The Devil's Staircase (12 page)

As he quickly concealed the secret door with cans of magnolia eggshell and matt, he wondered if he would have the stomach to visit her again.

Bayswater was turning out to be the perfect place – vigorous youth all round, in the hostels, the bars, the park, the leisure centre down the road. He was so excited by what was on offer that he almost managed to forget all about this last mistake, this thing who had a life and people who were looking for her. He could do that, couldn’t he? Ignore the sick feeling, drown it with a glass of cider? Start over again, with that one in the netball skirt perhaps?

Then one evening, after walking back from the park, he noticed someone fiddling about at the doorway. He watched from behind a tree as the girls ran inside giggling. Shit. They’d gone in. He watched as they went out again, then carried mattresses and junk back in through the front door. Shit. He felt desperately ill. They’d moved into the house. He took stock. She was underneath. The cupboard was locked and the door well disguised.

But shit. The place had been empty for months, and they had to pick
now
to take it over. He gulped nervously as he watched, wondering what it meant for him. Could he stop them? What could he do? He was always so careful, so thorough, and this was a terrible snag. He would have to sort it out, that much was for sure. The question was:
How?

Celia woke when she heard the footsteps. Light and darkness had come and gone. Terror, pain, boredom and anger had consumed the slow minutes. He’d not visited for a long time, she wasn’t sure how long, but it was long enough to allow her to move more than she’d managed before. She’d been beaten badly and had a fractured finger and cuts and bruises all over but she kept her focus – think about escape, nothing else. In his anger and frustration at her attempt to run away, he’d done a poor job of tying her up. While her gag was as secure as before, her hands were in front of her now, tied together but not to the chair, and her legs felt a little looser. Most importantly, the chair was no longer chained to the metal ring in the middle of the room and could be moved an inch at a time if she zigzagged carefully.

Her first expedition was to the drainpipe adjacent to the grate. The pipe was leaking a bit and she desperately needed water. She’d learned at college about dehydration and starvation, and knew how long she had: about twenty days without food, three or four without water. She was naked except for her necklace. Her gag was still secure, and it was driving her crazy. The lack of water had made her lips crack, her tongue swell, and she felt like vomiting. She knew if she did vomit she would die, choke on it and die, so she moved inch by inch over to the drainpipe and held her mouth against the dripping metal. It took almost an hour to soak the gag, but eventually it was sodden and she sighed with relief as she sucked the cloth to wet her mouth. She had bought herself some time.

Her second expedition was to get out of the room and into the small hall. The room she’d been trapped in didn’t have a door, but a piece of wood was still hammered into the ground where the door once was, and it took about four attempts before she managed to bump the chair legs over it.

The hall was about five feet square, with a staircase at one end, her doorless room to the right of it, and a locked door to the left. She couldn’t get up the stairs in her chair, or into the second room, and otherwise the hall was completely empty. The expedition proved fruitless and the hall stank even more than her shit, so she moved back into the room she now thought of as
her
room.

Her next project was to saw through her hand ties using the corner of the metal table that had the lamp on it. She was making her way towards the table when she heard the noise upstairs. Assuming it was him, she straightened herself and looked back towards the staircase. Funny, she almost wanted to see him. He might take the gag off to feed and water her, like in the good old days.

But he didn’t come down the stairs. And the footsteps got louder. And there was more than one set of them. There was laughter, squealing, the moving of furniture.

A frenzy of activity overtook her. A party was going on somewhere in the house – there were many voices, loud music. She rocked the chair from side to side, banged her head against the drainpipe, moved over to the table and pushed it with her chair to make a loud scraping noise. But the party upstairs was so loud that no one could hear her. She banged her head against the wall . . . and knocked herself out.

When she woke it was light and quiet. She cried waterless tears. Her focus was weakening. She slept.

It was dark again and the voices were muffled and distant. She soaked and sucked from her gag and waited for the right moment. She could hear someone entering the room above her, moving around, going quiet, talking to herself, alone. It had to be her bedroom.

Celia scraped her chair along the ground. Then she scraped it back again. She could hear someone getting up, walking across the floorboards directly above her head. Celia followed the shuddering boards with her desperate eyes. A door above creaked open. Feet left the room; floorboards stopped shuddering. Celia’s eyes flickered from side to side. Where had they gone? Had they heard? Were they coming down to save her?

The footsteps returned to the room and it went quiet again. She hadn’t heard.

Celia realised she would have to redouble her efforts. She rocked her chair from front to back, again and again, and after three or four hefty sways, the chair toppled forwards with a loud bang.

With her forehead bleeding onto the ground, Celia listened. Had the girl heard this time?

She had heard! She was getting up, walking over to the door, saying something. Celia held her breath and waited. A man’s voice. The girl’s voice. Then silence. Silence.

All night.

It hadn’t worked. Not only that, but now she was on the floor and no matter how hard she tried, it was impossible to move.

Celia lay in that position for two days.

It wasn’t so hard in the end. Just had to keep an eye on the place, wait for the familiar faces to get out of the way for a while, or at least out of hearing distance, then go in, just as before. He was surprised how easy it was. The residents were noisy dope smokers, stoned and/or pissed most of the time. Their hygiene was, on the whole, pretty poor, so no one seemed to have heard or smelt anything. No one had the foggiest.

The hardest thing was finding the motivation and he only managed because he realised it would be easier to get her out sooner rather than later. She could go the way he did, walking, and he could take her somewhere else then think about what to do.

When he arrived he was angry with her. For getting as bad as this. She was on the floor again, stinking and bleeding all over.

‘Fucking hell!’ he’d snarled as quietly as he could after he turned on the light.

He kicked her, untied her till she flopped into a silent brown puddle on the ground, then slowly poured over her the bucket of water he’d brought with him. He towelled her down until she looked something like a woman again.

He’d never been very good in bed, never quite knew how to get it going, and he wondered if anger might do the job. He was furious.

But he wasn’t sure how to position himself. At first he laid her spread-eagled on her back on the ground. Her eyes were open but dead-looking, her mouth still gagged. She closed her eyes when he told her to, and then he undressed and lay on top of her for some time before realising that this just wasn’t going to work. He needed to get the anger back.

He made her stand up. ‘Fight me!’ he said.

She did as she was told, slapping him on the chest, without conviction.

He punched her in the face and told her to do it again, which she did. She hit him twice, with conviction. He turned her around, made her put her hands on the back of the chair and spread her legs, but it still didn’t work.

He sat on the chair and asked her to straddle him.

No good.

Against the wall, two hands on her throat. This made her struggle and wriggle, which made him angrier and angrier. He pushed up into her.

‘Oh God, you’re a lazy cow!’ he’d said afterwards, throwing her to the ground. He was revolted by the whole thing, so much so that he decided to put off taking her out. He rushed to get out of there, away from the repulsive stink. He tied her as quickly as he could, crept up the stairs, opened the hidden cupboard door, quietly locked and concealed it with the paint and wallpaper, and crept out into the hallway.

As much as Celia had hated it, the rape had seemed almost irrelevant. She’d long lost possession of her body, had separated her mind from it, so when he’d managed the hardness and lifted her against the wall to thrust while panting into her nose, she’d hardly flinched. This was not her. She was somewhere else altogether.

And on the bright side, the fucking had made him sloppy. While his knots were as neat and professional as before, he’d tied her hands together less tightly, and in front of her again. He hadn’t padlocked the chair to the floor. He’d tied her feet less securely, so she could wriggle them wildly and zigzag the chair freely. As for the rope around her torso, it was pathetic. There was about an inch of movement between her back and the back of the chair.

After he’d crept back upstairs, a positive feeling overwhelmed her. With moving fingers, wriggling toes, a padlock, and a bicycle chain, the world was her oyster.

Celia split the days into sections. On her first shift she rubbed the ropes in the hope of weakening them. They were about a quarter of an inch thick, made of white nylon . . . and unyielding. Celia rubbed as much as she could with her hands and legs, pressing against wall, chair, pipe, table, but the knots were steadfast, and the ropes appeared to be completely resistant to abrasion and stretching.

Her second shift involved trying to climb the stairs while still in her chair. She positioned herself at the bottom step and knocked herself forwards so that her chin landed on the third step. She then tried to get her knees onto the first step in order to edge her way upwards, using chin and knees, one step at a time. In the end, getting out of that initial position became her primary goal, because the plan was a hopeless one.

During the third shift she banged at the walls with her fists and if her fists got too sore she used her forehead hoping that someone, anyone, would hear – one of the new residents upstairs, a passer-by perhaps, someone taking the rubbish out, a neighbour getting storage from the adjacent basement . . . anyone.

The fourth shift she used the padlock to chip around the lock of the door in the hall.

Her fifth: she used the padlock arch to pull at her ropes and gag.

Sixth: bang the bicycle chain against the floor.

Seven, suck at the wet gag.

But her rope ties and her mouth gag would not budge, the locked door would not open, the stairs were insurmountable and there seemed to be no one within hearing distance, no one listening.