person. ‘This is James Grant, our psychologist.’
I nodded at the officer.
He was young, which worked in our favour. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘We’d like a few minutes alone with the girl,’ Healy said, and moved us towards the room. The officer stood aside and we headed in and closed the door.
The room was tiny: twenty feet across, with one partially open window, a faded painting on the wall above her bed, and a cream-coloured bedside cabinet. She was propped up on some puffy white pillows, but asleep. Next to her an ECG beeped, and a metal stand held an IV drip. She was wearing a nightdress stamped with the hospital’s logo, and her face was almost entirely covered in bandaging. I could see her eyes, both of them closed; and, through the clear plastic of the ventilator helping her breathe, her mouth showed. Nothing else. A spot of blood had soaked through at her right ear.
I stepped in closer to the bed, and then noticed Healy. In the depressed light of the room, it looked like he had tears in his eyes. Sometimes I struggled to read or understand a single thing about him, but in that moment, as he looked down at the girl beaten and broken in front of us, I thought I understood where his head was at: Leanne.
‘Healy,’ I said gently, and he looked at me. There was nothing in his face. ‘I need you to tell me what else is going on.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want you doing anything stupid.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Has it got something to do with Leanne?’
His body shifted, some of the rigidity leaving it as if a part of him had deflated – as if he’d been found out – but as he went to answer, as I readied myself for what was to come, the girl moved on the bed between us, the sheets tightening around her legs.
And she opened her eyes.
63
She looked between us, her brain trying to make the connections. Earlier, she’d gone to sleep surrounded by nurses. Now she was waking up to find two men she didn’t know standing next to her bed. She immediately moved, trying to protect herself, turning on to her side and bringing her legs up into the foetal position. I felt a pang of sadness for her, felt the burn of anger too, but as I looked across at Healy, expecting to see the same, I instead saw a strange kind of stillness in him, as he retreated back eight months.
‘Marika,’ I said gently, holding up a hand. Her eyes continued moving between us and, after a couple of seconds, I saw Healy snap out of the fug, like he’d stepped right out of a bad dream, and he glanced at me, ceding control of the conversation. ‘Marika, my name is David,’ I continued, keeping my voice soft. ‘You aren’t in danger any more. We are here to protect you. But I need to know you understand me.’
Her eyes finally stopped moving and fell on me.
‘Do you speak English, Marika?’
No movement. She didn’t seem to remember me from the loft.
I let the silence hang there. Healy eyed me – his way of passing judgement on my tactics – but this wasn’t rocket science. She’d been pushed and pulled around, dragged, bruised and beaten the entire time she’d been in the country. If there was ever a time she remembered being able to trust someone, it was so far back it probably didn’t even exist as a memory any more. There was nothing as heartbreaking as seeing a childhood destroyed; a succession of men had taken hers from her, and it was never coming back. Silence was the least we could offer her.
She blinked. Tears in her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ I said quietly, and without moving any closer to the bed, I dropped to my haunches, down to her eye level. It was like rubbing away the dust and the grime on a windowpane and looking through to the other side: suddenly, despite the bandaging, I could see how young she was. In her eyes. In the movement of her mouth. In the small shape of her body, and the way her fingers clawed the bed sheets, like a comforter. In the videos she’d looked fourteen or fifteen. Now she looked even younger, barely into her teens at all, and my head filled with images of Pell – and what I was going to do to him.
I waited again. She was facing me, her back to Healy, and I could see him getting impatient behind her, shifting on the spot, glancing back out the door and into the corridor, as if he expected the cavalry to arrive any minute.
Then, finally, a spark of recognition in her eyes.
‘You …’ she said.
She’d spoken through the plastic mask over her mouth, her voice quieter and less refined. I nodded, and then sat back, on the floor. ‘I hope they clean in here,’ I said, smiling. She didn’t react, but that was fine. Even if her trust could never be rebuilt, it was at least important that she knew we carried no threat. ‘Do you remember me, Marika?’
She just looked at me.
‘Do you remember when I found you?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
She studied me for a moment, the bandages tight against her skin, disguising the tiny movements that experts in kinesics, in the language of the body, would have called illustrators, adaptors and emblems. Without the whole of her face, it was possible to miss some of its subtlety – but I still felt a slight shift in her, as if her defences had come down enough to allow me a little closer. ‘You save me,’ she said.
I smiled. ‘The doctors saved you.’
She didn’t reply, but I could see her face soften.
‘Where did you learn to speak English?’ I asked.
She removed the mask. ‘TV.’
‘You learned everything from TV?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you like to watch?’
‘The men take me …’ She paused. I didn’t say anything, but I let her know I knew she meant Wellis and Gaishe, and all the other worthless pond life that had had a part in bringing her here. ‘They watch football. Most of time just football.’
I nodded. ‘Do you like football?’
‘Yes. I play for the, uh …’
‘A girls’ team?’
‘Yes. In Cluj.’
‘You’re from Romania?’
She nodded. A flicker of sadness. ‘Yes.’
‘Were you as good as Gheorghe Hagi?’
The sadness disappeared and in her face, for the first time, was a hint of a smile. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No one better than Hagi.’
I smiled back.
Slowly, her legs slid away from her body, like part of a defensive barrier coming down, although she kept the sheets and blanket in close as a protective shield.
‘Marika,’ I said after a while, keeping my eyes on her and not on Healy, who was half turned towards the door again. ‘Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?’
She didn’t move. Didn’t react.
I nodded again, letting her know I understood her reluctance. I shuffled across the floor, so I was about four feet away, still at her eyeline. ‘Let me tell you about the men who kept you,’ I said, ‘about the ones who hurt you. They will
She glanced at Healy, then back to me.
