THIRTY-NINE

Within seconds of Stephanie and Knacker entering the house, they noticed the solitary door at the end of the ground floor hallway. It was open. Their shock brought them to a standstill.

‘The fuck?’ knacker said.

Stephanie panicked, as if the lightless entrance was a symbol that something terrible, something even worse than the current owners, had been set free inside the building.

Fragments of dreams came to life and filled her skull: a sad, pale female face, its blue eyes open and full of horror and despair. A brick tunnel. A little wooden box. A table in a black room. Candles. Polythene . . .

Stephanie took a step back towards the front path.

Knacker’s hand found her wrist. The grip was tight. ‘Nah, nah, girl. You ain’t finished yet, like.’ He closed the front door behind them with one foot.

‘I’m going once I have my bags.’

‘Fuck you is.’

‘What? You can’t make me stay here.’

‘We got an agreement, like.’ Knacker spoke without looking at her, as if his mostly concealed face couldn’t turn away from the sight of the open door at the end of the corridor. ‘These bills ain’t all done wiv yet.’

‘I did what you asked. You have no money left.’

‘End of the week we’ll be loaded again. You can fuck off once this is sorted proper, like.’ A grin spread across his face. The girls were a popular local item already; he’d taken six phone calls during their journey to and from the bank, and he’d arranged bookings for the next three afternoons and evenings. Eighty pounds for thirty minutes with either Svetlana or Margaret: the going rate at 82 Edgehill Road. Some of the callers were returning customers, repeat business.

But an assurance that she could leave once he’d stolen even more of the prostitutes’ money to clear the house’s debts was another lie, because then something else would be required of her. Knacker thought he owned her now. The realization took the strength from her legs. She wanted to be sick.

She tried to yank her wrist out of Knacker’s hand, but his fingers hardened into a bone cuff that became so painful she cried out. His arm merely rose and fell with hers. Then he turned so quickly she squealed.

Knacker crowded Stephanie against the front door. His face moved an inch from hers; his breath stank of the burger he’d stopped to buy in the street and gobbled down like a dog. ‘Let’s get one fing straight, yeah? About that room you been living in at the cheap rate, yeah? Well your terms have changed. You now owe on the room. Forty quid a week for them fittings and fixtures? You must be having a laugh, girl, if you fink you can rip us off like that. You already owe us on the room. Yeah? Price is hundred a week.’

‘What?’

He raised his voice. ‘So you already owes me sixty quid for the week you been here. And another . . . let me see, one mumf in advance . . . that’s three times another sixty quid . . .’

‘You can’t!’

‘That’s one eighty in total on the next three weeks on your first mumf. So you now owe me two forty. Just be fankful I ain’t charging you for damages. Fucking dust everywhere in there, like. And here’s you taking back that deposit like we owe you. You got a nerve. Fuck’s sake, I ought to march you to the cashpoint right this minute and take every penny you owe us. Which is more consideration than these council wankers are giving me, like. So I’ll have that one sixty back now, and on the rest, don’t make me collect in another way, yeah?’ He pulled her to the foot of the stairs. ‘Get up in your room. Fucking stay there.’

Without all of her balance, Stephanie stumbled up the stairs with Knacker pressed against her back; one of his arms was around her waist, his other bony hand slapping its way up the railing.

On the first floor he stopped at the sound of a crying woman. A terrible chest-deep sobbing came from the second floor; you couldn’t fake anguish like that. It was one of the Eastern European girls.

‘Shit,’ Knacker said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ His words panicked Stephanie.

‘Fergal!’ he shouted up the stairwell, his voice so loud it made her jump. ‘Fergal!’

There was no answer.

Stephanie made for her room. She took her phone out of her pocket as surreptitiously as she could.

From the landing Knacker shouted at Stephanie, ‘Eh, hang on!’

She entered her room regardless, planning to close and lock her door, then call the police. She was now being held here against her will, and something terrible had happened while she had been out; she could just feel it. A woman didn’t cry like that for no reason.

Knacker bounced down the corridor after her. He had a key. Shutting the door would undoubtedly provoke an escalation of whatever mass she’d sensed solidifying inside the house since they’d come through the front door, a growing tension she wanted to creep quietly away from.

Too late for that now, girl.

No!

She had to find a moment, soon. She shuffled her phone back inside the pocket of her jacket.

Knacker’s footsteps paused in the corridor outside her open door. ‘Fergal!’ he roared into the house.

In response, a fresh surge of woe erupted from the girl upstairs. Stephanie guessed it was Svetlana, because she could now hear the girl’s muffled cries through the ceiling of her own room. So where was Margaret?

Ryan. He cannot come here. Police!

She’d risk a quick phone call, keep her voice down. Hurriedly, Stephanie retrieved her phone from her pocket. Her scalp cooled when she realized no one, beside her bank branch, knew she was living here. Not even the temping agencies. She’d planned to move out quickly and so hadn’t supplied the address; they all still had the cell in Handsworth on record as her home address. She thought of Svetlana’s and Margaret’s phones in Knacker’s pocket and suddenly felt dizzy from the gravity of personal danger she found herself in.

She punched out 999 as Knacker came through her door, muttering to himself after failing to raise a response from Fergal. ‘Fuck is he, like?’

Maybe she should make the call to the police and leave it open with the phone in her hand. They recorded all calls.

Knacker spotted the phone. ‘Aye, aye!’ He ran at her. Whacked her hand hard. The phone thumped against the floor.

‘What the fuck!’ she shouted into his face.

Upstairs, a window smashed. Glass tinkled down one side of the house.

‘Shit!’ Knacker shouted. He scooped Stephanie’s phone up at the same time she reached for it. With one hand he shoved her backwards so hard she sat down.

‘You fucking prick!’ she screamed at him. ‘Don’t you touch me!’

Knacker was already on his way out of the room.

Svetlana screamed from her broken window upstairs. ‘Help! Help me! They kill her!’

Stephanie felt like she’d been electrocuted. Her vision shook. Through the juddering room she saw Knacker bound back at her. His bloodless face thrust against her own. ‘Give me your keys!’ Spittle flecked her face.

She didn’t react or move, beside flinching and instinctively covering her breasts with both arms.

Her head jerked to one side at the same time as she heard the slap of raw meat upon a chopping board. A sensation of having one side of her head underwater engulfed her. One ear became hot. Her hearing sang with tinnitus. A fire alarm had just been activated deep inside her skull. She wasn’t sure which direction she now faced.

When her vision settled she was lying on her back and looking at the ceiling. Knacker had thumped her.

A bony, clenched fist was pressed against her face. She thought her nose might snap. Knacker’s fingers stank of burned tobacco and tomato sauce. Above the knuckles she could see his big, wild eyes. ‘Keys, bitch! Where’s your fucking keys?’

Big feet at the end of long strides bounded across the ceiling. Stephanie heard the door above her room being hastily unlocked: Svetlana’s room.

Svetlana shouted, ‘Bastard!’

Heavy feet boomed deeper inside the room above.

Svetlana screamed. A heavy thump followed her cry.

A horrible silence ensued until the girl became hysterical again. She shouted words in her own language. What could have been a large, fierce animal bellowed in response. The very sound of the roar – inhuman, bestial – made Stephanie whimper. A solid weight crashed through splintering wood. Feet boomed across the floor of the room upstairs as if rushing at the sound of the breakage.

Slap. Slap. Slap.

‘Keys!’ Knacker bellowed into Stephanie’s face.

‘Pocket.’ Stephanie’s voice was a whisper. Her ear still sang like an old wireless; whale songs of trauma whistled from the deeps. The flesh on one side of her face smarted like she’d put her head on an oven hotplate. Inside her skull, blood thumped like a bass drum.

Knacker’s fingers went through the pockets of her jacket and fished out her room keys, her purse and the one sixty in cash. He bolted for the door, slammed it, locked her inside.

Stephanie moved from where she had been lying on her back. On her hands and knees she made for the window. Looked at the bars behind the dirty glass. The window was difficult to open, the frame old and swollen. She needed to break the pane with something so she could start screaming like Svetlana. But stopped looking for a heavy object when she thought of what she’d just heard upstairs. The thump. Fergal’s shriek of animal rage. A body crashing through wood. The slapping. Fergal must have gotten hold of Svetlana because she had broken her window and screamed into the street to attract attention.

They kill her. That’s what Svetlana had said.

Margaret.

Stephanie’s stomach turned over and she clenched her teeth and steeled herself to prevent what remained of two cups of coffee coming up.

With a paralyzing clarity, she imagined the girls drumming on their doors, hurling insults the whole time she had been away, threatening Fergal with this ‘Andrei’ because Knacker had stolen their phones and their money. She remembered Fergal’s face: the malice, the savagery, the instability therein. And she believed he could easily have lost his temper while she and Knacker had been at the bank.

Stephanie struggled to her feet, but didn’t know what to do.

She looked at the ceiling when she heard another pair of feet upstairs: lighter, swifter, with shorter strides. They bounded down the second floor corridor and moved into the room above her head: Knacker. He began to bellow at Fergal. ‘What you done? What you done, you fucking idiot? Where is she? Where the fuck is she?’

Fergal grumbled something she could not make out. But Svetlana heard Fergal’s reply because she issued a fresh upwelling of despair, before sobbing through the floor of her room and right into Stephanie’s heart.