Fiddleback

by Mark Morris

  The shape of the building, its long low flat roof, made it look as though it was being crushed beneath the considerable weight of the starless sky. By night it looked not merely drab but ominous, like a military holding block in some far-flung dictatorship. The globe of light above the door I had entered the last time I’d been here should have added a sense of welcome, of refuge, but its harsh glow seemed contained and thus only darkened the shadows around it. I took a step towards the door, but Horse-face grabbed me by the wrist.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

  I hated the feel of his skin on mine, but I endured it, determined not to do anything to provoke him or the others. ‘Inside,’ I said, then couldn’t stop myself from adding, ‘or are we staying out here in the car park?’

  He grinned and tugged on my wrist, pulling me closer to him. Still grinning, he hissed, ‘Don’t get clever, bitch.’ His face was only two inches from mine, and I could smell his breath, which had a meaty odour every bit as pungent as his colleague’s. ‘This way,’ he said and jerked on my wrist, leading me to the far side of the building. I was furious at being dragged along like a dog, but this time I managed to keep my mouth shut. The four of us – me, Horse-face tugging me along, Onion-breath lumbering behind me, the silent unseen driver bringing up the rear – moved around the side of the building and stopped at a set of locked double doors.

  ‘Tradesman’s entrance,’ Horse-face said and tugged on a loop of chain at his hip, one end of which was clipped to his belt, the other attached to a ring of keys which rose from his trouser pocket. He selected a key and the lock scraped open. A moment later we were in the building.

  The walls of the corridor we entered were taupe, the vinyl floor tiles a thin, watery blue. The bulbs overhead, contained in square mesh cages, offered such feeble illumination it seemed there was some sort of energy drain, that the place was operating on half-power. What light there was made everyone look wan and ill, slightly jaundiced.

  ‘You can let go of my wrist now,’ I said when the outside door had been locked behind us. Horse-face grinned again, his teeth slick as if newly varnished.

  ‘And here’s me thinking we were on the verge of a beautiful relationship.’

  He stared at me a moment, his grin never reaching eyes whose pupils seemed almost entirely black, then he very deliberately sprang his fingers apart.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, resisting the urge to rub my wrist, even though it felt hot and sore.

  Onion-breath placed a hand in the small of my back and gave a little push. ‘Keep walking.’

  We came to the end of the corridor, then turned right into another one, almost identical to the first. Halfway along we stopped at a door marked INTERVIEW ROOM 12. Onion-breath leaned forward and opened it wide. ‘In here,’ he said.

  I went in and thought that he was following me. However, he merely stepped inside to grab the handle of the door, then pulled it shut with a bang, leaving me alone. I didn’t mind that so much, but when I heard the scrape of a key in the lock I crossed back to the door and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’

  I heard Horse-face snigger. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll be dealt with soon enough.’

  Dealt with. With a rush the night’s events seemed suddenly to catch up with me, and all at once I felt so scared it was like sickness. The strength-sapping sensation that slithered up from my legs into my midriff was like the beginnings of the limb-aching fever (‘Ruth’s lurgy’, Alex calls it) that always grips me when I come down with flu. I wanted at that moment to protest, to reason with them, to plead even, but I managed to resist the instinct, to keep quiet. It would do no good to beg. In fact, they would probably have liked nothing better than to have me grovelling at their feet.

  The interview room contained a chipped Formica table bolted to the floor, a big, old, double-headed tape recorder built into the wall, and nothing else. I desperately needed to sit down, but there weren’t any chairs, so I sat on the floor in the corner furthest from the door, my back against the wall.

  How long I stayed in that room alone I’m not sure. I didn’t have a watch, and it probably seemed a lot longer than it actually was, but I’d estimate I was there for about an hour and a half. The debilitating, stomach-shaking fear stayed with me for a while; a couple of times I almost threw up at the thought of what might happen to me here. As time dragged on, however, I began to grow restless, to wish that something would happen. I wondered why they didn’t get on with it, what they could possibly hope to gain by keeping me hanging around. I thought about the body in the railway station. If that had been intended to scare me off, then it had been not merely a poorly judged attempt, but an act of crass stupidity. Did my persecutors honestly believe I’d flee Greenwell and say nothing? My brother was missing and a man was dead. Did whoever was responsible for all this truly think I’d put all that behind me, go back to London and get on with my life? Perhaps they had intended me to conclude that the hooded body in the station was Alex, though at no point had I ever entertained that possibility. Although it had been dark in the station and I’d got no more than a glimpse of the hanging man, I had known instinctively that it wasn’t Alex dangling there. Perhaps it was something about the build or the corpse’s hands … I don’t know. I simply feel that if it had been Alex, I would have recognized him immediately.

  Throughout my incarceration I heard not a single sound in the rest of the building. I began to wonder whether they’d all gone home and left me, whether I was going to have to stay in here all night without food or drink or toilet facilities. At one point I even wondered whether they were planning to leave me here indefinitely. After all, Greenwell was a small town and it was unlikely that anything would ever happen that would necessitate the use of twelve interview rooms simultaneously. This room could remain locked for weeks, months even, and no one would even raise so much as an eyebrow. Perhaps the same fate had befallen Alex. Perhaps he was less than an arm’s length away, separated from me by nothing more than a foot-thick wall.

  Such notions, ridiculous though they may seem in the cold light of day, gained a terrifying energy and significance in that bare, locked room. For a few minutes, stir-crazy, I lost control, abandoning my previous determination to hold on to my composure. I banged on the door, screamed to be let out, but no one came. Eventually, my fists aching, several of my knuckles bloody and bruised, I retreated to my corner and sank for a while into a kind of torpor.

  Exhausted, though jitteringly, nervily awake, I was wondering whether I ought to bed down for the night when I heard footsteps in the corridor outside. I scrambled to my feet as a key turned in the lock. The door opened and two men came in. They were both big and broad-shouldered. One had a pale grey suit on, the other dark grey. The one in the pale grey was podgy, with a scrunched-up face, grey-flecked thinning hair, a moustache and sideburns. His colleague was younger and fitter. He had neat, sandy-coloured hair and a square-jawed face with a pronounced dimple in the centre of his chin.

  The younger man closed the door. Both men were carrying chairs, which they placed at opposite ends of the Formica table. The older man sat down in his chair, the younger man simply put his into position, then went to stand by the door, hands crossed loosely in front of his crotch like a footballer in a defensive wall.

  I looked at the two men, licked my lips. My stomach cramped nervously. I needed to go to the toilet, but I didn’t want to ask because it would give them power over me, the power of adults over a child.

  ‘Sit down,’ the older man said coldly.

  I lingered for a moment, looked from the older man to the younger. ‘Do you mind my asking who I’m speaking to?’ I said.

  The older man regarded me steadily. ‘Yes.’

  I was confused. ‘I’m sorry … yes what?’

  ‘Yes, I do mind. Now sit down!’

  The venom with which he spat out these words shocked me. The saliva in my mouth changed to porridgey glue in an instant. I had to sweep my tongue across the front
of both rows of teeth before I could unstick them from my lips enough to talk. Trying not to sound nervous, I said, ‘I think I’m entitled to see some ID.’

  The older man leaned forward in his seat, his large stomach pressing against the edge of the table. ‘You are entitled to fuck-all,’ he said. ‘You have no rights here. Now either you sit down or we’ll break your legs so you’ve got no choice.’

  I could feel my chin trembling, but I was determined not to cry. I sat down and shielded my face with my hand, aware of the policemen’s eyes on me. I swallowed and blinked in an effort to regain my composure. Finally I felt able to talk, though the question I asked still came out as a squeak. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

  The younger man laughed. ‘You honestly don’t know?’ His voice was hard and flat, local accent. Apart from the waiters in the Red Dragon, I don’t think I’d met anybody in Greenwell who didn’t sound as if they’d been born and bred here.

  I wasn’t sure what to say, how deep to dip my toe. I didn’t know how much they thought I already knew, or had guessed. Finally I said, ‘I only broke into my brother’s flat because I’m worried about him. I’m not a criminal.’

  The older man pushed himself back with a snort as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘You commit a crime, you’re a criminal.’

  I shook my head. ‘This is a farce. It’s not as though I killed anyone. I don’t deserve to be treated like this.’

  ‘If you can’t take the consequences, you shouldn’t have committed the crime.’

  ‘I had no choice. No one was willing to help me.’

  ‘There’s always a choice. Why didn’t you bring the matter to us?’

  Because you’re all bloody in it together, and you know it! I wanted to shout at him. But instead I said, ‘I did, but one of your officers told me to fuck off back to where I came from.’

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ the older man said as if weary of dealing with liars.

  ‘I don’t care whether you believe it or not. It’s true,’ I said.

  The older man gave me a contemptuous look. ‘So make an official complaint,’ he said.

  ‘I’m making one now,’ I said, then glanced at the double-headed cassette recorder. ‘Shouldn’t you be taping all this?’

  The older man leaned back in his chair and looked at his colleague. ‘Hear that? She’s trying to tell us how to do our job now.’

  Except that that wasn’t exactly what the older man said, because after saying, ‘Hear that?’ he spoke what I can only presume was the younger man’s name. The thing was, it didn’t sound like a proper word at all. It didn’t even sound like a foreign word. It sounded strange. Dragging and crackly, like a poor recording that bleeds through on to the back of a cassette tape and comes out backwards and muffled on side B.

  ‘What did you call him?’ I asked.

  The older man turned back to me, all weary aggression once more. ‘What?’

  ‘Just then. You said something. Made some sort of weird noise. What was it?’

  The older man stared at me for so long that I felt the nervousness inside me jumping towards panic. I glanced at the younger man. He was staring at me too, his face so immobile that he looked to be in a trance.

  ‘We don’t stand for people like you in this town,’ the older man said suddenly.

  I blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Cunts like you. Coming here. Causing trouble. Disrupting our lives.’

  A terrible cold fear sluiced through me. ‘I just want to find my brother,’ I whispered.

  ‘Cunts like you have got to be punished. Made an example of,’ the older man continued flatly. ‘We don’t want vermin overrunning our town, infecting us with their filthy ideas.’

  Was he talking about Alex? Was I finally about to discover what had happened to my brother? I felt something tickling the fine hairs on my forearm and glanced down. A fiddleback spider emerged from the cuff of my jacket and walked across the back of my hand.

  I reacted instinctively, jumping up from my seat and brushing at the spider with my other hand. I saw the spider fly off, but I didn’t see it land. My chair fell over with a clatter.

  The older man jumped up too, face apoplectic with rage. Eyes bulging, cheeks almost purple, he screamed, ‘Sit down! Sit down, you fucking bitch!’

  I cringed, certain he was going to follow his verbal onslaught with a physical one. I tried to explain about the spider, but he overrode my words.

  ‘I’m sick of your shit! Sick of it!’ he shouted. ‘Take your clothes off!’

  I stopped, mid-explanation, and gaped at him. I wasn’t sure I had heard him properly. ‘What?’

  ‘Take your clothes off! Take them off now! Get your fucking clothes off!’

  I could see he meant it. I wanted to throw up. My need to pee was almost unbearable. At that moment I wished desperately that he would collapse with a heart attack. If he had clutched his chest, if his face had gone the colour of new denim, if he had crashed to the ground, I would have done nothing to help him. I had done a first aid course once, a million years ago back in London, but I would have stood by and watched him die, would have willed it with a fierce glee.

  Shaking my head, I backed into the corner. I had all but forgotten about the spider now.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’

  The younger man grinned and allowed his hands to drop to his sides. ‘Yes we can,’ he said. ‘If you don’t take them off yourself, we’ll rip them off you. It’s your choice.’

  My head seemed to be shaking of its own volition. My hands moved to protectively cover my crotch and breasts as if I were already naked. ‘Leave me alone,’ I said. ‘You can’t do this. It’s sexual harassment. It’s rape.’

  ‘So tell a fucking policeman,’ said the older man and laughed. The younger man’s grin widened and he moved towards me.

  I felt myself becoming hysterical with terror at what was about to happen to me. ‘Leave me alone!’ I screeched. ‘Leave me alone! Don’t touch me!’ I began to scream for help, but the two policemen just laughed.

  ‘You hold her down, I’ll get her kit off,’ the older man said.

  I sank into a crouch, arms hugging myself desperately, head hunched into my shoulders. They were standing over me. I had my eyes closed, but could sense them, smell them, could feel their shadows lying cold across me.

  ‘Last chance to do it yourself,’ the younger man said, ‘before we tear your clothes off your fucking back.’

  I sensed them waiting, heard the older man’s quick, animal-like panting. I sensed his fat, hot hands reaching down for me. ‘No!’ I screeched suddenly, my head snapping up, eyes opening. His sweaty face was looming over me, bloated with lust.

  ‘No,’ I said again. ‘I’ll do it. You keep your fucking filthy hands off me.’

  The two men backed off, the older one reluctantly. Slowly, in the hope that something would intervene to save me from having to do this, I began to unlace my boots. The two men watched, the younger one with a deadpan expression, the older one feasting his eyes on me. I tried to blot them out as I took off my boots and socks. I lifted my little shoulder bag over my head and put it on the table, then unzipped the jacket I was wearing and placed it on top of my boots on the floor. Now I was wearing nothing but a knee-length dress and my underwear. I hesitated.

  ‘And the rest,’ the older man said.

  ‘Stand up,’ said the younger. ‘Stand up so we can see you.’

  I looked up at the younger man. ‘Please,’ I whimpered. ‘Please don’t make me do this.’

  ‘Stand up so we can see you,’ he repeated, his voice flat.

  I felt tears swelling at the back of my throat. I had been determined not to cry, but I felt a few stray ones squeezing themselves from the corners of my eyes, fleeing in glittering tracks down my cheeks. I stood up clumsily, my legs shaking, my hands shaking as I gripped the hem of my dress, dragged it up over my hips, over my ribs, over my head. I dropped it on top of my jack
et. Without it I felt cold and small and horribly vulnerable.

  ‘Now the bra,’ the older man said throatily, goggle-eyes fixed on me.

  I was unable to prevent myself weeping now, my hands trembling so much that I couldn’t unhook my bra. When the hook popped free it did so almost unexpectedly. I dipped forward as my breasts became exposed, scooping them to me with my left hand and arm, squashing them against my chest. I dropped my bra on the pile of clothes at my feet.

  ‘Now the pants,’ the older man rasped.

  I removed my pants with my right hand, again stooping forward to conceal myself as much as possible. I placed my right hand over my crotch and flicked the pants on to the pile of clothes with my foot.

  ‘Excellent,’ the younger man said. ‘Now stand up straight, legs slightly apart, arms held out by your sides.’

  I was still weeping. ‘Please,’ I whispered, ‘please don’t make me do this.’

  ‘Do what we tell you,’ the older man said. It was evident he was enjoying this. When I didn’t immediately comply, he said, ‘If you don’t do what you’ve been told I’ll stick my finger so far up your fucking arse that you’ll be on fucking tiptoes.’

  Slowly I straightened up, but it took a huge effort of will to place my arms by my sides, to expose myself fully to these two men. As I raised my arms I was shaking not only with fear but with cold; I felt literally frozen with shock.

  ‘Legs a little wider apart, please,’ the younger man said.

  When I was standing in what the two men considered a satisfactory position, they began to examine me. They didn’t touch me – if they had done I would have curled up into a ball on the floor and screamed the place down – but simply walked around me as if I were an exhibit in a museum, peering at different parts of my body. At one point the younger one got down on all fours and gazed candidly between my legs.

  It was a horrible, horrible ordeal. They made me feel like an object, made me feel worthless and used and without dignity. I couldn’t stop weeping, but they were oblivious to my feelings. When I tearfully asked them why they were doing this, what they were looking for, the younger one just smiled and told me not to pretend I didn’t know.