Nadia stared at a point in the centre of the table, her shoulders rounded, hunched slightly forward as if projecting herself into the story she was telling.
‘Everyone was scared. All of the time. Some of the women starved themselves until they couldn’t even walk or speak. Some of them cut themselves. I didn’t understand that but a lady told me it was so they wouldn’t get sent away. They believed that if they could convince people that they had mental health problems, they’d have to be allowed to stay. But it didn’t work because they’d still disappear. We’d hear the doors open in the middle of the night and the next morning they’d be gone. You didn’t even get to say goodbye to them.’
She swallowed hard and inclined her head towards the wall, as if she didn’t want them to see the look in her eyes when she spoke again.
‘We were hopeless. We were … used.’ Her jaw worked at nothing for a few seconds as she steeled herself. ‘You can’t understand it until you’re there. You have to make a decision. One of the other women, she told me to find someone who’d protect me. She told me that if I chose one man, then maybe the others would leave me alone.’ She turned to Zigic, eyes hot with rage. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s one man or all of them?’
Zigic nodded because he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
She looked to Ferreira and Zigic noticed Mel’s posture now, chin dipped and her hands cupped together in front of her mouth. Closed off and defensive and she knew better than that, knew how important it was to hold yourself open and receptive in here as people unburdened themselves.
He knew where this was bubbling up from in her: Walton.
This was why Adams was prepared to risk so much on his hunch, Zigic realised. Because if she was like this now, then how bad was she in the early hours of the morning, laying awake and wondering if Walton was outside waiting for her?
Nadia gathered herself again, smothered the rage, chewed up all the other words she could have used but decided not to for whatever reason. Because she thought they reflected badly on her or because they were still too raw to share with strangers he didn’t know.
‘I did like Patrick,’ she said. ‘I was lucky because he liked me too. But I made the decision.’ She looked again to Ferreira, desperate for understanding. ‘It was better, right? To be in control of what was going to happen to me?’
‘You did what you had to,’ Ferreira said, her voice low and throaty. ‘But you never should have been put in that situation.’
‘None of you should,’ Ms Hussein said. Her face clouded over and she looked down into her lap. She obviously wasn’t surprised by what she was hearing, just unhappy about it.
Zigic could see her adding this to the mental inventory of Long Fleet’s crimes she carried around. He hadn’t expected the interview to take this turn when he called her, but he found he was relieved she was here rather than some duty solicitor.
‘Patrick knew all about my case,’ Nadia said pensively. ‘I didn’t understand it and my solicitor told me right from the beginning that there wasn’t much point arguing because I didn’t have any good reason to stay in England. Mum was the one who couldn’t go back to Ghana. I’d be safe there.’ She smiled bitterly at the idea, shook her head. ‘One day Patrick told me they were preparing to deport me. He said it was going to be very soon.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I cried. All day and all night. I couldn’t eat. I decided I’d kill myself before I let them send me there. And then I understood why the other women went on hunger strike. They can’t send you back if you do that. So that’s what I did. Within a few days I already felt like I was dying and they took me into the medical bay. Patrick was upset with me. He kept telling me not to give up but what else was I supposed to do? It was better being in there on a drip than being deported.’
She reached for her water again, took a tiny sip, her hand trembling.
‘He told me there was a way I could stay here.’ Nadia shrank slightly into her chair, drawing back from the table and away from Ms Hussein. ‘He said he’d tell me exactly what I needed to say because he knew how the system worked, and you couldn’t get around it unless you understood it inside out. He told me to make a report that Dr Ainsworth attacked me, then I’d be allowed to stay.’
‘But he didn’t?’ Zigic asked, as gently as he could. ‘Dr Ainsworth didn’t attack you?’
‘No.’ The planes of her faces sharpened, pain and shame along every angle. ‘I didn’t want to do it. Believe me, I kept telling Patrick it was wrong. Dr Ainsworth was a good man. He was the only man we trusted.’
‘Why did you trust him?’
‘Because he was a homosexual,’ Nadia said.
‘He wasn’t,’ Zigic told her.
She considered it, frowning, eyes scanning the tabletop as she tried to fit the new information into her conception of Ainsworth.
‘Then he was a very good man,’ she said sadly.
Zigic winced internally, thinking of how low the bar was set for Nadia. That she could conceive of no other reason for a man not to take advantage of his power over her and the other women in Long Fleet than that he was gay.
‘Nadia, I need you to be very clear about what you’re saying,’ he told her. ‘Are you saying that Dr Ainsworth didn’t attack you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘You don’t have the power to charge Nadia for events that took place within
