‘D’you know anything about a man – an older man – Sapphire might have met before she disappeared?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tia. ‘I told ’em about him.’
‘Told who?’
‘Police,’ said Tia. She took another deep drag on her vape and exhaled. Robin smelled candyfloss.
‘What did you tell them?’ asked Robin.
‘He said he was gonna get her a job as a backing singer. Said she could go on tour. With Ellie Goulding.’
‘Did you ever see her with this man?’
Tia shook her head.
‘Did anyone?’
‘Dunno. Don’t think so.’
‘How did Sapphire meet him?’
‘Up the road, in Jimmy’s,’ said Tia, nodding in the direction of the corner.
‘What’s Jimmy’s?’
‘Café,’ said Tia.
‘So she didn’t meet him online?’
‘I’ve just told you,’ said Tia, ‘she met him in Jimmy’s. She bunked off one afternoon and she got talking to the guy in there. He bought her a coffee. She said she’d looked him up online, so she knew he was for real.’
‘“For real” in what sense?’
‘He worked in the music industry or something.’
‘Did she tell you his name?’
‘Nah, she stopped telling me anything about him because I said he was full of shit and she went off on one and hit me round the face.’
‘She hit you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tia, with a wry smile. ‘Didn’t hurt, really. She’s tall but she’s really skinny… some of the boys used to call her Olive Oyl.’
‘But you were friends with her?’
‘Not really,’ said Tia, with a slight shrug. ‘I was her “buddy”. If you’re a good student, you get to look after people, if they’re new…’
‘You had to take care of her?’
‘Kinda, yeah… she was always fighting, though. Spent most of her time in special ed when she was here.’
‘What else do you know about her?’
‘Know her dad and uncle were abusing her until she went into care when she was seven,’ said Tia, a pronouncement more shocking for being said in such a matter-of-fact tone.
‘How awful,’ said Robin.
‘Yeah,’ said Tia unemotionally. ‘She put it about a lot. Girls like her, they think they’ll get over it by letting boys do it to ’em again. Telling themselves it’s no big deal.’
Tia’s thickly lashed eyes looked too old and world-weary for her youthful, rounded face. Robin didn’t think the girl’s unshockability was a pose. Perhaps she’d been ‘buddies’ with too many troubled students to remain ignorant of the uglier facts of life.
‘D’you think Sapphire was sleeping with this so-called music producer?’
‘Probably,’ said Tia, taking another drag on her vape.
‘Can you remember her saying anything else about him?’
‘Yeah,’ said Tia, ‘he give her a necklace. She told me it was rubies.’
In spite of her general misery, a shiver of excitement shot through Robin at this.
‘Rubies,’ sneered Tia. ‘It was just beads. My auntie’s got a ruby ring, I know the difference.’
‘Do you remember anything else she said about him?’
‘Nah,’ said Tia, and as she said it, a bell sounded in the distance, and Robin saw the red sweatshirt-ed hordes swarming into the ugly grey building. ‘I gotta go.’
Robin watched the girl cross the road, but Tia had barely reached the school gate when she suddenly wheeled around and dashed back to Robin.
‘Jus’ remembered. He told her she reminded him of a Swedish girl he used to know. When he said she had the right look for the backing singer job.’
‘A Swedish girl,’ repeated Robin, her heart suddenly racing.
‘Yeah,’ said Tia.
‘Thanks, Tia,’ said Robin. ‘This is a big help. Shouldn’t you hide that?’ she added, looking at the vape still clutched in the girl’s hand.
‘Oh. Yeah,’ said Tia, smiling for the first time. She plunged it into her backpack, then turned, sprinted back across the road and into the rapidly emptying yard.
59
Listlessly through the window-bars
Gazing seawards many a league
From her lonely shore-built tower,
While the knights are at the wars…
Ever since limping off the train at Glasgow Central at six that morning, the end of his stump sweaty and sore because he’d fallen asleep fully clothed with his prosthesis still on, Strike had felt atrocious: poorly rested, queasy and with a headache throbbing behind his temples.
Fully aware that with nearly a bottle of Johnnie Walker inside him he was still over the alcohol limit, he picked up his hired automatic Audi A1 and set off north through yet more pelting rain, stopping on the way at a fast food van at the side of the road to buy and eat a fried bacon and egg roll, because he’d been in no condition to eat the plastic-smelling breakfast he’d been offered on the train. For the next half an hour, he drove in constant uncertainty as to whether he ought to stop the car again to throw up.
Shortly before eleven o’clock, thick rain still falling, stomach churning, head pounding, Strike entered the small Perthshire town of Crieff where Niall Semple’s abandoned wife continued to live, and deposited his Audi in a car park off the High Street. The Semples’ house had appeared a short walk away on the map, but what Strike hadn’t noticed was that Comrie Road, up which he had to walk to get there, was on a steep incline. Head down, inwardly cursing the weather, the hill and his own whisky consumption, he set off up the street, passing small shops set in Victorian buildings of stained stone.
His mobile rang and he answered, taking inadequate shelter in a doorway.
‘Hi Pat, what’s up?’ he croaked.
‘You ill?’
‘No, I’m great,’ said Strike, while rain trickled down the back of his neck.
‘Might’ve found your Hussein Mohamed,’ said Pat. ‘There’s a local news story about a nine-year-old Syrian refugee called Hafsa Mohamed, who’s in a wheelchair. Says here: “Her father Hussein says proudly that although he and his wife had a little English when they arrived in London, Hafsa had to start from scratch. She’s now fluent in the language and flourishing at her primary school in Forest Gate.” Forest Gate, that’s still in Newham. Looks like they stayed in the area they knew.’
‘Sounds promising,’ said Strike. ‘Could you get on to the paper and see whether you can get contact details for the family?’
‘Yeah, all right,’ said Pat, making a note.
‘Better go, I’m heading for an interview,’ said Strike.
As he put his phone back into his pocket he turned his face upwards to allow rain to fall directly onto his face, hoping it might make him feel less ill. A familiar symbol caught his eye, directly overhead: the iron square and compasses, protruding discreetly over the nondescript blue door outside which he was sheltering.
He moved back onto the pavement, contemplating the masonic lodge, which was no larger than a two-up, two-down house, then walked on up the hill, wondering – while trying to maintain balance on the slippery pavement and ignore his broiling guts and his pulsing headache – how many masons met in the tiny temple behind him. He ought to have stopped for painkillers. He shouldn’t have sunk nearly an entire bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. He really wished he hadn’t had that fucking roll.
The Semples’ house was large, square, detached and made of grey stone, with a well-tended front garden. As he knew from Jade’s texts, this was the house in which her husband had grown up, and which he’d inherited upon his mother’s death.