Running Scared by Ann Granger Read Free Book Online Page A

blenched with fury. It emphasised the greenish-black patch on one cheekbone. ‘You following me around or what?’
     
    ‘Time for a coffee-break, Tig,’ I said. ‘And don’t worry about him. He’s in the pub.’
     
     
    We took our polystyrene cups of coffee down by the dark olive-green canal and found a seat. Tig hunched on her end of the bench, sipping the coffee, eyes fixed on the water swirling sluggishly past, thick as treacle.
     
    ‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
     
    ‘Jo Jo.’
     
    ‘He the one who beat you up?’
     
    Despite herself, she took one hand from the cup to touch the bruise on her face. ‘No one beat me up,’ she said. ‘It was just a slap.’ She straightened up and became belligerent, her eyes, through the rat’s tails of greasy fair hair, as cold as the canal’s waters. Since the Jubilee Street days, she’d acquired a ring through the outer edge of her left eyebrow. Speaking as one who wears a nose-stud, I’m not criticising, you understand. It was just one more detail about Tig different to the old days. ‘Anyway, it was your fault,’ she said.
     
    ‘Mine?’ I wanted to know how she’d worked that out.
     
    ‘The chocolate bar you gave me,’ she said. ‘He found it in my pocket. He said I’d been siphoning off the takings and spending them on stuff. I wasn’t.’
     
    ‘One lousy sweet?’ I gasped. ‘He thumped you because you’d bought one chocolate bar?’
     
    ‘I didn’t buy it,’ she argued. ‘You gave it to me.’
     
    ‘Oh, sorry, excuse me!’ I retorted sarcastically. ‘I didn’t realise that made it all right for him. Yes, my fault, why didn’t I think of that?’
     
    There was a silence. She looked away. ‘Well, anyway, Fran . . . I didn’t mean it wasn’t nice of you. But when people try and help they nearly always foul you up more, you know that.’
     
    I let her simmer. We finished our coffee and she slung her cup into the canal where it bobbed away. The old Tig, who’d arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed from the Heart of England, wouldn’t have dreamed of littering up the place like that.
     
    ‘Why’d you take up with him?’
     
    ‘Why do you think?’ She shrugged. ‘He’s not so bad.’ She glanced sideways at me. ‘If you want to know, I had – a bad experience. I was raped.’ She spoke the last words with an awful blankness of voice and expression.
     
    I waited. After a moment, she went on, ‘I was on the game at the time, but I hadn’t bargained for that. I was stupid. I should have realised – I mean, a regular working prostitute would’ve sized up the situation and got out of there, but I walked into it, didn’t I?’
     
    ‘It was a punter, then?’ I prompted her.
     
    ‘Yes, or I thought so. I thought he was on his own. He came up to me, youngish guy, bit drunk, City type. It was a Friday evening. He’d been celebrating the end of the week, I thought, and now he was looking for a cheap lay. I went with him to his car – I told you I was stupid – and the next thing I knew, there were two other guys, pals of his. They bundled me into the car and drove me to a house. They were just like him, hooray Henrys, red braces, Italian suits, the lot. Drunk as skunks. They kept me there for, I suppose, a couple of hours while they had their pervy fun. I don’t know exactly how long, I just wanted to get it all over with and get out of there alive. My biggest fear was they wouldn’t let me leave. But they did in the end.’
     
    ‘Do you know where this house is?’ I asked angrily.
     
    ‘No, it was dark. I was too scared to take notice, I was watching them, not watching the surroundings. I didn’t know what they were going to do next. There were the three of them and I didn’t know which one of them to watch. They laughed all the time. One of them was sick, threw up on the floor and the first one swore at him so I guess it was his house and his carpet. Perhaps that’s what made him think the time had come to