Moth Girls

by Anne Cassidy

  Henryk stared at Zofia. His face broke into a smile. Then he looked at Petra.

  ‘Henryk, this is my sister Klara. She’s all grown up now.’

  Henryk nodded. ‘Luggage all finished?’

  ‘He likes to talk in English. Is learning.’

  ‘We are ready?’ Henryk said.

  They got into the van and drove north, out of the city, into the countryside, heading for Harwich.

  PART FIVE: The Present

  Mandy

  Twenty-Nine

  Mandy was standing outside number fifty-three Princess Street.

  There was nothing left of the house or the garden, just two giant trees in the back corner. The debris left behind by the demolition company had been removed and the area was level. It looked neat and tidy. The fence was repaired and there were some men in suits on the site wearing yellow hats.

  Debbie Howard, the counsellor, was standing beside her. Debbie had spent some time at Mandy’s house. Their sessions were over and Mandy’s mum had insisted that Debbie come for tea and cakes. Debbie had finished her research at the surgery and was returning to university. Mandy was walking her to the Tube station. It seemed only right to walk past the site of the old house.

  ‘It’s big. The house must have been large.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And your friends were drawn to it. I read some of the articles on the net.’

  ‘They called them the Moth Girls. It doesn’t quite explain it. Petra was the one who was fascinated by it. Tina just went along.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen it when it was standing because we’ve spoken about this house a lot. But your problems were to do with your friends. Not what happened to them here.’

  ‘I think I understand that now. It makes me seem so shallow though.’

  ‘The friendship thing was what loomed large in your life. When they disappeared everything was unresolved. Perhaps if their bodies had been found, if there had been a funeral, then you could have moved on. But, you know, Mandy, you seem so much better these last few times that we’ve spoken. You’ve talked so much less about Petra and that’s good.’

  ‘I’ve been feeling better.’

  Debbie thought that she had cured Mandy. She didn’t know that Mandy had other worries that had nothing to do with her friendship with Tina and Petra. Mandy held Petra’s secret and in the weeks that had passed since their talk this knowledge had weighed heavily on her. She should go to the authorities. She knew this and yet she hadn’t done it.

  ‘Shall we walk on?’ Debbie said, turning away from the site.

  ‘Sure.’

  Just then the door of the next house opened. Mandy looked round and saw a man emerging from it. He was big, overweight. He was wearing heavy glasses and his face was red. He moved slowly, locking the front door with a second key. Then he came along the path and out of the front gate. It was the man who’d shouted at her, Petra and Tina when they’d gone into the garden that day all those years ago. And Mandy had seen him in the supermarket a few days later. The angry neighbour. She hadn’t set eyes on him since then but of course he still lived there. He took a minute to shut his gate and then turned round. She caught his eye and he stopped and looked puzzled. She felt she ought to say something but that was stupid because he didn’t know her except from that one time.

  ‘Mandy, I need to get a move on.’

  ‘OK,’ Mandy said and walked on with her.

  At the Tube station Debbie gave Mandy a hug. It was a bit awkward but Mandy did her best to reciprocate. Across the road she noticed a police car pull up just after the lights. A police officer got out of the car. Several people looked round at it.

  ‘I like your earrings,’ Debbie said.

  ‘I made them. Well, a girl at my school helped. Her mum makes this kind of stuff.’

  ‘You’ve got my email and mobile number. Keep in touch. I’d like to know how you get on.’

  ‘I will.’

  Mandy watched her walk off. She was all in black as usual. Her handbag swung wildly as she walked, hitting her hip. When she got to the barriers she flipped it open, pulled out her Oyster card and placed it on the machine. Moments later she was gone. Mandy felt mildly relieved. The sessions with her had become difficult because she’d been holding back. It was hard talking about Petra and Tina when she had this knowledge weighing her down.

  It hadn’t all been bad though. They had started to talk about different things. Tommy Eliot for instance. ‘Do you think your reliance on Tommy might stem from the same emotions that made you want Petra’s approval?’ Mandy had known she was right. She was too needy and she had admitted it. ‘Oh,’ Debbie had said, ‘that old word “needy”. It’s often spoken about in such a negative way. And yet wasn’t that why mankind survived when other species didn’t? Isn’t “need” one of the most important things that humans use to get on and to flourish? Don’t look at it as a weakness. You need people. So what? Embrace it.’

  So what if she needed people?

  Mandy felt one of the earrings hanging through her hair. She’d used her own beads but Lucy’s mum had shown her how to shape the wire using round-nosed pliers. They’d made four pairs that day and Mandy had enjoyed wearing them. Tommy had said, ‘Fab earrings,’ and she’d been pleased without feeling the old hurt that used to tinge any remark he made to her. She’d decided to make earrings for Christmas presents.

  She shook her head. Christmas. How could she think of it when she was carrying this thing round with her? It was getting dark as she walked away from the Tube and along the shopfronts. Christmas decorations flashed on and off, even though there was more than a month to go. She made herself focus, not that it was ever far from her mind.

  For a few days after seeing Petra she had agonised over whether to tell someone. Not because she wanted to give Petra’s secret away but because she wondered if the knowledge that the fate of the two girls had been different might help the police find out what had really happened to Tina. Alison Pointer was always on her mind. Alison, who suffered every day because Tina was lost. Would it make her happy to know what had happened to her? Even if the news was bad?

  Five years had gone by though. If she told the police about seeing Petra, how would it help? And would they even believe her if she told them? Might they not think that she’d conjured the whole thing up? She’d had sightings of Petra on the bus years before; might her ‘sighting’ of Petra now be construed as more of the same?

  She noticed the policeman again, walking along the other side of the road. Then she recognised him. It was Officer Farraday. The man she’d seen weeks before when the house was being demolished. Now he’d appeared before her just as she’d been debating whether or not to tell Petra’s story. Maybe it was a kind of sign. He stopped for a moment and talked to a boy on a bike, then he walked on. He saw her looking at him and seemed puzzled, but then he recognised her and raised his arm in a wave. He looked up and down at the traffic then crossed the road. As he sidestepped cars she thought, It’s too soon. I can’t say anything; it’s too soon.

  ‘Hello, Mandy.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m well. And you?’

  ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Last time I saw you, at the house, you seemed a bit tense.’

  ‘Well, it was quite a day.’

  He nodded. ‘I thought about you from time to time, especially when Alison Pointer came back from France.’

  ‘Are you going off-duty?’

  ‘No, I’m in the middle of a shift. I was going to get a sandwich and tea in the café. Do you want to join me? I’ve only got about fifteen minutes but I thought I’d take a break.’

  ‘Sure.’

  She went with him into a tiny café a couple of doors along from the Tube station. He got his food and she bought a can of drink. They sat at a window table on high stools facing the street and passers-by. They would only have a short time so Mandy decided to be brave and ask some questions.

 
‘I wanted to ask you something about the case,’ Mandy said.

  ‘Fire away,’ he said.

  He was struggling to get the sandwich packet open. When he did he exhaled and took a giant bite.

  ‘When the police were investigating, at the beginning, did they ever consider that the fate of the two girls could have been separate? In other words, something happened to Petra and something different happened to Tina?’

  ‘Why? Have you remembered something?’

  ‘No, no. I’ve just been thinking a lot about it.’

  He sighed. ‘The detectives pursued every possible scenario they could think of. Mostly they looked at the two girls disappearing together. They tried to link it to the murder of George Merchant, so they focused on gang crime, organised drugs crime. They even went down the paedophile road. Checked George Merchant’s background, private life, old computers they found in his house. Nothing on any count. You name it they went with it.’

  The street lights had come on outside. Instantly it looked darker than it had before; even the Christmas lights seemed sharper, more dramatic. Mandy was reminded of the painting she had looked at in Dr Shukla’s surgery: Automat. It was a word for a self-service café, one that had vending machines, although they couldn’t be seen in the picture. Only the girl was visible, sitting at a table, in what looked like the middle of the night. The picture had a sense of loneliness, as if the girl had nothing or nobody in the world, as if she was running away. Mandy thought of Petra. She had run away and she’d found a kind of happiness. Was it right that Mandy should spoil that? If she went to the police with her story then the newspapers would make it their job to find Petra, wherever she was. Did Mandy have the right to do that?

  ‘Was it definite that whatever happened happened in that house?’

  ‘Well, the forensics seemed to suggest it. Hairs were found in the living room that belonged to Petra and fibres were found on the kitchen door that matched a top which belonged to Alison Pointer. Tina borrowed it, you see. So it seems that they went in there and just never came out.’

  Mandy felt stricken. Fibres from Tina’s hoodie were found on the kitchen door. Not further into the property. This backed up Petra’s story.

  ‘Is the case closed?’

  Officer Farraday shook his head, putting the last piece of sandwich in his mouth. He chewed for a minute. Then he pulled out a large handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth, dabbing the corners.

  ‘It will never be closed. Not unless they’re found. There will always be a file open for those two girls. It’s reviewed every year. Indeed this year, because of the demolition of the house, several people were interviewed again: neighbours, people who’d been in the street and seen the white van, the people who’d used the newsagent’s. The detectives want to see if the activity around the demolition has jogged any memories.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe that no one saw anything.’

  ‘You were the last person to see them, Mandy.’

  ‘Why wasn’t I interviewed recently?’

  ‘A decision was made that your statement was complete and we could see no reason to dredge this all up in your life again. Although it seems as though you’ve been thinking about it a lot. In fact …’

  He opened one of the flaps on his belt and pulled out a wad of small cards. He gave one to her. On it was his name, a mobile phone number and an email address.

  ‘This is just in case something occurs to you. Even after all this time. You don’t have to go to the station or anything dramatic like that. If you ring me and I don’t answer, leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I’m free.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said and took the card.

  After he left she sat in the café and stared out into the street.

  She tried to think back to that night. It had been dark and the weather was cold. After Petra and Tina went through the side gate she’d walked away. She’d paused at the newsagent’s but then was so cross that she’d just gone home. Why should she have waited around for them when they’d just left her there? Ten minutes later she’d been in her living room watching television, staring angrily at the screen. She must have missed Tina by a minute or so. If she’d just waited there, in the light from the newsagent’s, she would have seen her emerge from the garden and they could have chatted and waited for Petra. Possibly Tina might have been critical of Petra. ‘She’s so obstinate!’ she might have said and Mandy would have enjoyed that. But she’d gone home and when Tina came out of the side gate into the street there had been no one there.

  Where had she gone?

  Had she walked across to the newsagent’s thinking that Mandy might be there? She thought then of Mr Johnson, the newsagent who always made a fuss of Tina when she went into the shop. That day when they were browsing the magazines for ideas for posters he came out from the behind the counter and stood closely to Tina, asking her if she’d like a magazine free of charge.

  ‘No thank you, Mr Johnson,’ she’d said.

  ‘Call me Alfie,’ he’d said and Mandy could hardly keep from bursting into giggles.

  Had Tina gone into the newsagent’s upset? Had Mr Johnson tried to comfort her? Was he a man who liked young girls? Mandy rested her head on her hands. Sometimes the world seemed full of shadowy people. You thought of them in one way but then they turned out to be something different. But Mr Johnson wasn’t like that! He was friendly, nice. He was old: forty or more. Wouldn’t he have just rung Tina’s mum if she’d asked him to?

  She got off the high stool and walked out of the café. The Christmas lights flashed on and off along the street. It had started to rain so she put her collar up and walked swiftly on. Officer Farraday’s card sat heavy in her pocket. She didn’t know what she was going to do. There was Alison Pointer to think about. And Petra.

  She came into Princess Street and saw a car double-parked outside the site of the old house. It made her slow down and brought back the morning that she went onto the site when Petra stepped out of a car and stood looking through the fence. This car had its hazard lights flashing on and off. When she got closer she saw that it was a minicab and a man had just got out of it and was paying the driver. He stepped onto the pavement just as she walked along. She paused to let him pass. He stopped and looked at her.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear, do I know you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, not wanting to explain.

  His lips moved as if he might say something else but instead he nodded and headed for the gate of the house next door to the building site.

  It was the next-door neighbour who had shouted them out of the garden.

  She hadn’t seen him for five years and that day she’d seen him twice.

  Thirty

  On Monday Mandy couldn’t go to school. She wasn’t ill but she stayed in bed and tried to read. She went on Facebook and then sorted out her beads and looked on the internet at the prices of the tools that Lucy’s mother had to see if she could afford to buy them. She hopped from one thing to another. The whole weekend had been like that, not really settling down to anything.

  She had some lunch and then found herself wandering out into the garden.

  She went all the way down the back and to the bottom. It was cold, the sky gunmetal grey. The wind was irritable, rushing this way and that, making her hair fly across her face. She’d put her fleece on but still felt the chill of the air. There was a small shed there that was hardly ever used. Inside was an old kitchen table and chairs that her mum and dad had replaced. Instead of getting rid of them they’d put it there just in case someone in the family wanted it, but no one did. Mandy looked through the cloudy glass window and saw them stacked away, the chairs upended on the table the way they sometimes did in school so that the cleaner could sweep underneath. The place was draped with cobwebs. Like the house on Princess Street. Petra had described it as if she’d been in there but it had only been her father’s words. She had told them about the ghosts as if she herself had experi
enced it. Tina had believed her completely, her eyes wide open, her face a mixture of wonder and fear. Mandy had never believed it. People lived in old houses all the time. Her house was old. People had lived and died here. There were no ghosts.