Shallow Be Thy Grave (21 page)

“Dealing.” Jo raised her eyebrows and nodded. Then grinned. “Only hash. But there was an address on the system. So, I thought I’d go and pay him a visit.” She winked. “You know, two birds an’ all.”

“Great,” said Stuart, the sarcasm in his voice impossible to ignore. “Fiona’s disappeared off the face of the earth and you’re thinking about where you’re going to score?”

“We needed to know where he is,” said Jo, sulkily. “Jeeze, I thought you’d be pleased. I found Bruno.”

“And where is he?” asked Stuart.

“He has a flat, not far from here, just round the corner, in fact. So I thought I’d go and pay him a visit.”

“And he was there?” asked Lily.

“He was there, a bit sleepy. I woke him up.”

“And? What’s he like?”

“Actually, you know, he’s sound. Once we’d got over the first few minutes. I took the phrase book. He apologised for stealing the diary – said he was trying to protect Brigitte. He thought it might contain incriminating information.”

“So, she’s his sister?” asked Stuart.

“Uh uh. No. She’s not his sister. He’s not Brigitte’s brother,” Jo paused, allowing the tension to build.

“Jo!” Lily shrieked, unable to bear the suspense a moment longer. Her nerves were already shot to hell.

“He’s her husband.”

“Her husband?”

Jo nodded, savouring the astonished look on their faces.

“How old is she?” asked Stuart.

“She’s twenty. And from the East. She escaped, before the wall came down. Fourteen years old - came over in the boot of a car.”

“Did he know why?” asked Stuart. “Why she escaped, I mean.”

Jo shrugged her shoulders. “It’s something to do with her family. And she’d have been shot if she’d been caught - so it’s got to be pretty hard-core. I’m thinking Grace was right. Sexual abuse.”

“Shit,” said Lily, as anger on behalf of this woman she’d never met, swelled in her stomach.

“He met her when she first came to France, couple of years back. I think he loves her, although he says it was an arrangement, what’s it called? A marriage of convenience. He married her so that she could get a French passport.”

“What did he get?” asked Lily.

“Chance is his surname,” said Jo, ignoring Lily’s question. 

“Does he know where she is?” asked Stuart.

“No, he’s really worried.”

Lily pulled a face.

“He is,” said Jo. “You can just tell. I totally believe him.”

“So are they like, married?” asked Stuart.

“What do you mean?”

“Are they together?” asked Lily at the same time as Stuart said, “Is she a prostitute?”

“I think, if it were up to Bruno,” said Jo, “they’d be living together and playing happy families. But Brigitte seems to be a complicated figure. He said she used to live with him, but then she took this place on, for clients. So, yes, Stuart, in answer to your question, she has made money from the sale of sex. If she was a man she’d be considered an entrepreneur, so let’s call her that instead of prostitute, shall we?”

Stuart pulled a face. “I’m not judging her.”

“Y’see, just by saying that you are. Men are allowed to sell anything: sperm, nuclear weapons, guns, babies, someone else’s kidney, water, whatever. We’ll give them a medal for it. But women, they aren’t even allowed to sell their own bodies. Talk about an uneven fucking playing field.”

“Alright, I was only asking.”

“Yeah, well don’t. Just listen.”

“Does he know anything about Brigitte’s family finding her?”

“All he knows is that Brigitte called round a couple of weeks back. He gave her a stack of letters that had come for her. She flicked through them, opened a couple, and then, he said, she turned white and he thought she was going to cry. He tried to ask her what it was, but she wouldn’t say anything.”

“Then she told him that if anyone came looking for her, he was to say they’d split up and he had no idea where she was. She told him to be really careful, to watch his back.”

“And has anyone been looking for her?”

Jo sat up higher in the sofa and leaned forward, like she was going to tell them so great big secret. “His flat was broken into, last Sunday - five days ago. Completely turned over.”

“And he thinks it was Brigitte’s family?”

Jo nodded. “He said they took some cash, some dope, but apart from that all that was missing was a photograph of him and Brigitte, on their wedding day, that he had in a frame. He said he’d put it up on the mantelpiece in case the immigration police called round, but like I said, I think he’s got a big thing about her. Unrequited love.” She stared at Stuart. “Poor bastard.”

Stuart flinched under Jo’s gaze but didn’t respond.

“So,” said Jo, dragging her attention from Stuart back to Lily. “I think that means Brigitte’s family are here. In Paris, I mean.”

“Which makes sense, really,” said Stuart. Lily looked at him confused. “When you think about it. The wall came down in November. East Germans can travel, can live here.”

“She must have been shitting herself,” said Lily.

Jo pulled at her pink Mohican, swept it from side to side until it was back and vertical in the middle of her head. “Oh, he also said she’s got four brothers. And a dad who she can’t bear to even mention.”

“He could be spinning us a line,” said Lily.

Jo shook her head. “When they got married, they invented a background for Brigitte – case the immigration authorities ever came calling. They decided she was from West Germany. She already had Brigitte Stolz’s birth certificate, but she didn’t have a passport.”

“What’s her real name?”

“Who knows? He knew she used to call herself Anna.”

 “Anna’s probably fake too,” said Stuart. “It’s a good name to pick. It’s pretty common across the whole of Western Europe. She could be English, Spanish, German, Dutch…”

“They invented a background for her,” Jo continued. “And he said that Brigitte decided to say she was brought up by her mum, a single parent - that she never knew who her father was. ‘That would have been a much better life,’ she said.”

“How did she get into France, without a passport?”

“Easy enough, if you’re coming from the West,” said Stuart. “The difficult bit would have been getting out of East Germany. But there’s miles of borders to go at between Germany and France.”

“She’s a tough little cookie, that’s for sure,” said Jo, admiration in her voice. She passed the spliff back to Lily.

“I wonder if that’s why they’re so desperate to track her down?” asked Stuart. “They’re scared she might talk. They’d be subject to West German law now.”

Jo nodded. “She’s been safe up until now, while they were all trapped in the East. They might as well have been in prison. But when the wall came down, she must have known it was only a matter of time. Poor cow.”

“Do you think that man in the Love Shack earlier…” Lily’s heart started beating faster just at the mention of him, “Do you think he was part of her family?”

“It would fit,” said Jo. “Because, according to Bruno, since Fiona moved in here, Brigitte had given up most of the sex work.”

“Most?”

“Well, she told him she’d packed it in completely, but he didn’t believe her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she didn’t have any other job, and yet she was still flashing the cash around. She paid his fines - the ones he got for dealing. He reckons she’s moved upmarket.”

“Upmarket?” Lily squinted as smoke made her eyes smart.

“She told him she might be going on holiday. When he asked her about how she was going to pay for it, she said something about getting a big payment. No details.”

“Well, now we’ve got something we can to the police with,” said Stuart. “I mean we’ve got a clear threat, two missing women. They’re going to have to do something about it now.”

“Hold your horses, Captain Fantastic,” said Jo. “We’ve got to think about this carefully. We know that Brigitte has married for convenience, which if they find out, might mean she gets deported.”

“Not now the wall’s come down,” said Stuart.

“She’s also been working as a prostitute.”

“I thought it was entrepreneur?” said Stuart, a sulkiness to his tone that Lily didn’t recognise.

“I’m looking at it through policeman’s eyes,” said Jo.

Lily raised her eyebrows, as much a gesture to herself as anyone else in the room.

Jo noticed. “I just don’t want to rush into something that might land them both in trouble, not if we can find them ourselves. What do you think, Lil?”

Lily hadn’t spoken for a while. She pulled on her bottom lip, looking out of the small kitchen window onto the tower block opposite. She was thinking back to when she was at Poly, among the mainly white, educated, middle class. She used to look at the girls with the two parent families, the daddy’s girls (and she could spot them a mile off) and be so overwhelmed by jealousy, envy and spite it used to almost knock her off her feet. She’d have these visions, of square-jawed, square-shouldered men, picking up their little girls and lifting them high up into the air, to reach the highest apples on the tree. And she’d think of her own father, who’d walked away from her the day she was born, who had never helped her in any way. Never encouraged her, lifted her up, spurred her on. She’d have this image of the square-shouldered daddies holding their children aloft, and she’d see herself as a small child, just squatting there on the floor while all the other kids got the best apples. 

But when the self-pity threatened to overwhelm her, she’d try to remind herself that there was a whole other category of child. The children whose parents had not only not lifted them up, they’d actively held them down.  Those children didn’t languish on the floor, unpicked up. Those children were burned with cigarettes, stamped upon, stubbed into the ground.

And Brigitte was one of those children. One of those children that made Lily realise that however badly she’d been let down, there was a whole heap further to fall.

“Come on then,” said Stuart, pulling on his jacket, as it became obvious that Lily wasn’t going to say anything. “This is way bigger than the three of us now. The police are going to have to take this seriously.”

“Wait,” said Lily. “We need to think about this. I’ve crashed in on Fiona’s life once before, remember? I didn’t think about her then, I was so bent on getting one over on my dad.”

Stuart crossed the room to the worktop where Lily was sitting. He made as if he was going to touch her, then seemed to change his mind. He held his arms at his side, but tried to make eye contact with Lily. “She said she was glad you’d kidnapped her, Lil. She’d always rather have known the truth. You know what she’s like. She sent me a card last year - ‘The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off.’”

Lily smiled, a half smile, but hearing that Fiona hadn’t born a grudge made breathing a little easier. She allowed the effect to filter through her body before speaking. “I want to make sure I’ve looked at it from her point of view, before we go running to the cops. And the way I see it is:”

She jumped down from the worktop and held up a finger. “Either, the worst thing has happened, and they’re both dead.”

She paused, interested to see how voicing her worst fears would impact on her. She’d half expected to collapse in a ball but her legs, miraculously, seemed still to be holding her up. “In which case going to the police only serves to solve our own curiosity. And while I obviously want to know where my sister is, this isn’t about me. I don’t feel like I deserve to know where she is - she didn’t choose to tell me a whole heap of stuff when she could have done.”

“That’s not-”

Lily held up her hand to prevent Stuart from talking. “Or, looking on the bright side, they’re still alive, and they’re hiding. In which case, we owe it to them both not to do anything that might jeopardise their hiding place. I mean, if they’re hiding from Brigitte’s family - why don’t they go to the police?”

“Good point, well made,” said Jo.

“Of course, there’s always the third possibility,” said Lily, putting three fingers in the air.

Stuart frowned.

“They’re being prevented from going to the police.” Lily paused again to assess how the thought of her sister being held somewhere against her will would make her feel. She couldn’t help but feel the odds were against her sister having the misfortune of being kidnapped twice in a relatively short lifespan. Or did it work the opposite way – the fact that Lily had kidnapped Fiona marked her out as a kidnap victim? She skipped over these thoughts and pressed on. “But if she’d been kidnapped, why would that man be there today?  At the Love Shack? They must be still looking for them. And they wouldn’t still be looking for them if they’d kidnapped them, or killed them. Would they?”

She looked from Stuart to Jo and back again.

Jo grinned. “All we have to do is make sure we find them before Brigitte’s family does. And we’ve got several advantages over Brigitte’s family.”

Stuart unconsciously took his jacket off again, as if he knew the decision had been made.

“What are our advantages?” asked Lily, sitting herself back up on the worktop.

“Well, number one, we’re not a bunch of paedos.”

“True,” said Lily as Stuart frowned. “That’s got to be an advantage.”

“I mean, they’re not going to want to go to the police,” Jo explained.

“But we don’t want to go to the police,” said Stuart. “I mean, you said…”

“But we have Andy,” said Jo, with the air of someone announcing they were Man U to someone else’s City. “We’ll be able to find out what the police know without actually having to involve them.”

“Mmmm,” said Stuart, like he wasn’t convinced. “What are our other advantages?”

“We have Fiona’s diary,” Jo picked it up and waggled it at him. “This might have clues.”

“Or might not,” said Stuart. “The other two didn’t say much.”

“And,” said Jo, stretching the word to build the suspense. When the other two were both looking at her with anticipation she announced, “We have Bruno, Fiona and Brigitte on our side. Not to mention truth and justice.”

“Yes,” said Lily, stretching out the word. “I mean, we all know truth and justice wins out in the end.”