SIXTY-THREE

Struggling to breathe easily, Stephanie stopped twice on the stairwell; the second time she stopped she hovered on the verge of passing out. Her vision shrank behind what looked like black smoke speckled with diamonds and she was convinced the walls were moving. She clutched the banister. The strength and resolve to get this far was deserting her fast.

Rounding the staircase slowly she looked up at the gloom of the second floor, and at where she had started at 82 Edgehill Road. Where it had all started. Pushing on with soft feet, up one side of the stairs to minimize the sounds of her ascent, she forced herself to regulate her breathing or she would be good for nothing.

She was soon looking at three closed doors of painted red wood. All of the rooms appeared to be occupied. On the right hand side, where she first heard the Russian girl, and where Margaret must have died, she could hear muffled sounds of grief: a chest-shuddering sound of a young woman wracked with misery.

One of them.

To her knowledge, the door of the room at the corridor’s conclusion had always been locked. A distant series of bumps now issued from inside, through the door, and into the fusty air of the old passageway, as if someone had fallen to their knees heavily. Only the suggestion repeated itself again and again as if they were always falling, standing up, falling.

One of them.

She shivered. The cold registered through her clothes and around her face as she edged along the wall to the first door: the one to her old room. Readying the bottle of acid in her hand by uncapping it, Stephanie listened outside and dropped the white plastic cap at her feet.

Thump. Slap. Thump. Interspersed with moans, female moans, as though someone was having sex. Was Fergal raping Svetlana before he killed her? The fact the idea no longer shocked her was the only thing that did shock Stephanie. And without another thought, she turned the handle and shoved the door open. It banged against the foot of the bedframe.

Stephanie walked into the room. Fergal turned his head to look at her. His face was tense with concentration and what looked like annoyance. He was standing near the head of the bed and leaning over the mattress. He held a pillow over Svetlana’s face; his other hand was raised to deliver a punch. He was beating the woman to death, with his second choice of hand, while trying to suffocate her at the same time. The fact that Fergal had damaged his right hand on Knacker the day before was the only reason Svetlana was still alive.

The room swam. Stephanie took in the sight of the naked female body, the head obscured by a pillow, the arms and legs pulled out from the body in a star shape and secured with thick leather cuffs at the four points of the old bedframe. Her old bed. She swallowed and tried to quell the urge to be sick.

From the fireplace came the monologue of a distant female voice.

Under the bed, unseen hands tore at plastic, as if on behalf of the helpless girl above who could move nothing but her fingers and toes.

Behind her head, by the windows and small table, nervous feet padded back and forth, back and forth. And whoever moved with agitation was whimpering. She threw a glance behind herself; there was no one there.

The skin of Fergal’s face smoothed out with surprise as he took in Stephanie’s bloodied jeans, mired hoodie, and what had flecked and speckled her face in the struggle downstairs and had now dried. He didn’t speak. Just squinted as if trying to fathom out how she had come to be standing beside the bed with a jar of acid raised in one fist and a shard of red glass in the other.

‘That tosser can’t get nuffin’ right,’ he eventually said, with a slow shake of his head.

His reaction to whatever had bustled into his mind next so surprised Stephanie that she hesitated. Fergal’s face screwed up and he began to cry, ‘You ain’t havin’ her! You ain’t havin’ her! She’s mine!’

His voice was thick with tears and his cheeks became wet and shiny in seconds. And in his distress and grief Stephanie saw a much younger, boyish face, and one so contorted by anguish she thought her heart might break. She wondered what kind of life this man had endured until this point in time. And she sensed, the permanent damage of not being wanted. For this man, who had also once been a small boy, perhaps rejection had been comprehensive from his first breath.

She swallowed. Forced herself to remember how dangerous he was. Made herself look again at the woman he was murdering. ‘Get away from her!’

Fergal released the pillow and stood up to his full and unnatural height: a dirty scarecrow man of bones, in filthy Gore-Tex and blackened denim, who wept like a ten-year-old boy in a world so hopeless and loveless that the very consideration of this world was unbearable. And Stephanie knew in a heartbeat what the Black Maggie had done to the man. She’d finished what life started.

‘You ain’t havin’ her! You ain’t!’ He took a step towards Stephanie.

She showed him the bottle. ‘I’ll use this, you bastard!’

Fergal snarled and threw himself across the room at her.

Instinctively, she stepped backwards and cringed.

One huge dirty hand swiped through the air and grabbed her shoulder so hard she nearly fell over. When his head was no more than three feet from her own, she jerked the bottle at his big, mad face.

The liquid came out in a silvery string, striking Fergal beneath one eye and spattering across his nose, cheek and forehead. He’d stepped into the stream and its near instant sting brought a sudden halt to the forward momentum of his long body. Stephanie jumped backwards to avoid the liquid ricochet.

Her second jab with the bottle didn’t produce much liquid and what came out disappeared between Fergal’s knees to soak into the carpet.

She was never entirely sure what happened next. Something that felt like a brick struck one side of her head, turned her body around completely and sent her crashing into the fireplace. She moved to her hands and knees with her hair in her eyes from where it had come loose from her pony tail. Inside her ears was the sound of a distant kettle whistling above deep water. Which only cleared to fill her head with the sound of an animal’s roar. An ape in terrible pain.

She turned and saw Fergal, snapping from the waist and lowering his head to his knees, then throwing his head backwards at the ceiling before breaking himself in half again at the waist, trying to throw something appalling from his face. His long-fingered hands covered his features and extended over his head and into his hair, a mask of spidery white bone gripping his head. He sounded like he was trying to breathe and shout through a snorkel as he fell about the room. He glanced off the bed and then dropped through the doorway.

When he wrenched his hands off a face that Stephanie could not bear to look upon, he screamed, ‘You ain’t havin’ her!’ before scrabbling to the stairs.

Stephanie’s hands were sticky and when she looked at them she saw deep cuts on the palm of the hand that had been holding the glass shard. Her skin looked like uncooked pastry sliced on top of a pie. The mirror-knife had broken inside her hand as she fell. Fergal must have swiped her off her feet with a punch.

Outside, Fergal grunted and banged his way down the stairwell.

Stephanie looked at the bed. The girl’s bare breasts were rising and falling.

On her knees and then her feet, Stephanie staggered to the bed.

A tiny voice was talking somewhere inside the room. From where? Close by. It took her several seconds to realize it was the police operator still speaking on the phone inside her pocket, imparting instructions.

Stephanie pulled the pillow off Svetlana’s face. ‘I’m here. I’m here now. Alright. I’m here . . .’ She only stopped jabbering when she saw the damage below.

Stephanie crawled around the bed and uncuffed the woman’s ankles and wrists. They were beautifully pedicured and manicured she thought, uselessly.

Once freed, Svetlana didn’t make any attempt to remove her limbs from the open bonds. Stephanie climbed onto the bed and slipped her arms underneath the semi-conscious woman and pulled her up and onto her own chest.

Stephanie flopped back against the wall and slipped a hand under Svetlana’s chin. Gently moved her head backwards so that Svetlana would not choke on her tongue.

A distant police siren came into Edgehill Road.

Something was hissing into the carpet. It smelled of a chemical burn.

With a shaking hand, Stephanie fished the phone handset out of her pocket and said, ‘Ambulance. She’s hurt. She’s really hurt. Please . . . please hurry.’