Cradle song, p.13
Cradle Song, page 13
‘She comes here occasionally,’ she said.
‘With your mother?’
‘My mother brings her and then waits outside in her car. He’s warned her what will happen if she attempts to see me.’
She indicated the first flight of stairs ahead of us and led the way.
‘What does she think he’ll do to her?’
‘Was she there – when you saw him?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did she stand ten yards behind him and keep her mouth shut?’
‘Something like that.’
‘That’s the deal. She’s neurotic. She likes to call herself “fragile”, but only so that people can act surprised, deny it and tell her she’s one of the strongest women they know. She’s as obsessive and as self-regarding as he is.’
‘And you fear for Susan?’
She stopped walking briefly, suggesting I had guessed correctly.
We reached the second landing.
I started to ask her something, but she put a finger over her lips and shook her head. Lights showed beneath two of the three doors along the short corridor ahead of us. Someone somewhere was smoking dope. Muted music filtered out into the scented half-light.
We walked silently along the corridor and through the door at its end. A flight of stairs, unlit and narrow, rose ahead of us. She bolted the door behind us and pressed a timer switch, revealing another door above us.
‘I’ve been here almost three years now,’ she said, making it sound like a lifetime. She unlocked the door.
Inside her flat, a hallway led directly to a cramped kitchen, a bathroom and a living room. The ceilings of each room sloped steeply, reminding me that we were in the attic space. In the living room was a sofa which folded out into a bed, and upon which a pillow and a rolled-up duvet still sat.
There were bookcases overflowing with books, and posters and photographs on most of the walls. Two small lamps illuminated the room. It was the kind of flat any student would be happy to own, and then even happier to leave behind them three years later.
She went into the kitchen.
I commented on how – I could think of no other word – cosy everything looked.
‘Not a lot like Swanland Manor, you mean? Perhaps that’s the point, Mr Private Investigator.’ For the first time since her face had appeared at the door, she smiled. ‘I was a student, once. English literature.’ She nodded towards the bookcases. ‘I never dreamed that kind of existence, well, existed. I loved it. It only lasted eighteen months. Does that surprise you, considering my background and schooling, that I never had any such’ – she paused, searching – ‘expectations?’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
She rubbed her thumb and fingers together. ‘No money. The deeper I got into debt, the longer hours I had to work; the longer I worked, the more everything else suffered.’
‘Were you kicked out?’
‘I left. If you leave of your own accord, then there’s always the chance you can go back and take up where you left off.’
I didn’t know if this was true or not, or if it was the only delusion she allowed herself in a life bereft of the more usual dreams and expectations of a girl her age.
‘I read the poem you wrote for Nicola’s school memorial service,’ I said.
‘I used to write one a day. I even used to think they were something worth having.’ It was another of her losses.
‘At least it rhymed,’ I said.
‘Don’t pretend to be a philistine, Mr Rivers,’ she said.
‘What did you study?’
She told me. She told me Spenser’s Faerie Queene was her favourite book.
I remembered the opening two lines and quoted them to her.
‘If they weren’t the only two lines you knew, I’d be impressed,’ she said.
I told her I had first editions of all Larkin’s poems, books and pamphlets.
‘Coffee?’ she said.
I followed her into the small kitchen. A cat sat on a shelf above the two-ring cooker.
‘That’s Huxley,’ she said.
‘After the defender of Darwin?’
‘After Aldous. He’s half-blind. He was a gift from—’ She stopped abruptly and turned away from me.
I took a chance. ‘From Martin Roper?’ I said.
She considered this for a moment and then nodded.
‘Was Huxley his name for it?’
She smiled at the suggestion. ‘“Number”,’ she said.
‘Number?’
‘The day he gave it me he called it “Number Nine” – its nine lives – and each year after that it changed – “Number Eight”, “Number Seven”. He just called it “Number”.’
I reached up and stroked the animal’s head, relieved that she had not been panicked into silence at the mention of Roper’s name. The cat responded to my attention, half-rising to meet my hand and revealing the milky ball of its eye.
We took our drinks back into the small room. She sat on the sofa-bed and I sat in a worn leather chair facing her.
‘Your mother and father know that Susan gave me the address,’ I said. ‘Neither of them tried to stop her. Just so you know.’
‘Just so I know.’ She rolled a cigarette and offered it to me. I took it and she rolled another.
I asked her how old she was.
‘Good question,’ she said.
‘You were a year or two older than Nicola Bishop,’ I said. ‘She was only fourteen when she disappeared.’
‘She was three months away from being fifteen. Did you ever see her? I mean, as she looked in those last few months?’
I shook my head, and then remembered the photographs taken from the film of Bishop’s party.
‘She could pass for eighteen easily. I was just sixteen. Fourteen months between us, that’s all.’
‘In some of the reports covering her disappearance, they said she was only thirteen.’
‘I know. One got it wrong and the others just copied it and went on repeating it. I daresay they would have corrected it if it had ever mattered for them to do so.’
‘If she’d been found, you mean?’
She shrugged. ‘When my father discovered what had been happening, he called me a whore. Technically wrong, I suppose, but all things considered I don’t imagine I could have expected anything better.’
I wondered if James Bishop had ever thought the same about his own daughter.
‘Tell me about you and Martin Roper,’ I said, and then added, ‘I’m trying to work out what exactly connects him to the other dead or missing girls.’
‘Did I know any of them, do you mean? Only Nicola.’ She took a long draw on her cigarette, careful to tap the ash into the glass bowl beside her. ‘I met Nicola when she first came to the school. By which time it was already obvious to all concerned that I wasn’t exactly turning into the doting and dutiful daughter everyone had hoped for. And so, like most other pampered and unhappy kids, I began to kick against the pricks. Prick number one, mostly. I met Martin Roper in a club in town. Lexington Avenue. I was there with a group of others, all under-age. The deal was that he took your photograph, and then when you left you could buy it from a display stand at the cloakroom door. We got talking, he let one or two things slip, and we went on from there.’
‘He told you that his interest in photography was somewhat more—’
‘“Somewhat more” what? Somewhat more specialized? Somewhat more exotic? Somewhat more pornographic? Say it, Mr Rivers.’
I waited without speaking.
‘I was fifteen then. I told him I was seventeen. He told me I was good-looking, that I had a good body. I wasn’t, I didn’t – not particularly – but I was never under any illusion about what he was telling me.’
‘And you agreed to pose for him.’
‘He showed me hundreds of other pictures he’d taken.’
‘And you knew right from the outset that he was selling those pictures, that he had paying customers for everything, that there were others beside himself involved in all of this?’
‘I didn’t do it for free, if that’s what you’re asking. He paid me. I never imagined he was a wealthy man pandering to his whims concerning schoolgirls showing their breasts, stocking tops and knickers.’ She stopped. ‘Have you seen any of the pictures?’
‘No,’ I said truthfully.
‘Or the films?’
I shook my head. ‘Tell me more about him,’ I said, sensing her fondness for him.
‘He changed,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘You said that I knew there were others involved. Well, to begin with, there weren’t. To begin with, it was just him and the girls, just him and me. They demolished his studio.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Was that because of what had gone on there?’
‘It was just due for demolition,’ I said.
‘That’s what I thought. In the beginning, it was just the photographs. He had a whole wardrobe of uniforms and outfits. Schoolgirl, nurse, French maid, all the usuals and a dozen others beside. I used to make a joke of it and ask him what the point was of me dressing up as a schoolgirl when I already was one and I had a perfectly good uniform of my own. He wasn’t too sure about that to begin with, but apparently his customers liked it – a touch of authenticity, I suppose. I used to open my blouse, let my bra show. And then I used to pull my tits over the bra so one of my nipples showed. I’d wear stockings, sit with my legs apart, that sort of thing. Hockey sticks and lacrosse rackets, long socks and pleated skirts. Whatever he wanted, really.’
‘Do you know how many other—’
‘Models.’
‘—he had working for him?’
‘Judging from the photographs, I’d say a fair few. Fifty or sixty, say. Some of them were only one-offs, but I suppose that was the point. Even I got tired of always being the schoolkid, and I posed in most of the other outfits.’
‘And then the nature of the photographs changed?’
‘Let’s just say I graduated, became more daring.’
‘Did you pose alone, or with other girls?’
‘Both. And sometimes I posed with men.’
‘Posed how?’
She looked up at me. ‘I didn’t sleep with them, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t have sex with them while Martin walked around us taking pictures. He wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t have let that happen.’
To begin with.
‘Sometimes we posed as though we were undressing each other. He’d take a whole sequence of shots, sell two dozen instead of only one or two. And, yes, sometimes we posed as though we were having sex, or as though I was performing on them. And sometimes all I – all we – had to do was sit with them. In they came, fully dressed, and all we had to do was sit on their knees, our white socks round our ankles, our pushed-up cleavages showing, and let him get on with it.’
‘So sometimes the pictures were taken to order?’
‘I imagine so. Some of them. I don’t know who they were, those men, but even I could tell they were somebodies. Martin behaved differently around them. He sold them the pictures and the negatives. They just wanted us to be little girls sitting in their laps, that’s all. Nobody ever got hurt.’
‘Hayley Forbes got hurt,’ I said. ‘Nicola Bishop probably got hurt. Lindsey Perry and Jennifer Wilson probably got hurt.’
She sat without speaking for a moment. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But that was later, afterwards. That was what I meant when I said that things changed.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I posed for him for about six months, no more. For the first month or so it was only ever photographs of me alone. OK, so they gradually changed in themselves – but that was just as much at my insistence as his – but after those first months Martin himself changed. He got involved with those others.’
‘The men you posed with?’
‘Some of them. I suppose so. I’m not sure. All I know is that he started doing more and more work as part of something more organized, something bigger, something that got him more and more excited.’
‘You sound as though you were fond of him,’ I said.
‘“Fond”?’ she said.
‘You felt some affection for him.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘Yes, I was fond of him and he was fond of me.’
‘Something beyond the photographs and the films?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you love him?’
She bowed and then raised her head at the remark. ‘Insofar as I knew what that meant at the time, yes, I suppose I did.’
‘And yet you stopped posing for him. To all intents and purposes, you detached yourself from him.’
‘I suppose I did. But not because I wanted to. He forced me.’
‘Forced you to what?’
‘To stop working with him. He told me about those others getting involved. He said that things were changing and that he didn’t want me to be involved any more.’
‘Changing how?’
‘He had a lot of new equipment – the stuff for the films – computers, digital cameras – and most of it was paid for by these others. His business partners, he called them. He said they wanted him to branch out, to expand, to make the stuff more explicit.’
‘More pornographic, you mean. They wanted him to start filming the real thing between the men and the other girls?’
‘That’s what he said. He told me he didn’t want me involved in any of it.’
‘Would you have agreed to do it if he’d asked you?’
‘Probably. I don’t know. I wasn’t completely inexperienced.’
‘What made you comply?’
‘He showed me a film one of the men had given him.’
‘The type they wanted him to start making?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And?’
‘And it wasn’t the kind of stuff I’d have been happy doing.’
‘But, presumably, he had plenty of other takers, girls he didn’t try to scare away?’
‘Presumably.’
‘Including Nicola Bishop?’
‘At school, Nicola was always at the edge of things, always trying to push herself in, to get involved. One time, pissed, I blurted out to her what I’d been doing and she said she’d like to do the same. Don’t believe all that butter-wouldn’t-melt stuff that did the rounds courtesy of her father when she disappeared. She was younger than me and she had everything I had and more. She pestered me to take her along to meet Martin. I wasn’t finding girls for him, if that’s what you think. First she pestered me and then she said she’d tell somebody what I’d been up to if I didn’t do what she wanted.’
‘And so you introduced her to Roper.’
‘I told him about her first. I told him how old she was. I knew she’d lie to him.’
‘Did it put him off?’
‘Are you joking? When he saw her he could hardly keep his hands off her. I’d never seen him like that. He told me that soon he would be able to handle as many models as he could get hold of. He would be making his films on a regular basis, with willing customers – he already had everything set up by then – and he’d need lots of new faces.’
‘And Nicola Bishop told him what?’
‘That she was sixteen and that she’d do anything he wanted her to do. He asked her what he’d asked me when we first met – if she was a virgin – and when she told him that she was, he told her not to worry, that he respected her for that. She told me she’d lost her virginity when she was twelve.’ She drank the last of her coffee. ‘To tell you the truth, I was beginning to get a bit disillusioned with it all by then. At the start I never used to feel dirty or used, but I did then.’
‘And Nicola Bishop?’
‘Took to it like she’d been waiting for it to happen.’
‘Was all this known at the time?’
‘To the police, you mean? Perhaps.’
‘Roper confessed to killing her along with three others, but he himself never said anything about what had gone on beforehand.’ I was thinking aloud.
‘Like I said, he changed,’ she said. ‘He once showed me a wad of money he’d been given.’
‘By his new associates?’
‘Presumably. There must have been thousands. He gave me some of it.’
‘But by then you’d stopped working for him?’
‘He got everything he wanted from all the girls like Nicola Bishop.’
‘You must have felt neglected.’
‘I did,’ she said. ‘Still, not to worry – good practice for what was yet to come.’
‘Your father?’
The half-blind cat came into the room and settled beside her on the sofa-bed. By then a pall of smoke hung around us. It was already dark outside. She rose and drew the single curtain.
‘You believed him when he told you you meant something to him,’ I said.
‘The world’s full of stupid girls.’
‘How did your father find out?’
‘I never asked him. Perhaps someone showed him some of the photographs, or perhaps he watched a film and there I was. It hardly matters – I’d brought shame on him and on the family; I’d brought shame on every member of the family who had ever lived.’
‘Do you think he showed your mother?’
‘I doubt it. She’d need protecting from that kind of thing.’
‘But it wasn’t until Martin Roper was arrested and charged with the murder of Hayley Forbes that everything came out and he put two and two together?’
‘And he did what he always does when something is beyond his control. I told him I was sorry for what I’d done, and in a sense, I was. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I regretted how I’d let myself be used by Martin when he was only doing what the others told him to do.’
‘And for having introduced Nicola Bishop to him?’
‘Perhaps. We lost touch with each other after that.’
‘He never once mentioned you when he was questioned by the police or at his trial,’ I said.
‘I know. What does it prove?’
‘It proves something,’ I said. ‘When did you leave home?’
