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‘So what else is she frightened of?’

‘She’s very superstitious, apparently. Faith can tell you more about it. I can ask her to call into the Garda station later this afternoon, if you like, when she’s finished at Dunne’s Stores. She works in the cafe at lunchtimes.’

‘No – what’s the time now? I can meet her at the hospital if she’s going to be there at ten. I’d like to see the girl again anyway. Does Faith have a mobile number?’

‘I’ll call her if you like, Katie, and tell her you’re coming.’

John finished his muesli and put the bowl in the dishwasher. ‘Any idea when you’ll be home tonight? Or is that too speculative? I was hoping I might be able to take you out for dinner, even if we only go to Gilbert’s.’

Katie went up to him and put her arms around his waist and looked up into his eyes. ‘Don’t be angry with me. I’ll get home as soon as I can. I’ll call you. And I swear on the Holy Bible I’ll finish reading your plan tonight.’

John kissed her, and smoothed his hand over her coppery hair. ‘I’m sorry about the puppet thing. We Meaghers have always been a prickly lot. Actually, I get it from my mam. She thought that everybody was out to take advantage of her – even God.’

By the time she reached the hospital the rain had begun to clear, and when she reached Isabelle’s room a watery sun was shining through the window. Isabelle was sitting up in bed, while a large African woman in a jazzy red and orange dress was sitting close to her. The woman was wearing a red silk scarf which had been folded into a high, complicated headdress, and huge hoop earrings. She had a broad, pleasant face, with a wide gap between her front teeth.

She lifted herself out of her chair when Katie came in and held out her hand.

‘Hallo, I’m Faith,’ she said. ‘And you must be Katie. Father Dominic rang me to say you were coming. I’m sorry. I know your title is chief detective something, but Father Dominic said you wouldn’t mind me calling you by your first name.’

‘Katie’s grand, Faith. Don’t worry about it. How are you this morning, Isabelle? You’re looking much better.’

Isabelle smiled, and Faith said, ‘She is
so
much better. She knows now that she is safe. You know that you are safe now, don’t you, Lolade?’

‘That’s her name? Lolade?’ asked Katie. ‘I’d better stop calling her Isabelle.’

The girl smiled even more broadly and said, ‘I tell Faith that you are a very kind person.’

Faith said, ‘It took a little time, but Lolade is no longer afraid to say what happened to her, are you, Lolade? She has been telling me so much this morning.’

‘Father Dominic said something about superstition,’ said Katie.

‘That’s right. Lolade believed that she was cursed. She was trafficked from her home village near Ibadan, in south-west Nigeria. That was about eight months ago, as far as she can remember.’

‘How was she taken?’

‘Her aunt said that she was going to find her work as a cleaner for a wealthy family in Lagos and that she would be able to send her parents money every month. But her aunt was involved in trafficking and she was flown here. More than likely she was given false documents. There are plenty of officials in Nigeria who will give you travel documents in exchange for the right payment.’

‘Mother of God. It’s the same old story. It’s enough to make you cry.’

‘There is worse, though. Before she was sent here, her aunt took her to a juju priestess. The priestess held a special ceremony and then she took clippings of Lolade’s nails and hair and wrapped them up in front of her. She warned Lolade that if she tried to run away or to tell anybody that she was being forced to be a prostitute, she would be struck dead by lightning and all of her family would fall sick.’

Katie nodded. ‘Our immigration people were telling me all about that not too long ago. They say it’s quite a common way that traffickers make sure that their girls all do what they’re ordered to and don’t try to run off. When you come to think about it, I suppose it’s no more bizarre than us Catholics believing that our souls will die if we have sex with a goat, or cheat at poker, or commit some other mortal sin. So that’s why the poor girl wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘That’s right,’ said Faith. She reached across the blanket and held Lolade’s hand. ‘I told her, though, that I too was threatened by a juju priest before I was sent here to Ireland. I was forced to work for two years in a brothel on Pope’s Quay and I will tell you it was like a living death. I was a prisoner, no person to speak to. I became useless, meaningless, helpless and hopeless. I felt I had to do whatever my minders told me, because I was terrified, just as Lolade was. The juju priest had warned me that I would burst into flames and all my skin would shrivel up, and that back in Nigeria my father and mother and all of my brothers and sisters would choke to death.

‘Ruhama saved me from the brothel, and it was a Nigerian sister from Cois Tine who finally convinced me that the juju curse could not harm me. In the end I told everything to the guards,
everything
. I didn’t catch fire. Father Dominic managed to contact my family through the Roman Catholic diocese in Oyo and none of them had been harmed because I had spoken out.’

‘What happened to your minders?’

‘Some of them were arrested and I think that one was ordered to be deported. Of course, they were not punished nearly enough for what they had done to me, but I try not think about that. The most important thing is that now I have my life and my freedom, and I believe in my true value as a person.’

Katie turned to Lolade and said, ‘You hear that, sweetheart? You’re going to have a very good life from now on. You have people around you who are going to help you now, and treat you with respect – not use you as if you’re worth nothing at all.’

Lolade nodded. ‘I feel happy now. I did not feel happy in a long time.’

‘I wanted to ask you about something you said to me in the ambulance. It sounded like ‘
Rama Mal-ah-eeka
’, if I remember it correctly. I didn’t know what it meant.’

Lolade glanced anxiously at Faith and gripped her hand tight. Whatever it meant, it obviously still disturbed her.

‘It means Angel of Revenge,’ said Faith. ‘The woman who killed Mawakiya, that is what she called herself. Lolade was not only frightened because this woman said she would shoot her like Mawakiya if she left the room, but because she was sure that she was a juju witch.’

Lolade made a quick side-to-side gesture two or three times across her chest. ‘She was wearing a juju necklace same like the witch who put the curse on me,’ she said. ‘I thought that even if she had gone away she could still kill me from a distance.’

Katie opened her briefcase and took out the CCTV blow-up that Detective Ryan had given her of the suspect following the purple-suited man along Patrick Street.

‘
That
is the woman,’ said Lolade, furiously nodding her head. ‘
That
is
Rama Mala’ika
.’

Katie showed her another picture, this time of both the suspect and the purple-suited man.

‘The man there – that is Mawakiya. He was wearing those clothes when he came to my room. He was coming for my money. He comes every day for my money. He told me also that two men were going to come in the evening. They want to have me at the same time, front and back, and I should be nice to them because they are his special friends.’

‘But then this woman appeared?’

‘Yes! She came in through the door
bang
! like thunder. And she point a gun at Mawakiya. And Mawakiya is very, very frightened! He gets down on his knees and says, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me! But she says I will kill you if you do not do as I say.’

Lolade was growing agitated now, and Faith stroked her hair and said, ‘Ssh, ssh, it is all over now. Nobody can hurt you any more.’

‘If it upsets you too much to talk about this now, Lolade, I can come back later,’ Katie told her.

‘I
want
to tell you,’ Lolade insisted. ‘I was very frightened of the woman, too, but she did not hurt me, and I hated Mawakiya. It was horrible, how she killed him, but I am happy that he is dead. I could sing a happy song that Mawakiya is dead.’

‘Did you see her cut off his hands?’

Lolade shook her head. ‘The woman said to me to sit down in the corner and to turn my back and to cover myself with my blanket. I did not see. I only hear. I hear the woman tell Mawakiya to take off all of his clothes. Then I hear her say that she would shoot him between his legs and turn him into a woman so that he would know what it was like to be treated like a slave.

‘I heard Mawakiya weep. I never hear a man weep like that before, only my grandfather when my grandmother died. I could not hear everything that the woman say to him next, but a long time pass, and then I hear him weep again, but this time it was different, and he say again and again “
ah
!-
ah
!-
ah
!”, like something hurt him very bad.

‘Next, another long time pass. I hear noises like “
sheee-sheee-sheee
”, but I do not know what is happening. I pull away my blanket and I turn around to see if the woman is still there. Mawakiya is lying on the bed and there is so much blood. I see then that he has no hands any more. The woman is standing over him with her gun. She is pointing it at Mawakiya’s face.’

‘She saw that you were looking at her, but that didn’t stop her?’

‘No. She was not afraid at all. She shot Mawakiya between his eyes. Her gun is very small but very loud
bang
! and his forehead disappear. She load her gun again and then she shoot him in his nose, and the rest of his face is disappear, too.

‘I feel sick to see what the woman has done to him. He has no face any more, only big red hole. She say something to me but I do not know what it is. I am deaf at first, because of the noise of her gun. She picks up my blanket and uses it to wrap up Mawakiya’s clothes, his suit, his dirty underpant, everything. I do not see what she has done with his hands, but when she goes, his hands are gone, too.’

‘But she warned you that if you tried to leave the room, she would kill you in the same way as Mawakiya?’

‘Yes,’ said Lolade. ‘And I thought that she could still do it, even if she was not there. I thought that she was a juju witch, because of her necklace, and because of the way she killed Mawakiya. He cannot go to heaven now because he has no hands to hold his spear and his shield, and he cannot wear warpaint because he has no face. He has to stay between this world and the next forever. They say it is like being drowned in a sack, you cannot breathe, but you never die.’

Katie said, ‘Tell me something about Mawakiya. What was his real name?’

‘I do not know. Everybody call him Mawakiya, because he was always singing, and always the same song. I once hear a woman friend of his call him Kola, but that is the only time. The first day when I come to Cork I meet only white men. They make me stay in this very cold bedroom for two days and all the time there is a big fat man watching me, even when I go to the toilet. His name is Bula-Bulan Yaro.’

‘That means “Fat Man”,’ put in Faith. ‘We know him. He’s an illegal who does all kinds of odd jobs for the traffickers.’

‘Bula, yes, we know him, too,’ said Katie. ‘He wallpapers brothels, drives the girls to the STD clinics, things like that. Not exactly criminal activities in themselves, but not very moral, either. Our Immigration Bureau have tried to deport him at least twice, as far as I know. I think his defence is that he’s fathered a child by some divorced woman in Farranree. There’s some human rights issue, anyway. He’s pretty low priority, but we’ll get him one day.’

Katie opened up her briefcase again and took out a manila envelope with more photographs in it. ‘I’m not going to tell you who the people in these pictures are, Lolade, but I want you to look at them carefully and tell me if you’ve ever met any of them, or seen them. If you have, I want you to tell me if you can remember any of their names, or what they might have called each other, or anything they might have said that sticks in your mind. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t make any sense to you when they said it.’

She took out six photographs and handed them to Lolade one by one. Lolade frowned at the first one, and then gave it back. ‘I have never seen these two men.’

‘That’s a relief. One of them is Chief Superintendent Dermot O’Driscoll and the other is Councillor Charles Clancy, the current lord mayor. That was just a test, I’m sorry.’

Lolade took much longer to study the second photograph. At last she tapped it emphatically with her fingernail. ‘
This
man came to see me when I was first brought to Cork. It was in a flat, with other girls. I don’t know his name, but before he came the girls kept saying that “Himself will be here in a minute”.’

‘Nobody actually called him by his name when he was there?’

‘I don’t think so. But I was very frightened and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I didn’t listen much to what the girls were saying.’

‘Did
he
say anything that you can remember?’

‘He looked at me and smiled and said I was a cutie. I asked him what he want me to do and he is surprised that I speak good English. I told him that I had best teacher in my school, Mister Akindele. He said because I speak good English this would help me with my work, to be friendly with customers. Then he tell me to take off all of my clothes.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I say no. But he say it is important health check. He say I cannot work unless he is sure I am healthy, I don’t have skin problem, something like that. One of the women was there in the room with us and she said to me that it would be all right, she would stay there. So I took off my clothes, but to do that in front of a strange man I feel very – I don’t know the word. Like shame.’

‘Embarrassed, of course,’ said Katie. ‘But what did this man say then?’

‘He was very angry when he see me with no clothes on! He ask the woman how old I am. He said look at her, she is only a
kid
! He said, do you want me to get done? I don’t know what he means by “done”. He keeps saying, “I’ll get done, you stupid woman! I’ll get done!” I want to stop him being so angry so I tell him that I am already thirteen. But then he was even more angry. I do not know about the law in Ireland – I think he is angry because he believes that I am lying. I have a friend at home who was married when she was eleven, and her husband is forty-nine, so I thought it would make it all right. But he is still so angry. And I have no clothes on.’