No One Gets Out Alive (29 page)

‘She don’t half make you repeat yourself, don’t she?’ Fergal began to unscrew the cap of the bottle. ‘So who else you told about this place.’

Stephanie pulled her legs further up the bed. She swallowed to find her voice. ‘No one. Just him’

‘That right?’

They were going to kill her. Curiously, she entertained the thought dispassionately. But even though her imminent death was becoming a fact, she would choose their punching fists and stamping
feet over acid thrown into her face. ‘He was just bringing me a deposit. For a new room.’

Fergal patted the pocket of his jacket. ‘He certainly did. And every little helps.’

The idea of Ryan’s money inside Fergal’s pocket – hard-earned money he had brought down to Birmingham so that she could escape from the house – stung her more than the
thought of them being in possession of a toy she might have treasured as a child. Despite what she had read in the news, or studied in a criminology module of her psychology A Level, or even seen
on television, she realized she had never fully understood just how base and cruel people like the McGuires actually were. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for them, not even her
stepmother.

‘So who else might your boyfriend have told about his little visit?’

‘I don’t know.’

Fergal unscrewed the bottle cap one full turn. ‘Fink harder.’

‘He’s . . . he’s not my boyfriend. Not any more. He lives with another girl now.’

‘My heart is breaking.’

‘He wouldn’t have told her anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because his girlfriend wouldn’t want him seeing an ex.’ She wished she were lying, but realized she wasn’t.

‘Not some slag he used to fuck. I can understand that. And your mum can’t stand the sight of you. Mine was the same. Your dad snuffed it. We got that in common too. Who else knows
you is here?’

‘Bank. Temping agency,’ she said before thinking it through, and immediately saw that they both believed her lie with a reluctance that caused them great displeasure.

‘Yeah,’ Knacker said. ‘She’s been giving out these food samples and all, but ain’t had no work for a while.’

Fergal turned his head to Knacker. He was showing all of his teeth and Stephanie was glad he was not showing
that
face to her. ‘Anyone ever tell you, Knacker, that you is a
useless twat? Eh? That can’t get nuffin’ right? Not never since I known you? I fink back to that day they put you in wiv me and Bennet, at the Scrubs, and I fink listening to you was
the worst mistake I ever made. Now, what are we gonna do about this situation?’ The question was intoned rhetorically because Fergal had already arrived at a decision.

It was just as well because Knacker didn’t offer an answer; he just stared at Stephanie in silence. And she knew that Knacker wanted Fergal to do something unpleasant, an act Knacker
didn’t have the stomach for and wouldn’t take part in. He didn’t care about how it was done, as long as he didn’t have to do it.

She was a witness to Margaret and Ryan.

If the two men were caught, she could already hear Knacker’s wheedling voice, and see the tears in his big, doleful eyes as he told the police how Fergal had killed Margaret, Ryan, her, no
doubt Svetlana too by then, and however many other women Fergal had murdered under this roof: ‘Nuffin’ to do wiv me, like. I was scared for me own life. Fought it was gonna be me next,
yeah? Swear on me muvver’s life.’

She felt like she was stuck in some horrible dream in which she was taunted with a vision of the next scene before it happened. She only wished she could live long enough to watch Fergal kill
Knacker; she knew there was a distinct possibility of that happening. Taking lives for expediency, or as the consequences of blind rage or insanity, was becoming commonplace, and seemed to have
long been normalized at 82 Edgehill Road.

She doubted Fergal had any illusions about his partner’s character either. And after his comment about meeting Knacker in what she assumed was a prison cell, in something they called the
Scrubs, she now doubted there was even a blood tie between them. A cover story and another lie. She didn’t even know their real names.

‘Only one fing for it at this stage of the game,’ Fergal said.

Knacker raised his eyebrows.

Fergal grinned at Stephanie. ‘Black Maggie. Black Maggie’s got business wiv her. Bennet’s right. Has been all along. So she’s going in. Down there. It’s where they
all end up anyway. And Maggie will want her. Bennet says she never says no to a bit of company.’

Stephanie walked through the dark house between the two men. Fergal led the procession at an eager pace, Knacker following with less enthusiasm and a limp. She could hear him
sniffing behind her, as if to clear the situation out of his nose and start over.
No harm done, like.
All she could feel was a relief she knew would be temporary, but at least the cap had
stayed on the bottle of acid, and they hadn’t repeated their performance on the garden patio. Not yet anyway.

Stephanie could only guess at Bennet’s relationship with Knacker and Fergal. But if Bennet had been put
inside
a certain place as punishment, within this building, and if she was
going to be put inside the same place so they could remove an inconvenience, then the destination she was being led to was as welcoming as the gallows.

She suspected the unseen occupants of the house had fallen into a hushed and expectant silence, like a crowd of shocked spectators with mouths agape because they knew all about the destination
of the condemned. Because that is what Fergal had just done: sentenced and damned her. ‘They all end up in there anyway. Down there.’ So maybe the other women, the ones she heard at
night, had been put inside a special place inside the house. And those that had died there had somehow
survived.

Hints and subtexts, it was all she had to go on – all she ever had to go on in this house. If things were not clear from the outset in a situation that a person had any doubts about, that
person should just start running. Nothing was worth the risk of this. She knew that now. But the penny had dropped too late for her.

Her mind drifted to a memory of Fergal’s long silhouette bowed, as if in worship, outside the solitary interior door of the ground floor. Because that was where she was going. To meet
whatever occupied the locked rooms in the lowest level of the house; whatever had obsessed Fergal and made him stand alone in the musty darkness, as if he were waiting for a sign, or listening to
instructions from
it
or Bennet, from the other side of that door.

We’s all got our little quirks, like.

The door had opened the day Margaret was killed; the day there was no going back for anyone.

Black Maggie.

Stephanie kept her face turned away from the stairwell window to avoid a glimpse of the freshly stained garden patio. The innards of the house suggested the structure was more active now too;
silent, but humming with an unwelcome energy. Was it her imagination or had the death of youth awoken the site from slumber? She believed she had been trapped inside the house’s dreams, but
now prayed that she would never have to bear its fully awoken consciousness. She wondered if anyone ever got out of this building alive.

Stephanie stopped on the first floor landing and closed her eyes until the worst of the feeling of dread and vertigo passed. She would do anything to be back inside her old room there, even with
the hole burned through the floor.

You will never leave here.

She would become one of
them.
An unrecorded death. A trace of someone who sobbed through the night and muttered from behind a poorly decorated wall; one of
them
who murmured
from the floor, or paced the wretched passages of the house, cold and lonely and looking for companionship.

‘Oh, God.’

Fergal stopped and turned to confront her. ‘He ain’t here no more.’ His face was expressionless, but his eyes were alive with what could have been excitement tinged with awe,
or even terror.

He eventually smiled in acknowledgement that she must have fully grasped the enormity of what she was about to experience and endure, but would never walk away from, not in any physical sense.
Fergal was proud of his role as facilitator. She suspected the cousins might be middle men for something that one of them denied the existence of, and the other didn’t fully understand.

Stephanie’s face screwed up for tears that never came because she was too frightened to cry. She clutched her hands to her cheeks, then placed one hand on the banister rail before she
fell. ‘I’m not . . . No . . . I’m not . . . I won’t leave.’ She wasn’t sure who she was even speaking to.

An eternal sorrow. A freezing forever. Perpetually trapped, lost, and only feared if discovered.

It never ends.

‘What . . . will I be?’

Would she remember anything, or only bits of things? Would she shiver and repeat herself in the darkness, always wanting to wake while being unable to rouse? Would there be some sense of will
and volition in an endless entrapment? Would only her final state of terror transfer into the cold infinity?

Bennet. Bennet the rapist still followed his nature.
So who was she? What was she now? She was terror, grief, despair and confusion.
Just like the other women.
Was that to be
her sentence?
Forever.

Stephanie turned around and tried to run back up the stairs to the second floor. Knacker caught her in his arms like a deceitful saviour. Fergal came up quickly from behind and slipped long
fingers through Stephanie’s hair. His hand became a vice to hold her head steady. His terrible breath puffed about her face. ‘You belong to the Maggie, bitch. We’re all hers
here.’

From the dim grey light of the long hallway she’d passed into complete darkness. Keeping her back pressed into the wood, Stephanie stood with her palms flat against the wrong side of the
door, afraid to leave her access point in case she never found it again. The painted wood moistened with perspiration seeping from her fingertips.

It took several minutes for her to overcome the panic that wanted to become hysteria after they’d locked the door. Her next instinct was to find the nearest light switch. In response, her
fingers crawled around the edge of the doorway like insects. A switch should be near the door she had come in through, but no matter how far her hands roamed she could not find one.

She must find a window and break it. From outside the front of the property she’d seen metal bars over closed black curtains on the ground floor windows, so she wouldn’t be able to
climb out that way, but maybe the rear windows were not barred, or maybe she could scream through shattered glass at the front. Not even the McGuires seemed keen on coming inside here, and she
could make a lot of noise before they were forced to silence her.

Or was breaking a window too easy? She doubted they would have shut her inside the place if there was any chance of her attracting attention by smashing glass and calling to people outside the
property.
Calling out to that empty, wet, sullen street.

And she was situated on the garden side of the house. To get to the street-facing end of the building she would need to move some distance to her right, in total darkness.

So what happens now?

Without her eyes she extended her hearing into the void.

Maggie.
What was this Maggie? Fergal had called it Black Maggie.

Beyond the door, in the hallway outside, Knacker broke her train of thought when he said, ‘Gonna check on Svetlana.’

Fergal never answered. She imagined him leaning into the door, his forehead no more than an inch from the back of her head, while the wood separated two minds and a whole lot of mutual
loathing.

‘Right then, I’m off,’ Knacker added cautiously, as if he were asking to be dismissed. The squeak of his trainers, defined by the limp, passed from the door and along the
hallway outside.

‘Oi!’ Fergal barked. His voice was dulled by wood but still so close to her head that Stephanie wondered if he was talking to her through the door. ‘You ain’t cleaned up
yet.’

Knacker’s footsteps ceased. Stephanie knew what Fergal was referring to.

‘I fought Svetlana could pitch in, like.’

‘You fought wrong cus you is a wanker. Get the rest of it cleaned up before the first punter arrives. I don’t want some perv freaking out if he treads on a toof. I seen one at the
bottom of the stairs.’

And Stephanie had too. One of Ryan’s teeth had been smashed out of his mouth. She’d seen it for no more than a second before she’d shut her eyes and allowed Knacker to lead her
to the door that Fergal had just unlocked and pushed her through.

‘Get all that claret up too, in the entry. He was dripping everywhere.’

‘He definitely snuffed it?’

‘I should hope so. You seen his fucking head?’

‘Where is he, like?’

‘Under the mattress.’

‘What we gonna do wiv him?’

Stephanie clenched her jaw, pulled at her hair. A low keening sound of impotent rage vibrated against her sternum until she cut it off.

‘What is
you
gonna do wiv him? Polyfene. In the kitchen. That’s what Bennet used. Get him wrapped up nice and snug then start digging behind that tree when it gets
dark.’

They were going to bury Ryan in plastic and drop him into an unmarked grave. A sob broke from Stephanie’s mouth, which stayed open as if to implore the darkness for mercy. Tears bitter
from a mourning still unripe, and from frustration that felt like a cancer, and rage that ulcerated her stomach, made her whole body tremble.

She stifled her torment. In case
something
heard her desolation.

‘I got fings to do,’ Knacker said from beyond the door that Stephanie had fused her body into. ‘People coming, like.’

Fergal’s voice quietened as he moved his head to speak to Knacker. ‘You piss me off anymore today and I swear Svetlana will be sweeping up your fucking teef. Yeah? Yeah?’