Shallow Be Thy Grave (9 page)

Lily glanced across to Jo. “We’ll have to go.”

Jo nodded. “You’re sure they definitely went?”

“I guess. I mean, I think she would have rung me if they’d changed their plans.”

“Have you got a photo of them both?” asked Lily.

“Yes, from when we went to the fair in Jardin les Tuileries. Hang on a minute.”

Grace ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs like an eager springer spaniel and returned a minute later with an envelope of photos. She flicked through a couple before handing one to Lily. “That’s all three of us. We got this bloke to take it. I was worried he was going to nick the camera. That’s why I look weird. That’s Brigitte.”

Lily stared at the picture of the three of them, arms round each other. Fiona was in the middle, grinning to the camera. The sun was beating down from a clear blue sky and all three girls had bare arms. Grace and Fiona were wearing short skirts. Brigitte had a pair of brown shorts on, her short dark hair pulled back from her face in some kind of headscarf, bandana. She was attractive in a boyish way. Like those photographs of Audrey Hepburn with her short hair cut that everyone seemed to buy at freshers’ fairs. Lily guessed she was a couple of years older than Fiona. Maybe twenty two.

 “Poor Fiona,” said Grace. “Just when she was starting to move on.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lily. “Move on from what?”

Grace’s cheeks turned pink. She poured the tea into three china cups. “Nothing. I just mean, she was so much happier once she left the Beaumonts. Life was starting to look up. You know she got a place at the University of Paris starting in September?”

“She mentioned something about it,” Lily lied. “I didn’t know she’d definitely got a place.”

“She only found out a couple of weeks ago.”

“What about their flat?” asked Jo.

“You mean Brigitte’s place?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been. It’s still there, I guess. Poor Fi. I guess she’ll have to go back to England now. I wonder whether she’ll still do her course? It won’t be easy for her, leaving her dad again. She worries about him enough as it is, especially since, well everything.”

“Can we take this?” Lily waved the photograph in the air.

“Sure. I’ve got the negatives.”

“Do you know,” Jo started to speak and then hesitated. She glanced across at Lily before looking back to Grace. “Do you happen to know whether Brigitte worked as a, worked at all?”

“Fiona said she was something in sales, but I don’t know what.”

“Sales?” Lily repeated. She feared the worst.

“Has she got any family, or friends in Paris? Brigitte, I mean,” asked Jo. “Someone who might know where they’ve gone?”

Grace shook her head. “That’s the weird thing.”

“What is?”

“Brigitte doesn’t have any contact with her family. I don’t even know where she’s from. She says she’s originally from Germany, but she’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“Her German’s not good enough. I mean mine’s not brilliant but I know the difference between zeichnen and zeignen.”

“Why would she say she’s German if she’s not?” asked Lily.

Grace hesitated a moment, like she was aware she was gossiping.

“Any information might be useful in finding Fiona,” said Jo primly.

Grace spoke quietly, slowly. “I think she’s run away from home.”

“Run away from home?” said Lily. “How old is she?”

“I mean, I think she ran away from home. Years ago.”

“Why?” asked Jo.

“Why do I think she ran away?”

“Yes.”

“Because she never mentions her family. And if you ever ask her a question, like where did she go to school, or anything, she just clams up. It’s like someone just dropped her off here in Paris a couple of years ago. Anything before that’s a complete mystery. She’s got no friends, not ones from way back.”

“Maybe she hasn’t got any family,” said Lily. “Maybe she was in care or something.”

“I think she’s running from something.”

 Lily considered this. She’d run away from her mother, but she’d only gone forty miles, to Leeds. To move to another country would have taken far more imagination than she’d had at that age. Far more imagination or far more fear. She looked at Grace. “What’s Brigitte’s family done?”

Grace looked like she might cry. “I don’t know. None of us know her that well. Fi kind of adopted her, but she’s never fitted in. I know what everyone thinks.”

“What?”

“Well, you know.” The skin on Grace’s chest and neck turned red again. Lily noticed she was wearing a gold crucifix. “What makes people run away from home?”

Lily could list a thousand reasons.  Watching your mother eat herself to death, getting away from the dickhead lads that hung around the estate trying to get you high on glue or aerosols in the hope they might cop a feel of something, the sensation that the walls are closing in and if you didn’t get out the life would be squeezed from you, rib by painful rib. Grace cut into her thoughts.

“It’s always abuse, isn’t it?” said the au pair. She took a sip of her tea, winced as if she’d burned her mouth and then lowered her voice. “Sexual abuse.”

“So, what do we do?” asked Lily, her head spinning. They were back on the pavement, outside Grace’s house.

“I don’t like this,” said Jo. “I don’t like the sound of Brigitte’s family. And why haven’t they rung anyone?”

“Should we go to Amsterdam?”

“Might as well,” said Jo. “It’s not like we’ve got any better ideas. We can check out this Choice Exact place.”

“Come on then,” said Lily. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we find them, the sooner we stop worrying. Do we need passports?”

Jo patted her canvas bag, which she took everywhere with her, indicating passports were taken care of. “Why would she say she’s German, if she’s not?” asked Jo.

“Maybe Grace is right. Maybe she is on the run from her family.”

Jo turned in the direction of the Metro. “At least we’ll get a decent smoke in Amsterdam.  And if they are there, it’ll be ace to hang out there for a bit. Have you ever b-”

Lily knew Jo realised she’d just asked a stupid question. Lily’s trip to the Costa del Sol with Jo last year had been her first trip abroad. She still hadn’t got her head around the fact that you could need a passport without going on a boat or an aeroplane. What happened when the border between two countries ran through a town or village? Did people on one side of the border speak a different language to the other side, even though they were only a street apart? Did they paint the border onto the roads, like double yellow lines? Lily wished she’d paid more attention to geography lessons at school, although all she could ever remember the teacher talking about was glaciers and coal mining. None of which was much use to her, she mused as they caught the train to the airport and Lily cashed another travellers’ cheque. 

They arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol at five o’clock and reached the centre of the city by train. Lily loved it immediately - the canals and the bridges, the painted houses. Even the policemen looked cool, in brown leather jackets instead of the buttoned up, repressed uniforms of the English police. Amsterdam felt like a city where everything went.

Jo pulled Lily into the first coffee shop they passed and Lily nearly fell off her stool as the waitress passed them a drugs menu. Ten different kinds of hash, five different grasses. Lily felt momentarily side-lined. She wasn’t sure she approved. There was something thrilling about drugs being illegal – their illicitness added to their appeal. She didn’t like them being offered up like hamburgers in a fast food joint. She didn’t complain though as Jo ordered three grammes of Lebanese red and they drank coffee while they smoked. Halfway through the first spliff, Lily’s head was floating and she couldn’t stop giggling.

A waiter came to the table, although waiter was probably a bit strong. He was dressed in ripped jeans and had tattoos covering every last inch of his forearms, so that it looked like he was wearing a tight fitting long-sleeved jumper, when actually he had on a vest.

“Can I get you anything else, ladies?”

“We’re looking for a place called Choice Exact,” said Jo.

“It’s in De Wallen, the Rossebuurt,” he said, as he stacked their empty cups. “Go out of here, turn left, you can’t miss it.”

“Guess what that means,” said Jo to Lily as they emerged onto the pavement.

“What?”

“Rossebuurt.”

Lily shook her head, not comprehending.

“It’s the red light district,” said Jo. “We came here when we went inter-railing. Dan the Dickhead was all up for a threesome.”

They strolled along by the side of a canal, Lily admiring the houseboats and trying not to trip over all the bicycles that were tied to the railings at the side of the road. “I’ve got an idea,” said Jo as they passed the post office. “Wait here.”

Lily sank into a cross-legged position on the pavement. The sun was sliding down the horizon, casting a rosy glow on the cyclists and other stoned tourists. Lily had been taken over by a sixth sense that everything was going to turn out ok. She smiled as Jo returned.

“I’ve posted the hash,” said Jo.

“Cool,” said Lily, although she didn’t really understand why Jo would want to post dope. “Where to?”

“Brigitte’s. I addressed it to Bruno. If it gets busted by the cops, we can deny all knowledge.”

They eventually found Choice Exact on Oude Hoogstraat, a small, narrow street that ran perpendicular to one of the canals. Entering the café was like entering a womb - it was small, and warm with beautiful deep-red wall hangings. Candles flickered in glass jars on every table. Lily relaxed and took a seat at the bar. She felt immediately at home, like she’d been here before.

“Is Frank around?” Jo asked as they ordered their drinks and an eighth of Moroccan Black.

“Who wants to know?” asked the waitress, a young woman who could easily have been English. She had hennaed red hair that fell almost to her waist.

“We’re friends of Brigitte.”

The waitress began wiping the dark wood of the bar with a damp cloth. “Never heard of him.”

“She’s travelling with someone called Fiona, an English girl,” said Jo. “They were supposed to get a job here. Show her the photo, Lil.”

Lily took the picture out of her inside pocket and handed it across the bar. The bartender glanced at it for a couple of seconds, and Lily thought she saw a flicker of recognition cross the woman’s face. But she handed the photo back to Lily and shook her head. “Never seen them before.”

She moved away to serve a group of English blokes who must have been on some kind of stag do, Lily guessed, all crowded into the bar. Jo and Lily sat down at a table at the far end of the room. Jo rolled another spliff. “God, smell that.”

Lily inhaled the warm, sweet dope that Jo had crumbled into the Rizla papers.

“Well,” said Jo. “At least we know one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Lily, her speech still slow and slightly slurred.

“They’re not where they’re supposed to be.”

For some reason this made Lily laugh. It took a few minutes before she could get herself back under control. “What are we going to do now?”

“Let’s finish this, then go for a wander. It’s crazy round here on a night.”

It was dark by the time they left Choice Exact and the streets seemed to have suddenly filled with people.  Lily saw the red lights lighting up small windows, with tasselled curtains at each side. Women gyrated in shop windows, like dressmaker’s dummies come alive. Lily’s eyes grew wider, until she felt they might pop from her head. She’d never seen anything like it before. There was a woman turning tricks on the estate in Accrington. She knew because most of the lads had paid her a visit at one point or another, but there was nothing in Lily’s background to compare to this. As they walked down the narrow, cobbled streets in silence, a woman dressed in tight black leather trousers and a bra shouted at her: “You want some action, honey?”

Lily blushed and turned to Jo, but Jo was no longer by her side. Lily looked down the street. Jo had completely disappeared.

“I do you for free,” shouted the prostitute. Lily felt a flush of something between excitement and fear. Where the feck was Jo? Neon lights lit up just about every doorway. ‘Sex Show’, ‘Sex Shop’, ‘Banana Club’, Lily read the signs as she retraced her steps back down the street, wondering whether Jo’s attention had been caught by something further down.

A man walking behind her started speaking to her in a low voice. “You want to buy drugs?” he whispered. “Hashish for the stress? Ecstasy for the love?” Like he was some kind of medic. He drew closer to her, so his voice was right in her ear. “Cocaine for the sex?”

Panic flooded Lily. What had happened to Jo? She passed a brightly lit sex shop, the largest on the block, and for some reason the least terrifying. Perhaps it was its chain store feel. She crossed the street towards it, and was about to step inside, when she felt a hand clamp itself over her mouth.

Her first reaction was to try to scream, but the hand was so big and so firm, she couldn’t even begin to open her lips. She felt herself being pulled backwards into a dark alleyway. In the distance she could still hear the prostitute yelling at would-be punters.

She tried to turn around, but the person who’d grabbed her - she guessed it was a man by the smell of his skin under her nostrils - was too strong for her. The alleyway was full of dustbins and Lily kept bumping into them as her feet tried to keep up with the speed her legs were moving.  Her assailant half-dragged, half-carried her to an open doorway and shoved her through it.

Inside it was pitch black and Lily tripped over a step. She lurched forward, putting her hands out in front of her to try and break her fall, but she never reached the ground because her assailant grabbed hold of her hair. He dragged her upwards, back into a vertical position and propelled her up the stairs. Now that the hand was no longer around her mouth, Lily managed a, “What the fuck?”

At the top of the stairs he pushed her along an unlit corridor, still holding her hair, until she came to a room with velvet curtains up over the doorway. Instinctively Lily dug her heels in, but the man behind her bundled her through the curtains into a small room, lit up with a red light bulb. The tasselled curtains were drawn across the bay window, where a three-legged bar stool sat empty. It took a moment for Lily’s eyes to get used to the light before she noticed Jo sitting on the single bed in the corner of the room. A second man, dressed head to foot in black - black suit, black polo neck jumper - stood over Jo, his arms folded across his chest, like he was some kind of bouncer.