The Trafficked (14 page)

31

 

Suzanne sat on the chair at Amy’s desk whilst Amy brushed her hair. Suzanne said the brush was made from real boar bristle. Amy wanted to ask Suzanne where the bristles came from, and did she mean a wild boar, like a pig? But she didn’t ask because Suzanne got cross when Amy talked. She liked Amy to be quiet and concentrate on the brushing, and if she didn’t then Suzanne would be horrible to her again. She would make her drink the salty water like the day before, and then Amy had been sick all night. Amy had had to sleep by the toilet because she mustn’t be sick in the bed, because Suzanne would hit her.

The bristle brush was soft. That meant that Amy could brush Suzanne’s hair with long hard strokes, the way she liked it. Suzanne closed her eyes.

In the next room, the spotty one, Tony, had left the telly on when he’d left, and Amy could hear
EastEnders.
Amy recognised the theme tune. She didn’t watch it normally. It came on at a time when she was doing prep, but she had sometimes seen the omnibus on Sundays.

Suzanne was getting drunk. Amy had seen people
drunk a few times. She’d even seen her own mother drunk. She would start happy, laughing and singing, and then become miserable. Sometimes Amy had been fast asleep and her mother had come and woken her up to tell her how much she loved her, and Amy had smelt the booze on her breath. But, she did love her—that was the main thing. Amy could tell that Suzanne didn’t even like her. And Suzanne had such bad moods. Amy didn’t know what she was going to be like from one minute to the next.

‘Suzanne?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you married to Lenny?’

Suzanne closed her eyes again and took a swig of gin.

‘I will be, just as soon as he dumps his wife. He promised me he’d have it done by now, but he still fucking hasn’t.’

Suzanne waved her hand in the direction of her glass and Amy picked it up.

‘How did you meet Lenny?’

‘I met him at home in Nanjing. He had business there. I was working as an interpreter.’

‘That’s why you speak such good English.’

‘Yes…’ She gave a drunken giggle. ‘…and I’ve been fucking western guys since I was not much older than you. I lived with a German for three years from when I was sixteen. That’s why my English has an accent.’

‘Yes, you have a strange accent. Not strange…’ Amy corrected herself quickly as Suzanne opened her eyes and glared at her ‘…but different…’

Suzanne tapped the glass with her false nails. She was still waiting for Amy to go and refill it. Amy took it from her and went out into the kitchen to do it. Amy had become an expert on gin-mixing in the few days that she had been left alone with Suzanne. She had even been allowed to go next door, into the lounge and the kitchen, to fetch the gin and tonic and to refill the ice tray when needed. Now Amy knew where lots of things were. She saw where they slept, when they took it in turns to stay over in the flat; she saw where Tony hid his porn magazines; and she saw where the spare keys for the front door were.

Amy came back in with a fresh drink for Suzanne, who was waiting for her.

‘Every woman has to make the best of herself, Amy. I have had to—you will have to. In this life women need to make use of
all
the assets they have to make it.’

‘Yes.’ Amy started reeling off a list. ‘Women need to be strong, intelligent…’

‘Of course we’re fucking intelligent.’ Suzanne’s eyes snapped open and she swung an angry look at Amy before settling back into her seat and signalling for Amy to continue brushing. ‘We’ve always been more fucking intelligent than all those pricks…Women need to know how to work the system, Amy: use your…’ She opened her eyes and looked Amy up and down. ‘…use anything you have. That’s what I will teach you, Amy. I have plans for you. Things have changed. Stand over there, Amy…’ Suzanne pulled Amy’s arm roughly, making her stand in front of her. ‘Take off your clothes. Let me look at you.’

Amy batted her eyes and her brace got dry and made the sucking sound.

‘Take that fucking brace out of your mouth. You’re not going to need it any more anyway.’ Suzanne sighed, exasperated, and looked Amy up and down. And don’t even bother to take off your clothes—I can see exactly what you look like; we need to put you on a strict diet. Come here…‘Amy inched towards her. ‘Give me that thing in your mouth…spit it out.’

Amy reached into her mouth and dislodged the plate.

‘Throw it in the bin—
do it.’

Amy went to the bin and dropped it inside.

‘Suzanne—let me do your hair now. I love your hair. You’re so beautiful, Suzanne—like a model. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Please let me do your hair…’

Suzanne’s phone rang. She answered. Amy knew it was Lenny on the phone because of the way Suzanne’s voice changed. Then Amy saw her smile disappear as she listened hard, concentrating on what Lenny was saying. Something wasn’t right.

‘Yes. Yes, I will do it now. Yes, okay. You know I will.’ Suzanne closed her phone.

‘Was that Lenny?’

‘Shut up and hand me my bag.’

Amy did so reluctantly. She knew what that usually meant. She watched Suzanne dig into the large leather bag and bring out the bottle of pills that Amy had seen many times since she arrived at the flat. Suzanne tipped out one into her palm.

She passed Amy the glass of gin and tonic.

‘Take it.’

Amy screwed up her face as she tasted the gin, but she knew better than to cross Suzanne.

‘Now lie down and go to sleep.’

Amy did as she was told. Suzanne watched her take the sleeping pill, then she went into the lounge to get ready. Amy lay down on her bed and pulled up the duvet. She waited for the familiar heaviness to come down on her. She listened to the sound of Suzanne tidying up the kitchen, washing the coffee cups. She heard her moving around the lounge; occasionally she heard her come back to Amy’s door, feeling her presence as she looked in to see if Amy was asleep yet, then went back to the lounge.

It wouldn’t take long for Amy to fall asleep. It never did. Suzanne peeped in. Yes, Amy was snoring away. She really needed to get her adenoids seen to, thought Suzanne, as she went back into the lounge and checked her watch. She should have been gone by now.

Fucking men!
They couldn’t do one thing right. Suzanne didn’t understand why Lenny kept changing his mind. She didn’t see why they were bothering to keep the child alive now. What was Lenny stalling for? That was the part that worried Suzanne. The side of Lenny that was capable of double-crossing anyone and everyone. Did that mean he would do it to her? She didn’t really believe that—they were the same type, him and her. They were meant for one another. He wouldn’t double-cross her. He must want the child alive in case the plan changed. He was smart; he was rich; he was good-looking—she didn’t need to worry. But she did
need a contingency plan, and she had it. If things went wrong, Suzanne had it all worked out what she was going to do. Amy was her ticket to freedom. With the money she could sell Amy for, she could retire.

She headed over to check on the new arrivals. She had better keep a more watchful eye on this lot. She couldn’t trust the men where the women were concerned; they weren’t using their brains to think. They were easily distracted. They had been responsible for the loss of the women in the fire—she had warned them that it was only a matter of time. She had told them to move the women earlier. But had they listened? Now Lenny was gone to try and sort it out and she was left to manage the idiots. Things had not turned out the way they were supposed to.

She locked up the flat and called a cab. The journey took her twenty minutes as she headed north off the M25. She reached her destination—a scruffy end-of-terrace on a road that was high up on a demolisher’s list.

Tony answered the door. Suzanne went past him and straight through to the kitchen. ‘It’s freezing here. Put the heating on.’

‘It doesn’t work.’ Tony followed her through to the back.

‘I thought you were going to tart this place up after we sold the other girls on.’

‘The Albanians screwed us over. We didn’t get a lot for the girls, in the end. They weren’t worth much—they were finished.’

Suzanne looked at him. She knew he was lying, but
it didn’t matter to her, she hadn’t handled the deal—if the shit hit the fan it wasn’t her mess to clean up.

‘Well, get the heating fixed before we start getting punters in here. They’re going to be too cold to get their clothes off. Ring someone and get them round…no, wait, leave it—I’ll do it tomorrow.’

Suzanne had decided that the men were best given minor tasks. She couldn’t risk another disaster. She set the bags of bread, pasta, jam and milk down on the kitchen table. A bare electric light bulb swung down over their heads. A small portable television was blaring out from the corner of the worktop. The house was ex housing association. It had been bought at an auction and needed a lot of money spending on it, which it wasn’t going to get.

‘You have four hours max. I have had to dope the girl as there is no one there to look after her.’

Tony was disgruntled. ‘We can’t manage them, just the three of us. It’s too much.’

‘It’s not too much if everyone does their fucking job. We’re already fifty grand down with the loss of the others.’

‘That had nothing to do with me.’

‘Yes, it did. You should have known the Chinese would come. You should have backed me when I said to move them on quicker and you should have kept an eye on that black guy. He wasn’t thinking with his brains.’

Tony shrugged. He was looking sheepish. He was up to something or he’d done something, thought Suzanne.

‘Where are the girls? Upstairs?’

Tony nodded. She could see by his face that he was hiding something.

‘What kind of condition are they in? They’ve been cooped up in the back of a lorry for a week. Are any of them sick?’

Tony turned his back on her and started to unpack the groceries.

‘Not sick, but they were playing up—making a noise. I had to get rough with them. Had to make them do as they were told, show them who’s boss.’

Suzanne could see by his face that he’d had his fun.

She went upstairs to look at the girls.

The house had four bedrooms. Six girls slept in one room and the other three were going to be used to entertain clients.

As Suzanne made her way up the stairs there was an eerie silence coming from above. The front door sounded loud as it juddered shut behind the exiting Tony. She opened the door to the girls’ bedroom. Two of the girls were sitting on their beds, facing each other, talking. Two more were lying curled on their mattresses. The other two sat together on the floor, their backs against the wall. The room smelt damp and dirty. Suzanne blamed the mattresses. Tony had found them on a skip. He was a cheap little hood, but Suzanne had to work with what she was given. She was still a minor player in the league but was working her way up the ladder. She and Lenny would be a great team one day, a formidable team. But for now she must look after a few frightened Filipinas—schoolgirls, kidnapped and
sold to the highest bidder, which just happened to be Suzanne’s new boss.

The girls on the bed turned and stared at her as she entered. She went over to the two on the floor. One of them was the youngest of the six girls, at thirteen. Her fifteen-year-old sister had her arm around her. Tony had done a good job by raping the youngest first—they looked frightened, traumatised,
exactly as they should look
, thought Suzanne.

32

 

‘How long are we in the air? Do you think the plane is safe? It seems really old to me…and what are those drops on the wing?’

Becky and Mann were sitting on a small domestic aeroplane heading for the island of Mindanao.

‘Just relax—just takes a couple of hours, that’s all. I can’t believe you are frightened of flying. I thought you loved travelling.’

Mann was having a hard job keeping the smile off his face.

‘I love to travel but I hate getting there.’

‘Just relax, close your eyes, try and sleep.’

‘No way—at any minute I might have to fly the plane.’

Mann laughed. ‘This plane is made out of bits of chicken wire and soggy cardboard, God knows how it stays in the air as it is—if there’s any trouble we are going down fast…’ He looked at her panic-stricken face—her eyes were huge. ‘I didn’t mean it. This airline has a better safety record than Qantas—believe me, there is nothing that can go wrong—why don’t you read a magazine and forget about it.’

Becky slumped in her seat and took the in-flight magazine from Mann, but continued to stare at the water droplets that ran in ragged paths across the wing.

They were on the second leg of their journey now. They had stopped at Cebu, sat in the suffocatingly hot departure lounge, paid boarding tax, luggage tax, departure tax and now they were sitting on the connecting plane that would take them to Davao, the capital of Mindanao. It was a small old plane with one very short-skirted hostess and a pilot who coughed incessantly. Becky was wearing cut-off jeans and a vest top. She looked at the hostess and was glad she had chosen not to wear shorts. She wouldn’t want to
begin
to compete with those legs.

They flew out of the cloud and Becky looked down below to see white-rimmed islands floating dream-like in the transparent turquoise ocean. She felt calmer. They had a chance now they were over water. She had rehearsed the escape from a plane in the sea many times in her head. She was a good swimmer; she could afford to relax for a while. She opened the magazine and started reading about Mindanao. She turned to ask Mann a question but he was asleep. His sunglasses were resting on his head; his black hair and choppy fringe were pushed back from his forehead. She studied his face. His broad forehead had a permanent crease, a frown line across it, even when he was resting. His eyebrows were black and thickest where they arched over the centre of the eye. The scar on his cheek sat right over the cheekbone in an otherwise quite beautiful face, thought Becky.

She looked at the way his faded blue T-shirt folded softly around his bicep and his washboard stomach. He was a lot like Alex, thought Becky, in the way he liked to look good, but Mann was understated, he liked to be well-groomed, not flash. Alex liked people to know how much his suit cost; Mann liked to keep them guessing.

Mann knew she was looking at him. He was resting his head and trying to take his mind off the fact that he was so tall that his knees were jammed against the seat in front. He was aware of her turning towards him and he felt her soft breath on his face—a hint of mouth-wash. He snapped his eyes open.

Becky quickly turned back to her magazine.

‘Says here that Davao is one of the safest cities in the Philippines. I thought Mindanao is where the rebels are?’

Mann leaned over to look at the magazine on her lap.

‘Some parts of the island are no-go areas—terrorist strongholds—but Davao has been transformed into a crime-free zone. It’s held up by the government as a model city, crime rates falling, vagrancy dealt with.’

‘How come?’

He sat back. ‘It’s called the forty pesos solution. Forty pesos is the cost of a bullet. Davao has a death squad. Two men dressed in black ride shotgun on a motorbike—the Davao Death Squad. They target anyone undesirable. It used to be rebels but now it’s petty thieves, drug dealers and vagrant kids who live off the streets.’

‘They kill
children
?’

Becky looked past Mann and became aware that she was speaking too loudly, as across the aisle an old Filipina was staring at her looking annoyed.

‘The Philippines has a massive vagrant child population.’ Mann kept his voice low and smiled over at the woman who smiled hesitatingly back. ‘The country is eighty per cent children. The average size of the family here in the Philippines is six. The streets are clogged with children, they live off refuse and they sleep on the pavements. They have no papers and no identity. Lots of the kids don’t have any birth records. They don’t exist, so far as this city is concerned.’

‘And so they just get rid of them?’

‘The DDS do. The kids are either stabbed or shot by them. They are bad for tourism, unsightly. Their bodies are dumped in a killing field outside the city.’

‘My God! That’s awful. Why are we going there? What has it got to do with this investigation?’

‘Because, recently, they seem to have
stopped
killing them. There have been reports of children being snatched off the street. There are rumours that they have started trafficking them instead. Making money from them instead of just killing them for fun.’

‘Does no one care about these kids?’

‘Some people care. They risk their lives to care. We are going to talk to one of those people right now.’

‘Oh God, are we landing?’ She swung round and pinned her face against the small window at the same time as there came the familiar clunk of the wheels being lowered. ‘More planes crash either taking off or
landing than at any other time.’ She sat back and quickly fastened her seat belt.

‘I wouldn’t bother doing that—when it catches fire you’re going to want to get out fast.’

Becky thumped him hard on the arm.

Ten minutes later she was following Mann out through Davao’s light and airy arrivals lounge.

There was no air-con, but the place was open fronted and the high ceilings, and cool stone floors kept the air circulating and the temperature down.

Outside, the day was idyllic: a constant breeze, rustling palms and an azure-blue sky. There was a throng of people waiting at the exit. Mann stood for a few minutes and scanned the crowd. He saw who he was looking for and waved. Becky saw a slight, wiry man, late fifties, salt and pepper hair, with a checked blue shirt, who was standing with his legs apart, his hands on his hips, like a military man. The man waved back and walked purposefully over to them. He shook Mann’s hand with both of his.

‘Good to see you, Johnny—can’t stay away, no?’

His voice had a charming, almost comical quality to it. It started soft Dublin then ended in squeaky Filipino as it rose at the end of every sentence.

‘Good to see you again, Father, this is for you…’ Mann handed him a bottle of single malt. ‘And this is my colleague—Becky Stamp, from London. Becky, meet Father Finn O’Connell.’

‘Both you and the scotch are very welcome.’ He shook Becky’s hand. He had a film-star charm about him: his twinkling emerald-green eyes were striking
against his tanned face. He had deep laughter lines around his mouth. His eyebrows were as thick as black caterpillars. He shook her hand and gently steered her out of the way of a runaway luggage trolley. ‘How is everything back in the UK? Must be summer, no?’ he asked her.

‘Nearly, Father, but it’s been a long time coming.’

‘Tell me, this is your first time to the Philippines, no?’ He was already on the move, steering them away from the exit.

‘Yes. I have done Thailand before, been to Bali, Goa, but never been here. It’s a beautiful place.’

‘Yes. Beautiful place, wonderful people. They have the most trusting, happy disposition. They try and please. That’s probably their downfall, no?’

‘What about you, Father? You’re a long way from home. What’s a priest doing out here?’

‘Ha…’ His laughter came quick and fast, exploding into the air. ‘I hope it’s God’s work. It keeps
me
busy anyway. I will tell you all about it in great length when we get into the shade. It’s good to have you here. Now let’s go.’

Becky looked around her as Father Finn led the way at speed across the car park. There were lots of people just milling about or sitting in the shade of the palm trees that ran around the perimeter of the airport. It reminded her of a music festival, where there was nothing to do but mill about. To the left was the palmed perimeter of the airport; to the right was the public transport area, where queues were forming to get on the Jeepneys to take people into town. The main form
of public transport in the Philippines, the Jeepneys were highly decorated and customised open-sided buses. Father Finn was a few paces in front; he was a fast walker. Becky stayed back with Mann.

‘Are there lots of priests here?’ she asked Mann as they walked past the people joining queues for Jeepneys.

‘Yes, they’ve been here for many years. They are all over the Philippines—mainly Columban order. They do a fantastic job at guilt tripping the government into facing up to a few of the problems. Father Finn here runs a refuge for the kids that get into trouble, one here and one in Angeles City, north of Manila.’ Mann called to Father Finn, who was a few strides ahead. ‘I was expecting Father Vinny to pick us up. I didn’t think you’d be down this way. Here on business, Father?’

‘Yes, I am here to pick up a child—a boy, Eduardo. He is in hiding at the moment. We rescued him from the jail. We found him in there—wrongfully accused of stealing and imprisoned there for two months. He was shut up with men, some of them paedophiles. He was terribly abused. It will be the first case of taking the Philippine government to court. He should have been protected and he wasn’t, no? He will testify against them. They will drag it out for as long as they can. The trial will take a couple of years. I am here to escort Eduardo back to Angeles, where I can protect him. But that is not the only reason I am here. I got a call from a young woman who used to live with us, in our refuge.’ He stopped and turned towards Mann. ‘You remember Wednesday, Johnny?’

‘I remember Wednesday. Cheeky little Amerasian
girl, she was with you at the refuge in Angeles for a few months, wasn’t she? That must have been, what, seven or eight years ago, Father? She must be grown up now.’

‘Yes. We rescued her from a paedophile ring when she was twelve. She stayed with us for a few months and then she ran away from our shelter—it is not a prison and we cannot force the children to stay with us. Well, sadly we lost contact. I didn’t know what had happened to her until she phoned me. I assumed, wrongly, that she had gone back to the bars, like so many do, but it wasn’t so. When she phoned me she told me she left because she found out she was pregnant and she felt she couldn’t tell us. That saddens me; there is nothing more joyful to us than the birth of a child, whatever the circumstances. Anyway, she came back here—to Davao. She was thirteen when she gave birth to a little girl. She has been a good mother. But her child has gone missing.’

They reached the car—a battered old maroon-coloured Toyota. Father Finn went round and opened all the doors quickly, whilst Mann lifted the boot and made some room inside for their bags. The heat was sweltering inside the car.

‘We need to leave it to air for a few minutes. We’ll turn on the air-con once we get going.’

‘You have air-con? I’m impressed,’ said Becky as Mann slammed the boot shut.

‘Ah, well, I might have exaggerated that slightly, no?’ he said with a mischievous smile. ‘We have Filipino air-conditioning in the car. When the windows are down
that means the air-con on. When they are up its off so, if you wouldn’t mind…’ He gestured towards the back windows

Becky smiled. ‘Of course.’ She slid into the back seat and set about winding the windows down as fast as she could. Her legs were already sticking to the hot leather.

Mann sat in the front beside Father Finn, who grated the old car into gear and waited for it to stop juddering before pulling erratically on the steering wheel and heading out of the car park. Becky smiled at the armed guards, who grinned back from their sentry boxes at the car-park exit, their rifles resting just inside the entrance.

‘I read a report about the DDS, Father,’ said Mann, his elbow resting out of the open window, his sunglasses on. ‘They seem to be growing from strength to strength. They are still killing anyone the authorities deem to be undesirable. I thought that the world press would have shamed the powers-that-be into stopping them.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s the very opposite. They are being praised for their good work. The government is encouraging all other cities to do the same—get rid of the unwanted from their streets. It’s even been suggested that the government are funding them indirectly. How else would they exist?’ Father Finn crossed himself and shook his head in disbelief. His erratic driving seemed to fit in perfectly with everyone else’s. Cars beeped, swerved and braked continuously. ‘The government is holding the city up as a shining example of a caring, crime-free city that
loves its children! Something has happened to the Death Squad—they are under new management, I think. They have taken a step up. They are an organised body now. They have a bigger team—not just two men on a motorbike. They now have new cars, black, plateless, of course, and they have been seen carrying the children away.’

They passed an ambulance with no windows. Curtains were flapping, and inside a man sat slumped forward, a blue mask over his nose and mouth. He was facing backwards, towards the road. A nurse held his T-shirt from the seat behind, to stop him collapsing and falling out of the back of the vehicle.

‘Is it true that the younger children are being trafficked? Is that what you think has happened to Wednesday’s daughter?’ asked Becky as she leaned forward between the two front seats. There were no seat belts in the old car.

‘We think so. At the refuge, we have heard many stories from the children whose friends have disappeared. They have seen the black riders appear, kill one or two of the children, then force the others into a car that accompanies the riders. They are selecting the very young girls. I’ll take you to talk to Wednesday. She’ll be happy to see you, Johnny.’