The Girl in the Ice

35

Erika went straight to the coffee shop when she got back to Brockley Station. She ordered a coffee, booted up her laptop and started to search the Internet. Armed with names and dates, it didn’t take her long to find details of the girls. The first victim was nineteen-year-old Tatiana Ivanova from Slovakia. A lone swimmer at Hampstead Heath ponds found her body in March 2013. It had been a warm start to spring, and her body was badly decayed. The press used a photo of Tatiana at a dance competition. She was dressed in a black leotard with sparkly silver fringing, striking a pose, hand on hip. She must have been part of a dance troupe, but the other girls had been cropped out. She was dark-haired, very beautiful, and looked younger than her years.

The second victim was Mirka Bratova, aged eighteen. She was originally from the Czech Republic, and was found eight months after her disappearance, in November 2013. One of the park wardens in the Serpentine Lido discovered her body floating in the water amongst leaves and rubbish by the sluice gate. In the press photo, she was also dark-haired and very beautiful, and pictured holding a black kitten on a sunny balcony. Behind her, blocks of flats stretched away in the distance.

The third victim was Karolina Todorova, again aged just eighteen. Her body was discovered in February 2014. A man was out walking early in the morning and his dog found her body by the edge of one of the lakes in Regent’s Park. Karolina was originally from Bulgaria. The press had used a photo taken in an automatic photo booth. She was dressed up for a night out, in a white low-cut top, and she had a streak of pink in her dark hair. Another girl was hugging her in the picture, presumably a friend, but her face had been blurred out.

It frustrated Erika that she couldn’t see more; details were sketchy and almost dismissive in the press reports of the deaths.

One other thing mentioned about all the girls was that they had come to England to work as au pairs, and that they had then “fallen into” prostitution. Erika wondered if it had been that gradual. Had the girls been lured to the UK on the pretence of a better life, of a good job? The chance to learn English?

Erika looked up from where she sat in the window of the café. Outside, it was raining hard. It hammered on the awning out front, where several people had gathered to shelter. She took a sip of her coffee, but it was cold.

Erika had left Slovakia when she was just eighteen, for the same reason, to be an au pair. She’d left the bus station in Bratislava on a bleak November morning, travelling to Manchester in England with little knowledge of English.

The family she’d worked for had been okay. The kids had been sweet, but the mother had had a cold attitude towards Erika, as if somehow Eastern Europeans were worth a bit less as human beings. Erika had found the suburban street where they lived to be sinister, and the atmosphere in the house was always tense between husband and wife. They’d refused to let her return home early that first Christmas, when Erika’s mother had fallen ill with cirrhosis of the liver, and eighteen months later, when they had decided they no longer needed an au pair, they had given Erika three days’ notice to leave. They hadn’t asked if she had anywhere to go.

Erika realised she was lucky, though, and blessed in comparison. Had Tatiana, Mirka, and Karolina said goodbye to family just like she had? Erika remembered the crumbling bus terminal in Bratislava: rows and rows of bus platforms. Each platform had rusting metal poles holding up an enormous long shelter, and it had been so damp. She had wondered if it was damp from the tears of all those teenagers who had to say goodbye, to leave a beautiful country where the only way to succeed is to get out.

Did the parents of the three dead girls cry? They had not known that their girls would never return. And what had happened when the girls arrived in London? How had they ended up working as prostitutes?

Tears rolled down Erika’s face, and when the waiter came to take her coffee cup, she turned her head away and angrily dried her eyes.

She had cried enough tears to last a lifetime. Now it was time for action.