‘A couple,’ said Fiona.
‘And there was Mia,’ Fatima added. ‘Don’t forget Mia.’
Winsome’s ears pricked up at the name. ‘What about Mia?’ she asked.
‘They met near the beginning of term,’ Fatima said. ‘Sarah and Mia. They hung out together for a while. Don’t go reading anything into this. It wasn’t a lesbian thing or anything. They just... you know, found they liked the same music and books and stuff. Just hit it off.’
‘And the rest of you?’
‘I don’t know about the others,’ said Fiona, ‘but I always found Mia a bit stand-offish.’
‘She was weird,’ said Erik. ‘She didn’t really seem to want anything to do with us. Just Sarah.’
Winsome remembered Colin Fairfax, Adrienne Munro’s ex-boyfriend, saying that he got a ‘bad vibe’ from Mia. Surely this had to be the same person? ‘But you say Sarah wasn’t gay. How do you know?’
‘I suggested it one night,’ Erik said. ‘Just making a joke, like, and Sarah got really pissed off with me.’
‘She wasn’t gay,’ Fiona said. ‘Take it from me. But Mia was a bit weird.’
‘So they were just friends?’ Winsome said. ‘What happened?’
‘Mia just disappeared.’
Exactly the way Adrienne’s Mia did, Winsome thought.
‘When?’
‘Around the middle of October. Poof. She was gone.’
‘Did she drop out?’
‘I don’t think she was ever in,’ said Erik. ‘She told us she was studying English, had transferred after doing her first year in Sussex because she wasn’t happy down south. But I never saw her with a book in her hand.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything, idiot,’ said Fiona. ‘You’re studying engineering but I don’t see you running around with a spanner in your hand.’
‘It’s electrical engineering.’
‘All right, a spark plug, then.’
Erik laughed and broke the tension. ‘A spark plug. The woman’s crazy.’
‘Back to Mia,’ said Winsome ‘Can you describe her for me?’
They thought for a moment, then Fiona said, ‘She’s about my height — that’s five foot six — wavy reddish brown hair, medium length, oval face. Brown eyes, I think.’
‘How did she dress?’
Fiona shrugged. ‘Just like any student, really. Jeans, denim jacket. I didn’t really notice. She didn’t dress to show off her body, though. Most of her clothes were fairly loose.’
‘She had a great body though,’ said. Erik. ‘You could tell. She certainly had a decent pair of tits.’
‘Oh, you. Typical male. Always the breasts.’
Winsome thought she had enough without going further into the ins and outs of Mia’s breasts. What she had heard so far matched almost exactly the description given by Colin Fairfax of the Mia who had befriended Adrienne Munro, and under much the same sort of circumstances. As far as Winsome was concerned, they were one and the same. What she needed to do next, she realised, was to get Ray Cabbot, if he was available, to work on a sketch with Colin Fairfax, then perhaps show it to Fiona, Fatima and Erik to check for accuracy, and to get their input.
‘Did Mia ever come here, to the house?’ she asked.
‘Not that I know of,’ said Fiona, still scowling at Erik.
‘No,’ said Fatima. ‘None of us hang out here, anyway. It’s mostly just for working and sleeping and eating. We go out when we want to see people.’
‘OK,’ said Winsome, putting away her notebook. She slipped a card from her purse and dropped it on the table. ‘If any one of you thinks of anything else, especially anything that might help us find this Mia, then please call me.’
They all nodded.
‘And again,’ said Winsome as she got up to leave. ‘I’m really sorry about your friend. She sounds like a truly special person.’
Winsome saw Fatima’s eyes mist up before she turned and headed for the door.
The businessman across the aisle was staring at Zelda. It didn’t bother her; it happened a lot. Over time, she had learned to differentiate a lascivious stare from a suspicious one. This man wanted to fuck her. That was all. She gave him a look that told him she knew exactly what he was thinking. He immediately blushed and turned guiltily away, perhaps plagued by a mental image of the wife he had been dreaming of deceiving. Zelda smiled to herself and glanced out of the window. It worked every time. Well, almost.
Zelda enjoyed the train journey to London from Northallerton, just as she had from Penzance. She had always travelled first class and tried to book a single seat so that she wouldn’t be bothered by any nuisance neighbours who wanted to talk. Men like the one across the aisle undressed her with their eyes, certainly, and perhaps wished they were sitting next to her, or more, but she found it easy to deal with them. She enjoyed a sandwich and a glass of wine as she travelled, looking out at cooling towers shaped like huge stiff corsets across dark muddy fields. Horses wandered here and there, sheep grazed and cows lay in close groups or munched what little grass there was. Occasionally the sun would reflect on a stretch of water or a car windscreen; a town would flash by, terraced housing, children playing in a schoolyard, church towers or spires, the station with a nameplate they were always travelling too fast to read. She liked to watch the people getting on and off at the different stops, wondered where they were going, what they were going to do, who they were going to meet. She made up stories about them in her mind.
Sometimes, if it was a dull day, or if she simply felt like it, she would read through most of the journey. This time, though, as soon as the train left the north, the weather was good, the sky blue and filled with white fluffy clouds casting swift-moving shadows as they scudded on the wind over the fields, and her attention moved in and out of Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, which she had read several times before. Mostly she didn’t think about the tasks that lay ahead of her — the time for that would come soon enough — but luxuriated in being suspended in an eternal now.
Sometimes, though, she couldn’t help but think about the past. She hadn’t told Ray the half of it, or Banks. She thought perhaps Banks could guess, but even his imagination might fall somewhat short of the full horror. She remembered the street in a suburb of Chisinau, with Soviet-era tenements, the tobacconist’s shop, the little bar on the corner where the menfolk gathered to watch football. Until that day her life had been good. It was true that she had no parents, no family — they had all been wiped out in the war — but that was a long time ago, and the orphanage had given her a sense of belonging, had been a good place to grow up, even when the government money ceased to come and they had to make do with what little charity they could get.
Zelda had been very lucky. She had been a good student; she had loved learning. Before most of the children could stumble through a sentence of English, if she could get to them before the nuns caught her, she was reading books by Charles Dickens and Beatrix Potter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and whatever strange English language titles turned up in the boxes people donated. She loved reading in English, and now, so many years later, it was the language she dreamed in, too, though even in her dreams she couldn’t always find the right word. Even more than in languages, though, she shone in art. But she was not well versed in the ways of the world and was a very naive, inexperienced girl for someone of her age.
In that one day, when she was eighteen and it was time to leave the orphanage, her whole life changed in a split second. Nobody was throwing her out; they didn’t do things like that. Zelda had done very well in all her exams; her teacher had sent out samples of her best work, and she had been accepted into a prestigious art college in Bucharest in neighbouring Romania. She was walking to the train station with her small suitcase of worldly possessions, a few leu in her pocket, an introduction to the head of the college and her ticket to Bucharest, feeling a little sad because she had to leave her friends behind, but happy and excited about the future because... well, because she was young and fearless, and she had the whole world ahead of her.