No One Gets Out Alive (34 page)

Fergal nodded at Knacker, who approached her warily, then dropped to his knees and cuffed her left ankle. He extended the chain to the bed frame, raised the mattress and closed the second cuff
around a metal strut that ran across the width of the bedframe. Glaring like a sullen child, Knacker removed the tiny keys from the locks on the cuffs and slipped them into his pocket.

‘Next time you need a piss,’ Fergal said to Stephanie, his face split by a grin, ‘piss in that.’ He dragged the saucepan by the handle and left it beside her legs.
‘I fink we run out of polyfene,’ he said through a smile. They must have used up the last roll on Margaret and Ryan. ‘I’m gonna go fetch some from that raghead
shop.’

‘You going out? That wise?’

‘You!’ Ignoring Knacker’s misgivings, Fergal jabbed a grimy index finger at his confederate’s face. ‘Watch her wiv your life, yeah?’

Fergal stalked from the room. She listened to his footsteps pound away, along the corridor to the staircase, and then heard them boom-creak down a flight of stairs.

Knacker looked at the underwear, clothes and shoes piled on top of the bed, and with such dismay it was like he was surveying the wreckage of a life’s work, hopes and dreams after a stock
market crash.

Eventually he broke his grim silence. ‘I fink you know what he’s fetching polyfene for, eh? I fink you know. You could’ve had it so good too. And Svetlana. And Margaret. I
liked her.’ He looked wistful at this mention of the late Margaret, and Stephanie wanted him dead with such an urgency she had to grit her teeth to suppress a scream of animal rage.

Knacker strolled across the room, checked the corridor outside to make sure Fergal had gone. He stared into the dim, ugly building until he heard the front door close in the distance. He turned
around and sauntered back to the bed, sniffing. He sat down a few feet away from Stephanie, out of her reach, and retrieved the bottle of acid from his jacket pocket and placed it on the bed beside
his hip. Played with the lid with one idle finger, his lips pursed. ‘Don’t got much to say for yourself no more, has you? You know he’s gonna do the uvver one too, like. Svetlana.
That ain’t right. Your fella was askin’ for it. That’s fair. But the girls. That’s bang out of order, like. They was good earners. They never hurt no one.’

Maybe this was a late appeal for her sympathy. While he explained that the murder of Stephanie’s innocent boyfriend was justified, perhaps Knacker was trying to come back over to her side
by showing his compassion for a girl who had been beaten to death and another who was currently tied to a bed upstairs so she could be raped by strangers.
Even after all that, I still have a
heart, like.
Stephanie swallowed at her fury, but it just kept boiling back up her gullet.

‘He sleeps wiv his eyes open,’ Knacker said, as if the thought had just drifted through his mind.

She could see Knacker’s face in the mirrored doors of the wardrobe. In this pensive mood he looked older, his face more lined now, and the thick youthful curls both ushered and worsened
the effects of age and violence and strife he had held back with his garrulous, disingenuous street attitude and his youthful clothes.

He wasn’t aware she was studying his reflection as he reminisced. But a change of aspect to something thoughtful did not soften his hard face; it just made him look pathetic, and troubled.
She doubted anything could redeem him. And if he ever appeared rehabilitated, that too would only be an act to get what he wanted. ‘You ever seen that? I ain’t, not even in the nick,
like. His eyes ain’t right no more. They’s all red and horrible. It’s in him. That fing. He needs a doctor.’ He grinned. ‘But we can’t go to the quacks cus we
been a bit naughty, like.’

‘He’s mad. And he hates you.’ It was the first time Stephanie had spoken since they had removed her from the ground floor flat.

Knacker started at the sound of her voice, like he’d been slapped across the back of the head. He gathered himself, slipped off the bed and walked across the room to the window. He clasped
his hands upon his cheeks. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he muttered. Without turning around he then asked her, ‘What is it, like? That fing down there? You been in there, you tell
me.’

‘You’ll find out. Soon enough.’

Knacker flinched more than turned towards her. ‘Eh? What you on, yeah?’

Stephanie enjoyed the spread of the smile across her face. ‘You think the
polyfene
is just for me?’

‘You watch your mouf. I ain’t telling you twice.’

‘Tell me what you know about it. And I’ll tell you what I know.’

His face visibly quivered with rage. ‘There ain’t no deals. None of this, you tell me somefink and I’ll tell you summat. Who you fink you is dealing wiv?’

‘A dead man. So fuck off. Go on and fuck off out of here. You think I want to look at your ugly face, you prick. I’m already gone. I’m still down there, with them, with
her
. I don’t give a shit. But when I go, I don’t want your stink anywhere near me.’

What little colour and animation had remained in Knacker’s face, vanished.

Stephanie shrugged. ‘You think I am afraid of death? It’s what comes after that’s worse. But I’m prepared. You’re not. He can’t do anything to me that’s
worse than what happened to me down there. What I have seen. What comes next. But you . . . you won’t even be half ready. It’ll be bad, Knacker. Really bad for you. I only wish I could
watch. Maybe I will.’

Knacker swallowed. He’d started to look at her in the same way he regarded Fergal, whenever his partner in crime mentioned the ground floor flat, or alluded to what was inside it.
‘Piss off.’ It came out of his mouth without any edge or force; the tone of a scared and beaten man. He paced across to the door in a hurry, as if he were about to pitch himself through
it, but paused in the doorway, afraid of disobeying Fergal. And maybe he had nowhere else to run.

‘You’re a prisoner too, Knacker. You’re going nowhere. Not after what’s happened here. Not after what you’ve done.’

‘I ain’t done nuffin’.’

‘Oh you have. You’ve stood by and let him kill. You’ve supplied him with victims, aided him, abetted him. No one will see your role as any different to the one who laid the
final punch.’ She thought of Ryan and nearly lost her voice. The sudden pang of heartbreak surprised her so much she lost her train of thought.

Knacker stopped pacing and filled the silence, desperate to release the pressure in his tormented and frantic mind. It was as if he now needed to make himself understand the impossible.
‘He’s always had a screw loose, but this place . . . fuck’s sake. What’s down there . . . it made him worse. That fing Bennet told us about.’

‘The Maggie. Where’d it come from, Knacker?’

‘His mum and dad had it wiv them since he was a kid. I reckon they was all at it. All of ’em. Whole family was perverts. His Dad put girls in there . . . in there wiv it,
like.’ He came towards her. ‘Where you was, what did you see? You see it? That horrible fing. It’s been trying to get inside my head. In dreams, like. Nasty fucker. It’s
turned me own against me. Fergal is in wiv it. They’re togever now. They fink they can cut me out!’

He was coming apart. All the tight flesh on his narrow, bony face seemed to be alive with jitters, like there was something twitching beneath the skin. One of his eyelids went into a spasm
around a big open eyeball, exposed by fear. And then, as if they were friends, he tried to smile at Stephanie. ‘You’re a smart girl, so you tell me. Tell me what’s here, like. You
been in there, where we put Bennet. What is it? You tell me, yeah?’

She shook her head. ‘You tell me about Bennet first.’

Knacker clenched his fists and paced about by the window like he was eager to be on the other side of the bars. ‘Smelly cunt. It’s all his fault. He let us come in here, yeah. What,
did he fink we would believe them porkies he was telling in the Scrubs? It’s all fucked up. Cus of
it
, like. Cus of
it
. I hate that fing. Fergal’s gone the same way as
Bennet. He don’t wash his clothes no more. And he ain’t never took his coat off once, like, not since he was let out. I know it. The unclean are pure, he kept saying that when I told
him he was riffy. Bennet used to say the same fing, in the Scrubs, like. They couldn’t get a comb froo his hair. They shaved it off. He was crawling with lice. Assaulted a guard when they
hosed him down.’ Knacker’s shudder was almost a convulsion. ‘Bennet was a dirty bastard. He always was. But not Fergal. He had pride, like. What makes them like this?’

‘This is Bennet’s house?’

‘Yeah, too right. And everyfing in it. Ain’t got fuck all to do wiv me, like. And I will tell them, like. Yes I will. You don’t need to worry about that. They’ll know who
done what in here.’

‘Why did Bennet’s family bring it here?’

Knacker shuddered and scratched at his arms, under his sleeves. ‘Was already in here, like. When his mum and dad bought the house. Somefing “bad” had been in the house for a
long time. Bennet used to say that. This ain’t my house, he’d say. Weren’t my mum and dad’s house neither. Don’t matter whose name is on the deeds, or who inherited
what, he always said this place belonged to the Maggie. Has done since before his lot come here. And he would say
she
likes fings done her way, like.’

‘But you came. You stayed.’

Knacker clenched his fists again and partially spat out his evident regret. ‘We fought Bennet was mad. Easy mark when he told us about running girls here, like his dad had done. Christ,
the money they was making. The money we could have made. Hurts to even fink about it. Wasted. All of it, wasted. It’s criminal. But he was really onto somefing, yeah, with the girls. Bennet.
His dad and him had a nice little business going that we was gonna take over when Bennet snuffed it, like. But he was nuts. His whole family was fuckin’ nuts to have that fing in their house
. . . It was their religion. You believe that? Their religion.

‘Bennet used to say, never ever go froo that door downstairs. Cus no one can live in there, like. His dad went mad in there, yeah. He was down there wiv it for years, like. His mum fucked
off. It’s why the social took Bennet off his dad when he was a kid. His dad was fucked in the head.

‘And they made it worse wiv giving it girls, like. Anyone you give to it don’t last long, he said. It’s big, he kept saying. It’s got so big now it’ll put you out
after it’s played wiv you. We fought he was crazy, cus of them drugs he was on. Morphine. But there was somefing in there. This fing that Fergal started hearing.’

‘Why did you put Bennet inside?’

‘Cancer. He hadn’t got long and he was getting on our tits. Fucking whining. Coughing like a cunt all the time. We couldn’t sleep in the flat. That’s when he starts going
on about down there and all. All the time, like. I fought it was the morphine they give him at the hospital, that made him say fings, hear fings. Said he could hear all the girls he’d done.
The ones his dad done too. And the ones that was done by others before his family come here. And then we get here and he keeps saying he don’t know if he wants to stay in the house no more.
Fought it was a mistake coming here, back home. He’d come here to die. Said he had somefing planned. Arrangement wiv that fing down there. He was let out the Scrubs early, cus of the cancer.
But then he weren’t sure he wanted to go froo wiv it anymore, this arrangement he had wiv down there. He started saying he wanted to die in the hospice instead. We said fuck off, like, cus he
had to help us set up the girls. Teach us how and all that.

‘Mumbo jumbo, I fought. I didn’t know what he was talking about. But Fergal did. Cus
it
was already telling him fings too. Told him it wanted Bennet, like. In there wiv it.
That they had a deal for when Bennet come out the nick. This house don’t forget nuffin’. And when we was pissed up one night, fings got out a hand, like.’

‘And you put him down there. A terminally ill man. You wanted him dead. And you thought you had killed him by putting him inside.’

‘Fought? He was dead. Fergal checked. He didn’t last the night. And no one screams like that and comes out standing. No way. ’Cept for you.’

Stephanie smiled as cryptically as she could.

‘It’s wiv you now, ain’t it? That’s what he’s afraid of, eh? Fergal is shitting himself cus it’s speaking to you. I’m right. I know I am. It went from
Bennet’s dad to Bennet, then from Bennet to Fergal. Then from Fergal to you. I fucking know it. You can’t trust no one. Can’t trust nuffin’. What’s it want now? You
tell me? Yeah? Yeah? What’s it want?’

‘Let me go. Let me out. I’ll say you helped me. That you were a prisoner too. Two against one. You were afraid for your life, and rightly so. Because when Fergal’s done me,
Knacker—’

‘Fuck off! You don’t know nuffin’.

‘And when he’s done Svetlana—’

‘Fuck off! We go way back. Me and him been in all sorts of scrapes.’

‘It’ll be your turn.’

‘Fuck off, I said.’

‘And you know it.’

‘Fuck, fuck, fucking hell.’ Knacker dragged his fingers down his face and shook his head. He was out of his league. He turned and ran to the bed, snatched up the bottle of acid.
‘You tell me, yeah? You tell me what it’s asking for? More girls? That’s what it wants, eh? More girls? That what I gotta do to keep it away from me, yeah?’

‘It wants company, Knacker. What it always wants,’ Fergal said from the doorway, before he walked into the room and slowly shut the door behind himself.

Hours had passed; it was dark outside. Stephanie could feel her humanity trying to return.

During the previous night, trauma had flattened any sense of who she used to be, and it had only reinforced its grip of numbness after the fresh violence of the morning. But now the part of
herself that registered fear and grief and hope was incrementally expanding and trying to remind her of who she was, and how she should respond to the things she experienced. A part of her psyche
had run into the road and was screaming before Stephanie’s windshield, flagging her down with crazed hands, trying to slap and claw its way back into her life. But she didn’t want to
feel normal again, not yet, because when the end came she would only feel worse.