‘Don’t you try and be clever with me. I know you. Like your job, do you? Got any friends?’ There was a silence. ‘No I thought not, never off duty, are you? You lot would shop your own mother . . . Left here.’
Erika put on the indicator and turned. ‘I don’t live anywhere, right now,’ she said, figuring she could offer up some info of her own. ‘My husband died recently, and I’ve been away, and . . .’
‘And you lost your marbles, yeah?’
‘No, but I came close,’ said Erika.
‘My ’usband was stabbed. Years ago. Bled to death in my arms . . . Go right here. You’re all right though, ain’t yer? Good job. I could’ve been a police officer, or something better,’ sneered Ivy.
‘You know this area well, then?’ asked Erika
‘Yeah. Bin ’ere me whole life.’
‘What bars do you recommend?’
‘What bars do I recommend?’ she said, mimicking Erika.
‘Okay, what bars do you know?’
‘I know ’em all. As I just said, I’ve been round ’ere for years. Seen places come and go. The rough ones last the longest.’
They passed the Catford Broadway Theatre, the front lit up, still advertising the Christmas pantomime.
‘Drop us here,’ said Ivy.
Catford High Street was deserted. Erika pulled up by a pedestrian crossing, next to a Ladbrokes betting shop and a branch of Halifax.
‘There aren’t any houses,’ said Erika.
‘I told you, I ain’t got a house!’
‘Where are you staying then?’
‘I’ve got business to attend to. Come on, wake them up,’ snapped Ivy to the boy. Erika looked through her rear-view mirror. The two girls were asleep, their heads leant together. The boy stared back at her with a white face.
‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ said Erika. His face remained impassive.
‘Leave it out, just give me the money,’ said Ivy, unclipping her seatbelt and opening the car door. Erika fumbled in her coat and brought out the twenty. Ivy took the note, stuffing it in the folds of her parka.
‘Before you go, Ivy, what do you know about pubs in Forest Hill? The Stag?’
‘There’s a stripper there who’ll do anything once her pint glass is full of pound coins,’ said Ivy.
‘And what about The Glue Pot?’ asked Erika.
Ivy’s whole body language changed. Her eyes went wide. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about that place,’ she said hoarsely.
‘You just said you knew all the bars around here. Come on, tell me about The Glue Pot?’
‘I don’t ever go in there,’ Ivy whispered. ‘And I don’t know nothin’, you hear me?’
‘Why not?’
Ivy paused and looked at Erika. ‘I’d get that hand looked at. Little Mike, he’s HIV positive . . .’
She got out, slamming the door, and vanished in between the shops, the kids trailing after her. Erika was so focused on Ivy’s reaction to hearing the name of the pub that she didn’t take in what Ivy had just said. She quickly opened her door and followed them to the entrance of a dank alley. She peered down, but it was too dark to make them out in the shadows. ‘Ivy,’ she shouted. ‘Ivy! What do you mean, you don’t ever go in there? Why don’t you?’
Erika started down the alley, the street lights quickly fading. She felt something soft and squelchy under her feet.
‘Ivy. I can give you more money, you just have to tell me what you know . . .’
She pulled out her phone and flicked on the light. The alley was filled with empty needles, condoms, and discarded packaging and price tags. ‘I’m investigating a murder,’ she continued. ‘The Glue Pot was the last place this girl was seen . . .’
Her voice echoed. There was no response. She reached a ten-foot high chain-link fence with metal spikes on top. Beyond, she could just make out a scrubby yard with some discarded gas canisters. She looked around.
‘Where the hell did they go?’ she said under her breath. She doubled back down the alleyway, but she could see no way out – just the high brick walls of the buildings either side.
When Erika came back to the car, her door was still open, the warning alarm gently chiming. She looked around and got back in. Had she imagined them? She spent a few seconds worrying that she had hallucinated the whole episode – Ivy, the kids – and then she felt a throb of pain in the back of her hand, and saw the square sticking plaster.
She quickly activated the central locking, then pulled away with a squeal of tyres. Fresh adrenalin surged through her body. Something wasn’t right about Ivy’s reaction to The Glue Pot. She had been terrified. Why?
Erika didn’t care how late it was, or how deprived she was of sleep. She was going to check out that pub.
11
Erika drove back over to Forest Hill, and parked a couple of roads back from the high street in a quiet residential area. The pub was halfway up the high street, a two-storey brick building with a wine-coloured frontage. The Glue Pot was written in white, the ‘t’ trailing away to a cartoon of a paintbrush hovering above a pot of white glue. It was an irritating sign, both naff and clueless. There were four windows, two on each storey, with thick stone sills. The windows on the first floor were dark. Of the two below, one was boarded up, leaving the other to glow murkily behind a net curtain.
Despite the cold, the outer door was wedged open. A sign promised that if you bought two glasses of house wine, you could get the rest of the bottle free. Erika went inside and found the bar was accessed via an inner door with badly cracked safety glass.
The bar was almost empty, with just two young men sitting smoking at one of the many Formica tables. They glanced up at her as she passed, taking in her long legs, and then returned to their beer. A small dance floor to one side was filled with old stacking chairs, and a Magic FM jingle played over the sound system, introducing the opening bars of Careless Whisper. Erika went to a long, low bar at the back that was framed by hanging glasses. A dumpy young girl was sitting watching Celebrity Big Brother on a tiny portable television.
‘Double vodka with tonic, please,’ Erika said.
The girl heaved herself up, reached for a wine glass, then pushed it against an optic, keeping her eye on the screen. She was wearing a faded Kylie Showgirl tour T-shirt stretched to capacity over her large bosom and dumpy frame. She adjusted the back of the T-shirt, pulling it down over her large backside.
‘You looking for an au pair? Childcare?’ the girl asked, presumably having picked up on Erika’s slight accent. Erika detected the hint of an accent in the girl, too, Polish? Russian? She couldn’t place it. The girl pushed the glass against the optic again.
‘Yes,’ said Erika, deciding to play along. The girl pulled out a plastic bottle of tonic water, and filled the wine glass up to the brim. She placed the drink down on the bar, then slid across a square of card and a biro.
‘You can put a card on the board for twenty pounds. New cards go up every Tuesday. Twenty-three fifty for that and the drink,’ she said.
Erika paid and sat down, taking a gulp of the drink. It was warm and flat.
‘Why didn’t you send your husband?’ asked the girl, watching to see what Erika wrote on the card.
‘Like I need my husband to drink more!’
The girl nodded with familiarity. Erika moved over to the small corkboard the girl had indicated, which was on the wall beside the bar. It was plastered with hundreds of cards, one over the other, handwritten in Slovak, Polish, Russian, Romanian – all advertising construction jobs, childcare, or au pair positions.
‘Is it always this quiet?’ asked Erika, looking around at the empty bar.
‘It’s January,’ shrugged the woman, wiping ashtrays with an old cloth. ‘And no football.’
‘My friend got her au pair from an advert here,’ said Erika, coming back to her bar stool. ‘Do you get many women in here? Young girls? Looking to be au pairs?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘My friend said that there was a girl looking for work, that I might meet her here?’
The girl stopped wiping an ashtray and regarded her with a cold eye. Erika took another sip of her drink then pulled out her phone. She scrolled through to the picture of Andrea and turned it round.
‘This is her.’