Human Remains

from her job. ‘We had no idea,’ she said yesterday. ‘I kept in touch with her regularly and she seemed to be getting better. We were all hoping that she would come back to work. The children are all very upset today.’ Counselling services have been brought in to speak to members of the class that Ms Viliscevina taught earlier this year.
    The two bodies discovered this week mean that a total of twenty-six bodies have now been found in the Briarstone area since the beginning of the year. The ‘Love Your Neighbour’ campaign was launched by your
Briarstone Chronicle
in an
effort to get across the importance of taking care of the lonely and vulnerable members of our society. However, it seems clear following the tip-off phone call that the increase in decomposed bodies in Briarstone may not be a random coincidence, nor does it represent a failure on the part of our community to take good care of our neighbours. The police are now looking for an individual who may have had contact with all of the people who have been found deceased, in the hopes of discovering exactly how they met their deaths.
    Anyone with any information regarding the death of Dana Viliscevina is asked to call the Incident Room at Briarstone Police Station.
    Remember too that it is not too late to check up on your neighbours!
    Detective Inspector Andy Frost said: ‘We all have a duty of care to look in on people we know are living on their own. There are a lot of vulnerable members of our community and the recent news means we should all be taking care of these people and not leaving it for someone else to do.’
     

Dana
     
    I’d been in this country for years but I never quite thought of it as home. I came here to escape the civil war that was raging, the stories we heard about the soldiers attacking towns and villages to the north, the things they were doing. I took all the money we had saved up and I bought transport for my elderly parents and me. First we went on a ship to Sicily, landing the day before Christmas Eve. The place was chaos. Others were trying to head north into mainland Europe, catching lifts from lorry drivers, or stowing away in transport containers when they could access them.
    My parents were not able to do that. My mother was sick already at that time, coughing blood and very weak. My father had very bad arthritis and found it difficult to walk. We still had money and it felt dangerous for me to have it, so I bought airline tickets for us all and two days into the New Year we landed in London.
    The airport closed after we landed, due to bad weather. We were taken to an asylum centre somewhere outside of the city. My mother was taken to hospital and she died the next day. She had pneumonia and they were too late giving her the drugs which might have helped her live.
    My father tried to carry on without her, but could not. He died within the month, a ‘myocardial infarction’, according to the death certificate. But really he had no reason to live without her. He had no will left, no strength. And so he left me, too.
    That is the story of how I came to be in this country. At home, I was a primary school teacher and a well qualified member of society. Here, I was nothing. I earned money waiting at tables in London, helping in the kitchen. I worked for a while in one of the London hotels. Anything I could to pay the rent on the bedsit I shared with three other girls from Eastern Europe, all of them refugees like me from the civil wars and ethnic cleansing. They all had stories to tell about things they had seen, what they had been through to get out. All three of them had suffered more than I had.
    I saved up what I could and eventually I had enough money to do a course that qualified me to be a teaching assistant in the UK. I looked for work up and down the country and eventually I got a job at a primary school in Briarstone.
    I had never heard of Briarstone before, even though it was nearer to London than most of the other jobs I applied for. The school was a small one, friendly, and the staff were kind – but I had nothing in common with any of them. They did not know me and there was no point in telling them what had happened to me in the last few years.
    I don’t know what started the problem. I was at the school for a long time. I saw the children progress from tiny little children in reception class to the verge of puberty, and then all their younger siblings as they grew up too.
    I think it might be that I