Looking Down by Frances Fyfield

pointed to the sofa and chairs arranged in front of the mirror, and then at the large plate-glass doors that led outside.
    ‘Yes. Always fiddling with her necklace.’
    ‘She was so thin.’
    ‘Until you fed her . . .’
    ‘It was my wife feeding her,’ he continued to whisper, uncomfortably. ‘She likes to cook. Said it was as easy to make stuff for three as two, and, anyway, Minty wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Both Romany, see?’
    ‘So, between you, you got the gist.’
    ‘Only that she was illegal. Like my wife,’ fore we got married. Never found out how Minty landed up with the Chinese either, didn’t come in on their passport, like some of them other slaves do. She was too frightened to say. She was stuck, anyway. They worked her to death, starved her and gave her no money. She’d no papers, anyway. Couldn’t call the police, could I? Should I? She definitely didn’t want that, and if the Chinese found out I’d caused that trouble, I’m out on my ears, like as not. I’d have risked it, mind, but she said no, no, no, and cried, and the wife wouldn’t have had it.’
    It was an often repeated conversation. Fritz always had to go back to the beginning, forgetting how Sarah had agreed with him, agreed still, that the choices about what to do about Minty were limited, so the plan they had formed was for the Fritzes to do the feeding, while Sarah and Richard Beaumont stuck money behind the desk regularly, followed by the gift of a prepaid mobile phone. Minty’s stash, they called it. Minty could not take it upstairs into the penthouse; they would find it, she said, but she knew it was there. Minty stole out of the top floor and left the penthouse door on the latch when they were out. She never went further than the foyer. No one ever spoke to the Chinese. A man, a woman and a selection of males seemed to live in the penthouse. They came in and out, always carrying something. Traders, Fritz said. None of them ever smiled.
    ‘And then the stash was gone,’ Fritz said mournfully. ‘A week since. I don’t like to think that was all she wanted.’
    ‘Doesn’t matter if it was, Fritz. It was choice she needed. You gave it her.’
    ‘Did we? Me and the missus, and you and Mr Beaumont? Anyway, she isn’t dead up there, she’s gone. I’ll miss her.’
    ‘You can’t help people more than they allow, Fritz. Never could, except for kids, and she wasn’t one of those. What if youhad reported her existence? She’d either be out on the street or sent home. If she had one.’
    Fritz was often close to tears. He blew his nose and laughed nervously, staring at her through dark brown, permanently sad eyes. She always had the desire to make Fritz laugh and never managed it. He was the sort of man who gave her the desire to pull silly faces if only to raise a smile. He sighed, hesitated before he spoke.
    ‘Home? Ah, I didn’t say to you about that. That’s the bit I never told you. See, the wife could never get her to believe what will be happening if she turn herself in. The worst and the best. She’d get sent
home.
And believe me,
that
was what she wanted most of all. To go home.’
    Sarah buttoned her coat.
    ‘I wish I’d known that. On the other hand, perhaps I don’t. We can only say good luck to her. She escaped on her own terms.’
    She turned for the glass doors. They looked thick enough to withstand bullets, with large brass handles and lock. All the residents had keys, unless they were slaves. Then she turned on her heel.
    ‘I suppose we’d better be on the lookout, Fritz.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    ‘For whoever the people in the penthouse get in next. There’s plenty where Minty came from.’
    Her own shoes silent on the pavement, she tried to remember the girl as she walked down the street, wondering when exactly she had gone, trying to picture the face she had seen behind the penthouse door putting her finger to her lips, shaking her head and shutting the door again. Doing the same thing