What Came Before He Shot Her

she wasn’t going to get away easily. She assumed they were on their way to wherever it was that they took shoplifters while they waited for a constable to show up from the Earl’s Court Road police station, and she began to prepare a tale to spin when the constable got there. She’d have time to do this in whatever lockup they provided for her. It would be, she reckoned, at best a small and windowless room and at worst a real cell.

            It was neither. Instead, the security guard opened a door and pushed her into a locker room. It smelled of perspiration and disinfectant. Rows of grey lockers lined it on either side, and a narrow, unpainted wooden bench went down its middle.

            Ness said, “I di’n’t do nothing, mon. Why’re you bringing me to dis place?”

            “I expect you know. I expect we can open that bag of yours and see.” The guard turned from her, and locked the door behind them. The dead-bolt clicked into place like a pistol cocking. He held out his hand. “Give me the bag,” he told her. “And let me say that things tend to go easier with you lot if I can tell the cops you’ve been cooperative from the first.”

            Ness hated the idea of handing over her bag, but she did it because cooperative  was indeed how she wanted to seem. She watched while the guard opened the bag as any man might: clumsily and unsure how the thing was meant to be handled. He dumped out its contents and there was the offending article, sequins glittering in the overhead lights. He picked it up and held it dangling from one finger. He looked from her to it, and he said, “Worth it, then?”

            “What’re you talkin ’bout?”

            “I’m asking is it worth it to nick something like this when the consequences might be a lockup?”

            “You sayin I nicked it. I ain’t.”

            “How’d it get in your bag if you didn’t nick it?”

            “Don’t know,” she said. “I never saw it before.”

            “And who d’you expect to believe that? Especially when I give chapter and verse on your picking up two, dropping them both, and returning only one of them to the rack. There was this one—with the silver sequins —and there was the other one—with the red and blue. Who d’you think will be believed? D’you have any priors, by the way?”

            “What’re you yammerin—”

            “I think you know. And I think you have them. Priors, that is. Problems with the cops. The last thing you want is for me to phone them. I can see that in your face as plain as anything, and don’t deny it.”

            “You don’t know nuffink.”

            “Don’t I now? Then you won’t mind when the coppers come along, when I tell ’em my tale and you tell ’em yours. Who do you expect they’re likely to believe, a girl with priors—kitted out like a tart—or an upstanding member of the public who happens to be on staff at this establishment?”

            Ness said nothing. She attempted to seem indifferent, but the truth of the matter was that she was not. She didn’t want to face the police another time, and the fact that she was eyeball to eyeball with doing just that infuriated her. The fact that she was in the hands of someone who was clearly going to play cat and mouse with her till he turned her over to the authorities only made matters worse. She felt tears of futility come into her eyes and this enraged her more. The security guard saw them, and carried on in accordance with what he believed about them.

            “Not so tough when it comes down to it, are you, now?” he asked her. “Dress tough, act tough, talk tough, all of it. But at the end of the day, you want to go home like the rest of ’em, I expect. That it? You want to go home? Forget about this?”

            Ness was mute. She waited. She sensed more was to come, and she was not wrong in this. The guard was watching her, waiting for a reaction of some kind. She finally said with a fair degree of caution, “What?

            You sayin you mean to let me go home?”

            “If certain conditions are met,” he said. “I being the only one who knows about this—” He swung the headband from his finger again. “I let you leave and I return this to where it belongs. Nothing further said between us.”

            Ness thought about this and knew there was no alternative. She said,

            “What, then?”

            He smiled. “Take off your T-shirt. Bra as well, if you’re wearing one, which I doubt, considering how much I can already see.”

            Ness swallowed. “What for? What’re you goin—”

            “You want to leave? No questions asked? No further cause for interaction between us? Take off your T-shirt and let me look at them. That’s what I want. I want to look at them. I want to see what you have.”

            “That’s all? Then you let me—”

            “Take off  your T-shirt.”

            It wasn’t, she told herself, any worse than opening the dressing gown in front of Dix D’Court. And it surely wasn’t worse than everything else she’d already seen and done and experienced . . . And  it meant that she would walk out of this place without a cop in attendance, which meant everything there was.

            She clenched her teeth. It didn’t  matter. Nothing mattered. In one quick movement, she pulled the T-shirt up, over her head, and off.

            “Face me square,” he said. “Don’t cover yourself cause I don’t expect you do that for all the younger blokes, do you? Drop the shirt as well. Put your arms at your sides.”

            She did it. She stood there. He drank her in. His eyes were greedy. His breathing was loud. He swallowed so hard she could hear the sound of it from where she stood some ten feet away. Too many feet away, as things turned out. He said to her, “One thing more.”

            “You said—”

            “Well, that was before I saw, wasn’t it? Come over here, then.”

            “I don’t—”

            “Just ask yourself if you want all this”—again the headband—“to go away, dearie.”

            He waited then. He was sure of himself, as a man who’d stood in this spot many times before and made the most of it.

Ness approached him, without any other option that she could see. She steeled herself to what would happen next and when he put his hand over one of her breasts, she did her best not to shudder although she felt a prickling sensation inside her nose: harbinger of the most useless of tears. His entire hand covered her breast, her nipple cushioned in the centre of his palm. His fingers tightened. He pulled her forward.

            When she was inches from him, he looked at her squarely. “This,” he said, “c’n all go away. You out of here and home to your mummy. No one the wiser about nicking this and that from the store. That what you want?”

            A tear escaped her eye.

            “You got to say,” he said. “That’s what you want. Say it.”

            She managed to mutter. “Yeah.”

            “No. You must say  it, dear.”

            “Tha’s what I want.”

            He smiled. “I guessed as much,” he said. “Girls like you, they always want it. You hold still now, and I give you what you asked for, dearie. Will you do that for me? Answer me now.”

            Ness steeled herself. “I do that for you.”

            “Willingly?”

            “Yeah. I do it.”

            “How nice,” he said. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” He bent to her, then, and he began to suck.

            SHE WAS LATE to the child drop-in centre. She made the trip from Kensington High Street north to Meanwhile Gardens without thinking about the locker room, but the effort to do this made her rage inside. Rage