rd October
The rain-in-shadows bled down the grey walls of Daisy’s living room. Down Daisy’s face and body, as she sat against the wall and stared at the phone, vibrating like an insect on top of the low table.
The noise was harsh in the still room. Each ring cycle triggered the flashing of her name. Daisy. Daisy. Daisy. Like it was hitting her. Sonically slapping her around the face to get her attention. Well it had her attention.
Someone had been in her flat. Impossibly, someone had been in her flat and messed with her space. Daisy’s eyes flicked off the phone, toward the door hidden at the end of the hall by the kitchen wall. The locked and bolted door with the keys hung up at the side on the hook like they always were. Always there because she always locked the door. Double-locked it.
Daisy tried to remember what had happened the previous night. Tried to picture it in her mind. What she had done after leaving Jay.
She couldn’t. The ringing of the phone infected her thinking. Sliced up her memory. She just had disjointed images. Stutters of time that didn’t make sense.
Walking down Boar Lane, away from the train station, step-counting, she’d tried to hide from the rain. Looking through the window of Waterstones, her reflection had ghosted back at her. Sitting at the bus station, letting bits of herself glide away to all the other places on the destination board: York, Huddersfield, Manchester. Emptying herself out so she could survive another day.
Daisy frowned.
She couldn’t remember going home. Letting herself in. Locking the door.
&
nbsp; Taking her meds.
Daisy’s vision blurred. She could feel her heartbeat speeding up as the black hole of the previous night presented itself to her, adding to the wrongness. Multiplying it. Increasing it to the power of fear.
She felt paralysed. Invaded. Someone had been in her flat whilst she was asleep. Got in somehow and left a phone for her.
And she hadn’t woken up.
Daisy’s eyes widened.
With an explosion of movement she checked her body. She felt her breasts under her T-shirt, trying to sense if they were bruised. If they had been groped or squeezed. Felt her groin through her boxers for tenderness. Ran her tongue across her lips and the roof of her mouth, checking for the telltale dryness of the after-effects of drugs.
Rohypnol. Molly. Scoop.
The rape drugs.
Daisy found nothing, but that didn’t mean nothing had happened. No bruising did not mean no rape. If she had been unconscious the rape could have been slow. Gentle. Lubricated, even. Daisy forced herself to breathe in through her nose. Out through her mouth. The phone stopped ringing.
Maybe that was what had happened? She’d been drugged and brought back here. Maybe that was the rapist on the phone. Maybe he knew something about her. Knew how to press the buttons for absolute fear.
Because rape wasn’t about sex. Not really. Not ever. It was about power. Power over someone else. Power over your own existence. Daisy knew all about it. Daisy felt her skin spasming as another thought slid into her brain.
Maybe there were pictures on the phone.
Daisy rarely used the internet. Didn’t own a smartphone or a computer. But she’d heard the stories. At the group sessions and from Jay.
File sharing. Dark places where sickos posted their human trophies. Places on the internet where bad people could meet and discuss and display their conquests. In one of the control sessions Daisy had attended they’d been shown a heavily redacted clip from a site called ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The spiel at the head of the site had said all the right things. That the images were of consenting adults. That the site was dedicated to specialist role-play. That you had to be a member to enter. All the right things. But when it came down to it, it was still images of unconscious women being abused by predators in masks. Daisy had fainted during the session.
The phone rang. Daisy watched it. After an agony, the phone stopped ringing.
She tried to piece together the previous night, but she couldn’t. In fact, there were more and more times lately. Times when the day seemed to have gaps like there were jigsaw pieces missing in her narrative. She’d find herself in the park with no idea how she got there. Or at the internet café where a whole hour seemed to have gone by, with her daydreaming the time away.
It had gotten so bad that she had decided to change her meds.
Daisy sucked in a shaky breath, knelt down and began to move forward on her knees. She inched across the wooden floor, sliding one leg at a time to make the least noise, as if the phone was alive and she could somehow sneak up on it. When she was a foot away she stopped. The phone looked expensive. Looked new. It was housed in silver metal and didn’t appear to be scuffed or scratched, despite not being in a case. Its glass face was black and frightening. Like a mirror that sucked in rather than reflected.
Daisy blinked as the phone rang again. It seemed to move slightly with each ring, and Daisy guessed it was vibrating. Underneath her flashing name was an image of an arrow, slowly moving across the screen from left to right, with ‘swipe to answer’ written underneath it. Daisy blinked again, tightening everything inside her, then picked up the phone.
Daisy swiped, following the direction of the arrow.
The phone stopped ringing and a box with a smiley face emoji replaced her name. Above it were two words written in a cheery blue font.
Open me.
Underneath were two flashing arrows pointing at the box.
Tap to open and view. That was the meaning.
Holding her breath, Daisy tapped.
There was a pause as the smiley face box disappeared, then an image filled the scene. Daisy felt her breath leaving her body, like she’d been punctured. Felt her eyes widening as she took in what was being displayed.
Not an image of her sleeping.
Not of her flat, or her being raped.
Just a picture. A hand-drawn mermaid, sitting on a rock. And written underneath:
The hook.
Daisy stared at the screen, her eyes scanning and rescanning, trying to input the data into her brain. She shook her head, tiny movements of disbelief.
The mermaid wasn’t a picture, she realised. Or at least not from a book. The edges were blurred, and the detail too vague.
It was a tattoo. It was a tattoo of a mermaid on somebody’s skin. The image was too cropped to see where on the body the tattoo was, but Daisy didn’t need to know. It didn’t matter where it was.
Daisy let the phone drop onto the floor like it was on fire, unable to hold it. She stood, ran to the bathroom, and threw up in the sink.
11
3rd November
‘This one was taken two years ago in Uganda. The girl who shot it is dead now, probably due to taking this photograph, or ones like it.’
Behind Professor Joseph Skinner another image dropped. The thirty or so students that made up the audience for his pre-breakfast lecture received it on their phones at the same time it appeared on the screen. Not only did they receive the photo, they got the whole lecture in text format, complete with notes, references, suggested links and reading.
Why not? reflected Joseph. They’d paid for it. Would be paying for it for the first ten years of their professional lives, probably. Skimmed off their salary like the juice from a black-economy loan shark. It made Joseph feel slightly dirty. But like everyone else, he had a job to do. And he needed to give them value for money. Needed to give them bank, as his son would say.
That’s why they were here, sitting in a windowless theatre in the middle of the city with their generic energy drinks and their Narnia phones. Money.
And all before breakfast. In his student days he’d still be in bed, whereas, Joseph thought sadly, these kidults probably couldn’t even afford to sleep. Ten thousand pounds per year fees plus living costs will burn a hole decades deep into a pocket. The professor looked out at the small gathering, the students at the periphery slightly blurred due to his bifocals. The students in front of him were crystal clear and looked like middle-aged children. He guessed that there was no room for experimentation in their life; that they were already getting a run-up on corporate life, sartorially speaking. He supposed they felt they had to. That the competition was so fierce that the office profiling had to start way back in school. Possibly before. Maybe at conception.
Hence the neat haircuts and smart clothes, instead of dreads and ex-army cargos.
Hence the Red Bull and smartphones, instead of Coca Cola and roll-ups.
Hence the full attendance of a pre-breakfast lecture.
Joseph looked past the students to the back of the room. A man and woman sat quietly watching him. The man was squat, had a fade-cut and was wearing a suit that was clearly tailored. The woman, on the other hand, seemed to have fallen into her clothes by mistake. Both were accelerating fast out of middle age and looked about as natural as sharks in the lecture setting. Joseph stared at them a beat, squinting in mild confusion.
Then dropped another image.
‘This one’s from South Sudan. Another girl. It’s interesting to note that nearly half the so-called child soldiers in the world are female. Although not all fight, of course. Many are taken and used for domestic purposes. Camp maintenance. Or sex. Often they are sexually branded.’
As the image changed behind him, one child replaced with another, Joseph studied his group for reactions.
‘Typically it is not a single child who is taken, but the whole community. Sometimes it is from the school, like the Chibok children in Nigeria, taken by the
Boko Haram in 2014; or perhaps an entire village is razed, and all the adults are killed. Sometimes they are even sold or encouraged to go by their families, under the belief that they are giving their children a better life. Many end up here, trafficked into sex or servitude.’
In front of him, the students were attentive, highlighting relevant text on their phones or tablets. Not even laptops anymore. Everything straight onto the cloud. Joseph wondered what they saw as their career path. Oxfam, maybe, or Amnesty. Some NGO for sure. A girl near the front raised a hand. It is the first interaction Joseph had witnessed. He’d done this lecture many times, and could guess what the young neatly dressed woman was going to ask. Which was why the next photo had been carefully cued up.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m wondering, sir, if most of the child soldiers are from Africa? As far as I can tell from your lecture, in almost all of the case studies you’ve given us, the children are either from one of the sub-Saharan countries or the conflicts in South Asia.’
Joseph smiled. ‘There is one from South America in there too, I think you’ll find, but I take your point. The wars of the Congo, and Afghanistan. Iraq and Sierra Leone. Children as young as thirteen were sent to Guantanamo Bay. All these children are what we would call children of poverty. In fact the first US soldier to be killed in the so-called war against terrorism was shot by a fourteen-year-old boy.’ The carefully cued image dropped behind him and there was a visible tensing from the students. It was not an image they were expecting.
‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? We see a black child, part of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, maybe, and it’s shocking, and awful, but not surprising. We’ve seen it before, become numbed by it. Smiling and holding rifles not designed for their size. Or posting a YouTube statement wearing a suicide belt. And after a while we learn to accept the stereotype. Rationalise it, even. See the soldier more than the child.’ Joseph turned and looked at the image, projected large and 4K clear on the wall. A boy, possibly no more than fifteen, smiling into the camera, holding his rifle high. At his feet was another child, dead. Half of his head is missing. Both the boys are white European.