“How do you know it happened that way?”

“I don’t. Not for sure. I only . . . I mean, I went in the van once with some blokes when Faisal asked me to. It was probably the same as with Mimsy.”

Gerry’s heart seemed to shrivel in her chest. She almost didn’t want to ask any more questions, but she had to push herself on. “What happened?”

“Not a lot, really. I didn’t want to go, but Faisal got really nasty about it. He grabbed my shirt by the neck and shook me and said after all they’d done for us. He didn’t hit me, but he said things would get nasty if I didn’t do what I was told. Said it was very important. So I went in the van. There was a mattress in the back. A bit old and dirty, but it did the trick.”

“So you had sex with the three men?”

“I don’t know if it was the same three Mimsy was with. I stopped in Dewsbury that night and the next day one of them gave me the money to get a train home.”

“So what went wrong with Mimsy’s trip?”

“One of them must have given her the K, like you said. It can make you crazy, that stuff. I only tried it once and I’d never touch it again. Maybe she did something to piss them off. She was beautiful and all, but she could be really gobby, could Mimsy, and they didn’t like that. She was getting worse and all. She was struggling. She said she wouldn’t bring in any more girls. We used to talk about leaving, me and Mimsy. She wanted out, like me, wanted to move on, but she was trapped, just like the rest of us. It was almost like she’d found something else, somewhere else to go, something to do . . . I don’t know, but she was different.”

“Did she say anything about this to Sunny?”

“Maybe. Like I said, she had a mouth on her, did Mimsy. She might have told him she wanted out.”

“Could he have told the men in the van to punish her? Teach her a lesson?”

“Maybe. It’d be just like him to get someone else to do it.”

“Jade, what might the men in the van have done that set Mimsy off?”

“They might’ve . . . they liked it, you know, from behind.”

Gerry remembered from the postmortem that Dr. Glendenning had found semen in all Mimsy’s orifices. “You mean anal sex?”

“Mimsy didn’t like that. I mean, nobody likes it, do they, but she really didn’t. Even worse than blow jobs. She told me. She said Sunny tried it once and it hurt like hell. It was one thing she’d never do again.”

“And these men liked to do that?”

“The ones I was with did. But like I said, I don’t know if it was the same ones.”

“Do you know their names?”