The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

by Riches, Marnie

  He drank from his coffee. Scattered crumbs onto his jeans from the appeltaart he had knocked up for him and the kids. Gabi wouldn’t touch anything containing carbs, of course. She was still on the corporate treadmill in her head. Sharp-dressing. 8 a.m. starts, though she no longer needed to keep those ridiculous hours. An hour of exercise every day: disciplined body, disciplined mind. Old habits weren’t dying hard.

  Leaning forward, knocking his coffee all over the plans of the existing front elevation, he opened the window.

  ‘Kids!’ he shouted in his native Dutch. ‘Ten minutes and I’ll bring you out some cake and milk. Okay?’

  Delighted squeals from outside. Josh jumping up and down, Lucy not really understanding much beyond cake and milk, no doubt. They waved up at him. All, ‘love you, Paps!’ Sticky juice hands. Dirty knees. Both with flaxen hair just like he had had as a child. But their curls had come from Gabi’s side of the family.

  Piet surveyed this perfect domestic scene. Perched atop the Day-Glo pink climbing frame were his very own small people. His family. Here – the middle of nowhere – had to be the safest place in the world to raise children, hadn’t it? Here, they had green space. Privacy. You wouldn’t even know there was a train line running behind the garden. It was a glorious sight. The relocation had been worthwhile. Gabi would come round without water eventually.

  Except Josh ruined the perfect snapshot in time, as usual. He started to dangle Lucy by her ankles over the ladder of the climbing frame. Shrieks of excitement from his tiny sibling, quickly turned to anguished screaming.

  ‘Stop that, Josh! Leave your sister alone. Don’t make me come down there!’

  Shit. Bloody kids. Coffee spillage or Lucy: which was the more urgent? Suddenly, he found himself flapping, and ran to the bathroom to get toilet roll. At least he could blot the worst of it.

  ‘I’m coming down!’ he shouted through the open window.

  ‘Pappie!’ Cries from Lucy.

  Mischievous laughter trilling on the air from Josh.

  But then the phone started ring.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Gabi on the other end.

  ‘Did you put the wash on?’ she asked. Sounded harried.

  ‘What? Yes. No. Hang on, darling. The kids are going mad in the garden. There’s coffee— I’ve got to …’ Looking out at the precarious scene below, he could see that Josh had released his sister from his tyrannical grip but was now holding the sides of the climbing frame, rocking the plastic tower back and forth. Trying to topple that which was not designed to be toppled.

  Gabi’s voice, tinny but insistent down the phone-line. ‘Piet! I told you to put the bloody washing in. The one time your mother actually comes to babysit overnight and there’s no clean bedding.’ Her tone had quickly turned from undisguised mistrust to naked fury.

  ‘I’ll do it! Darling, I can’t—’

  ‘Can’t? Can’t? Then how come I manage? I’m sick of it, Piet. You promised me we’d have some time for ourselves. That was the whole damned point, wasn’t it? Better quality of life, you said!’

  ‘Gab, the kids are—’

  ‘Did you put Josh’s assessment on the calendar like I told you?’

  Piet tore himself away from the window. He turned to the calendar, pinned to a corkboard in his little office, one ear still on the mayhem in the garden. Feeling torn between answering his wife’s demands and monitoring his ebullient charges, he was relieved when it became relatively quiet outside. Little children’s voices chatting nicely, not bellowing. Laughter. This meant the kids were finally behaving, leaving him to focus on dealing with Gabi. ‘Yes. It’s down for 10 a.m. on the 18th.’

  ‘Of June? You got the right month?’

  He felt the prickle of irritation on the back of his neck that he always got that when Gabi started to undermine him. He imagined her, snip, snip, snip at his testicles with the big garden shears. ‘Yes, I got the right fucking month. It says in capital letters, ‘Josh – psychiatric evaluation. 18th of June’. It was all he could do not to shout June down the phone.

  ‘Did you pay the credit card bill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘Not enough money in the account. Not after the deposit on the car and the first repayment coming out.’

  The argument quickly escalated into a slanging match over whether they were going to be cut off by the utilities company or not. As usual. By the time he slammed the phone down on his wife, Piet was exhausted.

  He finished mopping the coffee spillage. The drawing was brown and rippled now, like the waves of the North Sea in winter. Damn.

  Throwing the soggy tissue into his wastepaper basket, he peered out of the window. Sod Gabi. He would sit outside for a bit with the kids. If he invoiced a few more customers early, chances are, one would pay up before the thirty-day notice and he could settle the overdue gas bill.

  Padding down in bare feet to the kitchen – a sleek luxury he had insisted upon if she was to have that ridiculous car they didn’t even need – he sliced up the cake. Piet poured milk into two plastic beakers. One green for Lucy. One yellow for Josh. An orange one for him, so he could join in. Took a tray outside.

  The rustle of a late spring breeze in the trees was nothing short of idyllic. A train approached in the distance, although he hardly noticed the sound now, as the Rotterdam to Schiphol service trundled past some several metres below the line of houses – out of view, deep in its purpose-built cutting.

  ‘Come on, babies. Let’s take some time out.’

  Silence.

  Had they answered and he hadn’t heard them over the train’s rumble? Setting the tray down, he looked at the climbing frame, expecting to see his children. They weren’t there. Hide and seek, no doubt. Always a favourite. His heart had started to pound. He could feel the blood draining from his face. But that was fine, because they were hiding.

  ‘Josh! Lucy! Come on out now. Time for a snack.’

  No sign of them in the void of the climbing frame. Neither could he see small figures skulking behind the wooden sun-loungers.

  ‘Not funny, kids! Come out!’

  Peering at the bases of the holly bushes, he could see no telltale feet. Crap. The gate! He ran to check the side gate. Had they walked onto the street? No! The side gate was bolted and padlocked.

  ‘I know where you are, you little rascals!’

  It was a simple but mature garden, mainly full of evergreen shrubbery and trees. Holly, laurel, a eucalyptus, cotoneaster, the heavy canopy of three Japanese maples, specimen pine, other stuff he didn’t know the names of. All surrounded by a solid, six-foot-tall wooden fence. They were hiding. He had to calm down. It simply wasn’t possible for them to have disappeared. Only one place could successfully conceal them.

  At the far end of the garden was a small weeping birch that cascaded right to the ground, providing the kids with a curtain of green, behind which they could safely hide from view.

  Smiling tentatively, Piet crept forward. Preparing to sweep the whippy branches aside to reveal his collaborating toddlers. Grabbed the branches. Hope fading as he realised he could not hear any delighted, anticipatory giggling. Looked for the sandaled feet, mucky knees and brightly coloured shorts in vain. Lifted the canopy suddenly.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  The void by the tree trunk was empty.

  In a dizzying vortex of panic, Piet stepped backwards. Tripped on Lucy’s Sesamstraat tricycle, Big Bird staring goggle-eyed into the abyss as he was now.

  ‘Josh! Lucy!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.

  Hands shaking. His breath started to come short. Where was his inhaler? Inside. Maybe they had gone inside.

  ‘Lucy! Josh! Where are you?’

  Found his Ventolin on the worktop. Inhaled sharply. Eyes scanning the kitchen. Back into the garden now. Screaming at the top of his lungs. Frightened tears starting to leak from his eyes.

  ‘Joshua! Lucy! Where are you?’

  He fell to his knees
as the bottom dropped out of his world. The garden was empty. His children were gone.

  CHAPTER 9

  St. John’s College, then, The Bun Shop pub, Cambridge, 3 March, present

  ‘Fucking idiots,’ George muttered under her breath. She was eyeing the beefy rugger-buggers in the crowded college bar who had hoisted two blow-up sex dolls aloft and were bashing them together, ‘like lesboes’. Then, pretending to hump them, doggy style. Pints all round, boys, to celebrate Rupes’ birthday. Empty glasses bearing testament to two hours’ solid drinking.

  Looking at Charlotte, the mousy third-year student she was supervising on the side, George felt suddenly protective. ‘Let’s call it a night, shall we?’

  Charlotte fingered a twee enamel flower brooch on her jumper nervously. Nodded. She hooked her dark blonde hair behind her ears. Left her diet coke half drunk. ‘I always find it too rowdy in here,’ she said, barely audible above the raucous laughter and bawdy jokes. ‘But thanks for the drink anyway. I’m glad you thought the essay was okay.’

  ‘The essay was great, but this was a bad idea. I’m sorry. Next time, we’ll have the supervision at my house, right?’

  As she pulled on her coat, one of the boys locked eyes with George. Clearly failed to recognize her as a Fellow. He humped the blow-up sex doll towards her, shouting, ‘Fancy a ride, darling? I’ve got plenty of love to give when I’ve finished with this bitch.’

  Deftly, George detached the enamel brooch from Charlotte’s jumper. Nice long, sharp pin, she noticed with satisfaction. Took long strides to meet the leering idiot. Popped the first sex doll. Swung to her left and popped the second.

  ‘Oh, you total cow!’ one of the boys shouted.

  ‘See, boys?’ George said. All eyes on her. Stunned silence meant she had their attention. ‘An unwanted prick’s not much fun, is it?’

  Before the pack could round on her, she ushered Charlotte to the door. She only barely registered the fact that a man, too old to be a student, was sitting in an alcove. A man who didn’t fit with these surrounds. The wafting stench of more than stale alcohol. Watching her. Someone she didn’t recognise. Or did she? It was a shadow of a thought and George didn’t have time to form it fully before she was through the door; warm air supplanted by cold, a testosterone-fuelled demi-riot supplanted by silence.

  Outside in that frozen cloudless night, the drop in temperature punched the air from her lungs. She struggled to catch her breath as she watched Charlotte scurry off towards Cripps block in safety.

  George was preoccupied and unprepared, when a figure wearing too many clothes bundled into her.

  ‘Watch where you’re going!’ she said, wondering if one of the boys from the bar had come to start something with her. But the figure was too small, she realised.

  ‘George!’ A woman’s voice. Rich rolling R. She pulled back her hood enough to show her face clearly in the moonlight. Dark hair gathered in a low widow’s peak above her brow. Feather earrings just peeping out, though the colours were not visible in this half-light. ‘I was looking for you.’

  ‘Sophie!’ George said. Chuckling with relief at the sight of the Social Anthropology Fellow.

  ‘Fancy coming for a pint and we can chew over our collaboration some more? The Bun Shop does a good burger if you’ve not already eaten. My treat.’

  George assessed her options. Back to her college house full of untidy idiot undergraduates, where she could never find peace enough to work? Beggars, it turned out, really couldn’t be choosers. Or off to the pub for a second stab at sociability with women roughly her own age? Her empty stomach growled long and low. It had already decided on her brain’s behalf.

  ‘Perfect!’

  As the two women trudged arm-in-arm towards the Porter’s Lodge, George was unaware of the man following some twenty paces behind.

  That he had got past the Porters and into the college was a miracle. No. Not a miracle. Merely a feat of bluff and self-confidence. Walk like you belong there. Head held high. His time on the streets had taught him this was the best way to move around unnoticed. The moment you started acting like you didn’t belong was the moment people took you for an interloper.

  Still, his heart was thudding as he followed McKenzie and her friend through the labyrinthine medieval sprawl towards the lodge. Seeing the towers loom large, covered in the claustrophobic white blanket that swallowed sound like the walls of a confessional box, he felt sick. But in the middle of the snow-bound courtyard, where the gritted paths intersected, the women suddenly took a sharp left. They entered a different courtyard on the other side of the chapel. Wider spaces here. The snow glittered like homeless man’s diamonds in the moonlight. It looked like they were going through some more discreet exit. Except, downside was, he was exposed here. If they turned around, they would realise, perhaps, that they were being followed.

  Get to McKenzie, the email had said. Get her laptop and the USB stick that has her database on it – by any means necessary. The names are all on there.

  Any means necessary. Yes. He was a committed soldier and this was war. It was his job to obey orders. He removed his glove for thirty seconds – just long enough to reach down through the tear in his pocket into the space between the lining and outer of his coat. Touched the tools hidden along the inner seam. Screwdriver. Hammer. Chisel. Tonight he would not use ice and snow. Tonight, he needed something a little more robust.

  George looked into Sophie’s startling green eyes. Looked away after a couple of uncomfortable beats. Felt instinctively like there was more than just friendly curiosity at play in her new colleague’s exacting gaze. Some kind of chemistry shit going on. She hadn’t experienced that with a woman since Tonya …

  ‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ George said. ‘I don’t see how your study into the Roma has any bearing on my trafficking research. I’m all about qualitative and quantitative. Interview transcriptions from victims and perps. Stats. You’re presumably coming at it from a cultural heritage angle.’ She took a large bite out of her burger. Eyes on the clientele in the pub, feeling like she was being observed. Back to Sophie. Perhaps observed only by her.

  All hands flapping and smiles, Sophie’s intense expression was suddenly transformed. ‘You couldn’t be wronger there, my love,’ she said in that rolling West Country accent. George wasn’t sure about the ‘my love’. ‘The reason Sally wanted us to work together was that the Roma – my speciality – are at the centre of many a child abduction scandal.’

  Drinking deeply from her pint of beer, George started to arrange the condiments in a perfectly straight line along the middle of the table. Separating her and Sophie with a barrier of salt, pepper, vinegar and ketchup. ‘There’s often stories in the media about blond children allegedly being abducted by the Roma. Usually when northern Europeans are on holiday in countries like Turkey and Greece.’

  Chewing slowly, thoroughly, perhaps thoughtfully, on her veggie-burger, Sophie nodded and flicked her long hair over her shoulder. ‘Stories like that always engender mass hysteria in the press – especially in the tabloids. White Europeans are up in arms whenever they get wind of some kind of abuse of a blond child by an underclass of minority ethnic people like ‘gypsies’. And the Roma have always been vilified as child-abductors. It goes back donkey’s years, like the myth of Jews baking their Passover bread with Christian children’s blood.’

  ‘Racist propaganda, then?’ George asked, pulling her e-cigarette out of her rucksack.

  ‘But the point is, the Roma informally adopt children from families that can’t bring their own kids up. Happens a lot. I think in the case of the ‘Blonde Angel’ back in 2013, for example, the mother was Bulgarian and just couldn’t look after her daughter. Lack of paperwork implicates the adoptive parents though, and the media jumps onto a witch hunt.’

  George thought about how the case Van den Bergen had been working on had been given the moniker of Operation Roma by Kamphuis or Hasselblad or one of those odious bastards above him, and wo
ndered about the prejudices behind the name in light of what Sophie was saying. Missing person equals gypsies, if the bigots were to be believed. Hadn’t Hasselblad pointed the finger at Romani travellers, amongst other easily maligned groups? She had thought the Roma referred to the Italian capital of Rome – a suspected destination of the missing, at one point, and the frequently used European hub of trans-national trafficking networks. Only now did she make the link. How the hell did I miss that?

  ‘You’ve got a point.’ She rubbed her finger along her full bottom lip. Chapped and rough from the cold. ‘Roma kids from South Eastern Europe are by far the largest ethnic group preyed on by traffickers,’ George said, thinking about what she had read about beggars and child prostitutes in Italy, the Russian Federation and Turkey. ‘So, the truth is actually a world away from media representation.’

  Sophie seemed momentarily to be assessing George. Peering at her intently over her beer glass. She looked suddenly thoughtful again. ‘Yep. Of the kids trafficked out of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, Roma kids constitute about seventy per cent. They’re disproportionately poor. Maybe someone trusted in the family or village offers to get a child work elsewhere. What the fuck have they got in their little villages at home? Domestic abuse, maybe. Poverty, certainly. Sod all in the way of education or prospects. So they often go willingly. Unwittingly. Factor in corrupt border patrol and police, and you’ve got movement of children over borders into brothels, sweatshops, begging on the streets.’

  George drained her beer glass, feeling suddenly lightheaded in the over-heated warmth of the pub, with a full stomach. Sophie was twirling some of that long, unkempt hair coquettishly around her finger. Her chipped nail varnish made George feel itchy. Inadvertently, she found herself checking her phone for texts from Van den Bergen, as though those would save her from the keen-eyed appraisal of the inexpertly groomed Dr Bartek. Nothing. She found herself looking up at the décolletage of her colleague.