by Jay Stringer
“Cutbacks?”
“Yeah. That and the fact that they turned immigration into such a dirty word at the last election that all the private funding went up in a puff of smoke. Everybody was too scared.” She took a deep breath, like a child who was all cried out. “Then this businesswoman comes in and offers help, says she can take all her donations as tax write-offs as long as we keep it local. I thought she just wanted to help the local community, you know? But eventually I figured out she had other reasons.”
“Veronica Gaines.”
She nodded.
“I didn’t know what she was really into. She showed me her businesses, the legit ones, and they’re all—they look good, you know? Positive stuff. Public sports centers, beauty salons, restaurants. But once we were taking her money, she started adding all these strings.”
“How does it work?”
“I did a report on money laundering on the show a few months back, and the way it’s described? We’re doing a very similar thing. It’s like person laundering. We have enough legitimate work to do, enough legal immigrants and asylum seekers, that we can layer in the illegal immigrants without making waves. Give them homes and jobs. You know how many companies pay people below minimum wage by doing it in cash, off the books?”
“You’re happy with that?”
“No, but it’s a start. When my dad came over? There was no minimum wage. He was a qualified doctor, but over here he was nothing and nobody. Took him ten years to get a decent job, and he’s still trying to win back the self-respect that was stolen from him. These people are getting a start. They’re getting regular wages, and support, and a community. These kids will grow up not seeing their parents treated like dirt.”
“They’ll see them as lap dancers and unprotected workers. You know where this leads, right? You’re supplying a new working class. These people won’t get paid minimum wage, and they’ll never have employment rights. These flats?” I pointed to the flophouse we’d just emerged from. “They’re a modern poorhouse.”
“These people come from places where they don’t have any rights or wages,” she said. “Being working class is a step up for them. You want to lecture me on morality? You said yourself that one of them danced for you.” She hit on the one thing I’d hoped she wouldn’t, and it hurt. “Where was your anger at the way they’re treated when you were getting your dick wet?”
We sat in silence for a long time. I was fighting for a balance between anger and guilt. Salma was probably fighting to stop herself slapping me a second time. We were both slowly winning our battles. Then she spoke, this time sounding quiet and tired. “We do good work. We’re helping them. We’re getting them into homes, and jobs, and connecting them to friends. We don’t make them come over here, and if we stopped trying to help, they’d still come anyway. At least this way they have someone looking out for them when they arrive.”
“Where does Gaines get them from?”
“I don’t know. Really. I think there’s some cartel she has a deal with. But I don’t ask. I don’t want to think about it more than I have to.”
“And Connolly, he’s in on this?”
She shot back upright at that. “No. He was the one who originally contacted Gaines about funding, so he guesses some of it, sure. But he doesn’t know the worst of it. He only hears about the happy endings. Hearing the truth would kill him.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the person to explain to him the truth about happy endings.” I tried for the joke, but it didn’t connect. Then I took it down a notch. “This is the real reason you’ve been off with me, isn’t it?”
She thought for a moment and then said, “Yes. Look, I’m not happy with all of this. It’s not what I set out to do; it’s not what I want to do. But I can’t confront Gaines about it, and I can’t hate myself more than I already do. You’re the next best thing. God, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged. “Forget about it. People usually hate me for far less rational reasons than that. But now I want to know. How high up does this thing go? I mean, I noticed the smoke alarms and the new fire extinguishers. Someone did a fire and safety check on that place. Have you guys got an insider at the council who’s covering for you?”
“I don’t know. That would be Gaines’s end of things. I arranged the fire inspection, though. Robin’s brother, the fireman? He did that, and he checked the water and electricity too. These people get better care from us and Gaines than the legal ones get from the council.” She peered at me, trying to read my face.
I cut to the chase. “Which of the victims are illegal?”
“Bejna, the one you’re meeting today; her mum didn’t want to risk being turned down, so she came in illegally.” I could see Salma working hard to keep the fear out of her eyes. “Are you going to report us?”
Illegal immigrants or the man preying on the youngest and most vulnerable of them—which did I care about more?
Fuck it.
I said, “No. Whoever is doing this, he’s not just some guy on the street. He knows about all of this. It’s someone you’ve trusted. He thinks he has a free pass because you can’t report it.”
Young girls can be raped if they don’t exist.
An old man can die without a name.
Families can be burned out of their homes if their skin is the wrong color.
I need to live in a world where the tree makes a sound when it falls in the rain forest, even if there’s nobody there to hear it. I need people to matter, things to matter, because then maybe I will matter.
TWENTY‐FOUR
Salma led me to the third staircase in the complex of apartments. She motioned for me to lead, so I climbed the stairs in front of her. A woman was waiting for us at the top. She was wearing some kind of shop uniform, and her dark brown hair was swept back from her forehead; it was frayed as though it had been tied back all day and only just released. Her skin was a shade darker than mine, but that didn’t help me pinpoint her ethnicity. She wasn’t overly feminine, but she was well drawn and had an attractive face. The best word to describe her was handsome. She eyed me with a bemused expression.
“So this is him, yes?”
Her words were thicker in the middle, her accent carried something of Eastern Europe or the Balkans, but that was as close as I could get.
“Yes. Sally, this is Eoin. Eoin, Sally.”
I shook her hand; she had a cool and firm grip. “Hiya, Sally. What’s that accent? Russian?”
She snorted and looked again at Salma, keeping her eyes off mine. “Russian? How does he get Russian? Have you brought an idiot to help us, Salma, eh?”
“Sorry, I—”
“Oh, he’s sorry.” She turned to me now. “You hear my accent, and you call me Russian? I should laugh at you. I do, in fact. Is okay, though. If you called me Turkish, I would have spat at you.”
She turned and stepped back into her flat. The hall was exactly the same as the previous one, down to the new fire extinguisher. She led us into the living room. The furniture was secondhand, and the floor had been vacuumed more recently than my own. There was a dining table beneath the window, next to the door we’d come in through, and it was piled high with school textbooks.
“Please, please.” She pointed us to a space on the sofa after moving away newspapers and magazines. “You want to drink?”
Salma answered for both of us, saying I’d take a Coke and she’d have a tea. I went along with whatever she said. Every time I opened my mouth, I said the wrong thing. Sally disappeared into the kitchen to get the drinks.
“She’s from Turkey.” Salma talked low while we were alone. “But don’t tell her that; it’s a sore issue.”
“I thought the Kurds were in Iraq.”
“There too. And Iran, but—”
“We are lots of places.” Sally came back in carrying our drinks, and I wondered how much she’d overheard. “They say we are largest, um, group? Largest group without a home. Not true. We know where our home is, bu
t it’s not on the map. They took Kurdistan from us. So now they call us homeless.”
“I know how that works. My family are Roma.”
“Let me look at you. Yes, now I can see it. Good people, Rom, good friends to my family when I was a child. Would come when crops were ready to harvest, work with us for food. Eh, it was a long time before now. They moved away—everyone moved away. I did too, but not for a long time.”
“What made you move?”
“We are treated like shit. In my own country I am not allowed to speak my language. It is against the law. If Kurds try to talk politics, they are taken away. My brother was taken away. We didn’t see him again.”
“So you came over to get away from that?”
“My daughter, Bejna, I came for her. And for my husband.”
“Where is he?”
The air seemed to go out of the room for a second, and from the corner of my eye I saw Salma wince. I knew what the answer was going to be before it came, but Sally seemed willing to talk about it anyway.
“They say he was enemy of Turkey. They say he was planning to start a riot and that he was danger to everyone. They came into our house at dawn and beat us. They took him, and I never see him again.”
“So he started talking politics too, like your brother?”
“He was—” She looked to Salma for a second as if she had forgotten the word. “Journalist. He was a journalist. He wrote the truth. He wrote about his friends and his home, and it killed him.”
Saying that last part took something from her physically. Her whole body seemed to tremble for a second after she spoke, and it looked like she folded inward.
“The day after that, some of the soldiers came back. I thought, to take me also. But they didn’t come to arrest me. They said there was no man in the house now and that made me a whore, and that they would treat me as one. They took turns. After they left me alone, I got Bejna dressed in her winter clothes. I borrow money from next door, and we started walking. I brought her here to have a good life.”
I dropped my eyes from her gaze and sipped my Coke. Not for the first time it felt like my job to be ashamed simply for being a man. Salma gauged exactly the right amount of silence to observe before she continued.
“Where is Bejna?”
“She is in her room. I wanted to look this man in the eye before I let him ask my daughter those questions. I have to see what kind of man he is, yes?”
I nodded, wondering what conclusions she’d come to. I couldn’t blame her if she didn’t like me. If anything it would show she was a good judge of character. “Sally, I know you came in illegally, but you’d have a good case to stay officially, and it’s possible the police would be able to catch the man who attacked your daughter.”
“The men who came into my home and hurt me, the men who stole my husband? They were police. They wore uniforms the first time they came. The second time they didn’t.”
Salma touched my knee and explained quietly. “I’ve looked into it, and they do have a case to stay. But Sally feels the law would make an example out of her and deport her before the hearing.”
“Example, yes.” Sally shook her head. “I have been made example before.”
“What are you hoping I’ll be able to do? If I find him, I mean?”
“I do not know. That’s the truth. I would like that Bejna is safe.”
I nodded. Whatever Sally had been looking for, she seemed to find it in that gesture. She turned and called out her daughter’s name, facing in the direction of the bedroom as though that would help the sound travel through the wall. I heard movement, a bed creaking followed by a door opening. Soft footsteps padded along the hallway and paused for a moment short of the open door. Sally said something low and soothing in a language I didn’t understand, and then Bejna stepped into the room.
She looked very different from her mother, but it was clear they were blood. Bejna had the same posture, the same set to her jaw. She was taller than I expected, around five ten, and striking. If Ruth’s body had been mixed up, caught in the moment between being a child and an adult, Bejna was already coming out the other side. Any baby fat she might have carried was gone, except for a little softness in her face. Her skin was lighter than her mother’s, and her hair had more strands of dark honey woven through the brown. She was rail thin, but it was obvious that in a few years’ time she would be stunning. She had wrapped herself in a bathrobe though she was fully clothed beneath; I could see a T-shirt in the V of the robe, and jeans stuck out of the bottom.
It was when she stepped forward and walked across the room that she began to look like a little girl. Women are aware of their bodies in a way that girls aren’t, and Bejna clearly wasn’t ready yet for what her hormones were pushing her into. I had a moment of anger as I thought about what could be waiting for her as part of Gaines’s system. Would she get a choice? She sat at her mother’s feet and smiled at Salma, and then she looked shyly at me.
I knew I needed a way in, to make a connection, but there were no film posters for me to cheat with. Instead, Sally held her daughter’s hand and coaxed her through it. Bejna talked to her mother for a while in a mix of English and what sounded like either Turkish or Kurdish. She was biting her thumbnail as she spoke, and occasionally she glanced at me nervously.
Eventually Bejna spoke to me. “Can you make this go away?”
TWENTY‐FIVE
“Do you go drinking with any of the girls from the group?”
She shook her head. I wondered if she would tell a different story if her mother wasn’t around, but I got the feeling she wouldn’t answer my questions if she didn’t have that hand holding hers.
“I don’t like to drink,” she said. “It gives me a headache, and I talk too fast. People can’t understand what I’m saying. I don’t like that.”
Cross the pub off my list.
So far, I had two victims from different cultures, different countries, who had immigrated for different reasons. They lived in different parts of town, and they didn’t drink together. I needed a connection between them. The community group was the only thing they had in common. But there were a lot of girls in the group, and only three of them, as far as we knew, had been raped. If I could find a second link, I would find the man responsible.
“Okay. We can stop at any time, yeah? When did it happen? Was it after one of your group meetings?”
“No, no. I had been to the cinema with Robin.”
“Robin was with you?” Salma and I shared a look as Bejna nodded. “Which cinema did you go to?”
“The Showcase down at the motorway junction? You know it? Yeah. We go there—went there—every week after school. They have a cheap night, and the tickets are half price.”
“Was there anybody else there with you?”
She shook her head. “No. Usually there would be, but that night it was just us. The others were busy.”
“Who else normally goes?”
She looked at Salma rather than me as she reeled off names. The only one I recognized was Ruth.
“Was Ruth supposed to be there that night?”
“Um, no. They had fallen out, Robin and Ruth. Had an argument.”
“Really? What about?”
She blushed, and the story told itself. Teenage hormones. Someone fancied someone. Someone else fancied someone else. It all went round in circles.
“Okay, how do you get to the cinema? Bus?”
“No, there isn’t one that goes the right way. We walk, maybe sometimes get the bus half of the way. Sometimes people drive us.”
“Walk? That’s a long way, especially when it gets dark.”
I looked out the window. The evening was already setting in. The children were still playing football. I could hear the ball skidding across the pavement. The walk Bejna was talking about would have been three or four miles along main roads.
“She always told me they got the bus,” Sally said. “Always. I would never let my daughter walk all that way
. Never.”
“It wasn’t the walk!” Bejna shouted before taking a breath and regaining her composure. “It wasn’t the walk. It didn’t happen by the cinema. It was right—” She stopped and wiped away a tear.
“Where was it, Bejna?”
She pointed in the direction of the road outside. “Over there,” she said. “The other side of the road.”
Right outside her home, where she should feel safe.
I walked over to the window and looked out of it. On the other side of the road was a small field, a triangle of land between a house and a warehouse. There were lots of bushes and no streetlights.
“So Robin wasn’t with you by then?”
“No. He always offers to walk me all the way here, but it’s out of his way, right? His house is up the hill, and I’m a big girl.”
“Okay.”
“I was walking down the hill, right over there. And then I got hit on the back of my head.” She rubbed a spot near her crown. “Before I knew it, I was being thrown against one of the trees. I landed in the dirt. I got scratched, all here.”
She pulled up the sleeve of her bathrobe to show marks on her arm. The scratches were well on the way to healing, but they would have caused a lot of pain at the time.
“Did he threaten you? Say anything to keep you from screaming?”
“He never said anything, but he had a knife.” Her hand went to her throat involuntarily, resting there protectively. “He put it here, kept pressing it. When he got to the end, when he was getting excited? He was pressing it so hard I thought he’d kill me. I thought he’d cut me, but he hadn’t.”
Her jaw looked as if it was starting to lock up at the memories, and I knew we didn’t have long before we’d need to back off and leave her alone.
“Did he hit you again or run away? Anything like that?”
“No. When he was finished he just, he just left me lying there and walked away. He walked. Like he didn’t think about me after that. He just walked away and laughed a little.”