During the hours when she stayed in the steel-white room, she thought it through, and saw the shape of it. Having seen, Susan saw that it was obvious. She should have known. Anne should have known. Or had Anne known? They thought so. Or – did they?
A uniformed woman sat at a small table in the corner. First she ate a bar of chocolate. Then she took another one out of a drawer in the table, and ate that. Later, much later, she took out another, and ate that too. Each bar was of a different make.
The light was too bright. There were no windows, and they probably locked the door, although Susan wasn’t sure; she never attempted to open it. Once she asked for the lavatory. They made her wait nearly half an hour, then another woman came and took her to a toilet of three cubicles just along the passage. “Leave the door open.” So Susan left the cubicle door open, and sitting pissing in front of this other woman, who did, actually, turn her head slightly away, Susan remembered the awful bathroom in Wizz’s loft, with its two pally lavatories done in matching black and gold.
At other times, a man and a woman questioned her. She supposed that was what they were doing. They were not any of the men, or the one woman, who had taken Anne and Susan into custody at the pub. The man had gingery hair and a freckled scowl. The woman looked French, a delicate and sharply-made brunette. But she spoke with a slight trace of a Scottish accent.
“Where’s my mother?”
“Don’t worry about your mother.”
“Of course I am. What have you done with her?”
“The same as we’re doing with you, Miss Wilde.”
“Why am I – why are we here?”
It turned out they were there because of Delores, that brain-dead, rude and graceless child, who, with the man from her father’s office, had become melting and friendly.
It turned out too that Delores’ attitude and manner were undoubtedly the product of her intense conditioning, over a period of time, to know who must be made up to, and who must not. Also, of course, to a fear and horror and misery beyond anything such a child should ever know.
As it came clear to Susan, she was racked not only by her own leaden fear and panic, and her appalled concerns about Anne, but by remorse. The very young girl Anne had brought from JFK to London was no relative of Eve’s, no daughter of a rich friend of Wizz’s. She was one of those lost children, there to be taken by stealth or connivance from the sinks of most cities, warped and worked into the appropriate consistency, then flown out like refrigerated flowers to any destination that could pay.
She wasn’t the first commodity that Anne had ‘delivered’ for Wizz, and therefore for the firm. Anne, the paid or unpaid courier. What had those things been in the past, the thing she had had to take to the Georgian manor house near Brighton, the packets for Paris, and Germany. Illegal smuggled jewels or art treasures? Hard drugs?
They imported everything, the firm. Anne had said that once. A joke? Imported and exported.
Susan, as she put the pieces together, began trying to explain them to the people who talked to her on and on in the steel-white room. They were already aware of them, naturally.
“My mother didn’t know – she’s been duped. He’s used her.”
Basic psychology. Wizz wanted to get rid of Anne. He hadn’t known she’d planned to leave him. So if she were caught – too bad?
Susan grasped he would be safe away. Already she could tell this operation would have been far reaching. There would be others working on the other side of the Atlantic, to trap Wizz’s firm. But most would escape. Wizz always would.
He’s a gangster.
She had sensed it at sixteen, and Anne had not. But then, Anne was in love with him. What could Susan say she had known about R.J., really known? Love was blind, or blinded itself.
Had Anne, had she known? No. Anne, for all her crash into age and unbeauty and vodka, was not that kind of woman who could consentingly bring a kid of twelve to England to become the sexual toy of some wealthy group or outfit of paedophiles. Was she. Was she?
“Do you think I was in on this?”
“Well, Miss Wilde, were you?”
They must have tapped Anne and Wizz’s phones. They would have heard conversations between Anne and Susan. Did these people suppose it was all done in code, in case?
After they had photographed Susan, searched her – so shocked by then, numbed, she barely noticed this search, carried out by an expressionless woman, but wondering if there would be an internal search – there was not – then later wondering if Anne, the courier, had been – a woman of almost sixty-two – subjected to one – after they had done these, and other matter-of-fact, intrusive things, some of which Susan only recollected hours later, Susan thought, They do think I’m guilty of this. And Anne is guilty.
But she kept trying to persuade the gingery man and the svelte Scottish woman that neither she nor Anne was guilty at all.
Susan told them about Wizz, and what she knew about Eve. It was so little.
She supposed they would not catch Eve, either. Perhaps not anyone from the firm.
And so Anne and she might have to do.
“What time is it?”
She thought the chocolate woman might not answer, but she glanced at her watch and said, “Nine thirty-five.” They had taken Susan’s watch away, along with some of the things in her bag. If this was expediency, or another form of coercion, she did not know.
Some unmoist cheese sandwiches had been brought, and some tea. They had let her have a glass of water, too.
“I don’t know what
