Ruby and another fourteen-year-old girl had been imprisoned for six days in a ‘trick pad’, a temporary brothel set up in an empty house right in the middle of Portsmouth. She was locked in an attic room that contained nothing but a double bed. Thick plyboard had been nailed over the one small window so that she couldn’t call for help, and the handle on the inside of the door had been removed so that she couldn’t escape. She had been raped by dozens of men who were prepared to pay to have sex with underage girls. The children’s home she lived in had known that she and the other girl were missing, but hadn’t bothered to report their absence to the police. Out of sight, out of mind; plenty of other deeply disturbed, attention-seeking kids to deal with.
One of the men – of the hundred or more who had raped her over the six days – had salvaged a conscience from some part of his psyche, because he had phoned the police, after he’d forcibly had sex with her. He hadn’t left a name, had melted back to his family, returned to tuck his kids into their beds and watch Strictly with his wife, perhaps salving his conscience with the fact that his call had saved her. God knew how the minds of men like that worked, men who you’d walk past in the street, stand behind in the queue at the supermarket, share banter with in the office. It never ceased to amaze and depress him how people who considered themselves to be upstanding members of society could be so inhumane. Justification in that their victim was marginalized, beneath contempt, perhaps? None of the men who had kidnapped and imprisoned Ruby or the men who had paid to rape her were caught. History was left to repeat itself with countless other vulnerable girls, and the thought made him sick to his stomach.
A judge had sent Ruby back to the care home. She was too old to be wanted by people looking to adopt, or fosterers, too young to live on her own. A child like thousands of others who fell between all the stools. She had spent most of the two years that followed until she was sixteen and legally allowed to live on her own, playing truant from the children’s home and from school, sliding deeper and deeper into the underworld, further from help.
Within a year of Marilyn’s first encounter with her, she had a pimp and was hooked on heroin. He later heard she’d been knocked up by one of her clients, and then dumped by her pimp for refusing to get an abortion. He had no idea what had happened to the child, but their paths had crossed a few times since and each time a little more of that feisty, furiously proud but sad and deeply damaged girl he had first met had been replaced with shadow. Numbness. Lifelessness. He wasn’t sure when she’d wound up in East Wittering or where she was living. He’d need to know the latter at least.
Movement across the table brought him back to the present. Tilting back, Ruby slid her hand into the front pocket of her skin-tight jeans and pulled out a half-smoked cigarette and an orange plastic Bic lighter. Marilyn put his hand out for the cigarette. With his other, he reached into his suit jacket pocket and pulled out his own packet of Silk Cut, held them out to her.
‘Swap.’
He ignored the look that he was sure Workman was casting him, twisted in his chair and tossed the half-smoked cigarette Ruby dropped into his hand towards the bin by the door, watched it bounce on the rim and hit the floor. Sport had never been his strong point. He’d pick it up later.
‘I always knew that you were a softie, DI Simmons,’ Ruby said with a grin, scooping up the packet, opening it with a practised flick of her index finger and shaking out a cigarette. She slid the rest of the packet and the lighter into one of the bulging pockets of her olive-green army-style parka that was hanging on the back of her chair.
‘The smoke alarm will go off,’ Workman said.
Standing, Marilyn moved his chair to under the smoke alarm, climbed up and yanked out the battery. Returning his chair to the table, he sat back down, avoiding Workman’s gaze, again. He felt unsettled, disconcerted. There was something about being in Ruby’s presence that made him feel as if he had been trapped in a time machine and transported back fifteen years. Glancing down at Jodie’s file, he forced himself to focus.
‘Why didn’t you call us earlier?’ he asked. ‘When you first found the girl’s body?’
Ruby shrugged. ‘She wasn’t going anywhere, was she?’
Workman sat forward, elbows on the table, her fingers linked together to form one big fist with her hands. ‘She might still have been alive.’
Ruby curled her lip. ‘She wasn’t.’
‘How did you know that for certain?’
‘I didn’t come down with the first shower … Miss … Mrs …’
‘Detective Sergeant Workman,’ Workman said.
Marilyn thought that Ruby might sneer again, make some snide remark about Workman’s use of her rank, but she didn’t.
‘I’ve seen enough dead bodies in my time, Detective Sergeant Workman. I know what one looks like.’
‘And it didn’t occur to you that her mother might be wondering where she was? That people might be worried?’
‘She wasn’t, was she?’ Ruby snapped. ‘You didn’t even know who the poor little sod was until hours later, did you? Even I would have made a better fucking mother than that, if I’d wanted to keep my sprog – which I
