The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows: A gripping thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Marnie Riches
for you.’
‘Sophie!’ George said. Chuckling with relief at the sight of the Social Anthropology Fellow.
‘Fancy coming for a pint and we can chew over our collaboration some more? The Bun Shop does a good burger if you’ve not already eaten. My treat.’
George assessed her options. Back to her college house full of untidy idiot undergraduates, where she could never find peace enough to work? Beggars, it turned out, really couldn’t be choosers. Or off to the pub for a second stab at sociability with women roughly her own age? Her empty stomach growled long and low. It had already decided on her brain’s behalf.
‘Perfect!’
As the two women trudged arm-in-arm towards the Porter’s Lodge, George was unaware of the man following some twenty paces behind.
That he had got past the Porters and into the college was a miracle. No. Not a miracle. Merely a feat of bluff and self-confidence. Walk like you belong there. Head held high. His time on the streets had taught him this was the best way to move around unnoticed. The moment you started acting like you didn’t belong was the moment people took you for an interloper.
Still, his heart was thudding as he followed McKenzie and her friend through the labyrinthine medieval sprawl towards the lodge. Seeing the towers loom large, covered in the claustrophobic white blanket that swallowed sound like the walls of a confessional box, he felt sick. But in the middle of the snow-bound courtyard, where the gritted paths intersected, the women suddenly took a sharp left. They entered a different courtyard on the other side of the chapel. Wider spaces here. The snow glittered like homeless man’s diamonds in the moonlight. It looked like they were going through some more discreet exit. Except, downside was, he was exposed here. If they turned around, they would realise, perhaps, that they were being followed.
Get to McKenzie, the email had said. Get her laptop and the USB stick that has her database on it – by any means necessary. The names are all on there.
Any means necessary. Yes. He was a committed soldier and this was war. It was his job to obey orders. He removed his glove for thirty seconds – just long enough to reach down through the tear in his pocket into the space between the lining and outer of his coat. Touched the tools hidden along the inner seam. Screwdriver. Hammer. Chisel. Tonight he would not use ice and snow. Tonight, he needed something a little more robust.
George looked into Sophie’s startling green eyes. Looked away after a couple of uncomfortable beats. Felt instinctively like there was more than just friendly curiosity at play in her new colleague’s exacting gaze. Some kind of chemistry shit going on. She hadn’t experienced that with a woman since Tonya …
‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ George said. ‘I don’t see how your study into the Roma has any bearing on my trafficking research. I’m all about qualitative and quantitative. Interview transcriptions from victims and perps. Stats. You’re presumably coming at it from a cultural heritage angle.’ She took a large bite out of her burger. Eyes on the clientele in the pub, feeling like she was being observed. Back to Sophie. Perhaps observed only by her.
All hands flapping and smiles, Sophie’s intense expression was suddenly transformed. ‘You couldn’t be wronger there, my love,’ she said in that rolling West Country accent. George wasn’t sure about the ‘my love’. ‘The reason Sally wanted us to work together was that the Roma – my speciality – are at the centre of many a child abduction scandal.’
Drinking deeply from her pint of beer, George started to arrange the condiments in a perfectly straight line along the middle of the table. Separating her and Sophie with a barrier of salt, pepper, vinegar and ketchup. ‘There’s often stories in the media about blond children allegedly being abducted by the Roma. Usually when northern Europeans are on holiday in countries like Turkey and Greece.’
Chewing slowly, thoroughly, perhaps thoughtfully, on her veggie-burger, Sophie nodded and flicked her long hair over her shoulder. ‘Stories like that always engender mass hysteria in the press – especially in the tabloids. White Europeans are up in arms whenever they get wind of some kind of abuse of a blond child by an underclass of minority ethnic people like ‘gypsies’. And the Roma have always been vilified as child-abductors. It goes back donkey’s years, like the myth of Jews baking their Passover bread with Christian children’s blood.’
‘Racist propaganda, then?’ George asked, pulling her e-cigarette out of her rucksack.
‘But the point is, the Roma informally adopt children from families that can’t bring their own kids up. Happens a lot. I think in the case of the ‘Blonde Angel’ back in 2013, for example, the mother was Bulgarian and just couldn’t look after her daughter. Lack of paperwork implicates the adoptive parents though, and the media jumps onto a witch hunt.’
George thought about how the case Van den Bergen had been working on had been given the moniker of Operation Roma by Kamphuis or Hasselblad or one of those odious bastards above him, and wondered about the prejudices behind the name in light of what Sophie was saying. Missing person equals gypsies, if the bigots were to be believed. Hadn’t Hasselblad pointed the finger at Romani travellers, amongst other easily maligned groups? She had thought the Roma referred to the Italian capital of Rome – a suspected destination of the missing, at one point, and the frequently used European hub of trans-national trafficking networks. Only now did she make the link. How the hell did I miss that?
‘You’ve got a point.’ She rubbed her finger along her full bottom lip. Chapped and rough from the cold. ‘Roma kids from South Eastern Europe are by far the largest ethnic group preyed on by traffickers,’ George said, thinking about what she had read about beggars and child prostitutes in Italy, the Russian Federation and Turkey. ‘So, the truth is actually a world away from media representation.’
Sophie seemed momentarily to be assessing George. Peering at her intently over her beer glass. She looked suddenly thoughtful again. ‘Yep. Of the kids trafficked out of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, Roma kids constitute about seventy per cent. They’re disproportionately poor. Maybe someone trusted in the family or village offers to get a child work elsewhere. What the fuck have they got in their little villages at home? Domestic abuse, maybe. Poverty, certainly. Sod all in the way of education or prospects. So they often go willingly. Unwittingly. Factor in corrupt border patrol and police, and you’ve got movement of children over borders into brothels, sweatshops, begging on the streets.’
George drained her beer glass, feeling suddenly lightheaded in the over-heated warmth of the pub, with a full stomach. Sophie was twirling some of that long, unkempt hair coquettishly around her finger. Her chipped nail varnish made George feel itchy. Inadvertently, she found herself checking her phone for texts from Van den Bergen, as though those would save her from the keen-eyed appraisal of the inexpertly groomed Dr Bartek. Nothing. She found herself looking up at the décolletage of her colleague.
‘So, studying human trafficking in Europe…’ Sophie said, licking her fingers now that her plate was clean ‘… is not all stats. There’s a social anthropology aspect to it to. Poverty, ethnicity … Do you fancy a fuck?’
George burst out laughing, and felt the heat suffuse her cheeks with embarrassment though she had not been easily embarrassed in years. ‘I only came out to supervise my Sociology finalist!’
‘So?!’ Sophie reached out, stroked her hand, and started to play footsie with her under the table, which, in snow boots, felt more like a football tackle than flirtation.
The sight of ketchup under Sophie’s fingernails made George pull her hand away. She pressed her lips together and smiled awkwardly, looking everywhere but at this five-foot tall propositioner with mesmerising eyes. ‘I’m in a relationship. Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘On and off.’
‘Well, then?’
George had agreed to coffee. That was all.
The walk back to her place, up the steep incline of Castle