This was the day that went horribly wrong. The day my fragile world crashed down around my ears.
I finished work at four. I had been working on a recruitment campaign for a new warehouse that was being built to house our stock, on the industrial estate adjacent to the head office of the pharmaceutical company where I worked. The warehouse was due to open in April, and already we’d recruited most of the management. Now we were left with the supervisors and operatives, most of whom could probably be recruited from the local area. The newspaper adverts would run for the first six weeks of the new year. If we didn’t have enough quality candidates after that, we would look to agencies.
I caught the Tube as far as Kingston Street, only about half a mile away from home. I took a circuitous route, through the alleyway so I could check the curtains at the back, then one length of Talbot Street before I could get to the front door. I’d made a conscious effort to take the same route home on the Tube two days running, and I was limiting my checking as far as I could. It was taking me about an hour in the mornings—certainly a lot better than it had been.
A few steps from the front door I heard a shout behind me and I turned, startled. It was Stuart, running up Talbot Street.
“You’ve finished early,” I said.
“Yes, thankfully. How are you?”
“Good, thank you.”
There was a pause. I wondered how I was going to get away with checking the door with him there.
“So—are you coming up for a drink?”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now.”
“I was going to—er—”
“Come up now, come on.”
In the hallway he let me check the door once as he stood there impatiently.
“There’s a note for you here,” he said, pointing at the hall table.
I gritted my teeth at the interruption. If he kept talking to me we’d be here all night. “Just let me do this, then I’ll look.”
Of course, when I’d just about finished the check, the door to Flat 1 opened and Mrs. Mackenzie emerged, resplendent in a floral housedress and slippers. “Is that you, Cathy?”
“And me,” Stuart said.
“Oh, lovely! Both of you together.” She gave me a hard stare, the one I usually got when she caught me in the middle of checking the door. We all stood there for a moment looking at each other.
“Well, I can’t stand here chatting all day,” Mrs. Mackenzie said at last, “I’d never get anything done.”
She went back inside, and Stuart and I looked at each other. “Does she do that to you as well?” he whispered.
I nodded. “Just don’t mention Christmas to her, she doesn’t like it.”
“I know. I made that mistake last week. Here’s that message.”
It was a “While You Were Out” note, preprinted, and it had my name on it. Other than the standard boxes that allow you to tick options, the only information on the form was a name—Sam Hollands—a cell phone number and a landline number, and the message:
PLS PHONE ASAP
He handed it to me before I realized it, and of course by that point, with all the interruptions, the door was unchecked and I would have to start the whole damn thing again.
“The door is locked, Cathy,” he said gently, seeing my expression. “We can’t stand here all night. Let’s go and have a drink.”
“I can’t just leave it.”
“Yes, you can. Come on.”
“Why are you in such a huge hurry all of a sudden?”
“I’m not in a hurry,” he said.
He was so serene, so impossibly calm, I found myself getting wound up. “Why don’t you just go, and let me get on with it, then?”
“I’m not going to accommodate the OCD.”
I burst out laughing. “You what?”
“Cathy, you don’t need me to reassure you. You are going to get your condition under control. If I keep getting involved with your checking rituals, even by waiting for you to do them, you’re not going to be as motivated to work at it.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake. You’re such a fucking psychologist.”
“Yes, I am, as you keep pointing out. But I have actually finished work and I’d really like to go upstairs with you, right now, and have a drink. So come on.”
He made me go upstairs in front of him, the bit of paper clutched in my hand. I didn’t look back at the door. On the first floor I stopped and looked at the door of my flat. The need to go in and start checking it was very strong.
“Come on, Cathy, don’t stop,” Stuart said. He was halfway up the next flight of stairs already.
“I need to go and phone this person, this”—I checked the message—“Sam Hollands.”
“Do it from my flat,” he said.
When I still didn’t move, he came back down the stairs to me. “Your flat is still secure from when you left it this morning,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
Before I had time to consider this, he took hold of my hand. “Come upstairs,” he said.
After that, I could move.
Stuart’s flat was warmer than mine, and bright with all the lights on. He put the oven on and started busying himself in the kitchen. “Are we having a cup of tea, or a bottle of wine?” he asked.
“Wine, I think,” I said. “Shall I open it?”
He handed me a bottle from the fridge, and I found the glasses in the cabinet. “You’d better call that Sam Hollands,” he said, “before you forget.”
I took the message with me into Stuart’s living room and sat on the sofa, looking at it with trepidation. At this time of night, it didn’t seem worth checking the landline number, it was probably an office. So I tried the cell number. It rang for an age. Eventually it was answered—a woman’s voice.
“DS Sam Hollands speaking.”
DS? “Hello. This is—Cathy Bailey. You left me a note.”
“Hold on a moment, please.” There were muffled sounds, voices in the background, as though DS Hollands was holding the phone against her jacket or something.
I felt my heart rate speeding up, my mouth dry. I felt sick. What the fuck did the police want? It couldn’t possibly be anything good, could it?
“Yes, sorry about that, Miss Bailey. Cathy, was it? Thanks for calling me back.”
More muffled sounds.
“Right. I work at the Domestic Abuse office at Camden Police Station. I called by with regard to Lee Brightman.”
“Yes?” My voice had almost gone.
“It’s a courtesy call, really. I just wanted to let you know that Lee Brightman is going to be released from custody on Friday the twenty-eighth.”
“Already?” I heard my own voice as though it was coming from a long, long way away.
“I’m afraid so. He’s given a release address in Lancaster, so I don’t think you need to worry about bumping into him on the street, or anything like that. One of my counterparts in Lancaster gave us a call with his details so that we can inform you.”
“Does—does he know where I am?”
“Not unless you’ve told him. And
we
certainly won’t. I’m sure he won’t travel far, Cathy, there’s no need to worry. If you’re concerned, just give us a call. You can phone this number, or the other number I left, any time, if you’re worried about anything. All right?”
“Thank you,” I managed to say, and disconnected.
I sat and waited for it. I felt it coming toward me like a wave, the panic. I think I was still waiting when I heard the noise, the wail, high-pitched and terrible, and wondered for a second where it was coming from until I ran out of breath and realized it was me. I shrank back into the sofa, trying to make myself as small as possible. Trying to disappear.
It was all a bit blurred for a moment. I saw Stuart sitting down next to me, but the whole room was shaking as though there was some sort of earthquake going on. I felt him put his arms around me, heard him saying something—
breathe
? But I couldn’t tell the details—I pushed him away seconds before I started retching, and he grabbed the wastepaper basket and held it up just as I vomited.
And then just the sound of my own breathing, or not even that—just little pants for breath in time with the shuddering, the shaking that was completely beyond my control. And my fingers were tingling, but it was too late, and the ground was coming up to meet me.
Lee barely spoke to me all the way home.
He’d stopped and bought a bag of french fries from the takeaway in Prospect Street. They were sitting unopened on my dining table, the smell of them making my mouth water, despite the fact that I’d entirely lost my appetite. We were on my sofa, in the dark. He’d sat down and pulled me onto his lap. I was rigid and frowning like a petulant child. I couldn’t even remember what exactly it was I was so angry about anymore.
“We need to talk about this,” he said gently. He had his arms around me, his face into my neck.
“We should have talked about it a long time ago.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for all that crap tonight.”
“Who was he? The man with the bag?”
“He’s one of our targets. I’ve been following him for weeks. I had no idea he was using that pub as a meeting venue, obviously, otherwise I’d never have taken you there.”
“So you’re a police officer?”
He nodded.
“Why couldn’t you just have told me that before?”
There was a pause. Despite myself I was starting to soften. He was playing with my hand, threading his fingers through mine, bringing my hand up to his mouth so he could kiss the tips of my fingers. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen,” he said. “I don’t do this. I don’t fall for women. I don’t spend long enough with anyone to have to tell them anything. It’s not an easy job to talk about, you know. I’m working undercover a lot of the time. It’s easier to do that sort of thing on your own.”
“It looks dangerous,” I said.
“It probably looked worse than it was. I’m used to it.”
“That’s what you were doing that first night, the night you came here covered in blood? I thought you’d been in a fight.”
“Yes. That one wasn’t quite so straightforward. But that sort of thing doesn’t happen often. Most of the time I’m just sitting in a car waiting for something to happen, or having briefings in some stuffy room with no windows, or catching up on three hundred e-mails.” He moved then, reaching behind his back. “I’m sitting on some kind of brick here—what is this thing?”
It was my organizer. I’d thrown it on the sofa with my bag when we’d come in.
I disentangled myself and got up. “I’ll get the fries,” I said. “Do you want anything with them? Or a drink?”
“No,” I heard him say.
I put the kettle on. If there was something I needed right now it was a cup of tea.
“Mind if I have a look?” he called.
I brought the mugs of tea through a few minutes later and he’d turned the lights on. My organizer was open in his lap and he was turning the pages.
“What are you doing?”
“I was curious. Who are all these people?”
The back of my organizer was full of business cards in a clear wallet. “Just people I’ve met at conferences, things like that,” I said. “You shouldn’t be looking in there.”
“Why not?” he asked, but he closed it and handed it back to me.
“I’m a personnel manager, Lee. There’s stuff in there about members of staff. Disciplinary meetings, things like that.”
He grinned.
“Okay. Are those fries still hot? I’m starving.”
I came around slowly, my face against the carpet, the smell of vomit in my nose.
Almost immediately I started to panic again. Stuart tried to get me to breathe slowly. He held me, stroked my face, talked to me calmly, but at first it didn’t work. I couldn’t even hear him. I threw up again. Fortunately I was breathing enough not to pass out again, but in a way oblivion would have been kinder.
Eventually I heard him say, “Come back to me. Breathe with me, Cathy, come on. I don’t want to have to call for help. Breathe with me. You can do this, come on.”
It took a long time before I was calm enough to listen to him properly and understand what he was saying. He got me some clean clothes, some sweatpants and a T-shirt, because he didn’t want to leave me in the flat alone, and I wasn’t about to go downstairs. I was so weak I could barely stand, so he helped me to the bathroom and left me to get myself undressed and into the bath he’d run for me. He waited just outside the door, half open, and talked to me while I sat there, shaking, trying not to look at myself, trying not to look at the scars and what they meant.
It felt as if
he
was back in my head again. Or, not yet: but waiting. The images of him, the ones I’d fought to control, were still there. They had lost some of their sting. But now . . .
I used Stuart’s shower gel, my hand shaking so much that it spilled across my wrist and into the bathwater, but I got enough of it to soap my hands and try to get rid of the smell of sick from my hair and my body. The smell of the shower gel, curiously familiar, made me feel a bit better. I splashed water on my face and rinsed my mouth out with soapy bathwater.
“I was thinking about that first time I saw you,” he was saying, his voice so close as if he was sitting right next to me, but coming through the open door. He was sitting on the floor, outside in the hallway. I could see his legs stretched out in front of him. “That rental agent just barged in through the door; you must have been in the middle of checking. You gave me such a filthy look.”
“I don’t remember—did I?” My teeth were chattering. My throat was sore. Had I been screaming? I felt as if I had.
“You did.”
“The door was open—they’d left it unlocked.”
He laughed. “You poor old thing, how did you ever manage with them leaving the door open? Jesus.” The tone of his voice changed, then. “You were looking at me with this sort of horror that someone had crossed the threshold when you were in the middle of checking the door. I thought you were the most beautiful ball of fury I’d ever seen.”
I pulled at the plug with numb fingers. Listening to the sound of the water pouring away. I’d listened to that noise from my bed, in the flat below, the swish and gurgle, wondering what he was doing having a bath at three in the morning.
“I’m not beautiful,” I said, quietly, looking at the scars on my left arm, the deeper ones at the tops of my legs. The worst ones were still red, the skin still tight and itchy.
“I’m afraid that’s my call. Are you done?”
I managed to get up and put a towel around me. It was still a little bit damp from when he’d showered this morning. I felt completely tired, drained of all energy, and sat on the bath, waiting for my skin to dry on its own. I didn’t want to touch myself.
“Will you be okay if I go and put the kettle on?” he said, the sound of his voice making me jump. “And pass your clothes through, I’ll put them in the wash.”
“All right,” I said, a gravelly whisper. I was about to lose my voice completely. It reminded me of when it had happened, the next day when the police were trying to interview me, and I couldn’t speak. I’d been screaming for three days. They had to wait days before my voice came back enough for me to be able to talk to them properly. By that time, of course, he’d done a lot of talking too.
I dressed in the T-shirt and pants he’d left for me. They felt peculiar, so baggy that I had to hold the waistband up as they kept slipping off. I felt half-naked, especially as my arms were still on display. The scars were bad. I didn’t want him to see them. On the back of the bathroom door was a terry-cloth robe, navy blue. When I put it on, it went around me almost twice, and reached almost to the floor. That would do.
I met him in the kitchen. The washing machine was swirling around with my clothes inside it. There was a faint smell of some sort of disinfectant. He put a cup of tea on the kitchen table and I sat there, my bare feet feeling the strangeness of the tiled floor. I’d never taken my socks off inside his flat before, let alone my whole set of clothes.
“Do you want to talk?” he said.
“I don’t think I can,” I whispered.
“Can you tell me what they said on the phone?”
I considered this, testing the words out inside my head before I let them out. “She said he’s being released on the twenty-eighth.”
“The man who attacked you?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Okay. Well done,” he said, as though I was a star pupil who’d just completed a complicated mathematical equation.
“She said he was going to an address in Lancaster. She thinks he won’t come down here.”
“Does he know where you live?”
“I don’t think so. I moved. I moved three times. There’s only one person other than the police who knew me then—Wendy.”
“Do you think Wendy might be in any danger?”
I thought about this for a moment, then shook my head. “I don’t think he knows we became friends. I never spoke to her until the day she found me. After that he was arrested. She did testify at the trial, though. “
I drank some of my tea. It hurt the back of my throat, but it felt magical. I felt myself calming down almost immediately.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said, gently. “You’re safe now. He’s never going to hurt you again.”
I tried to smile. I wanted to believe him, I wanted to trust him. No, I
did
trust him, after all, I was sitting in his kitchen wearing his clothes and a robe. “You can’t promise that.”
He considered this, and replied, “No, I can’t promise you that. But you’re not on your own with this anymore. And you can choose to turn away from this evil man, and keep on getting better and stronger every day until you’re not afraid anymore, or you can let him keep on hurting you. It’s a choice you can make.”
I was smiling, despite myself.
“Are you going to stay here tonight?” he asked.
I thought of the options. I wanted to go home and start checking the flat, but at the same time I was afraid. I was afraid of going home. I was afraid of being anywhere without Stuart.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
“No, I don’t mind. You need your comfy bed,” I said, indicating his shoulder.
“You freaked out last time you slept on my sofa.”
“I think I’m less likely to freak out on your sofa than I am if I woke up and I was in your bed.”
“As long as you’re sure. Are you hungry?”
I wasn’t, but the casserole he had put in the oven hours ago was still simmering away, so we ate it from bowls on our laps, with chunks of bread to dip in the gravy. It was hot and spicy and it stung my throat. But it tasted good. He’d brought the bottle of wine that I’d never gotten around to opening, and we drank that.
“Probably not a good idea really,” Stuart said, finishing his first glass of wine.
“What isn’t?”
“The alcohol. You’ve had a rough evening, and I need to be wide awake to cook Christmas lunch tomorrow.”
“It’s nice, though.”
He turned to me and smiled. I thought he looked bone-tired, his eyes shadowed. “At work today I just kept thinking that tonight I was going to come home and get drunk.”
“Why?”
“Last Christmas was a bit crap, to be honest. I’m trying to get over it. Of course, getting pissed isn’t the answer, but I thought it might help.”
“What happened last Christmas?”
He poured himself some more wine and topped up my glass, although I’d only had a few sips. “It was when it all started to go wrong with Hannah.”
“Your fiancée?”
He nodded. “I made Christmas dinner. There were four of us—me and Hannah, and her brother Simon and his girlfriend Rosie. Simon was my best friend at college, that’s how I’d met Hannah. We’d just about finished eating and Han got a call on her cell. She wasn’t supposed to be on-call, but she told me it was an emergency and she was going in anyway. Simon had a real go at her, told her off, she told him to piss off and got her coat and she was gone. Simon was just so mad, I couldn’t work it out, I kept telling him to leave it. It got really awkward, they left a bit after that and I was on my own until she came home again, three o’clock in the morning. I fell asleep on the sofa waiting up for her.”
He turned to look at me, frowned at the memory. “Shit Christmas, it was, really. Turns out she’d promised him she was going to spend Christmas Day with him, the man she was seeing. Simon knew all about it. He was on the verge of telling me, apparently; that’s why Rosie made him leave. She didn’t want to spoil my Christmas.”
“When did you find out?”
“Not till July.” He leaned back on the sofa, finished the glass of wine. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said decisively.
He washed the bowls while I watched the late news, then he fetched his duvet from the bedroom and wrapped it around me. It was huge.
“I’ve got a sleeping bag in the wardrobe,” he said. “You have this.”
“Thank you,” I said. I caught his eye for a moment and I felt my heart quicken. If he’d tried to kiss me again I don’t know what I would have done. But he just smiled and went back to the bedroom. I listened to him puttering around the flat, turning off lights in the kitchen and turning on the light in the hallway, and I lay back on his sofa under the warm soft pile of duvet that smelled of laundry detergent and, faintly, of his aftershave. I never thought for one moment that I was going to be able to sleep. I lay there and thought about not sleeping, right up until the moment that I slept.