Susie Learns the Hard Way
squeals and then the bloke would depart alone. He’d come, and he went. ‘Very nice,’ she mumbled thoughtfully, tapping the phrase into her laptop, knowing it would look good on the page.
    All through the peaceful suburban evening the men came and went, departing as lonely as before, but relieved of their burden ...
    â€˜I wonder if that’s a little too much?’ she said, eyeing the screen, settling for a full stop after went , and deleting the rest.
    Â 
    On Thursday the visitors started arriving in the afternoon, for which she was grateful since her story was still unfinished. Although she had a careful diary of times and a scattering of car registration numbers, she needed loads more information to fill the paragraphs. She knew the police would be able to trace the car numbers but she didn’t want to involve them and blow the story. She didn’t think it was beyond her abilities to persuade a helpful policeman to do some private research for her, but it was risky. At the same time she was well aware that Annie was suffering, if not in danger. Although she couldn’t be suffering that much, she had decided, after careful listening while standing on a chair with a glass pressed against the ceiling had revealed that Annie’s noises weren’t just random squeaks. Not always, but quite often, they were cries of encouragement.
    So as visitors hurried up the stairs, Susie snapped away with the camera, delighted with the quality of daylight pictures; she’d read enough papers to know that furtive doorstep comings-and-goings were an essential ingredient of stories like this one. And she could read the car numbers better, and was even more delighted when one car, which disgorged no fewer than three smartly-suited and swarthy men during the late afternoon, had what appeared to be a very personalised and highly traceable number. And Arabs! She almost danced around the room with delight, almost forgetting Annie’s plight until the familiar overhead thudding and the faint wailing cries from upstairs reminded her.
    She snapped them furiously as they drove away in their big black limousine after staying for more than two hours, and she got the pictures of them huddled by the front door with Andy – handing over money! As soon as they’d left and Andy went back upstairs, she sat down and wrote a brief but – she hoped – intriguing letter to the editor of her favourite Sunday tabloid, asking for an interview and promising him a real headline-making sex scandal story as proof of her ability. Then she rushed off to town to post it and dropped off her films for processing, her jubilation lasting all the way home.
    When she sat down with the laptop to write she found it was still not much easier to fill in the blank paragraphs than it had been before. She wrestled for nearly two hours with her brain and the spell-checker, which was unable to identify some of the words she’d used, leading her to suspect that sado-masochistic bondage and sexually-subjugated slavery might be too lurid, even for the Sundays.
    It was some while before she noticed anything was wrong, and it was even longer until she realised what it was. At ten o’clock, when she decided to turn on the news for a bit of company, it hit her.
    Silence.
    Not a sound.
    No one had come to the house, not a soul emerged from upstairs, not a floorboard creaked, nor did anyone upstairs make a sound, sexual or otherwise. Based on the experience of the preceding days there should, by that time, have been at least a bit of traffic on the stairs and thudding from overhead.
    Instead there was silence, not even the rattle of Andy shifting jars, or whatever it was he did.
    So what was she to make of this latest development? Had Annie finally been sold to the Arabs and spirited away in the night? Almost certainly yes, was the answer to that. The last ones to visit had been those three Arab-looking ones in the posh car, and after

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