Her hands trembled then, barely perceptibly and for the merest sliver of a moment as she overrode the impulse to tug at her sleeves. She reddened half a shade, and her eyes drilled into mine, luring them away from the door to her self-consciousness. “Meaning?” she pressed, with a challenging smile.
“Well,” I said, “look at it this way. Some collectors are only interested in things that are like new, factory fresh, mint in the box. If something looks like it’s had a life before they got their hands on it, it loses its value. But then, other people believe that an object’s worth more if it’s been used for whatever it was designed for, so a stamp should have been stuck to an envelope and posted to somewhere a long way away, and a comic book is meant to be read and enjoyed, not sealed in a protective case and never opened, and an old racing car should be scuffed and grimy and—” with no particular emphasis “—scarred. And it’s the same with people. How much time do you think you’d want to spend with Barbie and Ken? Anodyne, by definition, is not entertaining.”
She gave a tight nod and handed me my plums. “So,” she said, slapping her totalizer and twisting the display for me to survey the damage, “what exactly is it that you collect? I mean, apart from frozen fish.”
I shan’t repeat what I said. Suffice it to say the ensuing silence was awkward enough that I might as well have just told her the truth.
It was on the dot of 6:00 a.m. that I wearily slammed the door of the Transit, remote-locked the garage and hauled my half-dozen bags of flora and fish into the house. The melodic, almost hypnotic sound of Caroline/Rachel’s voice still rang in my ears, our conversation looping over and over in my head. I knew nothing of her, and yet somehow I knew everything I needed to know. I knew the conversation wasn’t over.
An unprecedented calm enveloped me as I made space in the pantry freezer, between the joints of topside beef and the waitress from the Hungry Horse.
I cooked a late breakfast of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs, picturing Caroline-or-possibly-Rachel passing me each ingredient and implement as I needed it. I presented the result to Erica with a steaming cup of fresh coffee. She threw it at me.
Having chained her to the floor and cleaned up the mess, I brought her a sealed box of Rice Krispies and an unopened carton of milk. She threw those at me, too. Since no contents were spilled, however, I chose to leave them where they fell. I laid a plastic bowl and spoon beside them on the mat and left her to it.
I gave her an hour to sort herself out, then returned to the garage to fetch the hooker from the van. Naturally, she’d remained where I’d left her, slung hammock-like from the roof; secured with four-inch nylon webbing and suspended, spreadeagled, five feet from the floor, there was little chance of her wriggling free. What did surprise me, though, was that she’d managed to fall asleep. She didn’t even stir as I blindfolded her, and it wasn’t until I’d released her extremities and stood her upright that she began to flail and scratch like a cat in a bath. Needless to say, she no longer wanted to go anywhere quiet with me, and I literally had to throw her down the stairs.
Erica regarded her new cellmate with a mixture of elation and disdain. Whilst a problem shared is a problem halved, she clearly wasn’t overjoyed at the prospect of sharing hers with a bleeding, screeching harridan.
The hooker had told me that her name was Kerry. Then again, she’d told me that she was clean in every respect, where both her profession and her trackmarks suggested otherwise.
I’d picked her up a mile from Jeremy’s house on a foolish and immediately regrettable impulse fueled by raw adrenaline and the sheer bloody-minded need to catch something, so to speak. She’d directed me to a remote riverside picnic area on the south side of the city, and had been only too eager to jump into the back of the van, the false promise of mattresses and pillows offering a welcome relief from the repeated prod of a gear lever in the sternum.
Until that point, this, in a nutshell, was the reason I never interfere with ladies of the night: it’s just too damn easy. It’s a game for impotents and bed-wetters. These women queue up to get in the car with you, for Christ’s sake. They actually expect you to take them somewhere dark. That they exercise free will in putting themselves in harm’s way only makes obligingly slaughtering them all the more cowardly.
And as if that wasn’t reason enough to rue my lack of self-control, Kerry was about to give me a couple more to think about.
In her first few minutes in the cage, Kerry, despite the removal of her blindfold, seemed unaware of Erica’s presence. She flung herself at the door, screaming unintelligibly as she clawed at the mesh. As she ran simultaneously out of breath and fingernails, she began wailing that her children were home alone and that the electricity meter was empty. I suggested that had Kerry considered her parental responsibilities the night before, rather than offering to fellate me in a car park, their collective predicament might have been avoided.
Erica, on the other hand, was strangely subdued. She sat cross-legged on the bed watching this leather-skirted animal, knees skinned and blood dripping from its fingertips, howling and spitting at its captor just inches away on the other side of the door. “You bastard,” she said, simply.
Kerry whirled around then, threw herself off balance. She scrabbled on all fours to the corner of the cage and curled herself into a tight ball, fixing Erica with a petrified stare.
“What are you, starting a fucking zoo?” Erica’s face was a picture of self-righteous indignation as she jabbed an angry thumb toward the sobbing, fetal prostitute. “You can’t be fucking serious, surely?”
Not fully understanding the question, I chose not to answer.
At 6:00 p.m. I returned to the basement with two plates of tuna and pasta bake. The hooker appeared not to have moved from her corner; she merely continued to tremble and heave.
Erica had returned to the bed, where she lay silently gazing at the cage roof as I laid her dinner on the floor beside her.
“I’m not eating that,” she said.
This did not surprise me. “What’s the matter now, you don’t eat fish?”
“Of course I eat fish. I’m just not eating anything you’ve made.”
“Great, so now it’s no meat and nothing cooked, is that it?”
“Who said anything about meat?”
“You did, yesterday.”
“No.” She sighed. “What I meant was, I’m not eating any meat you’ve given me. And, yeah, I do prefer my dinner cooked. I just don’t want it cooked by you. I know your sort.”
Charming, debonair, handsome? Probably not what she meant. “Have you got any idea of the effort I went to last night to make sure you were catered for? And now what, you want me to hire you a chef? What do you think this is, the Savoy?”
“You could always just let me starve,” she said. “And yes, I can clearly see the kind of effort you went to last night, and I’m far from fucking impressed.” Her eyes never left the ceiling.
Erica hadn’t thrown her pasta bake at me, but by the following morning she hadn’t eaten it, either. To all appearances, she hadn’t moved from the bed.
Kerry was a different picture. She’d managed to piss herself three feet from the toilet, and had clearly stood in the resultant puddle. She was still pacing back and forth, leaving dirty wet footprints, when I got there. It took the threat of severed fingers to persuade her to mop.
In the evening, with Erica having eaten nothing more substantial than Rice Krispies since her arrival, I took the microwave oven from my kitchen and delivered it to her downstairs. Since I’d used the thing only twice in the three years