‘I’m here to search your premises. Please make all your accounts and employee records available.’
Jonny felt like his bowels were somehow ingesting themselves. The tell-tale sensation of needing the toilet, fast. But he wouldn’t show this bitch any fear. The authorities were like dogs; the moment they caught a whiff of guilt, they knew they had you. Tariq was relying on him. Both of their families depended on his giving a convincing performance. He put one foot in front of another and showed her to an office that looked onto the main factory floor through a large plate-glass internal window.
‘You can work in here,’ he said politely, switching on the flick-flickering strip lighting and pulling out an uncomfortable-looking brown plastic chair. It was cold in there. The thin carpet tiles were peeling upwards, revealing perished rubber underneath. Let the tax bastards suffer.
‘Where is Mr Khan?’ she asked, touching her no-nonsense brown bob. It appeared rigid and moved only slightly.
‘Family emergency. He’s been called away.’
Darley looked over her purple plastic-framed glasses, fixing him with hard hazel eyes. ‘Convenient.’
Shrugging, he held his palms aloft in a gesture of honesty.
‘Am I my business partner’s keeper?’
Jonny wished he could run away. Give it all up. Hide on a beach in Israel or South America or even crappy Marbella would do right now. Silently, he cursed Tariq for having chosen that morning, of all mornings, to visit their other place, leaving him to sort out this gargantuan shit-storm on his own.
As the day wore on, Jonny felt his spirit ebbing away, answering intrusive questions and observing his book-keeper, old Mohammed, delivering box after box of files to the temporary hub of HMRC investigation.
Knocking timorously on the door, he popped his head in to see Ruth Darley busily going through a sheaf of invoices with a determined look on her face. Her underlings flanked her, like Padawans studying beneath some great Jedi. Jonny looked at his watch pointedly.
‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘Would you like my secretary to bring you and your colleagues a coffee?’
Darley looked at him and slid her glasses further up her nose. Glanced at Jonny’s wrist. ‘I don’t need a Breitling watch to tell me what time it is, Mr Margulies.’ She offered him a grimace that was an approximation of a smile. ‘We’ll be leaving in ten minutes, but we’ll be back tomorrow.’
Jonny folded his arms. Imagined for a second that he could hear the inmates inside Strangeways jeering at him from behind their barred windows.
‘Back? Oh. You haven’t seen everything you need today? I thought Janice had given you access to the full monty. We’ve got nothing to hide here, you know.’
Ruth Darley stood and held a separate sheaf of invoices aloft. Invoices written in Chinese, by the looks of it. At that moment, a sweat broke out on Jonny’s top lip and he wished, however improbably, that he knew the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese. Had the invoices somehow got mixed up? Maureen would surely never allow that to happen.
‘I have found anomalies, Mr Margulies.’ Her smile was genuine that time.
Shit. Those were the last words he had wanted to hear.
Irina didn’t like the tall man who smelled of fish. She looked up at him and wrinkled her nose. She had heard tell of Jews back home, but had never seen a real one until coming to Manchester. Asaf, the beast was called. He looked like something out of the old stories she had been told as a child by her dear old Babicˇka. He even had the curly sidelocks she had described, though not the horns, it would seem.
Instinctively, she held her bag close to her body, thinking of the photo of Mama and Babicˇka that she had hidden in a special zipped compartment. Bad enough that these bastards had taken her Slovakian passport away from her. She would never let them have that photo. It was all she had left of her old life. How she missed her Mama. How disappointed Mama would be if she knew that her lover Dominik had betrayed them both by getting her pregnant and then – as if knocking up his girlfriend’s teenaged daughter weren’t bad enough – arranging her transport to England with the promise of a hairdressing career that had turned out to be nothing more than unpaid prostitution.
She patted her stomach. The baby wasn’t showing yet. She didn’t want a baby. This was not a world she wanted to bring a child into.
Spitting on the floor, she tried to get the taste of the boss-man’s dick out of her mouth.
Asaf looked down at her. ‘Hurry up,’ he said in her native tongue, grabbing her upper arm. ‘You’ve got an appointment.’
‘An appointment?’ Her heart fell. Another punter, no doubt. Perhaps some sweaty builder with dirt beneath his fingernails. Perhaps a businessman in one of the local offices. Clean hands, but the same stench of lust and lies evaporating from their pores, as they all cheated on their wives with some firm, forbidden flesh.
The Fish Man pulled her towards a battered purple people carrier, parked outside a run-down warehouse, marked out from all the other run-down warehouses by a sign in the window – written in English in poorly cut-out dayglo letters, the meaning of which she didn’t understand. An ‘F’ hung askew at the start of two words – ‘ANCY GOODS’. Beneath it was scrawled in black on a giant, fluorescent green poster, ‘WHOLESALE ONLY’. A dark-skinned man was sitting behind the wheel of the vehicle. Into his scalp was shaven a lightning bolt. He glanced at her, looked her up and down, and looked away. Perhaps derision or disgust or furtive lust. It was hard to tell.
‘Are you taking me back to the house?’ Irina asked the Fish Man. Suddenly, she was buoyed by the hope of a hot drink, a shower and a chat with her own kind. The house was full of other teens on the game for these sons of bitches – all from Eastern Europe, give or take the odd African. The black ones mainly kept themselves to themselves.
He opened the rear door to the people carrier and pushed her into the seat.
‘No. Not back to the house. Something else. Lev here will take us.’ He rummaged in a deep pocket sewn into his coat and frowned. ‘Stay put. I’ve got to go back and get something.’
He engaged the child locks and slammed the rear door, leaving her trapped in a vacuum of awkwardness with the stranger in the driver’s seat.
Clasping her hoody around her tightly, Irina stared at the back of the driver’s head. She recognised him as the man who came round to the house to collect money from those spotty-faced pimps that kept her and the other girls under lock and key, Tommo and Kai.
‘You doing alright?’ the driver asked.
Irina jumped at the sound of his voice, struggling to understand his words spoken with a strong Mancunian accent. She inadvertently locked eyes with him via the rear view mirror and immediately looked down to her lap, heat burning in her cheeks. It was best not to engage with these animals. You never knew when they were going to pounce on you, expecting sex.
