No One Gets Out Alive (23 page)

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 want? . . . 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.

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.

But an assurance that she could leave once he’d stolen even more of the prostitutes’ money to clear the house’s debts was another lie, because then something else would be
required of her. Knacker thought he owned her now. The realization took the strength from her legs. She wanted to be sick.

She tried to yank her wrist out of Knacker’s hand, but his fingers hardened into a bone cuff that became so painful she cried out. His arm merely rose and fell with hers. Then he turned so
quickly she squealed.

Knacker crowded Stephanie against the front door. His face moved an inch from hers; his breath stank of the burger he’d stopped to buy in the street and gobbled down like a dog.
‘Let’s get one fing straight, yeah? About that room you been living in at the cheap rate, yeah? Well your terms have changed. You now owe on the room. Forty quid a week for them
fittings and fixtures? You must be having a laugh, girl, if you fink you can rip us off like that. You already owe us on the room. Yeah? Price is hundred a week.’

‘What?’

He raised his voice. ‘So you already owes me sixty quid for the week you been here. And another . . . let me see, one mumf in advance . . . that’s three times another sixty quid . .
.’

‘You can’t!’

‘That’s one eighty in total on the next three weeks on your first mumf. So you now owe me two forty. Just be fankful I ain’t charging you for damages. Fucking dust everywhere
in there, like. And here’s you taking back that deposit like we owe you. You got a nerve. Fuck’s sake, I ought to march you to the cashpoint right this minute and take every penny you
owe us. Which is more consideration than these council wankers are giving me, like. So I’ll have that one sixty back now, and on the rest, don’t make me collect in another way,
yeah?’ He pulled her to the foot of the stairs. ‘Get up in your room. Fucking stay there.’

Without all of her balance, Stephanie stumbled up the stairs with Knacker pressed against her back; one of his arms was around her waist, his other bony hand slapping its way up the railing.

On the first floor he stopped at the sound of a crying woman. A terrible chest-deep sobbing came from the second floor; you couldn’t fake anguish like that. It was one of the Eastern
European girls.

‘Shit,’ Knacker said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ His words panicked Stephanie.

‘Fergal!’ he shouted up the stairwell, his voice so loud it made her jump. ‘Fergal!’

There was no answer.

Stephanie made for her room. She took her phone out of her pocket as surreptitiously as she could.

From the landing Knacker shouted at Stephanie, ‘Eh, hang on!’

She entered her room regardless, planning to close and lock her door, then call the police. She was now being held here against her will, and something terrible had happened while she had been
out; she could just feel it. A woman didn’t cry like that for no reason.

Knacker bounced down the corridor after her. He had a key. Shutting the door would undoubtedly provoke an escalation of whatever mass she’d sensed solidifying inside the house since
they’d come through the front door, a growing tension she wanted to creep quietly away from.

Too late for that now, girl.

No!

She had to find a moment,
soon
. She shuffled her phone back inside the pocket of her jacket.

Knacker’s footsteps paused in the corridor outside her open door. ‘Fergal!’ he roared into the house.

In response, a fresh surge of woe erupted from the girl upstairs. Stephanie guessed it was Svetlana, because she could now hear the girl’s muffled cries through the ceiling of her own
room. So where was Margaret?

Ryan. He cannot come here. Police!

She’d risk a quick phone call, keep her voice down. Hurriedly, Stephanie retrieved her phone from her pocket. Her scalp cooled when she realized no one, beside her bank branch, knew she
was living here. Not even the temping agencies. She’d planned to move out quickly and so hadn’t supplied the address; they all still had the cell in Handsworth on record as her home
address. She thought of Svetlana’s and Margaret’s phones in Knacker’s pocket and suddenly felt dizzy from the gravity of personal danger she found herself in.

She punched out 999 as Knacker came through her door, muttering to himself after failing to raise a response from Fergal. ‘Fuck is he, like?’

Maybe she should make the call to the police and leave it open with the phone in her hand. They recorded all calls.

Knacker spotted the phone. ‘Aye, aye!’ He ran at her. Whacked her hand hard. The phone thumped against the floor.

‘What the fuck!’ she shouted into his face.

Upstairs, a window smashed. Glass tinkled down one side of the house.

‘Shit!’ Knacker shouted. He scooped Stephanie’s phone up at the same time she reached for it. With one hand he shoved her backwards so hard she sat down.

‘You fucking prick!’ she screamed at him. ‘Don’t you touch me!’

Knacker was already on his way out of the room.

Svetlana screamed from her broken window upstairs. ‘Help! Help me! They kill her!’

Stephanie felt like she’d been electrocuted. Her vision shook. Through the juddering room she saw Knacker bound back at her. His bloodless face thrust against her own. ‘Give me your
keys!’ Spittle flecked her face.

She didn’t react or move, beside flinching and instinctively covering her breasts with both arms.

Her head jerked to one side at the same time as she heard the slap of raw meat upon a chopping board. A sensation of having one side of her head underwater engulfed her. One ear became hot. Her
hearing sang with tinnitus. A fire alarm had just been activated deep inside her skull. She wasn’t sure which direction she now faced.

When her vision settled she was lying on her back and looking at the ceiling. Knacker had thumped her.

A bony, clenched fist was pressed against her face. She thought her nose might snap. Knacker’s fingers stank of burned tobacco and tomato sauce. Above the knuckles she could see his big,
wild eyes. ‘Keys, bitch! Where’s your fucking keys?’

Big feet at the end of long strides bounded across the ceiling. Stephanie heard the door above her room being hastily unlocked: Svetlana’s room.

Svetlana shouted, ‘Bastard!’

Heavy feet boomed deeper inside the room above.

Svetlana screamed. A heavy thump followed her cry.

A horrible silence ensued until the girl became hysterical again. She shouted words in her own language. What could have been a large, fierce animal bellowed in response. The very sound of the
roar – inhuman, bestial – made Stephanie whimper. A solid weight crashed through splintering wood. Feet boomed across the floor of the room upstairs as if rushing at the sound of the
breakage.

Slap. Slap. Slap.

‘Keys!’ Knacker bellowed into Stephanie’s face.

‘Pocket.’ Stephanie’s voice was a whisper. Her ear still sang like an old wireless; whale songs of trauma whistled from the deeps. The flesh on one side of her face smarted
like she’d put her head on an oven hotplate. Inside her skull, blood thumped like a bass drum.

Knacker’s fingers went through the pockets of her jacket and fished out her room keys, her purse and the one sixty in cash. He bolted for the door, slammed it, locked her inside.

Stephanie moved from where she had been lying on her back. On her hands and knees she made for the window. Looked at the bars behind the dirty glass. The window was difficult to open, the frame
old and swollen. She needed to break the pane with something so she could start screaming like Svetlana. But stopped looking for a heavy object when she thought of what she’d just heard
upstairs. The
thump
. Fergal’s shriek of animal rage. A body crashing through wood. The slapping. Fergal must have gotten hold of Svetlana because she had broken her window and
screamed into the street to attract attention.

They kill her.
That’s what Svetlana had said.

Margaret.

Stephanie’s stomach turned over and she clenched her teeth and steeled herself to prevent what remained of two cups of coffee coming up.

With a paralyzing clarity, she imagined the girls drumming on their doors, hurling insults the whole time she had been away, threatening Fergal with this ‘Andrei’ because Knacker had
stolen their phones and their money. She remembered Fergal’s face: the malice, the savagery, the instability therein. And she believed he could easily have lost his temper while she and
Knacker had been at the bank.

Stephanie struggled to her feet, but didn’t know what to do.

She looked at the ceiling when she heard another pair of feet upstairs: lighter, swifter, with shorter strides. They bounded down the second floor corridor and moved into the room above her
head: Knacker. He began to bellow at Fergal. ‘What you done? What you done, you fucking idiot? Where is she? Where the fuck is she?’

Fergal grumbled something she could not make out. But Svetlana heard Fergal’s reply because she issued a fresh upwelling of despair, before sobbing through the floor of her room and right
into Stephanie’s heart.

As Stephanie attempted to open the window, as much to air the room of the smell of vomit as to attract attention without making any noise, she inadvertently summoned Knacker.
He came through the house and to her quickly.

She’d even switched the television on to run interference over the sound of the old sash window grinding upwards through the wooden runners. But Knacker had heard, perhaps from inside
Svetlana’s room because the window upstairs was now without glass.

She wasn’t going to scream, not after what she’d heard upstairs. Svetlana had briefly stopped sobbing and moaning when the McGuires had dragged her from her room. ‘Not in
there!’ she’d screamed. The desperate fear in the Lithuanian girl’s voice had transfixed Stephanie with terror all over again. Unable to swallow or blink, she’d stood
immobile and helpless in the middle of her room, her hands clasped to her cheeks while disbelief clashed with the horror that swept round and round her mind in a whirlpool of panic.

In where?
Where were they taking Svetlana? To another room? But not the room occupied by Margaret, because Stephanie would have heard their feet through the ceiling on the far side of
her bed. There was only one other room on the second floor: the room she had spent her first two nights inside; the room with the fireplace and the hands under the bed and the footsteps. A room
facing the back of the building and the junkyard that served as a garden. So she could only assume they had installed Svetlana inside that awful room, or even inside their flat.

Interspersed with the bangs of a hammer in the room above her own, as wood was applied to the upstairs window that Svetlana had smashed, Stephanie had heard faint bursts of a woman crying,
somewhere in the distance. She’d assumed it was the Lithuanian girl’s grief continuing undiminished, though in this house she could never tell who,
or what
, was crying.

Not in there.
Did the girl know something about that room then? After their brief exchange in the kitchen there had been no further opportunity to converse with Svetlana. The idea of
prostitution, the prospect of engaging with broken English, and Knacker’s clear displeasure about them speaking had deterred Stephanie. She wished she had been bolder. Things might have been
different had she and the other two girls discussed the house and the cousins. Regret: the most corrosive horror.

And within the house there was still no sign of Margaret.