Authors: Mark Douglas-Home
It was less than a mile from his parents’ house to The Mound, the man-made rampart which links Edinburgh’s Old Town to the Georgian New Town. Cal was at the bottom of the slope by the Royal Scottish Academy when it began to rain and he hailed a passing black taxi. The driver, a retired male nurse working night shift for holiday money, attempted conversation, moaning about the digging up of Princes Street for trams that nobody wanted. Cal made occasional sounds of agreement, for the sake of politeness and because he didn’t want a discussion. When the taxi arrived at The Cask, it was almost midnight and the driver said, without irony, ‘Thanks for the natter chief, God bless’. Cal paid him and hurried inside, holding his grandmother’s journals close to him to shield them from the drizzle.
One of the teenagers who lived the floor below passed him on the stairs. Cal said, ‘All right?’ The boy didn’t reply and Cal carried on to the top landing, taking his key from his pocket, forcing it into the lock – Ryan or whoever had ransacked the place had damaged the alignment. As soon as he opened the door he smelt it: a pungent, feral odour. The hairs on his arms bristled. Someone or something was in his flat. He kicked the door shut with a bang, kept off the light and dropped his grandmother’s diaries on his work table to free his hands. He hurried to his left. Now he was passing the spiral staircase to the roof. Was an intruder waiting for him there? At any moment he expected to be jumped, a knife cutting into him. When he reached the bathroom his heart was drumming. He closed the door, snapped shut the bolt and offered up a prayer that whoever was in his flat wasn’t in the dark of the locked bathroom. With him.
He listened, his shoulder against the door, his legs braced. After a few minutes, he shouted, ‘I’m calling the police. …’ Perhaps it
was
the police, he thought ruefully; another of Detective Inspector Ryan’s extra-judicial surprises. Still there was no sound from the other side of the door. ‘I’ve got no money,’ he called out.
‘… Or drugs.’
Or computers, his only possessions of any cash value, thanks to Ryan and Detective Constable Helen Jamieson.
‘Ok, time’s up. I’m ringing the police now.’
‘Help me, please help me.’ It was a young woman’s voice; pleading with him.
‘Who is that?’
‘My name is Basanti, Please help me.’ Her voice sounded foreign.
Cal listened at the door before shouting, ‘What do you want?’
He couldn’t hear all of her answer, but it ended with her begging him not to call the police. ‘Please.’
‘Are you on your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go to the back of the room,’ he instructed. ‘Turn on the light by the door.’
He heard her moving and the snap of the switch.
Then he opened the bathroom door, a fraction at first, his shoulder against it, certain this was the biggest mistake of his life. When he saw her she was at the far end of his work table, still walking backwards. Her clothes, baggy black jeans and grey hoodie, were stained and dirty, her dark brown hair cut short and ragged. Cal opened the door wider and she lifted her face at the movement, revealing hollowed cheeks and scabs on her cracked lips. Cal noticed this though not the knife behind her back which she’d taken from his kitchen drawer and which she kept hidden from him. Just in case.
‘What do you want?’ he said climbing the stairs from the bathroom and she told him about her friend whose body was fished out of the sea off the Argyll coast three years ago; the girl whose death was recorded in a newspaper cutting on his wall. ‘Please help me. There’s no-one else I can go to.’ She apologised for frightening him, for being in his flat.
‘How did you get in?’
‘I climbed the ladders at the back of the building. I got in by the door in the roof. It was unlocked.’
She said she’d waited for him, for three nights now. She’d seen her friend’s photograph in the background of the newspaper pictures of Cal. ‘You must help me find the men who killed her?’ It sounded authentic, particularly when she called the dead girl ‘Preeti’ and she added with a tremble of emotion ‘she’s from the Bedia tribe, like me.’
In the end what could he do but take her at her word? He sighed. ‘Can I trust you?’
She nodded.
He watched her, making up his mind. Then he went to the kitchen alcove and picked up the kettle and held it up. ‘I need some coffee. What about you?’
‘Thank you.’
Suddenly she looked very young.
‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen, I think.’
Cal registered her uncertainty, but didn’t pick up on it. ‘Listen, have a seat and I’ll bring this over. Milk? Sugar?’
She shook her head.
While he waited for the kettle to boil she sat cross-legged on the hearth stone and slid the knife behind a pile of books.
When Cal joined her, handing her a mug, he hooked his foot round a moulded plastic chair, one he’d salvaged from a skip, and dragged it towards him. He sat about two strides from her, closer than he’d intended. The smell from her was strong: sweat, damp clothes and terror. Putting his mug between his feet, he said, ‘So why do you think your friend was killed?’
‘I didn’t know Preeti was dead until I came here and read about her.’ She glanced up to the map and the newspaper cutting of Preeti beside it.
A tear ran down her face. It sparkled in the bright overhead light. ‘She died three years ago …’ She turned her head away from Cal towards the window. The back of her hand brushed her cheek. ‘… She must have been so frightened.’
A tremor passed through her.
Cal asked, ‘Could it have been an accident …? The police don’t know what happened to her …’
Basanti didn’t answer and Cal turned on a lamp and went to the door to switch off the overhead light. ‘That’s better.’
The glow from the lamp cast shadows on the floor where Basanti sat. They seemed to comfort her and draw her tension so that when Cal sat down again and asked, ‘How did you know Preeti?’ she told him about the Bedia and the tradition of selling daughters into the
dhanda
, the sex trade. ‘The Bedia are a warrior tribe. The
dhanda
is more honourable for Bedia girls than domestic work.’ Her tone of voice made it clear she didn’t believe this any more.
‘Your parents sold you?’
‘Preeti, too. We are from different villages. Our families were paid 60,000 rupees, for each of us.’ She glanced at Cal, as if expecting him to be impressed, but he didn’t react. She tried to make him understand. ‘For our virginity …’
‘They sold your virginity?’ Now he got it. ‘My God.’
‘Yes.’
She told him about the shiny black car, about Preeti holding her hand and looking after her even though she, Basanti, was the older girl and Preeti the younger.
‘How old was she?’
‘She was thirteen and I was fourteen.’
Basanti’s hands clutched her coffee mug. She hadn’t drunk from it. Cal asked if she would like something else instead and she shook her head. The warmth from the cup seemed to be sustaining her.
‘We were taken to a city, Mumbai I think, and then to an airfield where there were other girls we didn’t know, and then to a port where Preeti and I were put on a ship. I don’t know about the other girls. We never saw them again.’
Gradually the story tumbled from her, with Cal interrupting with questions or comments when her voice tired with the effort of it or when it cracked with emotion. She held her head down. Occasionally her voice would waver as though she was crying. Cal imagined that was why she hid her face from him. It allowed her some dignity, what little of it she had left. She told Cal how Preeti and she had been kept on the ship for weeks, months – ‘We lost any sense of time passing so I began scratching the days on the paint in our cabin and when we were taken ashore there were twenty seven scratches.’ That was the last time she’d seen Preeti. ‘We were taken ashore in a small boat, tied and blindfolded and carried from the boat …’
Cal helped her. ‘Where were you taken?’
‘I don’t know. It was a room without windows.’
‘And Preeti?’
‘I don’t know what happened to her. She was behind me, being carried when we came ashore … I never saw her again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Cal said.
She sighed. ‘Then the men came … for sex.’
She stopped again and Cal tried to make it easier for her by saying ‘only tell me what you can.’
‘Until this one night when I was taken outside. There was something going on. The man carrying me was running across rough ground – he was frightened. He tied me to an iron ring and left me. Then I heard shouting and sirens. By the morning I’d worked off my blindfold and that’s when I saw the hill and the tree.’
She paused again. He wanted to ask, ‘What hill and tree?’ but before he could she said, ‘The man came back for me and I was put in a van and taken away to a city. My new owners told me I’d been sold to them. I was their property. They said they could kill me if they chose, or sell me. I was theirs. They could do what they wanted with me.’ She knew now the city had been Glasgow.
‘How long were you there?’
‘I don’t know. Many months, years, I don’t know. I escaped nine days ago
‘And you’ve been living rough since then?’
‘There’s nowhere I can go. The men who own me will be looking for me – and the police will send me back to India and my family and I’ll be put in the
dhanda
again by my uncle to pay my father’s debts.’
‘The police will want to know about Preeti and you. The men who have done this are criminals. They’ll want to find them and bring them to justice.’ Cal thought it ironic he’d turned advocate for the police.
Basanti shook her head. ‘You don’t understand. I stabbed a man, when I escaped. I think I’ve killed him. Blood was coming from his neck. I can’t go to the police. I’ve got to find who killed Preeti.’
‘The police can do that.’
‘Won’t you help me?’
‘I’m not that kind of investigator.’
After a pause, he said, ‘There was something you mentioned earlier – a hill and tree?’
She unbuttoned her shirt at her midriff and slid her hand round to her back, pulling out a sheet of paper which had bent to the shape of her body. She put it on the floor and pressed it flat before handing it to him. It was her drawing of a hill with ridged flanks and a flattened top rising from a plain. Half way up its left side a tree leaned at forty-five degrees.
Cal studied it. ‘This is what you saw?’
‘Yes. This is where Preeti and I were taken ashore. This is where I last saw her.’
They talked for another hour, perhaps more, until the gap between his questions and her answers grew wider. Eventually, Cal said, ‘I must get some rest. Then I can think more clearly. It’s been a long day.’
Rachel was on his conscience too.
Basanti nodded.
‘There’s a bed,’ he said. ‘You have it. I’ll sleep here, in the armchair.’ He wanted to add, ‘You can wash. There’s a shower,’ but he was concerned she would take it wrong.
She didn’t respond and Cal said, ‘Well I’ll let you think about it.’ He stood up and went to the other side of his table and opened a map. ‘How long was the car journey when you were taken to Glasgow?’
‘I don’t know. Two, three hours maybe. Maybe less.’
‘Let’s say a maximum of two forty or two fifty kilometres.’ He drew a circle with Glasgow at its centre.
‘And you were close to the sea when you started?’
‘Close; a short walk.’
Cal studied the map again. The circle he had drawn included much of the Scottish coastline, west as well as east. Only the far north-west and north-east, Sutherland and Caithness, were outside the circle. The circumference ran south of the English border too. It included Blackpool on the west and Newcastle on the east. Her drawing – a hill and a tree growing from it at a peculiar angle – and 13-year old Preeti’s body were the only other clues. They pointed to Scotland, somewhere along the west coast. But where? Had Preeti also been sold again and taken to Glasgow before being drowned?
While he’d been studying the map, he’d sensed Basanti moving but hadn’t paid her any attention, hadn’t even said good night, in case she became self-conscious about taking his bed. He turned off the desk light and sat back into his arm chair. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Basanti go from the bathroom up the spiral stairs. On the landing by the half door to the roof she lay down on the bare wood. What he didn’t see was his kitchen knife on the boards by her; her hand beside it, protection if she needed it.
It was late morning when he was woken by his phone. He looked at the screen, didn’t recognise the number and let it ring. He stretched and coughed and glanced at the top of the spiral staircase. Basanti wasn’t there. He thought she might have used the bed when she’d seen him dossing down in the arm chair, but she wasn’t there either. Nor was she in the bathroom; the door was open. He went back to his chair. On the table beside it was her drawing and a scribbled note. ‘Thank you.’ Was she coming back?
His phone rang again. It was the same number as before.
‘Hello.’
‘Am I speaking to Cal McGill?’
‘You are.’ He didn’t recognise the voice.
‘I’m Eleanor Ritchie, a nurse at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. There’s a patient here who’s asking for you. Grace Ann MacKay.’
‘Is she all right?’ He hadn’t realised she was in hospital.
‘The thing is she says she hasn’t got any next of kin. …’
‘I’m not next of kin,’ Cal said in case that was what the nurse was checking.
‘It’s awkward when it’s like this … she’s most insistent that she sees you. She had your phone number with her.’
‘I visited her a few days ago. …’
‘She mentioned it. There’s something she wants to tell you.’
‘I’ve got an appointment this afternoon.’ He thought he wouldn’t say it was a visit from the police. ‘I can come after that.’
‘Good, I’ll tell her. It’ll calm her.’
‘What happened?’
‘She’s had another stroke, a bad one. I wouldn’t leave it too long Mr McGill.’
Detective Constable Helen Jamieson knocked once on Cal’s door. She heard the padding of his feet and pulled the sleeves of her jacket straight, one at a time with a precise jerk of the cuffs. The jacket was cerise with white stripes and a matching cerise skirt which was a little too tight. She’d bought it the night before, after announcing to herself in the changing room mirror ‘it’s time you were good to yourself Helen.’ She was an 18, but the skirt didn’t come bigger than a 16. The shop assistant said, ‘It makes you look very summery’ and it did. It’d give her a target, a reason for slimming, something to aim for.