Susie Learns the Hard Way Read online

  Now, here she was coming through the outside door into the hallway on Monday evening, and here was another bloke on his way down the stairs, a bloke who might have been Andy’s brother if physique – or lack of it – was the only guide. This was another shy, withdrawn individual who may well have been a meter reader by profession himself, so reticent was his nature. However, it was too late in the evening for meter readers to be out and so she greeted him with a cheerful, ‘Hello,’ but he scurried past her and vanished out of the building into the evening without a word, leaving Susie puzzling on the doorstep.

  Later on she heard footsteps on the stone steps climbing up to the front door and, curiosity stirred, felt she just had to peep. So she crept over to the tall bay window and peered shamelessly round the edge of the curtain. What she saw was strange, but reassuring. Andy was at the door with his key in the lock, accompanied by another man – just a bulky figure in the darkness.

  At least he’s got mates, she thought, so he can’t be all that bad.

  Hardly five minutes later, she went into her bedroom and was forced to change her mind yet again. Thud... thud... thud... came the unmistakable noise from upstairs. She sat on her bed to listen, in case she was mistaken, but there could be no question. It was getting a little faster now.

  Bloody hell, she thought, how can he be doing that? The rude bastard was shagging his girlfriend in the bedroom while his mate was watching football or whatever on the box, and there was no doubt at all that the noise which was racketing through Susie’s bedroom must have been clearly audible upstairs as well, even above the din of the football match; the television was very loud.

  But not loud enough to drown out the rapid thump-thump-thump as Andy went into top gear and Annie started to squeal in time. Faster and faster went the bed on the wall or the floor, whatever, and louder and louder Annie squealed and screamed until it was that long continuous wailing that meant for her at least it was nearly all over. And suddenly it was. One last shriek from Annie was drowned by a massive roaring cheer as someone somewhere scored a goal of a different kind, and then there was silence from the bedroom upstairs and relative silence from the television as well, as the bloke watching it turned the volume down. He’d obviously been trying to drown out the noise of Andy and Annie’s energetic coupling in the room next door.

  Not long afterwards there was the clatter of feet on the stairs, and now thoroughly intrigued, Susie peered round the curtain to see Andy and his mate scuttling off down the path towards the front gate.

  Odd, thought Susie. Very odd. She was aware from the still-audible television upstairs that the game was still going; in fact it probably hadn’t reached half time. But still, maybe they were watching it in the pub and he just had to come back for a quickie, she thought, highly impressed by the enormity of such an appetite.

  She was in the kitchen when she heard the street door bang, and footsteps on the stairs. Swiftly silencing the kettle she listened, and heard voices above – quite definitely two male voices.

  ‘What is he up to?’ she mumbled quietly, at a loss to explain the behaviour upstairs, or fit it within any rational pattern of activity that she knew of.

  Bringing the water to the boil once more, she went back to the settee with her coffee. She’d just found the remote control for her own television when a faint tapping noise seized her attention. Slowly, as quietly as she could, she put the remote down and uncrossed her legs, rising to her feet in one fluid movement of feline grace that would have stirred the loins of any red-blooded male lucky enough to see her like that in baggy T-shirt and knickers.

  Thud, thud, thud went the noise upstairs, and she shook her head in utter disbelief.

  He can’t be doing it again, she told herself firmly. But he was, thud, thud, thud, remorseless as a metronome, quite literally banging away in the bedroom upstairs.

  He can’t be that fit, she thought, as he really went at it. And he can’t be that rude, bringing his mates back to watch telly and disappearing every five minutes to screw his girlfriend. But he obviously was.

  They must have been out for some beers, she thought, settling back in her seat, although it was strange not waiting till half time – which she knew had just been reached because the television upstairs was back on its loud setting, to drown out the racket Andy was making in the bedroom.

  The rapid-fire tapping of the bed and the high-pitched squeals that went with it told her that this one wasn’t going to get into the second half, and sure enough Annie gave that long drawn out squeal of delight long before the football resumed. Susie was just pondering the fact that Annie must come every time Andy does, when the feet came trampling down the stairs again.

  Rushing to the window, she pulled the corner of the curtain aside and was just in time to see Andy and his friend outlined under the streetlight, two thin shapes heading away up the road in the direction of the Seven Bells. Upstairs, the television was quieter but the football was still on. Shaking her head again, Susie sat down, picked up her coffee and flicked on her own television.

  The coffee was, well – not cold, but not hot either. Pulling a face she went into the kitchen and made another, but hardly was she settled in front of the television again when she heard a car pull up right outside. Fearing it might be her latest jilted lover, she shut off the television and crossed the room in two strides.

  Through the tiny gap in the curtain she saw Andy emerge from the car and head up the path towards the front door. The driver followed him, a tall man with a flat cap and a fairly obvious beard. It wasn’t the bloke who’d arrived at seven o’clock to watch the football. He’d been a big, burly bloke, with no hat and no beard. Or had he? Hadn’t he just left, small and thin like Andy? No beard, anyway, nor a hat.

  The two sets of feet trampled upstairs and as they trod the boards directly overhead, she heard angry voices, a man and a woman, but no words, so she couldn’t tell if Annie was complaining about being intermittently loved and left, or him trooping his friends home to watch the football when she planned to be watching something else.

  Susie gave up, abandoning them to whatever peculiar lifestyle they had chosen for themselves and heading back towards her comfy seat at the end of the settee, and a quiet evening in front of the telly.

  Quiet? she thought, less than five minutes later. Quiet?

  Hardly had the angry voices died away than they had made up their quarrel and were cementing their relationship in the time-honoured way – the fourth time-honoured way that evening!

  He just couldn’t be that fit, she thought... Oh no!

  It wasn’t Andy at all! The scrawny little runt didn’t look like an Olympic sex machine because he wasn’t one! He wasn’t shagging her time after time – his mates were! In a flash of blinding clarity she realised that was the only way it made sense. He wasn’t bringing them home to watch football while he screwed his girlfriend – he was bringing them home to screw his girlfriend while he watched the football!

  Footsteps clumped loudly down the stairs and she peered round the edge of the curtain, and gained instant confirmation. The hunched little figure setting off down the pathway was Andy – certainly it wasn’t a big bloke with a hat and a beard, and he ignored the car and walked off in the direction of the pub.

  That means, she thought carefully to herself, that the bloke with the beard is still upstairs, alone with Annie.

  ‘And that means...’ she said to herself and cocked an ear towards the bedroom ceiling where the steady thudding noise was now punctuated by Annie’s little squeaks, ‘that means he’s the one screwing her, not Andy.

  ‘But she’s doing all right out of it,’ she mused, as Annie squealed her way through another orgasm, her third or fourth of the evening. ‘Unless of course she doesn’t like it and those are squeals of distress.’ She dismissed the thought almost before she’d had it. ‘No, she’s coming all right,’ she said thoughtfully, a spark of en
vy flickering deep in her tummy.

  But was she? And what about the argument just now? It wasn’t the first time those two had argued and then made up in bed... unless, in light of the evening’s events, they’d argued and then he’d made her get up to it in bed with someone else.

  Could that be it? Could Andy be keeping Annie prisoner, and selling her to his mates as a sex slave? The thought was interrupted yet again by the sound of feet on the stairs, heading down. He was leaving.

  She huddled by the window, peering through the narrowest crack she could open between the curtain and the wall.

  A broad figure with a flat hat jammed on his head waddled down the path, and as he reached the gate a thin figure emerged from the shadows. Andy! He’d obviously decided against the pub and had been hanging around outside instead. ‘Well, I’ll be...’ she exclaimed in hushed tones. The bloke was giving Andy something – money; he was counting out notes. At least five of them. Fifty pounds? Maybe more! And for what? For services rendered, that’s what. ‘And those services were rendered by Annie, if I’m any judge,’ she concluded, as flat-hat-and-beard climbed into the Jaguar and drove away.

  And not necessarily of her own free will!

  Recalling the angry words, she reconsidered Annie’s infallible gasps of what she’d taken to be pleasure and decided they could be interpreted as gasps of displeasure, or even distress. Perhaps, she wondered, perhaps he’d kidnapped her and was keeping her prisoner. He looked shifty enough, and she had never appeared in daylight since the day they arrived, except as a ghostly face at the upstairs window.

  ‘Yes,’ she said to herself. ‘Yes, that’s it!’

  Those weren’t his friends he was bringing home; they were customers!

  The evidence mounted up the more she thought about it. All the strange noises late at night, and those strangers arriving all evening. She was actually living underneath a master criminal who’d kidnapped the girl and was using her as his sex slave. Why, she’d read a story in the paper only the previous Sunday, where a gang of criminals were kidnapping girls and smuggling them to brothels and harems in the Middle East.

  Excitedly she went over the evidence in her mind, and could find no flaws to her theory.

  ‘This could be the story that gets me into the big time,’ she concluded, very conscious that with Finals in a few weeks she would soon be needing a job, and that she would soon be writing to all the Sunday tabloids asking for an interview. She knew she had a talent for writing and she just knew she could write sex stories better than anyone else. And now she had the perfect opportunity to prove it and persuade some editor to give her a job. She could write a brilliant, perceptive and very sexy story about white slaving in the Home Counties, get a banner headline and a massive fee, and a job too!

  As it suited her very well to stay at home for a few days, that’s what she did, keeping a careful watch from the slit in her curtains and using her cheap holiday camera to take some very hazy pictures of Andy and some indistinct shapes of individual men as they came and went. She only used it for the rarer daytime assignations, because the evenings would have triggered the flash and alerted them.

  And there was plenty of opportunity to keep watch; Andy would arrive regularly with a different bloke, there’d be the regulation thudding followed by Annie’s 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...

  ‘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.

  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 that – nothing!

  And the moment the money changed hands, Annie vanished completely.

  Spirited away as soon as dusk fell over the peaceful suburban street, she began her tortuous journey eastwards, towards a lifetime of enslaved depravity as the plaything of men who used her in any way they chose.

  Brilliant!

  Susie listened carefully through the night but heard nothing from the rooms above, nor saw a thing. Early next morning she lay in bed debating whether to get up early to go and collect her newly-developed pictures, or go later, after she’d finished off what her teasing fingers had just begun.

  No contest really.

  Chapter Three

  The distant trilling of a telephone brought her back from her dreamy relaxed state. It wasn’t her telephone but the familiar tones of the one upstairs, muffled by its passage through the floorboards. It rang for a long while, somehow making her own flat seem
as empty as the one upstairs, before it eventually stopped. By that time she was wide awake and on the move.

  Susie sat in her kitchen, coffee mug steaming beside her as she pondered carefully, and reached no conclusion apart from the fact that she was cold. She headed for the shower, and apart from a momentary distraction with the tingling jets of hot water, she thought carefully about the recent events and began to form an idea about her next course of action.

  She dressed quickly, pulling on a white blouse and a black pleated skirt. They were both old, and allowed her plenty of movement. She pulled on a pair of thick, soft socks; more grey than white, they were more than anything else, quiet. She didn’t know why she was bothering about noise, since there was no one to hear her, but somehow it seemed vital to creep upstairs on tiptoe.

  She didn’t know why she was frightened either, but she was, a sort of cold tingle all over her body, jittering every fibre of her being with icy fingertips. Well, almost every fibre. There was one part of her that was hot, and she realised that the fear had once again liquefied in her knickers as a pool of molten heat. She smiled at the familiar response, and that seemed to encourage her a little. Feeling more brave and less stupid, but just as aroused, she opened the front door of her flat a fraction and peered out into the empty hallway.

  It was, unsurprisingly, empty.

  On the stairs it seemed that every floorboard was loose and each one went off like a gunshot. Each sharp crack had a twofold effect, making her flinch with fear and seep more juice.

  At the front door she paused, listening, then knocked loudly. She wasn’t expecting an answer; she knew there was no one home, but just in case she was wrong she had her story rehearsed, even had an empty cup in her hand for the sugar. But neither were needed: there was no answer.