by Adam Nevill
Knacker pushed his chin up, his expression transformed into a mixture of incomprehension and animal suspicion.
‘Temping agency. Might be some work.’ Stephanie replied quickly.
THANKS. GOING TO HOTEL. TOO DODGY HERE. DANGEROUS. WILL CALL U LATER XXX.
She sent the message.
‘Hang on. Hang on, yeah? We got an agreement. You gotta sort this business out first. Tell yer agency they can fuck right off. You is busy.’
She looked at him and he did that thing with his face, like Fergal had done: thrust it at her in provocation, daring her to refuse, to disagree, to contradict, to disobey. ‘Give it here. I’ll do it.’ He snatched at her phone. ‘They’ll soon get the message you ain’t available.’
Stephanie clutched the handset to her chest. Her shock and disbelief made him pause; he retracted the hand and shook himself, as if shaking creases out of an expensive two-piece suit. He was a desperate man on the verge of going too far before he’d extracted what he wanted from her, and he needed to compose himself.
Knacker sat back down. ‘As I was saying. What we will do, like, is give them somefing. Bit here, bit there. Payment plan you mentioned, yeah? Get them off our backs, like. Wiv letters too, yeah? You been to college. You can write somefing explaining the situation that we been away. House was empty, like. Money wasn’t paid. That kind of fing. I shouldn’t have to pay nuffin’ anyway, if the house was empty.’
‘And you’ll give me my deposit first?’
‘First fings first, like. I wanna make sure you do it right. Properly, like. I’ll go down the council wiv you.’
There were so many things she wanted to say. So many things that wanted to burst from her. So many terrible things she wanted him to feel. Above all else she wanted him to feel like ‘nuffin’, because that was exactly how he wanted her to feel. But she had to get the deposit back first.
‘Yeah, so get that computer fired up and start these letters. I ain’t got all day, luv.’
‘Computer? The laptop is broken. And you need a printer.’ He wasn’t only illiterate.
‘Pull the other one, love. I is wasting my time ’ere. You wanna earn or sit there moping all day? We got work to do, you and me, to get these leeches off our backs.’
‘Our backs? This is your problem. You never paid the bills.’
‘Steady on, girl, I’m not in the mood for any of your shit this morning. This has all come as a very great surprise to me. I am very upset by all this.’
‘I don’t have to do anything for you. But if you give me the one sixty, I’ll help you. Cash up front or forget it.’
He was on his feet in less than a second. ‘Yeah! Yeah! That right?’ He stopped and looked at the ceiling. A bed creaked; footsteps sounded in the room above their heads. He’d disturbed his investment.
Knacker lowered his stare to Stephanie, but his eyes didn’t seem to consider the person before him as human. She was merely a thing that irritated him to such a degree he seemed ready to begin smashing it up. The feeling was mutual. He reminded her of her stepmother.
Stephanie stretched out her hand. ‘One sixty. The deposit. And I’ll help you out. Or I’m pissing off in the next ten minutes and you will never see me again.’
‘You’re no match for her, Knacker, you pussy. She’s got you over a barrel,’ Fergal said from the doorway. He followed the statement with his deep, forced laugh.
THIRTY-EIGHT
‘Don’t worry about him. Just collecting his foughts,’ Knacker said on their way out of the house. Fergal had followed them down the stairs to the ground floor, taking up position in the shadows before the white glimmer of the solitary inner door at the end of the hallway.
Knacker coaxed Stephanie out of the house, prodding her in the back, and then steered her by the elbow once they were on the front path. ‘We’s all got our little quirks, like,’ he said, pulling the front door closed.
Outside, Knacker continued to stand too close to her, his face never straying more than a few inches from her own. It was as if he were giving his eyes, his greatest weapons of scrutiny, interrogation and intimidation, an even bigger advantage by pressing them into her physical space until she could barely draw breath without inhaling him. She choked on his aftershave.
And what was that on his head? A knitted Peruvian skiing hat plastered with the Helly Hansen logo, with spidery jaw straps falling beside his sunken cheeks. A wanker hat: she’d never met anyone in one of those hats that wasn’t a tool.
When he slipped the Oakley sunglasses on, she realized he was wearing a disguise. Knacker didn’t want to be recognized. She’d reached this conclusion too late. Like everything else. He reinforced her suspicion by saying, ‘Just stick your head round that hedge. Make sure no one’s in the street, yeah? Some people round here I don’t want to speak wiv.’
Like the police? ‘No one there.’
‘All clear, yeah? Nice.’ He released her arm. ‘Can’t stand nosey parkers me, as well you know, girl.’
The open space and cold air of the grey, empty street jerked her back to a fuller awareness of her surroundings, and of herself. Even this close to her own escape, she felt too light on her feet as the adrenaline drained away. Despite everything that had so recently happened in the rooms of Svetlana and Margaret, minutes before she and Knacker left the building, her major share of shock and unease was reserved for Fergal.
At first she feared the effects of heroine, crack cocaine or crystal meth had been responsible for transforming Fergal’s face and appearance into something so unkempt. But so quickly? In a matter of days he now looked more haggard and feral than the last and only time she had seen him fully lit up: inside her room on Friday. Barely three days hence but the alteration to Knacker’s cousin was ghastly.
As soon as he’d appeared in the doorway to her room, she’d winced at the sight of him, and at the smell that issued from the absurdly tall shape hanging around her door like a large gingery gibbon. He’d grinned his yellow teeth at her and looked homeless, as derelict as the house he’d helped to transform into a brothel. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, the pupils massive; he was off his head on something. A childish excitement in his expression warned that he was not in control either.
He’d worn the only clothes she’d ever seen him wear: the hooded brown coat with jeans and trainers, but now the sleeves of the coat were blackened with soot or dirt to the elbow, his bony wrists and huge hands protruding from tatty cuffs. The final finger joints and nails of each hand were black. He looked like he’d been scratching around beneath the floorboards or crawling about in the garden. The knees of his jeans were dark with dried stains. Dirty hands, most likely his own, had been wiped across his thighs repeatedly to soil the denim. Stephanie hoped the promised renovations in the house would explain the state of the man, but what renovations had there been?
Everything had changed again, and so swiftly that morning; now she was doing them a favour, her lowly status in the house hovered around an enforced involvement in illegality. The bank notes of her deposit, safely tucked away in her jacket pocket, weighed heavily. They had stolen the money from Svetlana and Margaret.
Just get this done and then take off.
But who were they? And who was this Bennet? All of the correspondence addressed to the house had been directed at someone who was absent, who hadn’t paid a bill in a year. Bennet was no silent business partner, because the McGuires were not in business in any reasonable sense; they’d just started running girls, and she was supposed to have been one too. They were broke. They were nothing more than desperate, seedy rodents in a dirty house that might not even belong to them.
She recalled her conversation with the unpleasant neighbour: someone only referred to as him had started the father’s business up again. The business was prostitution. The house was known for it; the building had a past. And was him Knacker? Had Knacker and Fergal inherited a family house and an organized criminal operation? But then Knacker would have Bennet as a surna
me, not McGuire. Or were they using alibis? Was this even their house? My mother’s house. Knacker emphasized that fact at will, but he was a liar who would say anything to support his scams.
Neither of them could even read; Knacker had been genuinely shocked by the knowledge that bailiffs were coming for a great deal of money that was owed to utility companies and the council. But even if you could not read, how could you own a house and be surprised by the news that you hadn’t paid any bills? Knacker had seen the figures but did not fully understand they amounted to debts. He was idiotic. His lack of intelligence wasn’t suited to responsibility; he belonged to another world where a person made their way through intimidation and rat-like cunning.
What was this place?
I’m so cold. Hold me. Girls behind the walls: crying, repeatedly chattering the same nonsense, one of them being beaten, even raped. Something climbing into her bed for … comfort. Because that’s all that visitor had wanted: comfort. It was a presence so cold and lonely and so filled with despair that the air had turned to ice. No, not it; she had just wanted to be held. Something terrible had happened in the building, but what? And now new girls, living girls, were being put to work at the same address.
The blonde girl on the stairs and in the garden: a ghost? She wondered if women had been killed here in the past. Maybe they had killed women here. Residues might have remained. Yet she was mystified as to why she was the focus. Why did she have to know the presences were there?
A horrible carousel spun through her mind and imagination and she recalled Knacker’s veiled and unveiled threats, interspersed with the unnatural atmospheres and the sounds of the voices. Nothing was clear, but all was suggesting more than she wanted to acknowledge.
She was still not reacting quickly enough to each new situation, or even anticipating them fully, and she felt like she was stumbling about the street now too, still in shock after what Knacker had gone and done upstairs in the other girls’ rooms before they left the house. But she’d be out of this situation permanently within a few hours. Once she’d run these errands and paid off some of their debts, she could grab her stuff, call a cab and clear out. Get Ryan to bring the money to her hotel. She was almost free. Salvation was within reach. She’d decide later tonight about what to tell the police, how to phrase her story. Because after Knacker’s performance in the rooms of Svetlana and Margaret, and judging by the state of Fergal, who no longer appeared sane, she wasn’t sure that the two prostitutes were safe.
After Knacker had finally accepted her demands, paid her the one sixty in cash, and accepted the fact that her laptop was out of action, she’d been forced to hand-write letters to utility companies, debt collection agencies and the council. She’d used her own refill pad on the kitchen table, because the McGuires didn’t have any paper, or even a pen. Knacker had said, ‘I will be having these checked later, like, so make sure you get it right.’ But checked by who: Albanian and Lithuanian prostitutes?
In the kitchen, she’d taken Knacker’s dictation to the City Council, Severn Trent Water and British Gas. And the whole time she was transcribing Knacker’s attempt at business English, she wanted to burst out laughing and scream ‘imbecile’ into his idiotic face. But she had not forgotten that the moment this nonsense was concluded, she could leave.
The deposit that had been returned to her had been paid from the money the girls upstairs had earned. Svetlana and Margaret had been busy for a few days, but clearly not busy enough to clear the three grand Knacker owed on bills he couldn’t even read. He’d taken just under twelve hundred pounds off them. The situation was pitiful; Knacker was pitiful.
But not to be underestimated.
Until she was in a hotel room, she would never truly believe she’d escaped Knacker.
And everything inside his house.
On the pavement of Edgehill Road, Knacker appeared smaller, physically diminished, and wary of the light and space like an elderly man being taken on a walk by his carer. He whipped his concealed head about as he spoke quickly and nervously. ‘I need to get somefing out the way, like. Difficult conversation to have, but this is a matter of trust, like. Which is pretty thin on the ground right now, yeah? Wiv all that’s going on wiv the gas and council, like, and the way you been going off on me, and all that, but I appreciate what you are doing, right? Even though you’ve stitched me right up on that deposit, if I’m totally frank.’
His voice was hot against her face; he was whispering, wary of being overheard through paranoia or self-importance. ‘Fergal too. He might have his ways, like, but don’t you worry about him. He’s in hand, like. So we’ve had words and we is gonna cut you some slack cus you is helping us out. So I’m apologizing if fings got a bit heated, like, back there, wiv the girls. But no harm was done, yeah? What you gotta understand, right, is we’ve been under a lot of stress. Lot at stake here. When you is just a tenant, it’s a bit easier.’ He laughed at that, laughed at her naivety. ‘But we got responsibilities. Don’t forget we has been putting a roof over your head. And them girls. You have all been benefitting, like. Sometimes there might be words, but no harm done, yeah?’
She doubted that was true; he’d robbed Margaret and Svetlana. Gone up to their rooms and demanded all of their cash so that his other tenant could pay off bits and pieces of his debts on payment plans at a bank, while he shuffled beside her like a nervous agoraphobic. Knacker was terrified she would run off with the money. That was why he insisted on being beside her now, with one hand clasped around her forearm like a pimp with a recalcitrant street walker.
There had been a terrible row above her head as Knacker whined, wheedled and shouted threats at the two foreign girls. She had been forced to endure the noise coming through her ceiling while Fergal had stood in the doorway of her room, keeping watch, all stooped over and grinning, like someone who should have been sedated and restrained.
Knacker had left both girls hysterical, shouting a combination of ‘Bastard!’, ‘We call Andrei!’, ‘You bastard!’, as he made off with their ill-gotten gains.
In reply he’d shouted, ‘You’ll get it back, like. Just a loan, yeah? You’ll make it back by Friday. Relax, yeah?’
He’d stolen the girls’ phones too, so they couldn’t call this Andrei, before locking them inside their rooms. He’d come downstairs with a bleeding scratch on one wrist that Fergal had found hilarious. The securing of doors had frightened Stephanie more than anything else to that point in the confrontation. Theft of illegal earnings and private phones was one thing, but the locking of the girls’ doors was imprisonment; it had made the very floor feel as if it were moving beneath her feet. The rules of her world had changed again, and so quickly it was hard to second guess future implications.
But the hysteria of the two girls and the banging and kicking they inflicted against their locked doors had excited Fergal, who’d guffawed around a sadistic grin, as if it were all a game. The sound of his mocking laughter was even worse than what Knacker had been doing upstairs. Bookended by a snigger, a delighted Fergal had shouted, ‘It’s all going off!’, before breaking into an oafish ditty that sounded like a chant on a football terrace.
And now she and Knacker were outside, on the cold and silent street, on their way to the bank to pay off fragments of a Mr Bennet’s debts.
To get this far and to carry on, she concentrated on the moment when she would have everything she could carry in two hands and strapped onto her back; the very moment when she would be out of 82 Edgehill Road forever.
Nearly there, girl. Hold fast, babe. Do this, then take off.
And she smiled to herself at the thought of the phone call she would make to the West Midlands police that very night. She could almost hear Knacker’s wheedling entreaties as the police stepped into the grim hallway of the house.
In the pocket of Knacker’s new ski jacket, Svetlana’s phone began to chant its dance music ringtone. He whipped it out. ‘Yeah? Svetlana, yeah? It’s her phone, but she is busy, like. What you wan
t?… That’s fine … Today? Yeah, mate, call later and you can speak wiv her. About four.’ He finished the call and grinned.
Stephanie instinctively took a step away from Knacker as he answered the phone. Without even looking at her, or seeming to see her movement, his bony fingers reached out and tugged at her jacket.
THIRTY-NINE
Within seconds of Stephanie and Knacker entering the house, they noticed the solitary door at the end of the ground floor hallway. It was open. Their shock brought them to a standstill.
‘The fuck?’ Knacker said.
Stephanie panicked, as if the lightless entrance was a symbol that something terrible, something even worse than the current owners, had been set free inside the building.
Fragments of dreams came to life and filled her skull: a sad, pale female face, its blue eyes open and full of horror and despair. A brick tunnel. A little wooden box. A table in a black room. Candles. Polythene …
Stephanie took a step back towards the front path.
Knacker’s hand found her wrist. The grip was tight. ‘Nah, nah, girl. You ain’t finished yet, like.’ He closed the front door behind them with one foot.
‘I’m going once I have my bags.’
‘Fuck you is.’
‘What? You can’t make me stay here.’
‘We got an agreement, like.’ Knacker spoke without looking at her, as if his mostly concealed face couldn’t turn away from the sight of the open door at the end of the corridor. ‘These bills ain’t all done wiv yet.’
‘I did what you asked. You have no money left.’
‘End of the week we’ll be loaded again. You can fuck off once this is sorted proper, like.’ A grin spread across his face. The girls were a popular local item already; he’d taken six phone calls during their journey to and from the bank, and he’d arranged bookings for the next three afternoons and evenings. Eighty pounds for thirty minutes with either Svetlana or Margaret: the going rate at 82 Edgehill Road. Some of the callers were returning customers, repeat business.