The Game (6 page)

She nodded. Yes, she understood.

It had been nearly five months since Gemma’s disappearance. For Jackie and Neil it felt simultaneously like a lifetime and a matter of weeks.

Stacey leant around the fridge door. ‘We haven’t got any milk or butter, or juice or bread.’

She looked across the kitchen at her parents, who seemed fixated by the kettle. Her mum was wearing sweat pants that she had bought when she was fat; they now hung off her tiny frame. Her dad still had his pyjama top on under his jumper. They reminded her of zombies.

‘I’ll pop out later, Stacey.’ Neil smiled. It was his new smile, the one where his mouth flicked up but his eyes forgot to crinkle.

The phone made them all jump. As usual there was a split second when they all looked at each other. Was this it? The call they had been waiting for? The call they prayed would never come? The call they expected and dreaded in equal measure? This expectant dread usually lasted for a second or two, until the caller was revealed as a family member or someone selling something they didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

Neil pulled the phone from its cradle and nodded into the receiver. His wife and daughter watched as his legs seemed to buckle under him and he swayed.

‘What, Neil? What is it?’ Jackie started to question him while he was still listening to the words on the other end of the phone.

He held the mouthpiece against his chest as the strength finally left his legs. He slid down the kitchen wall until he was huddled in the corner.

‘That was Gavin.’

‘What? What did he say?’ Jackie twisted her T-shirt against her throat.

‘They’ve got her. She’s at the police station. They’ve got her.’

Jackie lurched forward and fell onto her husband. ‘Oh my God! Oh, Neil! Oh my God! I don’t believe it. I’d nearly given up, I had! Oh my God. Let’s go, let’s go! Come on!’

She moved quicker than he had seen her move in months as she gathered up the van keys and raced out of the front door.

‘Come on!’ she shouted back up the hallway.

Stacey and Neil followed her outside and into the sunshine.

‘I’ve already washed and changed her bed linen; I did that last week, that’s weird isn’t it? As if I knew, cos I haven’t done it for weeks! Her pyjamas are all fresh as well. I expect she’ll want a good rest, won’t she? We’ll get her tucked up.’ Jackie babbled through her tears with excitement and nerves.

Neil wasn’t sure how to play it. He had tried not to plan for this moment, hadn’t wanted to tempt fate. ‘We’ll have to see how she is, Jacks, take it slow.’

‘Take it slow? How much slower can we take it? We’ve been waiting for nearly six months!’ She clapped her hands together.

‘I know, love, but you need to calm down a bit. We don’t know what she’s been through or how she is.’

‘Don’t!’ Jackie held her hand up. She couldn’t bear to think of those details, not yet. First she wanted to get her home and then they would deal with what they had to deal with.

‘I’ll have to stop off on the way home and get some food in. I’ll get her some soup and apple juice, all her favourite little bits and pieces.’

‘God, there’s been none of my favourite food in for months and Gemma appears and you are already getting her special treats in – it’s not fair!’ Stacey piped up from the back seat.

Neil and Jackie looked at each other and laughed. It was the first time they had laughed in a very, very long time. It felt good. He reached across and squeezed his wife’s sculpted thigh beneath his fingertips.

Detective Sergeant Gavin Edwards and Detective Constable Melanie Vincent stood side by side in the foyer of Romford police station, waiting for the Peters family.

Jackie rushed through the main door, speaking as she entered. ‘Where is she?’

Neil wasn’t far behind her. He grasped Gavin’s hand in a handshake. ‘Thank you. Thanks, Gavin, for everything.’ He beamed. ‘Where is she?’

‘Come this way, guys.’ Melanie walked ahead and stopped at a bank of chairs set along the wall of a corridor. ‘You can wait here, Stacey, okay?’

Stacey shrugged and sat in the middle chair, crossing her outstretched legs at the ankle. She pulled her phone from the pocket of her hoodie and ignored the rest of the party as they sidled past and into an empty interview room.

Jackie and Neil sat on the two chairs opposite the police officers. Over the last few months the line between law enforcers and friends had become smudged.

‘I’m so excited! I can’t believe it. Where is she?’ Jackie fidgeted in her seat, grinning.

The two officers had never seen Jackie so animated.

‘I need you to calm down a bit, Jackie.’ Gavin gave a brief smile.

‘You’re the second person to say that to me!’ Jackie nudged her husband.

Gavin looked at Melanie, nodding slightly, handing her the reins.

Melanie sat in the chair on the other side of the table. She linked her fingers and placed them in front of her, looking more formal than she ever had in their little lounge in Ennerdale Close.

‘We have all worked hard, waiting for this day, Jackie, you know that.’

Jackie nodded, still beaming. ‘Yes, and we are so grateful, Mel, really grateful!’

‘We have found Gemma and she appears unharmed.’

‘That’s wonderful! Thank you, thank you so much,’ Jackie interjected. Neil was starting to ask himself the obvious question.
If she’s unharmed, then where has she been and who with?

‘We found her living in a flat in Paddington, with three other occupants. One of them is a man called Vassili Salenko; is that a name you know?’

They both shook their heads.

‘The flat was raided on an unrelated matter and we found Gemma, going by the name of Jemima.’

‘He must have taken her, that Vladimir or whatever his name is,’ Jackie jumped in. Her smile had faded. Her chest heaved.

‘Here’s the thing,’ Gavin cut in, his words coming slowly. ‘I have spoken to Gemma at length and she is adamant that she went with him of her own accord.’

‘What? Why? I don’t understand.’ Jackie shook her head as her eyes squinted in confusion.

‘We’re still not sure.’ Gavin’s tone was restrained.

‘He’s just making her say that! She’s a schoolgirl, for God’s sake!’ Neil couldn’t hide the edge of aggression in his voice.

‘Possibly.’ Gavin tried to throw the man a rope.

‘You know what,’ Neil stood and raised his palms, ‘It doesn’t really matter right now, who did what and who went where, we are just bloody glad to have her back. So if we can get her home, let her have a bit of a rest and then we’ve got all the time in the world to sort out what happened. You can talk to her to your heart’s content, but we just want to get her back.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not that straightforward, Neil.’

‘What d’you mean, not that straightforward? Course it is! Now if you could please just let us have our daughter back!’

‘She doesn’t want to see you.’ Gavin looked away, having delivered the cruellest blow.

‘Don’t be silly, Gavin, of course she does!’ Jackie spoke to him as if he were a child.

Melanie stepped in. ‘I’m sorry, Jackie, but she doesn’t.’

Neil sank back down into the chair and both sat in silence, trying to digest the information.

Jackie spoke to her lap. ‘He’s brainwashed her or something. Why wouldn’t she want to come home?’

Melanie swallowed the memory of her interview with Gemma.
‘You have put them through hell, Gemma. They are nice people, would it hurt to give them one quick telephone call?’

‘Can I just see her, please, Mel? Please.’

Melanie hated the way Jackie was almost begging. ‘She’s not actually here, she’s at Paddington Green, but they can only hold her for so long.’

Jackie placed her head in her hands and sobbed. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it.’

Neil rubbed her back as he tried to order his own thoughts.

They collected Stacey and the three of them made their way towards the van.

‘Neil?’ Gavin called from the top of the steps.

Neil walked back up to talk to him.

‘This breaks just about every rule and if you tell anyone, anyone at all, I’ll be in serious shit, but here is a mobile number for Gemma.’

Neil took the scrap of paper and pushed it into his jeans pocket. ‘Thank you. Is it as bad as it sounds, Gavin?’

He looked into Neil’s eyes. ‘Salenko is a nasty piece of work.’

‘How the hell has my Gemma got mixed up with someone like that?’ Neil asked, not expecting a reply.

He walked back to the van feeling exhausted and beaten. They drove home in silence, not bothering to stop and pick up food.

Jackie would not have believed that it was possible to sink any deeper into despair, but this was a whole other level of sadness and confusion. She was gripped by a numbness that left her feeling blind and deaf, unable to see, hear or communicate with the outside world. She climbed the stairs and lay on top of the freshly laundered duvet on Gemma’s bed, unable to cry, unable to sleep.

Neil flicked on the lamp and closed the front door behind him. He walked to the top of the close and turned left on the main road, out of earshot and out of sight. He held the scrap of paper in his palm and punched the digits into his keypad. He held the phone to his face and listened and then a mere couple of seconds later, there it was, sweet music that he had imagined he might never hear again. His little girl’s voice.

‘Heeello?’ She sounded cheery, playful.

The tears that clogged his nose and throat made speech almost impossible.

‘Hello?’ she repeated.

Neil pushed the phone into the side of his face, trying to get as close to her as possible. ‘Gemma?’

‘Who’s this?’

He hesitated, coughed. ‘It’s me, it’s Dad.’

He expected her to hang up. He waited. The silence connected them, a thin sinew from one silent vocal cord to the other, stretching approximately twenty miles across the dark.

He spoke slowly, with caution, as if bent low with hand outstretched, trying to lure a mistrustful pet. ‘Gemma, just listen, love. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but I just want to know that you are safe. I want to know that you are happy.’

‘I am,’ she whispered. It reminded him of when she was small and would whisper in the dark across the hallway, with bedroom doors open:

‘I’m scared, Daddy.’

‘No need, my little love, nothing to be scared of. It’s just the dark and Mummy and I are right here, we’re always right here.’

‘I don’t understand what’s happened, I thought we were happy.’ His tears ran down his face.

He could hear her breathing.

‘You were happy, Dad, you and Mum, but not me.’

‘I only ever wanted what was best for you, we both did. We love you so very much.’ It was becoming harder and harder for him to speak with clarity. ‘Could you give us another chance? Show us how to make you happy, because that’s all we want.’ It was his parting shot, to put her in control whilst trying to get her home.

‘Well then, you should be pleased, because I am happy, Dad.’

There was the smallest of clicks and then, just like that, she was gone.

Alyssa was thin, her ribs poked against her navy vest. And she was shorter than the platform-heeled sandals peeping out from beneath her tight jeans led you to believe. She swished her white-blonde hair over her bony, bare shoulder and held the smouldering cigarette aloft with her index and middle fingers; a slender white stick perched between two red talons. The long thumbnail of the same hand was hooked under her front tooth. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were narrowed against the yellow smoke that curled in front of her face. The bare inside of her arm revealed a tiny peppering of angry blue bruises. Gemma had to concentrate on the words; her English was far from perfect.

‘The bathroom.’ Alyssa waited in the open doorway and indicated with her cigarette. Her speech was heavily accented, her nonchalance doing nothing to help her enunciation. Gemma guessed correctly that she was Eastern Europe and wondered if she and Vassili had arrived there together. Maybe they were related.

She cast her eyes over the cramped room, maybe six foot by eight in size. The lemon-coloured plastic bath displayed residual grime in various lines. A shampoo bottle of no recognisable brand was tipped upside down and rested in a well on the bath top intended for soap; the owner was clearly trying to eke out one final blob, big enough to work into a lather.

A large metal-framed frosted-glass window was covered with a dirty orange and green striped towel. The frame was rusted: Gemma doubted it had been opened in a very long time. The loo was filthy; months of neglect had left it encrusted with every variety of human waste. The whole room stank of urine and damp, not the most pleasant combination. Gemma tried to breathe only through her mouth.

The floor was covered in pale green lino, which seemed to highlight the splats of blood and streaks of wee that surrounded the bowl. Dark pubic hair had gathered in little nests that lurked in every corner and behind every pipe. It was disgusting. A white plastic-coated wire shelving unit was cluttered with matted combs, splayed make-up brushes, bottles of peroxide, tubes of cream, boxes of condoms, three disposable razors and tampons in various stages of wrap. She felt embarrassed to bear witness to such intimate items. There was a round mirror above the sink, whose hot tap ran cold and dripped constantly.

Gemma tried to picture having a bath in this room; she shuddered involuntarily, blinking away the image of the family bathroom at home, with its clean white sink and fluffy towels. She followed Alyssa as she sashayed down the corridor at a leisurely pace.

Gemma felt a mixture of excitement and fear. This was it, her new, grown-up, pressure-free life. The moment she had pulled her sweatshirt over her head and laced up her high-tops after the play, she had known that the time was right. Fingering the folded piece of paper in her jeans pocket, which had nothing more than an address and a telephone number scrawled in biro, her adventure had begun. He had said that it would be her ‘get out of jail free card’. He was right, and now was the time to use it.