The dressing room was almost empty; many of the girls had already finished and left. I started to pull off my shoes, looking forward to putting my jeans on and going home, when the door opened.
It was Norland. “You’ve got another private dance,” he said.
“What? You’re joking,” I groaned. “I’m worn out.”
“I’m not fucking joking. Get on with it.”
I was half-inclined to leave it, to slip away and pretend that Norland hadn’t told me. But I put some lip gloss on and made my way down the hall to the Blue Room, thinking about the money, always the money—it was the only thing that made all this worthwhile.
I didn’t know who I’d been expecting—one of my regulars perhaps—but in the room were Leon Arnold and the two men I’d seen in the VIP booth earlier on. One of them closed the door behind me.
I felt uncomfortable for a moment but he gave me a warm smile and they didn’t seem to be drunk. I cast a quick glance up, to the corner of the room, the CCTV camera, hoping that someone was in the office upstairs keeping an eye on me.
“Hi, guys,” I said, trying to look and sound as if I’d just started work and was ready to give them their money’s worth and more besides, “take a seat.”
I’d said this to the guy who was still standing by the door, but he ignored me.
I was too tired to mess around so I left the music selection screen and went over to the doorway. “What’s your name?” I asked him. He was standing the way Dylan did, still and impassive, as though he were there for my protection. I didn’t feel protected.
“His name’s Markus,” said Arnold, amused.
“Come and sit down, Markus. You won’t get much of a view from there.”
He looked at Arnold, who was sitting on the sofa with his feet up. I raised a questioning eyebrow at him, and there was a nod in response—either to me, or to Markus.
Whatever. Markus left his post on the door and went to sit on the other side of Arnold.
I went back to staring at the screen, wondering what I’d already danced to this evening . . . then I had it. Madonna—I definitely hadn’t done any Madonna for a long time.
I started my routine by getting as high up the pole as I could, then spinning slowly back down to the floor.
Arnold was paying attention, thankfully. The other two were talking between themselves—nothing they hadn’t seen before. I was going to have to do something really spectacular to get them going. The question was whether I had enough energy left, and whether I could be bothered. It wasn’t them I was interested in, and it certainly wasn’t their money paying for my time—so I turned my full focus on Arnold. I wondered why he wanted them there. He would have had to pay for them, too.
Before the song finished, some signal must have been given that I wasn’t aware of, or didn’t notice, but Markus and the other guy got up and left the room.
I got to my feet for my final twirl and felt a grip of alarm. Arnold wanted me to himself.
I held out my hand to him and he kissed it, but he didn’t let go. “Come and sit with me for a minute,” he said.
The music automatically switched over to the lower volume, slow-time background noise that they left running in here when there weren’t any dances. I picked up my clothes from the floor and slipped back into them as quickly as I could. “I need to go and get changed,” I said in a voice that I hoped left no room for discussion, “but thank you. It’s been lovely to see you again.”
“Sit down,” he said again.
I sat, at the other end of the sofa. Without a word he moved closer to me, his thigh touching mine. I wriggled out and tried to stand, but suddenly, before I really realized what was going on, he was on top of me, his hand up my dress, pulling at my underwear, his mouth on mine.
I pushed him off with a shove and screamed as hard as I could, kicking out with my heels and making contact with something, a shin maybe.
“Get off me!”
“Ow, you fuckin’ bitch!” One hand on my shoulder, his knee in my groin, he pinned me to the sofa by my own stupid dress. “No need to be so unfriendly,” he said.
“There’s CCTV,” I said. “They’ll be in here in a minute . . .”
“No, they won’t,” he said, breathing hard.
His hands were all over me and I couldn’t think what to do. I’d been groped before, I’d had men shouting disgusting suggestions to me while I’d been onstage, and all I’d ever had to do was say something like, “Please don’t speak to me like that,” or look over to one of the guys, and before you knew it they would be carried off toward the exit.
Now I was on my own.
In the back of my head I was replaying the previous weekend, wondering if I’d said or done anything that might have given Leon Arnold the idea that I wanted this, that I wanted to be on my own with him. Or if this was some kind of setup, that Fitz had told him I’d be okay with it, having neglected to mention it to me before or since . . .
“Leon,” I said in a voice that I hoped was both calm and firm, “please—this isn’t right.”
“Shut up,” he said mildly, trying to kiss me while I turned my head left and right and crossed my arms over my chest to try to stop him getting so close, so horribly close.
I looked up again at the camera, praying for someone to come and help me. That was my only hope. Even if I screamed or shouted, nobody would hear me. The noise from the club was too loud.
“Please,” I said, “you really need to stop this. If you want to see me this isn’t the way to go about it.”
He was hurting me now, his hand gripped around the fabric of my dress, pulling it tighter and tighter against my skin. In a moment it would tear away. Where were they? Surely there was someone watching the CCTV monitors? Surely someone would come? I started to panic, writhing and trying to bring my knees up to throw him off. He covered my mouth with his free hand, pressing me down, pushing my head into the sofa cushions so I was fighting for breath while I clawed at him, trying to find skin that I could scratch. The panic was rising inside me, making me shake, weakening my efforts to get free of him.
I heard a muffled sound, like a bang, and seconds later felt clean air above me as Arnold was pulled away. There was shouting, but I couldn’t make out words . . . I found myself taking long gasps of air, as though I’d been drowning. My chest hurt.
I managed to sit up, and the room was empty. I was shaking, my hands tingling, my knees knocking together. I tried to push myself up but my legs wouldn’t support my weight.
The audio system was still playing at low volume and in front of me the pole rose from the laminate floor, shiny in the lights, gleaming and innocent, oblivious to what had just happened.
I sobbed then, trembling on the sofa, thinking about how they’d made such a big thing about the girls being safe here and how, actually, we weren’t safe at all.
And then Dylan was there, hands twitching into fists by his sides, breathing hard.
He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet, then he put his huge arms around me and held me. Inside the circle of his arms I was sobbing and shaking. He patted me reassuringly on the back. “Come on,” he said, “you’re all right now. Let’s get you to the dressing room.”
There was nobody in there, nobody in the hall on the way to the dressing room, either.
“Where is he?” I asked, when I could speak.
Dylan was sitting on the stool next to me, waiting patiently for me to stop crying. “He’s gone.”
“And the others?”
“They’re gone, too.”
“What happened, Dylan?”
He shrugged. “He thought he could get away with it, I guess.”
“What about the CCTV? Isn’t someone supposed to be watching it all the time?”
He grimaced. “Supposed to be.”
“It’s not fucking good enough.”
“No.”
The door opened and Norland came in.
“Don’t you ever fucking knock?” I d
emanded, finding myself angry, furious, where seconds ago I’d been falling apart.
“What’s up with you?” Norland asked with a sneer.
Dylan had got to his feet and moved between me and Norland. He looked twice as big as he usually did, and Norland, who was scrawny in comparison, looked alarmed and took an awkward step backward.
“She just got roughed up,” Dylan said, his voice dangerously quiet.
“By Leon Arnold? You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m laughing? Why weren’t you watching the cameras?”
“I had stuff to do,” he said.
“Where’s Fitz?” I said. “I want to talk to Fitz!”
“Fuck off,” Norland said, “he’s not here. And in any case, do you think he’s gonna listen to your whining? Who do you think you are?”
Without warning, Dylan launched himself at Norland, propelling him backward out of the doorway and off down the corridor. I got to my feet, but by the time I reached the doorway they were down the stairs and out of sight. “Dylan!” I shouted, following them on unsteady feet. “Dylan!”
He appeared at the foot of the stairs. There was no sign of Norland. He gave me a smile that was almost reassuring.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll call you a cab.”
He left me to get changed into my jeans and sweater and when I went downstairs he was there, sitting at one of the empty tables in the bar with a glass on the table in front of him.
“Dylan,” I said.
He looked up.
“Thank you.”
“No problem,” he said. “Cab’ll be here in a minute. You want a drink?”
“Vodka,” I said.
He helped himself behind the bar and poured me a glass. In deference to my femininity he shoved a handful of ice and a slice of lemon in there, too.
I drank two big gulps, intending to finish it off in one go but not quite managing it before it started to burn my throat.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I said.
“It’s a rough business sometimes. You know that.”
“It’s not like he was just a regular customer, Dylan. It’s Leon Arnold. What the fuck’s Fitz going to say?”
“That’s not your problem,” he said. “Let them fight it out among themselves.”
On the street outside, a black cab pulled up to the curb and I got to my feet. “Thanks again,” I said.
By the time I got home I was too exhausted to think but I felt grubby, so I ran a bath while I sat at my dining table, drinking cold water. I was aching all over, head to foot, as though I’d been beaten up rather than simply held down, and my head was pounding.
I opened my bag to look for some Tylenol, and as I did so I felt my phone vibrate, an incoming text. Not a number I recognized.
Meet me 6pm Monday upstairs food area Victoria Station
I felt a momentary panic. Who the hell had sent that text? My first thought was that it must be Arnold, wanting to get me on my own somehow . . . But then why would he want to meet me in such a public place?
I sent a text back:
Who is this?
But there was no reply.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I slept badly, worrying about Arnold and wondering what I was going to say to Fitz the next time I saw him. I had dreams about Victoria Station, about meeting some faceless person who meant to do me harm. I got to work even more exhausted than I usually was on a Monday morning, not looking forward to working my way through the day. To my surprise, Gavin was in the main office, sitting at his old desk, with Lucy next to him.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“He’s back,” Lucy said.
“Who’s back?”
The door to the manager’s office opened then, and to my horror Ian Dunkerley came out. He’d lost weight, but his smug expression hadn’t changed. He fixed me with a defiant stare that looked as though it had required some effort to produce.
“Genevieve,” he said. “When you have a moment?”
I stared at him, mouth open, while he collected papers from the printer and went back into his office, leaving the door ajar.
Oh, God. Not him, not him again.
“Don’t keep him waiting, whatever you do,” Gavin said helpfully. “He’s not in the best of moods.”
I didn’t even put down my bag or take off my coat. I went into Dunkerley’s office and stood in the doorway.
He was behind the desk, tapping away at his keyboard as if he’d never been away. “Shut the door,” he said.
“I’d rather leave it open, if it’s all the same to you.”
“You’re half an hour late,” he said. “Why’s that?”
I didn’t reply. It felt as though the world was caving in around me.
He stood up, straightened his pants, and came around the desk toward me. I took a step back, away from him, at the same moment wondering why I was afraid of him. If anything, he should be afraid of me.
“You thought I was gone for good, huh?” he said, so quietly I could barely hear. He was close enough for me to feel the warmth from him, smell his noxious aftershave.
“I hoped you were,” I said.
“Well, unlike you, I am a professional. I take my career very seriously. And I should point out that I have been working with the police to prosecute your—friends—for their assault on me. And the police have been very interested in you, too.”
I bit my lip. He had to be lying. Whatever else he was, Dunkerley wasn’t stupid—there was no way he’d report the incident to the police, not after the warning he’d had.
“Now, I suggest you get back to work.” He turned and went back to his desk.
I felt sick to my stomach as I left the room, closing the door behind me. Gavin and Lucy had gone out somewhere, and the main office was empty. I sat down at my desk and logged onto the network, my head in my hands as I waited for the emails to load. I looked at the list of unread messages in the inbox: four or five from customers, relating to contracts I was working on. And then twelve emails from Ian Dunkerley, one after the other, starting at 7:24 this morning. The subjects of the emails included “New working practice”; three titled, simply, “Meeting”; one at 9:01 titled “Timekeeping”; and, finally, a thirteenth: “Office dress code.”
I closed the email window without reading any of them and opened a new Word document.
Ten minutes later, Gavin and Lucy returned with their lattes from the coffee shop on the ground floor, laughing about something and chatting without a care in the world.
“Everything okay?” Lucy asked, seeing my face.
“Not really,” I said, retrieving the single sheet from the printer.
“What’s up?”
I couldn’t even bring myself to answer her. I folded the letter, not bothering to put it in an envelope, and took it with me along with my bag and my coat to the CEO’s office on the next floor. There was a meeting going on.
“Will it take long?” I asked.
Linda, the receptionist, looked at me blankly. “Could be ages,” she said. “Anything I can do?”
“I’ll wait, if that’s okay,” I said. I couldn’t face going back downstairs; the thought of having to see Dunkerley again, or even of explaining any of this to Lucy and Gavin, was almost too much.
I watched the little hand on the clock above Linda’s head creep slowly around. Was I really going to do this? Surely this wasn’t me—I’d never given up on anything in my whole life. Was I going to let that horrible man get the better of me? I should be fighting this. And yet, the thought of having to keep going . . .
Ten minutes.
The elevator doors opened and Lucy emerged. She looked at me and handed over some reports to Linda.
I don’t know if it was Lucy’s presence that made me move, or simply that I couldn’t stand being there a minute longer. I got up and went to the office door, opened it wide. Simon Lewis, the CEO, was sitting at his conference table with three other people, one o
f whom was a client I’d worked with on a major project last year. The conversation stopped abruptly and they all turned to look at me. I strode over to them and put the folded letter on the table in front of Simon.
“Genevieve? What’s going on?” he said, and despite my dramatic and unannounced visit his voice was so kind I almost regretted it, almost took the letter back and apologized for the intrusion.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”
I shut the door behind me and walked straight past Lucy, who was standing by Linda’s desk with her mouth open. I took the stairs, and by the time I got to the ground floor I was almost running. I went out of the building through the lobby and, despite my heart thudding with the enormity of it all, the relief I felt knowing that I would never be going back there was sudden, and immense.
The cab took me straight home. I had a hot bath and, after lying awake for a while, thinking about everything that had happened in the last two days, I finally managed to sleep. When I woke up in the afternoon, I put on a skirt and sandals with a denim jacket and headed out with my sunglasses to catch the bus to Victoria Station.
It was busy, packed with commuters making their way home. I took the escalators to Victoria Place, and then up again to the part of the mall where various food and drink outlets circled a central, open-plan eating area.
I looked around but there was no sign of Arnold, or anyone else I recognized. Not sitting anywhere obvious, anyway. I bought a coffee from the burger place and sat down on a hard plastic seat bolted to the table where I could see the escalators and anyone coming up them. I was still early.
A few seconds later, someone tapped me on the shoulder and I looked around, startled.
To my surprise and relief, it was Dylan. I barely recognized him; he was wearing jeans and boots, an unbuttoned Oxford, with a dark gray T-shirt underneath. I’d never seen him in anything other than a suit.
“Come with me,” he said.
I took my coffee and my bag and followed him around to the other side of the complex to a few tables and chairs that were tucked away behind a coffee kiosk.
“This is a nice surprise,” I said, sliding down into a seat opposite him.