“I think so. He said he was going home.”
“I’ll get Taib to ring him tomorrow,” she promised.
“What the hell is going on?” Rajesh said crossly when I rang off. “What have my sister and Taib got to do with this?”
“And why are you calling my brother, ‘Ishaq’?” Nasim asked with a wrinkled brow.
I stood rather helplessly staring back at them. “Um…”
“Eve?” Rajesh looked very angry.
“I’m sorry, we can’t tell you right now. Please don’t badger Sahmir. Please leave him alone. We’ll explain it all eventually, we promise!”
And when we explained it all to them, I predicted, they would really wish that we hadn’t.
I crept back into the flat so as not to wake Jo and Zanna. I hovered indecisively for a moment over my phone, and then I rang Nick. He answered, presumably because he must realise I wouldn’t ring unless it was important, and he didn’t sound sleepy at all.
“Sorry to ring so late,” I said.
“That’s ok, I always work late,” he said cheerfully. “What’s up?”
I explained what had just happened.
“Ok, upload it straight away and text me as soon as it’s there and I’ll take a look.”
“It doesn’t sound awfully nice,” I warned him.
“That’s ok,” he said, still sounding upbeat. “I started out as a war correspondent, so I consider myself, almost literally, bomb proof. But it’s best you take his advice and don’t get tempted to watch it. Let Sue and Tom do that for you. They’re a real asset aren’t they?” He added. “It’ll add a lot of weight that a Psychiatrist and a Senior Doctor have got involved… Ok you sleep peacefully now won’t you? Let us do the worrying about it…” And he rang off.
I tried to follow his advice, but I felt so guilty about what I’d got Sahmir into, that it was hard to feel at all like sleeping.
At work next day I felt quite anxious. What would be on that footage? But I also felt completely knackered.
Jo looked round to see me yawning yet again. “God, Eve, what were you up to last night? You were ratcheting around the flat until the early hours. No wonder you’re tired!”
“Jo, I really can’t face an evening Skeggie tonight. Please don’t make me go!” I pleaded.
Jo frowned at me. “I guess I don’t much feel like it either. But don’t blame me if the Silver goes right to the wire this year…”
“Right now, I just don’t care,” I said flopping sideways on the bench.
No-one rang me. And perhaps that was best. I dropped into bed at nine thirty and slept right through until seven.
Chetsi texted me. Cum round str8 aftr work.
I arrived on her doorstep at a quarter to six. She opened the door with an expressionless face and I followed her inside. She made me a coffee without saying a word. We sat at the table. She herself didn’t even have a coffee. I looked at her. I didn’t dare even ask anything.
“Ok,” she said abruptly. “Taib and I have watched the footage. And Taib insisted on Ishaq coming round here last night to talk while I made myself scarce.”
I waited, my eyes on her face, trying to second guess what she was going to say, my stomach clenched in a knot.
“Right,” she took a deep breath. She was fiddling with a pen that was lying on the table. “First off, Ishaq has found out that they’re not just raping white girls, they’re also abusing vulnerable Pakistani women and girls.”
“I know this is going to sound awful,” I said. “But I feel like saying ‘phew’. When you walk into those rooms and see only Pakistani men and only young white girls you just start thinking that when this gets out, people are going to start bombing the mosques…”
She glanced at me. “They probably will anyway. This is going to destroy this town.”
I said nothing.
“Anyway, poor Ishaq was taken along to one of the big blocks of old flats that one of his contacts owns and they started boasting to him that they made the women there exchange sex for rent. Apparently they take in single mothers and women from a Pakistani background whose husbands are in prison or have abandoned them for some reason, or have gone back to Pakistan or in one case, he got the impression that her husband might have gone out to fight in Syria. Women who are struggling to find housing or pay their rent or whose visas have run out and don’t want to draw attention to themselves by going down a normal housing route. Most of them have limited English so find it almost impossible to work out the benefit system, and they’re mostly unable to find work, or maybe never worked before because their husbands wouldn’t allow it… And then the group come in and offer ‘sanctuary’. And a few weeks in, the abuse starts. They’re expected to provide services for the men that turn up, and put their daughters forward as well.”
“That’s just awful,” I said despairingly. “Poor things…”
She looked around the room as though she was trying to avoid having to start on the next bit. “And then Ishaq was told that they were going round to ‘educate’ a couple of girls who hadn’t learned yet how they were supposed to behave. The two girls were on their own in a flat. The older one was about fourteen and the younger one about twelve. And when the older one refused to have sex with them, they started some pretty obscene torture on the younger one, and then the older one gave in to save her younger sister and they all raped her in turn while making the younger one watch.”
I stared at her, dry mouthed.
“They tried to make Ishaq join in but he started joking that he was attending the ‘clinic’ at the moment because of the dirty white girls, and he didn’t want to be passing anything around. So they let him off it.”
“Shit, that was quick thinking,” I said. “Poor Ishaq. What an appalling position to be put in! Those poor girls! That’s horrific!”
She nodded, her expression strained. “I rang that Nick and I told him in no uncertain terms that if they don’t quickly take all this to the Police, I’ll be going myself.”
“What did he say?”
She held the pen in both hands, her fingers tight on it. “He says that he’s throwing all the resources at it that they have, and that they’re making good progress, and that he wants to have some watertight evidence to give to the Police before they approach them, and that if we go in too soon then it’ll warn the groups that we’re on to them and they’ll have a chance to cover their tracks and destroy financial paper trails and so forth.”
“I suppose he has a point…” I said.
“I said, ‘what about the girls?’ and he said that if we went in too soon then most of the perpetrators would get off scot free and more girls would get raped in the long run and that the lesser of two evils was to let it carry on unchecked for another couple of months but get so much evidence stacked up that the network was put out of operation for good and the Crown Prosecution had enough to pursue every one of them to a conviction.”
“He’s been a war correspondent,” I said. “He’s probably seen much worse than this. And horrible though his rational approach sounds, he’s right. We’re doing none of those girls any favours if we mess this up and most of the evil bastards get away. The only way those girls’ll be safe is if those men are put away in jail.”
Chetsi suddenly hurled the pen across the room. “Dammit!” She yelled. That was the nearest I’d ever heard her get to swearing. She folded her arms across her chest. “This is awful!”
I rang Nick. “Ishaq needs to stand down now.”
“I agree,” Nick said. “Best he extracts himself now before he is somehow forced into taking part in something criminal.”
“But what about Ellie?” I asked.
Nick hesitated. “How do you feel about Ellie’s chances of staying safe for a bit longer?”
I explained to him about leaving the pen in the car when we stopped at the Council buildings.
He hmmed. “You’re right. If you could get that pen back, we might just strike lucky and find it’s recorded something that
proves political connections. It’s your call. Don’t do anything to put yourself at extreme risk. But if you think you can get it back without endangering yourself too much, then yes, I agree it’s worth a go.”
Cowdenbeath on the Saturday. I couldn’t face letting Cody loose near that wall so we left her at home that day and took her to Northampton on the Sunday instead. One of the slightly bigger tracks at 396 metres with a solid steel plate fence, I still wasn’t keen to overtax my engine nor get into any messy situations. I remembered Steve’s assessment that the Silver roof aspirant only needs a consistent first five places, and passed the black and white chequers in fourth position.
Jo eyed me. “Anyone would think you were in cahoots with a bookie and were trying to lengthen the betting odds for next Saturday!”
“I’m just being a lazy wimp,” I said. “Don’t want to trash my engine.” Then I smiled. “But if it makes the bloggersphere write me off as losing my edge, that won’t be a bad thing will it? It’ll make it all the more exciting for everyone if I win…”
She folded her arms.
“I promise you Jo, it’s not why I’m doing it. This is our last outing before the Final, and I just couldn’t risk damaging anything…”
Monday to Thursday evening that week we spent up at the barn making sure there was not a thing that could possibly go wrong with the car. We had completely new spare tyres ready for every weather condition and started eyeing the forecast from about Wednesday.
“It’s so uncertain,” Jo complained. “One of those annoying – maybe drizzly – maybe not, sort of ones. And you know it’s so high there up on top of the Mendips and when the cloud comes in it just envelops the bloody place and can make it damp and greasy even without actually raining!”
“Let’s take a bet on a wet weather set up as it sounds most likely on a balance of probability. And we’ll make sure we have everything ready for if the sun suddenly comes out…” I suggested.
On Thursday evening Nick rang me about ten pm. “We need you to get that pen back,” he said to me. “I’m really hoping that if he met with the person I think he did that evening, then that pen might just be the key that unlocks the final bit of evidence. We need it as soon as possible…”
Dammit! I just couldn’t! Not with the Final on Saturday. It would have to wait. But if I did put it off then it would probably be at least Tuesday before I had an opportunity to have a go. We wouldn’t be driving back till Sunday afternoon. Then Monday evening we’d be in the barn. I sat and thought about it rationally. I just needed a ride in the car. If he found me on that wall, he’d almost certainly have to be in his car. He’d definitely stop because he wouldn’t be able to miss the chance when he saw me so rarely. He’d be wanting to get that phone to me so he could start keeping tabs on me. He wasn’t in any hurry to rape me, that seemed clear. Now that he’d decided I was going to be one of his personal ones he was going to cultivate me carefully. And so far he’d let me leave when I asked to. So if I went and sat on the wall around eight o’clock tomorrow and he came past, I could probably be home by ten at the latest. I’d give it an hour on the wall and if he didn’t come than I could honestly say to Nick that I’d tried, and that I’d try again later next week.
Ellie’s knee length skirt was tight fitting, so in the interests of avoiding VPL I’d invested in a matching set of decorative thong and push up bra, to enhance my extremely modest natural attributes. They featured pink flowers and white lace. White skirt, red top with plunging neckline. Bloody earrings and shoes, I thought. I was stuck with this colour scheme… No make-up but a hint of red lippie. I threw my lacy white cardigan on over the top. That felt a bit better. And then I got the bus.
I glanced at my watch. Half eight. A bit of me, well maybe most of me, hoped that he wouldn’t turn up. I was already thinking that maybe I’d go at ten to, so as not to miss the five past bus a couple of streets away. Maybe quarter to, and walk slowly? I was so busy looking down at my watch I didn’t notice the car slowing down as it approached me.
I glanced up as the car stopped in front of me and a door slammed. The car wasn’t green. Damn.
“Yes, it’s her,” the guy said loudly back to the others.
I stared at him. Shit. It was that unpleasant guy that had told me to go to number fourteen where I found out later that the girl had got bottled. He grabbed my left arm and forced the cardigan sleeve up and looked down with an ugly sneer at the two marks – one obviously quite old now, and the other, though healing, obviously much more recent.
“Yeah, we heard about you jumping ship,” he said nastily. “And Kaz doesn’t put up with that sort of thing, as you’ll soon find out!”
“I didn’t,” I protested in a little girl frightened voice. “He just did it without asking me! I didn’t want to!”
“So what were you doing hanging out with him in the first place?” He demanded.
I couldn’t think of an answer to that, and he gave a nasty triumphant smile. He still had hold of my left wrist and without any compunction he just hauled me over to the car and threw me in the back seat where two other guys got hold of me and shoved me between them. Should I struggle? I thought. Should I try to get out now and run away? But the men seemed to divine my thought processes and immediately the one who’d dragged me over got back into the passenger seat and slammed the door, and the driver activated the child locks. My heart was thumping unevenly. This lot were fanatically nasty, I thought. That word kept coming to mind. Deliberately vindictive. Presumably they’d take me back to Kaz, and then what? Would Kaz look blank? He must know that he’d never seen me before. Maybe they’d all just assume that someone else from their network had marked me. Maybe it didn’t have to be Kaz in person?
My palms were sweaty and my mouth dry. If I was a praying type, I’d be praying now to get out of this in one piece. Absolutely years ago, John Holt, the policeman who went to the Quinn’s church, had told me that he prayed for me. I hoped someone up there had been listening.
They were talking in a different language. They kept glancing at me, so I guessed they were deciding what to do with me. I heard Kaz’s name mentioned a few times.
They drew the car up outside a house and two girls came out with another guy behind them. He opened the back door of the car for them and the two girls squeezed in, giggling. They seemed a bit high on something. I again thought about trying to make a run for it, but the girls were clambering clumsily around, including over me, getting onto the mens’ laps. One of the guys in the back seat glanced at me and said something to the man outside, who leant in and passed something over. The doors were locked again and our car drove off.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
The nasty one in the passenger seat half turned. “Somewhere you can pay off your debts you deceitful two timing bitch, so you keep your mouth shut and do what you’re told.”
I sat back. Ok, I thought. All this is just more usefully damning evidence. Nothing that bad is happening yet. I was reluctant to press the alarm and cause Quinn a heart attack when nothing had actually taken place except a few threats. I’d been threatened before, but got out of it ok hadn’t I? He’d have to ring the police, explain why a girl had a GPS locator in her shoe, humiliate himself convincing them that they really needed to go to whatever premises I ended up at, and then, if they did turn up, it would completely blow my cover and blow the investigation up in Nick’s face, just when they were getting somewhere significant with it. My hand dropped away from my earring. No it wasn’t at that stage yet. I needed to cross my fingers and stick it out a bit longer.
The car swung round the ring road, and then out onto the bypass, and then started following signs to the motorway. I kept eyeing every sign that passed. “Where are we going?” I asked again.
As we turned North up the motorway I asked yet again. I was told in no uncertain terms to shut it. The guy on my right offered me a bottle. I shook my head. I kept looking worriedly at every sign that passed. We were going at seven
ty miles an hour in the opposite direction to home. The guy on my left said something to the guy on my right and then the guy on my right, reached round the girl on his lap and tried to force something into my mouth. I instinctively closed my teeth against it and struggled. The man on the left slapped me suddenly very hard and as I reacted in surprise my mouth must have opened and the other man shoved it in and then held my mouth closed as I tried to struggle against it and spit it out. It was some kind of small pill. Then he picked up the bottle again and forced it against my teeth and tipped it up. It went all down my front but also into my mouth and it was a burning strong spirit that made me gasp and then choke. Against my will, some of it went down as I tried not to drown in it, and so did the pill. I leant forward and tried to choke it out. The men ignored me. I coughed and coughed but it wouldn’t come back up.
I straightened up and realised I felt a bit woozy. I knew I wasn’t thinking straight. Everything was feeling very distant and like it wasn’t very important anymore. Who gave a shit anyway? I lay my head back against the headrest. It started to flop sideways. Maybe I should just sleep, I thought. I’m not going to get out of this while we’re still on the motorway. No chance. Just sleep and wake up when we got there and then decide what to do.
The journey passed in a blur. Some guy dragged me out at the other end. I stumbled and tripped in my stupid high heels but he swore at me and told me to hurry up. Up two flights of steps that smelt of cat pee to yet another flat. He shoved me down onto a settee, where I flopped blearily and tried to focus my eyes. At least I was conscious, I thought. When Trev spiked my drink that night, I couldn’t remember anything after getting into the car. But whatever they’d given me hadn’t knocked me out, just made me feel oddly compliant, and like nothing much mattered. I curled up for a bit into the cushions to try to stop my head spinning. There were other girls in the room, but I couldn’t see any men. Finally I managed to focus on my watch. After one am? That must be wrong! How could four hours have passed? I peered really hard at it again, but it was definitely one am. I flopped back on the settee. Shit, I really needed to get home. We were meant to be setting off for the Mendips Raceway at seven thirty this morning. I bent over my watch and fiddled with it to turn the recording mechanism off. I would save it for when I thought my earring camera had run out of memory, and then switch the watch back on.
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