and my heart bursts with love for her. “That’s brilliant. How long can you hold—”
We look at each other, startled, as the strains of the doorbell die away.
“Someone’s at the door.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“We need to answer it.”
Why are they ringing the doorbell? Something doesn’t feel right. If Becca’s gone to the others for help—or even if she’d had a crisis of conscience—they’d know where we were. We’re hardly likely to answer the door, are we?
Who is it?
The question is answered in the very next beat, with a thump on the door that reverberates through the house.
“Open up, Holbrook!”
Sophia looks at me, recognition of her surname lighting up her face. I shake my head in warning, whisper a shhh, while I figure out what’s happening, although the lurch of my stomach has already told me.
The loan shark.
He hammers on the door. “I know you’re in there. I can hear the radio.”
“Daddy!” Sophia scrambles to her knees and shakes my shoulder. “Shout! Someone’s here. They can rescue us!”
“Sweetheart, that man won’t rescue us. He’ll—” What? Leave us? Beat me up? Hurt Sophia? It’s too horrific to imagine.
It started with text messages—your payment is overdue—then evolved to WhatsApp photos of my car, the house, Sophia’s nursery. I tried my best to make the payments, but it was so hard when Mina didn’t know—couldn’t know—what I needed the money for.
“There’s hardly anything in the joint account,” she’d say. “Can you stick in a couple of hundred?” She’d do the same, and I’d sweat for a couple of days, pretending I’d forgotten whenever she asked, then taking out yet another credit card. I earned more than her. We’d worked out a system, in the beginning, when we took out our first mortgage, that meant each of us contributed the same proportion of our salary toward joint bills. Aren’t we grown-up? we joked.
The first visit came six months after the WhatsApp photos started. I walked out of work, and as I turned toward the bus stop for the park and ride, I became aware of someone watching me. A man in a black bomber jacket, like a nightclub bouncer, raised a hand in something far from a wave. A warning. I know where you work. I know you’re a copper.
You’d think sorting out trouble would be easy when you’re a police officer. I know all the right people, all the right laws, right?
Wrong.
Debt—particularly the sort of debt I have, without contracts and credit checks—puts coppers at risk. It makes us ripe for corruption, vulnerable to approaches from the underworld. It makes us beholden to the very people we should be arresting. Getting myself in the shit isn’t a disciplinary offense, but not telling the bosses about it is.
After that, they didn’t hold back. I’d look in the rearview mirror and see one of them following me; I’d hear their footsteps as I walked through the alley to the bus stop. There were three of them—three that I saw anyway—and they never did anything, just raised a hand, then turned off. It was a message, that was all. We know who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work.
It’s not in a loan shark’s interest for you to pay off your debt too fast. Far better for you to rack up the loan, every day another hundred quid, until there’s no way you can pay it. And all the time, their scare tactics are paying off. Six months down the line, I would have done anything. Almost anything.
“I need you to do a little job for me,” the voice down the phone had said.
“What sort of job?”
“One of my boys is up for something he never did. I need you to disappear the evidence.” The voice was low and gruff. Was it the same man who gave me the money? Standing in a stairwell in the roughest part of the roughest estate? Could have been.
“I can’t do that.” Sweat trickled down my forehead.
That was the day they threatened Katya. They could have beaten me up, but instead they followed Katya and Sophia. They knew it would have more of an effect than a black eye or a broken nose.
“He said you owe him money,” Katya said afterward, when she’d stopped crying and I’d finally convinced Sophia that the bad men had gone and wouldn’t be back. “Lots of money.”
“I do.”
“Then how you know he not come back?”
“I don’t.”
She was too frightened to stay. I told Sophia it was nothing, told her not to