by Ivan Pope
They traversed the towers of the northern Isle, cutting through a zone that was not designed for pedestrian foot traffic.
‘When I first came to London,’ he said, ‘this was almost an abandoned zone. People did live here, of course, but they lived in a sort of different country. There was one road on to the island at each side. Everything was old-fashioned, but there was a sort of pride that the people here had. I think it’s all gone now, since they built a new city on the Thames.’
She looked at him. ‘I didn’t know it was an island.’
‘It’s not, not really. But it’s always been called one, the Isle of Dogs.’
After that there was a long period of silent walking. They dipped into the bowels of the skyscrapers and ended up walking through a dark and dangerous tunnel. Jennifer became tense and jittery in the underground passageway and walked faster and faster until he was striding to keep up. Finally, they emerged on the south side of the towers. The sun was up, raised railways hung in the air on all sides. Down below, on what seemed like mainly abandoned ground, there were building sites, endless arrays of housing, all the same. Ahead of them against the sky stood two or three tower blocks, tiny in comparison to what they had just travelled under, the remains of social housing projects from the sixties and seventies.
Jennifer stood and stared at these buildings.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘One of those.’
She started to shake and Allen took hold of her shoulders. He could feel the tremors running through her body.
‘Scared?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said.
Tired and thirsty, they arrived at the foot of a twenty-story residential block. They approached the building through grey dusty streets lined with small red-brick buildings sitting in the shadow of a line of four towers like a parody of executive housing. Some of the houses had neat, tidy gardens filled with flowers, others contained nothing but rusting household goods, piles of sodden newspapers, rolled up carpets or half-disassembled scooters, long abandoned. Some even had both.
Finally, they stopped walking and she craned her neck to look up, then turned and stared at a small cluster of shabby housing towers which looked grey and miserable in the shadow of the huge development. She pointed at them. ‘That’s where I was, up there, in the front one.’
‘This one?’ he said.
‘Must be. I could see this building closest through my spy hole, I think we’re about in the right place.’
She took his hand forcefully and, with renewed energy, led him away from the office blocks into the more human-scaled world of the Isle of Dogs itself. Soon the contemporary road layout and commercial mix was behind them and they were skirting a collection of council housing estates and miserable shopping streets. The remains of industry clustered along the riverside but people had hung on here, long after the dockside work had gone and the land been gifted to international commerce. They hung on because there was really nowhere else to go and because there was tradition and family in the area. The residential towers were tiny in comparison to the vast commercial monoliths they had recently passed below. He could see how different it was here but, Allen thought, although it was grubby and worn out, it was also more human. It was a real place where people lived out their lives, even if those lives were secret and totally hidden from the world.
Eventually they made their way to the nearest tower. Above the door a sign said Quarterdeck House. They looked at the ramped entranceway, the barriers guiding tenants and visitors towards heavy glass and dark wood doors. An array of regimented buttons greeted them on an aluminium box next to the door. The door itself was locked. He tried buzzing a few random flats. On the third press a voice answered.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello. Could you let me in, please?’
‘Fuckrightoff.’
He took that as a no. Jennifer had wandered off. He saw her disappear around the corner.
‘Jen,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t go off.’
He was nervous, this was new territory. The place was threatening. He wasn’t sure whether he believed her in the slightest, but she claimed to recognise the building. Could it be that she’d been held high up in this tower for years, in a room with boarded windows? He felt she was far too calm for someone who was approaching her own prison and it had occurred to him that if this was the place then they might meet her captor at any moment. He’d been writing about the kidnapping underworld for a few years but he’d never actually met any of them. He’d been to visit various holding sites before but he’d certainly never imagined taking a victim back into the place of incarceration.
A police car cruised slowly past the building. He watched it slow at the end of the short street and then turn the corner. He knew it was not there because of him, but still it frightened rather than reassured him. His police contacts had warned him about getting involved. He had put this down to jealousy, that they’d failed to make headway with her when they had the chance. That copper, Herman, had the press on his back and although the police would be happy to use his knowledge of the underworld to get a result, he knew there’d be trouble as soon as they found out he was doing his own footwork.
Then he realised that Jennifer hadn’t reappeared around the corner. Allen vaulted the handrail and quickly ran to the corner of the building, then around it. He looked out across an empty concrete yard but she was nowhere in sight. There were no people there at all, only a couple of television sets that had clearly been jettisoned from a great height. He crossed the open expanse, wary of getting the third set on his head, and scanned the area. Eventually he saw her, sitting on a low wall a few hundred feet back from the building, staring up at the roof of the building, shielding her eyes against the sun with her hand.
He tilted his own head back and looked up to see where she was looking. The balconies rose in front of him like an aggregate cliff. Seagulls wheeled and cawed around the edifice. Clearly some balconies were nesting sites, many others were netted against their presence. He tried to imagine who lived in the various flats. Some were immaculate and some, like the gardens of the houses along the road, were loaded with junk. Allen wondered what it was like to live up in the sky. He’d never lived any higher than the second floor of a house, and as he’d not known anyone who lived in such a building, he had no experience of vertical streets.
On the concrete pillars at the base of the tower, inscriptions read Fuck You Jerry and Loves Pam and Dog along with various symbols, hearts and genitals in a cartoon fashion. The craze for artistic graffiti had not yet reached the more remote estates on the Isle of Dogs. This was human emotion written in spray paint, not art from educated vandals.
‘Jen,’ he shouted at her back. Slowly she stood up and walked across to him. Rubbish caught in a down draft caused by the tower created an unpleasant vortex at the base. Crips packets and carrier bags were picked up and spun in the air and against his legs. Allen pressed his fingers against his eyelids to protect them from a stinging barrage of tiny whirling scraps borne in the cloud of dust. He held his mouth tightly shut. Jennifer ran through the middle of the storm and grabbed hold of him. ‘Help,’ she laughed, spinning him around with the airborne junk. He was amazed at her lack of fear.
She linked her arm through his, turned and walked him back to the entrance. They waited impatiently until an old lady slowly exited from the building, giving them a chance to enter under the guise of assisting her. ‘Thanks,’ they said in unison. She gave them a dirty look as they held the door open and walked in. The lobby was grey: grey tiled floor, grey eggshell walls, grey acoustic ceiling tiles and grey lift doors. The early evening light was fading now, adding to the monotone colour scheme of the building. They crossed over to the lifts. Allen saw they had tape stretched in front of them and a small handwritten sign stuck to the doors: Not working, sorry, engineer on his way. Underneath this somebody had drawn a penis and written, Wanker, 3 days now, fix the foking lifts.
He looked across to the staircase to th
e right of the lifts. It would be a long climb. He motioned with his head towards the stairs.
‘How far up?’
Jennifer whined. ‘Aww, I don’t want to climb them.’
‘Let’s go then,’ he said.
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘We don’t have much choice. The lift’s fucked.’
He didn’t understand why she had wanted to come here and he certainly didn’t think it was much of an idea to go to the top of the building, but he was drawn on by her insistence. He wondered if he was actually scared of what they might find. It was his promise to Jenkins and his curiosity that kept him here. Mostly curiosity. He didn’t expect to find anything at the top, he didn’t even believe this could be the right building, or that she was telling the truth, or even, if it came to it, that much of her story was true. Wherever she’d been held, up, down or fucking sideways, and quite what they were doing at this tower block, suddenly all seemed like a fool’s errand.
An internal fear gripped him, but he pushed it so far away that he felt ordinary again, bored even.
It was like one of those hypnosis shows where people were put under the influence and then regressed to a previous life. They would answer questions and come up with increasingly tortured explanations of what they did in a past incarnation without ever having to answer difficult questions or explain how it was they came to be reborn. With Jennifer it was as if she was recounting a previous life that was entertaining but in which he really could have no belief at all. He did believe that she’d been held against her will – he knew that there were people who could, and would, abduct girls purely to hold them for years – but he suspected that a lot more had gone on in the years she was missing. A lot more than she was admitting to. However, he was prepared to leave it for now. His professional life depended on this moment and what it might reveal. He had to keep all his antennae working.
She looked at the lift again and shook her head. ‘I know the lift’s fucked; it was always fucked.’
‘So, do we climb, or go?’
‘Let’s climb it, Allen.’ Suddenly she was climbing the first steps, almost running up.
He stood there for a few more moments, frozen, as she moved faster. He looked up at the lift, at the stairs, still hesitating for some reason to start the climb in earnest. He stared at her, letting her work through whatever was bothering her.
Then, from above him she shouted, ‘No, not up. Down. It always goes down.’
She took the initiative, walked to the stairwell and disappeared. He jumped out of his daydream and ran after her.
It took him a moment to get to the corner but she was gone again. He looked into the gloom. The stairs here went down as well as up. Which way had she gone, up or down? What had she shouted? He hesitated for a moment in fearful indecision, and then two at a time he leapt down into the dark before realising that there were only six steps and that he was going to hit the bottom at high speed. He hit the dirty concrete floor and skidded across it, coming to a halt against a locked, rusty metal fire door. There was no sign of her. He called out and waited a moment. Standing up, he shouted for her again, the fear tightening in his chest. Jennifer. Jennifer. Jennifer. But there was no reply. He ran back up the steps and looked around, then as fast as he could, down to the lobby and out through the doors. He ran round the entire building, then stopped to catch his breath. He tried to think seriously about where she could have gone. By logic she must be right here somewhere, or in the lobby or behind a concrete pillar or standing by the lift. But she was nowhere. He stepped back and tilted his head to look up at the tower block which seemed to stretch forever up into the grey sky. As he backed away from it, more and more windows came into view, some neat and tidy, some covered in grey cardboard or rotting net curtains. Every flat looked different, every flat could contain The Prick – or Jennifer. She was gone and she was his responsibility. Now he felt a rising panic in his stomach.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he muttered to himself. I’ve lost her. I’ve taken her away from her family, back to the most dangerous place in the world and I’ve fucking gone and lost her. He ran back to the building and banged on the front door which returned a booming echo but would not shift. Then a tiny ageing woman with a shopping trolley pushed the door open from the inside and Allen almost fell back into the lobby.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, he started to cry. He stood motionless while tears ran down his face. and as he sobbed, he wailed Jennifer, Jennifer.
And then, suddenly, she was standing there, looking at him, all innocence in her childish skirt and the jewellery he’d bought her earlier that day.
‘Why are you crying?’ she said.
The sobbing stopped immediately and Allen wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
‘Where the fuck have you been?’
His anger came from fear, but it had a bad effect on Jennifer. She shrank back away from him. Then, in a whisper she asked to go home.
Invitation
He took two bottles of wine home with him that evening as a peace offering to Emily.
‘That copper has been round again,’ she told him, before he’d even put them down.
‘Herman?’
‘He gave me an earful,’ she said. ‘They don’t like your Silence of the Lambs stuff and they’re not happy with your unhelpful attitude. You know you’re going to be in deep shit at this rate.’
‘There’s nothing they can do, and they know there’s nothing I’ve done. They’re just pissed off with me because they think I know more than them. I don’t, actually. Not yet. Well, maybe one thing – the girl might know where it all happened, where she was held.’
‘How could she know that?’
‘She doesn’t want to tell us, but she’s been out and about with him. In fact, I think she’s withholding information about their whole life together. Something strange went on. What do you think – she told me she’d been to auditions, to get on telly. Is that possible?’
Emily grimaced. She wanted to allow a human connection to this poor kid, but still she didn’t want to hear about Allen’s world.
‘Sounds like big trouble to me,’ she said. ‘You can’t just go running about town with girls who’ve been abducted for years, who might be on the edge of cuckoo land – and who the police must surely be watching closely.’
‘I know, but she’s my source. I’m supposed to be writing her book, I’ve got to get something out of her—poor thing. She was only a teenager when he took her.’
‘Who? Who took her?’
‘This guy. She calls him the Prick. Of course, she knows a lot more than she’s letting on. She doesn’t want to tell the police everything. She doesn’t even want to tell me, not really.’
‘What’s the point then?’
‘The point is – I’m not sure. But she’s got some sort of plan, maybe his plan, that they worked out between them. She won’t tell the coppers because, quite honestly, she’s had enough big guys shouting at her to last a lifetime and they’ll just get in her way. She’s got some crazy scheme about getting on television, and ending up famous, and that’s how he’ll know.’
‘Know what?’ said Emily.
‘Know that she kept her side of the bargain. Look, it sounds insane, it is insane. She said this guy, the Prick, who took her, he’s been training her for the stage. Oh, I know, it’s funny. It’s funny, until you hear it from her, then it’s not so funny.’
‘What does she do? I mean, what can she do to get famous?’
‘She’s the kid who disappeared for years. Everyone already wants to know what happened, she doesn’t have to do much. And she’s smart. You should hear her tell her story.’
‘Brought a tear to your eye, I suppose.’
‘It did actually. Well, you weren’t there, you don’t know. I mean, I’m not sure anybody will take her seriously, but the press will love it. He taught her everything, been practising for years. Anyway, I’m going to write her book.’
He sat
back in triumph. Emily looked at him in amazement.
‘So, what have you been doing today?’
‘We went to look for her place, where she’s been all these years. She took me to a tower block. We almost found where she’s been. Almost. I think.’
‘I think you should go to the police.’
‘And lose the whole story? There’s a copper, he wants me, me and Jenkins, out of the case.’
‘Well, what can they do? What’s the worst that can happen?’ Emily said.
‘They might take her away, away from her mum. Put her in a home.’ He was grasping at straws now ‘With what she’s been through they might as well put her back in a hole in the ground.’
Emily had heard this rant before. ‘Well, what next?’ she asked.
‘Well. First, why was she let go? That’s a good question, a good place to start. Twelve years is a long time to hang on to someone, and then you just walk them to the corner and say bye-bye. And another thing, I think she knows where she was and if that’s true it doesn’t make any sense. There were other men who looked after her when The Prick was away. Looked after her. It’s like an organised gang and they network like child abusers, but maybe they’re not paedophiles. And they’re not murderers. They don’t murder. They just snatch and keep, know what I mean?’
Any warmth seemed to have been extracted from the room and Emily shivered.
‘Then go to the police.’
‘I’m not taking this to the coppers. I’m sure I know more than they do now and it’s my story.’ He realised he sounded petulant. ‘Even if I had something concrete to tell them, they wouldn’t listen to me, and anyway, I’d be cutting my own throat, giving my best story away. I know a bit of what’s going on and I’m not doing their job for them. They’ve got their own theories and they are dead wrong.’