by Mark Edwards
I’m going to die, she thought. And she found that she didn’t feel scared. Death, she decided, would not be unjust.
It was dark inside the house. It smelled of something rotting—
putrescent
—and the light fittings were empty. The woman led her into a boxy living room. Black bin liners covered the windows, so it was pitch-dark inside.
‘Where the fuck is he?’ the woman muttered, and Laura’s heart lurched. He? Who was he?
The devil, a voice whispered in her head.
Now she was scared.
Swearing under her breath, the blonde used her mobile to cast faint light into the room, searching through the drawer of a cabinet until she found what she was looking for. Two candles and a box of matches.
She’s not holding the knife on me now, Laura realised. This would be the perfect time to run. But yet again, her legs wouldn’t do what she wanted. She was too transfixed by her surroundings. This place, the smell, the candles, the old dark-wood furniture. It was like that house, the evil house . . .
The woman turned to her, wearing a cruel smile. ‘Well, it looks like it’s just you and me, Laura. Men. They are so fucking useless.’ She laughed bitterly and pointed the knife at Laura, gesturing at a sofa that looked like it had been rescued from a rubbish dump. ‘Sit.’
Laura managed to speak. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I just want to ask you a question,’ the woman responded. There was a fake Prada bag on the floor, and the woman crouched and opened it, producing a pair of handcuffs. She yanked Laura’s shoulder and pulled her around, then snapped the cuffs over her wrists.
‘You won’t be able to bite your fingers now,’ she said.
She pointed the tip of the blade at Laura’s face. ‘Listen to me, and don’t speak. I am going to ask you a question. You are going to tell me the truth. If you don’t, I will hurt you, very badly.’ She took hold of Laura’s sweater and yanked it upwards, revealing her bra. ‘I will slice off your nipples. I will cut out your eyes. I will fucking circumcise you.’
Laura was too terrified to speak. You’ve seen worse, she told herself. You can get through this. Talk to her, reason with her. She’s a woman. She’ll let you go. But just like her treacherous legs, her tongue wouldn’t work.
‘But if you answer,’ the woman said, ‘if you tell the truth, you can leave this place in one piece. OK?’
It was freezing in the room, but Laura could feel sweat running down her back, and something wet on her cheeks too. Tears. She was crying silently.
‘OK. Here is the question. When you returned from Romania, you had two backpacks with you. Where are they? And what did you do with the contents?’
Laura stared at the woman, unsure if she had heard the question correctly. ‘Backpacks?’
Sighing, the woman pulled Laura’s sweater up again and stuck the knife down beneath her bra, between the cups, the flat edge cold against Laura’s skin. She pulled and the knife sliced through the fabric. The bra fell open, exposing her breasts. She grabbed Laura’s right breast and pinched the nipple, making Laura cry out.
‘Where is it?’
‘The backpacks? We left them behind. In the police station. In Breva.’
The woman stared at her. ‘I don’t believe you.’ She pressed the tip of the blade against Laura’s throat. ‘You sold it, didn’t you? Just tell me, and then this will all be over.’
‘I don’t . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Liar!’ The woman screeched in her face, spittle flying and spraying Laura’s forehead. ‘I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me the truth.’
‘We left them in Breva. I swear. I don’t understand—what . . . what are you looking for?’
The woman stared into her face, into her eyes, for several seconds, and then stepped back and, to Laura’s astonishment, began to laugh hysterically. She doubled over, barely able to breathe. She looked up at Laura and, catching her breath, said, ‘You’re telling the truth?’
‘I swear. I promise.’
As suddenly as it had appeared, the woman’s smile vanished.
‘After all this. You left it in Romania. And you don’t even know what I’m talking about do you? My God.’ She muttered something to herself in another language. Then she said, ‘OK. I’m going to wait till he gets here and you can tell him yourself. He can decide what to do with you. I’ve had it with all of this shit.’
Bang bang bang.
The blonde turned towards the sound. ‘That must be him. At last. Why doesn’t the stupid asshole just let himself in?’
She left the room. Laura heard the back door opening, then a woman’s cry, and a thump.
The man stepped into the room and, later, Laura would be amazed that she hadn’t wet herself at that moment.
It was him.
The devil.
‘Hello, Laura,’ the old man said.
He held an iron bar in his hand. He stared at her naked breasts for a long moment, licking his lips, then pulled her sweater back down, covering her. ‘The key,’ he whispered, leaving the room and coming back a minute later to unlock the handcuffs.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you home.’
He grabbed hold of her wrist and pulled her up. He put an arm around her shoulders and walked her towards the door. She felt dizzy, sick, barely able to stand upright. She stared at her feet, trying not to fall. As they reached the threshold of the room she heard a soft thump, like someone dropping a heavy bag, and a voice that she had heard before said, ‘Camelia?’
The old man sighed, took his arm away from Laura’s shoulders and stooped to pick up the iron bar again.
‘Wait here,’ he said.
Chapter Forty-One
I paced the flat, watching the sky grow dark outside, puzzling over everything Edward and I had been talking about. Claudia Sauvage had told me that in order to recover from my PTSD I needed to be able to confront what had happened to me, to slowly peel back the protective layers I had built in my mind and deal with the reality of the events that had frightened me so much.
But that hadn’t happened. Instead, those layers had been ripped away, burned as if they’d been struck by the Molotov cocktail chucked into Edward’s office, and now I felt like that guy in A Clockwork Orange—strapped down, eyes clamped open, forced to stare at the most horrific scenes, the evidence of humanity’s darkest heart. With no warning, the horror would flash into my real life, replacing it whole. When I looked at the framed photographs on the wall, I saw the Polaroids pinned up in that house. Walking into my bedroom, I found an emaciated woman with black spaces instead of teeth manacled to my bed, grinning at me. A neighbour’s baby cried out and I imagined it locked in that tiny coffin, beating against the lid.
I prowled into the kitchen, desperate for a drink, but I had poured all the alcohol down the sink. I clawed at my own face, sucked in deep breaths, tried desperately to calm myself.
If I concentrated on the puzzle, maybe that would work. Camelia. What did she want? I grabbed a fresh piece of paper and tried to summarise what we knew, or at least what we thought we knew, so far.
Camelia and her partner had keys to my flat. They must have obtained these in Romania, which meant they had to be the thieves from the train.
They had broken into my flat, searched it, taken my laptop and brought it back again. I presumed they must have looked through it, but why return it? I had searched it for viruses and spyware when I got it back, and it was clean.
Then they had come back again with the dog.
Finally, on two occasions Camelia had tried to seduce me, succeeding the second time, but stopping when I was unable to give her the information she wanted.
What was that information?
Something illegal.
I closed my eyes and went back to t
hat night in the train carriage. The thief—Camelia—had taken our passports, our money, tickets and keys. There were other valuables in our bags, like the camera. Why didn’t they take that? My phone had been sitting on my chest and would have been easy to take, but they had left it.
Why?
Because . . . The answer was almost there. I forced myself to concentrate. Why take only the items that would most inconvenience us, forcing us to cut short our trip around Europe? The loss of our passports meant we had to fly home. Was that their intention, to get us to come back here? To leave Eastern Europe? It almost felt like a prank, an act of mischief, something the thieves barely benefited from.
I sat up. Did that mean the theft wasn’t the point?
My mind flashed back to the CCTV video. The male intruder searching drawers and cupboards, the woman holding the dog on its leash. Did they really bring the dog so it would attack me? Why the roundabout method when they could just wait for their chance out in the world to get me? Why the dog? I pictured it now on the slightly grainy video clip. Straining at the leash, sniffing around.
‘Fuck!’ I shouted.
Sniffing around.
I had it.
The wait for Edward to return was agonising. Finally, I heard his car pull up outside and a moment later he pressed the buzzer to be let in. I had been over and over my logic in my head and was sure I was correct. I knew what Camelia was after. I knew what this was all about.
Drugs.
It was the only thing that made sense. Camelia and her partner, whoever that was, had planted drugs in my and Laura’s backpacks. Then they took our passports, knowing this would mean we’d have to go home. Two middle-class English people, respectable-looking, normal, not acting shiftily because we were oblivious to what we were carrying. The perfect drug mules. The plan must have been to intercept us once we were back in London, to retrieve the drugs before we found them.
They couldn’t have known that we would be thrown off the train. Or that we would leave our backpacks in a police station in Romania. I laughed when I thought about this. I would love to have seen their faces when they found this out. Then I thought about what would have happened if Laura and I hadn’t left the backpacks behind, if we’d been caught at customs trying to bring illegal drugs into the country, and my laughter died.
I went through it again. They had broken in, searched my flat, then come back with a dog to see if it could sniff out the drugs. I guessed they had left it here when it failed to find anything, probably in a fit of temper, wanting to punish me. Then Camelia had come back for another try, clearly believing that I must have sold the drugs: that was the illegal act she wanted me to admit to.
In my moment of triumph, having figured out the mystery, I didn’t stop to think about the rest of it: how this connected to all the other strange and horrible stuff that had been going on. Like, what did they hope to achieve by firebombing Edward’s office? Had they killed Jake? If so, why on earth had they? Why attempt to push Laura under a Tube rather than try to get information out of her? If I’d thought about it in any depth, I would have realised this violence just didn’t fit. If I was a vicious drug dealer I wouldn’t pussyfoot around. I would have waited here for me, grabbed me and tortured the information out of me.
But, sure I’d solved the puzzle, I didn’t wonder about that. The main question that bugged me was why they had waited so long to try to retrieve the drugs. It had been three months. What was the explanation for that?
Edward came into the flat and before I could open my mouth to tell him about my Eureka moment, he said, ‘You will never guess what I just saw.’
He ushered me into the living room, as if this was his own flat, and threw himself down on the sofa. I remained standing.
‘So . . . I went to the address you gave me, where Laura’s staying. When I parked I could see a woman standing by the gate. It was her.’ He pointed at the picture of Laura on the wall.
Edward went on. ‘I was about to get out of the car, call to her, but she went into the garden. She was acting . . . Well, I don’t know her, don’t know what she’s normally like, but she was acting weird. Like she was in shock or something. As if she hardly knew where she was.
‘I went up and looked through the gate. It was odd—I could hear a woman’s voice coming from somewhere in the garden, but I couldn’t see anyone. I didn’t want to scare her, because then I thought she’d never talk to me, but I wanted to see what she was doing. Was she talking to someone? I could hear only one voice. The voice sounded frightened, almost . . . on the verge of hysteria.’
‘That’s what she’s been like recently,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Anyway, I opened the gate as quietly as I could and went into the garden. I could see Laura clearly now. She was gesticulating, miming what looked like one person striking another. And then I realised she was talking to someone else.’
He paused dramatically, then said, ‘Describe Alina to me.’
‘Alina? She was quite tall, skinny, pale skin. Black hair with red streaks in it. She wore a black leather jacket and black jeans. Quite attractive if you’re into that sort of thing. Why do you want to know that now?’
‘Because I just saw Laura talking to her.’
‘What? But—’
‘Daniel, unless I’ve developed the ability to see ghosts too, Alina is very much alive.’
Part Five
Romania
August–November 2013
Chapter Forty-Two
Alina stopped as she stepped between the trees and looked up at the dark canopy of the forest, black branches knitted together against the sky, the faintest watery trace of moonlight seeping through. She was a city girl. She wouldn’t hesitate to walk through a dark underpass, to cross one of Sibiu’s roughest housing estates. Give her the darkest spaces of the city any day over this creepy, silent place.
Still, she was desperate for a piss and there was no way she was going to squat in front of the English couple, even if they promised to look away. She would find a spot here, close to the edge of the forest, not too far in, and then they could be on their way, so she could try to salvage this plan, make sure it worked despite what had happened.
The plan had been Ion’s idea. Ion . . . She still couldn’t decide if she really liked him or not. He was good-looking, confident and capable in bed, with no hang-ups, unlike some of the more sensitive writer and artist types she’d been with. When Ion had told Daniel that he was writing a book she’d had to work hard to keep her face straight. Ion had borrowed that line straight from Alina’s ex, a guy whom Ion mocked on a regular basis. All that stuff about collaborating on a graphic novel was bullshit too. Ion had no interest in her artwork, though he liked it when she drew naked women, would urge her to give them bigger breasts, curvier butts. He was an idiot really. He wasn’t even that tough, even though he talked the talk. He was a schemer and a dreamer. He wasn’t a violent thug. She wouldn’t have been with him if he was.
Anyway, once this was all over, when she had her cut of the money, she had decided she was going to leave him. She would use the money to buy herself enough time to finish her graphic novel. It was called Mirela and was the story of a girl who walks the earth after she is murdered by a cabal of serial killers, seeking revenge. Mirela finds everyone who is connected to her suffering and kills them in a variety of imaginative ways. Alina had already been working on it for two years, spending every spare minute, when she wasn’t at her shitty waitressing job, immersed in this tale of blood and redemption.
She didn’t think Ion would care too much when she left him. He would have his money, and Alina knew he had a thing for Camelia, who had moved to London last year, dreaming of making her fortune. The last Alina heard, Camelia was working as a fucking stripper or something. It suited her. Camelia had been showing everything to the boys at school in exchange for cash since she was fourteen. She traded on her beau
ty—a slutty, obvious kind of beauty—and Alina was pretty sure the girl would either end up married to a millionaire or murdered in an alley. Her fate lay in the hands of men.
Alina was different. She was going to make her own way, succeed or fail because of her own talents and luck. She accepted that, sometimes, other people would get hurt along the way. She felt guilty about wrecking the English couple’s holiday, for example, but not too guilty. They already had money, they were privileged without realising it, soft and gullible. What was the worst that could happen to them? As Ion had pointed out, people like that—wholesome, middle-class English people—didn’t get pulled aside at airports. With their passports stolen, their grand tour would be cut short. Oh, how her heart bled! They would go home, get married, start having babies, and they would soon forget all about their truncated trip. Best of all, they would never know what they had carried through customs. They would live on in blissful ignorance, while Ion, Alina and, unfortunately, Camelia experienced for the first time how it felt to have money.
It had all started with a stroke of luck. Ion knew a guy called Kris who had ripped off a drug dealer in Sibiu and had given the cocaine to Ion for safe keeping while Kris tried to convince the drug dealer that he was innocent. Ion, who dreamed of being a gangster but was too soft to do anything about it, had gone along with it, thinking it would impress his friends. With grim inevitability, the dealer and his gang had tortured and killed Kris. Ion, fearing he would be next, had suggested to Alina that they go away for a while. He sold it to her as a romantic adventure.
Then came the good fortune. They got as far as Hungary when Ion heard that the dealers had been arrested and charged with Kris’s murder. They would be in prison for a long time. At which point, Ion revealed to Alina that he had half a kilo of pure cocaine in his suitcase.
She was furious. He had smuggled the drugs across the Hungarian border. Was he so stupid that he didn’t know what happened to people caught with such a large quantity of drugs? Life in jail. For both of them.
