I go first, along the little corridor and into the office. Clive follows, pushing Freda. He’s not going to leave me alone in here, I can see, so I’m going to have to be quick. The door through from the office into the library is closed and I shut my mind to what may lie beyond it still. There is an odd smell, partly general staleness, partly, I think, blood, but I need to concentrate. I get my glasses on and scan the walls while Clive is still managing the buggy, and I spot the rota over by the far door. Under the pretext of looking through a pile of books nearby I manage a long enough survey of the rota to find the date I want: Tuesday 26th February, there it is, and the name beneath it. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Afraid that I may betray myself, I grab a book at random (when I get it out later it will turn out to be a survey of midwifery services in the UK) and slip it into my bag.
‘Got it!’ I cry to Clive Davies, and we turn to leave.
I thank him profusely and depart the building in a rush. As I back out through the swing doors, pulling the buggy after me, I see what I’m sure is the hooded pair who seemed to be following me earlier, disappearing round the corner of the building. I’m tempted to go after them and challenge them but I’ve got too much else to think about.
I head to my office as a place to do my thinking. Up to now, I’ve just wanted to be clever, to solve the puzzle. Now I know the truth and I don’t know what to do with it. It’s so extraordinary, so painful, so burdensome that I don’t even know what to think about it. I reach the English Language building and lug Freda and her buggy up the stairs. In my office, I sit her down on the floor with a paperweight to play with and sit down at my desk to think. Only moments later, there is a knock at my door and, unthinkingly, I call, ‘Come in.’
My stomach plunges as two hooded figures enter the room and then plunges again with dizzy recognition as they throw off their hoods. Those two. Of course. I should have known.
‘Good morning Mrs Gray,’ says Christiane as she walks across the room and picks up Freda. ‘Hello Freda.’ She pronounces the name the German way, with a guttural ‘r’.
Irina, meanwhile, stands with her back to the door, silent. Stupid, stupid, stupid. How stupid I’ve been. They’ve been ahead of me all the time and now, here I am on a Saturday morning in the vacation, trapped in my office where no-one will hear me scream, with my baby granddaughter and a pair of murderers.
‘Did you follow me all the way from my house?’ I ask, and my voice emerges surprisingly steady.
‘We did. You were up very early,’ Christiane replies, perching on the windowsill and dandling Freda on her knee. ‘Yukiko told us you had guessed something and we weren’t sure what you would do. Yukiko will be here in a minute, by the way. We’ve had no visit from the police, so we guessed you hadn’t told the Chief Inspector yet. We don’t know why you went into the library, though. We can’t work that out.’
‘I went to look at the library rota. I wanted to know who was on duty on the night before the murder. When I saw who it was, I understood everything – well almost everything. There are still a few questions I’d like to ask.’
‘You should start with telling us what you know.’ Irina speaks for the first time. ‘Then you can ask your questions.’
‘OK,’ I say, ‘let’s start with this.’
There is a small whiteboard behind my desk, which I use for reminders, ‘To Do’ lists, phone numbers et cetera. I wipe it clean, pick up a board pen and write:
If he had not raped our friend, we would not have killed him.
‘Yes,’ Christiane says, ‘you do know. So what are we going to do about it?’
What will they do to stop me from spreading my knowledge around? They’ve killed once – perhaps twice. What will they do to me? To Freda? What might Christiane do to her? Would she threaten to throw her out of the window? Would she do it? I want to run, to snatch Freda from Christiane’s arms and run somewhere where I can attract help, but Irina’s bulk is guarding the door. Involuntarily, my eyes go to the door to my inner office. If I sauntered over in that direction to make us a cup of coffee, could I get in there and lock the door? Well, I’m not going anywhere without Freda, am I?
There is a disturbance outside the door and Irina steps aside. Yukiko appears, followed by Ceren.
‘Well, this is quite a party,’ I say. ‘Do sit down, everyone.’
Ceren sits in the room’s only armchair and Yukiko perches on the arm. Christiane and Irina stay where they are.
‘What have you said?’ Yukiko asks Christiane, who gestures wordlessly at my message on the board.
‘Ah so, I see,’ Yukiko says, looking at me.
‘But there are things I don’t know,’ I say, ‘so do you mind answering a few questions?’
What do I have in mind? A sort of reverse Arabian Nights? Keep them talking because all the time they’re talking they can’t be thinking about how to shut me up? Well, in the absence of a better idea, it’s worth a try.
‘First off,’ I say, ‘what were all those messages on the board about?’
They exchange glances but before anyone answers there is a knock on the door behind Irina. She opens it a chink, then throws it wide to reveal the unexpected figure of Desirée. For the first time that morning I am truly surprised.
‘Desirée!’ I say in astonishment, ‘I didn’t think you’d –‘
‘You didn’t think I’d care?’ Desirée interrupts me. ‘Or you didn’t think I’d want to spoil my clothes? You always misjudged me, I think, Mrs Gray. Because I am a good Frenchwoman and must be soignée at all times, you think I have nothing in my head, that I care only to keep my man. I gave you a sentence, Mrs Gray, the day we killed Ekrem Yilmaz. If I were a man, I would be happier, I said. You thought I was not serious, but I was. It is truly no pleasure to be a young woman, you know, even in France or the UK, where we are liberated! What is it like for the millions of women like her?’
She waves her scarlet-tipped fingers in Ceren’s direction.
‘It sounds as though we’ve got plenty to talk about,’ I say. ‘Do have a seat, Desirée, and Irina, you really don’t need to guard the door any more.’
Desirée sits in the chair facing me across my desk, crossing her elegant legs, and Irina takes the only other chair in the room, in the corner near the window. This is better. I feel like the teacher again. I begin to feel in charge.
‘Tell me how it happened,’ I say, ‘from the beginning. Tell me the story.’
There is a silence. No-one looks at anyone else and I’m afraid they’re going to refuse, but then I see Yukiko bend down and whisper something to Ceren, who begins to speak.
‘So,’ she says, gesturing at my whiteboard, ‘the story starts with me.’
She is not looking at me, or at anyone else. She is fingering the edge of her scarf, teasing a thread from the fraying edge.
‘I was on duty in the library on Tuesday evening. At the end of the evening I let the students out and locked the door. Then I was walking back to the office when he grabbed me.’
‘Ekrem?’
‘Yes. He was hiding between the shelves. He grabbed me and dragged me back there. I tried to scream but he said – he said if I scream he will kill me. He will tie me up there and push the shelves together to crush me. So I didn’t scream. I pushed my scarf in my mouth to stop screaming and he – did what he wanted.’
There is a long silence in which only Freda makes any noise at all, sitting on Christiane’s lap, playing with strands of her long, sandy-blond hair. When Ceren speaks again she has her eyes closed, though her fingers are still working away compulsively at the edge of her scarf.
‘After, he asked me if I like it. He said we can do again many times. It is our secret. He said if I tell anyone, he will shame me to my parents. He will tell everyone I am bad girl, not moral. He said he has protection. He works for Turkish government. No-one will believe me.’
Yukiko puts out a hand to her, and she takes it between her own before she goes on.
‘I was f
ainting, I think, so he was nearly carrying me out. He gave the keys to the porter and he told him I was sick and he was looking after me. Then he took me outside and left me there.’
She releases Yukiko’s hand and opens her eyes.
‘I don’t know how long I was there. In the end I went to Irina. She has room in same hall as me and she is doctor.’
As if handing on the baton, she sits back in her chair and closes her eyes again. Irina clears her throat.
‘I examined her,’ she says. ‘She was not too bad. I have seen much worse, in hospital in St Petersburg, many women. Russian men are animals when they’re drunk. Ekrem Yilmaz was animal too, but Ceren was OK. No need for hospital. But she was in shock. She was crying and crying. I gave her painkillers and sedative but still she was crying. So I called Christiane, and she and Yukiko came over.’
‘I wanted she should go to the police,’ Christiane chips in. ‘I thought it was the only thing to protect her from that man and to protect other women, but she could not. After she fell asleep, we three went on talking. Yukiko understood better than us why she cannot go to the police. It is too much shame. In her culture, being raped is always the woman’s fault. Her parents would disown her and she would lose everything – her family, her chance to marry – everything. So what else could she do? What could we do?’
‘The idea to crush him with the stacks was just a joke at first,’ Yukiko says. ‘Ceren told us how he threatened her and we said it was a pity we couldn’t do the same to him. We talked how we might trap him there and Irina and Christiane said they were strong enough to turn the handle. Irina does weight training in the gym.’
‘And you have a strong right arm from playing your viola,’ I comment to Christiane.
‘I have. People don’t realise how much force is needed. My right shoulder is bigger than my left. But we didn’t plan anything then. We talked most of the night but in the morning we had no plan. One thing I did useful, though. I went to a pharmacy for a ‘morning after’ pill.’
Irina spoke from her corner.
‘So at least she won’t be pregnant.’ Then, in a tone gentler than I have ever heard from her, she adds, ‘When she is stronger she will need to have HIV test, and for other sexual disease.’
From her chair, where she is huddled with Yukiko’s arm around her, Ceren gives a sob. Yukiko takes her hand and says,
‘On Wednesday afternoon, before your class, Mrs Gray, Ekrem spoke to me. He thought he was so clever. He asked was I going to be on duty in the library tonight and he said he would see me there. I knew what he meant. Maybe he thought Ceren had told no-one what happened to her. Of course, I didn’t have to go to the library. I could call sick, or change duty with a man, or have someone with me, but I saw how we could trap him. I saw we could really do it.’
‘So,’ says Christiane, ‘after your class we stayed behind in the classroom and made our plan.’
Now it’s my turn.
‘Let me see if I can pick up the story now,’ I say. ‘Yukiko went to do her duty and the rest of you went to the SU for Women’s Night. At ten o’clock, Yukiko cleared the library of everyone but Ekrem, who, she knew, was lying in wait for her. She called Christiane to say she was ready – and I blush to think how I laughed at Chief Inspector Scott when he questioned why you were all calling one another that evening. Yukiko let Christiane and Irina in through the emergency door, then she held Ekrem at knife-point while they turned the stack mechanism for all they were worth. The police thought it had to have been a man, but two strong young women working together could easily do it.’
I stop for a moment to imagine the scene.
‘You couldn’t know that, though, could you? Supposing you hadn’t been able to move it fast enough? Supposing he’d got out? Had you thought about that?’
Irina speaks.
‘We didn’t plan to kill. We wanted to scare him, to humiliate him. We thought we could make sure he never tried the same thing again. We knew he could tell no-one. He would be too ashamed – to admit what he did and to admit that some girls could catch him like that and do this. But then the wheel turned so easily and he said such ugly things, so we just kept turning and turning – until he stopped.’
I look at Christiane’s calm face, like that of a flaxen German Madonna as she sits with Freda on her knee, and I picture that frenzied turning and Yukiko dancing before Ekrem with her little knife. Like maenads, I think, like Bacchae.
‘Then Yukiko let you out of the emergency exit, closed it and went out through the office, delivering the keys to the porter as usual. The whole thing hadn’t taken ten minutes. Then she joined the rest of you over in the SU, where Ceren and Desirée were ready to swear Christiane and Irina had been with them all along.’
‘We were there,’ Desirée says suddenly.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Ceren and I, we were there. Yukiko couldn’t manage alone to keep him in there. We were there too. You look amazed, Mrs Gray. You still don’t comprehend. Two of my friends have been raped in Paris. You believe here that French men are such great lovers, but it’s a myth. They think no woman can resist them, of course, and they think non is not meaning non. They think it’s a joke but it’s not a joke to us, not to my friend who is sick now.’
‘But Ceren,’ I say, ‘how could you –‘
‘I needed,’ she whispers without looking at me. ‘I needed being there.’
There is another long silence before I turn back to Yukiko.
‘Tell me about the knife, Yukiko. You’d planned it all so carefully, how did you come to leave it behind?’
‘Ah!’ She gives a little shout of anger. ‘This is my mistake. I didn’t plan to take a knife, but then I was afraid. I would be in the library alone with Ekrem before the others came. Suppose he caught me before? So I took the knife from our kitchen. I did use it for my apple, actually, but then I put it in my coat pocket when I went to lock the main door. Then when we were keeping him in between the stacks, he was fighting hard and I remembered I had the knife, so I used it. I stabbed him. Many times.’
‘And the blood got on your coat and you had to throw it away.’
‘You noticed about my coat. The police man would not notice.’
‘But why did you leave the knife in the library?’
‘I didn’t plan it. I had gloves to wear when I went to let the others out of the door, for fingerprints, but I had to put down the knife to do it. I pushed it among the books so no blood showing. I meant to take it again when I left, but when the others were gone I was alone – just with his body – and it was horrible, so I just ran out. When I realised, I hoped no-one would find it.’
‘Why did you tell the police it was yours?’
‘It had my fingerprints, and the police had too – from Ceren’s room. I thought they will check, so it is better to tell, to seem innocent.’
She smiles at me, perched neatly as ever on the arm of the chair.
‘I simply can’t imagine it,’ I say, ‘you stabbing a man with a knife and watching him get crushed to death.’
She stands up and comes towards me.
‘For ten years,’ she tells me, fixing me with her eyes, ’as Junior High School student, as High School student, as College student, I travelled every day on metro in Osaka. Always in rush hour, always standing up, because we are young and must give up seats to our elders. So these old businessmen are always sitting down, always with their hands up our skirts, stroking up. Up. Even inside our panties. And we can say nothing. Not a word. Christiane and Irina, they say why didn’t you shout, swear at them, stamp on their foot? But we cannot. We are not taught like that. It would be more shame for us than for them. And so we put up. But we have anger in us like flower bud and one day it must blossom. So for me that day it blossomed.’
‘You wrote the messages on the board, Yukiko. Only you could write so neatly. What was that about?’
Christiane answers.
‘That was my error. The day after we –
after the death, Ceren was afraid to come to class, but we knew she should come or she would be in suspicion, so we took her to the classroom earlier, before the class, and we took away Ekrem’s chair. The conditional sentences were still on the board and we showed them to her. Suddenly, I saw how we could make a new sentence from them and I erased everything except If I would kill you I would be happier. To make it say what we wanted, I changed you to him of course. It was just to amuse us and I meant to erase it, but I forgot. When we came back later for the class, you had erased it and as I sat in class I realised there was an error. It’s the error I always make because of how German is. I put would in the ‘if’ clause.’
‘And you knew I would notice the error and connect it with you?’
‘Yes. So the only thing I could think was to write another message with a different error to confuse you.’
‘A Turkish error. Didn’t you feel bad about implicating Asil and Ahmet?’
‘They were innocent. We couldn’t do them any harm. We have faith in UK justice.’
She smiles, conscious of the irony.
‘And the same goes for implicating the Iranians, I suppose?’ I ask.
‘Yes. We worried that the police were too interested in Denis, so we needed to distract them. The Turks had gone home, so it had to be Iranians.’
‘Does Denis know what you did?’ I ask Desirée.
‘Yes. I couldn’t lie to him, but it was difficult when the police got interested in his little bit of cannabis.’
‘Just one more question. What about the disappearing sentence? How did you manage that?’
‘We talked about that afterwards,’ says Desirée. ‘We didn’t plan it, of course. We couldn’t. But maybe we all had death in our minds.’
‘I added was crushed,’ Irina says. ‘Maybe I could use another word for how the man died when he fell, but crushed came in my head. Then, when we destroyed, Ceren changed subject of sentence. It was my father, the man on the trapeze, but she took out my father so the man was subject, and Christiane -’
‘Took out on the trapeze,’ says Christiane. So the final sentence had to be The man fell or the man was crushed, but Irina took out fell.’
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