Songbirds(51)

‘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.

He nodded while I spoke, occasionally jotting things down in the notebook. Once again, his cigarette had turned to ash and it fell onto his beige trousers. He swiped at it, smudging it in.

‘Where exactly is Maria’s?’ he asked.

I gave him the address and he wrote this down too.

Then I showed him the bracelet that I had been clutching in my hand the entire time.

‘Some friends of Nisha’s found this by the Green Line,’ I said, ‘not too far from Maria’s. See how the clasp is broken?’

‘May I?’ he said, and opened his palm.

I placed the bracelet upon it. He looked at it closely, examining its every line, running his finger over Aliki’s name on its underside.

‘Who is Aliki?’

‘My daughter. This bracelet was a present to Nisha from us for her birthday a few years ago.’

He gave me the bracelet and sat there, pensive. There was silence between us for a while. Ricky Martin’s ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ drifted in with the sounds of cutlery and conversation and laughter. Tony looked around the dining area through the glass of his office booth, like a captain at the bridge of a ship.

‘Could there be a connection,’ I said, ‘between these three women?’

In response, he tore a piece of paper out of the notebook and wrote down the names of the women, including the date of their disappearance. ‘I am assuming that you are in contact with some of Nisha’s acquaintances?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

He handed me the piece of paper. ‘Please go back and ask them about these two other women. Had Nisha mentioned them? Are they known within her circle of friends? Once you start asking questions, I’m sure more questions will emerge. But you never know, there could be some answers in there, too.’

I stared for a while at the names of the women: Rosamie Cotabu 12th October 2018 and Reyna Gatan 23rd October 2018. What had happened to these women? How had they disappeared without a trace? And now Nisha would be added to this list: Nisha Jayakody 31st October 2018.

Tony asked for my details: my full name, Nisha’s full name, my mobile number, my landline and my address. He took it all down in his notebook.

‘I’m going to go back to the police,’ he said. ‘I’ll write them emails, I’ll visit, I’ll camp out on their front step, if I have to. If a Cypriot woman had gone missing, they would have searched the Earth to find her. Why are they not bothering with these women? Because they are foreign. They are not Cypriot, they are not citizens. They just don’t count.’

*

As I drove away from the sea, I could still hear the music in my ears, smell the food on my clothes. The road was almost empty on this Sunday afternoon. I was both reassured and troubled by my meeting with Tony. Most of the way home, the names and the dates flashed through my mind. Had Nisha ever mentioned these women? I really didn’t think so. Perhaps their consecutive disappearances were mere coincidence. But something – something dark and sinking and sinister – told me this wasn’t the case.

It was just before 6 p.m. when I arrived home. In front of her house, Mrs Hadjikyriacou had her black skirt hitched up to her knees, teaching Aliki a dance move, kicking about in her new red and cat Converse. Aliki was taking the lesson very seriously. Ruba had opened a foldable wooden table in the front yard and was bringing out bowls of steaming food.

When Mrs Hadjikyriacou saw me, she beamed. ‘We’ve had the most fantastic time,’ she said. ‘I’m getting rather tired though.’ She let her skirt drop down to her ankles and insisted that I join them for dinner.

We all sat together around the table. Aliki must have been starving because she was already holding her knife and fork, eager to start eating. She eyed the food in the bowl – a Nepalese dish of fine noodles and vegetables that instantly reminded me of the smells at the Blue Tiger. There was a jug of bright, freshly made lemonade, bowls of creamy white goats’ yoghurt and warm bread.