Brutal, page 17
28
Frank was lying on top of his bed in his underpants. The heating had been on all day, and sweat was streaming off his body and soaking the duvet beneath him. But there was no way to escape the unbearable heat, because Karel had ordered his men to board his window up to prevent him from climbing out again, and the valve on his ancient radiator had snapped off when he’d tried to adjust it. And, to make matters worse, Irena hadn’t brought him anything to eat or drink today, so he’d been taking rationed sips of whisky to quench his thirst.
The bottle was empty now, and Frank’s mouth was bone dry. Earlier in the afternoon, desperate for the toilet, he’d banged on the door for almost half an hour. Nobody had come, so he’d been forced to relieve himself in an old vase of dried flowers Maureen had kept on the dressing table. Half-full now, the vase was standing in the furthest corner of the room. He’d placed one of his pillows over it in the hope of containing the smell, but it wasn’t working, and the stench of hot piss, combined with the rancid odours of his sweat and sour breath, was almost as unbearable as the heat.
He was starting to wonder if this was what Hell felt like. Maureen had been brought up in a Catholic household, and she’d maintained her faith throughout their marriage, despite Frank being a firm non-believer. She’d attempted to drag him along to church on numerous occasions, but he’d stubbornly refused, unless it had been to attend a wedding, christening, or funeral. But these last few days, since coming home from visiting Yvonne and walking into this nightmare, he’d found himself praying fervently to the God he’d professed did not exist. The prayers hadn’t been for himself, though; they were for those poor girls Karel was holding prisoner – and for his children.
At the thought of his son, Frank released a remorseful sigh. Evan was a smart cookie, and Frank had hoped he might sense that something was wrong and come back to check on him after his visit the previous day. He hadn’t, and Frank had resigned himself to the thought that Evan, like his sister, had washed his hands of him. He could hardly blame them, given the way he’d behaved since meeting Irena, but it broke his heart to think that the recent bitter arguments would be their last memories of him if he didn’t survive this ordeal.
A floorboard creaked outside his door, interrupting his thoughts, and Frank jerked upright, praying that someone had remembered to bring him a drink. Mouth already watering at the thought of it, he frowned when a shadow passed through the shaft of light under his door, followed by the sound of a key turning slowly in the lock of Evan’s bedroom door. It wasn’t Irena, because he’d heard her cry herself to sleep a couple of hours ago. And it wasn’t Nick, because Frank had heard him driving the girls away from the house earlier, and the van hadn’t come back yet. As far as he’d managed to ascertain, the other men slept in the caravan and never came any further into the house than the kitchen, so it wouldn’t be one of them. That left Karel. But if it was him, why was he creeping into the room as if he didn’t want anyone to know he was there?
Curious, Frank got up and crept over to the wall. Above the sound of bedsprings protesting, and a soft, feminine exclamation of confusion, Frank heard a deep, crooning voice, and his eyebrows rose sharply when he caught the words being spoken.
29
‘Yeah?’
The woman who had answered the door stared out at Evan. She looked to be in her sixties, but her heavy make-up and tight-fitting clothes told him that she thought she looked much younger – glamorous, even.
Unsure what to say, he stuffed his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet. He’d never been to a brothel in his life before, but he’d presumed it would be like any other business and he would be invited in, no questions asked. In hindsight, he realized what a ridiculous assumption that had been. Prostitution was still illegal, as far as he knew, so of course they wouldn’t let any old Tom, Dick, or Harry walk in off the street. But he’d come this far, so he wasn’t about to give up now.
‘I was, um, told I could get a good time here,’ he said, trying not to stare at the tattoo of a thick snake that rose up from the woman’s wrinkled cleavage and wrapped itself around her turkey neck.
‘By?’ she demanded.
‘Er . . . Dave?’ He blurted out the most common name he could think of.
‘Dave who?’ The woman narrowed her eyes and shoved her sleeves up, revealing yet more tattoos on her arms.
‘I don’t know him all that well, so I’m not sure what his surname is,’ Evan said, half-expecting her to slam the door in his face. ‘He’s got grey hair and a bit of a limp,’ he embellished, guessing that most of her customers were getting on a bit, like the two he’d seen tonight. ‘Drinks in the Dog and Duck.’
The woman looked him up and down, then jerked her chin up at him and opened the door a little wider to allow him entry. Closing and bolting the door when he stepped into the dingy hallway, she turned to face him.
‘This your first time, son?’
Cringing with embarrassment, Evan nodded.
‘OK, well this is how it works,’ she said. ‘It’s eighty for an hour, fifty for half. If you want extras, you settle up when you’ve finished and I’ve seen what state you’ve left her in. Just so you know,’ she went on, a clear warning in her voice. ‘I’ve got security. And if you get too rough, you’ll be walking out of here with a cunt where your cock used to be. Got that?’
Disgusted by her coarseness, Evan muttered, ‘Got it,’ and pulled out his wallet. Sliding two twenties and a ten out, he handed them over – praying, as he did so, that Marie wouldn’t question why the Christmas bonus he’d received from work had gone down so fast, because this would be bloody hard to explain.
The woman snatched the notes and shoved them into her pocket, and then opened an internal door and led him down a narrow corridor. At the end, she ushered him into a shabbily furnished lounge area, where five young women wearing skimpy underwear were huddled together on a long sofa, while two others were perched on tall stools at a tiny bar in the corner.
‘Take your pick,’ she said.
Evan felt a fresh fire burn his cheeks as he looked at the girls. The two at the bar appeared to be a fair few years older than the others, and one was blonde, while the other was a red-head, so he dismissed them and turned his attention to the ones on the sofa. He’d hoped he might recognize the one he’d glimpsed through the van window the previous night, but they all had the same dark hair and olive complexions.
‘Come on, son, don’t stand there gawping all night,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘You’re not fuckin’ window shopping.’
‘Sorry,’ Evan muttered. ‘I’ll, um, take her.’ He nodded at one of the girls.
‘Up you get,’ the woman barked, kicking the girl’s foot when she didn’t immediately move. ‘And make sure you give him a good time for his money.’
Evan picked up the warning behind the words – and he guessed the girl did, too, because she was visibly trembling when she stood up. She raised her eyes briefly before quickly lowering them again, and he was surprised to see that they weren’t brown, as he’d expected, but light blue; the pupils two tiny pinpricks in a sea of ice. His gaze instinctively slid to the crook of her elbow, and his suspicions were confirmed when he saw faint puncture marks and bruising.
‘Summat wrong?’ the boss woman asked, narrowing her eyes when she saw what he was looking at.
Evan remembered why he was there, and shook his head. Seeming to buy it, the woman turned back to the girl, and said, ‘Room two. Half hour.’
Following the girl up a steep set of stairs and into a bedroom, Evan looked around in disgust when she closed the door behind them. The threadbare carpet showed no hint of its original colour beneath the grime of a thousand punter-footsteps, and the grubby bedding didn’t look as if it had seen the inside of a washing machine in decades. A lamp with a red chiffon scarf draped over it sat on the bedside table alongside a box containing tubes of KY Jelly, condoms, and antiseptic wipes. It was depressingly clinical, and he suspected that the metal bars barricading the window were designed to keep the girls in rather than intruders out.
Expressionless, her gaze on the floor, the girl sank down on the edge of the thin mattress and started unhooking her bra. Evan’s frown deepened. He enjoyed the female form as much as the next man, especially when it belonged to a girl as pretty as this one probably was when she wasn’t stoned out of her mind. But this wasn’t what he’d come for, so he held out his hand to stop her.
‘You’re all right, love; you don’t need to take it off. I only want to talk.’
The girl looked up, her hands still behind her back.
‘You no want sex?’
Evan shook his head and sat down at the other end of the bed.
‘I want to ask you some questions – if that’s OK?’
‘I no talk,’ she said, eyeing him warily as she quickly refastened her bra. ‘Is not allow.’
Conscious that the old woman could be outside listening, Evan lowered his voice, and said, ‘I only want to know if you’re one of the lasses I saw getting dropped off in that van? From the farm?’
The girl didn’t answer, and Evan guessed that she was one of them when he saw the fear in her eyes.
‘Please don’t be scared,’ he said, holding out his hand to show he meant her no harm. Quickly withdrawing it when she shrank back, he said, ‘What’s going on here, love? Are you and your friends being forced to do this? Is it those men who brought you here, or her downstairs?’
‘Please leave . . .’ the girl whimpered, rising unsteadily to her feet. ‘I am try to be good like they tell me, but you are cause trouble for me.’
‘I promise I won’t tell them you’ve spoken to me,’ Evan reassured her, as he, too, stood up. ‘But that farm where you’re staying belongs to my dad, and I’m worried about him.’
‘You need leave,’ the girl repeated, the effect of whatever drugs she’d taken clearly not powerful enough to override her terror. ‘Please . . .’ she implored, as tears began to trickle down her cheeks. ‘If men find out, they will be angry, and . . .’
She tailed off without finishing the sentence, but Evan easily filled in the gaps.
‘I know you’re scared,’ he said quietly. ‘And I’m going to help you, I promise. But I need to know how many men are at the farm? And is my dad involved?’
The girl edged away from him without answering, and Evan cursed himself for diving straight in without thinking how she might react when she made for the door. Rushing across the room, he placed his hand on the wood to prevent her from opening it.
‘Please, love, let me explai—’
Wincing when the girl let out a blood-curdling scream, he whispered, ‘I’m sorry! Please stop screaming. I wasn’t going to hurt you, I swear!’
It was too late. The door burst open, and the old woman barrelled in, followed by a huge man with the biggest biceps Evan had ever seen, and a neck so thick it looked like his head was sitting directly on his shoulders.
‘What’s going on?’ the woman demanded, looking from Evan to the girl. ‘What’s he done to you?’
‘I haven’t touched her,’ Evan said truthfully, keeping a wary eye on the man.
‘You must have done something,’ the woman argued. ‘You’ve only been in here two minutes, and look at the fuckin’ state of her.’
The girl had stopped screaming, but tears were still streaming down her face, and she cowered like a terrified puppy when the woman stared at her and asked what had happened.
‘He – he say he not w-want sex,’ she stammered. ‘And he was ask about men who bring us here.’
‘Is that right?’ The woman narrowed her eyes and glared at Evan.
Guessing that he was about to be ejected, he held up his hands, and said, ‘It’s OK, I’m leaving.’
Before he could move, the bruiser lunged at him and hurled him across the room, and stars exploded behind his eyes when his head smashed into the wall. The last thing he heard before blacking out was a scream, followed by the whip-crack of a slap.
Big Shirl gazed down at the man on the floor and prodded him with the toe of her boot. Getting no response, she jerked her head at the bouncer, saying: ‘Put him away.’
The bouncer nodded and, scooping Evan up off the floor as if he weighed nothing, slung him over his shoulder and carried him out onto the landing. When he’d gone, Big Shirl turned back to the now-sobbing but no-longer-screaming girl, and demanded to know exactly what had happened.
When the girl had told her everything, Big Shirl locked her in the room and made her way downstairs, tapping a number into her mobile phone as she went.
‘It’s me,’ she said when her call was answered. ‘We’ve got a problem. You’d best get your arse back here ASAP!’
30
On a dark backstreet on the outskirts of the city centre, Nick shoved his phone into his pocket and looked around for Gaz. They had driven over here to collect money from the street girls after dropping the foreign ones off at the brothel, and he’d been about to punish one of the junkie slags for trying to conceal a twenty in her shoe when Big Shirl’s call came through. The cagey bitch had refused to tell him anything over the phone, but it sounded urgent, so he reluctantly let the tart off with a warning and summonsed Gaz with a shrill whistle before jogging back to the van.
Arriving at the house ten minutes later to find all the security gates locked, Nick hammered on the metal bars with his fist until Big Shirl opened up. Gesturing for him and Gaz to come inside, she quickly relocked the gate and then locked and bolted the door.
‘What’s happened?’ Nick asked, wondering if one of the girls had OD’d.
‘A bloke turned up and picked one of the new ones,’ Big Shirl explained over her shoulder as she walked down the hallway and slotted a key from the huge bunch she was carrying into the lock of an internal door. ‘Only he tells her he don’t wanna fuck, he wants to talk.’
‘Is that all?’ Nick pulled a face. ‘You made it sound like a fuckin’ emergency.’
‘He was asking questions about you lot.’
‘What kind of questions?’ Nick asked, watching his step as he followed her down a rickety flight of wooden stairs to the dimly lit cellar.
‘How many of youse are at the farm, and if her and the others are being forced into this.’
‘Are you fuckin’ kidding me?’
‘That’s what she said.’ Big Shirl shrugged and pushed the cellar door open.
Nick brushed past her and strode into the dank-smelling chamber. Tiny, their man-mountain Romanian security guard, was standing behind a chair, upon which an unconscious, bloody-faced man was slumped with his chin on his chest, a filthy rag in his mouth, and ropes binding his ankles to the chair legs and his wrists together behind his back.
‘Is he a regular?’ Nick asked Big Shirl.
‘First time I’ve ever seen him,’ she replied, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and slotting one between her teeth.
‘Are you serious?’ Nick glared at her. ‘Why the fuck did you let him in if you didn’t know him?’
‘’Cos he reckoned another punter sent him, and he looked all right, so I give him the benefit of the doubt,’ Big Shirl snapped, her eyes glittering evilly in the flame of her cigarette lighter.
‘You’re going fuckin’ doolally, you,’ Nick sneered. ‘Didn’t that last raid teach you nothing?’
‘’Ere, who d’ya think you’re talking to like that?’ she retorted angrily, jabbing him in the chest with her fingernail. ‘You ain’t bullying me like you bully them soft cunts up there, so wind your neck in before I snap it!’
Nick curled his lip at her and turned back to the man on the chair. Instantly recognizing him when Tiny grabbed his hair and yanked his head up, he muttered, ‘What the fuck’s he doing here?’
‘He must have followed us,’ Gaz said, also recognizing him. ‘K said he looked suspicious when he left the other day, but I wonder how much he knows?’
‘Soon find out,’ Nick said, taking a picture of Evan on his phone before lashing him across the face with the back of his hand.
Evan’s eyes flickered open, and Nick leaned down and tore the gag out of his mouth.
‘Yeah, that’s right, fucker, it’s me,’ he snarled, nose to nose. ‘What you doing here, then, eh? Daddy tip you off, did he?’
Evan’s heart was pounding so hard he could hardly breathe. His dad obviously did know what was going on, or the man wouldn’t have asked if Frank had tipped him off; but the scathing way the man had referred to him told Evan that he’d been right to suspect he was in danger.
Nick’s mobile phone suddenly started ringing. Straightening up, he answered it.
It was Karel.
‘Are you there yet?’
‘Yeah, just,’ said Nick. ‘It’s that cunt who turned up at the farm yesterday – the old fucker’s son . . . Yeah, he’s still here. Tiny sparked him and tied him up. What do you want us to do with him?’
Nick nodded as he listened to Karel’s instructions, and Evan felt sweat trickle down his back when the man looked down at him and grinned slyly, before saying, ‘No problem, boss. I’ll give you a bell when it’s done.’
‘Whatever you’re planning to do to me, you won’t get away with it,’ Evan spluttered. ‘My wife’s expecting me home soon, and she’ll ring the police if I don’t turn up. And they’ll go straight to my dad’s place, ’cos that’s where she thinks I am.’
‘Know your trouble . . .?’ Nick drawled as he slotted the phone back into his pocket. ‘You’re too fuckin’ nosy for your own good. You shoulda pissed off home like your old man told you to, but you had to go and stick your snout where it don’t belong, didn’t ya? And now you’re gonna pay for it. Any last words for your pa before you go?’
‘You can’t be serious?’ Evan squawked, struggling against the restraints when the man pulled a gun out of the waistband of his jeans. ‘You can’t fucking shoot me.’
‘Wanna bet?’ Nick drawled, grinning as he released the safety catch. ‘But first . . .’ He rammed the end of the barrel into Evan’s mouth. ‘You’re gonna answer some questions.’
