‘Not in the way you think,’ said Jennifer.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Jennifer Morgan died twenty-four years ago. The person you see now is someone completely different.’

‘But… but… how…’ stammered Bailey. ‘How did you…?’

There were questions suddenly. So many questions.

Jennifer smiled calmly. ‘All in good time, Bailey. I’ll tell you everything. After all, that was the whole reason I agreed to meet you.’

She stepped up to Bailey and peered closely at her face. She lifted a hand, and with the tips of her slender pale fingers, gently pushed Bailey’s loose-hanging lock of hair aside to reveal the scar on her cheek.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked.

Bailey drew her head back. ‘What happened to me?’ she said indignantly. ‘What happened to you?’

Jennifer sighed. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I need to know. I deserve to know.’

Jennifer stared at her silently for a few moments, then gave a small shrug and started to speak.

60

‘What’s there to say? Except that Jennifer was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was no conspiracy or master plan to abduct her. She was just plain unlucky, that was all. How could she have known that evil would be lurking there on a dull suburban street on a quiet Sunday afternoon?

‘You see, she’d been playing Barbie dolls with her friend, Sarah, who lived just up the street when she remembered that her mother was planning to make one of her special carrot cakes that afternoon. Jennifer was keen to get home and try a slice before her little sister, Bailey, gobbled it all up, so she said goodbye to Sarah and headed back to her house.

‘So there she was, walking along the pavement, her head so filled up with thoughts of carrot cake that she didn’t even notice the dirty white van that had suddenly appeared on the kerb, crawling along just behind her.

‘With a loud clunk, the door of the van swung open and rough hands reached out and grabbed her right off the street. And before she knew it, she was bundled up in the darkness in some kind of smelly sack and the van was speeding off. And that was the last anyone ever saw of Jennifer Morgan.’ She paused a moment, her grey eyes boring into Bailey.

Bailey stared back, transfixed, holding her breath in horror, as she finally learned the truth of Jennifer’s abduction. Hearing her sister refer to herself so clinically in the third person made it seem all the more disturbing.

Jennifer continued, her voice quiet but penetrating.

‘The men who took her were the worst kind of men. Sick, evil men. They made Jennifer do things. Awful things. Things that she didn’t understand. That she wasn’t ready to do. Things that no child should ever do. They kept her captive for many years, bringing other men in from time to time, letting them use her body as they saw fit.’

Having occasionally come across similar such cases in her career, Bailey registered with a deep sickening realisation that her sister had been subjected to the most appalling type of fate, and it revolted her to know that she’d been used in this way. She listened in mute shock as her sister carried on speaking in her weirdly detached manner.