Devna laughed but said nothing.
‘Don’t you like boys?’
‘I do,’ she replied with a smile, ‘but that is not why I am here.’
‘So why are you here? Tell Petra why you are here.’
‘Please, madam,’ she said, smiling again with glistening lips, ‘this is your coffee and water.’
‘If they were clever,’ Tony said loudly, more to Devna than to me, ‘they would save!’
Devna turned her back to him and winked at me. There was a faint smile about her lips, a knowing in her pitch-black eyes. I took the wink to mean: Don’t listen to him, we know perfectly well why we are here.
Someone called Tony from the kitchen. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said, leaving me in the booth with Devna.
‘I’ll tell you why I’m here,’ she said; and now that Tony was gone her voice was sharper, louder. ‘Tony is a good man, but he still doesn’t really understand. I came because I saw no other way forward at home. There was no work, nothing I could do. I have a brother who is disabled, he can’t walk or talk. My parents are old now. I have to send him money. Tell me, who will do this if I don’t? I was working night and day at home and it wasn’t enough. They say we have a better life here, but is that a reason to treat us like children, or worse, animals?’ There was a fierceness to her words. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ Her gaze was firm and penetrating.
‘Yes,’ I said, without looking away, feeling the full force of this woman’s determination and strength. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. Have you told Tony this?’
‘Of course I have,’ she said. ‘He knows. He knows. He likes to tease me. The others don’t know, though. They see me as a robot.’
I gulped down the water and placed the empty glass back on the tray.
Tony returned and Devna winked at me again, smiled and left.
‘I can see that you’re distressed,’ he said. ‘And I want to hear your story. But first, let me tell you about the other missing girl, Reyna . . . Reyna was a different matter altogether. She came here five years ago with her sister, through an agency. Her sister, Ligaya, was relatively happy with her employers but Reyna was miserable. She worked for an old woman who shouted at her and she felt pretty homesick most of the time. One night, she went out and never returned. Ligaya came here, a wreck, a week later. She was crying a lot and I had to calm her down before I could understand anything. Reyna’s phone was switched off. She had left everything – her passport, other precious items, she went out with the clothes she was wearing and the shoes on her feet and never returned. The old woman wasn’t bothered – she was advised to find another maid, and she did. Poor Ligaya got my details from some other girls and came to me because she was afraid to go the police.’
‘Afraid? Was she an illegal immigrant?’
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘She came here legally. She was afraid about how she would be treated.’
He struck a match on the box and it sizzled into a flame. He lit his cigarette and the smoke came out of his mouth in rings, which disintegrated and dispersed in grey wisps around the booth. He picked up his coffee and had a sip. ‘Help yourself,’ he said, signalling with his eyes to my coffee and the biscuits on the tray.
I took a sip. It was packed full of sugar, but I decided to drink it anyway – I needed it in the heat and stuffiness of the tiny booth with the fan that circulated the same smoky air. Scenarios flashed through my mind. Had all three women got involved with something that had led to their disappearance? Could Nisha have known Reyna and Rosamie? A shadow loomed in the corner of my thoughts. Had something else occurred, something darker . . . I couldn’t bear to think about it.
‘So, tell me,’ he said. ‘What makes you think Nisha hasn’t run away? Because I guess that is why you are here?’
I drank the rest of the coffee in one go, took a deep breath and told him the whole story: the trip to the mountains; her request to go out that evening which she hadn’t mentioned again; the crash I heard in the garden that night; realising the following morning that Nisha had gone; that her bed had not been slept in; that she had left her passport, her locket, her daughter’s lock of hair; and, most importantly, that she had not said goodbye to Aliki. I told him that she had been seen heading out at 10.30 on Sunday night, after I had gone to bed, and that she had been heading in the direction of Maria’s, which was basically a brothel-type bar.