His name was Ian Dunkerley, a well-built man with small-man syndrome. His way of working was to make you look like an idiot in front of your colleagues, so that you were left not trusting your friends, and despising him.
He’d taken over the line management for the sales team only a few months before. At the time I was one of the top performers, but not the top, and that made me a target. Everyone who wasn’t actually top of the performance tables was a target. The idea, I suppose, was to encourage us all to be hungry for profit, or at least to make us want to be the favored one who didn’t get picked on or abused, but in practice it pissed everyone off.
Of all the people to see at the Barclay.
I didn’t notice Dunkerley at first, as I was concentrating on the moves, but when I was pausing in a particularly provocative pose, getting my breath back for the next gymnastic flip, I scanned the room, as I always did, looking for my regulars, for new customers, for guys who looked reasonably well-oiled.
And there he was.
I was so shocked I nearly fell off the pole. I had to do an extra spin, which put me one beat off.
He was sitting in one of the VIP booths with a number of other men—quite casually dressed, I noticed; I was surprised they’d been let in—laughing and joking with a couple of the girls and fortunately paying no attention whatsoever to the action onstage.
When I’d finished the routine and run back to the dressing room, flushed, breathless, I contemplated going home sick. I hadn’t missed a single dance since Fitz took me on, but the thought of going out there and dancing in front of that odious man made me feel physically ill.
“Are you all right?” Kay asked me.
Kay was new to the Barclay, a pole dance specialist like me. She had been sent over from one of Fitz’s other clubs because she put on a “challenging” show, mainly due to her outfits, which had more than a hint of S&M about them. Her dance name was Mistress Bliss, but since that was a bit of a mouthful we were allowed to call her Kay, as long as it wasn’t in earshot of any of the customers.
“Yes. Thanks—I just . . . I thought I saw someone I know.”
“What? A customer?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. “I get that all the time. I saw my old math teacher when I was working at the Diamond.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There he was, Mr. O’Brien, in the front row, drooling. It was hilarious. Who’ve you seen out there, then?”
I grimaced. “My boss.”
“From the day job?”
Not all of us had day jobs. We never mentioned them here, in any case. I had no idea what the other girls I worked with did. “Yes.”
“Ooh, shit. He doesn’t know about this, then?”
“You must be kidding. What makes it worse is that he’s not even nice. He’s a complete, total douche bag. What am I going to do, Kay?”
She patted me on the upper arm. “Do you dress like this at work? What’s the chances he’s going to recognize you? Lord knows Mr. O’Brien didn’t recognize me. Hope not, anyway.”
“I feel sick.”
“Go home, then. Don’t ask Norland—go and see Helena. You’ll be all right.”
“I’m not a quitter.”
“Then you’re going to have to go out there and face him.”
It crossed my mind to ask one of the other girls for help, to distract Dunkerley for me. But, except for Kay, none of the girls on tonight were particularly friendly. Caddy wasn’t here to ask. There were a bunch of Eastern European girls who stuck together; they worked the room hard and concentrated on the lap dances, putting in a halfhearted show on the pole and then doing their best to hustle in the club. If I asked them for help, they’d be less likely to oblige by providing a distraction and more likely to use it as an opportunity to get one over me by deliberately pointing me out to him.
I sat miserably, putting makeup on in the hope that it would work as a disguise, borrowing someone’s curling iron to put a few loose curls into my normally straight hair. Kay was probably right. The chances of him recognizing me, with my hair down, wearing these clothes, in the dark, in that context in fact . . . it was all a bit unlikely.
And yet, he was a sharp little fucker. I wouldn’t put anything past him.
My next dance was slower—Portishead’s “All Mine.” The lights in the club were low and I could almost hear the conversations going on around me as I danced. I loved this song, it made it easy to block him out, to take myself off to a private space where I was alone and dancing for myself.
When I looked over to the table where he’d been sitting, toward the end of the song, he was gone.
Malcolm went back to the Scarisbrick Jean after two beers. Josie had popped her head up and seen us sitting together, feet up on the gunwale, laughing about something. I waved at her but she was already on her way back down.
“Better go,” he said, downing the last of his beer. He slid the empty bottle into the crate outside the wheelhouse and hopped down the gangplank. When he got to the deck of the Jean, he waved. “Cheers, Gen,” he said.
When I stood up, a little unsteadily, thinking that it was probably a bad idea to be drinking beer in the middle of the day, I caught sight of something down in the mud. I put both my hands on the gunwale and peered over the edge.
The mud was disturbed, churned up, around the boat. When I looked closely, I realized there were footprints, deep holes with trails between them as though someone had pulled their feet from one step to another, stumbling, leaving a muddy wake with each step. To my left the trail ended in a mess of mud, debris and river weed.
The footprints led away from the boat to the grassy wasteland between the marina and the great concrete legs of the Medway bridge. I followed them with my eyes all the way to an old dock, half-submerged in the mud, which was made out of old pallets lashed together with pieces of rope. There, more churned mud and footprints on the wooden pallets leading up to the tussocky grass, the marshy land under the bridge.
Someone had walked from there, down to my boat. They must have struggled in the deep mud, and, judging by the mess, they had probably lost their balance once or twice and fallen over. There was no sign of anyone—nothing moved in the marina, no cars in the parking lot. In the bushes under the bridge, the only movement was the leaves and branches stirring in the breeze.
This morning I’d felt relief that the night had passed without incident. I’d chastised myself for being foolish, for expecting more horrors when I had no reason to expect any. But as it turned out, I’d been right—someone had been here. Someone who hadn’t wanted to be seen by anyone at the marina and so had approached my boat from the river, across the mud.
I leaned over a bit further, dizzy with the beer and with a sudden waft of stinking silt, until I could see that the footprints were right underneath the porthole. The porthole that looked in on my cabin.