‘Family emergency. He’s been called away.’
Darley looked over her purple plastic-framed glasses, fixing him with hard hazel eyes. ‘Convenient.’
Shrugging, he held his palms aloft in a gesture of honesty.
‘Am I my business partner’s keeper?’
Jonny wished he could run away. Give it all up. Hide on a beach in Israel or South America or even crappy Marbella would do right now. Silently, he cursed Tariq for having chosen that morning, of all mornings, to visit their other place, leaving him to sort out this gargantuan shit-storm on his own.
As the day wore on, Jonny felt his spirit ebbing away, answering intrusive questions and observing his book-keeper, old Mohammed, delivering box after box of files to the temporary hub of HMRC investigation.
Knocking timorously on the door, he popped his head in to see Ruth Darley busily going through a sheaf of invoices with a determined look on her face. Her underlings flanked her, like Padawans studying beneath some great Jedi. Jonny looked at his watch pointedly.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘Would you like my secretary to bring you and your colleagues a coffee?’
Darley looked at him and slid her glasses further up her nose. Glanced at Jonny’s wrist. ‘I don’t need a Breitling watch to tell me what time it is, Mr Margulies.’ She offered him a grimace that was an approximation of a smile. ‘We’ll be leaving in ten minutes, but we’ll be back tomorrow.’
Jonny folded his arms. Imagined for a second that he could hear the inmates inside Strangeways jeering at him from behind their barred windows.
‘Back? Oh. You haven’t seen everything you need today? I thought Janice had given you access to the full monty. We’ve got nothing to hide here, you know.’
Ruth Darley stood and held a separate sheaf of invoices aloft. Invoices written in Chinese, by the looks of it. At that moment, a sweat broke out on Jonny’s top lip and he wished, however improbably, that he knew the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. Had the invoices somehow got mixed up? Maureen would surely never allow that to happen.
‘I have found anomalies, Mr Margulies.’ Her smile was genuine that time.
Shit. Those were the last words he had wanted to hear.
Chapter 5
Irina
Irina didn’t like the tall man who smelled of fish. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose. She had heard tell of Jews back home, but had never seen a real one until coming to Manchester. Asaf, the beast was called. He looked like something out of the old stories she had been told as a child by her dear old Babicˇka. He even had the curly sidelocks she had described, though not the horns, it would seem.
Instinctively, she held her bag close to her body, thinking of the photo of Mama and Babicˇka that she had hidden in a special zipped compartment. Bad enough that these bastards had taken her Slovakian passport away from her. She would never let them have that photo. It was all she had left of her old life. How she missed her Mama. How disappointed Mama would be if she knew that her lover Dominik had betrayed them both by getting her pregnant and then – as if knocking up his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter weren’t bad enough – arranging her transport to England with the promise of a hairdressing career that had turned out to be nothing more than unpaid prostitution.
She patted her stomach. The baby wasn’t showing yet. She didn’t want a baby. This was not a world she wanted to bring a child into.
Spitting on the floor, she tried to get the taste of the boss-man’s dick out of her mouth.
Asaf looked down at her. ‘Hurry up,’ he said in her native tongue, grabbing her upper arm. ‘You’ve got an appointment.’
‘An appointment?’ Her heart fell. Another punter, no doubt. Perhaps some sweaty builder with dirt beneath his fingernails. Perhaps a businessman in one of the local offices. Clean hands, but the same stench of lust and lies evaporating from their pores, as they all cheated on their wives with some firm, forbidden flesh.
The Fish Man pulled her towards a battered purple people carrier, parked outside a run-down warehouse, marked out from all the other run-down warehouses by a sign in the window – written in English in poorly cut-out dayglo letters, the meaning of which she didn’t understand. An ‘F’ hung askew at the start of two words – ‘ANCY GOODS’. Beneath it was scrawled in black on a giant, fluorescent green poster, ‘WHOLESALE ONLY’. A dark-skinned man was sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle. Into his scalp was shaven a lightning bolt. He glanced at her, looked her up and down, and looked away. Perhaps derision or disgust or furtive lust. It was hard to tell.
‘Are you taking me back to the house?’ Irina asked the Fish Man. Suddenly, she was buoyed by the hope of a hot drink, a shower and a chat with her own kind. The house was full of other teens on the game for these sons of bitches – all from Eastern Europe, give or take the odd African. The black ones mainly kept themselves to themselves.
He opened the rear door to the people carrier and pushed her into the seat.
‘No. Not back to the house. Something else. Lev here will take us.’ He rummaged in a deep pocket sewn into his coat and frowned. ‘Stay put. I’ve got to go back and get something.’
He engaged the child locks and slammed the rear door, leaving her trapped in a vacuum of awkwardness with the stranger in the driver’s seat.
Clasping her hoody around her tightly, Irina stared at the back of the driver’s head. She recognised him as the man who came round to the house to collect money from those spotty-faced pimps that kept her and the other girls under lock and key, Tommo and Kai.
‘You doing alright?’ the driver asked.
Irina jumped at the sound of his voice, struggling to understand his words spoken with a strong Mancunian accent. She inadvertently locked eyes with him via the rear view mirror and immediately looked down to her lap, heat burning in her cheeks. It was best not to engage with these animals. You never knew when they were going to pounce on you, expecting sex.
‘Okay?’ he said.
Irina nodded, surprised by the softness to his voice. He never sounded like that when he was guffawing with laughter at something the two pimps said.
‘You’re pretty new, aren’t you? What’s your name?’
She understood that much. ‘Irina.’
‘Mine’s Lev.’
In the rear view mirror, lightning bolt blinked hard and opened his mouth several times without saying anything, as though he were trying and failing to expel a thought.
‘I’m sorry …’ he finally said, eyes flickering down towards the scratched car stereo. Furrows appeared in his forehead. He stretched out the fingers on his smooth-skinned hand. Bitten fingernails said all was far from perfect in his world, too. She realised then that he couldn’t have been a great deal older than her. ‘… Sorry for all this shit. It’s not right. I wish I could—’
But Lev fell silent as the Fish Man opened the passenger door and slumped down into the seat, bringing with him the pungent scent of fish and menace.
They drove several blocks down the wide road that bisected the main Strangeways business district, the car bouncing and jerking as it hit pothole after pothole, making Irina’s jaw clack. Rubbish, whipped up by the wind, adhered itself to the car’s sloping bonnet.
They pulled up outside a large red-brick building that looked as though it had once been a giant factory, now with its large, multi-paned windows cracked and broken. The grime of a century’s existence clung to the façade like a mourner’s veil. No jaunty sign outside this one. But the noise of industry and voices coming from within. The Fish Man opened the doors and pulled Irina out, leaving Lev behind in the people carrier.
‘Be friendly,’ the Fish Man told her, ushering her through a heavy steel door that was opened by means of a buzzer entry system. ‘Smile.’
What Irina saw brought morning sickness on, bloating her like a quickly inflated balloon, stretched to popping point with bad gas. She held her hand over her mouth, willing herself not to vomit.
&n
bsp; There were people everywhere, beavering over production lines. Mainly men. Predominantly Asian, she could tell. Small and thin, as though they weren’t properly nourished. Chattering animatedly as they stuffed white pills into baggies at this workstation, put CDs into CD cases at that, packaged branded trainers into boxes. Just do it. The air was thick with pungent smells. Sweat. Bad breath. Dust. Hot machinery, where conveyor belts chugged ropey-looking dolls in various stages of assembly from one end of the factory to another. Everywhere, there was life. Everywhere, she smelled the clashing scents of desperation and hope. Were these workers all slaves like her? Perhaps just illegals. Lucky bastards.
‘Go to the back,’ the Fish Man said, prodding her between her shoulder blades. ‘The office, there.’
Irina’s heartbeat, already ragged, sped up further. Adrenalin doing battle with nausea. At the rear of the factory there was a door – battered khaki paint that revealed grey beneath and red beneath that. The Fish Man opened the door and pushed her inside a cold room that was furnished with a cheap old melamine desk and an ugly brown metal filing cabinet. Behind the desk sat a man dressed in beige tunic and baggy trousers. On his feet, which she could see poking beneath the desk, he wore blue flip-flops. His greying, shorn hair was covered in the main by a flat round hat that reminded her of the loaves of rye bread that her mother used to bake.
The man’s brown eyes darted in her direction, furtively taking a snapshot of her face. He looked back up to the Fish Man.
‘Tariq,’ he said simply.
‘Sit!’ The Fish Man pushed Irina into a torn grey twill typing chair, opposite the strange man.
Would she have to sleep with him? She looked at his fingernails. He was clean enough, at least. Oddly, he seemed more nervous than she felt, if that were possible, fidgeting as he was with his beard. Those darting eyes were dogged by dark shadows that said this man wasn’t someone who slept.
Presently, Tariq entered the dingy office. Irina recognised him. The other boss-man. The one who hadn’t tried to screw her. A well-dressed Asian man who smelled like heaven and would have been good-looking were it not for his beak-like nose that put her in mind of a hawk.
‘Hello, love,’ he said, smiling at her like a benign father she didn’t want. ‘How you doing?’ He rubbed the ends of her blonde hair between his fingertips, as though he were appraising the quality of a wheat stalk, saying something in a language she did not recognise to the man in the hat.
A conversation ensued during which Tariq never sat down, though he spoke calmly. He released her hair to jangle his gold watch and then turned to the Fish Man.
‘Get the fee from our client, here,’ he told him. ‘Fifteen K as agreed.’
‘Don’t you want to count it, boss?’ the Fish Man asked.
Tariq held up his hands and closed his eyes. ‘I’ve got a five-a-side team to manage at my son’s school. You take the money and give him details of the registry office.’ With a fleeting glance at Irina, he muttered, ‘Congratulations,’ and started to scroll absently through the texts on his phone.
The nervous man’s watery smile suddenly had something predatory about it. Sensing that something was afoot, Irina stood. Turned to the door. The Fish Man pushed her back into her seat.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked in her own tongue.
‘You’re getting married to Mohammed here so that he can stay in the country. You can’t get kicked out because you’re a pregnant EU citizen. He’s an Afghan national who’s been threatened with deportation.’
‘No!’ Irina yelled, tears welling in her eyes. She tried to force herself up and out of the chair but the Fish Man’s grip was too strong. ‘You can’t make me.’ Turning to Tariq, she cried in English, ‘Help, please!’
But Tariq’s phone was ringing. He turned away, speaking into the device.
‘Jonny. Slow down. What’s the matter?’
Irina struggled and tried to scream but, as if he had anticipated her protest, the Fish Man’s large hand pressed firmly over her mouth. She could smell stale herring on his fingers. The man in the round hat squirmed in his chair, counting out £20 notes as though his every move were being observed by some hidden camera. He looked almost apologetic.
‘HMRC have found what?’ Tariq shouted, opening the door to the hallway. Suddenly, he seemed to think better of it and shut himself back inside the small office. He shot an agitated glance towards the Fish Man, gesturing impatiently that he should lessen his grip on Irina. Held his finger to his mouth, motioning to her that she should resist the urge to scream.
For some reason – perhaps the sharp boning knife that the Fish Man had just taken out of his coat pocket and pressed to Irina’s throat – she felt obliged to obey.
‘This is bad. Very bad,’ Tariq said, pressing his fingers to his temples. ‘Oh hang on, I’ve got another call coming through … It’s Maureen. She’ll deal with this. Yeah, I’ll get back to you.’
Irina watched, pinioned to her seat by the Fish Man and a mixture of intrigue and fear. She didn’t fully understand Tariq’s words or whether they had any bearing on her fate or not. He greeted the caller named Maureen, whoever that was. His eyes grew wide. A smile, then – an unexpected sunburst brightening the stormy expression on his face.
‘You kidding me, Mo? The O’Briens are saying what?’
He whooped with apparent joy just as the Fish Man drew a bead of blood from Irina’s neck.
Chapter 6
Lev
‘What do you mean they can’t do surgery?’ Lev asked Tiffany, grabbing her by her thin, scarred arm. Adrenalin coursed around his body, making him feel breathless, light-headed, nauseous. This was the last thing he had hoped to hear. In fact, he hadn’t even contemplated the option.
She shook him loose. Glared at him, as though this was somehow all his fault. As though he had wished this fate on his son or brought some terrible curse on little Jay by walking out and not coming back. Her voice was husky with cigarettes and too many late nights smoking weed. Harder highs, when she succumbed to the pull of the brown, leaving those ugly red pinpricks tracking up her limbs.
She was avoiding eye contact. Covering her ears as Jay started to wail again in the back bedroom. ‘Fucking hell. He does my head in when he goes off on one like this.’ She stumbled away from the boy’s noise, towards the top of the uncarpeted stairs.
‘Hey!’ Lev shouted, half-wishing he were the sort of man who could just hit a woman and feel more in control. ‘I asked you a question. What do you mean, it’s inoperable?’
‘The tumour’s in a funny place.’ She started to descend, turning her ankle sideways in those heeled mules she always wore. White thong visible through her too tight yellow miniskirt. ‘If you’d come to the scan, Le-viti-carse, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Dick.’
‘Spare me the lecture, yeah?’ He glanced back towards the source of the woe – the door to his son’s bedroom was ajar. Confront her or comfort the boy? She was already in the hall, dragging those skanky, ramshackle heels into the skanky, ramshackle lounge.
Lev marched into Jay’s room, the sharp tang of damp in his nostrils as he lifted his son gently out of a cot he had long outgrown.
‘Jesus. She’s still not bought you a big boy bed,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know why I bloody bother.’
He had been put to bed in his jeans and a jumper. Sweating like a pig, the poor little bastard.
‘Come on, big man. Shhh, Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here.’ He held Jay’s small, hot body close, hoping that his voice and physical presence would be soothing. But the boy was beside himself, screaming now, tearing at his tight blond curls, clamping his chubby palms to his temples. Snot was plastered over his honey-brown skin in a shining, viscous film. With some struggle, Lev managed to remove his jumper. Changed his nappy. Cleaned his face with a cool wet-wipe and brought his son downstairs, holding him over the excruciating ache in his own heart. Rocking him gently, though the child arched his back, testing his father’s strength to th
e limit.
‘I couldn’t get to the scan, Tiff. I’ve had to lie low,’ he said, sitting among the crumbs and empty wrappers on the sofa. Jay’s screams reverted to crying, slowed to a hiccough and intermittent whinge. ‘I had a run-in with the O’Briens in M1 House. Had to keep a low profile. You know the sort of people I’m involved with. If I piss the wrong man off and I don’t watch my back, I’m dead. And I pissed the wrong man right off, good style.’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up, will you?’ Tiffany said, flicking the television on, absently. She lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t wanna hear your excuses. You should have been there. He’s your son too.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Lev asked, keeping his voice deliberately low, though his instinct was to bawl her out. With his free hand, he switched off the television. Grabbed the cigarette from her and stubbed it out in the overflowing chipped glass ashtray. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in the house. Is it any wonder he’s ill?’
‘Stuff it up your arse, you tosser.’ Tiffany defiantly lit another cigarette, filling the room with acrid yellow-blue smoke that only barely masked the smells of cooking grease and the stale wine that stood at the bottom of three bottles on the laminate coffee table. More empties on the telly table. She clearly still fancied herself as the molten core of every party that erupted from the pub after closing.
‘Where’s the money I give you for his big boy bed? Why’s he still in the frigging cot? He’s got a brain tumour, Tiff! And you’re letting him bang his head on the bars every five fucking minutes. You’re not on. Where’s the money?’
Tiffany narrowed her eyes and blew smoke in his and Jay’s faces. Chewed on her bottom lip.
‘You blew it on gear, didn’t you?’ Lev said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘I sell my soul to the devil to look after yous, and you just burn through it on shit. Selfish cow.’
Jay had fallen asleep in Lev’s arms. Passed out through sheer exhaustion, or maybe it was the tumour that caused him to swing from apoplectic one minute to comatose the next. Perhaps Lev just had the magic touch, whereas his babymother merely had the conviction that she somehow deserved better than to be a single mother to a dying child in a shitty damp terrace on the Sweeney Hall estate.
Born Bad Page 4