A Lesser Evil (44 page)

Yvette relived that night again as she told Fifi about it. She could see the bare wooden stairs she was led down, the long gloomy corridor, and a door at the end of it. She was frightened, not by what lay ahead, for she had no knowledge of what was going to happen to her. But she was afraid of the woman, for she had a long bony face, sharp dark eyes, and her front tooth was missing, like a witch’s in a fairytale book. She wasn’t dressed like a witch – her dress was dark blue creêpe, and her blonde hair was set in tight waves either side of her head – but the hand that held tightly on to Yvette’s forearm was like a claw, and the large ruby ring on her finger looked like blood.

The room she was led into was dimly lit, heavy tapestry curtains tightly closed, and sparsely furnished with just a bed and a couple of chairs. Sitting on one of the chairs was a man.

He was portly, and he looked old to Yvette, though he was probably around forty, and he wore a dark grey suit with a yellow waistcoat beneath it. He had a big, florid face with a double chin, and when he smiled as he saw her, she noticed he had wet, fat lips.

‘You are sure she is intact?’ he asked, looking Yvette over as if she were a prize sheep or pig. He was French, and a Parisian judging by his accent.

‘I checked her myself. Not even hair on her fanny yet,’ the woman replied.

It was that rude word that alerted Yvette to the nature of this man’s interest in her, and she tried to shake off the woman’s hand on her arm and run, but she was held too tightly.

The man got up from his chair and came over to her, grasping her by both hands and pulling her to him. ‘Come, my little flower,’ he said. ‘I want to look at you.’

Yvette screamed then, and it seemed to echo around the bare room. The man laughed, and picking her up, tossed her on to the bed.

‘You can go now,’ he said to the woman. ‘If she’s all you said, you’ll get your bonus.’

Every second of that terrifying and painful ordeal was still imprinted on Yvette’s mind. She could smell the man’s breath on her face, feel the heat of his body through his clothes as he wrestled with her on the bed. There was such shame as he tried to look at her private parts and the pain when he poked and prodded at them. She tried to fight him off, but he slapped her hard, and pushed her down on the bed so violently that she thought he would kill her.

Then he unbuttoned his trousers, and such a fearsome thing reared out that she screamed again. She had only ever seen a little boy’s penis, never a grown man’s, and although a girl at school had once shown her a drawing of one, she’d thought it was a joke.

‘He forced it into me, Fifi,’ she whispered. ‘I felt as if I was being split in two. I was trapped beneath him and the pain was too bad, like being burned with a red-hot poker. It seemed like hours he was ramming it into me. I think I may have passed out. I just wish I could have died there and then.’

Fifi cried with Yvette, as they held each other tightly and rocked together. All those questions she’d asked Yvette in the past, fishing as to whether she’d had a boyfriend or been married, and the jokes Dan made about the sexy French mistress, shamed her now. She wished she could find words to show Yvette that she not only fully understood her suffering but shared her pain.

Much later Yvette finished the story. She explained that she was one of many girls brought there. The brothel had been running for some years; most of the older girls had come to Paris to find work and had been lured by the promise of a bed and a meal. Some of them had not been little innocents; a few actually liked what they saw as an easy life. But the war had made it far easier for the owners to acquire much younger girls who were in great demand with their most decadent clientele. Desperate Jewish parents, terrified by the Nazis’ hatred for them, wanted to find a safe haven for their children until the war over, and it was all too easy for unscrupulous people like the Richelieux to take advantage and make money out of their fear. Yvette had heard that young boys were taken to another house and used in a similar way.

Orphans who lived on the streets were picked up too and several girls had been brought over from North Africa. The African girls were the most pitiful of all as they were often unable to communicate with anyone else.

New acquisitions were kept under lock and key, controlled by fear until such time as they accepted that they were now whores, and were grateful for their board and lodging. But for the Jewish girls there was an extra dimension of fear, for they were told daily what would happen to them if they didn’t please the men who came to use them. Enough information crept in from outside for them to know that trains left every day for Poland or Germany crammed with Jews being taken to labour camps.

In time, after many beatings and being starved and locked up naked in a cold room, Yvette knew the only way she would survive was to learn to smile and even pretend she liked what those terrible men did to her. Whether it was Nazi officers or slimy French collaborators she had to entertain, she stifled her feeling until eventually she felt she had none.

Most of the rooms had locked shutters on the windows, but not the attic rooms where the girls slept. Yvette would stand for an hour or more at a time staring out over the rooftops, looking for a landmark she recognized. But she couldn’t see the dome of the Sacré Coeur or the Seine, so she had no idea what part of Paris she was in.

Occasionally one of the newest girls would escape, but word always got back that she’d been shot or found drowned in the river. It wasn’t just trigger-happy German soldiers gunning down someone with no papers either; often the execution was carried out by one of the men who owned this place and others like it. So the girls didn’t dare trust anyone, not even one of their own, for anyone might be tempted to turn informer if it got them out of a night with one of the more brutal or perverted customers. Yvette became outwardly like all the other girls, docile, amenable, grateful for any little kindness.

‘But I was not like them in my ’ead,’ she said with a sharp edge of defiance in her voice. ‘I knew they would stay whores when ze war end, but not me. I kept it in my ’ead that I would come to England. In that house I did ze sewing, I knew I was good at it. If I had not had ze dream of England in my head I would have gone mad.’

Fifi could say nothing. She had profound sympathy and admiration for the inner strength Yvette must have had to live through such terrible experiences. Yet at the same time she could see that her friend hadn’t really won her freedom by coming to England. She had remained in a kind of prison, exchanging the men who ruled her life back in France for equally demanding women here whom she served by making their clothes.

She had no real life of her own. She went out only to visit her clients, and her cluttered flat was probably very similar to the apartment she’d shared with her mother back in her childhood. An empty life without any love or joy.

All at once Fifi felt a surge of shame that she had so often felt hard done by. She really had nothing to complain about – she’d never known hunger or real fear until now. Poverty, sickness, homelessness, she’d never experienced any of them, or even true loneliness. No one close to her had ever died, and she was born into a good, loving family. Then there was Dan, her friend, husband and lover, who would probably die for her if necessary. So maybe her mother’s disapproval of him was groundless, but mothers were the same the world over, they only wanted to protect their children.

Yvette’s mama had let those people take her child away to what she thought was safety. If she had been faced with the alternatives of Yvette dying with her on the train to Poland, or going into the brothel, which would she have chosen?

Chapter Seventeen

Dan shivered as he walked down Dale Street to the phone box on Saturday morning. There was a distinctly autumnal chill in the air even though it was only just the beginning of September, and that heightened his anxiety about Fifi. He was at his wits’ end now; he had exhausted all possible places to look for her.

When he rang her office on Wednesday morning and found she had failed to turn up for work the previous day, and hadn’t phoned in either, he knew something had happened to her. She liked the job too much not to let them know if she felt unable to work.

He phoned to see if she was at her parents’ house, but she wasn’t there either, and he could tell that Mrs Brown wasn’t covering for her – no one could feign such anxiety.

After that he systematically asked everyone in the street when they’d last seen Fifi, and if she’d said she was going away. The last sighting was by Miss Diamond who’d seen her going off to work on Tuesday morning at eight o’clock. She said she was wearing a blue and white checked jacket and a navy pencil skirt, and she definitely wasn’t carrying anything other than her handbag.

That was when he went to the police, but the minute he admitted that they’d had a row over the weekend, the police seemed to think she had just taken herself off to a friend’s place. Even when Dan said she hadn’t taken any clothes or washing things with her they showed no concern.

On Friday Dan had gone up to Chancery Lane to Fifi’s office. He’d spoken to her boss, Mr Unwin, and to every single girl who worked there, but not one of them knew anything.

The only person he hadn’t been able to talk to yet was Yvette. And now he was getting worried about her too. Mr and Mrs Balstrode, who lived above her, hadn’t seen or heard her since Monday teatime, when she gave them a parcel she’d taken in for them.

He decided he was going back to the police station as soon as he’d telephoned Fifi’s parents. They’d said last night that if they hadn’t heard from her by this morning they were going to come up to London. Despite all the bad feeling in the past, Dan really wanted them here; he thought Mr Brown might be able to persuade the police to act.

As each day passed Dan had grown more frightened. Until John Bolton was found in the river and Fifi disappeared he had been totally convinced that Alfie killed Angela. He had never been able to understand why the police had been hauling in decent, law-abiding men like Frank and Stan who would never have crossed the threshold of that house. To him it had all been cut and dried, a hideous crime carried out by a maniac, and all the police needed to do was find the other card players and clear up the finer points like what time they’d left the house, and whether they’d seen any lead-up to the crime.

But in view of recent events he was now looking at all the many questions Fifi had raised in a different light, and wishing he’d taken her more seriously. While he still believed Alfie was the murderer, it was very clear that some other kind of criminal activity had been going on at number 11, and that John Bolton had known about it. If Bolton had been killed to silence him, maybe his killers believed Fifi knew something too.

The prospect of Fifi being murdered was too terrible to contemplate. She was his love, his life, everything. He’d said that last night to Mrs Brown, and broken down and cried. He wished he hadn’t now; the woman would probably come to view that as yet another weakness. But she’d been surprisingly comforting and even sounded as though she cared about him when she’d asked if he’d had any sleep at all. As if he could sleep when his beautiful wife was in danger!

Dan came out of the phone box, turned up his coat collar because the wind was so cold, and began walking to the police station.

Mr and Mrs Brown had said they were leaving home immediately and they would stay in a London hotel until Fifi was found. Patty wanted to come too, but they’d said she was to stay in Bristol with her brothers, just in case Fifi phoned.

Dan was finally shown into an interview room with Detective Inspector Roper, the same officer who had taken Fifi’s statement after she found Angela Muckle. It had taken Dan a while to convince the desk sergeant that this was the man he needed to see. Fifi hadn’t actually liked Roper much, but she’d spent quite some time with him, and Dan didn’t want to waste any more time talking to people who didn’t know his wife.

The detective’s suit was still as crumpled as it had been that day in August, and Dan wondered how such a small man had got a job as a policeman. He didn’t look more than five feet seven, and he was in desperate need of a haircut and a dentist. His hair looked as though he’d had an electric shock, and his teeth were brown. But on the plus side, he did have a commanding voice and a firm handshake, and he had agreed to see Dan.

‘I understand your anxiety, Mr Reynolds,’ Roper said after Dan had explained that since last contacting the police he’d spent his entire time trying to trace Fifi without any success. ‘But you said yourself you had a row and you walked out. You were gone the whole weekend! She could just be giving you a taste of your own medicine.’

‘I might believe that of any other woman, but not Fifi,’ Dan retorted. ‘She isn’t a tit-for-tat person. She wrote to me and begged me to come back. Why would she do that if she was going to run off?’

‘To frighten you?’ Roper suggested.

Dan shook his head. ‘She isn’t like that. She left for work on Tuesday morning but never showed up. She took nothing with her. Do you know any women who skip off for a few days without even taking their toothbrush?’

‘She may have set off for work, and then changed her mind,’ Roper said. ‘She might have suddenly got it into her head to have a bit of a break to think things through.’

‘You’ve met my wife,’ Dan said, raising his eyebrows. ‘You must have formed an opinion about her?’

‘Yes, a very caring young woman. Intelligent and forthright.’

‘She’s all those things,’ Dan said. ‘She’s also nosy and impulsive. But above all she’s a person who needs people and when she’s troubled she likes to talk. She’d no more take off to some strange guest house on her own than fly to the moon!’

Roper shrugged. ‘I’ve been called to see men who have been married for thirty years or more, then one day their wife just ups and goes without a word. Every one of them has always been convinced she’s been killed or abducted. But the truth almost always turns out to be that the wife just got fed up or found a new man. I find that women are not as predictable as us men.’