To Tell the Truth

by Anna Smith

  Besmir hadn’t noticed the driver watching him during the journey to the port. It was only when they’d left the house after delivering the girl that the driver spoke to him.

  ‘Why you do this?’

  They were in the car. The driver kept his eyes on the road as he spoke. Besmir looked at him, then straight ahead. But the words hung in the air.

  ‘Just drive.’ He rolled down the window.

  They stopped in a line of traffic and the driver took a packet of cigarettes from the dashboard and handed it to Besmir. He took two out, lit them and handed him one. They drove on in silence, Besmir staring out of the windscreen. Eventually, the driver spoke.

  ‘They will get lot of money for the blue girl. For sex. They will sell her for sex. A lot of money.’

  Besmir watched the smoke circle up from the cigarette between his fingers. He swallowed but his mouth was dry. Leka and Elira had told him the girl was for a rich childless Arab couple who wanted a British girl so they could have British blood in their family line. When you were that rich you could buy whatever genetic make-up you wanted for your future generations, Leka had told him when he gave him the kidnapping job.

  ‘What do you mean, for sex?’ He turned his head to look at the driver.

  ‘That is the way.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Everyone is for sex. It’s what they do. Girls. Boys. Women. Doesn’t matter. You did not know that?’ His expression was quizzical, mocking.

  ‘She is a baby,’ Besmir said, surprised at the indignation in his voice.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Some men will fuck a baby. Plenty men will fuck a baby.’ He shook his head and puffed through his lips. ‘Plenty.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Besmir whispered under his breath as the girl’s face flashed into his mind. How stupid could he have been not to know, not even to suspect. All he’d cared about was the money.

  ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘How do I know you won’t kill me?’ The driver glanced nervously out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘If you thought I would kill you, you would have kept your mouth shut. Tell me.’

  The car stopped again in the queue of traffic. The air was stifling inside and outside of the car. The driver turned to Besmir.

  ‘I saw you with the blue girl. You don’t look right. You tough guy, for sure, but you care about the blue girl. I can see it. Why? Is no good to do your job like that if you care. You see her every day now in your head. You see her on the day you will die. Always she will be there. You are prisoner now.’

  Anger at his own naivety rushed through him. And guilt. He grabbed the driver’s arm and squeezed it, watching him wince.

  ‘What are you? My conscience? Are you the priest? Fuck you.’

  ‘Please,’ the driver said, softly. ‘I want to tell you.’

  Besmir loosened his grip. He listened as the driver told his story.

  The blue girl would be taken, perhaps already had been taken, to the place where they keep the young ones before they move them on. The children were mostly from Morocco and some further into Africa. Some from Romania. Street children, abandoned, most of them. Orphans. Ones like that could disappear and nobody cared.

  The kidnapped women were kept in a few houses across Tangiers and Marrakesh, and one or two outside the cities. Most of the women were eventually sold to work as prostitutes in the whorehouses in cities all across Europe. The best-looking ones were sometimes kept to be sold to the Arabs. The Arabs liked the girls from Eastern Europe and Bosnia, but especially the very light ones from Ukraine. Young teenage girls were valuable because of the men who liked children.

  But the very young children were special. They were for the sex rings, and for filming. They could end up anywhere. Europe, Bangkok, anywhere. Men who liked children would pay big money for a baby. The blue girl, he said, would be moved to the broken-down farm further away while they waited until things quietened down before they moved her on. They would already have a buyer for her because she is so beautiful. There were other children there, some as young as her, some a little older. They kept them in cages. Like animals.

  ‘Cages?’ Besmir felt hot.

  ‘Yes. Cages. Is dark most of the time. They never get outside. At night you can hear them crying.’ He shook his head. ‘Is a bad sound to hear children crying in the night. Very bad. Like souls from the dead.’

  ‘You have seen this? You have heard this?’ Besmir watched his face for lies.

  The driver nodded vigorously. ‘I am afraid. I am sad. I never tell anybody before. I have little sisters. Young twins, and one older. I cry in case someone takes them. I am like in prison because I have seen this. I drive the car for Khalid, the fat man. That’s all I do. But I saw too much and I am trapped. One time I saw the fat man take a girl of maybe only fourteen and he fuck her.’ He shook his head. ‘He would kill me if he knew I told you this.’

  ‘Fuck the fat man,’ Besmir spat.

  They’d been getting close to the harbour and the sound of a ship’s foghorn rose above the din of the traffic. He’d never cared before about what happened to the people he had dealt with for Leka. It didn’t matter if a drug pusher who was slow to pay needed his legs broken, or a few women had to be driven hundreds of miles to be passed onto someone else. He’d made his mind up never to ask questions or care about what happened to any of them. He had dulled himself to anyone’s stories many, many years ago. He’d got rid of corpses for Leka and he had killed people. He couldn’t have recalled any of their faces if his life depended on it. But this was different. He knew this was the beginning of the end. But he couldn’t stop himself.

  They were at the harbour.

  ‘You can show me this? You can show me these cages?’

  ‘I can show you,’ the driver said. ‘But your boat is here.’

  Besmir got out of the car, and walked around to the driver’s side. He leaned in the window.

  ‘Give me your phone number. If I don’t get the boat I will call you. You come back for me and you take me there tonight.’ It wasn’t a request.

  The driver looked worried. ‘But tonight? I don’t know.’

  Besmir grabbed his wrist and looked him in the eye.

  ‘If I call you, you will take me there tonight. You understand?’

  The driver nodded. ‘I understand.’ His hands trembled as he scribbled down his telephone number on a grubby piece of paper and pushed it into Besmir’s hand.

  Now Besmir sat and waited, watching the tourists drinking in the crowded bar, armed with trinkets and happy memories to take home from Morocco. They lived in a different world. At the table next to him, a middle-aged British couple got up and walked away, leaving behind an English newspaper folded on the seat. The picture caught Besmir’s eye, and he reached over and lifted the paper.

  It was Daletsky’s yacht, and a picture of Daletsky along with two other men, one of whom he recognised. He read the headline slowly:

  Home Secretary’s Russian Roulette

  And underneath, in smaller letters:

  Government rocked by revelations of Carter-Smith’s Costa del Crime junket with Russian oligarch

  The report described how the government minister was pictured going on board the yacht with his old school friend, the businessman Oliver Woolard, where they spent nearly three hours. And there was a picture of them emerging with Daletsky, who had his arm around the minister. A second story, with a picture of Daletsky looking younger, gave an account of his life story with the word ‘gangster’ in nearly every paragraph.

  Besmir glanced around at the British tourists, and allowed himself a wry smile. He had never met Carter-Smith, but he knew he was one of the VIPs who used the rent boys. He favoured the skinny little Moroccan faggot Taha, who Besmir felt sorry for because he’d once witnessed a pimp beating the kid up for turning up late for his appointment with a VIP. Taha had only been in Spain for a few weeks at the time and didn’t know his way around the various apartments his pimp used for what he called his special client
s. Besmir had to give the boy some wet towels to clean up the blood from his face. He’d told him sharply to stop crying, and that if he didn’t toughen up he might as well take the ferry back to his mother in Morocco.

  He imagined the crap that would be flying around right at this minute with Daletsky and Leka. He was glad he’d decided not to go back. At least for now.

  He saw the car pull in. He got up, stuffing the newspaper under his arm, and walked towards it.

  ‘Come,’ the driver said. ‘We have a way to drive and is not easy to find in the dark.’

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘I know. I hear what you’re saying, Mick.’ Rosie paced the floor of her hotel bedroom, the mobile phone pressed to her ear. ‘But we can’t make them admit it. Going in there like attack dogs and suggesting anything untoward at a time like this won’t get us anywhere.’

  She walked out onto the terrace and listened to McGuire ranting on. No matter how she protested, she’d have to doorstep either Jenny Lennon or Jamie O’Hara. Someone was telling porkies, McGuire fumed, and he hated people trying to pull the wool over his eyes.

  The day’s front pages had been full of the follow-up to Andy’s story about the windsurfer spotting a man with yellow shorts going into the Lennon house on the morning Amy disappeared. The press pack had descended on the windsurfer’s home first thing to get their own version of what had left them bare-arsed because of Andy’s exclusive.

  The windsurfer had stuck steadfastly to his story and Rosie saw no reason to doubt him, even if he did admit to smoking cannabis the night before he’d gone to the beach. That admission alone had given O’Hara and Jenny Lennon a lifeline. They blatantly denied his story. They’d rubbished it in a statement they released after the Guarda Civil had interviewed them separately at the police station when the story broke.

  Rosie had been with the rest of the press and the growing crowd when Jenny was driven to the police station by one of their friends. There was no sign of her husband. Regardless of whether she was lying or not, it was uncomfortable to watch her as she ran the gauntlet of rage from the righteous locals who had turned up to judge her. The Spanish news had been buzzing all day about the story that police were quizzing the mother and the friend about their statements, following the windsurfer’s revelations. Even though there was no evidence that anything had been going on between O’Hara and Jenny, it was looking like they’d lied – and that was enough to damn them. The locals had already made up their minds, and they shouted abuse at Jenny as she walked the narrow, cobbled street into the police station. Rosie cringed when someone shouted, ‘Whore!’

  Even if the windsurfer had been lying, it suited the Spanish agenda. They were pissed off that their family holiday resort was now known worldwide as the place where a toddler could be snatched from the beach in broad daylight. It wasn’t good for tourism. Any sympathy they had for Jenny Lennon was evaporating fast, replaced by anger and distrust.

  Jenny’s face was grey and there were dark shadows under her puffy eyes. She looked as though the flesh had dropped off her in just a few days. The loud haranguing had continued when she emerged two hours later, and it was just as bad when O’Hara arrived, his face set hard against the abuse being hurled at him. ‘Sonofabitch’, someone shouted in Spanish as O’Hara strode down the cobbled street defiantly square shouldered, looking straight ahead. But he was ashen-faced.

  When he emerged after a couple of hours, he ignored the questions that were shouted by the journalists, got into his car and drove off. Rosie wondered who would crack first – Jamie or Jenny. If either, or both, of them did, and changed their statement, the Spanish press would crucify them. And the British pack wouldn’t be far behind.

  ‘I just don’t believe them,’ McGuire was saying. ‘And it’ll be a lot worse for them now they’ve been given the chance to clarify their statements and are still refusing to do it. They’re lying, Rosie. They’re fucked.’

  ‘But—’ Rosie tried to get a word in.

  ‘I know, Gilmour,’ he interrupted, and she could see him pacing his office. ‘There’s a bigger picture here. A missing kid. Listen. My eye’s still firmly on the ball there. But these bastards are lying. They know it, and they’re ripping the pish out of us. It’s not on.’

  ‘But I can’t make them admit it, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I want you to put it to them that they’re lying. Go to O’Hara. He knows you and he knows us. He’s a fucking lawyer and he knows about damage limitation. Tell him in no uncertain terms that if he loses our support, he’s fucked. His time is running out.’

  Rosie sighed. ‘Okay. I think he’ll already know that. They both will, but I’ll try and give it to him right between the eyes. I can’t do much more than that. I’ll give it my best shot, but they’ve already rubbished the statement.’

  ‘See what you can get, Gilmour.’

  It wasn’t until the last media car had gone from outside O’Hara’s villa that Rosie and Matt decided to go back. There had been no answer at the door, either there or at the Lennon house when the press pack knocked. Whatever was happening to Jenny and her husband, they were keeping it under wraps. Rosie could only imagine what kind of mess Martin Lennon was in. He’d not only lost his only child, he had probably lost his wife. How could they ever come back from what had happened?

  There was no sign of life at the O’Hara apartment, just a few scattered toys in the garden and a football. Rosie guessed they might all be holed up at the Reillys’ house for the afternoon, probably trying to get some normality for the sake of the kids.

  ‘Let’s take a walk on the beach, Matt,’ Rosie said, getting out of the car. ‘Pass some time while we’re arsing around here. There’s a little beach bar along past the rocks. You can buy me a beer.’

  ‘Okay,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll not bring all my toys. Only one camera.’ He shoved the smallest of his cameras into his safari waistcoat pocket.

  It was Matt who saw him first.

  ‘Fuck me, Rosie. There’s O’Hara. Look. On the rocks.’ He grabbed Rosie’s arm.

  Rosie strained her eyes. ‘I see him. He’s on his own.’ She scanned the beach towards the bar which had a few lunchtime punters.

  ‘Let’s just take it slowly,’ Rosie said, looking at O’Hara who was gazing out to sea.

  She watched as he drank from a bottle of beer. There was no sign of the rest of the family. Rosie and Matt walked away from him and out of his eyeshot, so they could eventually come up from behind.

  ‘Looks like he’s deep in thought,’ Matt said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be? Right now, he must be sitting there looking at his life disintegrate before his eyes. And for what? An illicit shag. What is it with men?’

  ‘I know. Brains and dicks. Maybe they’re too far apart to function together.’

  He was already taking pictures after putting on the slightly bigger lens.

  ‘I’m getting good shots here, Rosie. Even if nothing else, the picture tells a story.’

  ‘You’re good, Matt, I’ll give you that. That’s why I like going on holiday with you.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see where we’re going next.’ Matt fired off several more shots.

  ‘You wait here,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m going to slide up and try to tackle him myself.’

  Rosie moved up behind O’Hara, and coughed before she reached him so as not to startle him too much. It didn’t work. He jerked his head around as though someone had shoved a cattle prod into his back, and she heard his sharp intake of breath. She put her hands up apologetically when she saw the expression on his face. It was somewhere between rage and tears.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jamie, I’m honestly not following you. I just happened to be out walking here. Please, can I have a minute? I know this is difficult, but please. I have something important to say to you.’ She rattled out her pitch.

  She expected him to get to his feet, ready for attack. But he didn’t. He turned his head away from her and looked out to sea. Rosie counted four empty bee
r bottles strewn around the sand where he sat. He sniffed and shook his head. He wasn’t drunk, not on four bottles of beer. But he wasn’t sober either. Rosie knew that O’Hara drank a lot anyway. In another world, another life, the one that he used to live before he screwed it all up here on the Costa del Sol on a family holiday, O’Hara could be found holding court in O’Brien’s of a Friday early evening along with all the other movers and shakers. A few beers in the afternoon wasn’t going to waste him.

  ‘Rosie,’ he said, not looking at her. ‘I know you’ve got a job to do, but Christ almighty. Can you not see there are people’s lives falling apart here?’ He shook his head.

  She’d caught him at the right time. He was weak. He’d come out of that police station knowing that his world was being dismantled piece by piece, and even a smart-arse brief like him knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was written all over his face, the knowledge that he would never again have a night of normal sleep. His face had aged ten years in the last week. Rosie sensed she could win this.

  ‘I can see all of that,’ she said.

  She toyed with the idea of sitting down beside him. No. Standing would give her the edge.

  ‘I can see that lives are falling apart, Jamie. I see it in Jenny Lennon’s face. I saw it in yours on that first day when you opened the door to me.’ She took a breath. ‘Don’t think I get any enjoyment out of doing this job when it comes down to something like this. I don’t. I can promise you that.’

  He said nothing. He looked down and lifted a handful of sand, watching as it ran through his fingers.

  Just do it, Rosie told herself.

  ‘Jamie,’ Rosie said. ‘This windsurfer’s story is true, isn’t it?’

  She felt a little explosion in her stomach. He would either get up and start ranting or he would say nothing.

  She pressed on. ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’