Mr. Barjatya, the manager of the World Of Wood, was a hefty Asian man who looked as if he had recently been dipped in chip fat. He swept into the store and spoke with the guards, and when he saw that I was their captive, his expression became even more surprised.
‘Mrs. Cryer, I didn’t know it was you. This is one of my best customers,’ he told the policeman. ‘Please let her sit down.’ I collapsed on a divan as Mr. Barjatya explained that it was probably just an unfortunate mistake and that he would speak with the other managers about not pressing charges. I felt sure he knew I was guilty, but incredibly, he let me go. Presumably he and the other managers were familiar with the spending habits of lonely housewives and preferred to protect someone whom they considered to be a long-term investment. I would return, he hoped, to gratefully spend a fortune in his store the next time I was afflicted with a shopping brain-cloud.
I needed to clear my head and start thinking straight, so I shared a mug of coffee with Mr. Barjatya, who politely suggested that after I’d had a chance to rest I might like to arrange 24-month payment plans with him. I agreed so enthusiastically that I felt guilty about climbing out of the window of the ladies’ toilet and legging it across the car park, but I was determined not to stay in Hamingwell any longer than was necessary.
I clung to the knowledge that nobody knew about Malcolm’s flat. I would be able to stay there, at least until I could return the keys. On my way back into London, I ignored the five messages on Lou’s mobile and decided to check in with Stefan. When I arrived outside the yellow container I found him cooking Toulouse sausages on his Calor Gas stove. He handed me one without thinking, as though it had already become a habit to let me check his cuisine.
‘One day you’ll have to come to dinner properly,’ he suggested. ‘There are some policemen looking for you.’
‘Who?’ I asked, alarmed. ‘When was this?’
‘I’ve just been talking to them. They said to call them if I saw you, then they took half my sausages and some napkins. They were in a white Rover in the corner of the car park. You just missed them.’
I wasn’t sure whether to feel comforted. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘That I didn’t think you’d come back.’
‘I had to, Stefan. People can’t be allowed to disappear without a trace.’ I thought it best not to explain why both sides of the law were looking for me.
‘Why can’t they? It happens all the time. This is nothing to do with you. Everyone is on the move, you can’t expect to keep track. Look at me, I am paid in cash. There is no paperwork. I am invisible. You can always get lost in the crowd.’ Stefan slipped his hand from my waist in order to give his saucepan of fried onions a stir. ‘The police find the body of a teenaged girl in a park, and to me the question is not who killed her, but why have her parents not reported her missing? No-one knows how to behave anymore. Why should you risk yourself for someone you didn’t even know?’
‘I don’t see that I have a choice.’
‘You mean you feel responsible for what happened.’
‘I’ve contributed to the injuries and possible deaths of three people, Stefan. It seems unlikely that my path could cross with people like this, but the two worlds have bisected somehow, and the result has been some kind of... misinterpretation. Getting to the truth is the least I can do. It’s the decent thing.’
‘I always hear this word in England, and I don’t know what it means. Something selfish, I think. These people who got hurt are living in a world you should not pretend to be part of.’
‘So they can just go around behaving however they like and we’re all supposed not to notice?’
‘They’re just not very fucking nice, okay? I don’t like to think of a lady like you staying in that building with those animals. They pretend they’re respectable, just because they have professional careers. Just because they’re doctors.’
‘Wait, what do you mean?’
‘Many of the big apartments have been bought by doctors. Not good ones, I think, not honest ones, the other kind.’
‘You’re sure about this? They’re all doctors?’
‘That’s what we heard, and they’re all friends, many Russians I think.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Come with me, I can show you the cars.’
‘But the car park is empty,’ I said, pointing to the bare tarmac spaces beside the building.
‘That is only for visitors. Residents have their own floor.’
I followed Stefan to the grille at the base of the building, and we peered down into the underground car park. Six identical dark blue Mercedes 350 saloons were parked beside each other. Even in the shadows their chrome and enamel gleamed with lascivious opulence. All six shared the same three-letter combinations on their plates. It looked like a shadowy megastore called ‘World Of Wealth’.
Stefan rose and began walking back toward the container.
‘Wait,’ I begged, running after him, ‘Stefan, tell me, what else do you know about them?’
‘Nothing. Maybe they all work together. Who knows what goes on? The city is filled with these groups, they keep their secrets and cover their tracks. I’m just a manual worker, I have nothing to do with them, and nor should you. I’ll tell you this. Last month one of them ran over the foreman’s bull terrier and broke its leg. I was the only one who saw him do it. I also saw him check his rear-view mirror and back the car over it again rather than take it to a vet. I see it all, but I say nothing.’ He broke into a gallop. ‘I think my dinner is burning,’ he called back. ‘You can join me if you want.’
‘Save me some,’ I shouted as I headed up into the Ziggurat, pausing briefly to look back.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. Find out enough to call the police when I get away from here.’
‘They’ll think you’re crazy.’
Stefan was at the door of his container with a saucepan in one hand, wrapped in the breeze-blown purple beads that hung across the entrance. For a moment I wondered if he was as crazy as the rest of them.
I looked around for the police, but there was no-one in sight. Anyway, what more could I have dared to tell them? That I had witnessed more violence or that I had stabbed someone in the street before being caught shoplifting?
By now I was getting used to a six-flight run up the building’s central staircase. Dr. Elliot answered my knock. He had no choice, as I was hammering hard and would happily have battered the door down. I’d seen his silly fetishwear laid out on the bed and wasn’t scared of him. He could have answered the door dressed as Lady Gaga and I’d have breezed right past.
‘You lied to me,’ I said breathlessly, pushing into the hall when he answered. ‘You know Dr. Azymuth and the others. You know what’s been going on around here. You might as well tell me, just to get me out of your hair.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Responsibility
‘Y
OU SHOULDN’T HAVE
come back, Mrs. – I keep forgetting your damned name. They’re looking all over for you. We’ve had the police up here, knocking on all the apartment doors. I didn’t answer. You know, you’re making life very difficult for everybody.’
Elliot appeared even more sickly than he had at our last meeting. This time I could tell that he had ingested some kind of drug. His skin was the colour of tracing paper and the shoulders of his undignified shortie dressing gown were dark with sweat. I explained what I now knew to be the truth, but he seemed inattentive, his eye diverted by the ominous dark clouds building beyond the lounge windows.
‘You know I’m not going to go away,’ I warned him, ‘not until you tell me the truth about what they did to that poor girl.’
Elliot grimaced and batted me away, as if he could no longer be bothered with lies. ‘There’s nothing much to tell. If I do, you must promise that you’ll leave immediately. You’ve gone beyond just being a nuisance, you know.’ He waved his hand drowsily at the door. ‘I really don’t want you here. I can’t afford to be involved.’ Behind him, the dissected figure of Maurice was outlined against a golden sliver of sun.
‘I just want to understand for my own peace of mind.’
‘Well, I certainly can’t give you that.’
‘Fine. Tell me something and I’ll go away, I promise.’
‘All right, come and sit beside me.’ I sat at a safe distance from his bare upper thighs. ‘Here.’ He tugged one of the Ziggurat brochures from the back of the sofa and laid it out. ‘Floor plans of the building. Corridors, exits, stairwells. The land is a royal estate, leased to a private international consortium and subleased to preferred suppliers. The biggest supplier has several hundred companies registered in the city, one of which is a very profitable international outfit called Slavista, one subsection of which is a company called Slavstars. Are you managing to follow me so far?’
My God,
I thought,
the home of Mark Antony, he of the protruding toga.
From princes to porn stars in a few degrees of separation.
‘Slavstars employs a great number of illegals who work for cash in hand, so no-one reports them if they suddenly go missing. Which means that your ‘victim’ probably doesn’t even have an identity. The good doctor Azymuth does, of course. He has a criminal record. You know what companies like Slavstars actually do?
‘Don’t talk to me as if I were a child. You’re going to tell me they’re linked to organised crime.’
‘That’s rather an old school idea, gangsters keeping their stars strung out on drugs and making snuff films – which incidentally don’t exist and never did, except in the minds of rabid politicians – but the public loves a good horror story.’ He settled wearily back into his sofa, and seemed in danger of falling asleep. ‘Actually, they give kids the chance of a better life, teenagers who grow old fast in the decaying cities of the Eastern Bloc. They help stupid little girls and boys who have nothing to trade except their looks. Most of them work for a few years and retire with more money than they ever dreamed of. A small handful screw up and ruin it for the rest. Recently one of the girls made a mess of things and was punished. Even you must agree that it’s only fair to penalise the ones who try to cheat the system.’
‘So you allowed someone to choke her to death as a punishment.’
‘Good God, it’s nothing to do with me,’ he complained indignantly. ‘Now, if you want to make a point, go to the police and tell them what you know. They’ll file your report with all the others. You’ll have done your duty, they’ll have done theirs and everyone can forget about it.’
‘The police wouldn’t believe me.’
‘Why not? You look so terribly respectable.’ He made the word sound dirty.
‘Perhaps I was. I don’t think I am now that I’ve been seen stabbing someone in public. Besides, I got myself arrested this morning. A very young police officer told me to stay out of trouble.’
‘You might want to take his advice.’
Elliot wouldn’t get rid of me that easily. I remembered that his bedroom contained more leatherwear than the average MTV set, and gambled on him having much darker secrets he wouldn’t want exposed.
‘If I did go to the police I’d have to give them the names of people I’ve talked to, and I don’t suppose you’d want to be involved.’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘But I would give them your name.’
He reached a decision. ‘If I explain something to you, will you just disappear and leave me in peace?’
‘You’ve got yourself a deal.’
He peered at me from half-shut eyes. ‘These new adult stars, Russian, Romanian, Lithuanian, asylum seekers, economic immigrants – they arrive along the south-east coast of England homeless and broke. How would you feel, coming here for a better life, only to find yourself stuck in Margate on £50 a week? The young ones are met by industry reps, or they answer ads offering auditions in adult magazines. The top companies give them cash in hand and a little plastic.’
‘They get credit cards?’
‘Cosmetic surgery. Simple stuff: chemical peels, blemishes removed, breast augmentation, pectoral implants, features tidied up to make them more photogenic. They’re used in movies, supplied with money and places to stay, then dropped when they can’t perform or when they start looking too used. Azymuth did the facial nip-and-tucks.’
‘And what’s your part in all of this?’
‘Oh, barely nothing at all. I just do the psychological evaluations, see if the new employees can be trusted, check that they’re up to the work. It’s simply a bit of freelance, entirely above board. Although, of course, none of us would be needed if the public didn’t require its fantasy figures to look like comic book characters.’
‘So you and Azymuth are employed by the same company. And I suppose the girls get passed around amongst you?’
‘Don’t be disgusting. It’s a professional business, no different from any other. Workers don’t handle the merchandise. Everything was fine until the directors realised that this building was still half-empty. You know, it’s difficult finding somewhere suitably attractive to film. Nobody wants to watch their fantasies being played out in council houses. Well, some do but that’s a niche market.’
And after they started filming here, in a property they already leased, the next logical step was to start using the building to dump their troublesome trash
.
Every corruption escalates unless it’s stopped. But why here?
I wondered.
Why would they kill a girl in a new building when you could dump her out on the streets? Bodies are found in parks and canals with depressing regularity.
‘It’s interesting to consider the psychological implications within a society that requires constant stimulus to continue functioning. But perhaps that’s for another time. I think we should draw this little chat to a close.’
‘You can’t cloak this in fancy psychology,’ I said. ‘You’ve taken money from people who destroy lives.’
‘Oh come on, one has to end the burden of responsibility somewhere. You buy products manufactured in sweatshops that impoverish and shorten the lives of millions. There’s no point in beating your breast about it if you’re powerless to initiate change. Pour me a bloody drink, for God’s sake. Don’t just stand there like some kind of sitcom charlady.’