The Wrong Girl Read Online Free

gone.
    ‘Yilmaz?’
    ‘Cem.’
    She was wearing a skimpy T-shirt, what looked like a bikini underneath. Hanna wondered how this kid would feel the day she realized she was getting old.
    ‘I don’t want to work for anyone. I told you.’
    ‘You work for someone every time you take off your pants. Don’t you?’
    Hanna reached out and touched the girl’s shoulder, turned it. The badge of ownership was there in her skin, bright-blue, crudely done. Two letters in a fancy script, the initials of his name, ‘CY’.
    ‘I don’t want any man’s tattoo on my back. Tell him thanks but no thanks.’
    ‘Didn’t hurt so much,’ Chantal grumbled.
    ‘It’s not about the pain,’ she said and wondered if this kid had any idea of the things she’d seen in her twenty-eight years.
    ‘Two thousand euros he gave me just for getting that.’ She tapped the blue scrawl. It was only a couple of weeks old. The sardonic smile dropped for a moment. ‘Gets worse if you hold out. And I don’t have to sit in some stupid window any more.’
    A voice rose from down the stairs.
    ‘Mum? Are we going?’
    Hanna Bublik forced herself to smile. She needed Chantal. Sometimes anyway.
    ‘Thanks for looking after Natalya this morning.’
    ‘Don’t work mornings,’ the girl said. ‘Don’t need to.’
    ‘Are you coming to meet Sinterklaas?’
    A grin. Quick and insincere.
    ‘Got a sugar daddy of my own to see, thanks. Cem fixed it.’
    There was something else she wanted to say.
    ‘Nat told me she has nightmares. About monsters. Something big and black. Coming for you two. Up the stairs.’
    ‘Natalya. Nightmares . . . ?’
    ‘Monsters in broad daylight.’ The Filipina girl laughed a little. ‘Kids . . .’
    ‘Have fun,’ Hanna said then walked downstairs and took her daughter by her hand out into Oude Nieuwstraat.
    She asked Natalya about the monsters. They’d turned up a year or two after Gori. She thought they’d left them behind in Georgia.
    The answer when it came didn’t amount to much. Chantal Santos, a dumb whore who was getting herself deep into something she didn’t understand, probably got more.
    ‘What did they look like?’ Hanna asked even though she knew the answer. Could picture them herself.
    Black demons full of smoke and thunder, fire in their guts, alongside sparks and tiny forks of lightning. The kind that had swarmed over Gori that bloody night the world collapsed around them.
    ‘The way they always do,’ her daughter replied in a small, sure voice and left it there.
    Hanna pulled her cheap black nylon anorak around her. It was cold out on the street.
    ‘There are no monsters,’ she said. ‘If there were I’d kill them.’
    Arms folded, as sceptical as the uniform woman beside her, Laura Bakker listened to the story of the woman called Renata Kuyper. Smartly dressed with neat brown hair, a narrow, anxious face and a Belgian accent. She and her daughter had ridden to the square in a cargo trike from the Herenmarkt, parked in a side street, watched the parade. All the way from home to Leidseplein a Black Pete had followed them on a rusty bike. Watching, not coming close. Not offering sweets. Just stalking.
    The uniform officer glanced at Bakker and rolled her eyes.
    ‘Why would he do that?’ Bakker asked as the band in front of the theatre struck up again with cheesy festive music.
    ‘How would I know?’
    There was a shrill and edgy air about her.
    ‘It’s Sinterklaas. We’ve got lots of Black Petes around,’ Bakker said. ‘Hundreds. Perhaps you saw more than one . . .’
    ‘He was on a bike. Following us. Watching us. He was wearing green . . .’
    ‘Lots of them wear green,’ the uniform woman cut in.
    ‘Look . . . look . . .’
    ‘Perhaps you and your daughter should go home,’ Bakker suggested. ‘You seem upset.’
    There was a roar from the square followed by frantic applause. Sinterklaas had appeared on his horse, surrounded by an army of Black Petes. Soon he’d be on the balcony