Decay Inevitable

Elisabeth, suspicious that the woman might turn her in, grabbed a stubby knife from the kitchen area and hid it under her jumper. The cat rubbed at her ankles now that she was near food but Elisabeth ignored it. She was geeing herself up to leave when the door flew open and Will ducked into the caravan, holding Sadie by the arm. The old woman brought up the rear. Will was smiling. Sadie looked tired and cold. Blue hoops hung beneath her eyes.

“Sorry,” she said.

The old woman poured water into a kettle. “I’ll make you tea. I’ll give you sandwiches. But then you must leave.”

Elisabeth said: “What happened?”

Sadie had been intent on hiding from them behind the trees until they stopped their bickering, no more, but when she had heard men talking beyond the embankment she had decided to check them out in case they might be looking for Will. One of the strangers had spotted Sadie and was friendly, offering her chocolate. He was around Sadie’s age. The other man was older and was walking a docile-looking dog; he moved away when Sadie approached.

The boy, whose name was Jacob, was good-looking and Sadie had warmed to him. They talked for a while and Jacob asked if she would like to see a bird’s nest. It was then that she realised she might be missed and explained that she needed to go back. But the boy grabbed her arm and begged her to go with him. The man with the dog returned. The dog was no longer placid and scared her into going with them. They gave her something hot and sour to drink from a bottle without a label that made her feel dizzy. She remembered someone trying to pull her top up and she had struggled with him. He’d had a grope of her breasts and seemed to be satisfied with that. Then she had been being pushed into a caravan where she had fallen asleep on a sofa. Blankets that smelled of tar. Then nothing more until Will and the old woman found her.

“They’ll notice she’s gone,” the old woman said. “Won’t be long. You should be on your way soon.”

Elisabeth ignored her. “Are you all right?” she asked Sadie.

“Fine,” Sadie replied.

“No,” Elisabeth intoned, more firmly. “I mean, are you all right?”

The old woman pursed her lips as she handed mugs of tea around. “If you mean, ‘Have they raped you?’, why not say?”

Elisabeth put her mug down. “We should go to the police about this,” she said. “Sadie was kidnapped. We don’t know what’s happened to her. She was drugged.”

“Your daughter was not raped.”

“She isn’t my–”

The old woman paid no attention. “She was not raped. I know my kind.”

“We’ll see about that. She was kidnapped, at any rate. There’ll be prison sentences in this, I promise you.”

The old woman rounded on her. “There’ll be death before there’s prison sentences, I promise you that, if you carry on with this nonsense.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Well what do you think it is? A brace of pheasants?”

Will moved, breaking the tension that was thickening in the cabin.

“Eli,” he said gently, “Nula helped us. She helped us. We should be grateful.”

“And what would have happened to her if we hadn’t come after her, Will? What then?”

Nula offered Elisabeth a thick slice of bread spread with margarine. Despite her hunger, she spurned it.

“She’d have come with us,” Nula said, re-directing the bread towards Will, who took it. “She’d have been safe with us.”

“Safe?” Elisabeth mocked. “Safe?”

Sadie stood up. Groggily, she said: “I’m okay. They didn’t touch me. I promise.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes. She felt close to tears. Regardless of her mistrust of the old woman, she didn’t want to go back out into the cold and dark. The cabin, though cluttered and musty, was at least warm. “Let’s get out,” she said.

THEY WALKED IN silence until they rejoined the railway line. Before dawn, they scattered, hiding in the bushes as three helicopters chattered low overhead, arc lights swooping over the embankment and the tracks.

“Do you think they’ll come after us, those people?” Will asked. “When they find that Sadie is gone?”

Elisabeth shook her head. “Not if they’ve any brains between them,” she said. Will’s reluctance to report the incident had refreshed the frost between them that had until that point been gradually thawing. At lunchtime, exhausted, Will conceded that if they weren’t to alert the authorities about the camp, they should at least treat themselves to a decent lunch for a change. It would be worth the risk. And after last night, he privately considered, he wasn’t bothered any more. What happened now didn’t matter.