be a good little girl? Why don’t you come outside and help me find him?” he says in a sad voice, which makes me feel awful bad.
“I don’t think I’m allowed.”
His face looks even sadder than his words sound. “It’s okay.” His face moves quite close to the glass again, so that I lean back a little, even though I know he can’t touch me. “I understand. It’s a shame you can’t help me though, he’s such a good dog, I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. You don’t want anything bad to happen to him, do you?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t, I can tell you’re a good girl. So, if it’s not too much trouble, can I use your phone, so that I can call the police and they can help me find him?”
We have plenty of phones. We’ve got a whole room full of them, for when people want to place bets without coming to the shop, but it feels as if I need to have a think. Maggie says the police do not care about people like us, so people like us don’t care about the police and must never talk to them. But Cagney and Lacey on the TV are the police too, and I like them a lot, so maybe some police are okay? If this man is a bad man, he wouldn’t want to call the police because they would throw him in jail. I feel confused and I’m still not sure what to do, so I decide to ask Maggie, again.
I walk back to the stripy curtain and peek through the gaps, twisting one of the long red bits of plastic around my finger. Maggie still looks awful busy, and so does John.
“What is it, Pipsqueak?” he asks, counting some ten-pound notes out on the counter. I watch as he slides the bundle underneath to the waiting hands I can see on the other side. That means a customer won a bet. John hates it when they win.
“I don’t know what to do about something.”
He turns to me and shakes his head. “Can’t you see how busy your mum and I are? You’re old enough to make some decisions for yourself, Squirt. Time to grow up. Who’s next for the two-forty?” he says to the men lined up behind the glass.
I take the keys from the hook next to the phones, then push my chair up against the back door, unlocking one bolt at a time, from top to bottom, before turning the key.
The door pushes open a bit from the other side, and I can see the man’s boot. “You forgot the chain.”
I unhook it and he comes in, smiling and closing the door.
“Good girl,” he whispers. “Now, where’s the safe?”
“I don’t think your dog is in there.”
He laughs, then pushes me out of the way. I hear the race start in the shop and it’s so loud. I think I might have made a mistake.
“Who the fuck are you?” asks John, standing in the doorway behind us.
The man grabs me and I see the knife in his hand. He points it at my neck and lifts me off the floor so that my legs are dangling.
“Put her down,” John says in his normal voice, as though he isn’t scared at all. But I am scared and I wet myself, my pee running down my legs, stopping at my socks, then dripping down onto the stone floor.
“I want the contents of the safe, right now, or I’ll slit her fuckin’ throat.”
I start to cry. I can hear the race still going on out front. The voice of the man on the TV seems to get louder and louder inside my ears: “Rhyme ’n’ Reason is still in the lead, closely followed by Little Prayer on the inside, Dark Knight bringing up the rear…”
Maggie appears behind John. She looks at my face, then at the man who is holding me. Her face doesn’t change, but her eyes do.
“You can have the money, I don’t care about that, we have insurance. Just don’t hurt our little girl,” says John.
“Don’t play games with me,” says the bad man, I know that’s what he is now. I feel him press the tip of the knife against my neck.
“Aimee, don’t be scared, sweetheart,” says John. “We’re going to give the man what he wants and nobody is going to get hurt, I promise.”
“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.” The man’s breath smells like the pub