The Girl Who Had No Fear. Marnie Riches
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Cambridge, Huntingdon Road, then, Stansted Airport, 29 April
‘You just keep a lookout,’ George told Aunty Sharon, shouting above the gusting Cambridgeshire wind. Her pulse thudded in her neck as she calculated how long it would take Sally Wright to grind and wobble her way up the hill to the student house on the Huntingdon Road. Surely a chain-smoker like her would asphyxiate before she’d be able to scale Cambridge’s infamous Castle Hill on a sit-up-and-beg bicycle. Calm down, George. Chill your boots. You get in. You get out. You get gone. ‘I’ll be down in ten. I’ve only got a couple of bits to get. Honk if you see an angry white woman with a bad fringe. Okay? Honk!’
This was a flying visit to Cambridge, precipitated by two texts she had received the evening she had returned to Aunty Sharon’s after interviewing Gordon Bloom in Belmarsh. Relieved to find that she was not, after all, being followed through the Catford backstreet by anything more sinister than an inquisitive cat and her own burgeoning paranoia, she had hastened to her aunt’s house, walking straight through to the kitchen. She had put her bag squarely on a kitchen chair, so it had aligned with the edges. Rearranging it until it was just right. The routine had been like every other evening.
‘All right, love,’ Aunty Sharon had said. ‘I’ve made goat curry. Fancy it?’ She had lifted the lid on a simmering pan, the contents of which had smelled like heaven but had resembled diarrhoea. George had embraced her aunt, barely circling her chunky middle. Had kissed her on the cheek, feeling whiskers that hadn’t been there twelve months earlier. But at least Aunty Sharon had ditched the raggedy extensions and had covered her desperately stressed natural hair with a decent wig.
Beneath her apron, Sharon had already been wearing her clothes for the club, where she served watered-down shots to the pissed denizens of Soho’s Skin Licks titty bar.
‘Oh my days, Aunty Shaz! I could eat a scabby horse on toast. I only had a bag of cheese balls all day. Bring it on. It smells bloody gorgeous.’ George had flung herself onto another kitchen chair, contemplating how empty the house had felt with her cousin, Tinesha, long departed to live with her boyfriend, and Patrice who was more out than in, now that he was in the upper sixth. Once again, George – past the point where she had been the fresh young thing, out on the tiles all night long and now having reached the age where her contemporaries were married with children – had only her own company to look forward to, as the evening had stretched ahead of her. Hadn’t one of the new male Fellows at college jokingly referred to George as a spinster? Some long-legged floppy-haired arsehole in a pseudo-intellectual tweed jacket, originally from Eton. Tim Hamilton. Dickhead. He’d stared at her tits when he’d said it. George had batted the thought aside. ‘You go to the community centre today? Any news?’
Sharon had shaken her head and had plonked too much rice onto a plate with a giant serving spoon. ‘Nah, love. Nobody’s seen her. Nobody’s heard nothing on the grapevine. Not a fucking sausage. Even that nosey old cow Dorothea Caines didn’t have a clue, and I had to eat one of her rock-hard cupcakes to find that much out.’ She had put her hand on her hip and had grimaced. ‘She’d not sieved the flour. Can you get over it? I mean!’ She’d made a harrumphing noise. ‘Talk about taking one for the team. My God! If the Black Gang or Pecknarm Killaz or whatever the fuck those gangsta rarseclarts call themselves used her cupcakes as missiles, all there’d be left of Southeast London would be fucking craters. Craters, darling!’
Nodding, George had forked her curry into her mouth with the enthusiasm of the semi-starving. Surreptitiously grabbing at her spare tyre beneath the table, thinking it time she had a chat with Aunty Sharon about portion size, now there were fewer of them in the house.
Sharon had been unaware of George’s dietary preoccupation. She had been waving the spoon at her with dangerous intent. ‘I’d take that Dorothea Caines out like a fucking ninja if we was going head-to-head in a bake-off.’ Droplets of curry had spattered the dated splashback tiles.
‘So, still no news of Letitia. Or my dad?’ George had asked, feeling irritation prickle at the roots of her hair. Same questions. Every. Single. Day.
Her aunty had fallen abruptly quiet, sniffing pointedly. Her eyes had become glassy without warning. ‘Sorry, love. If anyone had seen your mum knocking around on the estate, that do-gooding righteous witch Dorothea would be the first to hear it and crow about it. Honest. Your mum’s evaporated into thin air, like.’ She had reached out and had grabbed George’s hand, squeezing it in a show of solidarity. ‘Nothing on your dad, either.’
Noticing the curry and grains of rice stuck to Sharon’s index finger, George had pulled her hand away, stifling a sigh.
As she had crawled into Tinesha’s old bed and had pulled the duvet up to her chin, she had thought about this impasse she had reached. An unwelcome tear had tracked along her cheekbone, running into her ear. Annoyed, she had poked at it, wondering if Letitia had been thinking about her; if she had even still been alive.
‘Like fuck she is,’ she had said to floral curtains, backlit by the yellow streetlight.
She had wondered yet again if there had been even the slightest possibility that her father had sent the untraceable emails, courting contact with her; saying he was watching her.
‘Not after nearly twenty-five years of silence. No way,’ she had told the glowing numbers on the old ticking alarm clock.
With sleep beckoning her towards yet another fitful night of tossing, turning and imagining the gruesome fate of her possibly enucleated mother, she had been jolted wide awake by her phone vibrating with two new emails. The first had been from Marie.
Police in Maastricht have found a man who may be of interest!
The second had been from Van den Bergen.
Come back to Amsterdam. I need you for something.
Now, Aunty Sharon was wedged behind the wheel of her old 53-plate Toyota Corolla, parked badly on Huntingdon Road, peering up with a puzzled look at the tired Gothic student house that loomed above them. Yellowing chintz curtains at the window and a broken pane of glass in the 1960s replacement front door.
‘You live here?’ she asked, curling her lip with clear disgust. ‘In that dump? You having a laugh with me?’
George frowned. Shook her head dismissively and tutted. ‘Save it, yeah? Beggars can’t be choosers. Now remember. If you see Sally Wright—’
‘What about Sally Wright?’ Sally Wright asked, emerging from behind the overgrown privet that bordered the end-of-terrace. She clapped her hands together in George’s face. ‘Ha! Got you, you sneaky sod!’
Opening and closing her mouth, George foraged in her mental lie-box for a good, feasible excuse as to why she had kept her flying visit to Cambridge a secret. Tried to work out how the aerobically challenged Senior Tutor had hoofed it from her office in St John’s College up the road to the house inside ten minutes. Ten goddamned minutes since Aunty Shaz’ car had rolled into town.
‘How—?’
‘Sophie Bartek,’ Sally explained, marching to the taxi that George had only just clocked, parked all the while in front of Aunty Sharon. She explained to the driver that she had decided to hitch a ride back in Sharon’s Toyota, paid him and sent him on his way.
‘Fucking Sophie,’ George said under her breath. ‘Shit-stirrer owes me one.’
She forced a smile for the Professor of Criminology who ruled her academic life like a benevolent dictator; the woman she would always be indebted to for having allowed her to learn her way out of a future where petty crime or prison or stacking supermarket shelves would otherwise have beckoned.
‘Why haven’t you been taking my calls, young lady?’ Sally asked, glowering at George. Pointing with a gnarled, amber-coloured finger. ‘It’s our bloody book launch tomorrow evening, and Sophie tells me you’re buggering back off to