No One Gets Out Alive (25 page)

Jesus, God, it could have been your face.

The new room had thus far remained locked and mostly undisturbed during her tenancy, save one evening when she’d heard an old woman’s voice reciting scripture. And since she’d
been sealed inside the room, Stephanie had successfully suppressed that memory because she could not tolerate another reminder of being swallowed whole and alive by the horror that refused to be
sated inside this house.

The window of the room was barred. Before the bars the sash window frame was secured with an old metal fixture that required a key with a square end. It was the kind of lock that suggested the
key was long missing.

The grubby glass of the window pane could be broken. But to what end? The McGuires would hear it smash. She’d already imagined her cries for help echoing back at her from inside the narrow
stone gap between two detached houses built close together.

The seedy man with a messy front garden lived in the house that neighboured this side, but Stephanie couldn’t imagine him running to her aid. And escape from here wasn’t possible
because the room was a cell. In her misery she wondered if it had been used as one in the past.

Fergal’s acid trick had achieved the desired effect; Stephanie shrivelled inside whenever her thoughts returned to the white steam rising from the carpet, the crackle and hiss. Imagining
the acid’s tearing heat over her face and the pooling of it inside her eye sockets thwarted any urge to shout from the window. To serve as another reminder, the left side of her head was
swollen, the ear too painful to touch.

Stephanie knew why she was here and still alive. Why Fergal hadn’t killed her like she suspected he had murdered Margaret. Because they were cutting her off and ending her final resistance
to their will. Knacker had tried to do this incrementally by selling the idea of prostitution to her, while emphasizing her lack of alternatives, a sales pitch underwritten with suggestions of
violence, preceding actual violence, and then extortion. But Fergal had strong-armed and fast-tracked her towards their original goal of selling her body to strangers for profit. It’s why
Knacker had rented the room to her in the first place.
Girls only.
Knacker had hoped she was young and desperate enough to be blindsided by his spiel and seduced by the promise of riches,
eventually. He must have sensed how compromised she had been that first day, smelled her need like a weasel sniffed out a timorous, hungry vole on a canal bank. But he had missed his recruitment
target and Fergal had stepped in with a bottle of acid.

They were a girl down now and she was the replacement.

The sounds of her impending fate were audible through the ceiling. Svetlana had been put back to work. Svetlana was her future.

Above her head, the girl whimpered around the muffled rhythm of a bed thumping a wall as another man threw himself into her body. She had entertained her first ‘client’ hours before.
Had anything remained inside Stephanie’s stomach she would have spat it onto the dusty carpet. This was Svetlana’s third visitor since Stephanie had been locked inside the new room.

Tonight Svetlana’s cries lacked their former enthusiasm, from a time when the tough Lithuanian must have considered herself to be freelance, perhaps one of this
‘Andrei’s’ girls, leasing premises in a building owned by his peers up north. But she was now being forced to have sex after she had been beaten, and had maybe borne witness to,
or at least heard, the murder of her friend, a consideration that made Stephanie physically tremble.

This was new territory and within its borders she felt more vulnerable than she had ever felt before in her life; it was a landscape in which all boundaries of restraint, that she had previously
taken for granted, had not so much been moved as obliterated and replaced with an arbitrary state of being.

Murder.
The very word so close to her actual existence made her feel as if the floor of a lift had just vanished from beneath her feet.

She knew almost nothing about the girls. And the same could be said for everything else at the address: who Bennet was, who the McGuires were, what had happened to those unseen women whose
voices and footsteps still lingered inside the dusty, poorly lit rooms. It was ironic that she’d now do anything to go home to her stepmother, to withstand whatever she chose to, literally,
throw at her.

How had this happened?

You don’t know what happened to Margaret. You don’t. You don’t. You don’t.

She repeated this mantra to the regions of her mind that had already acknowledged the worst, which only responded with some recalcitrance by not being convinced.

So fatigued by the day’s relentless cycles of fear and anxiety, loathing and hatred, crowned by the devitalizing episodes of outright terror in Fergal’s dirty hands, she needed to
sit down before she fell over. She was hungry and thirsty and faint, her thoughts becoming vague. She had not stopped feeling nauseous and if she cried any more she feared her eyes would close from
the swelling.

Coughing, she batted the fur of grey dust from the pink candlewick bedspread skimming a single bed that looked too small for an adult. She sat down. Turned over the bedspread and cotton sheet
and discovered the grey dust had seeped inside the bed’s coverings. A once white sheet was stained by vague brown marks which she immediately covered. The ancient pillow was also watermarked
by a former occupant’s sleeping head.

A headboard of cushioned white vinyl completed an item of furniture she’d do almost anything to avoid sleeping on. The last bed she had seen of this age and style had been in her
gran’s spare bedroom when Stephanie had been a child. And this was the smallest room she had yet seen inside the house. It hadn’t been cleaned in years, or even aired. The odours of
mildew, dust and sour paint refused to normalize into something her nose no longer detected.

Beside the small bed was an empty bedside cabinet made of chipboard and laminated with white plastic. The top surface was fluffy with dust. A grimy mirror was screwed to the back of the door. A
solitary light bulb hung inside a plastic shade and made the dim electric light look like it was being shone through a bowl of fruit cocktail, poured from a cheap tin.

It was a room in which an occupant could only feel trapped, hopeless and miserable, which is exactly how Stephanie felt. She zipped her jacket up to her neck until the heating came on, surprised
they hadn’t shut it off to save money. Perhaps they didn’t know how to. And if she was to be left in here all night, she realized she would need to sleep on the floor. The bed was too
dirty.

All she had going for her was the knife.

She took it out of the pocket at the front of her hooded top and rolled it between her fingertips. Clenched her teeth until her face pulsed with the heat of her blood.
If one of them came in
now
. . .

She didn’t know what she would do. The knife was blunt, the blade short. It couldn’t kill, but it might slash, might wound.

And if it went through an
—

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she whispered to herself.

When the world outside darkened, and as Svetlana’s unwilling hospitality extended to her fifth customer, the squeak of a floorboard preceded the rattle of a key inside
the lock of her door.

Before the door opened, Stephanie leapt off the bed and then backed against the window. Struggling to swallow the lump in her throat, she slipped a hand inside the pocket of her hooded top. Her
fingers squeezed the plastic handle of the knife, but it felt smaller and lighter than it had done before.

Knacker’s bony face thrust inside the room, grinning. ‘Fought you might like somefing to eat.’ He held a yellow polystyrene container, the kind takeaway restaurants used to
package kebabs.

Shuffling into the room, he peered about the walls and bed warily, maintaining the grin as if trying to find something positive about the situation he could comment upon.

He placed the carton on the foot of the bed and pulled a can of Carling Black Label out of the pocket of his ski jacket – the coat her deposit must have paid for.

He dropped the can onto the dirty bedclothes. ‘This stuff don’t come cheap neither. Yous’ll have to pay me back tomorrow. Till I can get to a cash machine that is, so you
better be quick wiv that pin number, yeah, when I ask for it. Nuffin’s free in this world, girl. Don’t I know it, like.’

Unable to speak through a blockage of rage, disgust and fear, Stephanie glared at his face. Behind his curly head the light clicked out and plunged the corridor into darkness.

She needed to lose it, needed to get angry and provoke him, and then ignite herself. It was the only way she would be able to use the knife, by losing control in a hot flurry of hate and
hysteria. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is kidnap.’

He tried to laugh it off. ‘Nah, nah, it’s nuffin’ like that. You’s a bit of a drama queen, ain’t ya? Just a little setback, like, that we is fixing. No harm done,
yeah.’

‘Your cousin threatened to burn my face with acid. He beat Svetlana. Margaret’s . . . You punched me. Assaulted me. And now you’ve locked me in this room. You’re in
serious trouble. You know that?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Or, at least, your cousin is.’

Knacker’s eyes narrowed. He glanced over his shoulder into the dark corridor, pushed the door to then turned to her. ‘Let’s get one fing straight, yeah. So pin your ears back,
girl, while I is explainin’ somefing to you. First fing, you don’t know nuffin’. Nuffin’ about me or Fergal, our backgrounds. Nuffin’. Second fing is, you better start
cooperating, like. I’m doing my best to fight your corner here. But if the truth be told, you ain’t helpin’ much. Only fing in your favour with Fergal is you helping us out wiv a
few small fings. But that ain’t enough no more. And I been trying to offer you a way out. I gave you a choice, on a plate, like, but you turned your nose up. Bent over backwards, I have,
since you been here, but we ain’t got no time for passengers no more. Patience is all used up wiv them that don’t do what they are here for.’

‘I’m not here for anything. I rented a room. And if you thought I’d be a . . . a whore because I rented a room off you, then you were mistaken. Very much so.’

‘None a that, eh? And keep your voice down, yeah? I shouldn’t even be talking to you. Decision’s been made. Time for discussion is over. You saw what he done to that floor. Be
fankful it weren’t somefing else, like.’

‘You can’t make me. I won’t. I won’t do it.’

‘Make you? No one is trying to make you do nuffin’. You knew what the score was, so why didn’t you fuck off, like? Like Fergal said, you was tempted. You was finkin’
about it. So we is just helping you wiv your choice, like. Bennet . . .’ Knacker held back, as though he’d just let slip the first word of a secret while justifying his odious
coercion.

Stephanie loosened the knife inside her pocket. ‘I wasn’t tempted by anything. I don’t have any bloody money because you kept my deposit. That is the only reason I am still
here. I was trying to get enough money together to get out and you know it. But you thought I was some kind of dumb teenager who’d fall for your bullshit and become a slag. And now
you’re keeping me prisoner—’

‘Prisoner? Hold on a minute—’

‘Then what’s this? Locking me in this dirty room—’

‘Ain’t that bad—’

They’d begun to talk over each other in tight, breathless voices. Why was she bothering? He was a liar, a pimp, he’d assaulted her, and even now he could not stop twisting everything
she said. She was never getting out.

Her thoughts sped up; she thought as quickly as she could of motives, horrible eventualities, possibilities, ideas . . . anything she could do to free herself.

The knife.

‘You won’t get away with it. People know I am here. What do you think is going to happen? Have you thought about that? No good telling yourself you’re in control and that
it’s all going to work out. That your bills will get paid and that I’ll become a whore and start earning money for you, so you can buy trainers and skunk weed. I mean, are you fucking
stupid?’

Knacker took two steps inside the room, at her.

Stephanie stared at the dried blood on his shoes. ‘You come near me again and I’ll fucking kill you!’

‘That a fact?’

‘You bloody hit me. Hit me!’

‘Then you should have been quicker wiv them keys, like.’

‘You stole my phone. My money. Locked me in here. It’s all stacking up against you. But you weren’t quick enough. Yeah? Yeah? Because help is on its way, you piece of
shit!’

Knacker stepped away from her and seized the door handle. His eyes had lidded and he’d thrown his head back so she could just catch a thin gleam of the reptilian pupils and also see inside
his big nostrils. He was shocked because he hadn’t expected this from her.

‘Margaret’s dead, isn’t she? That psychopath killed her.’

As she spoke the girl’s name, she sensed an immediate increase in his indecision, his torment, the endless mental wrangling beneath the curly hair and behind that bony and big-lipped
façade of a face. He was scared of Fergal too, maybe more than he was of getting caught. She could sense it, because Knacker wasn’t as far gone as his cousin, hadn’t quite left
humanity in the same way. And his partner in crime, his muscle, had done something to unsettle the creature before her. She could smell the fear on him, under the aftershave.

‘How many? How many has he killed?’

‘What you talking about?’

‘Here. In this house. I’ve heard them. Seen them. You know I have. Maybe you have too.’

Knacker looked puzzled. It seemed genuine.

‘The girls. The girls in these rooms. They’re dead. But they’re still here.’

‘You is cracked. Fucking cracked. Here’s you talking about psychos. Have a look in that mirror, girl. You is making my skin crawl. Saying these fings about my muvver’s house.
What’s a matter wiv you, yeah? I give you a place to live. Try and help you out wiv some quick cash—’