Dispossession (28 page)

Never old enough for that
,
a weary cynicism, the voice in the back of my head; and no, I didn’t move. Not
scared, perhaps, not entirely that. Only wise, perhaps, not to involve myself
with something that in reality I knew I couldn’t change. Gestures are futile,
and common sense has always been one of my strengths.

But I stood and watched, I felt I owed her that at least, a
witness for the world.

o0o

I watched, but Deverill not. He hardly gave a glance in her
direction after his first, the glance and the jerk of the head that sent Dean
over to attend to her. Seen it all before, I suppose; or else that was part of
the punishment, being rendered so insignificant that the man she had so
offended couldn’t be bothered even to watch his retribution enacted on her body.

I watched, but Mrs Tuck not either: “I don’t care for that
sort of thing,” she said, when I’d muttered or hissed or gasped something that
must have sounded to her like an invitation,
for
God’s sake, have you seen what they’re doing to that kid?
“Vernon says
that it’s necessary, but I don’t believe that it needs an audience.”

Whether that was directly aimed at me, I wasn’t certain. If
so, it missed its mark. I didn’t feel like an audience at all, I felt like a
participant, a conspirator, very much a part of the drama for all that I only
stood and watched. Maybe that’s universal at such times, maybe that’s just what
happens: but I thought it was all being acted out for my benefit, I felt so
complicit. I thought that if I wasn’t there, this wouldn’t be happening.

This wouldn’t be happening to her.

o0o

First thing Dean did, he snapped his fingers towards the guy
in the van—
learned that from Deverill
, I
thought,
very much his master’s man
—and
asked for something. Demanded it, rather, that’s what his body language said.
This is my speciality, I’m in charge here now.

And he got what he wanted, something small and silvery
glittering in the air as the man threw it, as Dean’s hand snatched it from its
arc.

Dean bent over the girl then, and she flinched away,
frightened already: beaten up already, I guess, I thought I could see bruises.
But he gripped her arm to hold her, then slid his grip down to her wrist,
turning her away from him to see what he was doing; and then I could see also,
and all he was doing was taking the handcuffs off her with the key he’d just
claimed, and maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all...

I guess that’s what the girl thought also, I saw her turn
her face up to find him, looking for mercy, perhaps, looking for hope. Not
seeing or else forgetting, as I was trying to forget, how much he was his
master’s man under his master’s indifferent eyes.

I almost didn’t see his arm swing, it moved so fast as he
lashed her across the mouth with steel, those handcuffs an improvised
knuckleduster; but I saw her fall back from the impact, and I saw him kick her
in the ribs and stomach; and when he stood back for a moment, when she pushed
herself up onto her hands and knees I saw blood running on her face, dripping
onto the tarmac.

o0o

Brave girl, stupid girl, even now she seemed to think she
could make a fight of it, she could or should resist. She tossed her head to
send a spatter of red across Dean’s clean white shirt, where he had taken his
jacket off to his work; and she somehow dragged herself up onto her feet and
stood swaying, frowning, trying to focus. Trying to stare him down, I suppose,
trying to defy him.

Neither her bravery nor her defiance touched Dean, I suppose
he only saw her stupidity. One quick pace forward he took, and he kicked her
knee with the side of his shoe. Just an office shoe, black and shiny, he wasn’t
wearing boots for the better kicking of captives; but her leg twisted abruptly
against the joint, and she fell again with a useless flailing of arms, that
couldn’t stop her landing sickeningly on her face.

“Come away,” Mrs Tuck said behind me, motherly, concerned.
“This isn’t for you.”

But it was, my guilty soul said it was entirely for me;
certainly I couldn’t turn and walk away, however much I wanted to. I needed to
know, or she needed me to know, or I thought she did. She would if she knew
that I was watching.

o0o

Dean’s feet rolled her around the hardstanding for a while,
he kicked and she rolled and he kicked again. When she stopped rolling, he
stopped kicking. He stood for a moment looking at her stillness, then he went
into one of the outbuildings, the former stables that were garages and
storehouses now by the look of them. After a minute he came back with a bucket
of water in his hand and something else slung across his shoulder, a length of
cord or cable.

I was expecting him simply to chuck the water over her, a
cold wake-up call from her dreams of agony, back to the real thing again. But
no, he stood over her and tipped almost delicately, and the water flowed in a
hard spattering stream into her face. Washing the blood away, how kind, and
filling her mouth and nose; giving her a choice, kindness personified, that she
could choke or drown.

And had to wake to make it: so she woke and choked, her
slight body arching with the effort; and turned her face out of the stream, so
that then Dean did simply fling the rest of the bucketful across her, soaking
and chilling and making her buck again with the shock of it.

He tossed the bucket aside, bent over and seized her by the
hair, by that long decorated ponytail; and he dragged her across the tarmac,
and she lay slackly in her pain, in his grasp, not fighting him at all any
more.

He hauled her back to the van, pulling the handcuffs from
his pocket where he had stowed them. With those he fastened her wrists to the
van’s rear bumper, so that she lay face-down and her upper body dangling, just
off the ground.
Just like Jacky Chu
, I
thought, though the thought sounded quiet and distant in my head, not
attention-grabbing. Nothing in the world could have grabbed my attention from
this, nothing could shout loud enough to get through.

Dean gripped the fabric of the collarless, sleeveless shirt
the girl was wearing, tugged a little to test it and then jerked once, twice
and a third time, ripping it roughly down all its seams and tossing the
remnants aside.

Half-naked she was now, but there seemed to be nothing
directly sexual in that, though no doubt the added humiliation counted for
something. Mostly this was for efficacy, I thought; because Dean took the coil
from his shoulder then, unwound it—electrical cable it should be, bright orange
and heavy as it was, and trying to hold its curves—and swung it through the air
for practice, lashed the tarmac a time or two, then doubled it over and lashed
her exposed shoulders instead.

She lifted her hanging head and screamed, silent to me this
side of the window, and I thought maybe silent to them out there as well,
silent even to Dean beside her. I thought maybe she didn’t have the breath to
scream with, for all that she had the pain that made it necessary.

o0o

Me, I didn’t have the eyes to watch any more. Still present
in my skull they were and not blurring, not weeping; but not making sense to me
now, images without meaning. I turned away from those, fought to focus on the
room, the woman in the room, the large handbag on the small table beside the
woman in the room.

“Er,” I said, “there wouldn’t by any chance be a phone in
that bag, would there?”

Phones by the dozen, of course, elsewhere in the house. None
in here, or none that I could see, and I was suddenly urgent about this, I
wanted it done now.

Wonderful woman, she proved to be all that I hoped she’d be.
“Yes, there is,” she said, and produced it, switched it on for me and passed it
over.

My fingers were punching buttons already, a number so
familiar I never stopped to think; and when a breathy, familiar voice answered
at the second ring, I just said what I’d said many times before. “Dulce, it’s
Jonty. Come and rescue me.”

“Don’t we always?” she demanded, chuckling. “Where are you?”

And that was where I ground to a halt, because I didn’t
know, except in a general sense. And the voice of doom was whispering in the
back of my head,
they’ll never come this far out
of town, forgot that, didn’t you? Taxis don’t like driving miles to pick up a
fare...

But these particular taxis I’d been using since I was a
student, I thought they’d come if I could only tell them how to find me; and
when I asked Mrs Tuck if she could give me directions, she just beckoned
imperiously for the phone.

Once she had it, she gave Dulcie crisp and clear
instructions; and when she’d finished I bade her farewell, said nice to have
met you and like that, and found my way back to the hall and then defiantly out
of the front door, to sit on stone steps in sunshine—balanced, it seemed to me,
as this adventure had been, between the dark weight of Deverill’s limo on the
one side and the crisp, smooth efficiency of what must surely be Mrs Tuck’s Jag
on the other—and wait for someone to come and take me away from here.

o0o

When the taxi came, it was Dulcie’s daughter Tina behind the
wheel.

Originally, she’d been trained to spell Dulcie at the
switchboard. Like any family business, what had been right for the parents was
seen as right for the kids also. But when she hit twenty-five, she rebelled;
she wanted to drive like her brothers, and if they didn’t give her a car she’d
go and find another firm that would.

So she got her car, and started picking me up from parties
instead of chatting me up on the phone. She flirted as her mother did, because
it was good for business, as her father and her uncles and her brothers no
doubt flirted professionally with their regular women clients, as they talked
sport and local crime with me; and she drove probably better than they did,
knowing that not me but the better half of her fares would be watching with a
macho and cynical eye; and I knew just what protection she carried in the car
and where she kept it, because she’d asked my advice about what was legal and
what she’d need to hide. Sensible woman, our Tina.

Today I thought I just might need some of that protection
myself, because she was turning the car neatly around on the gravel forecourt
when the big front door opened behind me, and out came Dean.

Bouncing on his toes, he was, like a fit man looking forward
to a little trouble; and he said, “Running out on us, Jonty?” like a man
expecting the answer no, like he was expecting me to say
no, no, just taking a little air, Dean, a little
post-prandial stroll
when the evidence was right there in front of us to
call me a coward and a liar.

I looked at him, this grinning, winking buddy of mine, this
lifesaver; and I said, “How the hell are you going to stop her talking?”

Dean laughed. “Come on, get with it. We know where to find
her, we know where to find her boyfriend and her family. You think she’s going
to talk? Believe me, by the time we’ve finished with her she won’t say a bloody
word.”

What, they hadn’t even
finished
yet? God almighty...

“She’ll talk to her friends,” I said. “Not the police,
but...”
Luke
, I thought,
she’ll talk to Luke. She’ll tell him everything.
People did, if they could only get him to listen.

“By the time we’re finished,” Dean said again, “she won’t
have any friends.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“She’s going to be a good girl,” he said, “she’s going to do
exactly what we tell her to. They always do. And I’ll be watching her anyway,
making sure.”

“What, then? What are you going to make her do?”

“I’m taking her back to Leavenhall,” he said, “soon as she’s
learned to speak nicely to Vern and obey his orders. They’re starting work on
stage two of the bypass soon, so her friends are moving back there, they’ve got
some more trees to protect.

“And what that bitch is going to do,” he said, “is drive a
bulldozer again, we’ve found her a big one; and first she’s going to drive a
nice path through all those trees, and then she’s going to trash her mates’
camp, the way she trashed our compound. And they’re going to see her doing it,
up there in the cab, all on her own. And I don’t think they’ll be talking to
her after that, not after she’s been a traitor and a tree-killer...”

o0o

That was clever, it was nasty, it was life-destroying; but
it was better I thought than what I’d been most afraid of, better than the girl
being beaten to death. Slightly, very slightly easier to live with, though I
guessed I wouldn’t be sweet on myself for a long time after this. Running out I
was indeed, on her rather than on them; and Dean knew without asking, no need
to warn or to threaten, I wasn’t running to the police any more than I had run
to her rescue. They knew where to find me also, they knew where to find my
wife.

No, I’d been wrong, Dean hadn’t been looking for or
anticipating any trouble when he’d come lightly down the stairs to intercept
me. He knew I’d make none. This, I thought, was only a reminder. They had their
eyes on me, I was on the payroll and I couldn’t even sneak away without their
knowing it, even when their gaze was seemingly turned entirely the other way.

He said goodbye, nice and friendly, my buddy Dean. I
muttered something and got into Tina’s taxi feeling craven and disgusting,
wondering how much more they’d do to that poor girl before she was persuaded to
speak nicely to Vernon Deverill.

They’d not had to do much to me, seemingly, to achieve the
same effect. Not had to do anything at all: I’d gone to him of my own free
will, to ruin my life under his aegis. To lay my hard-won reputation in his
untender hands, deliberately to see it damaged or destroyed; and all for some
unlikely undercover plot, to rescue my mother from the deadly consequences of
her own folly.