Quickly she went back into the office and to the computer. David hadn’t logged out of the session – everything on the screen was plain to see. The wallpaper for the desktop was a scanned newspaper page. It showed a man in his forties, heavy chin, thinning hair, dressed in a suit. The photo seemed to have been taken in the street somewhere: he was holding his hand up to the camera as if he’d been caught by photographers. The headline read: ‘Top MoD man Mooney heads Kosovan sex unit’. It looked as if the article had come from the Sun or the Mirror or another tabloid. She scanned the article – something about a unit that had been set up within the United Nations to stop women being brought in as prostitutes for the peace-keeping forces. Then she examined the man’s face. Mooney. Steve’s client. Did the fact it was on his computer mean David knew Mooney was watching him?
She bit her lip and glanced up at the doorway. Overlying the photo on the screen there were ten icons on the desktop, each with the file extension ‘mov’. Videos. Still David was pounding on the treadmill. She let the mouse trail over the icons. It was ridiculous, when she thought about it, but she was thirty-five and she didn’t remember ever having seen a porn movie from beginning to end. She must have seen snippets, though, somewhere along the line, because if she really concentrated she had an idea of what to expect – very tanned women with blonde hair and bouncy breasts and lips painted pillar-box red. She thought of faces contorted in ecstasy. What she didn’t expect was what she saw when she got up the courage to click on the first icon.
It was set in what looked like a large livestock pen, with whitewashed concrete walls and grid-shaped floodlights suspended overhead. At first all Sally could see were the backs of people gathered around, as if they were watching something on the floor in the centre of the pen. They were all men, dressed averagely enough from the neck down – jeans, shirts, sweaters. Their faces were covered – some wore scarves tied so that only their eyes showed, others had ski masks or balaclavas. A few wore rubber party masks: Osama bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Barack Obama. It would seem bizarre and even comical if it hadn’t been for the fact that all the men had their flies undone and were openly masturbating.
The camera panned up, the picture became clearer, and Sally felt herself go numb. In the centre of the ring someone lay naked on a tattered mattress – a girl, though at first it was difficult to see her sex, she was so emaciated. Her tiny ankles were manacled to the floor, her legs forced apart. Her face wasn’t visible, but Sally could tell she was young. Very young. Not much older than Millie, maybe.
A man wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low over his face pushed his way through the crowd. He wore jeans and a tight T-shirt and, although his face was half covered, she immediately recognized him as Jake. It was the tan and the muscular arms that did it. He approached the girl and straddled her, one foot on either side of each shoulder, so he was looking down at her head. He began to unzip his flies – and as he did Sally realized the noise of the treadmill had stopped.
She clicked off the video and hurriedly went to the shut-down button. And as she did she remembered it had been on standby, not shut down. Quickly she changed her mind. Chose Sleep. She jumped up from the seat and went to sit at the other desk, her back to the computer, willing it to close down faster – wishing she’d just unplugged it. But then David appeared in the office doorway, dressed in his jogging pants and trainers. The postman must have been because he had a glass of pink champagne in one hand and a stack of letters in the other. More letters still were wedged under his chin. He was shuffling through the envelopes, murmuring under his breath, ‘Bill, begging letter, sell sell sell, fucking credit-card company shite.’
Then he saw that the computer was alive and that Sally was sitting, stony and still, eyes locked on the database, her face flushed.
Slowly, he lowered the handful of letters. ‘Uh, ’scuse me for pointing this out, but someone’s been titting with my computer.’ He stood in front of it, frowning, watching the screen whirr itself into darkness. There was a long silence, in which all Sally could think about was her heart thudding. Then David turned.
‘Sally?’
She was silent.
‘Sally? I’m speaking to you. Look me in the eye.’ He reached over and pulled her shoulder. Reluctantly she turned. He made a bull’s horn with his pinkie and his thumb, jabbed his hand at his eyes. ‘Look me in the eye, and tell me why you did that.’ A vein was pulsing in his forehead. ‘Eh? When I told you to keep away from that side of the room.’
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She thought she might be sick, any moment.
‘Don’t give me that patronizing look. I’m not the lowlife shit on your shoes, Sally, it’s the other way round. Has it escaped your attention that I’m the one employing you? Just cos you speak like you got coughed out of some hoity-toity fucking finishing school that teaches you how not to flash your snatch when you’re getting out of a Ferrari doesn’t make you better than I am – you still gotta pretend to like me. Because you’re desperate and you—’
He broke off. Something else had caught his attention. The TV monitor on the wall. He raised his chin, gazed at it, his mouth open. Shakily, Sally looked up and saw on screen, behind the electronic gate, the familiar metallic purple jeep. Jake was leaning out of the window, pushing the buzzer.
‘Well, that’s fucking mint.’ He slammed the post down. ‘That has really made my day.’ He snatched up a riding whip that was propped against the wall and strode into the hallway, bending every three steps to slap it furiously on the floor. The gate buzzer echoed through the hallway. David didn’t go upstairs to get the crossbow. Instead he went straight to the door and pressed the button to open the gates. Seeing her chance, Sally silently grabbed her bag and jacket and crept down the corridor. She came into the kitchen as she heard the jeep pulling into the driveway. She grabbed her cleaning kit from the work-surface, went quickly to the door that led out across the terrace, and put her hand on it, expecting it to open.
It didn’t. It was locked.
She jiggled it and tugged, but there was no mistake: it was locked. She hunted around for a key, picking up pots and vases to check under them. The utility room. She knew for sure that that door was open – it always was. But before she could get across the kitchen the front door slammed and the two men came into the hallway. She stood, frozen, her heart thumping. There wasn’t any escape from this – she couldn’t go back to the office without passing the hallway. She couldn’t get to the utility room either. She was trapped.
Quickly she slipped into the huge glass atrium that was tacked on to the back of the house. The doors that opened from it five yards away were closed, but she couldn’t risk crossing it to check if they were locked because the men were nearly in the kitchen and they’d spot her. A chaise-longue was set against the wall, just out of sight of the kitchen – she could hide there for the time being. She sat down silently. The men came into the kitchen and at the same time a long bar of light moved across the atrium windows. A reflection. She realized she could see all the familiar things across the kitchen and into the halclass="underline" mirrored in the panes. If the men stood at the right place and glanced across they’d see her reflected back at them, but it was too late to move. She pulled her feet up tighter, her case and jacket crunched against her stomach, and kept as still and quiet as she could.