Carnal Acts

by Sam Alexander

  ‘Catch any criminal Picts?’

  He gave her a long-suffering look. ‘The tribe that occupied the area north of the wall didn’t paint themselves. They were the—’

  ‘Votadini, aka Otadini,’ Ag interrupted. ‘I do know something about local history, sweetheart. ‘She stepped closer. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘No worse than usual.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. Are you going into town later?’

  ‘No chance. Morrie Sutton’s on duty. Let’s hope he doesn’t cock anything up.’

  ‘Dad!’ Their twelve-year-old son Luke ran up and thumped his shoulder into Heck’s thigh, his back bent in the approved rugby tackle stance. Cass jumped up, forepaws scrabbling on the boy’s sweatshirt.

  Heck winced as he returned Ag’s wry smile, which said, ‘You wanted him to play rugby, now take the consequences.’ His own nose, broken when he was nineteen and not properly reset, was a permanent reminder of the sport’s hazards.

  ‘Very good, lad,’ he said. ‘What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘A bit of this, a bit of that,’ Luke said, acting the wide boy from some TV programme. Heck only ever watched the news, sport and the History Channel.

  ‘Hi, Daddy.’ Kat stood at the garage door, her black hair in a ponytail and pretty face damp beneath dark brown eyes.

  ‘Not again,’ Heck said. His daughter might only have been fourteen, but she was already showing a worrying propensity for affairs of the heart. ‘I’ll break his legs.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t be daft. He’ll be on the phone again in a few minutes.’ She held up the ludicrously expensive mobile he’d been talked into buying for her last birthday.

  ‘Ah, the strider returns.’ David Rutherford came under the retractable door, bowing his head with its bush of demented professor’s white hair. ‘See any interesting birds?’ he asked, with a wry smile.

  His father had an encyclopaedic knowledge of wild birds, but he also still had an eye for women.

  Heck shook his head in resignation.

  ‘Come on, you lot,’ Ag said. ‘Lunch is nearly ready.’

  ‘Are you doing roast spuds?’ Luke asked. His face was a mass of freckles and his red hair was cut short in imitation of his father’s.

  ‘I might be,’ his mother replied, pulling him away from Heck. ‘Leave your dad alone. He’s knackered himself on the Wall. Come on, Cass.’

  Kat slipped her arm under her father’s. ‘You should rest more,’ she said. ‘And spend more time with us.’

  Heck nodded, his eyes meeting David’s. ‘I know, pet. I need time to get my head together, that’s all. How about Monopoly after lunch?’

  Kat shook her head. ‘Grandpa always steals money when he thinks we’re not looking. Cluedo?’

  ‘Cluedo it is,’ Heck agreed. If only catching real criminals was so easy; not that he often won the game. He’d been in love with Miss Scarlett since he was Luke’s age and he cut her all kinds of slack.

  4

  Gaz was still panting five minutes after he’d come. He was trying to work out what the woman was doing. This time she hadn’t slapped him. He was pleased with himself because he’d made her moan and scream, but what the fuck was she up to now? He could feel her head against his thigh, but none of the rest of her body. In the light from the open door, he made out a vague shape. Was she doing a head stand against the wall?

  Then a familiar figure appeared in the door. All the pride and pleasure vanished. Heavy feet came close. He felt a sharp blade along his throat beneath the balaclava.

  ‘You do anything except what I tell you and you’ll be having a shower in your own blood,’ the man said. ‘You got that?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Gaz said, his voice embarrassingly high.

  ‘Good. I’m taking your cuffs off, all right? After that, you’re going to the bathroom. Clean yourself up, especially down there.’ A gloved hand grabbed his balls.

  When he was free, Gaz was led on unsteady legs to the other door and pushed through. The door was closed behind him and an external lock turned. The light was switched on. The room was small and there was no bath, only a shower without a curtain in one corner. There was soap and shampoo, but nothing he could use as a weapon – no razor, no mirror to be smashed; even the toilet lid had been cemented against the cistern.

  At least the water was hot and there was plenty of it. When Gaz finished, he found there were no towels, only a pile of face cloths. What was the gorilla scared of? That he’d flick his eyes out? The bastard had the fucking cattle prod. Then he had a thought. Maybe they’d taken precautions against him topping himself. That made his stomach flip. What else was in store for him?

  ‘I’m opening up,’ came the gruff male voice. ‘You don’t need to wear the balaclava now.’

  When Gaz came out, hands over his groin, the man was pointing the prod at him and his face was still covered.

  ‘There are clean clothes for you and more food.’ He laughed emptily. ‘Get a feed down. She might be back any time.’

  When he’d gone, Gaz huddled under the covers in the dark and ate more bread and cheese. He and his mates had often joked about being gigolos or toy boys. The reality wasn’t funny at all. Even though the sex was amazing.

  5

  Suzana – she could hardly remember her surname, the Noli family having so little significance for her any more – ran her finger across the tines of the fork. It was a heavy piece of cutlery, steel, she thought, one that must have originally belonged in a rich house. She’d found it beneath a floorboard in the room that had been her prison for months, filling the gap with hair and dust so it wasn’t discovered during the daily searches. The second-floor window was barred and the glass covered with black tape, but she peeled back a corner ever day and had seen winter turn to watery spring, and now the first days of sun. She had no other means of telling the time, just as she had nothing of her own. Her captors had taken everything.

  Although she could only vaguely remember her mother’s tear-stained face and the defeated way her father had raised his arm in farewell, Suzana could still see the mountains around the village, snow on the peaks even in early October. She had grown up in their embrace and had been proud to be a ‘child of the rock fathers’, as the villagers called themselves. They were poor, but every family had strips of land on the terraced slopes and a few beasts. There were trees in abundance as well – almonds, chestnuts, even some hardy cherries. The river that rushed down the crack in the mountains kept the small valley fertile, while the ridge at the western end cut it off from the rest of Albania. Even Hoxha’s functionaries had given the villages there a wide berth, in awe of the powerful clans that ran things the traditional way. Deals were done with the communist state, a few lanky boys sent to do their national service and some truckloads of logs driven to the capital.

  Suzana, seventeen a month before she left, brought the fork close to her left eye. She could put it out, she could rip apart her cheeks and slash open her breasts – that would reduce her value to the men who pimped her. Only one thing stopped her, and it wasn’t fear for her parents. Once she’d arrived in London – how she had dreamed of that moment – and passed legally through the border control at the airport, her passport had been taken by the shaven-headed brute Leka. Later that day he and three other men raped her. She understood why her father had looked at her the way he did; he knew she wasn’t destined to work in a restaurant or as a cleaner. She had made her decision. The only way to save herself was to be harder than stone with everyone else. She had shed her last tear weeks ago.

  There was no mirror in the room, only a cheap wooden bed, a chair for the customers’ clothes – though many of them did nothing more than undo their trousers – and a small table. On it were a box of condoms, tissues, lubricating jelly and a pair of nipple clamps. Two men liked to attach them to her (she still hadn’t got used to the pain), while there was one with breasts larger than hers who clamped his own nipples. There was also a metal waste bin. When she was wo
rking, it soon filled up with sodden paper and used rubbers. During the few hours she got to herself, it served as a chamber pot.

  The absence of a mirror was a blessing from God, not that Suzana had any faith. There had been an imam in her village since the end of communism – the imposition of atheism had been one of the few things the state had been rigid about – but her family had not gone back to being Muslims. What faith would have helped her in these months of violent coupling, sometimes twenty times a day, often without protection because the customers preferred it that way: she hoped she had passed on diseases to them. The doctor Leka brought in regularly had given her antibiotics more than once, but she wasn’t allowed to stop working.

  Even without the mirror, Suzana knew how she looked. She could feel the swellings on her cheeks and was sure that the bones had been broken that first night when she’d fought until she was subdued. The acne that had plagued her when she was younger was still there, made worse by the chocolate she was given as a treat – the only one. Her nose was broken too, though it seemed to have reset itself in a fairly straight line. The strands of black hair that hung in front of her eyes were greasy. She thought today was her turn for the shower. It didn’t matter. The customers fucked her even when she stank of the previous ones. They were animals, as was Leka. He had looked at her after he stripped her that first night, ogling her breasts but mocking her skinny legs and thin arms. There was more meat on them now as the ‘girls’ – she wasn’t sure how many others were in the house – were fed mostly white bread and tasteless yellow cheese, and on rare occasions salty sausage; but never fruit or vegetables. Her skin was pasty and slack, and she hated herself. But not as much as she hated Leka.

  She heard heavy steps on the stair and darted across to the loose floorboard to conceal the fork.

  ‘Up, bitch,’ Leka said, slamming the door against the wall. He gagged. ‘And take that shit-can with you. Make yourself decent. It’s a festival. There’ll be a lot of customers.’

  Suzana carried the bin against her chest, hoping he wouldn’t follow her into the bathroom. He had taken her in the shower more than once, forcing her to bend over until the top of her head touched the cracked tiles on the floor. Instead, he watched her from the door-less entrance as she emptied her waste into the toilet and flushed it, then got under the shower. There was no curtain, but she’d got used to being stared at. She scrubbed herself with the pungent brown soap and rubbed thin shampoo into her hair. She was thinking about what the bastard had said. Plenty of customers. That meant the house would be busy, Leka and his friends making sure the correct money was handed over and the drunken men kept in line.

  It was her chance. Tonight. Suzana couldn’t wait any longer. If she wasn’t free by this time tomorrow, she would mutilate herself beyond all use and recognition.

  6

  Joni looked at her watch, a cheap thing she’d bought from a street-seller in London who claimed he was from Nigeria though she thought his accent was more Brixton. Growing up with money permanently in short supply had made Joni oblivious to fashion and status symbols. Her mother, Moonbeam, was an art teacher in a comprehensive, but she spent most of her salary on robes and other Wicca impedimenta, rather than saving to get out of the council flat she’d been assigned when she was a single mother. Whence Joni’s nine-year-old Land Rover, identical dark grey trouser suits and pairs of heavy-duty black boots. Her only weakness was for blinding blouses, though she generally kept to white for work. She pulled on a tan leather jacket and headed out.

  From what Joni had learned, May Sunday was one of the few times of the year when there was a degree of harmony in Corham. Perhaps there had been a homogeneous population in Roman times, though the presence of legions raised in continental Europe and even Asia Minor suggested otherwise, but in the final decades of the twentieth century the divisions between the town’s northern and southern halves had attracted sociologists from the universities in Newcastle, Durham and beyond. The medieval town, built on a strategically salient hundred-foot cliff above the River Derwyne, had become a centre of worship and commerce because of the large abbey and monastery. It encompassed the remains of the Roman town, an important camp servicing the Wall fifteen miles to the north. In later centuries, tanning and distilling developed outside the old walls, still on the northern side. There had also been a large sugar mill, owned by the ennobled Favon family. It was only with the discovery of iron ore a few miles south of the town that the steel works and surrounding workers’ communities sprang up there. The area was called Ironflatts and Corham’s burghers paid as little attention to the rapid development there as they could, until they realised they could make money – serious money – from the works and the workers, as well as turn their town into a nascent city. They even built a second bridge to supplement the still operational medieval one. Pride was swallowed and profits pocketed.

  But not by the poor. They had always been Corham’s problem, and the multitudes that colonised Ironflatts made it worse. The tanneries, sugar processing plants and distilleries needed more labour than was available locally, so families had moved from the Derwyne and Wear urban areas. The landowners, bankers, lawyers and preachers who controlled Corham saw them as a necessary evil, but made sure only a minimum of the town’s wealth was spent on them. Cheap two-up, two-down houses in narrow streets ran outwards like the spokes of a wheel from the old town centre, the abbey and its environs occupying a teardrop-shaped peninsula that the river wound around in a ‘u’ bend.

  Ironflatts and its neighbouring communities south of the river were even worse. Terraced houses to the west and sixties tower blocks in the east stood up to the disparaging gaze of the Northies, as the people beyond the Derwyne were known to the Southies. The blocks’ expanses of glass reflected the red explosions from the foundries as well as the weak north-eastern sun. True Corham natives blinked before shaking their heads. The brief presence of Ironflatts Rovers in the 1970s First Division was also a shock, but the team plummeted along with the local heavy industry. When the works were finally shut down in the mid-eighties, thousands of people left the area, turning it into a social and industrial wasteland. Drugs were the only burgeoning commercial venture and generations of Southies had been raddled by heroin, crack and any other poisons the disaffected youth could get its hands on. AIDS took a swathe as well. Meanwhile Northie kids did alcopops, weed and Ecstasy at weekends, dutifully doing their homework when they’d sobered up. But not on May Sunday.

  Joni went down into Corham Square, with the Abbey on one side and refurbished shops and pubs on the others. It was full of braying and squawking humanity. Her uniformed colleagues had cordoned it off, but that hadn’t stopped some idiot dressed as a traffic light standing in the middle of one of the access roads. He had rigged up functioning red, amber and green panels, which he changed every so often. People paid due attention, egged on by his friends; waiting when he displayed red, and then moving on with green. The level of hysteria this provoked drew Joni closer, though she had to push her way through a group of men in bikinis with peacock feathers sprouting from their heads.

  ‘Come on, Nick!’ a short-haired youth with a red plastic fish on his head shouted. ‘Beer time!’

  Joni saw there was a slit in the tall cardboard rectangle the traffic light had erected on his shoulders. The eyes behind it were creased in amusement.

  ‘A few more minutes,’ he said. ‘This is fucking brilliant!’

  Joni wasn’t sure whether impersonating a traffic light was illegal, but swearing in public definitely was, under section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986. Not that she particularly cared. There were no small children nearby to be harassed, alarmed or distressed and this Nick was hardly the only person using profane language. She watched as the red light above his head came on. Then his friends lost patience and grabbed him, holding him horizontally and driving him like a battering ram into the Coach and Horses. Not all of them looked over eighteen, but that wasn’t her problem either.

  T
he crush of people headed down Derwyne Street, the main thoroughfare, and Joni went with them. There was a lot of drunken bonhomie, mainly to do with the amount of flesh on display. A guy dressed as a mermaid, tail split, was sitting on a fat man’s shoulder. The beast of burden was naked to the waist. On closer inspection, Joni realised the black-and-white stripes on his abdomen were a tattoo.

  ‘Like what you see, lass?’ the man asked, with a grin.

  Joni glared at him until his bravado departed. ‘Two things. I’ve got a judo black belt. And I’m a police officer.’ She watched as he took a step back, provoking an angry yell from the man whose toes he’d trodden on. ‘Fancy your chances?’

  He patently didn’t. She let them go, the mermaid bending down to find out what had happened. Maybe her mother was right, Joni thought. Moonbeam claimed that Wicca was about harmony and not doing harm to anyone. If only life – let alone police work – was so straightforward.

  7

  Over the hours Gaz had worked himself into a state of serious anger. He was ashamed at himself for being used by a woman – he was used to telling the cows what to do – and he was fucked off big time by the gorilla who had rolled all over him. What the shithead didn’t know was that Gaz had form when it came to dishing it out. He had knocked out plenty of guys behind nightclubs and pubs. He’d even lain in wait for a forward who made a fool of him during a football match and done major damage to his kneecaps. He wasn’t going to take being kidnapped and used as a sex slave lying down.

  When the door crashed open, Gaz was ready. The man in the balaclava wasn’t carrying the cattle prod this time, though he did have the knife in his belt. Gaz stood up, his shoulders down to make it look like he was defeated.

  ‘Sit down, fuck face,’ his captor said.

  Gaz thought about it, then complied. Anything to get the gorilla up close.