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“Well,” I said, “look at it this way. Some collectors are only interested in things that are like new, factory fresh, mint in the box. If something looks like it’s had a life before they got their hands on it, it loses its value. But then, other people believe that an object’s worth more if it’s been used for whatever it was designed for, so a stamp should have been stuck to an envelope and posted to somewhere a long way away, and a comic book is meant to be read and enjoyed, not sealed in a protective case and never opened, and an old racing car should be scuffed and grimy and—” with no particular emphasis “—scarred. And it’s the same with people. How much time do you think you’d want to spend with Barbie and Ken? Anodyne, by definition, is not entertaining.”

She gave a tight nod and handed me my plums. “So,” she said, slapping her totalizer and twisting the display for me to survey the damage, “what exactly is it that
you
collect? I mean, apart from frozen fish.”

I shan’t repeat what I said. Suffice it to say the ensuing silence was awkward enough that I might as well have just told her the truth.

It was on the dot of 6:00 a.m. that I wearily slammed the door of the Transit, remote-locked the garage and hauled my half-dozen bags of flora and fish into the house. The melodic, almost hypnotic sound of Caroline/Rachel’s voice still rang in my ears, our conversation looping over and over in my head. I knew nothing of her, and yet somehow I knew everything I needed to know. I knew the conversation wasn’t over.

An unprecedented calm enveloped me as I made space in the pantry freezer, between the joints of topside beef and the waitress from the Hungry Horse.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

I cooked a late breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, picturing Caroline-or-possibly-Rachel passing me each ingredient and implement as I needed it. I presented the result to Erica with a steaming cup of fresh coffee. She threw it at me.

Having chained her to the floor and cleaned up the mess, I brought her a sealed box of Rice Krispies and an unopened carton of milk. She threw those at me, too. Since no contents were spilled, however, I chose to leave them where they fell. I laid a plastic bowl and spoon beside them on the mat and left her to it.

I gave her an hour to sort herself out, then returned to the garage to fetch the hooker from the van. Naturally, she’d remained where I’d left her, slung hammock-like from the roof; secured with four-inch nylon webbing and suspended, spreadeagled, five feet from the floor, there was little chance of her wriggling free. What did surprise me, though, was that she’d managed to fall asleep. She didn’t even stir as I blindfolded her, and it wasn’t until I’d released her extremities and stood her upright that she began to flail and scratch like a cat in a bath. Needless to say, she no longer wanted to go anywhere quiet with me, and I literally had to throw her down the stairs.

Erica regarded her new cellmate with a mixture of elation and disdain. Whilst a problem shared is a problem halved, she clearly wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of sharing hers with a bleeding, screeching harridan.

The hooker had told me that her name was Kerry. Then again, she’d told me that she was clean in every respect, where both her profession and her trackmarks suggested otherwise.

I’d picked her up a mile from Jeremy’s house on a foolish and immediately regrettable impulse fueled by raw adrenaline and the sheer bloody-minded need to catch something, so to speak. She’d directed me to a remote riverside picnic area on the south side of the city, and had been only too eager to jump into the back of the van, the false promise of mattresses and pillows offering a welcome relief from the repeated prod of a gear lever in the sternum.

Until that point, this, in a nutshell, was the reason I never interfere with ladies of the night: it’s just too damn easy. It’s a game for impotents and bed-wetters. These women queue up to get in the car with you, for Christ’s sake. They actually
expect
you to take them somewhere dark. That they exercise free will in putting themselves in harm’s way only makes obligingly slaughtering them all the more cowardly.

And as if that wasn’t reason enough to rue my lack of self-control, Kerry was about to give me a couple more to think about.

In her first few minutes in the cage, Kerry, despite the removal of her blindfold, seemed unaware of Erica’s presence. She flung herself at the door, screaming unintelligibly as she clawed at the mesh. As she ran simultaneously out of breath and fingernails, she began wailing that her children were home alone and that the electricity meter was empty. I suggested that had Kerry considered her parental responsibilities the night before, rather than offering to fellate me in a car park, their collective predicament might have been avoided.

Erica, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. She sat cross-legged on the bed watching this leather-skirted animal, knees skinned and blood dripping from its fingertips, howling and spitting at its captor just inches away on the other side of the door. “You bastard,” she said, simply.

Kerry whirled around then, threw herself off balance. She scrabbled on all fours to the corner of the cage and curled herself into a tight ball, fixing Erica with a petrified stare.

“What are you, starting a fucking zoo?” Erica’s face was a picture of self-righteous indignation as she jabbed an angry thumb toward the sobbing, fetal prostitute. “You can’t be fucking serious, surely?”

Not fully understanding the question, I chose not to answer.

At 6:00 p.m. I returned to the basement with two plates of tuna and pasta bake. The hooker appeared not to have moved from her corner; she merely continued to tremble and heave.

Erica had returned to the bed, where she lay silently gazing at the cage roof as I laid her dinner on the floor beside her.

“I’m not eating that,” she said.

This did not surprise me. “What’s the matter now, you don’t eat fish?”

“Of course I eat fish. I’m just not eating anything you’ve made.”

“Great, so now it’s no meat and nothing cooked, is that it?”

“Who said anything about meat?”

“You did, yesterday.”

“No.” She sighed. “What I meant was, I’m not eating any meat
you’ve
given me. And, yeah, I do prefer my dinner cooked. I just don’t want it cooked by you. I know your sort.”

Charming, debonair, handsome? Probably not what she meant. “Have you got any idea of the effort I went to last night to make sure you were catered for? And now what, you want me to hire you a chef? What do you think this is, the Savoy?”

“You could always just let me starve,” she said. “And yes, I can clearly see the kind of effort you went to last night, and I’m far from fucking impressed.” Her eyes never left the ceiling.

Erica hadn’t thrown her pasta bake at me, but by the following morning she hadn’t eaten it, either. To all appearances, she hadn’t moved from the bed.

Kerry was a different picture. She’d managed to piss herself three feet from the toilet, and had clearly stood in the resultant puddle. She was still pacing back and forth, leaving dirty wet footprints, when I got there. It took the threat of severed fingers to persuade her to mop.

In the evening, with Erica having eaten nothing more substantial than Rice Krispies since her arrival, I took the microwave oven from my kitchen and delivered it to her downstairs. Since I’d used the thing only twice in the three years I’d owned it, this seemed the simplest option if I wasn’t to be stuck with a weak and starving Erica.

I found them huddled together this time; Erica draped protectively over the hooker, shushing and stroking her hair as she lay curled on the mat, shuddering from head to toe. Kerry’s babbling was only barely coherent and preoccupied with her need for some “stuff.” Her domestic situation seemed all but forgotten.

Not wishing to interrupt such a tender moment, I left them a pair of microwave mushroom stroganoffs and went to run a bath.

By Monday evening, there were clear signs of disharmony.

The junkie still had not stopped wailing, and had taken to writhing on the rubber floor like a snake with an ache. The perspiration poured from her, and she wiped it across the mat with her arms and legs, leaving an impression that could only be described as a sweat angel.

Erica had taken to pacing now, teeth clenched, arms wrapped tightly around herself as she circled the cage. She turned to face me as I entered, the hatred in her eyes replaced with a look of haunted despair. “You need to get her out of here,” she pleaded. “She’s sick, and she needs a doctor, and this noise is doing my fucking head in.” She jabbed an accusatory finger then; as a gesture from Erica this was not unremarkable, though its direction of travel raised at least one of my eyebrows. She aimed it not at me, but at the wriggling whore on the floor.

I could see her point. I only had to see Kerry for minutes at a time, and she was already getting on
my
nerves. It was, however, only a temporary annoyance. “She’ll be out of here by the weekend,” I promised.

“The weekend?” Erica regarded me somewhat incredulously. “Are you taking the piss? Do you think I have any idea what fucking day it is today? I don’t know whether I’ve been here a day, a week or a fucking month. I don’t even know how long
she’s
been here. What the fuck does
the weekend
mean?”

Ah, what the hell. “Well, today is fucking Monday and it’s just gone ten past six in the fucking evening. That fucking irritating creature will be out of your fucking hair by ten o’clock on Saturday fucking morning. Provided you tone down your fucking language, which is starting to wear a little bit fucking thin.”

Predictably, she told me to go fuck myself.

I’d purposely built the basement under the garage rather than the house so that I wouldn’t feel compelled to run down and check it out during every ad break. I like to keep a little distance between rest and recreation. I did, however, find the developing situation strangely fascinating, and so on Tuesday I nipped into town and purchased a closed-circuit television camera.

Erica had reverted to gently rocking the shivering hooker when I set about installing the camera above the basement door. “Why are you doing that?” she asked as I wobbled atop my stepladder, up to my elbows in power cord and co-ax.

“So I can keep an eye on you and make sure you’re all right,” I explained.

“Oh, right, like you care.” She scowled. “What, you’re not violating our human rights enough so you’ve got to watch us on the toilet now, as well, right?”

It actually hadn’t crossed my mind. “Erica, I have no interest in watching either one of you on the toilet. And if I did, I’d get a much better view if I just stood in there with you so, all things considered, I wouldn’t concern myself too much with that if I were you.”

“Where’s Kerry going at the weekend?”

“That’s none of your business. If Kerry wants to know, Kerry can ask me when she’s stopped dribbling like a baby.”

“What are you going to do to her?”

“Look...” The four screws I was holding between my inturned lips fell out, plink-plinking down each step of the ladder and scattering across the floor. “Shit, now look what you’ve done.”

“How did I do that? I’m over here, locked in this fucking cage.”

I allowed my diminishing patience to show across my face. “Erica, is there anything else I can do for you?”

She seemed to take the hint. She looked around her for a moment or two, deep in thought, before her eyes settled on the quivering wreck in her arms. “Yes,” she finally replied. “We could really do with some soap.”

It took me until just past one in the morning to install the cable, which had necessitated among other things the drilling and filling of two walls and a ceiling. By the time I’d figured out how to feed the signal into the television, it was almost two o’clock and, unsurprisingly, both subjects were asleep. Erica had not yet lowered herself to sharing the bed, and was tucked up most cozily. She had, however, managed to throw Kerry a blanket.

I tuned in over breakfast on Wednesday to find them both awake. I got the distinct impression from Erica’s demeanor that the hooker’s cold turkey had been first to rise. There was no conversation, no sound at all but for a soft, breathy whimper. After three minutes of inactivity Erica rolled off the bed and approached the toilet, whereupon she turned around and glared up into the camera. She gave it a dismissive wave, pointed at the bowl and stagily covered her eyes before taking a step back and hooking her thumbs over the top of her knickers. I flicked over to the BBC breakfast program and ate my toast.

By Wednesday evening, the cuddling and the rocking were history. After refusing a dinner of mushroom tagliatelle, Erica returned to bed to stare silently at the ceiling, while the junkie threw up and paced around the cage, clawing at her own arms with her broken nails. This made for uninspiring viewing, and I soon turned my attention to the sudoku in the newspaper. My glances at the screen became increasingly infrequent, and by ten o’clock I was reaching for the remote, rueing the time and money wasted on such a poor source of entertainment. And right then, swallowing a yawn with my finger poised over the off button, I witnessed a moment that, somehow, I sensed would come back to haunt me.

Unmoving, unblinking, she spoke so calmly and softly that mere seconds earlier, for better or worse, I would have heard only the rustling of my newspaper. “Bitch,” she said, “if you don’t sit down and shut up in the next five seconds, I will come over there and I will fucking kill you.”

Erica had begun to unravel.

* * *

On Thursday at 06:23, Erica graciously prepared her cellmate a bowl of cereal, using the fresh milk I’d provided. Kerry was lethargic and unresponsive, and at 06:46 had to be spoon-fed.

At 09:42, Kerry collapsed into a bout of uncontrollable shuddering accompanied by loud, breathless sobs. Erica wasted no time in slapping her violently across the face and demanding that she pull herself together.

At 13:39, the event was repeated, though this time one slap became two and set off a period of intense wailing. After twelve minutes, the hooker was silenced with a swift kick to the abdomen.

At 13:59, Erica sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands and silently wept for seven minutes, before letting herself down with, “Kerry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Which just made Kerry cry harder.

At 18:02, after an uneventful afternoon, I entered the basement and was greeted with the now-standard scene: Erica horizontal and staring, Kerry bunched up in a twitchy little ball. Neither spoke a word to me.

Thursday evening passed without further incident, and both Erica and Kerry were sound asleep by ten. With the dawn on Friday, however, came a perplexing turn of events. The hysterical hooker failed to wake up.

In her place come 6:00 a.m. was a quiet, still, steely-eyed bird of prey. She sat on her haunches against the side of the cage, silently watching Erica as she murmured and stirred, rolled slowly out of bed and headed straight for the toilet. I buttered my toast.

Erica regarded Kerry through sleepy eyes and paused only for a split second before shrugging to herself and snatching up the cereal packet. “Where’s your bowl?” she yawned.

“I’ve already eaten.”

The flat, aggressive tone made her pause longer this time. Finally, she moved to Kerry’s side, knelt down beside her, leaned in just a little too close. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked with what at least sounded like genuine concern. “You look a little bit...odd.”