“You against Corgan?” I saw the expression on his face. “Sorry. I do not want to sound like I am taking the piss. He’s a brutal man Daniel, you know that. And you are not.”

  He glared at me. “I could be,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “OK,” I said, because if I said anything else, it would sound as if I was mocking him.

  “Besides,” he said after a while. “There are other ways.”

  “I do not follow,” I said.

  “He might be able to take me in a straight fight,” Daniel said, as if he was admitting a distant and unlikely possibility. I thought that Corgan would beat Daniel without breaking into a sweat or putting down his cup of coffee. “But there are other ways.”

  “I am sure there are.”

  “You don’t take me seriously, do you?”

  “I do, Daniel.”

  “I got the contacts, you know. Like, I could walk away from here, make a phone call, get a gun, just like that.”

  “Don’t even talk like that Daniel.”

  “Do you not believe me then? I fucking could, half an hour. You want, I’ll go get it now, prove it to you.”

  “I believe you, I believe you. I don’t need proof. And you don’t need a gun.”

  He stared at me for a little while, and I could tell that he was not happy.

  “Sometimes I don’t think that you take me seriously,” he said. “Think I’m just a little kid.”

  “Not fair,” I said. “I do take you seriously. I just do not need you to keep trying to prove it to me.”

  He stared some more, then a smile stole onto his face, and the smile turned into a big grin. He laughed, like a naughty schoolboy.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “No, tell me.”

  “Don’t dare,” he said.

  “Tell me!”

  He laughed again. “See, prove my point for me. I was just imagining Anna with a gun. Christ, it’d be a massacre. Corgan...bang! Someone who borrowed your toothpaste without asking...bang! Someone who looked at you the wrong way...bang! Fucking massacre.”

  Now it was my turn to pull a face. “You make me sound like I’m always cross,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s unfair,” he said. “Not always. I’m sure there’s the odd moment. Maybe when you’re asleep,” and then I proved his point for him, by elbowing him hard in the soft part of his upper arm and walking off towards town.

  “Look, I dunno if I can be around tomorrow,” Daniel said when he had caught me up. “Sorry. And that hurt. Anyway, things to do tomorrow that I can’t shift. For the man, you know. He doesn’t take no for an answer. If I could be here, I would.”

  “It is not a problem,” I said. “I will go and find this Jonesy, talk to him. I appreciate you being here today.”

  “No problem. Bit weird, them two.”

  “You didn’t have to come with me,” I said.

  “I know,” he grinned. “But I did, didn’t I?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You did. And thank you.”

  We stopped, standing very near to each other. He was going one way, I was going another. Daniel looked at me, a long look without saying anything. He stepped forward, so that we were toe to toe. I looked up.

  “Bye,” I said, and I stepped back very quickly, before it was too late and anything could happen. “Peter is a bastard if I am late. Thank you, again. Really.”

  “Yeah,” Daniel said, and he smiled a smile that said he knew that I knew, but he had to try, didn’t he. “Let me know what happens. And you take it easy and watch yourself, yeah?”

  “I will,” I said, and I walked away.

  I had told a little lie, as there was an hour before I had to be in work. It wasn’t worth going back to the hostel, so I wandered down streets of shops, looking at the mannequins in the windows, watching the people shopping, the children trailing behind leaving sweet wrappers wherever they went, the assistants wrapping and bagging and looking at the clock after every third customer. Once, in another life, I shopped. Now, I looked for bargains, and made things last and got used to wanting, and used to not having. Spoilt girl, I thought. Stop your whining, and think about people like Elena’s son. And I did, and I knew that life could be worse. But it still did not stop me from missing the time when everything was easy. And then I thought about where that time came from, and what paid for it, and I stopped trying to think at all. Just as I always had.

  I came close, sometimes, but then I would back away, as if I had touched something hot.

  “What time do you call this?” I had not seen my father that night, sitting in his armchair in the dark.

  “I’m not a child, you don’t need to wait up for me.”

  “Not a child. Listen to her. Anna, you have school tomorrow, you have exams soon that will take you to medical school if you pass them, you are not to stay out this late.”

  “Sometimes I think you want me to be a doctor more than I do.”

  He got up out of his chair.

  “You can be something, Anna. Do something with your life. Go places. Don’t be like these girls who do not study because all they can think about is some mechanic who is promising them the moon but will leave them with nothing more than oil stains on their dress and a baby in their belly, these girls who end up with nothing, worth nothing. I want more for my daughter.”

  “So tell me: what do they do, those girls, Daddy? What do girls who are desperate do? Tell me.”

  He looked at me for a long time, without saying anything. Then he turned and left. “Go to bed, Anna,” he said as he walked up the stairs. “Think about your studies. Not about things that you do not understand.”

  Or things that I did not want to understand.

  On the way to work, I splashed out on a packet of beef crisps and a Mars Bar, a king-size one because a girl has to pamper herself sometimes and make herself feel special.

  It was in the slow time, early evening. The customers who stopped in on the way home for a burger, looking guilty because they would be eating again in an hour or two, had gone. The crowd that wanted to grab some food in town before they started on the drink had not yet arrived. In one corner of the restaurant, a couple of teenagers sat over an hour-old milkshake and when they thought that nobody was looking they kissed as if they wanted to get through to the other side of each other. A middle-aged man sat in another corner, making his way through Peter’s Mega Meal, reading a newspaper and looking too often at the kids when he thought that nobody was looking. I could not decide whether he was reliving memories of his own childhood, the sweetness of that first kiss, or if he was just a pervert. Peter was in the kitchen, trying to fix a deep fat fryer that no longer fried. I cleaned up, restocked the burger boxes and the pizza boxes for the evening rush. Standing doing nothing was not something that I liked, and also, it gave me time to think.

  The door banged open and shut, and I dropped my cleaning cloth into a dish of bleach, and wiped my hands, ready to serve. Then I took a step back.

  “My angel.” It was Kav. The man whose bullet wound I had treated as my first job for Corgan was leaning on the counter. “My Florence Nightingale. Still think you’d look canny in a nurse’s uniform, mind. One of them short ones, with the stockings.”

  “I’m not a nurse,” I said.

  “More’s the pity.”

  “If you are ordering food, order. If not, go away.”

  “I don’t want a burger, sweetheart.”

  “Then you have come to the wrong place.”

  “Oh no,” Kav said. “I don’t think I have.” He looked me up and down, like I was dancing for him in a club. The uniform I wore for work was very far from what you could describe as being attractive. The red shirt made me look as if I was a children’s entertainer, and the scratchy grey trousers hung baggy where they should cling and clung where they should be baggy. I realised though, after a few days in the burger bar, that to many men this made no difference.

  “All we do here, is sell burgers,” I said. “Chips and pizzas. Chicken nuggets and sausages in batter. If you don’t want that, go.”

  “Not quite all you do though, is it pet? Not from what I’m hearing. You’ve been doing more than that. I understand you and me have something in common.”

  “You like pretty dresses too? Yes, you look the type.”

  “Feisty.” Kav grinned. “I like a lass who puts up a bit of a fight.” With his little goatee beard and his dirty grin, he looked as I imagined the devil would look.

  “Lucky for you then,” I said. “Because I imagine the only way you get a woman is to force them.”

  His grin slipped, just for a moment. Then came back. He leaned even closer. I leaned away.

  “Aye, lass, well maybe we’ll find out one day, eh? You and me. You won’t be so gobby with your fucking mouth full.”

  He stared at me. I stared back. The counter did not seem like much of a barrier between us. He laughed. “We’ll see. Sooner than you think, if you don’t watch yourself. Anyway, what we’ve got in common is one daft lad, one very daft lad. I think you know who I mean, pet. Because little birdies tell me that you’re looking for him too.”

  “Little birdies say lots of things,” I said. “And when you go past they shit on your back.”

  “No-one shits on my back, sweetheart. Not if they have any sense. And never twice. I trust what I’m hearing, and what I keep hearing everywhere I go is your name.”

  “I am a popular girl.”

  “Aye, I bet you are. But listen to this: I want that lad, you understand me? And nothing’s going to get in the way of that, especially not some mouthy tart who doesn’t even belong in this fucking country anyway. ’Specially not when we’re both meant to be working for the same boss. If I had my way I’d be making you talk now, but Corgan says it’s too much effort to find another one like you. So you do yourself a favour, before you really fuck me off, be sensible. I want to find your mate. If you know where he is, and don’t tell me, Corgan’ll change his fucking mind, and I’ll get the green light to make you. I’m going to find him. Just don’t get in my way. And if you know where he is, you let me know.” He slid a piece of paper across the counter, with two phone numbers on it. “Top one’s me, bottom one’s Corgan. You phone one of us, mind. Or if you fancy an evening out, let me know that too. I could give you a night you would remember, pet.”

  “Back when I was a medical student, I had classes in the morgue,” I said. “Pathology. There was a man, I remember. About your age. About your height. He had spent three days in the river before he was found.”

  “Oh, aye? That a threat of some kind?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled sweetly. “It is just that I would fuck him before you, any time.”

  He lunged across the counter, grabbed my top, and pulled me towards him. The middle-aged man folded away his newspaper in a hurry and scurried out of the door. The teenagers were joined at the lip again and would have been oblivious had the restaurant fallen down around them.

  “One day Corgan will be done with you.” His face was close to mine, his breath strong with tobacco. “And then, pet, he’ll give you to me. And when he does, the first thing I’m going to do is make you—”

  “Put her down. Now.”

  The man looked across at Peter, who was advancing round from the kitchens.

  “You stay out of this. Not your business.”

  Peter reached the counter next to me. He was red in the face, and breathing hard. “I said let her go.”

  “You don’t want to be getting involved, pal, believe me—”

  Peter growled like an animal and lifted the cleaver that he used to separate burgers when they were frozen together. “Let her go.”

  Kav stared at him for a moment, and then dropped me. He rolled his shoulders back, straightened the cuffs on his jacket. He jabbed a finger at me. “You, remember what I said.” And then he jabbed the finger at Peter. “And you, I’ll remember your face. I’ll be seeing you.”

  Peter said nothing, just stood still, impassive, holding the cleaver. The man spat on the floor, and then walked out.

  The two teenagers, who had finally noticed that something was happening outside of their skins, watched him go out, wide-eyed. Then they looked at Peter. They looked like they were too scared to move.

  “You all right Anna?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, thank you. Thank you, Peter. I’m sorry. I hope this doesn’t come back on you, on the restaurant. If you want, I will leave.”

  “I didn’t just front some thug down only to have you leave. I’m short-staffed enough as it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said again. “I am really sorry. You scared the shit out of him, you know.”

  Peter grinned. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” He looked very pleased with himself, and seemed to be standing a couple of inches taller than he usually did. “I did. He wasn’t having any of it, was he? Look, you all right to carry on?”

  “I’m fine, he won’t be back.”

  Peter went back to being serious again for a minute. “What you’re mixed up in...”

  “I am not going to share. No way, Peter. I have involved you enough.”

  He didn’t argue. “If you need...anything. Let me know.”

  “I will.”

  “But more than anything else, you get yourself out of this, whatever it is. It’s not drugs is it?”

  “No drugs. I don’t need them, not with the coffee we serve in here.”

  “Less of that,” he said, “It’s gourmet coffee that. Says so on the machine.” He looked at me for a moment, then walked back into the kitchen. “I need you, Anna,” he said. “So you stay safe.”

  “I will try,” I called after him. I screwed up the paper that Kav had given me and threw it in the bin with the chips scraped from the floor. I made a chocolate milkshake, extra large, and I took it with two straws over to the two teenagers. “Here,” I said. “Enjoy this. And always use a condom. Listen to me, I am a doctor. Well, medical student.”

  They stared at me while I walked back to the counter. Then they went back to their own world. Violence and strange foreign waitresses were interesting enough, but no competition for milkshakes and kissing.

  ~

  As soon as I walked in the front door of the hostel, I knew that something had happened. Three women stood in a corner of the hall talking, and when I came in they stopped. There was something in the air, a change. I climbed the stairs to my floor, and let myself into my room.

  Safeta sat in a chair crying. Sally sat on the edge of Alice’s bed, chewing on one of her finger nails.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Safeta, and she sobbed and said something to me in her own language that I could not understand and probably would not have done even if it had been in mine. I looked at Sally. She said nothing, but jerked her thumb towards the bed.

  “They came back?” I said. Sally nodded. “For Alice?” Safeta sobbed again.

  “Bastards,” I said. “They can’t send her back.”

  “Course they can,” Sally said. “They can do what they want. I’m having her bed, mine’s freezing, I want to be by the radiator. What?” She looked at Safeta and me. “What? I’m sorry too, but it’s not like she can have it any more, is it?”

  I didn’t say anything to Sally, but I knelt on the floor next to Safeta and I put my arm around her until she stopped crying. When she did, which was not for quite some time, I knelt on Alice’s bed, despite Sally’s mutterings, and I carefully peeled each of the pictures of her children from the wall and put them into a drawer in the lopsided cabinet beside my bed.

  “Maybe I can find out where they have taken her,” I said. “They might let her have them.” Safeta smiled. Sally snorted. That night, the landlord moved a new woman into the room, and she smiled shyly at us and got into Sally’s old bed and went to sleep facing the wall, without saying a word.

  Alice was not the first who had disappeared like this, and she would not be the last. For the people I knew, this is what things were like. Faces came, faces went. Some of their own choosing, some not. Some were taken, some left before they were taken, others nobody knew about at all. Everyone had names, and a place that they were from, but none of these things mattered any more, and you never knew if the names and places were true or a story anyway. We all lived in stories. Not many had a happy ending.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I woke up early the next morning, because the rain rattled hard at the windows and the wind shook the roof and made it sound like the end of the world. When I opened the front door of the hostel I paused to see if it was still raining. A little way down the road, a very big man leaned against a black car, his arms folded. I looked away as quick as you take your hand from a pan you did not know was hot. I pretended to hesitate in the doorway, looking for something in my bag. The last time that I had seen this giant of a man, he had been opening the door of that car for the Ukrainian. A bad choice to follow someone, I thought. And then I thought: not if you were meant to see him.

  I shook my head, showing how annoyed I was that I had forgotten what it was that I had looked for in my bag, and I wandered back into the hostel. But I ignored the stairs to my room and ran down the narrow stairs at the back of the building and into the basement where they kept the boilers and the mops and buckets for the caretaker to clean the common areas once a week. It smelt of bleach and mildewed cloths. The door to it was meant to be locked, but it never was. I ran through the boiler room and unbolted the heavy door that led to the back alley behind the hostel, and dragged it open. The alley was empty of everything but bins and litter and stink. At one end there was the blank face of a dirty concrete wall three times my height. In the other direction the alley curved round and then led out onto the street. It would be a risk, because from where the Ukrainian’s man stood, you could still see where the alley met the street. But I didn’t have a lot of choice.

  When I reached the end of the alley, I peered round the corner of the building, feeling stupid, like I was pretending that I was in a spy film. The Ukrainian’s man leaned against his car, arms folded, looking like he was made of stone. I stood where I was for a moment or two, breathing heavy, trying to convince myself that I could make it. Then he moved, turning his head as if someone had spoken to him, and he dug in first one pocket, then another. As he found his phone and pulled it out to see who was calling, I slipped out from the alley and ran in the opposite direction, taking turning after turning until I did not have the breath to run any more. I found my bearings and set off down towards the river.