by Angela Dyson
Perry who had my arms pined behind my back now thrust me forward. I flailed and kicked out at him but he held me fast.
“GET OFF ME,” I screamed.
“Looks like she’s got some spirit,” said the auctioneer. “We like a bit of that don’t we gentleman? And she’s a blonde. The only blonde we have for you tonight I believe. And we all know that blondes like to have fun.”
He frowned at me. “Up you get now.”
I looked at him full in the face then. He appeared so ordinary, jolly even, like someone’s dad. He could easily have been the father of one of my friends making a speech at a wedding or at an anniversary party.
He ran his eyes over me. “But what we don’t like is not being able to see the merchandise, so let’s get that T-shirt off you, shall we? It seems a shame to have you so covered up.”
“Get the hell off me,” I yelled as Perry released me and started pawing at my body. He managed to get my T-shirt over one arm and up and over my head. With my other arm stuck and my mouth covered by the material I thrashed about wildly but he was too strong for me. Seconds later the T-shirt was off and I was being hoisted awkwardly aloft on to the stool. This could not be happening. The sense of unreality I was experiencing was so strong that I swayed on my feet and felt myself start to zone out.
“Now who wants to kick off the bid?” asked the auctioneer blandly. “Do I hear ten thousand? Ten thousand? Ten thousand. Yes you sir?”
He nodded at a man in his sixties sitting alone at a table near the door. In a navy suit and tie, he had a face that otherwise would have been utterly nondescript if it hadn’t been for the little beads of perspiration that ran across his forehead and the look of intense excitement in his pale unblinking eyes.
“Fifteen thousand,” called the auctioneer. Do we have fifteen thousand? Yes, yes we do. We have fifteen thousand.” He acknowledged a bid from an Asian man with a bottle of whisky in front of him. “Twenty thousand, twenty thousand. Do I hear twenty thousand?” he looked back to the first man who raised his index finger.
“Yes, I have twenty thousand,” called the auctioneer. “Oh and now we have twenty-five thousand.” An arm was raised by someone I couldn’t see at the back of the room. “Looks like your blood is well and truly up tonight, gentlemen.”
Perry still stood behind me holding me by the legs as feebly I tried to cover my chest with my arms and the auction went on around me. My mind was in free-fall. I was standing here exposed in my bra, being sold off like a farm animal or a piece of furniture and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it. My brain snagged on that thought and held. I might not be able to stop what was happening but I was fucked if I was going to go passively.
The rage that had been searing through me from the moment that I had seen the girls through the window now completely engulfed me. I felt in a state of heightened consciousness. Everything was real now. I was no longer paralysed by shock, I was no longer hypnotised by terror. I was back in the room. An auction room.
“Stop this you sick bastards,” I screamed. “You can’t do this. I won’t let you. I am not for sale.”
I fought desperately to get down from the stool as the auctioneer said with a laugh, “You’re going to have fun with this one. She just needs a bit of handling. But let’s keep that pretty mouth of yours shut, shall we?” he turned to me. “Or we will have to close it for you.”
And that’s when the lights went out.
The first thing that happened was that Perry let go of me. The stool wobbled, but I managed to steady myself and step down. It was almost pitch black except for the glimmer of cigar butts. The men in the room, initially stunned into silence, were all now shouting and there was the scrapping of chairs being pulled back and the sound of glass breaking as they rose and started to fight their way to the door.
“Now gentlemen let’s try and remain calm.” The auctioneer who was standing somewhere off to the right of me, tried to take charge of the situation. “There is nothing to alarm you. It’s probably just a power failure. I’m sure we will…”
No one took any notice of him. I was violently pushed aside as someone thundered past me and then another. Like stampeding cattle, the men cannoned into one another. Tables and chairs overturned, there was more shattering of glass when suddenly the lights came back on and the door came crashing open.
“POLICE,” called a voice through a loudhailer. “Don’t anybody move.” “POLICE,” the voice repeated and half a dozen armed officers burst in.
Within minutes the room was cleared. A black officer put a supportive arm around me and without speaking I pointed to my T-shirt lying on the floor. It had been trampled upon. He picked it up and gently handed it to me. I shrugged it on and smiled my thanks to him and I thought, in that moment, that he might have the kindest eyes that I had ever seen.
Uri, Aischa, and Rima, reunited in the corridor, stood sobbing in each other’s arms whilst being comforted by a female officer.
The auctioneer protesting loudly that he was a professional and that he knew his rights was frogmarched past me. As was Perry, the rings of sweat beneath his arms a tide mark now. I watched as the man in the black hooded sweatshirt, his eyes narrowed to slits, put up a futile fight but was overpowered by two of the officers. Two against one, I thought. Just as he and Perry had overpowered me.
And then finally there was the man I took to be Stavros Zakiat. He put up no opposition at all. I didn’t hear him say a single word as he calmly and without hurry submitted to instruction but as he passed me our eyes met. The effect was chilling.
And the customers? They were all led out in handcuffs and I, standing by the front door, made sure to look into each and every one of their faces. With the exception of the Asian man, they were all white and middle-aged. And, just like the auctioneer, I noted how very ordinary they looked. You could pass them in the street or work alongside them in an office and would never know what monsters they truly were. They walk amongst us I thought. They are our fathers, our brothers, and our husbands.
It was then that I started to cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
An officer was sent to find my phone. I was taken in a squad car to the local police station where I was questioned gently but insistently for two hours. Then I was driven back to London and deposited home.
When I awoke at nearly eleven o’clock and looked out of my bedroom window it was to see life going on as usual. Out there it was just a regular Saturday morning. I remembered what I had told myself the morning after Simon’s attack on me, just a mere four days before. How having witnessed violence first hand, I had decided not to let it alter my perspective and my trust in the concept that most people are intrinsically decent.
Now my outlook had altered. I suspected that there would have been something very wrong with me if it hadn’t. And I knew then that I had a decision to make. I could let what had happened shadow me for years to come, I could lie on couches and pour it all out to professionals, or I could confront it myself, out loud. I could listen to my own voice; hear my own words as I described the impotence, the fear, and the fury that I had experienced.
And so that’s what I did. I purged and in that outpouring, I found my centre again, which was just as well because that afternoon Inspector Lawson had a lot of questions for me. I went over what I had told the officers last night and she listened avidly. She tried to disguise it but I think she regretted that she had not been part of the take down. To have played a central role in the operation would, no doubt, to her, have been both exciting and rewarding. Try being slap bang in the middle of it, I thought. Exciting it was not.
It was whilst we were going through my statement for a second time that I remembered something. “Ah, it couldn’t have been his car after all,” I exclaimed.
“Whose?”
“I thought one of the cars I had seen; one of the ones I hid behind in fact, had belo
nged to Chris Lianthos, but it couldn’t have been because he wasn’t there.”
She looked down at her case notes. “No. He’s not on the list of arrestees. We will be talking to him though. How sure were you Ms. Pennhaligan that it was his car? Do you know the make and the model?”
“No I don’t. And please would you mind calling me Clarry?”
“OK, Clarry then. But it is a good point you have made. I will check if all cars at the scene correspond with the individuals in our custody. I doubt if my colleagues in Luton will have neglected to do so but it is possible.”
As I got up to leave, she added, “Good work on deciphering the advertisement and for tracking the perpetrators down. I would not, however, recommend that you persist in your investigative pursuits. It’s not a job for amateurs.”
I bristled a bit, at that. Without me, Uri, Aischa, and Rima might have been condemned to a life of sexual and domestic servitude, never to have been seen again. But then so might I.
“Oh, there’s no need to worry about that,” I replied. “I have no intention of ever playing detective again.”
Later in the afternoon, the Renault appeared outside my house and the keys were dropped in though the letterbox. I didn’t have any plans. I didn’t want to make any plans. My part in the investigations of Stavros Zakiat and Chris Lianthos was at an end and so why did I feel so in limbo? As if I was stuck and unable to take up my ordinary life again? I felt listless and lacking in energy and oddly irritable.
I knew I should phone Flan, but put it off. And Laura, I should speak to her, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear all the details of her budding romance when what I’d just experienced was still so raw. I had a good feeling about her and James Dunstan, but did register a pang of regret for the way our friendship would inevitably alter. She would be part of a couple with a man with two children and it would be natural for the demands on her time to increase. I didn’t think she could ever become one of those women that she and I rather disliked, the Smuggy Mummies we called them, but you never knew.
And with this thought I wondered if she had been partially right when, in the heat of our row, she had accused me of not wanting her to be in a relationship. Was it true? I knew it wasn’t jealousy, but perhaps I was reluctant for things to change. She was my best friend and she was single. I could always call her and she’d mostly be available or could share whatever plans she had with me. It was selfish of me to mind if this would no longer be the case. I’d just have to live with it and be happy for her. I gave myself a little shake and then brightened at the notion that now all my investigations into her love life were over I could concentrate on my own once more. But that would be for another day, when I felt up to it.
Later, still wandering disconsolately about the house it came to me that there was something I wanted to do. A gesture that might help me make sense of the world again because that, I saw now, was what was troubling me. I needed to understand how to balance the small highs and lows and petty cares of my own life with the pain, loss, and despair that so much of the world experiences and not feel forever guilty at my good fortune.
I drove to the nearest supermarket where I picked up two bumper size boxes of teabags, some sugar and milk, a few packets of biscuits, and three bottles of wine, then, I headed to Surbiton.
Again, I parked outside the newsagents and I spotted the same Asian men behind the counter. On my previous visit their shop had been the only one open, but now at nearly six o’clock some of its neighbours were still doing business. At the auto repair shop, giant spanners, jacks, and strangely shaped pieces of rusting metal spilled out on the forecourt. A man in dirty overalls and thick crepe soled boots sitting in a weathered disembodied car seat nursed a mug of something hot. He looked too old to be working still. Maybe he preferred being amongst all this junk to going home I wondered, and then shook the thought away.
In the window of the laundrette sat a solitary Somalian woman in a headscarf gazing vacantly out at the street. I could smell soap powder and steam in the blast of heat that gusted through the open door. The bookies wasn’t doing a roaring trade either. In the doorway a stick-thin man in an anorak, sweatpants, and trainers stared down at his betting slip. Was he weighing up the odds of his luck turning? He must have decided to take another chance because, jingling the small change in the pocket of his sweatpants, he turned and made his way back into the shop. I hoped he’d back a winner. He looked like he needed it.
This is seriously depressing I thought, as I got out of the car. I looked around hoping to spot a happy family group or a pair of lovers walking hand in hand, but there was no one else about. Right get a grip Clarry I told myself. Do what you came here to do then go home, pour yourself an enormous glass of wine, switch on the TV, and lose yourself in some soppy film. That should do it.
Since I’d last been here somebody with obviously nothing better to do, had defaced the company insignia. It now read Purbright Pool Farts. Toting three bulging carrier bags, I skirted the entrance and picked my way carefully through the brambles until I was at the back of the building. All seemed very quiet. Putting down the bags I knocked once on the glazed panel of the door and waited. Nothing. I knocked again more loudly, still nothing. I hesitated, reluctant to leave without depositing the supplies I’d bought. I looked around for somewhere to stash them, somewhere that Dan, Sheena or Maggie would be sure to find them.
The scrubby ground to the rear of the unit ran back about fifty yards to a high wall. Overgrown and neglected for what must have been years, I didn’t fancy negotiating my way through it. Should I just leave them on the doorstep? It would have to do.
As I stooped to group the bags more neatly together my arm grazed the door which shifted a little. I stood upright and gave it a tentative push. It swung open and without making a conscious decision, I scooped up the bags and walked into the large open-plan room where one week before I had accepted the hospitality of strangers who had almost nothing.
“Hello,” I called tentatively, my voice sounding small and a little squeaky in the quiet. “Dan? Sheena?”
Very little light found its way through chinks around the boarded-up windows. Dust motes stirred and settled in the gloom as the echo of my voice petered out. I placed the shopping on the bank of office desks but realised almost straight away that Dan & Co would not need the tea and biscuits, or the wine. They’d gone. The builders’ palettes were bare of blankets and the piles of clothes had gone. Oh well, I’ve left it too late I thought. They’ve cleared out.
Then I spotted the gas heater and tin kettle in the corner. Probably too bulky to take with them I supposed. I was about to leave when I saw that I’d been wrong about the clothes. In the corner, the chair with the casters was overturned and on the back of it was a long, stripy jumper. The jumper Sheena had been wearing, I was sure of it.
I looked about me. I had only received a dim impression of the place the last time. The desks suggested that this had been where the pool parts company’s administration had been carried out and I could see now that there were a couple of official looking documents in clear glass clip frames on the wall. Legal requirements detailing health and safety regulations for signage showing changes in water depth from shallow to deep and for the chemicals used in the various water treatment processes, they didn’t make for interesting reading.
I stooped down to pick something off the floor. A blue cardigan. I put it down again. And what was that behind the glazed panel door? A pair of women’s shoes, a bit worn but still wearable. That was odd. Why would they leave anything at all behind? Maybe they’d left in a hurry.
My trainers making no sound on the concrete, I crossed to a door at the opposite side of the room from the open rear door and found myself in a narrow corridor. At one end was the front door of the unit, boarded up from the outside and with an empty metal post cage fixed below the letterbox. A door to the left of it revealed a loo, which looked clean and s
till had two rolls of loo paper. A full cake of soap was in the sink, and above it on a shelf was a can of deodorant and a bottle of shampoo. Again, it was odd. Why leave them when they had so little money? Remembering what Sheena had said about some of the places she had stayed in not having water, I turned on the tap and allowed a trickle of cold water to run through my fingers.
I walked to the far end of the corridor where a pair of doors stood slightly ajar and opening them, walked through into what once presumably had been the storage area. A larger space than the office it had a metal shuttered loading bay taking up one wall which, if I’d got my bearings correctly, I thought would lead out to the rear right-hand side of the building where deliveries would be dispatched. And there was a distinct odour in here. Not a chemical smell, but something rotten and sweet. Maybe a dead mouse or a rat I thought.
Above the shutter was a long oblong window which, probably because it was too narrow for anyone to climb through, hadn’t been boarded up. Its blurry spider webbed panes allowed in a sliver of light but it was too weak to permeate fully into the shadowy recesses of the room. The other three walls were set with long deep shelves still bearing labels marked Filters, Pumps, Vacuum Release Systems, and Cast Iron Suction Traps. A few miscellaneous shapes lurked at the back of them. Abandoned parts for pools that no one would swim in.
The air felt damp and the sweet fetid odour strong and pungent. The silence was muffling and complete. I could well understand why Dan and the others had opted to use the office area as their living space. Not just because of the smell, but the fact that there was something spooky and unsettling about this ghost of a failed business. It must once have represented someone’s dream or even if not their dream, then at least the focus of their energy and hard work.
Standing there in the soulless concrete block in which Dan, Maggie, and Sheena had made their home; I brooded on how difficult it must be to be anchorless. And I wasn’t unaware of the irony of my own situation as I thought this. I owned a house that I had not earned, that I had not worked for. I was incredibly lucky, unlike Dan, Maggie, and Sheena. Where had they gone I wondered? Would they stick together? I hoped so.