The Girl in the Ice

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.’

‘Never seen her,’ said the girl, a bit too quickly.

‘Really? My friend did say she was in here just a few days ago . . .’

‘I didn’t see her.’ The girl lifted up a wire tray half-filled with empty glasses and went to leave.

‘I’m not done yet,’ said Erika, placing her police ID on the bar.

The girl hesitated and put the wire tray back. When she turned, she saw the ID and looked panicked.