‘Hi, we need to use your collection,’ I say, holding my ribs on the right side, a bruise fattening under my eye. Along with Mrs Bridges and Miss Heywood, she’s part of a very exclusive inner circle of confidantes I’ve built.
‘Great, come in!’ Evelyn says without a beat.
Five minutes later we’re flicking through the 2004 copies of The Turkish Chronicle all over again. We only have half a story so far; there must’ve been some kind of resolution.
We don’t go too fast just in case we miss any little update that might be hiding in the corners. It’s an irksome task, but this time I know there’s a face capable of catching my eye, which swells my fervour as I search for my kissing tree friend. My first crush, in truth, the one whose face I looked for in the barrage of faces that spilt onto the playground every break or lunchtime. In that sea of freckles below undercuts and ponytails, she shone out formidable. It’s coming back to me, bit by bit.
I remember the day she left. I looked for her all day, expecting her alabaster complexion around every corner. And I’m still looking.
As we move onto pages seven and eight, the bag of frozen peas I’ve been given for my face starts to drip down onto the paper below, the contents becoming rather less frozen and more garden fresh. Our encouraging words to each other soon drop away to the odd mumble and, more painfully, the occasional noise of excitement that quickly fades to a disappointed nothing.
Then Bartu stirs with a slow epiphany. Evelyn rushes in to take a seat as he reads aloud. The date was just two weeks after the original January story, and was lodged in the corner of page nine.
‘Police feel they have a strong lead on the disappearance of three girls from Battersea. Their clothes and rucksacks were found in the wooded area of a nearby park… ’
‘Bloody hell,’ Evelyn says. We’d told her what we’d seen today.
‘The families of Sarah Walker, Natalie O’Hara and Aliya Akkas have identified the clothes as their daughters’. Traces of blood were also found at the scene and have been sent for tests. Police are still appealing for witnesses.’
We all sit, dug down into the enormity of it, deep in the trenches of things that we know and that others apparently don’t. I feel closer to them both. A sort of foxhole brotherhood took over; a closeness I haven’t felt in a long while, since I sat listening to Elvis in the back of the car on a long drive with mum and dad.
‘We need to tell people about this. Now,’ says Emre Bartu.
‘Maybe they already know,’ I say, clicking at my phone. Lazily seeking comfort in a warm white screen. Even I do it. The sort of person who would take a full five minutes to type out ‘funny cat pics’ or ‘three girls go missing.’
‘We have to make sure,’ Bartu says, insistently. Annoyed that I seem to have checked out of the conversation and straight into modern distractions.
‘Or…’ I say.
‘Or what?’ he says.
‘Or we follow our last hunches, see where they take us, then come back to Levine and the rest when we have something concrete.’
‘What if we never get something concrete?’
‘I’m not stopping until a man’s in prison, or I see a body, because until then I think they’re out there.’
‘That’s what you think, is it?’ he says.
‘Yes. You want to know what else I think?’ I say.
‘I’m going to hear it anyway, so…’
‘It’s definitely not their blood. They leave the scene looking like a ritualistic serial killer thing, throw some blood on the clothes, offer the police a mystery. The police do what they tend to do, they Occam’s Razor themselves up the most likely suspect. They make it stick. Then the real kidnappers get to do whatever they want with those girls on their own time.’
‘And this is based on… ?’
‘The bits of the puzzle the way I see them.’
‘Well, forgive me if I don’t think that’s fool-proof logic!’
Evelyn rises and turns. Too embarrassed to do anything about the raised voices in her house, but too uncomfortable to stay still.
‘Sarah Walker is alive! We know that!’ I shout, thunderously.
‘No, you think that. You think you saw her. I didn’t!’
‘Please…’ Evelyn says.
‘Do you know what these people do? They capture them. They brainwash them. That’s what’s happened to them. You don’t have to be clever to do this. You just manipulate people, dominate them. Err… my doctor mentioned this only the other day. Cults, rings, they…’
‘Oh, come on!’ he shouts, standing now and pushing me. The childishness of which startles me and hurts my ribs, too, but I don’t want to show it.
‘No, you come on,’ I say, pushing him back, misjudging the level of force needed and sending him reeling back against the wall. I decide not to apologise, instead I advance on him as I speak.
‘There are news stories, people who’ve been kept inside houses for years. Then in the end you can train them to go out and they’ll come back of their own accord. You learn to love your captor. Call it Stockholm Syndrome. Call it reprogramming. Whatever. They’ll come back because you’ve starved them of every piece of reality –’
‘Oh, look at yourself! Even if you’re right, don’t you think someone else would be better placed to do this, than a… than…’
‘Than what?’ I say, close to his face. I’m smaller than him but not by much. My heartbeat throbs in my head as I yell. ‘Come on then!’
‘Boys. Just hold on a moment, for fuck’s sake,’ Evelyn says, lighting up a cigarette, which she has placed in a holder. She takes a long drag.
‘If there’s any chance, any chance at all of finding them, alive, then you have to be sensible about it,’ she says.
Emre agrees, sagely nodding as he eyeballs me. There’s a petty air of ‘You see?’ about it.
‘I’m talking to you, Emre. Be sensible. What did you get into this for? Have you lost your bollocks or something? Look, make a compromise, but then go. If you wanted to follow regulations you would’ve been an accountant or something – not that there’s anything wrong with that – but you mugs chose this. So go and do it!’
They glance at me. I’ve been on my phone during most of her speech. I look up, wide-eyed, innocent, passion quelled.
‘What? No, I’m listening, but… ’
Headshakes from both and she takes another long draw on her cigarette.
‘Emre? What does this say?’
He grabs my phone and reads aloud.
‘Three girls go missing from Woolwich school… girls are… unconnected… they were in different years… one girl was said to have been initially contacted on social media… It’s dated January 2009. The girls are… Rita Singh… Sophie Chang… Katherine Grady…’
Bartu slumps down into his chair, still looking at the white screen. It was buried on page 5 of a Google search. I wouldn’t call Grady unrelated. I’d call her part of the jigsaw.
‘I told you in the car. If they’re still alive, wherever they are, they may be running out of room.’
This, I glean from their faces, after a revelation of this magnitude, is not what they expected me to say next.
‘I’m saying, I think that when our lost girls joined Sarah Walker and Grady and whoever else, wherever they are, Grady saw new flesh and thought her time may be up. She saw an opportunity to run and she took it. But he chased her out into the woods, and stopped her in her tracks,’ I say, tapping Bartu in the back of the head.
‘All I keep hearing is missing girls, blood, a lot of appeals and not many witnesses. This exact thing seems to have happened twice before, and it doesn’t look like the police solved this thing back then. Our ideas have to be worth a shot.’
Three’s a pattern. Three’s a charm. Maybe we’re the only ones far back enough to see the whole picture.
*
We strike a deal on the way. We will lie through our teeth to whoever we have to, to get wherever we need to be, un
til this thing is solved. We will go where I want to go next, to the Fraser house, back to that scent of light blue.
But first we’ve arranged to speak to Turan, privately. We’re going to give him everything we have. We’d feel like shit if we didn’t and it could have led them somewhere. I have thirty-eight names and a lot more that I think he might be interested in, and I have to concede he’s better placed than us to follow it up.
He leans back in a plastic chair with his chicken sandwich.
‘I’d have taken you to the snooker club but there are too many people there who can’t see me consorting with uniforms.’
Levine laid out Turan’s work during a rare candid chat. Sure, everyone knows he’s police, but talk to him long enough and you might start to believe he’s police that’s on your side. Look up and he’s telling you to come to him with any information. Look again and maybe he’s asking around for good coke and saying he’ll look the other way if he gets a taste himself. He’s half well-connected man of the community, half law enforcer. The trick is not to let the community know that his loyalties will always lie with the police. Although, Bartu, for one, seems far less certain than Levine about where exactly Turan’s loyalties lie.
‘We wanted you to know a few things,’ I say. Bartu stays quiet on the subject but his presence should show he’s complicit.
‘That’s good. What have you got?’ he says. A man very used to this kind of relationship.
‘First. Don’t share this with Jarwar. If you can, keep it as close to your chest as possible.’
‘Okay,’ he says. I expected him to stifle a grin and humour us but his ears seem to prick up.
‘We’ve been chasing a few things maybe we shouldn’t have, recently, and Jarwar didn’t take too kindly to it. If I’m honest, I think she confiscated a mini-DV tape from Emre.’
Bartu widens his eyes at me, slightly castrated by this notion. I hadn’t worded this theory out loud, but then communication isn’t our strongest relationship attribute.
‘I think she saw me palm it to him, then, for whatever reason, nicked it from his car.’
Turan takes a bite of his sandwich before speaking.
‘I won’t ask, sounds like naughty stuff, but you’re safe with me. Trust me, she’s all right, but it’s not like we meet up for a beer and a chat about our sex lives.’
Something catches Turan’s eye outside, as I look to Bartu, before spilling it all on the table.
‘We got some information from an old lady who lives locally, about three girls going missing ten years ago.’
‘Yep. Girls go missing. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t,’ Turan says. He’s going for professionalism and experience but he can’t spin it without it seeming a little numb. He’s more interested in his burger than me. I look on as he lays down three lines across his fries, one of mustard, one of ketchup, one of mayo. It has a certain ceremony about it.
‘Anyway, we looked into it and it was all dead on. Down in Battersea, three girls go missing in one week, not friends, in different years. Then their clothes turned up, in a wood, covered in blood.’
‘Oh yeah, that is interesting. Rings a bell. Reminds me of… I think I know this old bird, she that Miss Marples?’
He’s looking for a snigger but it’s not forthcoming from either of us. It’s usually my levity that clashes with the mood.
‘And when we looked further, we found that the exact same thing happened five years later over in Woolwich. What’s more than that, one of those Woolwich girls is Katherine Grady, and there’s already a guy called Ed Rampling in prison for her murder,’ Bartu says.
I turn for a second and see the guy walk past casually on the other side of the road. Dark glasses on a gloomy day. The same guy we saw last time we were here, for certain. The one no one seems keen to talk about. Turan also spots him but isn’t giving anything away. The abused kid that grew up. He could be an informer or a dealer. He could be anything. Turan is into a lot of stuff we don’t know about. That’s part of his job.
‘Seriously, that’s good work boys. London’s a big city, lots of crime, lots of shit to sift through. I don’t think anyone’s looked into this Woolwich or Battersea stuff yet. I’ll make sure they do.’
‘Thanks,’ Bartu says. But I don’t want to thank him for doing his job.
‘I have been trying to keep in touch with it, but now the bodies are in the detectives are out. Pretty soon I’ll get shut out too. I can, however, follow up a few things if they’re important. And this seems important, so thanks.’
‘Hey, Turan, did you ever follow up that car?’ I say, casually gazing out of the window.
‘What car?’ Turan says, before sinking his teeth wet and deep into his burger for one last firm bite.
‘The err… there was a blacked out car we found just after the first girl went missing, smashed up and left at the side of the road. We found it. Just being amateur sleuths again, I guess. Levine was talking about looking into it. Did anyone do that?’ I say.
He looks out the window, too, and seems hurried.
‘Yeah. Oh yeah, course. Followed it up myself. It was burnt inside. Plates off. Couldn’t find which dealership it might have come from, nothing. Dead end.’
‘Who is that guy? What’s his name?’ Bartu says, as the man in the shades heads away. I want to follow and have a word, but with Turan here our hands are plasti-cuffed. It wouldn’t exactly suit our ‘staying out of it and handing everything to you’ theme.
‘Which guy?’ Turan says, nonplussed.
‘Yeah. That’s the guy. You remember?’ I say. ‘I tried talking to Jarwar about him but –’
‘Oh. That fella? Yeah, he keeps me in touch with a few things. I got plenty of his kind about,’ Turan says.
‘I get it,’ I say, but I don’t entirely. Is he forgetting we’ve spoken about him before?
‘Think maybe I talked to him once. His name’s… err…’ I click my fingers a couple of times.’
‘Rabbit?’ Turan says.
More people enter the restaurant that Turan seems to know, and he nods sagely at them. This really is his part of town. Maybe it’s difficult to keep track of everyone.
He pops the last of his burger into his mouth and stands.
‘Yeah, that’s him. Rabbit,’ I say.
‘Yeah, listen, thanks for the heads up, I’ll get on it,’ Turan says.
I can’t go without giving him everything. I’d feel bad if I didn’t, now we’re here.
‘Hey, and take this,’ I say, palming him a slip of paper. ‘It’s a list of kids that might have seen the girls with someone. Don’t ask how I got it, but someone should check it out. And talk to the cleaner too. Youngish guy, seems like he knows more than he’s letting on.’
‘Cleaner?’ he says, as if he’s never heard the word.
‘Yeah, you’ll know the one, possible curvature of the spine, averse to eye contact, really knows how to make you feel welcome.’
He looks at it me for a second, blinks, then folds the note.
‘You given this to anyone else?’
‘No, we haven’t,’ Bartu says.
‘Okay, I’ll go by the school and handle it later today.’
I lift my hand to my bruise. It throbs for a second.
‘Between you and me, boys, there’s good police and bad police. It’s mostly hierarchy stuff and I don’t want to go too deep into it, but you might be right not to trust some people. Anyway thanks for this, this is good.’
He pockets the paper and goes.
We watch him turn right.
As ‘Rabbit’ drifts down a side-street, far away in the other direction.
31
‘Can’t. get that girl dah dah, out of, my head…’
‘Sorry, Ms Fraser, it’s us again,’ Bartu says.
She thankfully greets us warmly, but also with the threat of hot drinks and small talk to slow us down. I observe a mania in her behaviour which I can’t place. Perhaps whatever hadn’t sunk in
last time has had ample time to drop. She insists on us making ourselves comfortable, when comfort is the last thing on our minds. She doesn’t make reference to my bruised and bulbous face at all, but then Turan didn’t either. I guess they assume people like me tend to fall down a lot, and it’s rude to ask the cause.
I don’t mention to either of them that I found the small blue circle with two diagonal lines on the kerb, as we stepped onto her drive, because that’s what I expected to find. It’s not on all streets. Just certain ones.
Our small-talk descends into so many little fragments of nothing, broken sound bites and pleasantries: ‘You do a top job, you guys…’ ‘I suppose you don’t feel the weather after… ’
I begin to think her disposition is not in fact an effort to stay positive and busy, but is instead an indicator that she’s hiding something.
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anything for you at present. But as soon as we do, you’ll be the first one to know,’ Bartu says.
It’s true in a way. In other ways, it’s utter hypocrisy. Hearing this affects her more than I thought it would. I don’t know why this surprises me. I curse myself inside for this disassociation. I have an instinct to dig my fingers into my eye for forgetting that the bloody core of these people’s lives is entirely bound to the gruesome scene I witnessed in the woods.
The truth is, the elements of ‘solve riddle’ and ‘soothe victims’, have a metamorphic relationship.
I breathe in through my nose and smell the blue. I can feel the mahogany that goes with it, and the hear the note ‘F’ playing lightly. It’s so strong to me it distracts me as I struggle with the problem of whether to tell her what we now know. I’ve been happy enough to tell before, to break the rules, why not now?
• I can’t stand to see her cry, here, in front of me.
• I am a coward.
• I should tell her the flat reality and let her decide how far she indulges in it.
‘No news, at all?’ she says, tears forming in her eyes like the threat of some far-off hurricane that hasn’t hit yet but surely will.
She repeats, ‘Nothing?’, attempting to elicit a different response. Bartu can’t help me. She’s asking me. Pleading with me.
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