Revenge of the Tide (17 page)

‘Genevieve,’ said a voice – the second man. ‘You want to tell us what the fuck’s going on?’

‘What? What do you mean?’ I wailed. They were whispering but I had no intention of doing that on my own boat.

He lifted my head by my hair and flung it back on the pillow so my teeth knocked against my lip. I felt blood in my mouth and spat it away.

‘Don’t make it worse. Tell us what you’re up to, and get it over with, or we’ll just fucking shut you up and have plenty of time to look round the boat. What’s it going to be?’

‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘My boyfriend’s coming over when he’s finished work. He’ll be here in a minute.’

He laughed. ‘Like fuck he is. You mean your boyfriend Mr Carling? He’s tucked up at home with Mrs Carling. He’s certainly not on his way round here. Oh, Genevieve, you’re hilarious.’

There was a breeze a fraction of a second before his fist connected with the side of my head, just behind my ear, once, twice – hard; I felt dizzy and sick.

‘Don’t be stupid. Right?’

I could hear buzzing, a ringing, and for a second I wondered what it was, until I realised it was coming from inside my own head.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, my voice muffled by sobs, by the bedclothes and the pillow, ‘what you’re talking about.’

Someone else was on the boat. They were throwing things around in the galley.

I recognised the voice of the second man, the one who had stopped the first from strangling me. It was Nicks, Robbie Nicks, one of Fitz’s men.

‘Nicks?’ I said.

There was silence in the room, broken only by the noises from the saloon and the galley.

‘Will you shut up, you stupid fucking bitch,’ he hissed.

There was a bang like a firework going off in my head, and the room disappeared and everything in it.

A
fter the episode with Dunkerley, I spent some time counting up the money I’d saved. Realistically, I needed eighty to a hundred grand for a barge in a reasonable condition. I could have got a narrowboat for much less, but I found them restrictive. I wanted the same space I could get in a house, on a boat. After all, I was going to live on it, not spend summer weekends there. After that, I would need cash to do it up – say another twenty or thirty grand assuming a worst case scenario, a boat with some sort of structural problems or one that needed taking out of the water and welding. On top of that, I’d need enough to live on for at least twelve months, although it was in the back of my mind that I could get a part-time job if I had to, once the process had started.

I had about two-thirds of the amount I needed, and most of that had come from equity from my flat, which I’d sold a year ago. Nowhere near enough to be able to leave the job now. Part of the trouble was that, as much as I earned from dancing, there were expenses too: clothes, shoes, cosmetics – even being frugal I was spending a small fortune on make-up every month. So: another six months at work, assuming I didn’t get the opportunity to do any more of Fitz’s private parties, and I should have enough money to be able to resign.

I didn’t know if I could stand it that long.

Dunkerley went back to keeping out of my way, but he had also returned to his usual dreadful self. Performance targets had been published – an increase for all of us. We were already working as hard as we could. Where the extra was supposed to come from, none of us had any idea. The only reason I stayed was because of the money. Other organisations in our sector were actively making people redundant. I didn’t hold out much hope of getting another job if I chose to leave, especially since Dunkerley would be the one writing my reference.

No, I decided: I would have to stay, and just try and manage Dunkerley the best way I could.

It was a week after the incident on the Underground, Friday again, that I first had an indication that Dunkerley was not prepared to let things lie. I opened my desk drawer, and inside on top of the papers was a flyer for a lap dancing club.

I took hold of it and marched into Dunkerley’s office. He was in there on his own, pretending to be busy. I slammed the leaflet on his desk.

‘What is this all about?’ I said, furious.

He grinned. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘What’s that – applying for another job, are we?’

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, quieter.

His face changed.

‘You know why. You had me chucked out of that club. It was humiliating.’

‘I didn’t do anything of the kind,’ I said, embellishing the truth a little. ‘The manager told me you’d asked for a private dance for free. They don’t like that kind of thing, as I’m sure you realise. You don’t get anything for free in that place and, if you ask, they take it as an insult. So that’s why you got chucked out.’

‘So if you weren’t in the club, would you have given me a private dance for free?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re an odious little shit. Quite apart from the fact that you’re my manager and it’s inappropriate on just about every level.’

‘You complete bitch,’ he said. ‘Get the fuck out of my office!’

I went to see the Human Resources officer. If he was going to get nasty on me, then I could play the same game. I sat in her office, breathless and flustered and teary, and told her his behaviour towards me amounted to sexual harassment and I was sick of it. She listened sympathetically while I explained that I’d seen him in a nightclub and he’d tried it on, and ever since then he had been making inappropriate suggestions. I showed her the leaflet.

‘He put this in my drawer,’ I said.

‘How do you know it was him?’ she asked.

‘I went to ask him. He denied it at first and then he – he said something about how I should dance for him.’

‘I see.’

She asked me to write her a report detailing all the incidents I could remember, all the times when he had said things to me or done things that I considered inappropriate. I was still anxious, stressed by the whole thing, and she said I should take the rest of the day off and she would sort it out.

I had work to do, and realistically I should have gone back to my desk and carried on with it, especially considering the new targets we were working towards. But the thought of having to face Dunkerley again was making me feel sick, so I did as I was told and went home.

I was looking forward to tonight, and the weekend. Assuming they wouldn’t let my cock of a boss in through the door at the Barclay I was going to have a great weekend dancing, seeing my regulars, getting some good exercise and earning money into the bargain.

I opened my eyes and almost immediately closed them again, because the light was too bright and everything hurt, everything, from my head to my feet.

It took me a second to realise where I was, then I saw I was on the floor and someone was talking to me, only I couldn’t hear them properly. It was like being underwater – I could hear my own breathing, my heart, the blood rushing through my veins.

‘Gen? Oh, thank God…’

‘Malc?’

He went off somewhere, saying something – ‘Where’s the fucking scissors…?’

In the drawer in the galley
, I wanted to say. Why couldn’t I move my hands? Then it started coming back to me – there were men in here, in my bedroom, on my boat…

I started to panic, and struggle, and then Malcolm was back. ‘Hold on, hold on. You’ve got a cable tie on your hands. I can’t find any effing scissors, it’s a bit of a mess back there…’

‘There’s a pair of pliers in the hatch… in the box of tools…’

The hatch was a mess, too, apparently. That told me everything. They must have found the parcel. It was a miracle they’d left me alive.

He found the pliers under one of the pallets in the storage room. It hurt like hell, levering the jaw of the tool under the cable tie, digging into my swollen flesh, and then one snip and the plastic tie came free and I let out a scream of pain as my arms were released and the blood started rushing back through my hands and fingers.

For a moment I couldn’t move, I just lay on my bedroom floor sobbing, crying my heart out. How did I get into this stupid, crazy mess? What had I done to deserve all this shit?

Malcolm was sitting on the floor, resting with his back against my bed, watching me steadily. ‘Take your time,’ he said. ‘When you want to sit up I’ll give you a hand.’

I gasped and sobbed into the carpet. My hands were in agony. ‘Oh, God, Malc… I was so scared…’

‘Did you see who it was?’ he asked.

I shook my head and tried to push myself up from the floor. He stood, and hooked his hands under my armpits, pulling me upright and then helping me to sit on the bed.

‘It was dark… oh, God. Have they trashed it, Malcolm? Have they damaged the boat?’

‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘I think they’ve just thrown stuff around. If it was my boat you’d not even notice they’d been in. Perhaps I should ask them to come round
Aunty Jean
next time; they might make it look better.’

I smiled despite myself.

‘Do you want me to call the gavvers?’ he asked, in a tone that suggested complete unwillingness to do anything of the kind.

I shook my head again. ‘I can’t.’

‘This is shit, Gen, you know,’ he said.

‘What – not calling the police?’

‘No. What they’re doing. It must be that fucking parcel you told me about.’ He was shaking his head, running a hand through his hair. ‘They could come back any time, couldn’t they? They could start on us too; they could be threatening us next if they can’t get what they want from you, and Josie…’

‘Calm down, Malcolm. I’m not even sure that’s what they were after.’

‘Of course it fucking is! Why else would a load of heavies suddenly start searching your boat and beating you up?’

I wished I’d not told him about the stupid parcel. He was raising his voice now, pacing up and down.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’ve gone, right?’

‘How do you know they haven’t taken your parcel?’

‘I don’t know. They might’ve. But I somehow think they didn’t find it.’

‘You want me to check for you?’

‘No, I don’t!’ I was losing patience with him now – always this bloody need to help, to interfere. ‘Thanks. Honestly, I’ll be fine. I’ll have a look in a minute, okay? I need to – sort myself out first. I need to tidy up a bit. Will you come round later?’

‘Yeah, if you want,’ he said.

He looked a bit peeved. He shuffled on his feet, clearly not ready to go just yet.

‘I wanted to tell you we buried Oswald,’ he said gruffly. ‘We found a nice quiet corner of the rec. He used to bring us back presents from there – you know, even a baby rabbit once. He’d like it, where we put him.’

‘Is Josie alright?’

‘She’ll be okay in a week or so. Right as rain. She’s already talking about going to the RSPCA at the weekend, look for another rescue cat.’

‘That’s a good sign.’

He nodded, and then stood. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to help you tidy up?’

‘I’ll be fine, honest,’ I said.

‘I’ll see you later, then,’ he said.

‘Malcolm – thank you.’

He shrugged. ‘Would have come over sooner if I’d known you were lying here bloody well tied up and unconscious,’ he said with a smile.

What did he mean? I looked at the clock as he left. I’d been out of it for hours. No wonder I ached all over.

I got up slowly, finding my feet, feeling the room wobble even though the tide was out and the boat was back to resting on the soft mud below.

The cabin was such a mess that I cried out. Paperwork everywhere, my drawings and measurements for the conservatory roof, scattered all over the floor. The drawers in the galley had been pulled out and emptied. The cupboard doors had been ripped off. The dinette seats had been dragged off and the storage space beneath, which was full of odds and ends, bedding, ropes, rigging, spare parts for the engine, had been emptied.

I looked back at the hatch. Malcolm had left the door open and I could see a black space. Was it even worth checking? I knew it had been turned over.

They’d even opened a tin of paint, but thoughtfully emptied it down one side of the hull, presumably so they didn’t get any on their clothes and shoes. All the boxes had been tipped up.And the one at the end, the one helpfully marked
KITCHEN STUFF
.

I crawled painfully over the pallets to the corner, over tools and bits of hardware and the cordless drill and spare lengths of wood I’d been keeping just in case. Some of them had been broken.

The box was upside down, but as soon as I lifted it I realised that it hadn’t been fully emptied. The false bottom hadn’t been touched. They had just kicked the box over, seen the kitchen things spilling out of it, and moved on.

They hadn’t found it. And at least now I knew who it was, targeting my boat: Fitz. And Caddy must have been coming to warn me. She must have known Fitz had found out about Dylan’s parcel, and they’d stopped her before she could get to me. She’d died because of me.