much to her surprise, when she entered the small reception area, she found Alia not in the waiting area, but sitting behind the reception desk.
“Alia! You work here?”
“Miss-it’s Miss James, isn’t it?” Alia looked pleased to see her, then alarmed. “Is Charlotte okay? How did you-What are you doing here?” She dropped her voice, even though there was no one else in the room. “My parents didn’t-”
“No, no, don’t worry. Charlotte’s fine, and I haven’t spoken with your parents. I was just on the street and I happened to see you. Do your parents not know you work here?”
“I volunteer,” Alia said defensively. “I don’t work for pay. But no, they don’t know. My dad, he’d go ballistic, like.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because it’s important. And because she did.”
Following Alia’s glance, Gemma turned and saw two of Sandra’s collages on the wall above the slightly tatty sofa and magazine table in the waiting area. They were smaller works, but beautifully textured and colored, and in this room they looked like peacocks among sparrows.
“Sandra donated her collages?” she asked.
“Not just that. She worked here, too. She was really good at getting the women to talk to her. They trusted her, like. She said they needed a voice, didn’t she?”
Voice and faces, thought Gemma. She studied the collages. One conveyed hints of shops in a tumble-down street, their windows filled with multicolored bolts of cloth. Women in fluttering sari silks and head scarves clustered in the doorways like bright jewels. In the background rose the now-familiar shape of the Gherkin, 30 St. Mary Axe, and a building like a shard of glass.
The other collage was darker, the feel more Georgian, the women’s clothing suggested by bits of silk and lace, and all seemed to be engaged in some kind of manual labor. One scrubbed a doorstep, one hung up scraps of washing, one, glimpsed through a loft window, worked at a loom. And integrated throughout the piece were bits of paper covered with ink-blotted script, and scraps of old, yellowed maps.
Still gazing at Alia, she asked, “What do they mean, these pictures?”
“She didn’t like to say. She said the point was, the piece would tell you a story, same as it did her, but you would hear it in your own way. For every person it was different.”
Hearing the quaver in Alia’s voice, Gemma turned. The girl’s eyes were red. “You miss her, don’t you?” she said gently.
“I thought she’d come back, see. She said I could do anything, be anything, and I believed it. But now”-she shook her head-“it’s not true, is it, or she wouldn’t never have left.”
Alia looked as if she had lost weight since Gemma had last seen her, less than two weeks ago, and there were dark hollows under her eyes.
Gemma played a hunch. She sat down in the chair across from the desk so that she was close to the girl and on her level. “Alia, you knew about Sandra’s brothers and the drugs. What else did you know?”
The girl’s reaction was immediate. Her eyes widened, pupils dilating, her mouth tightening. “Nuffink,” she said, her Estuary accent suddenly thicker. “Don’t know what yer on about.”
Gemma pulled her chair a little nearer. “You can talk to me. I won’t tell your parents.”
“If my dad even knew I was here, he’d kill me.” Alia cast a furtive glance at the door. “Only reason the women who come in here don’t tell is that they don’t want nobody to know they was here either.”
“There’s a coffee shop down the street. Let me take you for something-”
“I can’t leave. The regular girl’s on lunch, and so’s the doctor. There has to be someone here, ’cause of the drugs and things.”
“Well, that’s perfect, then. There’s just the two of us. We can talk before anyone comes back. Don’t the women mind seeing a doctor?”
“It’s a lady doctor, miss.
“He?”
“Mr. Miles. But it’s his own money that runs the place.” There was a note of hero worship in her voice. “We give women advice about contraception, and sexually transmitted diseases and stuff, and what to do if they’re pregnant.” She was back on more comfortable ground, the stress gone from her voice, although she pronounced the clinical terms with studied nonchalance, as if she’d practiced.
“That’s brilliant, Alia. I can see why Sandra cared about the clinic. But you were her special friend, weren’t you? She told you things she didn’t tell anyone else. You’d have known if something was worrying her.”
Gemma could see from Alia’s expression that she was wavering, and made herself keep quiet. The girl had wanted to talk before, in fact, had defied her father to come after them and tell them about Sandra’s brothers. Would she have said more that day, if her parents hadn’t been hovering? Or if Gemma had been alone?
“There was something,” Alia said at last, with a glance at the door. “One of the girls that came in…afterwards Sandra was all quiet, like. Even at home the next couple of days, when I was looking after Char.”
When Alia stopped, Gemma said very quietly, “But Sandra told you, didn’t she? About what was bothering her. She needed someone to confide in.”
“Yeah.” Alia kept her gaze on her hands. “One day when Charlotte was asleep. Sandra said the girl that came in here, she was Bangladeshi, like, and just a kid. Younger than me. She was all crying, and Sandra took her into the little conference room.
“This girl, she told Sandra-she said that some man had married her in Sylhet, paid her father a lot of money. He got papers and he brought her here, but then he never let her out of the house. He-” Alia picked at her cuticle, her face suffused with red. “He did-” She met Gemma’s eyes for a moment, then looked away. “If my dad knew I was repeating these things…” She swallowed. “This man, the girl said he did-did things to her. Then, when she- when she started her periods, like, he didn’t want nothing more to do with her. He sent her to another man, who liked girls that little bit older, a man who didn’t mind about…women’s things. She wasn’t supposed to go out of this house either, but that day she did. She was scared of what would happen if she got caught.
“Sandra asked her why she didn’t tell no one, and she said because the man would do bad things to her. And even worse, she’d be sent back to Sylhet, where her family wouldn’t have nothing to do with her and she’d be cast out on the street.” Alia looked up at Gemma. “It’s true. It’s what my father would do. She’d be unclean, like, and it wouldn’t matter that none of it was her fault.”
“So what did Sandra do?” Gemma asked, trying to keep the horror from her voice.
“She told the girl to come back, that she’d help her work out something. But the girl never did.”
Gemma took a breath. “This man, the one who brought the little girl in from Bangladesh. Was it Mr. Azad?”
“Oh, no.” Alia looked shocked. “Mr. Azad wouldn’t do nothing like that. He and Sandra, they were friends. No, this bloke, the girl never told Sandra his name. Just that he was rich, and white.”
“And that’s all you got out of her?” Kincaid said when Gemma rang him from the car and related her conversation.
“The regular receptionist came back from lunch. And I think that’s all Alia knew. Except she did say she thought this happened two or three weeks before Sandra disappeared.”
“And she was adamant that it wasn’t Azad?”
“I asked her twice. She insisted that Sandra told her the girl had said the guy was white.”
“Well, either the girl lied because she was afraid or…if she was telling the truth, that makes Lucas Ritchie the obvious candidate,” Kincaid said. “Although there’s nothing in the checks we’ve done that suggest he’s ever been to Sylhet. And if he killed Naz Malik, he must have been able to teleport, because everyone at his niece’s birthday party swears he was there the whole time.”
“Back up a bit.” Gemma had been thinking furiously. “Granted, Ritchie’s club seems the perfect vehicle for moving on trafficked girls. But look at ‘rich white guy’ from the point of view of a girl who came from a village in Sylhet.”
“Ah.” Kincaid was following her. “That broadens the spectrum a bit, doesn’t it?”
“Any male with a reasonable income would do. A professional, say. I think we should check out the vet, John
