Dancers in the Wind: a gripping psychological thriller

by Anne Coates

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not staff so I really don’t have any influence at the paper.” She hoped she sounded convincing. She herself was desperate for her own fee and didn’t fancy losing the interview.

  Princess took a long gulp of lager, lit a cigarette and eyed the journalist through the smoke she exhaled. Her expression was unreadable. Hannah thought she was going to make more of a protest and wondered how to deal with it. She was wrong.

  “Well see if you can…” Princess’s voice trailed off. For a second she looked so young and vulnerable. It hit Hannah in that moment that she was just about old enough to be the girl’s mother. It was an odd but not original thought. Ageing didn’t worry Hannah and maternity in her mid-30s had brought a dimension to her life that was both surprising and fulfilling. It made her wonder now, with heightened awareness, how any woman – whatever her circumstances – could let this happen to her child.

  “How old are you, Princess?”

  The girl blew a smoke ring and seemed pleased with the achievement. “19. Do you think I look 19? I always looked old for my age.” She spoke quickly, excitedly, like a child.

  Hannah smiled, at the moment Princess looked about 16. “How long have you been working?”

  “Five or six years, I suppose. Look I’ve written it all down. When I knew I was going talk to you, I started writing it all down. I usually try to forget. I don’t know what it’s going to do to me. Bringing it all up.”

  Hannah glanced at the three red exercise books Princess had produced, filled with childlike script and felt humbled. She sipped her wine. “Why don’t you just tell me what happened, in your own words.” She smiled, intrigued by the girl’s accent which was a curious mixture of nasal North London vowels, lazy consonants and something altogether more refined. She also wondered how important Princess’s role had been in the documentary. Maybe they hadn’t asked her too many questions.

  Princess consulted the notebooks and read in a monotone voice: “I was ten when my parents broke up. Mum was left to bring up the three of us – me and my two younger sisters – and we never had much money. My granddad died then as well and I started bunking school and spending more and more time on the streets. My mum shacked up with another man. He was always trying to have it off with me and in the end, he raped me.” The horror of it was at variance with her matter-of-fact tone.

  “Wasn’t your mother aware of what was going on?” Hannah was appalled and gulped some more wine.

  Princess shrugged. “It’s not the sort of thing you can talk to your mother about, is it?”

  Hannah fervently hoped that she’d be the type of mother her daughter would be able to talk to about anything. Then she remembered her own mother’s reaction when she told her she was pregnant.

  Daphne Weybridge had been incredulous. “But darling, how could you? In this day and age?”

  “These things happen,” said Hannah. “Contraception does fail.”

  Her mother’s face wore an odd expression – awkward. “And what does Paul have to say about it?” Daphne had never had a high opinion of the man she assumed would eventually be a son-in-law.

  For a moment Hannah thought about the truth then decided to modify it for her mother. “Paul isn’t around anymore and wants no contact with the child.”

  Daphne had given Hannah one of her looks. It was obvious she wanted to say a great deal but settled on, “Well I never thought it would happen to the daughter of mine.” Her face was puce with indignation.

  “Look, Mother, I’m 34 not a 16-year-old. I’ve got my own home and a career and now I’m going to have a baby – on my own.”

  “Well, I wish you luck,” said Daphne. “I don’t know what your father will have to say.”

  As it happened, her father – to Daphne’s fury – was delighted for her. But his support was short-lived. Rather sheepishly, the man who had worked for an insurance company all his life and had never been interested in foreign holidays, told her of their migration to the Loire Valley. Hannah was astonished. She couldn’t help thinking that her mother had engineered their retirement to coincide with her own maternity. They had, however, been around for the birth and were delighted with their grandchild, if not with their only daughter.

  Hannah sighed at the memory. She, for all her maturity, had been unable to convince her mother that she was doing the right thing. How could a pubescent girl succeed with a mother weighed down by financial insecurity, who was determined to see no ill in her new man?

  “But me mum was worried about me,” Princess assured her, “and eventually she went to the welfare people.” The girl paused for a gulp of lager and another cigarette. “They did do one of those 28-day place of safety order things. When she tried to get me back, they did it again, didn’t they? And again until finally I was taken into care for good.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  Princess wound a strand of hair around a finger, then inspected it for split ends. An absorbing activity.

  “Surely it was better than living with a man who raped you?” Hannah prompted.

  “You mus’ be joking.” The girl’s laugh held no humour. “The staff were having sex with each other and with the kids. They were taking us on holiday, letting us get drunk, do what we liked, when we really needed to be taught to be good. Kids were even sniffing glue on the premises and I had a go at it.”

  She paused, as if waiting for a comment, but Hannah only nodded. She wasn’t sure how much of this she believed but she didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

  “In the end, I ran away,” the girl continued. “I came here an’ met up with this woman. Linda her name was.” Princess’s voice trembled becoming almost a whisper. “I didn’t know she ran a brothel. I didn’t even know what a brothel was, but I needed some money and…” Momentarily, her composure cracked and Hannah saw an even younger face contorted with the pain the memories evoked.

  The penniless young girl’s fate had been sealed. Princess had never really stood a chance. Linda, she learned, had some unsavoury friends and Princess suddenly found herself at the mercy of two heavies.

  “If I didn’t have the money at the end of the day, they used to get hold of a big clump of wood and spank me with it, fuckin’ hard.” The girl’s voice seemed suddenly loud.

  Hannah glanced over at the elderly couple a few tables away. They were patently getting some vicarious pleasure from listening to this poor girl’s story but no more so than the tabloid buyers destined to read Hannah’s article. The woman in her felt sick. The journalist nodded.

  “I’m not joking,” the gravelly voice went on. “If I didn’t have that money, I was in fuckin’ trouble. And I didn’t even know how to do it, never mind anything else.” Princess managed a smile. “I’d get in a car and if they said how much, I’d say well how much do you think I should get?”

  Princess gulped her lager and stubbed out her cigarette, lighting another one immediately. She didn’t want to remember the shit she’d gone through. The smell of stale breath, sweat and semen; the pain that her body endured time and again and the awful things men, who one minute looked and sounded so nice, mouthed into her ear as they abused her and then almost threw her out of the car when they had finished with her – sometimes without even paying. She shook her head to try and stop more memories surfacing in her mind.

  FOUR

  “Not much to show for her life, is it?” DI Tom Jordan was inspecting some of the bagged-up belongings from Lisa’s flat. There were no surprises. Her landlady hadn’t seen her for two weeks, as Spenser and Doveton discovered when they visited the address they had for Lisa.

  “But she was often not around for a while. One of the reasons I liked having her here.” Shirley Lane, leaning heavily on a walking stick, had let them into the flat without asking to see the warrant.

  “So there was no reason to report her missing?” WPC Spenser, recovered from her bout of vomiting earlier that day, was writing in her notebook.

  Shirley, w
ho could have been any age between late 40s and early 60s, wiped an imaginary speck of dust from the table they were sitting at. She was smartly turned out in a neat cotton frock, almost as though she were expecting visitors. “Like I said, she was often out – overnight, a few days.”

  “What did she do?” Pen poised, Avril feigned disinterest. “For a living?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure really – something to do with PR and seeing clients?”

  It was all Avril could do to stop herself snorting. “You didn’t ask for references when she moved in?”

  “No.” Shirley tucked a wisp of light brown hair behind her ear. “Wasn’t necessary. She gave me a large deposit – in cash. She seemed a very private person and so am I, Officer.”

  Avril made a point of reading through her notes as DS Doveton came back into the sitting room.

  “Thank you, Mrs Lane – “

  “Miss.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lane. You’ve been very helpful. And you say Lisa didn’t have any friends phone or drop in?” The woman shook her head.

  Blood from the proverbial stone, thought Doveton, but he managed to smile. “All Lisa’s possessions are being removed and we’ll just need to take your fingerprints to eliminate them.”

  “Won’t she be coming back, then?” Shirley Lane asked as each finger was pressed into the inkpad and then recorded. There was something in the way she asked this that made Avril look up, but the grey eyes which met hers gave nothing away.

  A look passed between the officers. “No, Miss Lane, her family have asked us to remove everything.”

  “But, I …”

  “If you have any further questions, or have any ideas about Lisa’s whereabouts, Miss Lane, please ring this number.” Doveton handed her a card. It stuck in his throat that he had to lie. That he couldn’t tell this woman the reason Lisa wouldn’t be coming back was that she was, at this moment, on a slab in the mortuary.

  Just before they left, Avril asked to use the bathroom.

  “Just through there.” Shirley pointed her in the right direction.

  If Avril thought there would be something of interest, she was disappointed. Lisa obviously kept all her toiletries in her room. Then, just as she flushed the loo, she noticed a box tucked away on a shelf behind some towels. A huge box of condoms. Miss Lane’s or Lisa’s? Whoever they belonged to, Shirley Lane must have known they were there. It threw an altogether different light on their relationship.

  Doveton was saying something about the weather when Avril emerged and they took their leave.

  Within ten minutes, they were back at the station and writing up their reports. Miss Lane obviously wanted to know more, but they’d kept her out of the way when the scene of crime team broke the lock on the wardrobe, the contents of which revealed Lisa’s trade. Hardly the clothes and accessories for a PR. Photographs were taken of everything in situ before they were bagged up.

  DI Jordan was looking at those photos now.

  “Someone’s daughter, sister, friend and no one has missed her.”

  “Well, it’s hardly going to be front page news.” Doveton’s tone betrayed his sense of frustration. His new boss was an enigma. They all knew why DI Thornton had taken “medical” retirement and some had more to fear from the new broom than others.

  Tom’s face was unreadable. “Let me know when the PM report comes through. I’m going home to change.”

  FIVE

  Princess glanced at the journalist’s face through a haze of smoke: a picture of self-righteous middle-class concern. She doesn’t have a fucking clue, she thought, then continued her story. “Luckily, luckily I met a community worker from Brixton. He used to work in legal aid or housing or something and he was a friend of Linda’s, right, but straight. Now, he helped me a lot.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Princess hesitated. “Tony. Tony Vitello,” she said quietly. “But you won’t put his name in the paper, will you?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to. I can leave his name out.”

  The girl looked relieved. “He wouldn’t like it, would he.” It was not a question.

  “And what did he want from you?” Hannah didn’t believe in knights in shining armour.

  “Nothing. He wasn’t into sex. He was really good at that kung fu stuff. He beat up these two guys when they were threatening me with a hatchet.” Hannah’s eyes widened. “I was shit scared, I can tell you. But he was great…” Princess’s face lit up momentarily. Then, her mood changed again. “Afterwards,” she said brusquely, “he arranged for me to stay with a social worker he knew. Gaynor, her name was. I didn’t know she was lesbian,” said Princess flatly.

  Some luck, thought Hannah wryly. How can anyone have so many cards stacked against them? “Did he know that?”

  “What?” Princess, a train of thought broken, looked at her vacantly.

  “Your community worker, Tony, did he know about the social worker?”

  Princess shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked as though the thought had never crossed her mind. There was a second or so when Hannah thought she’d made some connection, but the moment was lost. Princess took up the narrative as though the interruption had not occurred.

  “She got short of cash and had to go hustling for big money – people who wanted lesbian scenes.”

  Hannah almost choked on her wine. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did she have to go hustling, as you put it? Why didn’t she just borrow from the bank?”

  Princess looked blank. “I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t ask her. I just did as I was told.”

  “Was she already on the game then?” Hannah persisted.

  “I don’t know! Look, all I know is that she went for people who wanted lesbian scenes, right?” Her tone was belligerent, hostile.

  “I’m sorry,” Hannah murmured and touched the girl’s hand lightly. “Go on.”

  Princess consulted her notebook, sighed theatrically and cleared her throat.

  “Please go on,” the journalist prompted.

  The girl continued as she lit another cigarette. “They’d phone you up and ask you to dress up for them and come round. Imagine big red lips and high heels and going out like a bloody tart!”

  Hannah smiled. The irony was clearly lost on Princess.

  “We used to get about £600 a night.” “How much?” Hannah thought she must have misheard the amount.

  “600 quid,” Princess said with more than a hint of pride in her voice.

  “But what happened to all that money? Your share?”

  Princess pursed her lips. “Dunno. Gaynor kept it, I suppose. She gave me pocket money though and she didn’t charge me any keep to stay with her.”

  I should hope not! thought Hannah. “What happened then?” she asked, still reeling from the amount of money Princess and Gaynor had earned.

  “She started getting jealous, didn’t she?” Princess pulled a face. “She was a bloody nymphomaniac – all she wanted to do was keep having it off with me all the time, but I didn’t want that and I moved out.”

  “Did your friend help you?” Hannah wondered what else could go wrong. “Did Tony help you?”

  “No, he wasn’t around then.” Princess toyed with the almost empty glass. Hannah managed to catch Mike’s eye through the glass door and signalled for refills.

  “I found a room and started working the beat on the Edgware Road and King’s Cross. I did it because I needed the money and it’s all I knew how to do. All I’ve been taught.” She drained her glass. “We’re like a family here. It’s my home.”

  Hannah felt a deep sadness. She didn’t want to believe what she was hearing. A 14-year-old girl abused mentally and physically by just about everyone she came into contact with. Her “family”, a network of whores, drug addicts and down-and-outs who provided her education. Her “home”, the car parks and disused and derelict buildings around the station where she plied her trade.

  “What about you
r family? Do you see your mother or father?”

  “My dad was in the army. So we didn’t see him much. He was a sergeant major.” Hannah doubted that, but the girl’s eyes lit up with pride. “It was my mum’s fault they broke up – stupid cow couldn’t keep her knickers on.”

  Princess stared into the bottom of her glass. “He got married again and moved away up North. I did go and see him once, but I just couldn’t tell him what was happening. He used to call me his little princess. I didn’t want him to know what I become.”

  The girl sniffed loudly.

  “And your mother?” Hannah prompted.

  “She couldn’t help. She didn’t have any money and she’s got two more kids now. She’s still with the same man… I send them money, you know for my sisters, when I can. I keep hoping she’ll get rid of him…”

  The click of the cassette recorder interrupted them. Hannah turned the tape over. She felt numbed, humbled. She had the feeling she was going to hear worse.

  Mike came through the door and brought over more drinks. He glanced at the two women’s faces, said nothing and walked away. Through the glass door, Hannah could see him talking to Kathy. She wondered how the researcher who had spent so much time with these women had coped. Had she managed to preserve her professional objectivity? How could she not feel in some way contaminated by this world where sex is just a commodity and casual violence a way of life?

  “Have you ever been attacked?”

  “You’re joking?” Princess rolled back her left sleeve to reveal a jagged, healed scar running almost the length of her forearm.

  “How on earth –?”

  “A punter who didn’t want to pay.” The resignation in Princess’s voice was heartbreaking. “I’m always being fucking done over or threatened. It goes with the job. One night I got a chauffeur and went to an NCP car park I used. I thought there was something funny. He was wearing these black gloves. He bent forward – to give me the money, I’m thinking – and he came out with a corkscrew knife. I shit myself. I got out of the car and ran over to the attendant who I’m paying to look after me and he just locks the door and hides under the table. So I ran up this little alleyway to a block of flats where there’s a porter and he said I could stay there until the guy goes. I couldn’t go out for ages after that even though I was broke.”