He lay there groaning. “No way McGinty, you win! That was utterly terrifying, I’m never ever doing that again!”
On the way back on the plane I leaned into him. “I might need your help Quinn with something. I don’t know for sure, but I may need some back-up sometime soon.”
“That sounds ominous,” he said, eyeing me.
“I suppose it is,” I agreed. It was clear that the journalistic team wasn’t going to be helping by being physically present. It was going to be up to me to gather my own team around me. And being thrown together with Quinn this week and having some fun together had re-established a bond between us. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but he was usefully big, so if I pointed him at something, he’d probably go at it for me.
“We’ll see,” he murmured cautiously.
But I knew that if I called, he’d come.
On the phone to Damian I asked if it seemed like the sort of thing he’d wanted. “Yes, it’ll edit well,” he agreed. “Had you really never flown before? Or seen mountains? Or skied?”
“Nope, never,” I assured him.
“What else haven’t you done?”
“Just about everything,” I said. “Including shagging Quinn, which is what I’m guessing you’re hoping for by the end of this series!”
He robustly denied it, then started to laugh. “Well maybe we are, but just don’t do it on camera, will you!”
“So where’s this journalism team then?” I demanded. “You promised me, you know!”
He read me out a number. “They’re ready when you are…”
We’d arrived back late on the Friday evening, but Jo was cracking the whip and wasn’t letting me off driving on the Saturday. I volunteered to sacrifice myself to being the one to transport Cody to allow Jo a bit of precious time on her own, and besides, at least she’d keep me awake.
I’d spent all week thinking about what approach to take. It had finally borne upon me that I wasn’t going to be able to help Jessica. And I had to distance myself from her as unreliable witness. But if she was telling the truth and several hundred other girls had been drawn into this as she claimed, then it shouldn’t be too hard to find some others. But they had to not know Jessica. If they turned out to be buddies of hers then they might just be parroting what she’d told them to say.
I didn’t want to get Cody involved in this, but for the moment she was the nearest I had to it all.
“If I wanted to hang out somewhere to casually bump into the sort of girl that Jessica hangs out with, where would I go?” I asked her.
Sunday was a World of Shale Qualifier at Sheffield.
“Excuse me if I drive a bit conservatively today,” I said to Jo as I slipped into my car. “But I’m too busy this week to have to rebuild this car from scratch by next Saturday if I get put into the fence.”
Sheffield was a good track in and of itself, with good venue facilities, but its style of fence and posts were notorious and made the place unpopular with F2 drivers. You didn’t bounce back off that fence. You just got shredded into it and that made it an expensive mistake. Sheffield, too tough to tame, went the tagline. And next Saturday was another World of Shale Qualifier at Mildenhall. “And they’d better have made a better job of the track in advance at Mildenhall,” I complained. “They had to get a load of spades out last time we were there and fill in all the holes. I thought my teeth were going to rattle out of my head by the sixteenth lap of the first heat, and I wasn’t looking forward to another thirty two to go by the end of the day!”
I came in fifth with three blasé locals ahead of me, and one hardened Scottish Cowdenbeather. I could imagine him scoffing in his head, what, running scared of a wee fence? Try having a wall!
Still, I was in one piece with no injuries and virtually no repairs to make on the car. And as I said to Jo on the way home, “It all adds to the points…”
On Monday at work, I gave out presents to everyone that I’d bought in Ischgl. Austrian Rum, various sorts of Schnapps. They seemed quite pleased.
“So what was it like?”
“Amazing! All the buildings were like from the fairy tales, all wooden and painted and like the gingerbread cottage. There were horses pulling sleighs… Snow everywhere! Blue sky and sunshine.”
“Blue sky and sunshine,” the men sighed. “Alright for some, huh?”
I grinned at them. Dewhurst and Bolton hoofed off on summer sun holidays every year and I never got to go away except when I was racing somewhere, so I knew they were just hamming it up for effect.
At lunchtime Jo was sneaking a crafty fag.
“She’ll know you know,” I warned her. “She’ll smell it on you…”
Jo pulled a face and defiantly put the cigarette back to her lips. Zanna was determined to put a stop to what she referred to as Jo’s ‘filthy habit’.
I sat down beside her on the step and watched her for a moment, then on the spur of the moment I rolled my left sleeve up and reached over and plucked the cigarette from her fingers.
“Oy!” She said crossly.
I pressed the red hot tip into the inside of my elbow before I had time to think about it enough to get wimpy about it.
“Ow fuck!” It hurt much more than I’d expected. I hissed through my teeth, then handed the cigarette back to her and stuck my arm out shaking it, counting in my head to twenty to prevent myself swearing again.
She stared horrified at me. “What the hell are you doing Eve?” She demanded. She stared fixedly at me. “You’re not starting to self-harm are you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I snapped. I didn’t smoke myself, so it had just seemed like a useful opportunity to get it done, but now I realised that whoever I had done it in front of would probably consider it a bit weird.
Tony was watching from a few feet away. He was looking worried. Jo and he exchanged glances. I got up sharply and walked back inside the shed rolling my overall sleeve safely back down over it. It had to be only one. If it was two I’d be taken to Mohammad which would be in Jessica’s group. And if it was three it would be Hussein’s and I couldn’t risk it being the same Hussein that knew me. So it had to be Kaz.
Jo refused to speak to me for the rest of the day. Tony kept shooting me sidelong glances. At the end of the day he came up to me and said, “How’s the burn?”
I rolled up my sleeve and looked dubiously at it. It had felt raw all day. Now it was a perfect small round swollen red and white blister. He went to the first aid box without saying anything, fished out a plaster and covered it up for me.
“There’s a rational reason for it Tony, I just can’t tell you, that’s all.”
His eyes searched my face. “Ok,” he said and turned away.
I took my overalls off and hung them up on the peg. I liked Tony. But I suspected he would now be imagining that I was heading into some sort of mental breakdown.
I didn’t go to the flat, I went straight to my appointment with two guys from the journalism programme company who went by the name of Straight Talking and whose productions were often bought and aired by ITV. We sat in a corner table of Pizza Hut and discussed in detail how I should set about the task I’d set myself. In the end the main thing they were concerned about that everything had to be accurately documented and be the absolute truth.
“No exaggerating for effect, stay observational, stay neutral, stick to the absolute facts,” Nick urged. “Collect every scrap of evidence you can, however small. Don’t guess at anything, don’t twist the facts to fit a theory. Come across as rational at all times.”
They wanted me to keep a video diary. “For the sake of the final screening, you can put some personal responses in. How what you’ve discovered makes you feel. How you feel just before doing something – are you scared? But mainly we just want you to record everything you remember of what you’ve just seen and heard, and everything you plan to do, however small. Sometimes it’s the tiniest thing that becomes the main lead. And you don’t want to look like you’re having
to suspiciously back-track to fill in a vital missing fact… It’ll all be heavily edited for the purposes of screening, so don’t worry about being boring and factual. We’ll cut out everything that turns out not to be relevant. But if it all ends up in court, every single sentence could become significant. So remember that all sorts of people may gain access to the recordings, so don’t say or do something on camera that you won’t want the whole world knowing about.”
I nodded.
“Back it up onto an exterior hard drive and onto the cloud, Simon will go through that with you and set up a Dropbox with you so we can all have access to what you are recording as you go along. Ring us up any time of the day or night if you need to know anything – though we can’t promise to answer you then and there, we’ll get back to you. Don’t put yourself in any unnecessary danger. We are not responsible for you and won’t be able to rush in and rescue you from anything. You are not employed by us or working with us, we are just advising you and supplying you with some equipment. Basically, you’re on your own, but we’ll do what we can to be helpful. You, yourself, are solely responsible for everything you choose to say and do, and we won’t be backing you up if you break the law. On the other hand, we can help you by pixilating faces and number plates and anything that is not allowed to be shown if we end up making a programme out of it, so don’t get hung up about capturing what you can on film.”
My head was spinning by the time I got home that night. It was all a bit overwhelming. Later in the week I was going to be meeting up with Simon with every digital gadget I already possessed for him to look over and set up for me, plus I had to bring a spare smart phone, a completely new clean phone on a pay as you go package, and a pair of high heeled shoes that I was likely to be wearing whilst out looking for the men. I couldn’t even begin to guess what the last request was about…
“You’re a bit quiet,” Jo said at work, two days on. That was rich. She’d just ignored me for forty-eight hours and left me to work on my shale car up at the barn alone.
I shrugged. The blister on my inner arm had popped and gone all gunky. But I needed it to heal quick and look like it had been there a while. Jo had obviously gone back to the flat and sounded off about it to Zanna, because the next evening Zanna had handed me a tube of aloe vera gel and said abruptly, “Good for burns.” I didn’t know whether it was her way of offering sympathy or her way of telling me that she knew about my mental behaviour and would be checking up on me. Anyway I used it, and it did help soothe it.
My evening in the empty office with Simon was shocking. I was introduced to the equipment I would be using.
“Thing is,” he looked coolly at me as though what he was saying was normal, “you’re going in to investigate the rape of little girls, and you’re going to be posing as a young teenager yourself, so you have to think about what is the last item of clothing that will be removed from you if the worst came to the worst. We talked about it and figured that a lot of the usual surveillance devices used, button cameras, recording devices hidden in phones and bags will be useless. They’ll always take your phone off you, they’ll be running their hands over you so you can’t have any odd lumps to be found, you’ll end up having to put down a bag, plus any spectacles would come off right at the beginning, so if it came down to it, probably the last items you’d have on you would be your watch, your earrings and your shoes, especially if they were sexy high-heeled ones…”
I kept my face completely expressionless and nodded politely, but inside, my stomach was clenching.
“So here goes…”
He took apart the heel of one of my shoes, dug out a small rectangle from the top of it, placed a small microchip in the hole and glued the heel back on. “Tracking device,” he explained. “I’ll set it up to transmit to the smart phone, you’ve brought along. You’ll leave that smart phone with someone you trust for back up. It can be set to re-transmit your position on Google Maps as often as every twenty seconds or as little as every fifteen minutes. I’d advise you set it to about every five minutes to get a balance between saving battery and making it possible to follow you in a moving vehicle but it can be re-programmed and controlled on the phone, so if the person is worried about you or thinks you are moving at speed they can quickly change the frequency of transmission.”
He reached for a pair of earrings. They were zany 3D cubes in black, white and red stripes, the button sort, not dangly. He pushed the first one at me. “Left one, emergency alarm. Press here on it,” he pressed underneath, “and it will set off an alarm on the smart phone in conjunction with the tracker device and Google Maps to tell your trusted person that they need to send the police in, or whatever back up you’ve arranged in advance. Or you can use it for some other signal to that person according to what you’ve arranged that signal to mean on that specific occasion. The alarm one has an extra red stripe on it so you can tell which is which.”
He pushed the other one to me. “Right one. Camera and recording device. Usefully this will follow your head movements so is likely to capture faces and anything that catches your attention.”
As back-up he also had a watch for me to wear which was an additional camera and sound recording device, able to record up to eight metres away, and which had infra-red capacity out of human sight range so could carry on recording undetected in dim light. Plus a working pen which was also audio recording device, which could be switched to being voice activated so it could lie around for a while without wasting battery.
He shrugged. “Not sure when you will use this, but it’s a useful thing to loan to someone, switched on like this,” he showed me. “But only if you can find an excuse to get it back after, as all the audio and camera devices need a USB cable to upload everything onto your computer. You can’t retrieve the footage remotely.”
Everything seemed to have an amazing battery life and a surprising number of hours of recording ability. And then they’d need re-charging, and clearing for the next recording. He handed me all the necessary USB cables and tools for getting backs off and so forth to get at the mechanisms. I wondered if I’d have enough hours of the day and enough plug sockets in my room for all this!
He sat back and looked at me. “Got it?”
I nodded.
“Remember – get in the habit of uploading absolutely everything whenever you have a moment and putting it in that Dropbox we set up then delete it off your computer so it can’t be accidentally found. Don’t check it. Don’t worry about quality. If we end up making a film, that’s our responsibility. If it goes to police then it’s their tough luck to have to trawl through it. Have a practice with them all at home first till you’ve got the hang of them.”
He gave a slight smile. “Good luck.”
That night I woke to find Zanna sitting on the edge of my bed, yawning. She was shaking me.
“God Eve, you were screaming so much I thought you were being murdered. You’re having a really bad nightmare. I thought I’d better wake you up.”
I stared at her. My heart was absolutely pounding and I was soaked with sweat. Already I couldn’t remember what it was about except that it was horrible and to with some evil men.
Zanna was sat there in a vest top and loose boxer type bottoms. Every bit of her was tattooed except for her face. That’s why she couldn’t work in the NHS she said, and had to stick to private practice. Once Jo had persuaded her to show me the graphic one on her stomach. I had stared at it, lost for words.
“God Zanna, you’ve already got a real one of those, couldn’t you just lie down and open your legs!”
“But that would just be rude,” she’d said, raising her eyebrows.
Just as well she never wore bikinis.
“There’s a worse one on her left buttock,” Jo had whispered.
“What could possibly be worse?” I racked my brains but really couldn’t come up with what it could be and Jo just blushed and said, “Really Eve, I just can’t tell you!” Tantalising or what?
“
Are you ok now?” Zanna asked.
“Yeah, thanks…” I decided to get up for a pee to break the spell.
Zanna went back into Jo’s room.
When I looked down in the toilet there was blood in it. I panicked for a moment, and then realised it was just my period starting. There’d been lots of blood in the dream too I suddenly remembered. My own.
Zanna and Jo went out together on Friday night. That left me usefully alone to record my first digital diary on my lap top, and test out all the equipment. I put the horrible earrings in to film a blog entry with myself wearing them for the purposes of the diary.
“God you can tell these were designed by a man,” I complained to my screen, turning my head left and right so the viewer could cop an eyeful. “They’re absolutely horrible! How am I supposed to dress to match these? I’m going to be permanently referred by the other girls as ‘the one with the poor dress sense’. Just as well men never notice those sort of things – they’ll just call me the blonde with the small tits, and if ever asked, they’d probably respond blankly What earrings?”
I held the watch up to the screen as well. “Man’s watch too. Clearly that’s the main target demographic for geeky spy equipment!”
I held up one of the shoes. “They told me to bring the sexiest pair of high heels I could find and still manage to walk in!” I pulled a humorous face. “It was only after I brought these in that I found out that their thinking was that the sexier the shoes, the more likely they’d leave them on me after they’d completely stripped me of everything else and were raping me. They are calculating that rapists don’t remove your earrings, watch and shoes. Thanks a bundle, guys! Very reassuring!”
I pulled up my left sleeve and showed the burn mark to the camera. “So here’s my mark. I’m told it’s Kaz’s. So let’s wait and see who tries to pick me up shall we?”
I spent half an hour telling the ‘story so far’ about Jessica and so forth, and the bargain I’d done with ITV and then I closed it down and switched the pen on and left it out on the coffee table in the living room, and went to bed.
Purgatory Is a Place Too Page 10