The Dangerous Kind

by Deborah O'Connor

  In theory I could have refused Leo. Used the handover from Sunny to walk away and try to become a normal girl again. One who goes to school and spends her days worrying about what to wear to the Christmas disco, who snogs boys and spends her nights hanging around bus stops drinking cider or carving her name into park benches. But without Leo I’d be at the mercy of Sunny. And it’s not as if I can go to the police. If they didn’t believe me the first time, there’s no way they’d trust what I had to say about Leo. I don’t know what he does exactly but I do know he’s important. Besides, whenever I think of all the things I’ve done and the sort of people I’ve done them with, who’d want me now? It’s just like those police officers said: I’m not dragged to these places kicking and screaming.

  I wait another minute, then go and sit between two girls on the sofa. They tut and huff, but eventually they shuffle aside to make room.

  ‘Like what you see?’ says the girl to my right. She motions at the window.

  ‘That fountain always makes me need the toilet,’ says the girl to my left. ‘All that rushing water. They turn it off at night, but until then, it’s just there in the background, making me need a wee.’

  They giggle.

  The girl on my right is beautiful. About my age, her skin is toffee-coloured, her hair a mass of brown spiral curls. She reminds me of Scary Spice. The girl on my left seems younger, but that might just be because she’s small like me. The upper sides of her cheeks are covered with acne and she holds her head at this strange tipped angle, which means her hair swings forward, hiding the spots.

  A knock at the front door and another man appears. Sweaty and out of breath, he’s really fat, so fat that he struggles to walk. At his side is a boy who looks to be eight or nine. He gives the child a Game Boy and settles him on the floor in the living room, then waddles into the kitchen to where the other men are laughing at some joke.

  My stomach turns. This isn’t right. The girls at either side of me are also sitting up a little straighter. I call the kid over to where we are but he won’t look up from his game.

  ‘My one brought a camera with him tonight,’ whispers the girl who looks like Scary Spice.

  ‘A camera?’ says acne girl.

  ‘A video camera. Dirty bugger.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Why do you think?’

  They pause. Then the one to my right turns to me. ‘This your first time?’

  ‘In London, yes. We normally go other places.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘What are you – his girlfriend?’

  They fall about laughing.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asks the one to my left.

  ‘Rowena.’

  ‘I’m Queenie and this,’ she reaches behind me and gives the smaller girl a tickle under the armpit, ‘is Erin.’

  The little boy is still focused on his Game Boy. It gives off a stream of beeps and dings. The electronic noise mingles with the sound of the water from outside.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  Queenie shrugs. ‘The fatty likes them young.’

  ‘But he’s a child.’

  She grabs the back of my head. Then, gently, as though she is a ventriloquist and I am her dummy, she turns my gaze towards the kitchen.

  ‘See those blokes in the corner?’ She drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Judge, police officer, cabinet minister.’ Every time she moves on to a different person in the line, she moves my head ever so slightly. ‘The judge has the worst bad breath. Total toilet. Avoid at all costs.’ Done with her lesson, she removes her hand. ‘Sometimes there’s a few celebrities here, pop stars, even.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything? He’s a kid, just a baby.’

  ‘What’s it got to do with anything?’ Queenie and Erin roll their eyes. ‘They’re all rich. Powerful. If they want to bring little kids in from children’s homes, they can. No one cares about those children and these guys know it. They can do what they like.’

  Two of the men break away from the crowd and stand at the entrance to the living room. They look at us like they’re on the other side of a disco, working up the courage to come and ask for a dance. As if we could ever say no.

  Leo hasn’t noticed, he’s too busy talking to the man pouring the drinks. Every now and then a snatch of what he’s saying travels up and out of the din. The talk is the same everywhere we go, all council seats and parties.

  Queenie gets to her feet. There seems to have been some cue, a prompt that only she registered. A man in a dressing-gown takes her hand and she follows him down the hall.

  I watch her go and it’s then I realise I can no longer hear the shush of the fountain outside. In the short time I’ve been here I’ve already got so used to the constant slap and patter of the water hitting the dolphins’ backs that I’d stopped hearing it, only noticing it once it was gone.

  Monday 19 December

  Present day

  Jessamine

  Monday morning, and Jessamine was on the top deck of the number 15 on her way to work. She usually relished the journey. The bus route took her past the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral. Today, though, her enjoyment was marred by the bus being grossly overheated.

  She unbuttoned her coat, reached for the long, thin window to her right and yanked it open. Air streamed in onto her face, cold and sweet. The man next to her tutted and pulled his scarf tight. She gave him her best fuck-you smile and settled back into her seat.

  Today she was going to moot the idea of a PDP special to Mick. She was excited and had spent most of last night awake, running through the details of Cassie Scolari’s case in her head. A present-tense investigation would give the show a new lease on life. If the rumours were true and the show was under threat, a fresh approach might make the powers that be reconsider or, at the very least, keep them at bay for a while. She was about to go over the case’s key points again when her phone rang.

  She answered as soon as she saw the caller ID. ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Jessamine, hello. Is now a good time to talk?’

  ‘It’s always a good time to talk with you, Ellen, you know that.’

  Ellen laughed.

  Ellen Griksaitis was Sarah’s social worker, assigned to her when she’d first entered the care system at eighteen months old. Jessamine had got to know her when she’d applied to adopt Sarah, then aged two. Ordinarily, once an adoption had been finalised, the family fell out of touch with the social worker. Ellen was different. Not long after Sarah’s adoption had gone through, Jessamine had gone to her for help. They’d stayed in contact ever since.

  ‘I thought you’d want to know. I had a call from your daughter yesterday.’

  When Ellen spoke she tended to emphasise those words in a sentence that usually went unnoticed. ‘To’, ‘had’, ‘from’. It gave her voice a rocky, jolting cadence that made Jessamine think of a rapidly deflating balloon, jerking from wall to wall as it descended to the floor.

  ‘Really? She didn’t mention it.’

  ‘The tinker.’ Ellen laughed again. ‘I guessed as much.’

  A prickle of worry. Sarah also remained in regular contact with her social worker but she usually told Jessamine whenever she was planning to check in.

  ‘She was asking about her file. She wanted to know if she could see it.’ Ellen paused, waiting for Jessamine to speak. When she didn’t, she carried on. Her tone was still light but there was a new tinge to it, an edge of concern. ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No.’ Jessamine thought of Sarah on the sofa at home before she’d left for work this morning. She’d been swaddled in her dressing-gown, her hair damp from the shower. ‘At least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘It often happens at this age,’ said Ellen. ‘They get that bit older and they start to think things through. They have questions they didn’t have before.’

  Jessamine considered this as a possibility, then discarded it. It made no sense for Sarah to ask Ellen for her file. She knew perfectly well that Ellen
wouldn’t be able to give it to her and would almost certainly mention the request to her mum.

  Jessamine used her coat sleeve to wipe the fogged glass and fanned herself with a newspaper. Even with the window open, her forehead was sheened with sweat. Peering out, she saw that the bus was now on Fleet Street, headed towards the Strand: the street where CCTV had captured Cassie Scolari coming out of her office on the day she’d gone missing.

  ‘What did you tell her? About the file.’

  ‘The same thing I tell any of my kids. As stated by the law of this land she will be able to see it when she reaches the age of eighteen and not a day before.’

  Since Sarah had first come to the attention of social services her life had been meticulously documented and collated by a variety of state-run agencies. A secret history of sorts, her Child Placement Report contained details of every police call-out, hospital note and foster-family, and every court order made in relation to her care. Sarah had been told the rough story of how and why she had come to be removed from her birth family – she knew, for example, that her mother had been in abusive relationship with her father and that, after an altercation with him, her mother had died. The details were vague and it was up to Jessamine, with Ellen, to decide how and when Sarah should be exposed to the uncensored and distressing truth that surrounded her adoption.

  The bus inched past the Royal Courts of Justice. In the distance Jessamine could see the signage for the Vaudeville Theatre and, next to it, the door to Ticketmaster’s headquarters, Cassie’s place of work.

  ‘Look,’ said Ellen, yawning, ‘it’s your right as her mother to keep her file sealed, but that as a strategy has a limited shelf life. My advice? Talk to her. I know you’re worried about how she’ll react when she sees what’s written there, but it will be so much better if she hears it all now, from you, voluntarily. And I mean all of it.’ She softened. ‘Jessie, what happened back then, I see it more often than you might think. She’ll understand.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her, I promise. But in the meantime, if she calls again, will you let me know?’

  Ellen agreed, and Jessamine put the phone in her bag. Sarah’s Child Placement Report was a series of A4 ring-binders stacked on a dusty shelf in some office, but Jessamine thought of it as a kind of Pandora’s Box: for years its contents had been no more than a speck on the horizon, but now its dark hulk was drawing closer, its lock and key coming into terrible focus.

  The heat on the bus was unbearable. Her inner thermostat seemed to have given up completely, her back and underarms drenched with sweat. She checked the time, an idea forming. Her production meeting wasn’t for another two hours. Cassie’s office was literally over the road from where she now sat. She could swing by, see if anyone was willing to talk. A first-hand account of Cassie’s behaviour in the hours before she disappeared might strengthen her pitch.

  She pressed the stop button and was about to make her way down to the lower deck when she noticed the man she’d been sitting next to was still huddled underneath his scarf. She reached back to flip the window shut, then noticed a woman in the seat behind. Her coat was in her lap, her cheeks and neck flushed, her face raised to the breeze, eyes closed. Jessamine recognised the signs.

  The bus was pulling into its stop. She’d need to get a move on if she was going to make it down the narrow stairs. Instead of closing the vent she reached across and opened a second window, increasing the flow of cool air. Her eyes still closed, the woman smiled. The man grimaced, deep in his scarf.

  Jessamine gave him a finger-waggle wave, then lunged for the stairs. She only just made it through the doors in time.

  Jitesh

  There was a problem with the microphones. The sound kept cutting out. The last time it had happened was this morning, during a live show. There had been complaints. Jitesh Ganguly placed the screwdriver between his teeth, got down on all fours and crawled underneath the control desk.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Malcolm, from above. He tugged at the red wire so Jitesh would know which one to isolate. ‘Follow the cable to the breaker circuit, then check to see if it’s loose.’

  Jitesh did as he was told and traced the wire’s origin to a square metal panel in the floor. He unscrewed the panel and shone his pocket torch inside. The wire looked fine. ‘C-can’t s-s-s-see a problem.’

  ‘Shit.’ Malcolm let go of the red wire and it fell back into the tangle. ‘Okay, out you come.’

  When Jitesh stood up, Malcolm was already surveying the nearby walls and floors. He replaced the screwdriver in his tool-belt and made sure to keep very still. Malcolm had an uncanny ability to map in his head the thousands of hidden wires and fuses that snaked under and behind the building’s carpets and plasterboard, but to complete his inventory he needed absolute silence.

  Malcolm was the radio division’s chief electrician. Jitesh had been assigned to him at the start of his internship and, although he had the option to be seconded to at least three other specialities, he’d long ago decided to stick with him for the duration. The reasons for this were two-fold. One, Malcolm was a decent, kind person (a cursory trawl through his email had shown him to be a straightforward family man with an interest bordering on obsession in old Land Rovers). Two, he wasn’t fazed by Jitesh’s stutter. Whenever he struggled to articulate something, Malcolm never did the awful encouraging-smile thing, and he never grew so impatient for Jitesh to finish that he said the words himself.

  Their job was to maintain and repair the electrics in all twenty-two of the radio studios spread across old and new Broadcasting House. Problems happened, people reported them, then he and Malcolm fixed them. And, boy, were there a lot of problems. Especially in the last month or so. Today’s issue with the microphones was the tip of the iceberg. In the last week alone entire control desks had randomly lost all power, an editing suite had fizzled out for no apparent reason, and switches in the voice booths had refused to work. The faults were clustered around three or four studios and meeting rooms on the second floor of old Broadcasting House. It was a mystery, and being unable to determine the root of the problem was driving Malcolm crazy.

  A minute or so more of staring at the wall, and Malcolm thought he might have located the source of this particular issue. ‘The problem is that this floor was never meant to be organised like this. When they renovated BH all the studios and offices were laid out differently. Then someone made them add in all these weird partitions at the last minute. It makes it harder to figure out the electrics.’

  He approached a seemingly anonymous section of plasterboard and, reaching to just above head height, used his finger to trace a horizontal line from one side of the studio to the other. It mirrored the journey of the wire beneath and came to a halt at the divider that sectioned the studio from the glass-walled meeting room next door.

  ‘Oh, Lord.’ Malcolm left his finger in place as a marker and nodded. ‘The breaker we need to check is in there.’

  Jitesh appraised the group of people on the other side of the glass. A man with black-rimmed glasses was pacing up and down on his phone while two women sat at a table drinking coffee. One woman wore a bobbled cardigan over a Jean-Michel Basquiat T-shirt; the other had a gold nose-stud and wore a striped Oxford shirt, buttoned to the collar. In the middle of the table was a pile of scripts, the Radio 4 logo in the bottom right corner.

  The woman with the nose-stud made him think of Meera. His stomach lurched. It had been five days since he’d hacked her account and he’d yet to do anything good to make up for that, never mind his plan to act on what he’d learned (an email exchange in which Meera had arranged to meet a friend called Katy this coming Tuesday). Eager to see her again, Jitesh had made a note of the date and was aiming to be in the vicinity at the same time. He resolved to do something soon, within the next forty-eight hours, and if he couldn’t he’d make a donation to charity.

  ‘We’re going to have to interrupt their production meeting.’ Malcolm grabbed the stepladder and went back out into the co
rridor. ‘Brace yourself.’ He rapped on the door and, without waiting for them to acknowledge him, barged in. ‘Don’t mind us,’ he said, marching over to the wall in question. ‘Won’t be long.’

  Jessamine

  Up two flights of stairs, Ticketmaster’s London HQ was all high ceilings and walls hung with posters advertising pop concerts and West End shows.

  Cassie’s boss showed Jessamine into his office and told her to wait while he removed a pile of cardboard boxes from the sofa. One had split, a perforated length of blank tickets spilling over its sides, and as he lifted it to the floor it collapsed, the tickets splaying out across the carpet.

  ‘Thanks again for seeing me at such short notice,’ she said, as he attempted to manoeuvre the mess into the corner with his foot. She took a seat on the newly exposed sofa.

  ‘Anything to help,’ he said, abandoning his strategy for the even less effective technique of trying to scoop up the ticket loops in his arms. ‘It’s so awful about Cassie, the whole thing.’

  His name was Stuart Coombes and he wore black trousers and a white shirt, underneath which Jessamine could see the faint outline of a vest. He had granted her an audience without much fuss. Rocking up at Reception, she’d explained that she was looking into Cassie’s disappearance. The receptionist had been predictably suspicious. Jessamine wasn’t police and she didn’t have an appointment. But then Jessamine had said the three magic letters that opened doors for her and thousands of other journalists all over the world: BBC. As soon as the receptionist had seen her work ID, she’d made a call. Moments later Stuart had appeared.