by Lara Dearman
‘So I’m panicking about the fact that I might panic? You’re right. It does sound crazy. I sound crazy.’
She was nothing of the sort, Rosemary said. There was a reason it was called post-traumatic stress. It was because it happened after the event – sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes years after. Sometimes, as in Jenny’s case, the stress could be dealt with and then triggered again. Treatment was an ongoing process. It was nothing to be ashamed of. She wasn’t crazy. She was unwell. She would get better.
‘Are you doing plenty of exercise? You swim, don’t you? Your mum mentioned it once, said she was worried about you going out in all weathers.’
Jenny nodded.
‘Well, carry on. You can tell your mum doctor’s orders.’ She smiled. ‘And maybe try something more relaxing. Sarah’s just signed up for a jewellery-making course at night school. Don’t roll your eyes! It might keep you out of mischief. And here.’ Rosemary turned to her computer screen and typed in a few notes. The printer churned out a prescription.
‘We’ll get you an appointment with mental health services but there’s a wait, a month or two perhaps. In the meantime, take this. Just in case. It’s for a very mild sedative.’ Jenny grimaced. ‘You don’t have to take them,’ Rosemary said, ‘sometimes just having them to hand can help.’
Jenny thanked her and promised to try to take it easy. She walked back out to the waiting room, checked her phone for messages. There was one from Michael, asking her to come over to his house, not the station, as soon as she could. She stared at the message and then at the prescription in her other hand. It was for the same medication her mother was taking. As if moving back in with her wasn’t sad enough, they had matching prescriptions now too. She screwed it up and put it in the bin. She didn’t need pills. She needed to face up to what had started this whole nightmare up again. She needed to deal with what happened in London.
September 2012
She had been glued to her computer screen for hours, trying to put the finishing touches on a piece about a campaign to have a local pub granted Community Value status. Developers were threatening to buy it and turn it into a luxury apartment block. It was a favour for a friend, a worthy enough story, but unlikely to pique the interest of the nationals. She was hoping to call in a couple of favours at the Guardian – there was a slim chance they’d go for it, but it was more likely going to end up on her blog.
She snapped her laptop shut, reached again for the piece of paper on the top of the pile of reports and research she kept pushed to the corner of her desk. It was an address, Madalina’s address. Gripped by an overwhelming need to do something, she put it in her pocket, grabbed her jacket and bag and headed for the Tube.
She had tried to talk to Madalina several times after the day she’d seen her with the bruise but Madalina had not even acknowledged her presence, hurrying past her, head down. She had looked thinner and more haggard each week and then, suddenly, she had stopped coming. Jenny had asked her neighbour about her, under the pretence that she was looking for a cleaner. She was sick, the well-dressed woman who answered the door had said. Do you know what’s wrong with her? Jenny had asked. No, the woman said, she didn’t even know her surname, as it happened; all she had was a number. She had given it to Jenny and then she’d disappeared back into her house, as if it was perfectly normal to have no information whatsoever about a woman who had the keys to your well-appointed Victorian terrace. Jenny had tried the number, a landline, a few times, but it went through to an answering machine and something stopped her from leaving a message. So she had had it traced and found an address: 42 Fairfield Road. She hadn’t been interfering, she told herself. Madalina was in trouble, she was sure of it. And so often trouble meant a good story.
Fairfield Road was in a rundown part of town between Stoke Newington and West Ham, yet to benefit from the regeneration of the area that the Olympic Park was supposed to have brought. Jenny walked from the station through the Stratford Centre, a covered shopping mall, where she bought a bunch of flowers, out on to Broadway, before joining Romford Road. She passed a tall redbrick block with a hoarding on the side advertising ‘Refurbished Offices TO LET’, a strip of shops – a nail salon, a Chickens ’R’ Us, a grocer’s with produce arranged outside on stacked plastic crates covered in grass matting. She turned off the main road on to Fairfield Road. Number 42 was halfway down.
She had thought about how to do this. She was aware that if Madalina was being abused by a husband or boyfriend, that her showing up could make things worse. If anyone other than Madalina answered the door, Jenny would say Madalina cleaned for her, she wanted to bring her some flowers and check when she’d be back at work. It might not be what most employers would do, but Jenny figured it was believable and easy enough for Madalina to explain away if she had to.
The house was dilapidated. Paint peeling from the window frames, an old, stained mattress resting on scrubby grass in the tiny front garden. Jenny hesitated. Then she knocked.
Movement inside, a gentle thudding, a door slamming, but nobody answered. She waited a couple of minutes and then knocked again. She stepped back, looked up to the top-floor windows. Filthy net curtains twitched. A man’s voice called out. ‘Who is it?’ Heavily accented English. ‘I’m a friend of Madalina’s,’ Jenny said. ‘Just coming to see how she is.’ The door opened. A stocky man in a leather jacket and highly polished shoes. He would be handsome, Jenny thought, if he smiled, but his face was set in a frown, his eyes cold.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
Behind him, at the back of the hallway, she glimpsed a woman. Not Madalina. Another woman, thin and pale. The man turned and shouted something in a foreign language. The woman disappeared behind a door.
‘What do you want?’ He looked her up and down.
‘I just…’ Her resolve faltered as he stared at her, unblinking. ‘Madalina cleans for me. She said she was sick. I suppose she must be better?’
‘She’s fine,’ the man said. ‘She’s out.’ He slammed the door shut. Jenny stood there for a moment, wondering if she should knock again, trying to think of another question to ask, some way to get into the house. But the way he’d looked at her … She walked away, still holding the flowers. She looked back up at the top window. The curtain was pulled aside and Madalina was looking out at her, her face stricken with fear.
A week later there was a knock at Jenny’s door. It was late, past ten. The others were out and Jenny hesitated before answering.
‘Madalina…?’ The question mark hung in the air between them. The woman looked behind her and pushed past Jenny into the hallway.
‘I need money.’
‘What for?’
‘I need one thousand pounds. For my life.’
* * *
Jenny led her into the kitchen, poured them both glasses of cheap wine. Madalina grimaced as she sipped it.
‘My family make wine. It is good. Not like this.’ She put the glass down and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘So, you help me?’
‘I don’t have a thousand pounds, Madalina.’
‘You must get. You borrow. It is your fault. You come to house, you make them worried. I need to get away now.’
‘Get away from who? From the man I met? What are you so afraid of?’
‘Get me the money. Then I tell you story. When I’m gone you sell it to the newspaper, they pay you. Simple.’ She gazed at Jenny, her eyes like pebbles, dull and lifeless.
‘I’m sorry if I caused you trouble. I didn’t mean to. I was trying to help.’
‘Well, you did. Big trouble for me and now you pay.’
Jenny shook her head. ‘You won’t even tell me what it’s for.’
‘I tell you, you will help me?’ It was barely more than a whisper.
‘If you tell me, at least I can try.
Madalina told her story.
* * *
Her family owned a small vineyard in Urlați, she said. She was the youngest of three. He
r elder siblings worked for the family business, she was finishing school. But things were not going well. They were struggling. Her father had an idea. They would try to attract tourists for wine tasting and meals, perhaps provide rooms. It was decided she would come to England. Many people had come to England after the borders opened. She would work and send money home to help her family, and she would learn English so she could help with the business when she returned.
She had an uncle. He was not really an uncle. He was someone her mother knew. He said he knew people who could help. They ran a cleaning agency. Hard work, he said, but good money. They would give her a job. They would pay for her journey and she could pay it back when she had earned some money. They would find her a nice room. He showed them all pictures on his phone of a redbrick house on a street with trees and a room with yellow walls. She could stay there. There were other girls there. She would make friends. She would work and she would learn and then she would come home.
A man met her at Luton airport. He smiled at her and was kind. He was warm and friendly and smartly dressed in a leather jacket and shiny shoes. He was a friend of her uncle, he said. He carried her bag. He had a nice car. He drove her through streets with trees and rows of redbrick houses. They did not stop there. They kept driving. When they did stop, finally, she was almost asleep. Her flight had been early and she had not eaten all day, she was tired and weak. The man opened the car door and shook her. There was no time for sleeping, he said. They had paid her uncle one thousand pounds for her and she needed to start paying it back. She was confused. She knew nothing of a thousand pounds, only her flight, which she would pay back out of her first month’s wages, it had been arranged. Stupid fucking bitch, he had said. Always such stupid fucking bitches.
There was no bedroom with yellow walls. There were no bedrooms at all, just mattresses on floors, two in each room, filthy and bare. The walls were unpainted, stained with damp and mildew. In one room a woman in leather trousers and a black bra was bent over, painting her toe nails bright red. In another, a woman with peroxide blonde hair lay half sleeping, in a dirty, shapeless T-shirt. The man pointed at the mattress next to her. That is yours, he said. She would pay for her bed, her clothes and her food every month. Anything left over would go towards paying her debt. When the debt was paid, she could go.
‘They give you choice.’ Madalina almost smiled. ‘You can work for agency, cleaning, or you can work for shop, fucking. It is very clever, I think. If you work for shop, you have money. You pay more of your debt. You are free in a year. If you work for agency, you do not earn enough. I am working twelve hours a day, every day, for more than six months – and still they say I owe one thousand pounds. Everyone starts in agency. Everyone finishes in shop.’
* * *
They met several times over the following weeks. The last time, Madalina had seemed the most desperate.
‘When will you get money?’ It was the first thing she said as she walked through the door, rubbing her thin arms against the autumn chill.
‘I’m working on it. There’s a big newspaper interested in the story and they’re willing to put me on staff while I investigate/I may be able to claim some expenses, but it’s going to take some time. How are you going to explain the money anyway, when you do get it?’
‘I will worry about it, not you. They only want money, I think. Look at me.’ She was gaunt, her skin sallow, the circles under her eyes almost black. ‘I am not good for them anyway. They need fresh girls.’
‘You should stay here. We can go to the police together, right now.’ Jenny had known it was useless.
‘I tell you already. I go to police, my family will be hurt, maybe killed. I have to do this way. I’m sorry.’
‘You have nothing to be sorry about.’
‘I will come here again. Sunday. And then you will have money?’
‘I’m doing my best, Madalina.’
Madalina squeezed Jenny’s hand, her fingers rough and calloused. ‘Thank you for helping me.’
She did not come back that Sunday.
Jenny never saw her again.
* * *
She pulled up outside Michael’s house, a neat white bungalow at the end of Pont Vaillant Lane in a nondescript corner of the Vale. The Vale was considered less desirable than the Southern Parishes. Jenny had found that out on her first day at the Ladies’ College. She’d won a scholarship there and her parents hadn’t even been able to afford the uniform, with its duffle coat, wax jacket and hockey stick for winter, blazer and lacrosse kit for summer. They’d had to take out a loan, three hundred pounds, to pay for it all. When she’d arrived, she’d been cornered, along with the other scholarship girls, by the girls who had come straight up from Melrose, the prep school. They were asked where they lived, what their fathers did, where they holidayed, whether or not they were members of the Pony Club or the Yacht Club, did they ski? All of the prep school girls lived in the upper parishes: St Martins, St Saviours, Torteval, the pretty parishes with the big houses and the sea views. When Jenny said she lived in the Vale, one of them said, knowingly, that her dad owned an estate agency, and you could get good value for money there.
She’d been embarrassed at the time, wished she’d lived anywhere but the Vale. Stupid, the things you worried about as a kid. She loved it here now. It was flat and sandy and windswept, from L’Ancresse and Pembroke in the far North, through L’Islet, with its surf shop and downmarket supermarket, the Vale Church and Rousse. Beautiful Rousse. Hours spent jumping off the fishermen’s pier into the water, clear as glass, so deep and so, so cold, fish tickling your feet as you swam to the rocky bay, gasping for breath, salt in your ears and your eyes and your hair.
She saw Michael standing in the front window, no doubt wondering why she was sitting there daydreaming. She got out of the car, wished all she had to worry about was whether or not the tide was high enough to jump from the pier.
Stone ornaments stood on the well-maintained front lawn, most of them animals – a cat with a kitten, a bloodhound looking mournfully towards the house, an otter posed on a log, an old man with a round nose wearing a sou’wester. They were all surrounded by carefully placed pieces of sea glass, waves of blue and green rippling around each figure. There was something sad about the scene, she thought. The figures looked trapped. Or, not trapped so much as marooned, the water around them unmoving. Frozen in time.
A slice of polished tree trunk etched with the word ‘Karaikal’ hung to one side of the front door. It was a strange Guernsey affectation, naming houses like pets. She wondered who or what Karaikal was. The house next door, another bungalow (‘Four Winds’) was unkempt, the paintwork stained and the gutters full of leaves. There were three cars in the driveway, one with the engine running. A man emerged from the front door before turning back and shouting something in a foreign language. He pulled the door shut. His head was shaven, the muscles in his neck sinewy. Jenny knocked loudly on Michael’s door. The man nodded at her and smiled a ‘good morning’, before getting in the car, revving the engine and spinning the wheels as he turned right on to the Longue Rue and sped off towards town.
The door opened. Michael clearly hadn’t slept. He had heavy bags under his eyes and a day’s worth of stubble on his face. His breath smelt of stale alcohol and his lips were stained red. They stood on the doorstep. A young woman emerged from the house next door, dressed in a navy pinafore and white apron, her mousey hair pulled back into a tight bun. She gave a smile and a wave. Michael returned the greeting.
‘Come in.’ He stepped aside to let Jenny in. She hesitated before she followed him through a narrow hallway.
‘What’s the story next door?’ She asked.
‘Multi-occupancy housing. Polish, I think. It’s a three-bed place and there are at least nine people in there so far as I can work out. Young lady there works at one of the hotels. One of the lads is a cook. They’re no trouble. They only sleep there – the rest of the time they’re working.’
The w
alls of his hallway were mostly bare. A simple crucifix hung next to an old-fashioned entry mirror with shelves underneath and hooks at the side holding a set of keys and a small torch on a wrist strap. The kitchen, for the most part, was neat and sparse. White walls, no pictures, clear surfaces, a chrome kettle and toaster, a mug tree with three white mugs hanging from it, a bread bin. No clutter, no mess. And then, in the middle of the room, was the table. Every inch of it was covered in papers and photographs, scribbled notes, open files, crisp wrappers, a banana skin, three half-drunk mugs of what appeared to be black coffee, a wine glass, and an empty bottle of red wine.
He moved the bottle, placed the mugs and the glass in the sink and filled the kettle. He seemed even bigger in this small kitchen, the kettle diminutive in his large hands. He turned to her.
‘Thanks for coming at such short notice.’
Jenny gestured to the table. ‘What have you found? Am I right? Or am I going mad? Because I really don’t know any more.’
‘I don’t think you’re going mad. I wish you were.’ He glanced at her. ‘No offence.’
‘So you think the deaths are connected?’
He didn’t answer immediately, but moved the food wrappings and police reports to one side and just left some pictures on the table, pictures of dead girls. Not whole, dead girls, parts of them: an arm here, a leg there, a close-up of a shoulder. He lined them up, checking the back of each one before he placed them in order. Then he pulled out a chair for her.
‘Sit down, Jenny.’ She sat. He pointed at each picture. Amanda Guille, Hayley Bougourd, Melissa Marchant, Janet Gaudion, Mary Brehaut.
‘Elizabeth?’
‘There are none in the file. Seems they went missing at some point over the last fifty years.’
She picked up Hayley’s. Her right arm, covered in tattoos – Celtic symbols, Chinese letters, and on her wrist – what was it on her wrist? She pointed to it, left her finger hovering over it. Michael rifled through some papers and placed one on top of the picture of Hayley.