“You keep yourself clean. You’ll be supplied with everything you need to do your job. You’ll find new supplies at the end of the corridor; one of the others will show you. No funny business. No phones or radios.”
I swallow hard and the terror rises.
“So what are the hours? And when do I get paid. Only, at the club . . .”
They nod.
“Yeah, right love. There’s something you’re not understanding here. Mr. Jameson gave you a chance, and you lied. Took advantage. You even had an opportunity to work out of your own apartment, but seeing as you turned it into a pigsty that smelled of baby shit. Well. Mr. Jameson thinks you clearly can’t look after yourself, so you’ll be staying here for a bit. Don’t worry, you’ll be well looked after.”
I look around. The windows are double glazed and bolted shut.
“Don’t even think about it, love. Seriously. Just do as you’re told, and show him you can be a good girl.”
“You mean I can’t go outside? But . . .”
One of the men leaves and the other steps forward.
“Go out any time you like. Give it a go. But how far are you going to get without ID or money? Eh? You don’t look the sort to have opened a savings account. And, anyway, it seems you’ve been saving up already.”
He pulls a brown envelope out of his pocket. It’s got my name on the front. It’s packed full of twenties, the money I was saving for me and Elise to go to Spain.
“That’s my money. I earned it. Please. Please don’t do this. Take me back to the flat, and I’ll do anything you want me to.” Anything.
“Just get cleaned up. And be downstairs at eight.”
“How will I know what time it is?”
He points at a glowing alarm clock by the side of the bed.
“And don’t do anything stupid. Or you’ll only make it worse for yourself.”
They leave, and I wait a little to see if they come back, then I try the door. It’s not locked. I look up and down the corridor, but no one is there. I look in my suitcase, and it’s just a random bundle of speedily grabbed items from my bedroom. Underwear, a couple of tops. No jeans or trousers. A cardigan. I feel in the pockets and find a tissue and some headphones. In the other pocket is a little white sock with a frill around the top.
It’s all too much. My heart feels like it’s being ripped out, and I lie on the bed sobbing. My body aches, and I can feel my arm swelling. But it’s nothing compared to the pain I feel when I even think about Elise. I can smell her on my clothes, and I feel like my soul is trying to escape my body and go out to find her. I feel it for myself, the pain of loss, but I know deep down I’ve done the right thing. I know I’ve done what’s best for her, and now I have to save myself.
My whole life has been a continuous stretch of saving myself. As an eldest child, I had to look after my brothers and sisters while my parents worked, and while they played. And while they argued and conducted their love life in front of us.
My own social life started at around thirteen, when I started hanging around outside the pub, waiting for Mum to come out and give me money for the chippy. I’d get talking to older boys, and then by the time I was fifteen, I was playing pool in the back bar. It was a vibe I liked, getting attention and skipping school to be with cool people.
I did really well in my exams, which was a miracle because I was distracted by my parents trying to rip each other to shreds. I was good. I was dark-haired and pretty. One particular boy took a shine to me. How was I to know he was the nephew of Manchester’s most wanted? Declan Connelly. We went out for six months, then he asked me to move in. I’d barely left school, but I got a buzz out of Declan.
I didn’t want to leave my brothers and sisters, and I was so scared of what my mum would do to me if she found out I was living with Declan. As it turned out, she didn’t notice. Not until she came home one night from the pub, and Dean, the next sibling down from me, had been arrested for burglary. When she’d gone to lash out at me in her alcoholic stupor, she found I wasn’t there.
She sent my dad after me, but it was too late. The Connellys had sucked me into their world. I knew what was going on, I knew the ins and outs of exactly what fraud and extortion was going down in Manchester. Money laundering, prostitution, gang violence, I’d seen it all. Like now, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved. But who knows exactly what they’re doing when they’re sixteen?
I’d started to plan my way out, going back home, naively thinking Declan’s family would let me. Then I found out I was pregnant. I was violently sick every morning, and Declan guessed and made me do a test. By the time I had Elise, we’d moved into our own house, and Declan, five years older than me, had been promoted in the organization. Then I saw him kill someone. I saw him snap a man’s neck for cutting him off on the motorway and throw his body out of his car onto the hard shoulder of the M62.
I ran away that day with Elise. I ran and ran, but they found me wherever I went. They found Elise, so I had to run farther, somewhere they would never find me. I’d thought about London, but I couldn’t leave my brothers and sisters. I wanted to be nearby just in case they needed me.
But they never did. Social services cleared up the mess when my mum choked on her own vomit after a particularly heavy session. It turned out that Dad had a second family on the other side of the housing estate, and he just moved in there; he just went wherever he could get someone to cook for him and generally do everything for him.
So they were gone. The family was scattered, and all the hard work I had put in was for nothing. I couldn’t even go to Mum’s funeral, because that would be the first place Declan would look for me. I was too scared to even send flowers. I should have left then, me and Elise, and gone far, far away.
But here I am at nineteen, saving myself again. Rolling onward into the next catastrophe.
There’s a knock on the door, and I wait. I wonder why in a place like this someone would knock. There’s another knock, and I open the door. A young girl stands in the doorway with some clothes over her arm. She holds them out. Her eyes are heavy with drugs and dark circles, and her limbs skinny.
“Here you are. Try these. You need to be ready soon. You need to look good.”
Her accent is broad and childlike. I wonder if I’ve seen her before in the club. I drag her inside and shut the door.
“OK. Give me the rundown. What is this place?”
She takes her cigarettes and a lighter and lights one up.
“Isn’t it fucking obvious? It’s everything you think it is.”
She blows a long trail of smoke out and points at me.
“I’ve seen you before. Behind the bar, yeah. Bloody hell. They must have fast-tracked you. Usually takes longer than this.”
“What does?”
She smirks and throws the clothes on the bed.
“Till we get here. It’s like one long conveyor belt. All the girls who need cash, and need it fast, all work in the bar, then dance, then in the back, then here.”
I stare at her. I’m so stupid. I’d thought I was in control, taking money and saving it up. And all the time Jameson knew. She’s looking at me, her pupils like pin pricks, and her hand shaking slightly. It was never my money. Never my job. And I ask the inevitable question.
“What’s after here then?”
Her eyes move involuntarily to the window then back to me, and she looks alarmed. I look out of the double glazed windows out onto the moor. The purple heather looks soft, like a carpet, and I think about running over it in the fresh air to freedom.
“And is there any way out?”
She shakes her head slowly.
“Don’t even think about it.”
I sit down heavily.
“What’s your name, by the way?”
“Eva.”
“How old are you, Eva?”
She blushes.
“I’m sixteen. Nearly seventeen.”
“And how long have you been here?”
“About three months. But you lose track. One day merges into another. You know how it is.”
I do know how it is—the lack of sleep, the aftereffects of the drugs and drink, the soreness of your body. I do know how it is.
“So what’s going on here?”
She frowns and backs away.
“Didn’t they tell you?”
I shake my head. She’s red now and panicky. I rush forward and stop her from leaving.
“What, Eva? What happens here? Is it similar to the club?”
A single tear rolls down her cheek.
“Just do what they say. Don’t argue. Just do everything, and they’ll look after you.”
“And what happens if I don’t?”
Again, her eyes stray to the window. I turn around and look outside into the dusk. The sun’s going down over the hill behind the house. A trick of the light makes me think I see someone running up the hill and over the other side, but then I realize that I’m demented with sadness and tired and hurt.
Eva taps me on the shoulder and hands me a strip of pills.
“These’ll help. Just do what you’re told, and they’ll let you be a helper. Just don’t do anything to upset anyone. I’ll come for you at eight.”
I watch as she leaves. It’s twenty to eight. A spike of distress is drilling at my brain, but my tears won’t come. What about me? What about me being upset? I’m on the verge of emotional collapse, yet somehow it doesn’t matter to a single human being. What is it about me that makes me less than everyone else? What have I done to deserve this?
Chapter 9
I’m out the door before Jim Stewart finishes speaking. I pass Mike, and he backward high-fives me; I can tell that he wishes it were him rushing to hail a taxi back to the station with me. Instead, Damien strides along behind me, his brown trench coat flowing in his wake.
We hurry outside and stand on the pavement and wait for a cab to pass. It’s summer, and the night is light. He looks at me questioningly, and I wonder why he’s here.
“So. Station first, then we should go and talk to the mother. What do you think then? And while I’m at it, who are you? I’ve seen the looks from the press. I need some background so we’re not duplicating tasks. Too many cooks and all that . . .”
Back to rule number three, but this time on my terms. He turns around and looks up the road.
“You know who I am. I’m a profiler. From London.”
“So how did those reporters know your name? I’d Google you, but I haven’t had time. So what’s the story?”
He laughs now. It’s inappropriate under the circumstances, and I am starting to think that Damien isn’t used to working with other people. Not a team player.
“Ha. What’s the story? That’s a good one. I specialized in storytelling. For my PhD. Not just storytelling, but how people tell stories in their everyday life. How life is constructed from stories.”
I’m suddenly interested. My profiling training included identity construction, and since then I’ve become attuned to the often unnoticed patterns people leave that point us right to them. But stories?
“Right. So how is that connected to profiling?”
“Well, you can tell if someone’s telling a version of the truth from lots of things—body language, visual signals—but most of all from their version of events and how close it is to reality. Or not. Put together all the versions of the story, and you can spot the discrepancies.”
“I’ve heard about that. Look to the left, and you’re lying. Right?”
He laughs loudly. Again. He’s unnerving me.
“Wrong. That’s too simplistic. It sometimes works, but as soon as you’re aware of it you consciously, or subconsciously, won’t look to the left when you are lying. So it’s counterproductive to rely on psychology 101. It’s much more complex than that.”
I look at him, engaged and passionate. He’s looking up and down the road at the traffic, bouncing on his toes, dying to get on the case.
“So what does all this have to do with a missing girl?”
He stops and stares at me.
“Take the playlist. I’ve listened to it, and I can get a feel for how the mother was thinking, what she’s feeling. This isn’t someone who doesn’t care, she’s someone who didn’t want to give up her child. Someone who had nothing to give except a piece of paper. We know she’s young from the shop CCTV, and we know that she’s left Elise in front of the TV for long periods of time. Yet she didn’t want to let her go. What story would you put to that, Jan?”
I think. It’s difficult for me to get past the badness of leaving a child on the street, but I wonder why she’d left her child and gone to the shop. Why she’d left her in front of the TV. Who would do that on purpose? Which leads me to the conclusion that there must be a reason, something pressing so hard on her that she has to give Elise up.
Damien sees the spark of understanding and nothing else. He hails a taxi, we climb in, and I try to weigh up my stance of logical material evidence against Damien’s more abstract way of working.
The taxi takes us to the station and we rush up to ops. Stan directs us to one of the interview rooms, and I stop short just before we go in. Damien stops behind me, and I turn quickly.
“Be careful here. Don’t mention Elise or anything to do with that case.”
He stops in his tracks.
“You asked who I was. How the reporter knew my name. I think this is about to get serious, so I think it’s only fair to let you know that I’m very experienced in solving child abduction cases.”
“So what are you doing in Manchester then?”
He’s looking at the floor now. His eyes have glazed over, and he’s scuffing his shoe on the tiles.
“Applied for a transfer. They didn’t want to let me go, but I couldn’t stay there. For different reasons. But the reason the reporter knows my name is that I was one of the senior investigators on the Greenaugh case.”
I catch my breath. The Greenaugh case was a major missing child case. I’d heard that the Met had drafted in everything they had, and it had paid off. I vaguely remember the tabloid headlines saying that a police psychologist had found the killer almost single-handedly. And now I was face-to-face with him, standing on the precipice of a new missing child case.
That leads me to believe that Damien knows the script. We both know that if a little girl goes missing in the afternoon and isn’t returned by nightfall, the chances of her being recovered alive have already narrowed. I test my theory.
“Odds?”
He thinks.
“Four hours—nightfall—sixty-four percent.”
Not 60 percent, not 65 percent, 64 percent. I don’t ask him to explain this accuracy because I can hear loud voices from inside the interview room, then the sound of a chair thrown against the door. We look at each other, and I open the door.
Marc Price is thickset, 6 feet tall, and approaching forty. He’s standing in the corner of the interview room. Two police constables are standing in front of him, and they look relieved when we enter the room. He looks at us and flexes his arms.
“About time. I want to see the organ grinder, not the fucking monkey. Are you the organ grinder, mate? You’d better be.”
I sit down, and Damien sits beside me.
“I’m DS Pearce, and this is Damien Booth. We’ll be interviewing you, then we’ll get someone to drive you home, and we’ll follow you and interview Mrs. Price. Is that all right? So can we start with what happened today?”
He sits down in front of me and leans over the table.
“Find my daughter.”
I nod.
“We need to work this out. We need to work out what’s happened.”
He scrapes his chair back and bangs his fists on the table.
“Find my fucking daughter. Now. Go and find her. She’s out there somewhere, and you’ve brought me here, separated me from Amy when she needs me.”
I read the charge sheet. He’s hasn’t been charged
as yet. Stan’s held off. Good man.
“Look. We can do this one of two ways. I can arrest you now and have you charged and you’ll be in overnight. Or you can tell us what happened, then we’ll take you home. You assaulted a police officer. That’s a serious offense.”
He’s scarlet with anger.
“But he wasn’t doing anything. Like you’re not doing anything.”
I wait a while and he stares at me. Damien’s like me. Poker-faced. He’s good. This guy could take us both out easily if he jumped over the table now. But it’s always a waiting game.
“What time did you notice your daughter was gone, Mr. Price?”
He breathes out. He’s going to play the game.
“Half past five. We’d had some friends over for the afternoon, and she fell asleep on Amy’s knee. I took her and put her into her bed about four. She normally sleeps for about an hour, or we wake her up ’cause she wouldn’t sleep at night. When I went in to get her, the bed was empty. All the covers were messed up, and . . . and . . .”
“Take your time, Mr. Price.”
“And the fucking window was open. I could have sworn I’d shut it. I could have sworn. Where is she? Where? Who’d take her?”
He’s got his head in his hands.
“Look, we’ve got forensics all over your house, and we’re going to send out all available officers as soon as we’ve been up there and talked to your wife. Shall we go?”
“I’m not getting done for hitting the policeman then?”
“No. No charges. We need to get you back to your wife, and then we can start looking for your daughter. We’ll need to talk to all your friends and anyone who was around at the time.”
The two policemen show him to the desk, and Stan signs the charge sheet. They leave by the cells entrance, and I follow Damien back up to ops. I look at my phone; it’s eight thirty. There’s a Facebook message. I quickly open it, and it’s a picture of Aiden. In my “Other Messages” box. It’s true. He’s trying to contact me. I panic and phone the unidentified number again. It still rings out.
Playlist for a Paper Angel (DS Jan Pearce Crime Fiction Series Book 3) Page 7