Dead Girl Found

by Giles Ekins

  I kept sporadic touch with Josie’s parents, who remained convinced that I knew where she was, or at least Joyce did. She openly accused me of keeping Josie’s location a secret and it was only now that I began to realise just how much Joyce Jowett disliked me.

  I had always been polite and courteous, for despite my dysfunctional upbringing, I would always say please and thank you and how are you today Mrs Jowett and try not to pick my nose or scratch my crotch in front of her.

  She hid her dislike of me well, at least whilst Josie and I were still friends, sometimes even inviting me to take tea with Josie on occasions when we did our homework together.

  But it was a thin veneer, a mask behind which lay her true face. She now made it clear that she had never considered me to be a suitable friend for Josie. She accused me of leading her astray, of giving her drugs and deliberately causing dissention between mother and daughter and complicit in all the troubles that Josie had at school.

  The more I denied the more she believed it.

  She showed herself to be what she always had been, a bitter, rancorous woman. I pitied any poor sod who ever had the misfortune to have Joyce Jowett as a mother-in-law.

  On the other hand, Dennis, Josie’s father, could not have been kinder. He always seemed pleased to see, especially as I grew older. There was nothing creepy or improper about his behaviour. He never looked overtly at my legs or breasts, never put his arm about me or in any way behaved towards me to give concern.

  How wrong can you be?

  I was 17 and half, still a virgin but hardly unsullied. Damien Jowett had had his nasty fingers inside me and wanted to fuck me, but I wasn’t having that. Alan Priest with whom I went out for a while, he had had his hand inside my knickers but that was all.

  I had not been penetrated by a penis and I intended to keep it that way until I was good and ready and made love on my own terms.

  Until that day.

  Sixty-Eight

  The Clusterfuck, Part One.

  Charlie tried to avoid going to the Jowett house if there was any possibility that Damien would be there,

  She wasn’t very anxious to be there when Joyce was around either, she had made it abundantly clear that Charlie was not welcome.

  Quite why Charlie continued going back to Josie’s house, she could never have explained. She told herself it was because she wanted to know if there was any news about Josie, but she could easily have phoned or texted. Or was it simply because she liked the house so much, such a contrast to her own shabby home.

  Whatever the reason, every month or six weeks Charlie would make that half mile walk from the council flat on the Upper Storrs Estate and up the hill onto Fenstall Road and the Jowett house.

  That Saturday, the snow had almost gone, there was just a solitary pile that had been shovelled to the side of the road, but that was all. The late January sky was purest azure, cloud free, and so sharp and crisp as to be almost crystalline. But the blue sky and pale sun were misleading, the northerly wind was icy and cut through her coat and into her bones like iced needles.

  ‘Charlie, how nice to see you. Do come in, come in, my lord, that wind is sharp isn’t it?’ Dennis Jowett greeted her as he opened the door and ushered her inside.

  Dennis was a big man with large hands, broad shoulders, large nose, thinning hair and a small beer belly. Always friendly, he did seem genuinely pleased to see Charlie.

  He took both of her hands in his, ‘Oh Your tiny hands are frozen’, he said, looking expectantly at Charlie for a response. ‘Puccini? La Bohéme?’ but he might have been speaking in Swahili for all she understood. opera was not her scene, fat ladies screeching in a foreign language was not for her.

  ‘You must be frozen, take off that wet coat and come on into the living room, it’s nice and warm in there. Come on,’ he said as he helped Charlie slip off her coat and then took her hands and led her into the front living room

  Sixty-Nine

  I remember the deceitful sun, bright and shining but without a shred of heat shining through the window. I recall the Jowett’s had just bought a new three-piece suite, a sofa and two attendant high back chairs covered in a flowering yellow, green and red chintz material with an artfully array of multi-coloured cushions draped across the back of the sofa. The television was large, twice as big as the one we had in our house. The carpet was new as well, a thick cream long-pile on which a teak and glass coffee table perched with a copy of Ideal Home magazine on the glass top.

  ‘Is Mrs Jowett’ at home?’ I asked, not wishing to be confronted by her hostility again

  ‘Joyce? No, she out with her charity fund raising group, at least that what she calls it, but think it’s just an excuse to get together for a drink and exchange malicious gossip.’

  ‘Or Damien?’ not wishing to see that creep either.

  ‘No, he’s out, round at a mate’s I should imagine, we don’t see much of him these days,’

  ‘What’s he up to, is he working?’ Not that I gave a shit what the little bastard was doing, you understand, just being polite

  ‘No, not at the moment, he had an altercation with his last manager when he felt his work was not being appreciated, and so he decided to leave, he’s looking around at the moment,’ Dennis answered as he fiddled with the knob of a dark grey box, about the size of a large heavy hardback book which sat on a sideboard, next to a tray with glasses and a water jug.

  ‘Just a moment and I’ll find the right track. Ah, here we go! ‘La Bohéme’ by Puccini. This is Pavarotti as Rodolfo, he is singing to Mimi, a neighbour who comes into his room at night to ask for a light for her candle.’

  ‘Makes a change from asking for a bowl of sugar, I suppose.’ I said, deliberately flippant, I had not come here to listen to some fat guy (even I knew who Pavarotti was) bellowing out in Italian or whatever.

  ’Rodolfo, he gives her a glass of wine and then takes her hand and sings, ‘Your tiny hand is frozen, let me warm it’

  ‘Can’t say it’s the most original chat up line I’ve ever heard.’

  Dennis gives me a funny sort of look, predatory, too eager to please me and offers me a drink. That was the warning sign I chose to ignore. I should have said no and left,

  ‘Yes, OK thanks, do you have a rum and coke?’

  ‘Sure, I’m certain there’s coke in the fridge, don’t drink the stuff myself. Personally, I think it’s only good for clearing blocked drains, but I know Damien drinks it. Be back in a moment, make yourself comfortable.’ Dennis, said, pointing to the settee.

  Seventy

  ‘Personally’, Charlie thought, ‘I’d clean out Damien’s drains with proper drain cleaner or maybe sulphuric acid’. She sat back in the settee, so much more comfortable than the one in her house and closed her eyes and let the weariness flood through her. She heard the clink of glasses and bottles, and as if from a great distance she heard Dennis ask, ‘Is white rum OK?’

  ‘Bacardi?’ she responded, she liked Bacardi,

  ‘Not exactly, but similar, I brought it back from the Caribbean’,

  ‘Sure’, she said, ‘OK’, eyes still closed, luxuriating in the warmth of the room, so much warmer than her own home which always seemed cold and uninviting, her mother’s concept of central heating being copious quantities of cheap vodka from Aldi, thus saving money on heating.

  Dennis reached to the back of the cabinet and took out a litre bottle of Sunset Very Strong Rum, an over-proof white rum distilled in the Caribbean island of St Vincent in the Grenadines at 84,5% alc/vol, more than twice as strong as regular rum.

  Using a stainless-steel jigger, Dennis poured two doubles into a tall glass, added another splash for good measure and filled the glass to a quarter inch of the brim with supermarket coke.

  ‘Here you go, Charlie,’ Dennis said, toasting her with his own drink, a Macallan single malt scotch.

  Charlie took a sip, ‘Wow, that’s strong.’

  ‘Good stuff, isn’t it? Have you been to the Caribbean, Char
lie? he asked, knowing full well that she had not. ‘We try and go every year, a bit of winter sun, you know. Or at least we used to until, well, you know, Josie. Joyce doesn’t like to leave the house now, you see, just in case Josie comes home. Which she will do, I’m sure, she’s very much a home bird. Come on, slowcoach, drink up, there’s plenty more where that came from’

  Charlie took another, longer drink and felt the effects of the rum on her stomach, she had not eaten since breakfast (cornflakes with a sliced banana) and the over-proof was hitting hard. She felt woozy and disorientated as she took another drink and drained the glass. She had just drunk the equivalent of nine regular shots of rum.

  Leaning back into the sofa, she closed her eyes again, trying to stop the room from revolving at speed, she felt Dennis sit down alongside her, could hear his strident laboured breath. Then his arm wrapped around her shoulder and pulled her closer towards him as he slobbered at her neck and tried to kiss her. Then his hand was on her breasts, she ineffectively tried to push him away, he was pushing her sweater, his bad breath was pantingly heavy before she felt his hands between her legs

  ‘Come on Charlie, I’ve always fancied you, always, such a pretty girl, come on, give me a kiss.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want to, let me go.’

  Dennis was now on his knees before her, tugging and her jeans trying to pull them down as she pushed away at his hands.

  ‘No, stop, I don’t want to,’

  ‘Course you want to, course you do, your sort always do.’

  The words ‘your sort’; struck her like a blow. What did he mean, ‘your sort?’ Even though she did come from a council estate, Charlie had assiduously resolved not to speak with a Yorkshire accent and largely succeeded. Her clothes, although cheap and often second-hand were meticulously clean and pressed. She was always clean in herself, was clever and intended to go to university, so what did he mean by ‘your sort?’ Just because she was poor and lived in a council flat did not mean she had no self-respect. It did not make her a ‘sort’, and she was certainly not anybody’s to grope and claw at.

  Her jeans and panties were now down below her knees, and Dennis used all his strength to drag them down to her ankles. He fumbled at his own clothing, forced her legs apart, rose up from his knees, pushed her back onto the settee and forced himself inside her. She felt a searing pain, she was dry as he thrust into her, time and again. Mercifully it was soon over, and he pulled away, panting heavily. He pulled out a tissue from a box on the side and wiped himself, taking no notice of the spots of blood, simply assuming Charlie had either just started or just finished her period.

  ‘You bastard’, she hissed through hate-filled teeth as she pulled up her pants and jeans, re-adjusted her bra where he had pushed it up over her breasts and pulled her sweater down.

  ‘What’s all the fuss about, you’ve done it before, your sort are at it as soon as you hit puberty, probably before that even.’ Dennis answered, getting his own clothes back in order.

  There it was again, those hateful words, ‘your sort’. What was that supposed, to mean? She was not of a different race, not from a different planet, not from a different town or country, not from a different continent, she was just a blonde teenager who lived down the road, went to school with his daughter and just happened to live on a council estate.

  ‘I am…was a virgin, you fucking rapist creep.’

  ‘A virgin! Come off it, sweetheart. How old are you now? 17? I bet you’re well reamed out by now.’

  ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say.’ And the bile welled up. Harsh and acrid, she knew she was going to throw up and made a dash to the downstairs cloakroom She made it just in time before vomiting copiously into the toilet, most of it going into the pan but some splashed across the seat and cistern or down onto the floor. When she had finished heaving, she washed her hands and face, wiped her mouth on toilet paper, but left the mess on the toilet and floor, damned if she was going to clean that up and now wished she’d thrown up on the nice new cream carpet and nice new chintz sofa.

  She felt raw inside, as if she had been scoured out with a sandpaper, coarse grade. Her throat also felt raw from retching and her stomach still roiled and squirmed, with nauseous intent.

  Wincing with pain, Charlie made her way back into the room, intending only to pick up her handbag and get out of there as quickly as possible.

  To her amazement. Dennis had mixed himself another drink and was acting as if nothing had happened.

  ‘You won’t be telling anybody about this, will you, nothing much happened anyway, did it?’

  ‘You raped me!’ she spat at him.

  ‘So you say, but who will believe you over me, eh?’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Joyce, you won’t be telling her, not that she’d believe you, you know what she thinks of your sort.’

  There it was again -your sort! And Charlie knew that he was right. Joyce would never believe her, she was ‘your sort’; scum, sluts, born liars and trouble makers from the slums.

  ‘The police.’ She sobbed, wiping her tears, tears she had been determined not to show, on a tissue taken from the box

  ‘You think they’d believe you? Look at it. You come here uninvited, the first question you ask is if my wife and son are here, then you ask for a drink.’

  ‘I didn’t….’

  ‘You ask for a drink and then join me on the settee and came on to me.’

  ‘That’s not what happened, and you know it’

  ‘Do I? That’s what I would tell the police and that’s what they would believe.’

  ‘You bastard.’

  ‘I think it’s time you left now, Charlie. And don’t come back again. If we hear from Josie, I’ll give you a call, otherwise, keep away. We know you got Josie onto drugs and all that, don’t think we don’t. Now just piss off, you little slut.’

  Humiliated beyond belief, Charlie hobbled back to the kitchen, put on her coat, which was still wet from the rain and slunk out into the evening.

  Seventy-One

  The funny thing is, out of everything that happened, one of the things most clear in my memory from that day, are the coasters that Dennis put down on the coffee table. They were from the Peak Café in Hong Kong and were circular with the words Peak Café Hong Kong around the perimeter in red letters and four Chinese characters, presumably saying the same thing, in the centre. Why would such an inconsequential detail like that stick in my mind?

  Charlie never told a living soul what had happened to her, but she never forgot. And she never forgave. Like father like son, rapists both

  . Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord.’

  No way, Lord, am I going to wait that long, Charlie thought. I will get my revenge. I will wreak vengeance on the both of them.

  But starting from that day, everything in Charlie’s life turned to rat-shit.

  Seventy-Two

  Josie planned her escape from Ahmed’s clutches very carefully. Almost as soon as she realised that Jackson Parrott was interested only in selling her body, she hid a credit card in a box of Tampax, reasoning that Jackson was unlikely to look in there.

  She was right. Neither Jackson, or later Ahmed, ever checked that box of tampons.

  For the first few days, Josie was kept locked in a bedroom at the back of the house and was raped several times by both Ahmed and his brother Ibrahim. The rapes were intended to make her compliant. She was also fed drugs, which of course she had to pay for by ‘servicing her customers’

  She was not at the time injecting, but ‘chasing the dragon’, that is, smoking the heroin. She would put powdered heroin onto a piece of tinfoil and heat it from below with a cigarette lighter. She then inhaled the precious smoke as the heroin became a sticky brown liquid, wriggling around on the foil, twisting and writhing around like a ‘Chinese dragon’, hence the name

  The first high was so good, so peaceful, allowing Josie to escape the foulness of the world for a short while. But then she began to need mo
re and more of the powder to achieve the same sublime state, getting deeper into debt to the brothers. But she could not do without it and did whatever she had to do, chasing her own relentless hungry dragon.

  There were two other girls in the house, neither of them English but both white. Eva, a girl from Tallin in Estonia, was lured by the promise of the ‘good job’ at a hotel in Paris but fell into the clutches of traffickers. Since being smuggled into England, she had been moved around, sold on, and had been working for Ahmed for several months. Eva spoke good English, telling Josie that although she did not like her life , she was too afraid of Ahmed and Ibrahim to consider escape. Josie had once suggested it to her, without letting on that she had a bank card.

  ‘No, for me, the life is not so good, but better than other places. And they will kill my parents in Estonia if I try to escape or talk to the police. This I know for sure.’

  The other girl, Maria, was from Poland and looked about 15 years old, spoke little English and was so wrapped up in her misery that her clients often complained about the lack of enthusiasm for her work. The brothers were getting tired of her, she was not earning enough and would be soon be sold on.

  That punishment for trying to escape would be brutal and painful, of that Josie had no doubts. The brothers, especially Ibrahim were violently vicious. She had seen Ibrahim beat a Pakistani taxi driver with a cricket bat over a drug deal that had gone wrong, breaking his right arm and several ribs. The man’s screams as his bones broke echoed around in her mind and that of the other girls for days afterwards.

  And so, she bided her time and served her customers, mostly Asian men who wanted a stereotypical ‘easy white girl.’ She kept herself to herself, avoided eye contact, did as she was told, carrying out whatever household chores she had to do with apparent good grace. She chased her dragon and stayed below the radar, lulling the brothers into believing she was fully cowed and dependent upon them for her habit. She was subservient, almost servile, she spoke softly and even then, only if spoken to first.