Scarlett shivered.
The man took hold of her upper arm, slammed the van doors shut with the other hand, and pulled her along in the direction Yelena had taken. When they reached the back of the lorries, the man held her back while he checked left and right.
Then pulled her quickly across a road toward some trees and bushes, dragging her through the undergrowth.
“All right, all right,” she said, “you don’t have to be so bloody rough.”
They had reached a dusty gap in the trees where Yelena was squatting, jeans around her ankles, while the man with the hat watched. It was darker here, but not too dark to see that Yelena was doing a shit.
“I’m okay, thanks,” Scarlett said.
“You do,” her companion said, pushing her roughly next to Yelena.
So she did it. She was desperate to go, in any case, though knowing that it was going to hurt. And it did. The concentrated urine burned, and tears squeezed from the corners of her tightly closed eyes. Her piss splattered noisily into the dust and she could smell her own body—the sweat, the dirt, the discomfort of it.
The men made Yelena and Scarlett wait in the trees, looking carefully at the road. Two strong beams of light swept through the trees. A lorry, or something, was coming. The man ahead of them held up his hand in warning. Wait.
They were in some sort of services, Scarlett realized. Across the other side of the car park—maybe three hundred meters or so—Scarlett could see a restaurant. It was well-lit. There were people inside, cleaning.
They could run.
Scarlett looked across at Yelena, tried to catch her eye. The dark-haired girl was staring ahead. They had broken her, she thought. They had killed her friend. They had stood by and watched while she defecated behind a bush. No wonder she looked so done-in.
Eventually she looked across at Scarlett. Scarlett tried to convey her thoughts just in the expression on her face. She looked across to the building, to the various vans and lorries parked, dark and silent, then back to meet Yelena’s eyes. They could run. If they both ran in opposite directions, using the lorries for cover, they would have a chance. If they got to the restaurant, they would be safe. There were people there. The men would not risk it, would not risk a scene.
Yelena followed all this unspoken communication, opened her eyes wider and, as the lights from the second lorry swept across their faces, she shook her head, slowly and deliberately.
No.
Just as deliberately, Scarlett nodded, her eyebrows knitted in an insistent frown.
And then the man who was waiting by the road beckoned them forward.
Scarlett saw the chance slipping away. If she ran, Yelena would follow; she would have to. The only chance they had was if both of them ran, to create a diversion. The men would panic. There would be a few seconds of confusion: they would not know which one of them to chase. The old, fat one would not be able to run fast enough in any case. One of them might, then, be able to get away.
The man who was holding Scarlett’s upper arm stumbled in the dark undergrowth, released his grip on her as his arms flailed, trying to regain his balance.
That was it.
She ran.
A second later she burst through the trees and she was on the tarmac, running, running. It felt as if she was going so slowly it was almost backward, like dream-running. She had no energy, her breath already coming in frantic, wheezy gasps, and the air was so cold. . .
Behind her a shout, and Yelena shouting too and then suddenly Yelena was beside her, running, faster than Scarlett, on longer legs, panicky, wobbly strides.
“Don’t follow me!” Scarlett shrieked, darting to her left. Behind them a lorry was coming, they could hear heavy footsteps above the noise of the grinding lorry gears and the lights swept across them as the lorry turned. It must be between them and the men.
They were going to make it. Yelena was ahead of her now, heading for the building, the lights making a halo of her flying hair, and she was screaming, yelling something in that language. . .
Scarlett’s legs were giving way. There was still two hundred meters or so between her and safety, and Yelena was a few paces ahead of her.
There was a sudden silence as the lorry parked somewhere and cut its engine. There was no shout, no warning, nothing. There was a fizzing noise as something whistled past Scarlett’s ear.
Then the side of Yelena’s head exploded and the girl dropped like a stone, the momentum of her running causing her to skid a few feet, face first, on the tarmac in front of Scarlett.
Scarlett stopped instantly. Stood still, waiting for the second shot. She felt as though she was screaming but no sound was coming out of her open mouth. She looked at the body in front of her, the dark puddle spreading out from what was left of Yelena’s head.
The man with the hat caught up with her, grabbing her arms, panting and muttering something angry and urgent at her that she didn’t understand, and it took a few seconds for her to realize that he was speaking broken English. “You stupid! You fucking girl!”
Then the minibus was next to them, braking sharply, cutting out the light from the building and separating her from Yelena’s body. She was pulled around to the back, the door was opened and she was thrown inside. The door slammed. Seconds later, the bus was moving and she hadn’t had time or the thought to hang on to something, so she rolled and tumbled around in the back, fell against the back doors heavily, knocking the last gasping breath out of her body.
And they were back on the road before Scarlett had had time to think.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god no, no no no . . .
She couldn’t stop shaking. Her whole body, shaking, even though she pulled herself into a tight ball, trying to shut everything out. What she had seen. What they had done.
Yelena was dead, lying on the ground in the dark. They had left her. They had just left her where she fell, driven off again.
That could have been me, Scarlett thought. Should have been me. She had been the one to run, Yelena had just followed. She hadn’t even wanted to do it, had she? She hadn’t wanted to. She had been afraid. Yelena had gone along with it because she had no choice. What could she do, let Scarlett run?
They might have shot her anyway.
But why shoot Yelena—why her? Because she was faster, because she’d overtaken Scarlett and they couldn’t catch her? Because she was nearly at the restaurant?
Scarlett closed her eyes again. Every time she shut them she could see the same thing, playing over and over again like a video on loop: the side of Yelena’s head bursting open, and no sound other than the fizzing of the bullet that went past Scarlett’s head.
Tears from between her lashes, sticky on her dirty face. It’s my fault, that was all my fault. She died because I made her run. I made her do it.
And now she knew something else, too: she couldn’t, wouldn’t do anything like that again. They would kill her, as quickly as they killed Yelena. And if they did it they would just pick up another girl from somewhere, to drive around in the back of the minibus. Girls, whatever they wanted them for, were expendable, disposable.
Above the sound of the engine and her own sobs, she could hear the two men in the front arguing. One of them was shouting, the other one nasal, placatory. It would stop for a while, as though the discussion had run its inevitable course, and then restart without warning. Shut up, shut up! Scarlett wanted to yell. She was afraid of their anger, wanted to silence it. She wanted them to stop, get out somewhere so they could have a reasonable discussion and negotiate whatever it was they wanted in order to let her go. Just leave her, by the side of the motorway in whatever country they were in by now—Eastern Europe somewhere, possibly, given the length of time they’d been driving and the sudden chill in the air. They were heading north.
And then, having thought herself out of the panic, suddenly it was there, again. Yelena was dead. They shot her. They blew the side of her head off. And she had dropped like a stone, not stumble
d or tripped, not put her hands forward to stop herself but just BANG and face-down on the tarmac, the momentum of her running feet sending her body skidding and juddering for a second before it fell still.
And Scarlett had stopped.
She should have kept on running. Would they have shot her too? Yes, probably—and what of it? She would be no worse off dead than alive.
I wish it had been me. I wish they’d shot me instead of her.
LOU
Friday 1 November 2013, 11:00
First things first: Lou gritted her teeth and phoned Waterhouse again. Standing, in case she needed to get assertive with him.
“Waterhouse.”
“Hi, it’s Lou Smith.”
To her surprise, he seemed much more cheerful this morning. Maybe he was regretting being such an arse yesterday? “Oh, hi. How did you get on with our celebrity?”
“All right, I think. With your permission I’d like to get my DS to see her. If anyone can get you a result, Sam can.”
“Fill your boots,” he said chirpily. “We won’t be able to hang on to the VVS for long, Estates are moaning about us using it as it is. I can’t see any of my team making progress with her. My guess is that she knows bugger all about the McDonnells, and if she did know something useful, she also knows it’s more than her life’s worth to share it with us.”
“Something else—you know we were looking at Maitland for a job last year?”
“The stable girl murder, wasn’t it?”
Lou bristled at having a young woman with a life, family and people who loved her reduced to such a diminutive. The “stable girl”—she was a person, you little shit.
“Polly Leuchars, her name was. My exhibits officer is going down to the farm at some point to hand back some unused material. Just in case you’ve got a team on him, I wouldn’t want her to get in the way. Do I need to hold her off?”
“I’ve only got one team so far and we’re sticking with Lewis McDonnell. So as long as she goes there in the next day or so, should be okay. I can’t see McDonnell going anywhere near the farm, but if he does I’ll give you a shout.”
“Thanks,” Lou said.
Her priority for today was going to be making some sort of progress with Op Trapeze: Carl McVey, the murdered bar owner, and Ian Palmer, still unconscious in hospital. Both of them needed her full attention.
Everything she read, though, seemed to be going over old ground. The further back she went, the less relevant it seemed to become. When she found herself reading about a neighbor dispute involving a yew hedge between Carl McVey’s house and the property next door, she gave up. Instead, she reached for the Op Diamond file—the historic case notes on Scarlett Rainsford’s disappearance. She would sort out the most relevant bits to hand over to Sam.
It was massive, of course, and before going to Special Branch yesterday she had only had the briefest of chances to reacquaint herself with the facts of the case. In reality, it didn’t take much to remind her of it, as the memories of her work on this case had stayed fresher than any other. Possibly because it had never been solved; possibly because of the resonance of it being a missing child, the most devastating of all crimes to work with.
But now, flicking through the file, Lou began to realize just what a small part she had played in the investigation. Here, for example, were the initial statements of Clive, Annie and—to her surprise—Juliette Rainsford. By the time Lou had been assigned to the team, a few days after Scarlett’s disappearance, all the initial interviews had been conducted under Greek jurisdiction. Everything done very differently.
The last time any of the family had seen Scarlett had been when they had all retired to bed, on the last night of their holiday, which was Friday 22 August, 2003. The parents had a studio apartment next to the one shared by Scarlett and her sister, Juliette. They had been out for the evening to a taverna in the main town square, and returned by half-past nine in the evening. They had gone to bed. The next morning, Clive and Annie had gone to the room next door to find Juliette reading, and Scarlett missing. It had been as simple as that.
If she had gone willingly, she had taken nothing with her; her clothes, shoes, passport, even her mobile phone had all been left behind. At first there had been a disagreement about what she had been wearing that night, and whether her pajamas were missing, or some clothes. Eventually, confused, distressed, Annie had worked out that Scarlett had been wearing shorts and a short-sleeved blouse, with sneakers. Her shortie pajamas were found in the tangle of clothes that spilled out of the open suitcase on the floor.
They’d asked Annie what she and Clive had done after leaving the girls that evening. They’d sat out on the patio drinking a beer, as they had done most nights. Eventually—Annie wasn’t able to give a specific time—they’d gone inside. Had they checked on the girls before retiring? No. There was no need. The light was off in the girls’ apartment; they would both have been asleep. They had had no reason to have any concerns.
It wasn’t very thorough, Lou decided. They’d asked these open questions but were not getting detailed responses. It would have been better to take Annie through it bit by bit: who said what, how did she seem, what did she do? All of that. It would have been the way the interviews were conducted if Scarlett had disappeared in the U.K. As it was, the investigators had limited time, and were working in what they called “close cooperation” with their colleagues in the Greek police force. There was a strong sense of frustration coming out of the official wording of the notes, what was unsaid telling Lou almost as much as the words that had made it onto the paper.
Could she have run away? they wanted to know.
Annie had answered: I guess so.
Lou flicked through the pages until she got to the official witness statements that had been taken after the Rainsfords returned home, and the one she herself had conducted and signed: the first interview with Annie Rainsford, Briarstone Police Station, Interview Room Three.
By that time, they had established that on the night Scarlett went missing the family had eaten out as a threesome—Clive, Annie and Juliette. The taverna owner, who had served the four of them on the Wednesday evening, was certain beyond any doubt that the older girl had not been with them on their second visit. He had asked them about it, and the man had told him that she was not feeling well and they’d left her back at the apartments. The restaurateur had even offered to make up a takeaway parcel for the absent daughter. This had been declined. When questioned further, the taverna owner had found the till receipt indicating that the party had eaten one salad (Juliette), one beef stifado (Clive) and one lamb kebab with rice (Annie). One mineral water, and four beers—two each for the adults. That was all.
This had been Lou’s objective for the interview—to try to clear up that discrepancy. She remembered Annie well: pale cheeks under her tan; big, liquid blue eyes made even bigger by her habit of keeping a wide, earnest stare going at all times; long straight hair. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, and slightly built. She seemed the sort of person you immediately wanted to look after, and yet she did not invite protection. For the duration of the interview she sat straight in her chair, occasionally sitting on her hands as if they were cold. Other than that, she did not move.
Transcript of Interview in Relation to Op Diamond (Missing Person Inquiry in Relation to Scarlett Rainsford)
Briarstone Police Station, Interview Room Three
Date: 15 September 2003, 09:01
Present: Annie RAINSFORD (AR)
DC Louisa SMITH (LS)
DC Sarah JONES (SJ)
[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
LS: Annie, can we go back to the evening Scarlett disappeared? You ate out at the Zeus Taverna, is that right?
AR: Yes.
LS: Can you tell us what you remember, from the time you left the apartments to go out to dinner?
AR: Scarlett wasn’t well. We left about . . . seven o’clock. Scarlett was in bed when we went. We walked down toward the town and
we got to the taverna about twenty minutes later. We had dinner . . . we were there a couple of hours . . . and then we came back.
LS: What was the matter with Scarlett?
AR: She said she had a tummy ache.
LS: She said? Didn’t you believe her?
AR: I never knew what to believe with Scarlett. But we’d all had an upset tummy at some point during the week. It’s part of going on holiday, isn’t it?
LS: And you were comfortable, leaving her on her own like that?
AR: She knew where we were; we’d eaten there earlier in the week.
LS: When you were interviewed the next day—the Saturday—you told the Greek police that you’d all eaten out together that night. Is that right?
AR: I can’t remember what we said. It was all so confusing. I was upset.
LS: You said you all ate together and then went back to the apartments together.
AR: I was confused. I must have been confused.
LS: What time did you get back to the apartments?
AR: I think it was about half-past nine.
LS: And did you see Scarlett then?
AR: We looked in on the girls’ apartment and Scarlett was asleep in bed.
LS: In bed, or on the bed?
AR: On the bed.
LS: So she wasn’t covered over?
AR: I don’t think so. No.
LS: What was she wearing?
AR: Her shorts and blouse.
LS: You didn’t think to wake her, to get her changed?
AR: No. She was asleep. She’s not a child; she was capable of getting changed herself if she’d wanted to. And she looked comfortable, so we let her sleep.
LS: Did you go right into the apartment, or just look from the door? AR: We stood in the doorway.
LS: But you were sure she was asleep?
AR: I guess so.
LS: She might have been pretending?
AR: I suppose so; I don’t know.
LS: What happened then?
AR: Juliette went into the room. She turned on the bedside light so she could read. We went back to our apartment next door.