there for them, or bided his time until they were more vulnerable?
Trying to answer those questions was like catching falling rain with your hands; for every drop that landed in your palm, a thousand more fell freely to the ground. The futility of it became clear. Lennon couldn’t change what had happened. Instead, he would give Ellen the best life he knew how.
Things were bearable, at first. Her silence was a relief, in a way, even though he knew he was a coward for feeling so. But then the anger came. Bright flashes, like lightning from a blue sky. Anything could set the child off. She’d be playing with a doll, and when it wouldn’t hold the pose she’d arranged it in, she would scream and thrash and bite. Sometimes she would break things in her fury; whether they were her possessions or her father’s, it didn’t seem to matter. Each flare would burn itself out as quickly as it ignited, and she would carry on as if nothing had happened.
It was around that time that Bernie McKenna, Marie’s aunt, began to call. She was a dry-hearted spinster who couldn’t crack a smile if God himself had come down from above and told her a knock-knock joke. Lennon agreed to her requests to see Ellen, thinking contact with her wider family could only help her deal with her new situation. He never thought for a moment it would lead to Bernie suggesting, in a tone of labored innocence, that the child might be better off with her maternal relatives. Sure, a single man like him, how could he raise a little girl? Not that they’d think ill of him for giving her up, of course, but a man is a man, and if he worked the odd hours of a police officer, how could Ellen have any stability?
Lennon would never admit it as long as he lived, but a small and frightened part of him did wonder if Bernie McKenna was right. After all, he had abandoned Ellen while she was still in the womb and had no contact with her for the first six years of her life. Then he would remember she was the only family he had. At least, the only family that acknowledged his existence since his mother and sisters had disowned him when he joined the force.
No, he would not give his daughter up. Was that selfish of him? Maybe. Probably. But that was the promise he had made to himself when he carried her from that burning building, the building where her mother died, and it was a promise he was going to keep.
Lennon shivered as he watched the photographer help the forensics officer raise the tent, white PVC over an aluminium frame. It took less than a minute between them, and one more to secure it with pegs.
He walked to the open flap and stepped inside. The translucent roof allowed the street lighting to penetrate the shell. Lennon stood over the corpse, feeling like a mourner at some strange funeral.
He wondered who would mourn for Tomas Strazdas.
11
MY NAME IS Galya Petrova,” she said. “Please help me.”
“Where are you?” the man asked.
“ “I don’t know,” she said. “Under a bridge. Near water.”
“Look around you,” he said.
“There is a big building,” she said. “Glass and metal painted red. I hear cars on the bridge. There are cranes and fences all around.”
“I understand,” he said. “That’s the Royal Mail building you’re talking about. Don’t move from there. Stay under the bridge. Stay in the dark. I’ll find you.”
Tears climbed up from Galya’s throat. “Thank you,” she said, and hung up. She retreated further into the shadows, clutching the phone to her breast as if it were a newborn infant.
It had only been this afternoon—no, yesterday afternoon— that Rasa had come to the bedroom where they had kept her locked up for almost a week. She told Galya she would start work that day.
Galya knew what kind of work.
Rasa had laid out underwear on the bed, tiny sheer things, and placed a pair of shoes on the floor. The shoes had platform soles and heels that were so tall Galya could not possibly have walked in them.
“Take your clothes off,” Rasa said in stilted Russian. “Put these on.”
“No,” Galya said.
Rasa smiled in the tired but patient way a parent does at a slow child. Galya guessed her to be twenty years her senior, maybe more, her face lined by age and tobacco. Rasa dressed like a businesswoman who yearned for younger men. “Don’t be silly,” Rasa said. “You want to look nice for your client, don’t you?”
Galya backed toward the wall. “Client?”
“The gentleman who’s coming to see you. He’ll be here soon.”
“Who is he?” Galya asked.
“No one,” Rasa said. “Just a nice man.”
“What does he want?”
Rasa laughed and sat down on the foot of the bed. “That’s for you to find out. And whatever he wants, you’ll do it for him.”
“I won’t do—”
“Whatever he wants,” Rasa said, her voice hard like bones beneath skin. “Come. Sit beside me.”
Galya pressed her shoulders against the wall, kept her feet planted firm on the floor. “I don’t want to.”
“Sit,” Rasa said. “Now.”
Galya moved to the bed and lowered herself onto the mattress, keeping a good meter between her and the other woman. She kept her eyes downward.
“Are you a virgin?” Rasa asked.
Galya blushed.
“Are you?”
Galya chewed her lip.
“Answer me,” Rasa said.
“No,” Galya said.
“One man?” Rasa asked.
Galya looked at the wall.
“Two men? More?”
“Two,” Galya said, wondering why she told the truth even as she spoke it. “There was a boy back home. We were very young. It was in a field near Mama’s house. It was so quick, he hardly started before he was done, then he ran away. He never spoke to me again. I didn’t sleep for two weeks. Not until the blood came.”
Rasa’s voice and countenance softened. “And the second man?”
“Aleksander,” Galya said. She turned to look directly at Rasa. If Rasa recognized the name, she didn’t let on. “In Kiev. The night before we flew to Vilnius. He told me I’d live with a nice Russian family in Dublin, that I’d look after their children, and …”
“And what?”
Galya almost said she’d teach them English, that was what Aleksander had told her as they drove the many kilometers from her village near the Russian border to Ukraine’s capital. Aleksander had told her of the life she’d have, of the places she would see, of the money she would make and send back home to her little brother Maksim so he could settle the debts Mama had left behind.
Aleksander told her about the good life she would have as he took her in his arms in that hotel in Kiev. Galya had never seen such luxury, such thick carpets, sheets made of silk, more food than she could eat. All this would be hers, he said, and he pressed his lips and his groin against her. And she succumbed, despite what Mama would have thought looking down from Heaven, because, dear God, she was grateful. And Aleksander was handsome and tall, with dark eyes and long lashes, and Galya needed to touch something beautiful, just once in her life.
Her orgasm had come like breaking glass and left her hollow like one of the mannequins she’d seen in the shop windows at the Metrograd center. For a minute, perhaps only a few seconds, she felt she might have loved Aleksander. But the feeling dissolved in her breast, washed away when he handed her a Lithuanian passport with a picture of a girl who looked just enough like Galya Petrova to satisfy a casual glance.
She boarded the plane alone, the passport clutched in her hand, a joyful fear in her heart. Her nerves sparked with anticipation. She had never flown before and gasped at the sensation of being pushed back into her seat by the speed of the craft. It left the ground, and she made a prayer that God would deliver her safely to Vilnius.
Looking around, she noticed the faces of other passengers. Whether they laughed with their companions or
