Runaway Girl Page 9

  And second – and this really brought me up short – that Adrianna’s grasp of the English language was a great deal better than anyone had suspected.

  Chapter 9

  There are times when you despair of the human race. You watch some act of violence unfold on television, or read about a terrorist atrocity in a paper, or hear of some cruelty taking place scarily close to home, and suddenly it hits you. There are times when all the ill in the world seems to rear up and bite you, and when your faith in human nature can’t help but plummet. I experienced one such nadir with Adrianna in the hospital the following afternoon.

  Saturdays, in our house, were still sacrosanct. During the football season – and we were currently very much in the thick of it – no Saturday would be complete without some sizeable chunk of it being devoted to the beautiful game. Tyler went training in the mornings with the youth team he played for, and in the afternoon there would usually be some Kieron-related exodus, either to watch him play or coach his own team or referee.

  And that was very much the way I still liked it. I’ve never been one for moaning about ‘men and their football’, because I’ve always enjoyed my Saturday afternoons too much, it having long since been clear that Mike didn’t do shopping, and everyone was happier if I didn’t make him.

  And after getting over that hurdle, the weekends worked for everyone. I’d tootle around the shops with my sister – and, as the years passed, with our toddlers and then our children and then, eventually (and joyously) with our shopping-obsessed girl teenagers – while Mike inducted Kieron into the world of kicking balls round muddy fields.

  Not so this afternoon. With Mike and Kieron off my hands, I’d invariably spend time with either Lauren or Riley, but this particular Saturday lunchtime saw me headed back to the hospital and, as I’d just managed to catch Mike the previous evening, carrying a weekend bag full of bits and bobs I thought Adrianna might need. And that included the paperback Tyler had bought her and which, if the page corner that was turned down didn’t lie, she was already three-quarters of the way through.

  I’d called the hospital first thing, as I’d been told to, and was put through to the ward, where I was told that the operation and transfusion had both been completed and that I should mosey up some time after one o’clock. Adrianna had slept well, apparently – which was probably no surprise to anyone – and as soon as I approached the bed I could see the change in her. She was clearly young enough to bounce back from the effect of the general anaesthetic, but more tellingly, she really did look as though a weight had been lifted. She was sitting up in bed, and there was a brightness to her skin that I had never seen before.

  She frowned, nevertheless, as soon as I got to her.

  ‘I am so sorry, Casey,’ she began.

  ‘Gawd,’ I said. ‘Don’t start on that one again, please. You’ll wear the flipping word out – in both languages!’

  ‘I know, but I am,’ she said. ‘I cannot begin to tell you how much. You’ve been so kind to me, always. I hated to have to lie to you.’

  I put the bag of clothes and toiletries down in front of the bedside cabinet. ‘Sweetheart, I hate to know you felt that you had to,’ I said, pulling the angry-sounding chair up to the bed again. ‘Why did you? Why were you so afraid to tell us the truth?’

  Adrianna clasped her hands together in her lap, lacing her slender fingers together. Pianist’s hands, my dad would have said. Pale and elegant. Ballerina’s hands, I thought. Beautifully expressive. ‘I did not know what to do,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened. I was so frightened I would be put in prison. That’s why I said I was 14, because I have been told they do not put you in prison if you are 14.’

  ‘But why would you think that anyway? Where did you get that from?’

  ‘Because I have been in Britain illegally, for all this time now.’

  ‘But you’re from Poland … which is in the EU – in Europe.’

  ‘Because I came here illegally. I have no passport.’ She pronounced it ‘pass-e-port’. ‘I know that now. There was a forged one. I never saw it. But it was forged. I know that now, too. And I do not know how now I can get one. Whether I can even have one. Polish? English? But I am never going back. Never.’

  Back. Not home. Back. No mention of home.

  I said so. She nodded. ‘No home. I have no home in Poland now, Casey. I have no one. Really. No one.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘here I am. All ears.’ I waggled them. She smiled a small smile. I smiled back, still a little bemused by the fact that this girl wasn’t 14, but 16, and it suddenly made all the difference – though I couldn’t for the life of me work out why.

  I crossed my legs. ‘So,’ I said, ‘how did you get to this point?’

  And, in sometimes halting but always comprehensible English, Adrianna told me.

  She’d told the truth when she told Marley Mae she came from the far north. She was from Gdansk, a Polish city on the Baltic Sea. Her father had been an industrial chemist and her mother a secretary, though, once Adrianna had come along, she had switched to working part time in a local wool shop. So far, so the fairy-tale, privileged childhood. But then, when Adrianna was 11, her father had been killed in a big industrial accident and her and her mother’s lives had changed overnight.

  And changed radically. This was Poland at the start of the century. There was little in the way of a safety net, and with hardly any financial recompense her mother struggled to make ends meet. As a result, all the trappings of Adrianna’s privileged childhood – including the piano lessons and the dancing, which she shyly admitted was a big part of her life, began falling away.

  ‘So Lauren was right,’ I said, remembering her commenting that Adrianna seemed good enough to dance professionally – in fact, almost as if she had already done so. ‘You are a trained ballet dancer.’

  ‘I won a scholarship,’ she admitted, making mention of an academy whose name meant nothing to me. ‘And for a time …’ She trailed off, seemingly lost in thought. ‘But it is all in the past now. I could not continue. Because we moved.’

  And move they did, her and her mother. To another part of Poland, down in the south, where her mother had the opportunity of working within a family business and, where, soon after, she met the man who was to become Adrianna’s stepfather.

  Adrianna’s expression darkened as she described how quickly this man became the centre of her mother’s world. And he had money too, which she said he used ‘to control her’. To control both of them, it seemed, because, without him, they would have been a great deal worse off. ‘On the street, he said. With nothing. But in whose eyes?’ Adrianna asked me urgently. ‘I had lost my father and now my mother. To him.’

  She wavered then, her eyes filling up, but soon composed herself. I got the feeling anger was her form of self-defence. ‘And then one day,’ she continued, plucking idly at a loose thread on the hospital blanket, ‘he told me I was old enough now, and that I had to earn my keep and help look after my mother. And so,’ she continued, her voice clear and strong, ‘he said that, from now, he was going to fuck me.’ She raised her eyes to meet mine again. ‘And so he did.’

  I’m not easily shocked, for obvious reasons, but at that moment, in that setting, I think I actually gasped. Not so much by the fact of it – such calculated abuse is hardly unheard of, after all – but there was something so chilling in the calm way she reported this to me. As if it had become a memory, and a pain, that she’d long learned to accept.

  And she seemed to have no concern about the choice of word, either. Were those his exact words to her? I suspected they might have been. I glanced around me, expecting to hear indignant huffs and puffs. I couldn’t help it. But, thankfully, her voice was low enough to remain unheard; not least because of the average age on her part of the ward. Still, it brought it home to me that this apparently middle-class child (if such a thing existed in Poland) had come to the UK and learned her English from a very specific group of people – ones who’d throw
such words into conversations without a thought.

  And I suspected she’d followed the arc of my startled gaze, because she immediately reached out a hand to touch me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, also glancing at the women in the adjacent beds.

  I realised then what had made my antennae so twitchy. Under the bright flush in her cheeks, she was broken. ‘Oh, sweetheart …’

  It’s okay,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s okay, I am okay.’

  There was, of course, the fact that we had only just scratched the surface, and with Adrianna still too queasy from the anaesthetic to think about eating lunch I was keen to hear the rest of her story.

  Indeed, once the trolley had moved on, she seemed equally keen to get the lot of it – the whole lot of it – off her chest. She’d clearly been living with her terrible secrets for much, much too long.

  She told me of how she initially felt complete disbelief. Of being in denial, of being raped and of finding it impossible to tell her mother. Of wondering if she should tell a teacher – she was by now attending the local middle school – but of fear of the repercussions paralysing her completely. He’d made repeated threats to her if she intended to say anything – didn’t they all? I thought angrily – and she had no doubt that he would carry them out, either.

  By now her maternal grandmother, with whom they’d first stayed, was growing elderly and in decline, victim to the ravages of dementia. And Adrianna quickly decided she couldn’t hope for help there.

  ‘So in the end,’ she said, ‘after six months or so, I found my courage and decided to tell my mother.’

  I held my breath, knowing what was coming. Would have known anyway, even without Sister Skaja telling me. Because it so often happened. Which was why our city streets were paved not with gold but with homeless teenagers.

  ‘She didn’t believe me,’ Adrianna confirmed. ‘She thought I was making trouble. She told me I was jealous of her. She told me that I must never speak of it again.’

  ‘And did you tell him – your stepfather – that you had told her?’

  She nodded. Said in a small voice, ‘I felt braver then.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He laughed. He had my mother – I think you have a saying – wrapped round his little finger. So I thought, I had two choices. To stay or to leave.’

  ‘So you left. But where did you go? Didn’t your mother try to stop you?’

  Adrianna shook her head again. ‘And it was okay that she didn’t. It was better. To be away from him. For the first part, it was okay. For a small time I moved in with my grandmother. To help her. Which was good for her. And I still went to school.’

  ‘You didn’t think to tell a teacher?’

  She looked at me as if I’d suggested something insane. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. He was a big man – big in the town there. Well known. I think people were scared of him.’

  I nodded. It figured.

  ‘No, I couldn’t,’ she went on. ‘I dared not. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t know how it would help me. What it would achieve. And then my grandmother got sicker, and my uncles – who were far away – paid to move her to a home.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I ran away,’ she said, once again clearly and calmly. ‘I took money from my grandmother. I thought … I thought that she would not mind. Only a little money. Just enough. And then I went back to my house one day – I had a key to it still – and I found my birth certificate –’

  ‘Which you still have?’ That handbag. Which she guarded so carefully. Which, for all I knew, was kept safe under her pillow as she slept. Which I hadn’t thought to look for when I’d gathered her things together. Why hadn’t I? But it no longer mattered.

  ‘I still have it,’ she confirmed. ‘Then I went on a bus to Krakow. I knew from the internet that there was a hostel there I could go to. So I went.’

  I remembered what she’d originally told social services. ‘You mean the children’s home?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘No children’s home. Just to a hostel.’

  ‘And no one looked for you? Searched for you? Reported you missing?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And your grandmother? Your uncles? You’ve had no contact with anyone?’

  Her jaw jutted. ‘My grandmother is gone for me. I know that.’ I noticed her lower lip begin to tremble again. ‘Casey, they can kick me out of here. It makes no difference. I am never going back. I have to stay. My baby …’

  I grabbed the tissue box again.

  I knew a lot about a lot – well, in my field of work, anyway. But I knew next to nothing about a whole lot else, obviously. And I knew very little about trafficking.

  I racked my brains, vaguely recalling a course that Mike and I attended when we had very first decided to foster. That had been about trafficking – I was sure of it. About men who preyed on vulnerable teens and promised them the world. Men who made them feel as if they were the only people in the world that truly understood and loved them, and then, when they got them hooked on the idea of the big romance, gradually started to break them down.

  And ‘break them down’ – such a chilling term – was invariably the right one. These men were without scruples in destroying a girl’s sense of self. They’d laugh at them, belittle them, make them feel inadequate – play with their hearts and their heads, worming away at their self-esteem, till they became completely dependent, unable to imagine life without them. Unable to imagine that they could even survive without them.

  I remembered how, when I was young, I couldn’t quite imagine how that happened. How one person could wield such immense power over another via such apparently resistible means. I couldn’t, because I couldn’t imagine it ever happening to me – if a man laughed at me, I’d laugh back. If a man insulted me, I’d ignore him. If a man tried to make me feel small, or so my thinking went, I’d simply consider him a loser and walk away from him.

  But I’d lived and I’d learned, and I’d now worked with these kinds of teens, both as a foster carer and before that in a school. I’d have been fine because I wasn’t vulnerable in that way – I’d had the privilege of a loving, supportive childhood. But they invariably didn’t. Far from it. And that was key – these men knew exactly who to prey on, and the power that they wielded was very real. They could make these girls do anything, no matter how vile.

  Because they were vile. They were scum. Barely human.

  From what Adrianna told me, it sounded as though she’d been targeted and then painstakingly groomed. Which was no surprise to me, as she was such a striking girl. And also pliant – she was already vulnerable, being so far from home. Well, for the place that had once been home, anyway.

  I seethed inwardly at the evil that had been done to her. Though, as always, at the same time I tried to be rational; tried to see the mother as the victim she undoubtedly was too. But it was hard, and I struggled to sympathise with a woman who refused to believe her own daughter; failed to understand how she could rationalise all that evil away.

  It was a fool’s errand even thinking about it. It was fact, and, as such, was unalterable. It was also testament to the power that a controlling sociopath – psychopath, even – could wield.

  And so there Adrianna was – out of the frying pan and headlong into the fire. Which she soon found, in the form of an apparently nice guy, whom she met via a girl who had befriended her on her travels. A young man who had taken a shine to her, wanted a relationship with her and had promised her the world. Had promised, at the very least, that she could go with him to England, where she could work with him in the family shop and they could be together.

  Of course, in reality, there was no ‘family shop’. Just a knocking shop in a house somewhere out of the way in the Midlands, apparently, where she was quickly disabused of her hopes for their romantic future, when she was billeted in a house with four other young girls, all of whom were being forced into prostitution.


  I thought of Sister Skaja, who wasn’t on duty today, but whose head I could see bobbing in my mind’s eye, her hunch confirmed. ‘So what did you do then,’ I said, ‘now you knew what was really happening?’

  Adrianna shrugged. ‘The same. I ran away again.’

  ‘What about the police? Did you not think to go to the authorities?’

  Again that look. Not disrespectful. I didn’t think Adrianna was capable of it. Just the same surprise that I’d even think to ask such a thing.

  ‘Never,’ she said firmly. ‘I thought they would put me in prison. That’s what they do,’ she added, leaning forwards, as if there might be police officers lurking behind the hospital curtains. ‘They put people like me into detention centres. Another girl … one who was with us … That’s what happened to her. She was never seen again.’

  Or so she’d been told, I thought. By her captors – of course they would tell her that. So easy to terrify your teenage slaves. ‘So, what then? How did you manage to get away?’

  ‘I went for milk one day …’

  ‘You weren’t physically held captive, then?’

  She shook her head. ‘I was told of some who were. We were told we would always be watched, and that if we tried anything they would always bring us back. But we weren’t actual prisoners. A couple of the girls had to go to this other place. This brothel. Except we were prisoners, of course, because we all knew the alternative. We had no money, no immigration papers, no passport, no ID cards … but I had a little money, kept in secret, that no one knew about, and I used that. It is very cheap on the coaches to go a very long way. So I got on a bus.’ She made a motion with her arms, as if she were running. ‘It was at the bus stop, and I pretended to be walking past, then waited till the very last moment, before the doors shut. And I jumped on. Then another bus. To the city. Then on a coach. And went a long way away.’