63
She looked between us, her brain trying to make the connections. Earlier, she’d gone to sleep surrounded by nurses. Now she was waking up to find two men she didn’t know standing next to her bed. She immediately moved, trying to protect herself, turning on to her side and bringing her legs up into the foetal position. I felt a pang of sadness for her, felt the burn of anger too, but as I looked across at Healy, expecting to see the same, I instead saw a strange kind of stillness in him, as he retreated back eight months.
‘Marika,’ I said gently, holding up a hand. Her eyes continued moving between us and, after a couple of seconds, I saw Healy snap out of the fug, like he’d stepped right out of a bad dream, and he glanced at me, ceding control of the conversation. ‘Marika, my name is David,’ I continued, keeping my voice soft. ‘You aren’t in danger any more. We are here to protect you. But I need to know you understand me.’
Her eyes finally stopped moving and fell on me.
‘Do you speak English, Marika?’
No movement. She didn’t seem to remember me from the loft.
I let the silence hang there. Healy eyed me – his way of passing judgement on my tactics – but this wasn’t rocket science. She’d been pushed and pulled around, dragged, bruised and beaten the entire time she’d been in the country. If there was ever a time she remembered being able to trust someone, it was so far back it probably didn’t even exist as a memory any more. There was nothing as heartbreaking as seeing a childhood destroyed; a succession of men had taken hers from her, and it was never coming back. Silence was the least we could offer her.
She blinked. Tears in her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ I said quietly, and without moving any closer to the bed, I dropped to my haunches, down to her eye level. It was like rubbing away the dust and the grime on a windowpane and looking through to the other side: suddenly, despite the bandaging, I could see how young she was. In her eyes. In the movement of her mouth. In the small shape of her body, and the way her fingers clawed the bed sheets, like a comforter. In the videos she’d looked fourteen or fifteen. Now she looked even younger, barely into her teens at all, and my head filled with images of Pell – and what I was going to do to him.
I waited again. She was facing me, her back to Healy, and I could see him getting impatient behind her, shifting on the spot, glancing back out the door and into the corridor, as if he expected the cavalry to arrive any minute.
Then, finally, a spark of recognition in her eyes.
‘You …’ she said.
She’d spoken through the plastic mask over her mouth, her voice quieter and less refined. I nodded, and then sat back, on the floor. ‘I hope they clean in here,’ I said, smiling. She didn’t react, but that was fine. Even if her trust could never be rebuilt, it was at least important that she knew we carried no threat. ‘Do you remember me, Marika?’
She just looked at me.
‘Do you remember when I found you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She studied me for a moment, the bandages tight against her skin, disguising the tiny movements that experts in kinesics, in the language of the body, would have called illustrators, adaptors and emblems. Without the whole of her face, it was possible to miss some of its subtlety – but I still felt a slight shift in her, as if her defences had come down enough to allow me a little closer. ‘You save me,’ she said.
I smiled. ‘The doctors saved you.’
She didn’t reply, but I could see her face soften.
‘Where did you learn to speak English?’ I asked.
She removed the mask. ‘TV.’
‘You learned everything from TV?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you like to watch?’
‘The men take me …’ She paused. I didn’t say anything, but I let her know I knew she meant Wellis and Gaishe, and all the other worthless pond life that had had a part in bringing her here. ‘They watch football. Most of time just football.’
I nodded. ‘Do you like football?’
‘Yes. I play for the, uh …’
‘A girls’ team?’
‘Yes. In Cluj.’
‘You’re from Romania?’
She nodded. A flicker of sadness. ‘Yes.’
‘Were you as good as Gheorghe Hagi?’
The sadness disappeared and in her face, for the first time, was a hint of a smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No one better than Hagi.’
I smiled back.
Slowly, her legs slid away from her body, like part of a defensive barrier coming down, although she kept the sheets and blanket in close as a protective shield.
‘Marika,’ I said after a while, keeping my eyes on her and not on Healy, who was half turned towards the door again. ‘Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?’
She didn’t move. Didn’t react.
I nodded again, letting her know I understood her reluctance. I shuffled across the floor, so I was about four feet away, still at her eyeline. ‘Let me tell you about the men who kept you,’ I said, ‘about the ones who hurt you. They will never hurt you again, do you understand? The two men that kept you, they’re gone and they’re not coming back. Now I need to find the others. But to do that, I will need your help, okay?’
She glanced at Healy, then back to me.
‘I know it’s hard.’
Tears blurred in her eyes.
Then she nodded.
‘Thank you.’ I reached into my pocket, removed my pad and placed it down on to the floor next to me. The girl followed every movement, a habit born out of having to predict the next development, the next attack, the next assault. ‘Do you feel ready?’
‘Yes.’
I asked her how she ended up in the UK, and from there she told us – in staccato, broken English – about her journey. She was one of four sisters, with an absent father and a chronically depressed mother. Tears continued filling her eyes as she told us how she was grabbed one day on the way back from school and thrown into the back of a van, and then the next time she was conscious, she woke up in a room full of men – four, maybe five of them – and they raped her repeatedly. She told me she was eleven at the time. It was all I could do to keep it together, to remain emotionless as the pain tremored through her voice, and I had to look down at my pad to prevent her seeing my anger and thinking it was directed at her. I wrote meaningless notes while she told me how she’d been pulled out of the room and into a lorry, then another van, except this time she was in a new country, and they didn’t even speak her language.
‘When did you first get here?’ I asked.
‘In UK?’
‘Yes.’
‘December,’ she said.
‘December last year?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ve been here six, seven months?’
‘Yes. That was when I meet Adrian.’
The people who’d kidnapped her handed her over to Wellis, and from there she became a prisoner. As she talked, I realized she wasn’t scared of Wellis – or, at least, not like she had been at the beginning – but the way he’d used her and treated her had left her with a look of inevitability, as if being dragged from one punter to the next was all she should expect from life. She had no money. No one to run to. Nowhere to go. It was a heartbreaking moment; one of those times when it felt like you were watching someone drifting out to sea, knowing the fate that awaited them, and all you could do was watch from the shore.
‘He had friend,’ she said.
‘Adrian?’
She nodded. She’d referred to him as ‘Adrian’ throughout. She didn’t know his surname and had probably only learned his first name from listening to their conversations. ‘He had friend called Eric. He always …’ A pause. ‘He always look at me. Never say nothing. Just look. I didn’t like way he look at me.’
But eventually Eric Gaishe did more than look. I remembered Pell turning up the night I’d been watching their house, seeing him talk to Gaishe before driving off again. Gaishe must have told him Marika was unavailable, or Pell would have surely asked for her. Either way, it wasn’t much of a shift: one violent rapist to another.
‘Eric was one who hit head. I can’t remember nothing after. Just remember you. You save me.’
‘Do you remember any of the other men who came to see you?’
Her eyes blinked, surrounded by the bandaging. Somehow I could see the answer without her saying a word: After a while I stopped paying attention.
‘Do you remember a guy called Duncan?’
A blank.
‘He used to film you?’
Now she remembered. From behind her, Healy couldn’t see her reaction but when I glanced at him he could see exactly what I was telling him: She remembers Pell.
‘He never told me name,’ she said, and her voice was so quiet it was barely even audible beyond the ECG and the murmur of conversations in the corridor outside. I didn’t interrupt, though, just shifted in, across the floor, a little closer. ‘He was … strange man.’
‘Why?’
‘He never say nothing. No words.’
‘Ever?’
‘No words,’ she repeated.
‘He hurt you?’
‘Yes. Hurt me.’
I remembered finding her in the loft, and remembered the words she’d managed to get out, through all the bruising and the blood and the damage: Don’t let him hurt me.
‘He was the one you were talking about?’
She frowned.
‘When I found you in the loft, you said to me, “Don’t let him hurt me.” Was that man – Duncan, the one who filmed you – was he was the one you were talking about?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
There was something in her face.
‘Marika?’
‘Yes. Him.’
But as she looked at me, a lie passed between us, and fear bloomed in her face. It wasn’t Pell she was talking about, just as it had never been Wellis. None of the DVDs Pell had of them were timecoded or dated, but if she’d landed in December, it meant the majority of them were filmed after Sam Wren’s disappearance.
‘Was it the man who watched you and Duncan that scared you?’
She glanced at me, trying to figure out how I knew.
‘Was it him, Marika?’
It seemed to take her a long time to process the question, and when she finally did her legs came back up to her chest, and she resumed the foetal position. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘It was the man who watched you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he only watch?’
Tears in her eyes now. ‘Yes.’
‘So why were you scared of him?’
‘I don’t know how to …’ She paused. ‘Don’t know words.’
‘Can you try?’
The tear escaped and she automatically went to wipe it away, but all she felt at her fingertips were bandages. She sniffed. ‘He never show face. I just hear him behind me.’
‘You never saw him enter or leave?’
‘Never see him. Ever.’
‘Then how did you know he was there?’
‘I hear door.’
‘You heard him come in?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s it? You only heard him?’
‘I see his …’ She waved a hand. ‘In mirror.’
‘His reflection?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did he look like?’
She shook her head. ‘Face was in dark.’
‘Shadow?’
‘Shadow, yes. Mostly.’
‘You never saw any of his face?’
‘Only once. A small …’
‘A small bit of his face?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he ever say anything?’
She was staring off now, beyond me, into the middle distance. She might have been able to darken the memories she had of the other men, but she couldn’t darken this one. Even faceless, she knew there was something up with him. Something bad.
‘Did he ever say anything?’ I asked again.
‘He say words to …’
‘Duncan?’
‘To Duncan. He say words to him.’
‘Like what?’
She blinked. ‘He call me “it”.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He say, “F*ck it. Hit it. Hurt it.” ’
‘He was telling Duncan what to do?’
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice breaking a little now.
I took out a photograph of Sam. ‘Could it have been this man watching you?’
She studied the picture for a long time, saying nothing, her eyes wide beneath the bandaging, shimmering a little in the light of the room.
Then, finally, she ripped them away and looked at me.
‘Yes,’ she said, a tear breaking free. ‘That could be him.’
The minute we were outside the hospital, Healy lit himself a cigarette and we stood there in the car park watching the rain come down. Neither of us said anything, Healy trying to figure out where to go next, me trying to process what I’d just found out. Marika thought the watcher might have been Sam, which meant there was also a chance it might not have been. But it was certainly getting harder to back Sam, to deny he was involved, and that was eating away at me. I didn’t call things wrong. I didn’t read people wrong.
Except maybe, this time, I’d done both.
As if on cue, Healy started shaking his head, and when I glanced at him, a caustic, self-satisfied expression formed in his face. My hackles rose instantly. ‘So you still somehow think he’s not involved then?’ he said, blowing a flute of smoke out.
I looked at him. We were standing beneath an overhang, rain running off the roof and exploding against the ground next to us.
He glanced at me and saw my reaction. ‘What?’
‘That’s all you can say?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘That’s the first thing that comes into your head?’
He frowned. ‘What the hell do you mean?’
‘I get her to talk in there because there was no way she was going to talk to you when you’re bouncing around like you’re waiting for your f*cking dealer. Last night, I meet you at the Tube because you can’t trust anyone and literally all you care about is bringing this home and stuffing it down everyone’s throat. I do that for you, I look past your flaws, your anger, your capacity to create an argument out of nothing – and, having seen what just happened in there, that’s the first thing that comes into your head?’
He just stared at me.
‘Do you even realize how alone you are, Healy?’
‘I don’t know what –’
‘That’s just your problem, Healy. You don’t know.’
And I walked away.