My head hurt.
My legs ached.
It was 8.55 p.m.
Time to get going.
I lit a cigarette and set about trying to remember where I’d left my car.
An hour or so later, after I’d walked back to the Blue Boar to pick up my car — stopping only at a cashpoint in town and for a couple of quick drinks in the pub — I was driving slowly along a street of terraced houses at the back of Hey Town’s football ground. London Road looked much the same as any other residential street on the south side of town — parked cars, satellite dishes, pavements glistening dully in the street-lit rain — and during the day there was no way of telling that this street, together with a handful of others, was at the heart of Hey’s red-light district. At night though, especially late at night, when the skinny young girls appear on the streets, and the men in cars come creeping around … well, it’s not hard to guess what’s going on then.
I hadn’t seen any working girls yet, but I guessed that as the rain was still coming down quite heavily, I’d probably find most of them up by the railway bridge at the far end of London Road.
I drove on, constantly checking in the rear-view mirror for any sign of the Renault. I was keeping my eyes open for it all the time now, and although I hadn’t seen it since getting beaten up, I wasn’t going to take any chances.
Halfway along London Road, I caught sight of several girls hanging around in the arches next to the railway bridge up ahead, and a few more taking shelter in the tunnel itself. I checked in the mirror again, seeing nothing but rain and an empty street, and I slowed down and pulled in at the side of the road. I turned off the engine, lit a cigarette, and waited.
A number of cars went by me during the next few minutes. Most of them just drove past the girls and carried on under the bridge, but some of them momentarily slowed down — window-shopping, I guessed — and a few of them actually stopped. The one girl I saw getting into a car couldn’t have been more than sixteen.
With a final look over my shoulder, and satisfied that there wasn’t a silver-grey Renault in sight, I got out of the car and headed for the bridge.
I’m not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting from the girls, but once they realised that I wasn’t a punter or a cop, and that all I wanted was information about Anna — and that I was prepared to pay pretty well for it — most of them were friendly enough. The only trouble was, most of them, if not all of them, were addicts of some kind or other — heroin, crack, meth — and they were usually pretty out of it when they were working, which didn’t make for the best witnesses in the world. Most of the girls knew who Anna was, even before I’d shown them the photograph. And they knew about her reported disappearance too. But that was about it. As one girl put it, ‘She wasn’t a regular. She’d come down every other night for a while, then we wouldn’t see her at all for a couple weeks, then she’d start showing up again.’
When I asked this girl, whose name was Lizzie, what kind of person Anna was, she just shrugged and said, ‘Fuck knows … I don’t think she ever said a single word to me. She kept herself to herself, if you know what I mean.’
‘Do you remember anything about the night she disappeared? It was 6 September, a Monday.’
Lizzie laughed. ‘You must be fucking joking … I can’t even remember what happened this morning.’
It was much the same story when I asked the other girls about Anna — she wasn’t here all the time, she didn’t mix with us when she was here … and, no, I don’t remember the night she disappeared — and I’d almost given up hope of finding out anything useful when Lizzie came up to me and suggested I talk to a girl called Tasha.
‘I don’t know if she’ll know any more than the rest of us,’ Lizzie said. ‘But I remember her talking to Anna a couple of times … so, you know …’ She smiled at me. ‘You got a cigarette?’
I took out an almost full packet, slipped a?20 note inside, and gave it to her.
‘Where do I find this Tasha?’ I said.
Lizzie nodded in the direction of the tunnel. ‘Her on the left, the blonde.’
From a distance, Tasha looked like a perfectly ordinary — if slightly underdressed — fifteen-year-old girl, and I suppose that was the intention. But up close, she didn’t look quite so young. She was heavily made-up — pink lipstick, black eyeliner — and her blonde hair was dyed, the roots showing through. She was wearing a faded denim jacket over a sheer black miniskirt and a low-cut top, with black stockings and knee-length high-heeled boots. Beneath the make-up, her once-pretty face was tired and gaunt. She was chewing gum and chain-smoking cigarettes.
She didn’t say anything when I went up to her, she just looked at me — like she couldn’t give a fuck — and took a hard drag on her cigarette. I told her who I was and what I was doing, and I asked her if she remembered Anna Gerrish.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I remember Anna.’
‘Was she a friend of yours?’
‘No.’
I nodded. ‘Lizzie told me that you talked to her sometimes.’
‘So?’
‘What did you talk about?’
A car cruised past, a Vauxhall Astra, the driver checking out Tasha. Tasha stared back, her eyes a mixture of expectation and contempt, but the car didn’t stop. She turned back to me. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’
I shrugged. ‘For money?’
‘How much?’
‘That depends on what you know.’
She snapped her gum. ‘I already lost thirty quid from the guy in the Astra. He would have stopped if you weren’t here.’
‘Thirty quid?’ I said, surprised it was so low.
‘Twenty-five then,’ said Tasha, misreading my reaction. ‘Whatever … I can’t spend all night talking to you, I’ve got a living to make.’
I took out my wallet and passed her three?10 notes. ‘There’s more,’ I said as she took them from me, ‘if you tell me what you remember about Anna.’
Tasha tucked the notes away in the top pocket of her denim jacket. ‘We didn’t talk about anything really,’ she said. ‘I mean, I don’t even know why she spoke to me. She never talked to any of the others. She was kind of cold, you know … like she was always a million miles away.’ I waited while Tasha dropped her cigarette to the ground and lit another. ‘I only spoke to her twice, as far as I can remember,’ she went on. ‘The first time she told me all this crap about being a model, which I don’t think even she believed, and the second time …’ Tasha paused, trying to remember. ‘I don’t know … I think it might have been something about her old man, but this was about five or six weeks ago when there was a lot of really good gear around and I think we were both pretty wasted at the time …’
‘Do you remember what she said about her father?’
Tasha shrugged. Just the usual shit, probably … you know, the same old Daddy-used-to-fuck-me story. I’ve heard it so many times now that I just kind of blank out whenever I hear it …’ She looked at me. ‘Have you lost something?’
I was patting my pockets, looking for my cigarettes, but then I remembered that I’d given them to Lizzie. ‘You couldn’t spare a cigarette, could you?’ I said to Tasha.
She smiled as she offered me her packet. ‘You’re supposed to be paying me.’
It was a nice smile.
I lit up and said, ‘Can you remember anything about the night Anna disappeared? It was about a month ago, a Monday — ’
‘Yeah,’ Tasha said. ‘I know what day it was.’
I looked at her, unable to keep the surprise from my eyes.
‘What?’ she said. ‘You think I’m lying?’
‘No, of course not. It’s just … well, none of the other girls could remember that far back.’
‘I’m not one of the other girls, am I?’
I nodded. ‘Do you mind me asking why you remember that night in particular? I mean, no offence, but I’d imagine that one night down here is pretty much the same as any other night.’