Miriam’s face is a bagful of anger. Her arms come up too. ‘Get out of my way.’
Somehow our waving arms tangle as I shift to let her get past. Miriam wobbles, manages to lose her footing and fall on to me. Her weight propels me backwards and with an almighty crash we smash through the plasterboard under the stairs landing in the void behind. My back slams into hardness. Miriam lands on top of me. The contents of my bag spill out.
Winded, a grunt of pain escapes me. We both shriek when something bangs on to the floor beside us.
Miriam is the first to recover, awkwardly scrambling off me and pulling out her phone to switch on her torch. She stuffs all my things back into my bag. Her light falls on to a small empty bookcase that’s fallen and then sweeps over this hidden space. It’s murky and old down here, the brickwork riddled with mildew; a cat-pee stench clings to the inside of my nose. The smell doesn’t faze me; as a doctor I’ve smelt much worse.
‘What was that?’ Abruptly, I point at a spot on the wall.
Miriam shines her torch. It’s a bag hanging on a hook. A black-and-blue-striped crochet shoulder bag. And, if I’ve got this right, I suspect from the position of the fallen bookcase it once stood in front of the bag. Did someone deliberately hide the bag down here?
Miriam and I slowly look at each other, eyebrows raised. We turn back to inspect the bag. Miriam brings her light closer to it. She steps closer, her hand dives into the bag. ‘There’s a label!’ she exclaims. ‘It says “Hope”。’
Inside the car I place Hope’s bag with reverent respect in my lap.
Excited words tumble out of me. ‘Hope hid her bag in there. She wanted someone to find it. To look inside it.’
No response from Miriam. I hear her light up. She’s been silent since we left the former Suzi Lake Centre. I don’t know what’s going on with her, but I don’t have time for it.
My hand hesitates at the opening of Hope’s bag. ‘I feel like I’m desecrating her grave, which sort of means I’m implying she’s dead.’ Not a word from Miriam again. I shake my head, my voice a fierce choke as I say, ‘And I don’t want her to be dead. This is the first time I’ve admitted out loud that I might not find the women alive. That I’m on a journey that ends in death.’
I open Hope’s bag. Inside is a piece of paper. I study it for a time, eventually figuring out it’s an invoice for consultancy services to a company, well, I think it’s a company, called . . .
‘Pretty Lanes,’ I murmur. ‘Who the hell are Pretty Lanes?’
Although the name rings a bell. Where have I heard it before? It eludes me.
‘Never heard of them,’ Miriam snaps like I’ve accused her of the worst type of crime.
Hope’s name is written in big, bold letters at the top of the paper. ‘Maybe she did some consultancy work for this company?’ I ask uncertainly. ‘It’s dated 1994.’
Everything keeps coming back to 1994.
I turn over the document and my breath catches because Hope has written something else.
‘“Show police. Amina. Sheryl. Veronica.”’
Excited, I look at Miriam. ‘I think Hope was going to show this to the police as some type of evidence.’
My sister doesn’t answer. She’s retreated to her hiding place behind her pot smoke, mascara and fringe again. One of her hands is jammed inside her pocket. I wonder if she’s got her precious keepsake with her.
Frustrated, I ask, ‘How were Hope, Amina, Sheryl and Veronica connected to a company or whatever’ – my hand waves with uncertainty – ‘called Pretty Lanes?’
Talking about connections, something else occurs to me.
In less than five minutes I park up outside the place where I was abandoned as a baby, the former Caribbean Social Club. It’s still a sucker punch to the guts to be here.
I don’t look in Miriam’s direction, calmly reciting, ‘I was abandoned here as a baby.’ The words are a razor-sharp laceration in my throat. This is not easy to say.
I take a quick peek at Miriam’s face. The creeping horror colouring her face makes me recoil. Her skin has the unhealthy sheen of a fever.
The muscles in her neck bob and twitch as she convulsively swallows. ‘You never told me that you were abandoned as a kid.’
My face warms up. ‘I’m still coming to terms with it myself. It’s so close to where the Suzi Lake Centre was. That can’t be a coincidence.’
I reach for Miriam. Her sudden flinch away stuns me.