‘I’m sure they were. Sexually, most like, the way some of them were giving us the eye.’
‘You don’t have to go to Estonia to find sexist cops,’ said Annie. ‘Come to Eastvale with me now, and I’ll show you a few.’
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘But I appreciate the offer.’ The kids started shouting down on the playing field, and Pauline went over to shut the back window. When she returned, she poured herself another shot of vodka to replace what she had spilled, and lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘Noisy little buggers,’ she said.
‘Whose idea was it to go to Tallinn?’ Annie asked.
‘Mine. I was the bride-to-be, after all.’
So much for the idea that Rachel had arranged the hen weekend so she could meet up with a foreign boyfriend in Tallinn. She could have met someone between the decision to go there and the trip, but that seemed too much of a coincidence.
‘What was Rachel like as a friend?’ Winsome asked.
Pauline paused. ‘Like? She was full of life, loved to help people, bright, beautiful, funny, stubborn, a bit wild sometimes, spontaneous. Christ, she was just nineteen, you know. What are nineteen-year-olds like? I don’t remember. Do you?’
‘Did you take drugs?’
Pauline paused and looked at Winsome through narrowed eyes. ‘We might have done E once or twice, you know, at a club.’
‘In Tallinn?’
‘No way. Far too dodgy getting drugs off some stranger in a foreign city.’
‘Rachel?’
‘No.’
‘In your opinion, was she likely to go off with a stranger in a car?’
‘Maybe, if it was a nice car and she liked the look of him.’
‘So what do you think happened to her?’
‘I think she got lost. Wandered off the beaten track. Some sick bastard abducted her, raped her, then killed her and buried her, or chucked her body in the sea, and it floated all the way to Sweden or somewhere.’
‘You don’t believe she’s alive? That she lost her memory, or decided to start a new life?’
‘No. That’s not Rachel. She loved her family and her friends. And her bloody budgie. If she was alive she’d have been in touch. She would have gone home. And this amnesia business is just a load of bollocks. I don’t blame Maureen and Luke for clinging on to hope, you know, but sometimes I find them a bit hard to take.’
‘And why haven’t the police found Rachel, or the person who abducted her?’
‘Because they’re useless.’
‘But you weren’t able to give them much help,’ Winsome went on. ‘From what I’ve been able to make out, it wasn’t until the following morning that you reported her missing, and then it took the police nearly two days to get any sort of coherent story out of you about where you’d been, who you’d talked to.’
Annie had to give it to Winsome, she was coming along nicely, developing a tough edge. Many others would have shied away from asking an obviously disturbed person like Pauline those sorts of questions.
To her credit, Pauline just shook her head sadly. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘since I came back from Tallinn, there isn’t a day gone by when I haven’t tortured myself with the same thoughts. If only we hadn’t forgotten her in St Patrick’s. If only we’d told her where we were going. If only she hadn’t forgotten her mobile. If only I had insisted right from the start that we call the police. If only I hadn’t passed out in my room. If only I hadn’t been so drunk and then so hung over I couldn’t remember a single useful snippet of information. If only. If only. If bloody only. And there isn’t a day gone by when I haven’t imagined what she went through, played the movie in my brain of what he must have done to Rachel, and how much pain and fear she must have suffered before she was killed. It varies a little each time, the details, but it’s basically the same movie.’
‘Any chance you would have recognised who did it in your movie?’ Annie cut in.
Pauline looked at her in surprise. ‘That’s a bloody clever question,’ she said. ‘Nobody asked me that before. But I’m afraid not. No. He’s always just a vague shadow. It’s only Rachel I see clearly. One of the cops suggested it could have been someone we met during the course of the evening, but we danced with a lot of lads, and nobody stands out as particularly weird. Still, they wouldn’t have to, would they? Don’t they always say it’s the boy-next-door type you have to watch out for?’
‘It was worth a try,’ said Annie. ‘I just thought it might have been someone you’d seen in the course of the evening, even just from the corner of your eye, and for some unconscious reason, you cast him in that role.’
‘No. I’m sorry. No.’
‘Were you aware of anybody following you, or paying undue attention during the evening?’ Winsome asked.
‘I’ve racked my brains to dredge up something time and time again, but I just can’t do it,’ said Pauline. ‘It makes me want to tear my hair out. We talked to a lot of lads that night. Just for fun, nothing serious. We danced, chatted, had a good time. I mean, I was getting married, so I wasn’t interested in other blokes. Rachel had just split up with shit-for-brains dickhead Tony Leach. The others, I don’t know... I don’t even know if I would have noticed if someone had been stalking us.’
‘Do you still see the others?’ Winsome asked.
‘No. Funny that, isn’t it? People used to say we were inseparable. Course, Janine topped herself. Took an overdose. That’d be three, four years ago now.’
‘Because of what happened?’
‘Boyfriend troubles, but that covers a multitude of sins, doesn’t it? She was always the sensitive one. Gillian’s all right. She got married last year, and she plans on turning herself into a baby factory. First one’s out already. She even sent me a wedding invitation and a Christmas letter. I think they’re living in Canada. Helen’s an alcoholic. I don’t know where she lives. On the streets in London, I think. And Brenda’s a social worker. She finally got it together after treatment. She’s discovered she’s really gay, so she’s shacked up with some African woman. Our Brenda. Sweet little naïve Brenda. Would you believe it? What a turn up.’
Five young lives destroyed, Annie thought. Except maybe for Gillian and Brenda, who seemed desperately trying to put their lives back together, even if the paths they had chosen were difficult ones.
‘How bad was Rachel, really, that night?’ Winsome asked.
‘Well, she wasn’t totally legless. She was a bit wobbly, like, but she could have got back to the hotel on her own, or at least managed a taxi. She had some money. Other than that, it’s hard to say. Her judgement was probably a bit fucked up, but I think if someone had grabbed her, she’d have known what was happening. She was streetwise enough. She wouldn’t just have gone along with it.’
‘She would have struggled?’
‘And screamed. I think so. Yes. But if it was someone strong, with an open car door, or maybe even two people, there wouldn’t have been much she could do, would there? All he’d have to do was put his hand over her mouth and push her in.’
‘Is that how you think it happened?’
‘More or less.’
‘What happened in St Patrick’s?’ Winsome asked.
‘We were just talking to the German lads. They all spoke good English, and they had a great sense of humour. You don’t think that about Germans, do you, but they did. It was busy, but not as crowded or hot as that dance place we’d been to. Club Hollywood. I think we even had something to eat.’
‘A bit of an oasis, then?’
‘Something like that. A breather. Then we went off to another bar, and we were thinking of leaving there and going dancing again when I missed Rachel.’
‘It was you who noticed she was missing?’