‘We don’t like to disappoint,’ said Annie, stepping forward. ‘Shall we go up?’
‘There’s nothing to see, like I told you on the phone,’ said McCrae, ‘but be my guest.’ He led the way to the first floor, at the back, where Marnie’s tiny bedsit overlooked an alley full of wheelie bins and the backyards of the houses opposite. Beyond them lay train tracks. McCrae hovered in the doorway as if he was worried they’d steal the silverware. Only there wasn’t any silverware. There wasn’t anything except an empty three-shelf homemade bookcase built of bricks and boards.
‘Exactly when did she leave?’ Annie asked.
‘End of April.’
That worked out at a couple of weeks after the rape, Annie reckoned. ‘Did she take all her stuff with her?’
‘There wasn’t much to take. That’s the thing. She just left one day and left the mess to me. As far as I could tell, she probably didn’t take more than a suitcase with her. Clothes and some personal stuff. She left the rest. A few books. Some cutlery, dishware, pots and pans. Household things. That’s about all. Here one day, gone the next. But her rent was up to date.’
Annie managed to hold her tongue before saying how happy she was to hear that. ‘What about a forwarding address?’
McCrae just shook his head.
‘Previous address?’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t ask for her details?’
McCrae shifted from foot to foot. ‘Well... er... no.’
‘What happened to her things?’
‘Bin bag in the cellar. I thought I’d keep it a little while, you know, in case she called back for it.’
‘We’ll look at it when we’re done here,’ Annie said as she started wandering about the small room. She peeled back a moth-eaten curtain and saw the hot plate with two shelves above it, both bare. There was nothing else in the room.
‘Where did she sleep?’ Gerry asked.
‘Mattress on the floor, under the window there, and a ratty old sleeping bag,’ said McCrae. ‘I threw them both out.’
Annie sniffed the air. It was stale and foisty, as one would expect in a room shut up so long in warm weather. She tried to open the window but couldn’t budge it.
‘Bloody painters,’ said McCrae. ‘Only painted it shut, didn’t they?’
‘What was Marnie like?’ Gerry asked.
‘Like? Well, just ordinary really. Quiet. She never said much. Seemed a serious sort of girl. Used to have posters on the walls — save the planet, that sort of thing. Always polite, though. A smile and a hello. Well brought up. You could tell. I never had much to do with her, really, so there’s not a lot I can tell you beyond that.’
‘What happened to the posters?’ Annie could see the bare patches where they used to be.
‘I took them down, dumped them.’
‘Did you notice any changes in her behaviour or demeanour?’
‘Eh? Come again.’
‘Anything different about her around the time she left?’
‘I didn’t talk to her much the last few weeks she was here. I don’t live here, of course, so I wouldn’t know. But I don’t think she went out much. I mean, if I was around fixing something, I didn’t see her coming or going. Like I said, she left at the end of the month.’
‘Did you see her at all?’
‘Once or twice.’
‘How did she seem on those occasions, the last two or three weeks?’
McCrae seemed stumped by the question. ‘Tired, mostly,’ he said. ‘Her eyes, you know. Puffy. With bags under. As if she hadn’t been getting enough sleep.’
‘Or crying?’ said Annie.
‘Aye, maybe that, too.’
That made sense, Annie thought, given what Marnie had been through. Why had she not sought help? What had been going on in her mind? ‘Was she a student?’ she asked.
‘Miss Sedgwick? No, I don’t think so. You’d have to ask the others, though.’
‘How did she get around?’
‘She had a car. A Fiat, I think.’
‘So Marnie was wealthy?’
‘No, I’d hardly say that. You wouldn’t, either, if you saw the car. But she had a paying job. Two, actually.’
‘What jobs?’
‘A cafe in town. Waitress. One of those chains. Ask. Zizzi. Pizza Express. Something like that.’
‘You can’t remember which one?’
‘I think it was Pizza Express, but I can’t be certain. She gave me a slice once. Pizza, that is. She brought some home from work with her and I happened to be in the hall. I think the box was Pizza Express but I wouldn’t swear to it.’
‘And the other?’
‘Catering of some sort, or helping caterers. That one was occasional. Just when she was needed, like.’
‘Did she have any close friends among the other tenants?’
‘I did see her chatting with that Chinese lass from 3b once or twice. They seemed quite close.’
‘OK. I think we’ve seen enough here,’ said Annie. ‘Can we go and see the stuff she left behind her now?’
‘Follow me,’ said McCrae. He led them down to the ground floor, where he fumbled for a key in his pockets and opened a door to the cellar. It was more of a basement, really, Annie thought, having imagined a grim and sooty old coal cellar, and she was surprised McCrae hadn’t done it up a bit, given it a lick of paint and rented it out as a basement apartment. Instead, it was full of junk.
McCrae took them over to a black bin bag in a corner. ‘This is it,’ he said.
Gerry went back to the car to get the proper bags to store the stuff as evidence. There wasn’t much, as McCrae had said. Books, mostly philosophy and psychology as far as Annie could tell; two plates, cups, glasses, knives and forks; and a pan and kettle she would have heated on the hot plate. That was it. No personal items — notebooks, diaries, lists of addresses, letters, nothing like that.
‘What about post since she left?’
McCrae walked over to a battered chest of drawers, opened the top one and took out a bundle of envelopes fastened with a rubber band. ‘I keep the mail of any tenants who leave for a while, if they don’t arrange a forwarding address, just in case there’s something important. You’d be surprised. Over the years I’ve had cheques, passports, you name it. These are just junk mail.’
Gerry took the bundle. They might hold some clue as to where Marnie had gone. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ll take these, too.’
After they had carried out Marnie’s stuff and stored it in the boot of the car, they tried the door to 3b, occupied by a student called Mitsuko Ogawa, who was definitely not Chinese, as even Annie’s rudimentary grasp of foreign languages told her. But there was no one home. She scribbled a little note, added her mobile number and said they’d be back later, then she grinned at Gerry. ‘If you ask me, it’s lunchtime. Fancy a pizza?’
Zelda still couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. At one time, she thought she could hear traffic beyond the boarded-up windows, or an airplane fly over, but even then she thought she might be imagining things. One thing she wasn’t imagining was that nobody was coming to rescue her. No Willie Garvin. No doubt the police were trying to find her, but they clearly had no more idea where she was being kept than she did. And there was no way she could see of getting a message out.
She spent a lot of time trying to figure out ways of killing herself before they could take her to that brothel in Dhaka. She tried to wrap the leg chain around her neck to strangle herself, but it wasn’t long enough, so she only managed to strain a muscle in her thigh. She tried holding her breath, and swallowing her tongue, but found she could do neither. She always gasped for breath on the verge of passing out and never got as far as putting her fingers in her mouth to push the rolled ball of tongue down her throat. She couldn’t face trying to bash her brains out against the radiator.