FORTY-FIVE

‘Wipe it down. Anyfing they is touched, like. You’re a woman, you knows what gets messed wiv in women’s rooms and all that, yeah?’

Stephanie knew at once what Knacker was referring to: evidence. And there was plenty of that inside the room. At a glance from the doorway of the second floor bedroom that Knacker clearly did not want to enter in case he incriminated himself by leaving any trace of his presence, Stephanie could see blood on two walls and speckled across the white material of the bedspread. Margaret’s blood.

On one wall the stains had dried black and were flecked in a long arc. Stephanie’s imagination offered the image of a woman’s head snapping sideways after a bone-crunching blow.

The second spatter had the pattern of a smudge, as if a wet face had been pushed into and then wiped down the wall. Beside the main stain were finger marks: drag lines.

Within the doorframe, Knacker crowded about Stephanie and pointed at the floor. ‘And on the carpet. See it? Down there by the bottom of the bed. You need to get it up, like. All of it, yeah?’

Stephanie looked at the shadow beneath the hem of the duvet at the foot of the bed. Someone had lain still in that spot and bled.

She leant against the doorframe and stifled the urge to cry. The need to break down rippled up from her feet and through her body like a current of electricity that took hold of her jaw. She closed her eyes and tensed all of her muscles to force her face not to crumple.

‘Better get started, like. Cus Fergal— We want it done sharpish, like, yeah?’

In one hand Stephanie held the bucket Knacker had given her, containing whatever oddments of cleaning materials he had been able to rummage out from under the kitchen sink. To remove the traces of a foreign sex worker’s violent death, Knacker couldn’t even organize the right kind of cleaning materials. In the bucket he had given Stephanie there was a rusty bottle of Pledge furniture polish, a near empty spray bottle of Windolene for cleaning glass, a virtually depleted bottle of Best In bleach, and a trickle of Jiff bathroom scourer in a plastic container with a top entirely sealed with crusted fluid. Not the ideal equipment for removing substances that forensic technicians would scour every millimetre of floor space to discover.

Knacker was terrified of going outside the house to fetch new cleaning materials in case he was identified in the street. You don’t know nuffin’ about my background. It was true, but she felt more capable of making informed assumptions now.

Stephanie returned her attention to the room.

Margaret had tried to feminize the space before she died inside it. Silky black wraps and scarves were draped around the curtain rails and over the white fitted wardrobes, perhaps to hide a cheap and unappealing background in a space allocated to sexual activity. An impressive range of perfume bottles and expensive make-up littered the surface of a dresser fitted with a mirror; the mirror was angled to reflect the entire bed for whomever was lying upon it.

The mattress had been dressed with a zebra throw rug too, and the girl must have brought her own sheets and pillow cases with her because Stephanie could not imagine 82 Edgehill Road containing anything as fancy as Margaret’s plump, tasselled, satin pillows.

Beside the wardrobe, a stainless steel rail on little wheels was festooned with gauzy underwear, latex dresses, clothes made from Lycra, and black dresses. At least twelve pairs of high-heeled shoes and boots were scattered beneath the clothing rail.

Yet all of the Albanian girl’s paraphernalia could not disguise the aged and tasteless spectacle of the wallpaper and carpet. The tropical bamboo pattern that had covered the walls of Stephanie’s first room was replicated here.

At least there were no bars on the windows. Stephanie wondered if that was why the girls had been installed on the second floor. Operating from the second floor was hardly convenient, as customers had to walk through two storeys inside the dark, scruffy house on their way to see the girls, with Knacker bantering after them. It would have been much better to have prostitutes work from the ground floor, the part of the building that had always been locked away for renovations, or so Knacker claimed. She had a sense Svetlana and Margaret had been borrowed, or leased from this ‘Andrei’. But if the girls had been given some choice in coming to work here, window bars would have been an instant cause for alarm. Svetlana had once complained about the bathroom; it now looked like that had been the least of her worries.

Her frantic internal inquiry about Bennet, whom Fergal had referred to as if the man was still in residence, along with the cryptic exchange regarding Fergal’s threat to put Knacker ‘in there wiv it’, all derailed once Stephanie entered the room.

Beaten to death. Fists. Kicking feet.

She moved further inside the room. When she saw Margaret’s black furry cat – a soft toy on the chair before the dresser, its neck encircled with a red velvet band and heart-shaped locket – a wash of hot tears made her see the room as if through the windscreen of a car in a rainstorm. She dropped her face into her hands and sniffed back the mucus that ran from her nose.

Oh, God. Dad. Dad. Daddy.

They were about the same age. Margaret had been sweet and happy the one time they had met on the stairs. The girl must have had parents, maybe brothers and sisters, people who loved her, and maybe she was just trying to earn money to advance herself with all she had at her disposal: her beautiful body. Margaret had not looked like she was feeding a drug habit.

Something burst inside Stephanie. She fell to her knees. The levee that had held so much fear, regret, anxiety, hope and despair in check, while she had prayed it would all end quickly as she slogged to and from temping jobs, was swept away. And in a fragment of a second she felt the full force of her situation impact and then engulf her. Her body shook like she was going into shock.

She could not be strong any more. She had been punched, had her hair pulled, had been dragged across a dirty floor and shut inside rooms that no living thing should ever enter. And now she had to get down on her hands and knees and wipe away the blood of a young woman who had been beaten to death.

‘Why?’ she said through her sobs. And she momentarily examined the futility of her recent existence: the endless work and revision for her A Levels so she could escape her stepmother; the soul-destroying jobs that filled her with a boredom that slow-burned inside her stomach and made her want to self-harm; the wretched rooms let by criminal opportunists that she had lived inside because she was poor. All of it. ‘For this?’ To wipe up a victim’s blood in a house that had recorded so much loss and confusion and horror she could not begin to process it. Only to then have her body sold for sex when she was finished scrubbing.

Too much. No more now. No more.

‘I can’t. I can’t. Don’t make me. I haven’t done anything to you. I just wanted a room and a fucking job!’ Her cries ended in sobs.

Behind her, Knacker began to fidget. He softened his voice. ‘Come on. I don’t like to see you like this, Steph. You know that. Aye? Let’s just get this done then lock up, yeah? We’s all gotta pitch in, like.’

She stopped crying and turned on him. And while she spoke she didn’t care whether they killed her or let her live. ‘Pitch in? Pitch in! This is blood. A woman’s blood. She’s dead, I know she is. He killed her.’

‘You don’t know nuffin’. There was a misunderstanding, yeah? But it’s all sorted now, like.’ Knacker wasn’t even convincing himself. He looked like he wanted to cry, but not for Margaret. Stephanie didn’t believe he really understood her death; he was only concerned about self-preservation, his survival.

He slapped a hand to his forehead and winced. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.’ And at this display of emotion, this regret that his plans had not followed the script, she probably hated him more than she had ever hated him. And she wanted him dead. He should be dead, not Margaret.

Stephanie looked at the blood. I’m sorry, Margaret. I’m sorry, she thought, and swallowed what was left of the emotion in her throat that could have been despair, misery, or even the beginning of madness.

‘What will happen to me?’

‘Eh?’

‘When I have done this. Cleaned her away . . .’

Knacker composed himself with a big sniff up one nostril. Raised his chin. ‘You do as I say and you’ll be awright. No mouthing off, yeah? I got your back here. You got no other friends in this house, girl.’

Knacker then slipped further inside the room to stand behind her, but not as close as he’d previously favoured since the incident with the knife. ‘Now ain’t the time, like, for discussing what you mentioned earlier, yeah? About who’s responsible and all that, for this, yeah? But strictly between us, yeah, I am concerned by fings as they have turned out. None of this was planned, like. Fuck all to do wiv me, if the truth be told, like. I’m just trying to earn a crust here. So we gotta choose our moment, yeah? Which means you got to play along a bit. You get me? Sake of appearances and all that. You know, bit a cleaning in here. Then maybe we can see about connecting you wiv a client—’

‘Fuck off! Just piss off right now!’ Even in here, where a woman had recently died, he wouldn’t give up.

Having progressed up the corridor without making a sound, a long, thin shape moved across the doorway and the light dimmed; the arms were orangutan like, the shoulders stooped so the horrible head could protrude inside the room.

Stephanie caught her breath. Because for a moment, when she first saw the figure’s shape flow across the doorway, she was certain that in the bad light she had glimpsed a black, eyeless oval extend into the room like the head of a large snake, while the end of the protrusion was engaged in a silent snarl that revealed too many stained teeth in a mouth more primate than human.

The bestial head passed into the tarnished light of Margaret’s room and became Fergal’s face. He grinned at Stephanie and nodded at the foot of the bed. ‘You missed a bit.’