Bull Running For Girlsl (10 page)

“Cook it for longer, longeeer, okay Gabriele?”

Gabriele nodded enthusiastically, “Okay Christy,”
—
and proceeded to dish out the undercooked bacon again.

Perhaps that is the way they cook bacon in Lithuania,
thought Christy.

She spun on the spot, recalling that she had come into the kitchen for another reason.

“Where is Marija this morning?” Gabriele’s smile dropped quickly from her face and she shrugged.

“Have you seen her?”

“No Christy, perhaps she not wake-up.”

With a last, disappointed look at the breakfast Gabriele was taking out to a soon-to-be-unsatisfied guest in the dining room, Christy took the lift up to the fifth floor of the hotel. Here were the dingy and neglected staff bedrooms; the staff who usually rose early in the mornings. That is, if they hadn’t left for other jobs.

Perhaps that is what had happened to Marija,
thought Christy.

Marija’s room was number fifty-eight, at the end of the dismal corridor that had not benefited from the meagre renovation programme. The carpet was a dark grey, covered with equally dark brown stains, and one in particular reminded her of the silhouette of John Hurt in his grotesque role as
The Elephant Man.

Christy rarely ventured into this part of the hotel.

Before her time as a manager a young girl had committed suicide in one of the rooms. Christy didn’t know the details, nor which room it was. Perhaps it was the room she now approached.

She knocked on number fifty-eight. No answer. She knocked again. Still no answer. She took the passkey out of her pocket and unlocked the door. There wasn’t a particularly
bad
smell
—
just stale cigarette smoke mostly, and damp. Christy switched on the light.

A few posters adorned the walls. A cream-coloured lamp barely lit the travel posters, which offered paper promises of happiness in exotic destinations, such as Bali and the Maldives. An old wardrobe stood sentinel in the corner and a teak-coloured dressing table sat by one wall. On top of the dressing table was a three-panelled mirror
—
a trinity of three mirrors. Christy’s mother used to have one. She could angle the side mirrors to see different parts of herself. Christy had used the mirror to look at her naked body when entering puberty, at the time when most youngsters explored the quickly developing parts of their body.

The bed had been stripped and an old mattress lay uncovered. Here, the memories of everything that had ever happened on it were traced within the cover and deep in the heart of the springs. No clothes, nothing personal left over, nothing to suggest that a human being had ever been content in that room. How could they be? It was a room without windows situated in the upper part of the hotel. A tiny attic room, in which a window would have been welcome, to at least let through one ray of sunshine and offer its occupant some hope.

As Christy stood in front of the three panelled mirror she smoothed out her work clothes and tidied her hair, noting that she would need to colour out the grey soon.

She became aware of movement in the mirror.

A figure slowly appeared behind her left shoulder, black hair floating around a pale visage. It lingered long enough for Christy to recognise the look of despair and pain on its shriven face, and then it was gone.

Christy had never in her life been more afraid as in that moment. She ran to the door, stumbled, regained her balance and attempted to open the door, fingers trembling. It wouldn’t open and she could smell the cold, charnel house breath of something long dead and felt the icy touch of an insistent hand upon her shoulder. She fought to tell herself that it wasn’t happening, that there wasn’t anything there. She tried to block out the experience
—
as it was happening
.
For behind her, pulling her now by her waist as if it wanted to combine its icy death with her still warm life…was
something.

“Stop this. Stop this.” The words more hissed than spoken from some unseen thing.

Christy struggled to turn around and push whatever it was that was holding her by the waist. She saw nothing, but then felt the reluctant letting go of invisible hands and heard a low, soft moan, now over near the dressing table. Another attempt at the door and this time it gave. She ran without closing it behind her, through the tepid light, and into the partial darkness of the stairwell.

On the next floor down Christy steadied herself in the well-lit corridor where the guest rooms were. Tight lipped and telling herself that it never happened, for the last half an hour of her shift she busied herself with paperwork at the front desk, close to the main entrance and the street.

As Christy left the Mortimer Hotel that evening she put up her umbrella. Nervous and still in denial, she welcomed the cold air. It was already dark and raining. She pulled the collar of her coat up around her neck to keep out the cold and hurried along the pavement, careful to dodge the puddles and keep as dry as possible. The rain ferociously pounded the road and sidewalks, as if demanding immediate entrance to the concrete. In the distance, just a little way past the street where her old mini was parked, she could hear raised voices.

Through the pelting rain she saw two figures: a man pulling at a woman’s arm and dragging her towards a car, where another man sat behind the steering wheel. The driver shouted something at the other man, which had the effect of heightening the tension between the three. The girl screamed and Christy started to dash forward, but held back as the girl was bundled into the car and driven off, away from Cooper Street. Christy was unable to get the number. She thought she could have been mistaken, but the girl looked like Kamile, the waitress who had left her job a few weeks earlier.

Christy fumbled in her pocket for her mobile phone and called the police, explaining what had happened. But they didn’t seem interested, stating simply that they would send a spare car around the area when they had one, which she knew meant never.

The next morning another girl, Janina, didn’t turn up for her shift and Christy nervously sent one of the maids to check her room. The maid found that most of Janina’s clothes were still there. Christy phoned the police again. This time they came round straight away, took a few details, noted that the girl had not been in the country long, and went on their way.

Reluctantly, Christy phoned the agency for another girl. They agreed quickly but that didn’t satisfy her. Girls couldn’t go on disappearing day after day and just be replaced as if they were practically worthless. She would go and see if she could find Kamile and see if she wanted her old job back.

That evening Christy drove around the streets of Manchester trying to find Kamile, knowing it could be a useless effort and doubting that she would come back. The girls never came back. It was a bitter night and the rain of the previous evening had been replaced by a scattering of snow.

Not far from where she had seen her last time, Christy believed she saw Kamile again, talking to a man before getting into his car. Christy recognised him as one of the men who had hauled a girl into that same car the night before. This time Christy had a chance to follow. She tried to drive just far enough behind to keep up but not be too obvious. People, for all their evil acts, could be seen
—
and what you could see perhaps you could do something about. Christy liked Kamile and didn’t want her in any kind of trouble.

After a few minutes or so the abductor’s car pulled onto a road between two high gate posts. It was a familiar place to Christy, as the road led to the crematorium where they had burnt her mother’s body. Leaving her car a little way down the road, away from the main entrance, she looked for another way in.

Christy remembered a little side door in the high perimeter wall and tried the latch. Surprisingly that door opened and she ventured towards the back of the crematorium, over the lawn and through the circular garden of remembrance. She was careful not to trip over the small memorial stones, visible in the moonlight. She worried about being seen, but Christy took a chance
—
she had to know what was going on. It was a cold night, the temperature had dropped and the snow was lying thick enough for her to see footprints at the back of the crematorium, where members of the public were normally prohibited.

It began to snow more heavily, the kind of snow that piled up quickly and could take days to thaw. It only needed a few hours of it. The fresh footprints that led up to the back door of the crematorium would soon be covered up. There were no windows at the back of the building, for obvious reasons. She glanced up and saw black smoke belching into the night sky from a tall chimney above the snow covered roof. She shivered, more from disgust than the cold. She supposed they must do some of the disposal of bodies at night; but what of Kamile? Why had the two men brought her there?

Christy dreaded that she already knew the answer to that question.

At this point she thought it best to ring the police and try to get them to investigate. She put her hand into her pocket for her mobile phone and then swore, realising that she had left it in her bag in the car. She would have to go back.

As she turned, she slipped on a patch of ice near the door and fell against it with a heavy thud. With a stifled cry of pain she fell onto her knees and tried to get back to her feet, but too late. The door opened to the outside and knocked her down again. This time it was her hand that scraped against the ice and stone. She cried out again. Rough hands dragged her to her feet and hauled her into the building. Terrified, she struggled against two bulky figures as they pulled her further into the bright light of the crematorium.

The first thing that she noticed was the smell. A mixture of formaldehyde and an odour equally unpleasant, that must be of burnt flesh and bone.

The room was quite large, crowded with large steel tables and an old cart. On the cart was an open coffin. The two men had wasted no time, for as the taller one dragged Christy past the coffin she saw the body of Kamile
—
but she was raised up, too high, as if something was underneath her. The heat from the furnace became overwhelming and beside it stood a third, small stringy man in a boiler suit, who looked rather nervous.

“Look here, you didn’t say that you were bringin’ two here tonight. I can’t cope with a change of plan.”

“You’ll do as we say Bill. There isn’t going to be a choice for you.”

Christy tried to back out of the room, away from the coffin. “No, please
—
don’t do this. I won’t say anything.”

“Yeah, right
—
course you won’t,” said one of the men.

“Like you could keep quiet about this.”

“If my life depended on it, I could.”

“It isn’t up for discussion.”

“Bill. Get on with getting rid of those two in that coffin.” He pointed at the cart.

Christy stifled a sob as the crematorium attendant drew the cart closer to the furnace. She turned away in disgust as she heard the electronic conveyor start up and the sound of the coffin move into the fire. A loud bang signified that the furnace door had been closed. The cart pulled back and the process started.

Two bodies, in one coffin.

Christy struggled again and the man in a black overcoat shoved her across to the corner of the room and threw her down into an old high backed armchair. She winced when her arm banged against the wooden chair.

“Tie her feet and hands,” he said to the other man in the doorway. That fellow took a plastic cord from his pocket, wrapped it around Christy’s wrists and pulled hard, the plastic biting into her skin. He did the same thing to her feet. Just as he gave a last, painful tug a mobile phone went off in his pocket
—
some ridiculous frog ringtone that Christy had never found funny. He fumbled and answered.

“Yes, okay. Dave…” He thrust the phone at his mate and bent down to see if the plastic ties were tight enough.

“I’m in the middle of
—
” Dave looked annoyed but he deferred to the voice on the other end of the line.

“Okay. I’ll be straight over.” He threw the phone across at the other man who clumsily caught it. “Sid. You wait with her. I won’t be long.”

“But, can’t we get this over with first?”

“No.”

“Can’t I sort this out?”

“I wouldn’t leave you to sort out your own shit let alone this.”

Bill looked even more distressed as Dave left the building and stepped into the raging blizzard outside.

“Watch out for the icy roads!” called Sid after him, then he sheepishly bit his lower lip.

“Where’s the can? You watch her. I’ll pee myself if I don’t go. And you fucking watch her well.”

Bill pointed to a red door opposite the exit from the building and Sid rushed over to it.

The heat from the furnace was intense. Christy could hear the roar of the fire as it consumed its contents.

Bill shook his head, muttering away to himself in the corner. Christy looked on, her eyes open wide in terror, as she saw him take a pile of human bones from a cardboard box in the corner. He threw them into a funnel and started the bone grinding machine. It would have been the same machine that had reduced the remains of her mother to tiny bits of bone. The noise was unbearable. Something jarred and stuck and he swore under his breath as he turned the machine off.