FORTY-ONE

Outside the window of the room she had been locked inside, night fell over the brick entry. Through the solitary window she could see little to either side of the space between 82 Edgehill Road and the wall of the neighbouring property.

The cousins had installed her inside the only room on the right hand side of the first floor corridor. Despite what had happened in her bedroom, and the fact they had crossed the final line by putting their hands upon her, she’d felt relief as she was escorted out of the room where the reek of Fergal’s unclean flesh and fouled clothes was replaced by the stink of the acid-burned carpet.

Jesus, God, it could have been your face.

The new room had thus far remained locked and mostly undisturbed during her tenancy, save one evening when she’d heard an old woman’s voice reciting scripture. And since she’d been sealed inside the room, Stephanie had successfully suppressed that memory because she could not tolerate another reminder of being swallowed whole and alive by the horror that refused to be sated inside this house.

The window of the room was barred. Before the bars the sash window frame was secured with an old metal fixture that required a key with a square end. It was the kind of lock that suggested the key was long missing.

The grubby glass of the window pane could be broken. But to what end? The McGuires would hear it smash. She’d already imagined her cries for help echoing back at her from inside the narrow stone gap between two detached houses built close together.

The seedy man with a messy front garden lived in the house that neighboured this side, but Stephanie couldn’t imagine him running to her aid. And escape from here wasn’t possible because the room was a cell. In her misery she wondered if it had been used as one in the past.

Fergal’s acid trick had achieved the desired effect; Stephanie shrivelled inside whenever her thoughts returned to the white steam rising from the carpet, the crackle and hiss. Imagining the acid’s tearing heat over her face and the pooling of it inside her eye sockets thwarted any urge to shout from the window. To serve as another reminder, the left side of her head was swollen, the ear too painful to touch.

Stephanie knew why she was here and still alive. Why Fergal hadn’t killed her like she suspected he had murdered Margaret. Because they were cutting her off and ending her final resistance to their will. Knacker had tried to do this incrementally by selling the idea of prostitution to her, while emphasizing her lack of alternatives, a sales pitch underwritten with suggestions of violence, preceding actual violence, and then extortion. But Fergal had strong-armed and fast-tracked her towards their original goal of selling her body to strangers for profit. It’s why Knacker had rented the room to her in the first place. Girls only. Knacker had hoped she was young and desperate enough to be blindsided by his spiel and seduced by the promise of riches, eventually. He must have sensed how compromised she had been that first day, smelled her need like a weasel sniffed out a timorous, hungry vole on a canal bank. But he had missed his recruitment target and Fergal had stepped in with a bottle of acid.

They were a girl down now and she was the replacement.

The sounds of her impending fate were audible through the ceiling. Svetlana had been put back to work. Svetlana was her future.

Above her head, the girl whimpered around the muffled rhythm of a bed thumping a wall as another man threw himself into her body. She had entertained her first ‘client’ hours before. Had anything remained inside Stephanie’s stomach she would have spat it onto the dusty carpet. This was Svetlana’s third visitor since Stephanie had been locked inside the new room.

Tonight Svetlana’s cries lacked their former enthusiasm, from a time when the tough Lithuanian must have considered herself to be freelance, perhaps one of this ‘Andrei’s’ girls, leasing premises in a building owned by his peers up north. But she was now being forced to have sex after she had been beaten, and had maybe borne witness to, or at least heard, the murder of her friend, a consideration that made Stephanie physically tremble.

This was new territory and within its borders she felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt before in her life; it was a landscape in which all boundaries of restraint, that she had previously taken for granted, had not so much been moved as obliterated and replaced with an arbitrary state of being.

Murder. The very word so close to her actual existence made her feel as if the floor of a lift had just vanished from beneath her feet.

She knew almost nothing about the girls. And the same could be said for everything else at the address: who Bennet was, who the McGuires were, what had happened to those unseen women whose voices and footsteps still lingered inside the dusty, poorly lit rooms. It was ironic that she’d now do anything to go home to her stepmother, to withstand whatever she chose to, literally, throw at her.

How had this happened?

You don’t know what happened to Margaret. You don’t. You don’t. You don’t.

She repeated this mantra to the regions of her mind that had already acknowledged the worst, which only responded with some recalcitrance by not being convinced.

So fatigued by the day’s relentless cycles of fear and anxiety, loathing and hatred, crowned by the devitalizing episodes of outright terror in Fergal’s dirty hands, she needed to sit down before she fell over. She was hungry and thirsty and faint, her thoughts becoming vague. She had not stopped feeling nauseous and if she cried any more she feared her eyes would close from the swelling.

Coughing, she batted the fur of grey dust from the pink candlewick bedspread skimming a single bed that looked too small for an adult. She sat down. Turned over the bedspread and cotton sheet and discovered the grey dust had seeped inside the bed’s coverings. A once white sheet was stained by vague brown marks which she immediately covered. The ancient pillow was also watermarked by a former occupant’s sleeping head.

A headboard of cushioned white vinyl completed an item of furniture she’d do almost anything to avoid sleeping on. The last bed she had seen of this age and style had been in her gran’s spare bedroom when Stephanie had been a child. And this was the smallest room she had yet seen inside the house. It hadn’t been cleaned in years, or even aired. The odours of mildew, dust and sour paint refused to normalize into something her nose no longer detected.

Beside the small bed was an empty bedside cabinet made of chipboard and laminated with white plastic. The top surface was fluffy with dust. A grimy mirror was screwed to the back of the door. A solitary light bulb hung inside a plastic shade and made the dim electric light look like it was being shone through a bowl of fruit cocktail, poured from a cheap tin.

It was a room in which an occupant could only feel trapped, hopeless and miserable, which is exactly how Stephanie felt. She zipped her jacket up to her neck until the heating came on, surprised they hadn’t shut it off to save money. Perhaps they didn’t know how to. And if she was to be left in here all night, she realized she would need to sleep on the floor. The bed was too dirty.

All she had going for her was the knife.

She took it out of the pocket at the front of her hooded top and rolled it between her fingertips. Clenched her teeth until her face pulsed with the heat of her blood. If one of them came in now . . .

She didn’t know what she would do. The knife was blunt, the blade short. It couldn’t kill, but it might slash, might wound.

And if it went through an—

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she whispered to herself.