Shallow Be Thy Grave, page 7
Grace seemed overjoyed to meet Lily. “Oh my God, I’ve heard so much about you.”
She took them through to a kitchen that was half the size of the Beaumonts’, but still spacious. “What are you doing here? You know Fiona’s not here? She’s taken off for the summer.”
“Yeah, we know. That’s why we’re here. We need to find her,” said Lily.
“We just wondered whether you knew where they were heading,” said Jo.
Grace picked up a heap of clothes she’d obviously been sorting when they rang the bell, and threw them back into the wash basket. She didn’t look at either Jo or Lily as she spoke, “Oh right. No, I haven’t heard from her since she left. God, I miss her. She was my best friend here. We used to slag off all the other au pairs. And Michel.”
“Who’s Michel?” asked Jo.
Grace shoved the last armful of what looked like entirely pink clothing into the washing machine and shut the door with a flamboyant bang. “Who I work for. Michel Montre. His wife died.” She lowered her voice although Lily was pretty sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house. “He’s a bit of a tyrant. I keep trying to put it down to a broken heart. Insists on having the-”
“So you can’t help us?” interrupted Lily. Grace’s mention of dead relatives reminded her of the reason they were trying to track Fiona down. She watched Grace select the programme on the washing machine and push the start button. “We really need to get hold of Fi. Her granddad’s died.”
“Oh.” Grace straightened up and her hand went to her throat. “There’s me blathering on again. She’ll be really upset. Oh, course, he’s your granddad too.” She fixed Lily with a look of sympathy. “I’m sorry.”
Lily shrugged off the apology. She didn’t want to be reminded of her involvement in the family, because that would lead to other thoughts, thoughts she didn’t want to acknowledge right now. “We need to find Fi.”
“Oh blimey. All I know is they were going to Amsterdam first.”
“But she told her dad she was looking forward to getting a sun tan,” said Lily. “It’s not sunny in Amsterdam.” Lily paused and said with a little less certainty. “Is it?”
Grace flicked the switch on the side of the kettle. “Do you want a cup of tea? Kettle’s just boiled. My mum sends Yorkshire tea bags over. And there’s gateau. Or pain au chocolat?”
“Why Amsterdam?” asked Jo. “I mean, apart from the obvious.”
“Brigitte’s got them a job there.”
“Why would she tell her dad she was heading south?”
“I don’t know. I think the plan is they’ll go to places like Portugal or Spain, once they’ve earned some cash, and the tourist season gets under way. Maybe she didn’t want him to worry.”
“What do you mean worry?” asked Lily.
“Well, you know, Amsterdam, it’s a,” she searched for the right word, “a vibrant city.”
“When did you last actually see Fiona?” said Jo, sitting down at the table and pulling her notebook out of her bag.
“Last week, a couple of days before they set off.”
“When exactly last week?”
“It must have been,” Grace glanced at a long, thin calendar that was tacked to the wall, “the 3rd. A week ago today. Thursdays are my morning off, although,” she glanced at the mountain of clothes, “you wouldn’t always notice.”
“And how was she? I mean, how did she seem?” asked Lily.
“Good,” Grace paused for a moment as if thinking for exactly the right words. “A bit distracted. It was all a bit last-minute.”
“She rang me,” said Lily as Jo scribbled things down. “Thursday night. She left a message, sounded really upset. Do you know why?”
Grace looked puzzled. “No. Maybe she was sad to be leaving Paris? I mean she’s got,” there was a slight pause, barely noticeable, but Lily heard it, “friends here.”
“When was she going?” asked Jo. “To Amsterdam, I mean?”
“The Saturday. They’d booked their train tickets. She showed them to me.”
Jo opened her notebook. “So Saturday, 5th May.” She wrote something down. “Ok, well we’re getting somewhere. Do you know whereabouts in Amsterdam?”
“Brigitte’s got friends over there, a guy called Frank.”
“Frank.” Jo wrote it down in her notebook and then sucked thoughtfully on the end of her pen.
“Ok, so Amsterdam,” said Lily, trying to catch up with the sequence of events. “Do you know where they’re staying?”
“No,” Grace raised her index finger up in the air, like Lily had scored a point. “And that’s the weird thing, because she promised she’d ring me as soon as they got there and got settled. They should have got there by Sunday.”
The feeling of gnawing anxiety returned to Lily’s stomach.
“Brigitte’d got them a job in a café. Choice Exact.” She shrugged and looked at them both. “I thought it was a weird name for a café.”
Lily glanced across to Jo. “We’ll have to go.”
Jo nodded. “You’re sure they definitely went?”
“I guess. I mean, I think she would have rung me if they’d changed their plans.”
“Have you got a photo of them both?” asked Lily.
“Yes, from when we went to the fair in Jardin les Tuileries. Hang on a minute.”
Grace ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs like an eager springer spaniel and returned a minute later with an envelope of photos. She flicked through a couple before handing one to Lily. “That’s all three of us. We got this bloke to take it. I was worried he was going to nick the camera. That’s why I look weird. That’s Brigitte.”
Lily stared at the picture of the three of them, arms round each other. Fiona was in the middle, grinning to the camera. The sun was beating down from a clear blue sky and all three girls had bare arms. Grace and Fiona were wearing short skirts. Brigitte had a pair of brown shorts on, her short dark hair pulled back from her face in some kind of headscarf, bandana. She was attractive in a boyish way. Like those photographs of Audrey Hepburn with her short hair cut that everyone seemed to buy at freshers’ fairs. Lily guessed she was a couple of years older than Fiona. Maybe twenty two.
“Poor Fiona,” said Grace. “Just when she was starting to move on.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lily. “Move on from what?”
Grace’s cheeks turned pink. She poured the tea into three china cups. “Nothing. I just mean, she was so much happier once she left the Beaumonts. Life was starting to look up. You know she got a place at the University of Paris starting in September?”
“She mentioned something about it,” Lily lied. “I didn’t know she’d definitely got a place.”
“She only found out a couple of weeks ago.”
“What about their flat?” asked Jo.
“You mean Brigitte’s place?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been. It’s still there, I guess. Poor Fi. I guess she’ll have to go back to England now. I wonder whether she’ll still do her course? It won’t be easy for her, leaving her dad again. She worries about him enough as it is, especially since, well everything.”
“Can we take this?” Lily waved the photograph in the air.
“Sure. I’ve got the negatives.”
“Do you know,” Jo started to speak and then hesitated. She glanced across at Lily before looking back to Grace. “Do you happen to know whether Brigitte worked as a, worked at all?”
“Fiona said she was something in sales, but I don’t know what.”
“Sales?” Lily repeated. She feared the worst.
“Has she got any family, or friends in Paris? Brigitte, I mean,” asked Jo. “Someone who might know where they’ve gone?”
Grace shook her head. “That’s the weird thing.”
“What is?”
“Brigitte doesn’t have any contact with her family. I don’t even know where she’s from. She says she’s originally from Germany, but she’s not.”
“How do you know?”
“Her German’s not good enough. I mean mine’s not brilliant but I know the difference between zeichnen and zeignen.”
“Why would she say she’s German if she’s not?” asked Lily.
Grace hesitated a moment, like she was aware she was gossiping.
“Any information might be useful in finding Fiona,” said Jo primly.
Grace spoke quietly, slowly. “I think she’s run away from home.”
“Run away from home?” said Lily. “How old is she?”
“I mean, I think she ran away from home. Years ago.”
“Why?” asked Jo.
“Why do I think she ran away?”
“Yes.”
“Because she never mentions her family. And if you ever ask her a question, like where did she go to school, or anything, she just clams up. It’s like someone just dropped her off here in Paris a couple of years ago. Anything before that’s a complete mystery. She’s got no friends, not ones from way back.”
“Maybe she hasn’t got any family,” said Lily. “Maybe she was in care or something.”
“I think she’s running from something.”
Lily considered this. She’d run away from her mother, but she’d only gone forty miles, to Leeds. To move to another country would have taken far more imagination than she’d had at that age. Far more imagination or far more fear. She looked at Grace. “What’s Brigitte’s family done?”
Grace looked like she might cry. “I don’t know. None of us know her that well. Fi kind of adopted her, but she’s never fitted in. I know what everyone thinks.”
“What?”
“Well, you know.” The skin on Grace’s chest and neck turned red again. Lily noticed she was wearing a gold crucifix. “What makes people run away from home?”
Lily could list a thousand reasons. Watching your mother eat herself to death, getting away from the dickhead lads that hung around the estate trying to get you high on glue or aerosols in the hope they might cop a feel of something, the sensation that the walls are closing in and if you didn’t get out the life would be squeezed from you, rib by painful rib. Grace cut into her thoughts.
“It’s always abuse, isn’t it?” said the au pair. She took a sip of her tea, winced as if she’d burned her mouth and then lowered her voice. “Sexual abuse.”
Chapter 6
“So, what do we do?” asked Lily, her head spinning. They were back on the pavement, outside Grace’s house.
“I don’t like this,” said Jo. “I don’t like the sound of Brigitte’s family. And why haven’t they rung anyone?”
“Should we go to Amsterdam?”
“Might as well,” said Jo. “It’s not like we’ve got any better ideas. We can check out this Choice Exact place.”
“Come on then,” said Lily. “The sooner we get there, the sooner we find them, the sooner we stop worrying. Do we need passports?”
Jo patted her canvas bag, which she took everywhere with her, indicating passports were taken care of. “Why would she say she’s German, if she’s not?” asked Jo.
“Maybe Grace is right. Maybe she is on the run from her family.”
Jo turned in the direction of the Metro. “At least we’ll get a decent smoke in Amsterdam. And if they are there, it’ll be ace to hang out there for a bit. Have you ever b-”
Lily knew Jo realised she’d just asked a stupid question. Lily’s trip to the Costa del Sol with Jo last year had been her first trip abroad. She still hadn’t got her head around the fact that you could need a passport without going on a boat or an aeroplane. What happened when the border between two countries ran through a town or village? Did people on one side of the border speak a different language to the other side, even though they were only a street apart? Did they paint the border onto the roads, like double yellow lines? Lily wished she’d paid more attention to geography lessons at school, although all she could ever remember the teacher talking about was glaciers and coal mining. None of which was much use to her, she mused as they caught the train to the airport and Lily cashed another travellers’ cheque.
They arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol at five o’clock and reached the centre of the city by train. Lily loved it immediately - the canals and the bridges, the painted houses. Even the policemen looked cool, in brown leather jackets instead of the buttoned up, repressed uniforms of the English police. Amsterdam felt like a city where everything went.
Jo pulled Lily into the first coffee shop they passed and Lily nearly fell off her stool as the waitress passed them a drugs menu. Ten different kinds of hash, five different grasses. Lily felt momentarily side-lined. She wasn’t sure she approved. There was something thrilling about drugs being illegal – their illicitness added to their appeal. She didn’t like them being offered up like hamburgers in a fast food joint. She didn’t complain though as Jo ordered three grammes of Lebanese red and they drank coffee while they smoked. Halfway through the first spliff, Lily’s head was floating and she couldn’t stop giggling.
A waiter came to the table, although waiter was probably a bit strong. He was dressed in ripped jeans and had tattoos covering every last inch of his forearms, so that it looked like he was wearing a tight fitting long-sleeved jumper, when actually he had on a vest.
“Can I get you anything else, ladies?”
“We’re looking for a place called Choice Exact,” said Jo.
“It’s in De Wallen, the Rossebuurt,” he said, as he stacked their empty cups. “Go out of here, turn left, you can’t miss it.”
“Guess what that means,” said Jo to Lily as they emerged onto the pavement.
“What?”
“Rossebuurt.”
Lily shook her head, not comprehending.
“It’s the red light district,” said Jo. “We came here when we went inter-railing. Dan the Dickhead was all up for a threesome.”
They strolled along by the side of a canal, Lily admiring the houseboats and trying not to trip over all the bicycles that were tied to the railings at the side of the road. “I’ve got an idea,” said Jo as they passed the post office. “Wait here.”
Lily sank into a cross-legged position on the pavement. The sun was sliding down the horizon, casting a rosy glow on the cyclists and other stoned tourists. Lily had been taken over by a sixth sense that everything was going to turn out ok. She smiled as Jo returned.
“I’ve posted the hash,” said Jo.
“Cool,” said Lily, although she didn’t really understand why Jo would want to post dope. “Where to?”
“Brigitte’s. I addressed it to Bruno. If it gets busted by the cops, we can deny all knowledge.”
They eventually found Choice Exact on Oude Hoogstraat, a small, narrow street that ran perpendicular to one of the canals. Entering the café was like entering a womb - it was small, and warm with beautiful deep-red wall hangings. Candles flickered in glass jars on every table. Lily relaxed and took a seat at the bar. She felt immediately at home, like she’d been here before.
“Is Frank around?” Jo asked as they ordered their drinks and an eighth of Moroccan Black.
“Who wants to know?” asked the waitress, a young woman who could easily have been English. She had hennaed red hair that fell almost to her waist.
“We’re friends of Brigitte.”
The waitress began wiping the dark wood of the bar with a damp cloth. “Never heard of him.”
“She’s travelling with someone called Fiona, an English girl,” said Jo. “They were supposed to get a job here. Show her the photo, Lil.”
Lily took the picture out of her inside pocket and handed it across the bar. The bartender glanced at it for a couple of seconds, and Lily thought she saw a flicker of recognition cross the woman’s face. But she handed the photo back to Lily and shook her head. “Never seen them before.”
She moved away to serve a group of English blokes who must have been on some kind of stag do, Lily guessed, all crowded into the bar. Jo and Lily sat down at a table at the far end of the room. Jo rolled another spliff. “God, smell that.”
Lily inhaled the warm, sweet dope that Jo had crumbled into the Rizla papers.
“Well,” said Jo. “At least we know one thing.”
“What’s that?” asked Lily, her speech still slow and slightly slurred.
“They’re not where they’re supposed to be.”
For some reason this made Lily laugh. It took a few minutes before she could get herself back under control. “What are we going to do now?”
“Let’s finish this, then go for a wander. It’s crazy round here on a night.”
It was dark by the time they left Choice Exact and the streets seemed to have suddenly filled with people. Lily saw the red lights lighting up small windows, with tasselled curtains at each side. Women gyrated in shop windows, like dressmaker’s dummies come alive. Lily’s eyes grew wider, until she felt they might pop from her head. She’d never seen anything like it before. There was a woman turning tricks on the estate in Accrington. She knew because most of the lads had paid her a visit at one point or another, but there was nothing in Lily’s background to compare to this. As they walked down the narrow, cobbled streets in silence, a woman dressed in tight black leather trousers and a bra shouted at her: “You want some action, honey?”
Lily blushed and turned to Jo, but Jo was no longer by her side. Lily looked down the street. Jo had completely disappeared.
“I do you for free,” shouted the prostitute. Lily felt a flush of something between excitement and fear. Where the feck was Jo? Neon lights lit up just about every doorway. ‘Sex Show’, ‘Sex Shop’, ‘Banana Club’, Lily read the signs as she retraced her steps back down the street, wondering whether Jo’s attention had been caught by something further down.
