When asked the identity of this health professional or doctor who had proved so easily corruptible, been so willing to become involved in such a plot - and Alice had given the name of Dr Anne Ecclestone, shakily pointing her finger at one of the august figures sitting on the investigating panel itself - well, the room fairly erupted with howls of derision. The chairperson - that plump crow of a woman, her tailored grey skirt suit appearing dumpily beneath her wing-flapping open-fronted black gown as she jumped up from her seat - had to slam her gavel on the table in front of her to quell the row, calling for quiet in strident, ironically raucous tones of her own.
As the witness statements were read through, contemporaneous notes read out by the police officers who had made them and the recollections of the air ambulance men who had attended the scene were tested it became increasingly apparent that, inexplicably, none of the individuals Alice recalled as being central characters and whom she had described in the various statements she had made had been encountered in the raid. Not one; it was as if they had all disappeared off the face of the earth, all been spirited away.
The work rooms which had been set up in the outbuildings had mysteriously reverted to hives of other forms of industrious endeavour. Rows of bespectacled nuns had been discovered bent over sloping oaken desks and wielding tweezers and gold leaf, hand-illuminating, copying and restoring priceless ancient Christian texts, practicing calligraphy, bookbinding, and all those other traditional crafts the great religious houses had traditionally been famed for. Where there had been school rooms, there had been found two or three simply and easily explainable store rooms, piled with easels, desks and chairs et al dating back to nineteenth century when the establishment’s laudably charitable intention had been to ‘administer the gift of literacy to the toiling sons and daughters of the soil’.
As for the brown-dress-uniformed browbeaten workforce described by Alice - of which she had claimed to have been one among many - no trace whatsoever had been found of them, nothing to show for their previous presence, no evidence even to support the allegation that they had even existed. They, too, seemed to have vanished off the planet. Indeed no evidence had been uncovered to suggest a harking back to the dark days of the church in Ireland’s long, brutal history of systematic sexual exploitation, ritualised corporal punishment and abusive clergy and other religious figures. And it was hardly likely nuns would be vulnerable to accusations of misogyny, however ‘sexually repressed’ (‘frustrated’ was the word more usually banded about in the tabloids) they might be represented as in popular media, however morally conflicted some might actually have been.
It all went to undermine the perceived validity of Alice’s testimony, even began to chip away at her ‘fitness to testify’; there began to be queries fielded as to her mental health, her ‘psychological competence to testify’.
Alice couldn’t for a moment fathom what could have become of all those girls that had slaved away with her in the priory work rooms, who had sat alongside her sharing the tedious discipline of the school room, suffering the never ending prayers and recitals of psalms in the chapter house and readings of the scriptures at mealtimes. But what could Alice know of the extensiveness of the network of Roman Catholic missions around the world? It was a diffuse, convolutedly linked tissue of connections and establishments across which many could anonymously vanish in to new posts and positions. And Alice would barely of heard of far-off Angola, even if she had heard the country mentioned, let alone São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, the Capital, now more modestly named simply Luanda. Sure, she might have guessed, correctly, somewhere in Africa; but she just as likely might have guessed Central or South America or an island of one of the archipelagos in that part of the world. But Angola had a key role to play in the mystery, if only she knew it.
Angola was a mishmash of belief systems, roughly twenty-five percent Protestants, twenty-five percent ‘indigenous beliefs’ but a full fifty to fifty-five percent Roman Catholic, especially in the remoter, western and north western regions of the country. It is within one of those remote north-western Angolan regions - uncomfortably if not suspiciously close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo - where we would find, if we were to search hard enough, not one but two Catholic Church-run mission complexes. Huge priory-like complexes - each constructed like a walled fortress, and for good historically-apt reasons - a little delving would have shown that each also had direct historical links to the old priory wherein Alice had been held.
The largest of these missions’ connection with certain of the Chinese state-owned businesses presently buying up large tracts of land and resources around Africa was a lucrative one: You see, the Church mission sweatshops were large and burgeoning - and human labour just another resource after all. While most beavering away under the appalling conditions in the Chinese-run sheds around the village were unashamedly exploited indigenous people, the Catholic mission workshops typically - though not uniquely - exploited an entirely different resource. Finding themselves possessed of excess capacity, the mission administrators had been happy enough to take on the manufacturing overspill from the Chinese. Unashamed, because the fact was that the Angolan government, although oil-rich, had already come to depend upon Chinese investment and expertise in supporting farming and developing the country’s roads and other infrastructure and couldn’t afford to offend their new partners.
The Chinese state-owned manufacturing companies that had set up shop here, while vulnerable to international scrutiny and criticism over worker’s pay and working conditions within their own borders, ironically were vouchsafed within this foreign land. The Angolan authorities could be relied upon to turn a blind eye to almost anything related to Chinese investment. No government inspectors would come calling at any Chinese industrial ‘initiative’ - and the Church mission complex now sheltered under the umbrella of the Chinese.
It was an uneasy symbiotic relationship: The income generated benefited the Church and those within its local hierarchy who quite frankly fared rather well on the back of the deal, a certain section of whom lived in some degree of opulence. And the God-fearing teachings of the church - that brand of ‘hot-gospel’ preaching thrice-daily thumped out within the lavish mission complex and ‘outreached’ to the local community - helped keep the populace under the yoke of their new masters...
It all worked rather well: The nuns of the Church mission - connoisseurs of repressive self-guilt, every one - were experts when it came to instilling rigid discipline into the young women left in their charge. And there were certain other ‘benefits’ the church mission could offer visiting Chinese government men and dignitaries, besides a labour-intensive manufacturing capability - Angolan dignitaries too.
But it was in the capital of Angola’s north-western Zaire Province São Salvador - these days known as M’banza-Kongo - close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the latest fresh influx of workers en route for the mission workshops could presently to be found, the prettiest of them undoubtedly destined to sooth some Chinese or Angolan minister’s brow. Home to one of the oldest cathedrals in sub-Saharan Africa - dating back to the 16th century and considered important enough to have been visited by the Pope himself, Pope John Paul (II) in 1992 - despite the close proximity to the Congo’s border the presence of European faces was nothing unusual or remarkable here. Not even a coach load of sullen, crestfallen-looking pale-faced schoolgirls, smartly, if anachronistically, uniformed, trundling past raised more than a couple of eyebrows; not when they were accompanied by a party of nuns from the mission convent sited in the remote north.
The populace were used to the sight of nuns and Catholic religious regalia, were becoming rapidly acclimatised to the presence of foreign visitors - what with the contingents of Chinese and all - and African schools were awash with outdated, colonially influenced, stylistically challenged and often unsuitably juvenile school uniforms; the discipline
metered out in African bush schools was strict and legendarily harsh... To any onlookers it was little wonder those pampered western girls were looking glum, then; but that was as far as their thought processes would have ran. They might have found the short-shorn boyish hairstyles a little odd, but the neat straw boaters the girls all wore took care of that. The thick strong nylon cable-tie style wrist restraints each had been wearing since back in the UK would have raised questions, but with their hands resting meekly in their laps, resting on the pleated skirts of their bib-fronted gymslips, these were out of sight and out of mind, as were their sedative-glazed eyes, lolling, listless demeanours and blank, dream-like expressions.
They had cleared UK customs, bound for Rome, armed with Italian passports and garbed in full Muslim dress of black burkas covering everything save for a slit over the eyes, floating through in an unaware tranquilized stupor. Some - the potentially more recalcitrant, requiring the heaviest sedation and loaded with muscle relaxant - had been trundled through seated in wheelchairs; others had waddled stiff-gaited in leg callipers or braces, each aided by a nun. In this manner the party had boarded a special flight laid on by Vatican authorities; a contingent of disabled young Muslim women plucked from abusive backgrounds, bathing in the warmth of Roman Catholic compassion, that they might come to see the true light, hear the true word.
In accordance with the stipulations respecting the Muslim faith, each had passed through a private room, staffed by a lone female immigration officer whose sensitive duty it had been to lift the veil for facial comparison with the girl’s passport photo. It had been simplicity itself for the influence of the Vatican to extend to ensuring one of its own agents had been on hand to take care of the latter aspect - and the kid-gloves, nervous sensitivity of the UK government in forever kowtowing to the Muslims had done the rest. A couple of nights spent in a disused section of a secluded seminary on the outskirts of Rome - in truth a sort of Vatican ‘safe-house’ - and, for the time being still burka-clad, it had been onwards and upwards and off.
Each now having been furnished with a rare Vatican passport - and the diplomatic immunity and privileges which go with one - the precious cargo of potentially blabber-mouthed whistleblowers had been whisked safely well beyond the reach of European legislature. It had meant a temporary doubling of lay persons holding a coveted Vatican passport - the average at any one time varying over the years from forty to forty-five - but it had entailed little trouble on the Vatican’s behalf nor expense. Besides it had been a temporary arrangement; the paper trail could be covered, the bureaucratic traces brushed over like wind-obliterated tracks in the desert; the passports were easily revocable at the stroke of a pen; surely a bureaucratic error perpetrated by a pen pusher in one of the Vatican’s many administrative departments, nothing more than that.
In fact that pen stroke had already been struck, the girls’ passports had already been revoked; the revocation had occurred the very moment they’d cleared that Angolan landing strip, the tell-tale passports had been gathered up for disposal (the physical evidence would perish later, in the mission convent’s incinerator), and the satellite phone call had gone through to the Vatican. From that moment this quaintly-uniformed group of apparent Catholic schoolgirls had in effect become ‘stateless persons’. And the cogs and gears of Vatican bureaucratic influence (or should that be interference?) were already grinding away in the background to ensure the hapless group remained that way, retained that status; non-persons, figures that for all intents and purposes no longer existed.
All manner of false trails were being laid, leading all over the world before petering out, ‘just in case’. Certain databases and computerised travel records were being altered even as their coach trundled on, its rattling old diesel engine coughing black smoky phlegm, the occasional backfire prompting one or two of the less heavily sedated to start upright and look about for help with startled frantically-worried eyes, before once again succumbing to the uncaring drugged bliss.
Those who may at one time have held a UK National Insurance (NI) number or those one or two who might once have held a valid full - or even provisional - driving licence would have found that all traces of it ever having existed had been erased, or more likely transferred to some other individual, some foreign national willing to pay good money for someone else’s identity. This was where certain underworld connections came into play (the term, Mafia, was never to be heard within Vatican corridors). Identity theft, as with people smuggling (the two were inextricably linked), was a lucrative business. There were those who just needed steering in the right direction, who just required tipping off about the relevant details, NI numbers, driving license, bank account details, that sort of thing - the sort of data the Vatican, as a state in its own right, could easily get hold of - and they would do the rest. The Vatican itself didn’t even have to sully its own computer keyboards.
Even Alice herself - still safely back in the UK - wasn’t exempt from the Vatican’s attentions. Nor were the computerised records of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) as immune to tampering as that authority would have like to have believed. Already - even before having entered the tribunal - Alice had been saddled with a long and well documented history of having been in and out of various NHS mental institutions, complete with learned diagnoses and prognoses. And one glance at the latter, signed off on by the eminent pen of the now professor Anne Ecclestone herself - a title earned since returning to academia, even though still retaining her private practice, albeit downsized - would have been enough to prompt any health professional to suggest committal to long-term residential care as an urgent contingency.
Alice couldn’t possibly know it, but she really was a very lucky girl. She too could so easily have been whisked away. But Alice’s stepmother had felt she might still want Alice around the house from time to time in the future; after all, putting Alice to work would certainly be cheaper than hiring domestic help... And the notion had a certain ‘something’, a certain frisson’! For the interim, however, Alice was even luckier; and she had the ever-compassionate professor Ecclestone to thank for her good fortune. There’d be no grotty NHS mental home for our Alice; in an ebullient demonstration of the Christian spirit of compassionate generosity the professor would offer to take the girl under her own personal care, see to it she be found a suitably secure place in a private psychiatric hospital she happened to be a trustee of.
As for those others, those out in Angola: They were likely even now being dizzily disembarked from the battered old green coach, heads still spinning and vision blurred, having arrived in the swelteringly humid compound behind the high, spiked stone block walls of the ‘St Ursulain’s Church mission to Angola’, an ecclesiastical complex originally constructed by Portuguese colonists in the early seventeenth century and peppered by fine examples of Portuguese Colonial religious architecture. Some, helped along by nuns, would already be shuffling unsteadily towards the barrack-like living quarters, solid-looking single-story limestone-block structures with steeply inclined steepled roofs, prison-like bars on the whitewashed windows and heavy red-painted iron doors; others, still weakened by muscle relaxant drugs, would be awaiting transfer by wheelchair.
The lucky ones would likely be those who would become the concubines of visiting dignitaries, or the ‘favourites’ of certain of the nuns. There were the Chinese and certain church dignitaries of course. But there were also one or two local government officials, African men, who required paying off; and a girl or two made for a most generous ‘tribute’. There were those among the African Angolan affluent, or even from the neighbouring Congo, who prized having a white girl at their beck and call, waiting on table with her head bowed in humility at dinner, or gathering up coats and curtsying at the door when guests arrived.
It was odd observation, often made, that it would be the man of the house who would want to buy their white-skinned pet some sort of lavish, short-skirted and multilaye
red petticoated ‘French maid’ type confection, all heavy duchesse satin and flounced and frilled prim accessories - the kind of thing that they were skilled at knocking up in the mission workshops. The woman of the house, however, was often the one more likely to insist on total nudity, or if her husband persisted in his insistence in dressing the girl in some costume or other, would insist on the confiscation of the girl’s knickers, often delighting in watching her knickerless, short-skirted servant girl down on her hands and knees scrubbing floors or cleaning in and around the toilet bowl with a deliberately short-handled brush. More than one set of nearly transparent harem pants had been ordered by the wife of one local official for their girl; sized and cut to be skin tight and with the gusset removed.
It was always the woman of the house that would be the most spiteful when it came to administering the cane or the strap or whichever implement they chose to keep order. And - depending on the culture of the household - it seemed always the woman who would insist on decking out their prize with tribal markings as a mark of ownership. The latter would usually take the form of a series of chevrons running down each of the girl’s cheeks, though sometimes a design would be cut into, and run across, the top of her breasts or the centre of her buttocks. The wife would usually press into use one of her husband’s razorblades to carry out this task, though one woman, whose family traditionally carried out such marking, was known to have put to use her husband’s needle-point electric soldering iron.
A final indignity that might occur would be if girl was brought before an elder for the traditional act of ritual female circumcision. Whether this was worse for a girl to suffer -or equal to - being ritualistically disfigured so that someone’s husband might not be tempted to so often pluck at low-hanging fruit is open to conjecture.
Alice Under Discipline, Part 2 Page 20