Behind Closed Doors (24 page)

‘Bleached blonde hair, shoulder-length. Wore clothes that were too tight for her. It was years ago; you really think that’ll help?’

‘What about the other girls? What do you remember about them?’

Scarlett looked down at her thumbnail. ‘They were young too. One of them looked like a child. Her name was Suzy, I think. She was from Eastern Europe somewhere but her mother was from Scotland so she spoke a bit of English. The other one was older, had some kind of mental problem.’

‘What about this Tina?’ Sam said. ‘Would you recognise her again?’

‘No,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, she was only there for that week and then we never saw her again.’

‘So how long were you in Prague?’ Sam asked.

‘I lost track. Years. Then one day they moved me without warning. I got put back in a van and shipped to Amsterdam. I was there for years too.’

‘Do you know the address where you were living? Or where you were moved to?’

‘No. It was an apartment in the city. I can tell you it was the third buzzer down out of ten. They never left me alone, not for a second. The whole time I was there I was shipped between the apartment and the rooms where I worked. I never went anywhere else – oh, apart from to the doctor once or twice. And then they took me there. I was never alone.’

‘The doctor?’ Sam said hopefully. ‘Did you know his name?’

Scarlett shook her head. ‘I’m not being deliberately obstructive, you know. He wasn’t a real doctor in any case. He was some Russian medical student who gave us antibiotics for an extortionate fee and didn’t bother to ask if we were allergic to anything. And, before you ask, his office was behind a shop in Bijlmer. I could possibly find it if you drove me there, but it would be a struggle. The last time I saw him was over a year ago. And I only ever went there at night-time.’

‘How long have you been back in the UK, Scarlett?’ Sam asked. She felt as though Scarlett was relaxed enough with their discussion for her to start talking about more recent events.

Scarlett shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Months. It was before Christmas that I came back. What month are we in now? November? Well, then. Nearly a year.’

‘And you’ve been here in Briarstone the whole time?’

‘More or less,’ she said. ‘I’ve been keeping my head down.’

Sam’s hand was aching. She flexed her wrist, turning over to the next page.

‘Can we stop for a bit?’ Scarlett asked.

While Scarlett went to use the bathroom, Sam stood at the kitchen window and stretched. The weather was closing in, almost dark outside already, the afternoon fading into evening before the world was ready for it. The garden was a tangled mess of waist-high weeds, a plastic slide half-hidden in the undergrowth, a tree at the bottom with the remainder of a rope swing hanging forlornly from a branch. Grim, this place, however much they’d tried to make it feel like a place of sanctuary. No wonder they were going to get rid of it. Of course, they weren’t replacing it with something better – they weren’t replacing it at all. Vulnerable victims were going to be dealt with at regular police stations like everyone else. They’d redecorated two of the interview rooms at Briarstone nick, but, whatever the management thought, a nice pot plant and a box of tissues weren’t going to help people feel comfortable enough to talk.

The front door opened and Orla came in, bringing with her a gust of wind.

‘In here,’ Sam called.

‘Hi. Where’s Scarlett?’

‘Gone to the loo. How did you get on?’

‘Not ideal, but I’ve got a place at a hostel in Charlmere.’

‘Gosh, that’s a trek. Nowhere closer?’

‘Everything’s full to bursting. I’ll take her over there this evening.’

‘Take me where?’ Scarlett said, from the doorway.

The Coach and Horses was what Lou would have called an old man’s pub. A bar with a tiled floor, rough plaster walls and waist-height dark wood panelling, sticky wooden tables, mismatched chairs and a fireplace that might well have cheered things up had the fire in it been lit. The place was empty. Next door, the snug was not much better, but at least it had a carpet. There were three blokes sitting around a table in the corner upon which sat three half-drunk pints of bitter and three empties. Lou caught the words ‘overhead cam’ and ‘four-wheel drive’, followed by something that sounded like ‘but it’s all about the gravy. You get the gravy right, everything’s right’. Sky Sports was on the TV bolted to the wall above the bar, the sound mercifully turned down.

The woman behind the bar looked ridiculously pleased to see a fresh customer approaching. ‘Yes, love! What can I get you?’

Lou looked at the optics and the fridges, wondering what she could get away with. Decided it wasn’t worth it. ‘Just a Diet Coke, please.’

‘Can’t tempt you to a late lunch?’ the woman said, pointing with a heavily manicured finger at the ‘Specials’ board. ‘Got some beef curry left.’

‘No, thanks,’ Lou said, thinking of the crisps and chocolate she’d already consumed and wishing she’d waited.

She sat down where she could see the door, got out her mobile and ran through her messages. There was no signal this far out in the sticks, but even pretending to read old messages was preferable to staring into space or making eye contact with any of the other occupants.

The door opened and Annie came in, bringing with her a blast of cold air. ‘Thank you for meeting me,’ she said. ‘Can I get you something?’

‘I’ve just got one, thanks.’

Annie went to the bar. She was wearing skinny jeans, trainers, a hooded top under a black wool coat, a thick scarf wound around her neck several times, her hair tucked inside. While she waited for her drink, she tucked one trainered foot behind the other.

‘Can I tempt you to a late lunch?’ the woman behind the bar offered, and Annie shook her head.

A moment later she came back with a large glass of red wine. She sat down next to Lou. Her eyes were wide, tears brimming. ‘I didn’t know who else to call,’ Annie said. ‘You gave me your card. You said I should ring.’

‘That’s right,’ Lou said. ‘Has something happened?’

Annie was breathing fast. ‘It’s Clive – it’s just all starting to go wrong again. Everything was… normal… and now it’s not normal any more.’

‘What do you mean? What’s going wrong?’

‘Clive,’ Annie said with desperation in her voice. ‘He keeps trying to tell me I’m going mad. He says I’m neurotic. He doesn’t understand how hard all this is for me.’

She pulled a tattered tissue from the pocket of her coat and wiped her eyes with it. Her hands were shaking. Lou noticed the brown spots on them, the deep grooves of tendons running along the back. Annie might dress like a teenager, but her hands gave away her real age.

‘I’m guessing he doesn’t know you’re here?’

‘No. He doesn’t. You won’t tell him, will you? Please?’

Annie stretched out a hand and took Louisa’s, unexpectedly, making her want to recoil. Her hand was cold, the fingernails sharp. Lou patted the hand and released it in a way she hoped was reassuring.

‘Of course. This is between us.’

‘He doesn’t think I should tell you what happened in Spain. He says you’ll prosecute us for wasting police time. Is that true?’

‘It depends,’ Lou said, suddenly on high alert. ‘It sounds as if this is something we should talk about properly, Annie. If you want to make another statement, it would be a better idea to —’

‘No, I don’t want to – I mean – I don’t have to make a statement, do I? I just want to explain. It wasn’t how you think. It wasn’t because I was hiding things, I was just confused at the time, and then when Scarlett didn’t come back it didn’t really seem to matter that much. But now – well, Clive thinks Scarlett is going to try and make things look bad for us. And we had nothing to do with her going, nothing at all.’

‘Annie,’ Lou said, ‘if you don’t want to make a statement then at least let me record our conversation. Just for me to refer to later. Whatever you tell me, I am going to need to write it up.’

For a moment Lou thought Annie was going to refuse, or was about to get up and walk out again – in which case she would have given in and just listened. But to her surprise Annie nodded. Lou found the sound recording app on her phone and started it, hoping to God it picked up the conversation well enough.

‘Go on,’ Lou said. ‘You tell me what happened. I’m listening.’

‘Well,’ Annie said, keeping one eye on the phone, lying on the table next to her wine glass, ‘I saw her go. That’s the second thing. I suppose the first thing was that boy she was with…’

‘The boy?’

‘She had somehow met a Greek boy while we were on holiday. It didn’t much seem to matter. But you see, I thought she might have run away with him.’

‘But you didn’t tell the police this at the time? Why ever not?’

‘Clive didn’t want to. He didn’t believe she had run away. He thought if the police knew she’d met a boy, then they wouldn’t bother to look for her properly.’

Lou kept her face neutral, although at times like this it was a struggle. Had they not considered that the boy might have had something to do with Scarlett going missing against her will? That finding the boy might have meant finding Scarlett? It was difficult, too, not to feel the sinister undertones in what Annie was saying. Deliberately withholding information during a live investigation into the kidnapping of a child? How could they possibly have thought that was the right thing to do?

‘So what happened with the boy?’ Lou said. ‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know,’ Annie said, shaking her head. ‘I never spoke to him. I saw her kissing him, out on the road, the night before she disappeared. He ran off when Scarlett saw me.’

‘Did you discuss it with her?’

Annie smiled. ‘Yes. Her father wasn’t very happy, put it like that.’

‘You asked her about him?’

‘She said he was just a boy she’d met. She denied anything had happened, just kissing.’

‘But Clive was angry?’

Annie paused before answering. ‘Yes.’

‘Did he hurt her? Punish her?’

‘Oh, no! Not – not really. I mean, he was angry, he might have shouted a bit, but then she was being deliberately disobedient. She knew what our expectations of her were. She was only fifteen! Still a child! Clive has this thing —’

Annie broke off suddenly, and Lou caught the thread of something important that she had almost let slip. She hid it by taking a sip of wine, almost putting the glass back on the table and picking it up and sipping again, giving herself time to think.

‘What were you going to say?’ Lou asked.

‘Nothing. Clive just – he doesn’t want our daughters to grow up too fast. These days, girls are sexualised at a younger and younger age, aren’t they? We didn’t want that for our girls. They both knew that. They knew the difference between right and wrong; we’d told them often enough.’

‘So what happened after you discussed the boy with Scarlett? Did she see him again?’

‘She stayed indoors, sulking. She said she didn’t feel well, and I guess she might have had that tummy bug we’d all had, so she didn’t come out to dinner with us the night after. That was the night she went.’

Annie lifted her glass again and drank the last of the wine in two noisy gulps.

‘You said earlier that you saw her go,’ Lou said. ‘What did you mean?’

Annie looked at her hands, rubbed the fingers of her right hand over the back of the left. Lou could see a tear hanging on the bottom lashes of her eye.

‘Annie?’

But she shook her head, causing two tears to fall in wet splashes on to the table. ‘I can’t, I can’t.’

‘It will be much better if you tell me,’ Lou offered, ‘it really will. It sounds as if you’ve been carrying this around with you all these years.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said, taking a shuddering breath in. ‘If Clive knew I was telling you this…’

‘What would he do, Annie?’

‘Nothing, nothing! But he’d be so upset. He thinks you don’t understand us, how it is between us and Juliette – with both of the girls, before… We’re happy together. We make each other happy. Nobody seems to understand that.’

‘Tell me what happened,’ Lou said softly. ‘Take your time.’

‘I… I heard the patio door go. It was the middle of the night – well, the early hours of the morning, really. I thought I’d dreamed it, but then I couldn’t get to sleep. I got up and went next door a few minutes later. Scarlett’s bed was empty. I went looking for her.’

‘And – you found her?’

‘She was on the road outside the resort where we were staying. I was standing just by the gate. I was about to shout out for her, and then I saw her getting into a van.’

‘Getting into a van?’ Lou echoed.

‘A white van – like, I don’t know, a Transit, something like that, with a door at the side. It pulled up next to her. I saw her talking to someone, and then she moved closer to the van – it was blocking my view. And a few seconds later it drove off and she was gone.’

Lou couldn’t say anything for a moment. She waited for Annie to continue, but the woman was staring at her wine glass as if hoping it would magically fill up again. Lou wanted to shake her.

‘I know I should have said something.’

‘Yes,’ Lou said. Left it there.

‘But it didn’t cross my mind that she’d been taken. I thought she was meeting that boy. I thought he’d just picked her up. What could I do? I couldn’t chase after a van at two in the morning. I thought she’d be back in a couple of hours, back in her bed pretending nothing had happened.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I went back to the room. Clive woke up when I came in. I told him what I’d seen. He was cross, of course he was. We sat up for a bit hoping she’d come back, then after an hour or so we went back to bed.’

‘And the next morning, when she still wasn’t back?’

‘We went out to look for her. I was getting worried. I hadn’t thought for a minute that she wouldn’t come back. I thought she might have run away, but that she’d think better of it and come back of her own accord before the bus came to collect us for the airport. Or we thought – we thought she might have slept with him, this boy, and that she’d fallen asleep and hadn’t realised that it was morning. Then we thought maybe she was too scared to come back, in case we were angry.’