The next time I saw Alistair I told him that I was going through another difficult time. I told him about Lee’s habit of moving things, hiding things, and about the twisted scrap of red cloth and button I’d found in my pocket. I could tell by the expression on his face that he’d never come across a story quite like this one, even if he did his best to hide it. He probably thought I did it myself. He probably wondered whether actually I’ve got some sort of psychosis as well as an anxiety disorder.
To his credit, he was both soothing and at the same time strict. However it happened, the button was just a button. It didn’t mean anything. The world was full of red things, he said, and they didn’t cause us any harm. The red button didn’t actually cause me harm. It was in my pocket, I touched it, it made my anxiety levels increase, but other than that, it didn’t actually hurt me, did it?
It wasn’t the button that was the problem, I wanted to shout, it’s how the fuck did it get in my pocket? But there was no point going over all that with him, he couldn’t help, and I was all too used to people not believing me. I needed to hear back from the police, to be reassured that Lee was safely still miles away. In any case, one thing was just starting to become clearer to me, a faint glimmer within the darkness. Whether I was picking up red objects to feed my own fears, or whether Lee was actually starting to stalk me again, what I needed from Alistair was the same. I needed to learn not to be a victim this time—of myself, or of anyone else. I needed strength, to deal with the bad things that life threw at you. I needed to take back control.
For now, Alistair said we should concentrate on the PTSD. Working on the PTSD had a number of elements. When I had flashbacks, or thoughts about Lee, I should let them come, and let them go.
I remembered being in the café in Brighton with Stuart when he’d said something similar about that man who had startled me. It was all about recognizing the thoughts as being part of the disorder, rather than something that was defining me as a person.
“I’d prefer not to have the thoughts at all,” I told him, “never mind accepting them.”
Alistair rubbed his hands together, sliding the middle fingers against each other in a regular pattern that was somehow soothing.
“The thing you need to remember, Cathy, is that these thoughts have to go somewhere. They are in your head at the moment and they have no way out. That’s why they’re so upsetting. You have these thoughts and when you get them, you try and bat them to the back of your mind. You try to push them away, then they will have to come back because your mind hasn’t had time to process them, to deal with them. If you let them come, consider them, think about them, then you will be able to let them go. Don’t be afraid of them. They are just thoughts.”
“You say that. They might be just thoughts, but they’re still terrifying. It’s like living in a horror film.”
“Think of them like that, then. They are part of a horror film, and sooner or later, no matter how scary they are, they will come to an end if you just let them come, and let them go.”
His voice was calm and curiously soothing. I tried to think of Stuart in here, running a clinic, listening to people telling him about their misery, about grief, loneliness, about not understanding the world anymore, about wanting it all to end.
Then I went home to try to digest it all.
As would be the case with any other addiction, on the nights when I was home alone, it would have been very easy to get away with indulging in my vice without Stuart or anyone else knowing. But checking didn’t give me any actual pleasure, it never had; it was more of a relief—a temporary absence of terror. Alistair gave me a number of things to try to reduce the stress caused by not checking properly, including the deep breathing, rationalizing my fears, renaming them so that they become not real, normal fears but just a manifestation of my OCD. They’re not good fears, they are part of my condition—why would I want to keep them?
Earlier this evening, just after I got home from work, I had a phone call. My first thought was that it was Stuart, but it turned out to be DS Hollands. That sudden racing heartbeat—would it ever get any better? I thought she was going to tell me that Lee was missing, Lee had told someone he was coming to get me, one of the other officers had been tricked into telling him my home address.
“I just wanted to let you know—I spoke to my colleague at Lancaster police station DA unit.”
“Yes?”
“They sent someone to check up on Mr. Brightman on the morning after you called me. Can’t guarantee he hadn’t been to see you, but it’s very unlikely. He was in bed having been working the night before. He’s working at a nightclub in the town. The officers checked it out and he was definitely at work the night you called. So although it’s not impossible that he made a trip to London, it’s pretty unlikely. Do you have any other reasons for thinking he might know where you are?”
I sighed. “Not really. Just that I know what he’s like. Isn’t he supposed to have some sort of license, if he’s working as a doorman?”
“He’s not a doorman; apparently he’s just a glass collector. Lancaster is going to check it out, though, don’t worry. Even though he doesn’t have any conditions attached to his release, I get the impression they’re keeping a close eye on him.”
Can’t be close enough, I thought to myself.
“I think you can relax a bit, Cathy. If he was going to come looking for you, I think he would have done it by now. And you’ve got my numbers, right?”
“Yes, thanks, I have.”
“And if you think there might be someone in your flat, just dial 999 immediately. All right?”
“Yes.”
I wish I could shake off this feeling. It’s not a fear that one day he might come for me, it’s more certain than that. It’s not
if
he finds out where I am, it’s
when
. The only reason he has not put in an appearance yet, assuming of course that I did leave my own curtains open and I did somehow absentmindedly pick up a red satin-covered button from somewhere, is that he doesn’t know where I am.
But when he does, he will come for me.
The first thing I noticed was the light—bright light, into my eyes, which were closed.
My mouth was dry; I couldn’t open it at first.
Had I been asleep?
For a moment I couldn’t feel my arms, then I realized they were tied behind me, tightly. Everything from my shoulders to my fingertips ached, suddenly and powerfully.
Handcuffs.
I forced my eyes open, panicking now, to see that I was lying on my side, the side of my face pressed into the carpet. Gray carpet, familiar. At home, then, in the spare bedroom.
I twisted my face around as far as possible, but I couldn’t see much. It took a few moments for me to remember where I’d been going, and what happened, and when I remembered it, it came like a crushing, weighty blow. I’d been going to escape. I had been . . . so . . . close . . .
There was no sign of him in here, at least, but I knew he couldn’t be far away. I had no idea how long I had before he came back, so I forced myself to think.
My head hurt. I couldn’t tell, at first, if it was because of lying in such an unnatural position for so long, or if he’d hit me. Every thought felt labored and painful.
From the airport . . . back home . . . he must have driven me, in his car. I don’t remember it. It must have been several hours. I don’t remember any of it.
I had no idea what the time was, and I couldn’t even tell if it was still daylight, because the overhead light was on. The curtains must be closed.
I tried to stretch my legs out, but they seemed to be tied up to my wrists somehow. I was hog-tied. I could not move at all. I tried to roll over onto my back but had to stop that immediately because every movement was incredibly painful. My head was swimming and for a moment I could see nothing but stars.
What happened? I needed to think. I had to concentrate on this. It was too important.
He said he was arresting me . . . the people standing watching, and some of them walking past as though nothing whatsoever was going on. He showed his warrant card to the security guards—then they were asking him if he needed any help. I must have been fighting. Dragging me away. I’d been shouting, trying to tell them that he was kidnapping me, he was going to hurt me, but of course they must have all just thought I was a raving madwoman. I would have thought the same, if I’d been in an airport, waiting for my flight to be called, off on vacation somewhere hot, somewhere exotic. Perhaps going on honeymoon, or just somewhere on a business trip. Raving madwoman, being arrested. Drugs, probably. A business trip. Maybe to New York.
I wondered what had happened to my suitcase. They must have pulled it off the plane somehow. I bet the flight was delayed.
How long would it be before I was missed? I wasn’t due to start work until Tuesday—three days. Before that, the landlady of Jonathan’s apartment would likely just assume I was getting a later flight. If she even noticed I wasn’t there. Lee could do a lot of damage in four days.
Tears rolled from my eyes to my nose, dripping off the end and onto the carpet.
How long before he came back? I couldn’t move. He couldn’t just leave me here, surely? I needed to find out what he was planning to do. If he was just going to kill me, I would be dead already. Whatever it was would probably be worse.
Almost as I had that thought, I heard the sounds—the stairs creaking, the sound I remembered from lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, waiting for him to come upstairs, wondering if he would be in a good mood and if he’d leave me in peace.
The door to the spare room was shut, and I heard a key turning, close by. I hadn’t even realized the spare room door had a lock. I’d never needed it before. Just one key, then.
I felt him pulling at the back of my head, and it hurt—pulling my hair. He was untying the gag. I hadn’t realized I was gagged, but I was—with some sort of cloth. And underneath it, the corners of my mouth sore, crusted with blood. I felt fresh blood start to trickle when he pulled the cloth away. I tried to speak but all that came out was a groan. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want to look at him. I never wanted to see his face again.
“If I undo the cuffs, are you going to behave?” he asked. His voice was calm, controlled. He wasn’t drunk, then. That was something.
I nodded, my cheek scraping against the carpet. It still smelled new. I felt him grab one of my wrists and unlock the cuffs, the rasping rattle as they came away. My arms contracted and I cried out with the agony of the sudden movement.
“Shut up,” he said, his voice still calm, “or I’ll knock you out again.”
I bit my lip, the tears pouring. Now the cuffs had gone, I could stretch my legs out, although that too was incredibly painful. So much for fighting back, I thought. I could barely move.
After a while, stretched out on my side, I thought I could manage to sit up. I tried to raise myself on one elbow, opened my eyes. The room swam. I could see my arm, my wrist in front of my face, swollen, the skin grazed and raw where the cuffs had chafed.
He waited there, patiently, watching me while I struggled again and again to sit up. When I managed it, and looked at him, he was sitting on the floor with his back to the door, his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked pleased with himself. I wiped the back of one hand over my mouth. It came away bloody, but not much. My head still thumped. He must have hit me somewhere to knock me out.
I was still wearing the suit—the navy blue suit I’d chosen for the journey to New York because it wouldn’t crease. Well, it was creased now. The jacket was torn across one shoulder, I could feel it give as I moved. The skirt was undone at the back. Had he tried to undress me?
My ankles had rope around them, a blue nylon rope, not very thick, loose at one end. It must have been looped around the cuffs somehow. I wanted to reach down and untie them, but I had no energy at all.
“D-did you drug me?” I asked, my voice barely there. My throat was dry.
He laughed. “Is that the only question you have for me?”
I gave a barely perceptible shrug. It had seemed like a good question a moment ago, but it suddenly wasn’t relevant any more.
How did you find me? I wanted to ask. How did you know? How did you get down to Heathrow so quickly? And above all,
why
. . . ? Why hadn’t my plan worked? Why wasn’t I on a plane, somewhere over the Atlantic? Why wasn’t I in New York already?
“They’ll miss me,” I said. “When I don’t turn up in New York they’ll report me missing. Someone will come looking for me.”
“Who will?”
“My friend. He’s going to give me a job in New York.”
“Your friend? You mean Jonathan Baldwin?”
My blood ran cold at the sound of that name on Lee’s lips.
“What? What did you say?”
He reached behind and pulled something out of the back pocket of his jeans, threw it toward me. It was a business card. I picked it up with numbed fingers. On one side, in neat black letters in a corporate design of green and gold, I read:
Jonathan Baldwin BSc (Hons), MBA, CHRP, CHSCSenior Management Consultant
I turned the card over. On the back, in my handwriting, was written:
Change Management Conference, Manchester,
5–16 June 2000
“It was in your organizer,” he said, “and you fucking fell for it, every bloody word of it. I always knew you were naïve, Catherine, but I didn’t realize you were that stupid.”
So there was no job in New York. No flat waiting for me. No escape. And nobody to notice my absence: nobody in New York, and nobody here either. It might be weeks, months even before anyone realized I was gone. By that time I would be dead. I felt a huge wave of despair, a black cloud that made it difficult to focus on anything other than the pain. This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t. I’d spoken to him, he’d e-mailed me, it hadn’t been Lee, it had been a different man, a deeper voice, a different accent. Jonathan was a real person, I remembered him. Lee couldn’t have done it. He couldn’t have.
“You set me up?” I sobbed. “You set all this up?”
“In my last job, I used to do stings like this all the time. People who are committing crime are suspicious, they sometimes take ages to convince. But you fell for it straight off, didn’t you? And you didn’t even hesitate. You didn’t even think about whether it was the right thing to do. You just jumped at the chance to fuck off and leave me behind.”
So it was true. He’d played me, he’d taken my need to escape and used it against me. There was nothing I could do. All those moments when I’d seen blue sky, when I’d seen that hint of freedom, I had still been in the cage.
My question,
the
question, had formed itself in the black fog of my brain. “What are you going to do?”
That got him thinking. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, but I could tell he was concentrating.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said at last.
“You can let me go,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he shot back. “You’re mine, you know that. You tried to leave me. I gave you chances, Catherine. I gave you so many fucking chances. And you let me down.”
“You know you can’t keep me here forever. They will find out. You’ll lose your job.”
He gave a short laugh. “Yeah, right. You mean if I’m planning to do anything, I’d better finish you off?”
I nodded.
“You want me to kill you?” he said, curiously.
I nodded again. All the fight in me had gone. I wanted it over with.
He got up, suddenly, stood over me. I started to feel sick. “You see, that’s what I fucking hate about you, Catherine,” he said, his voice a growl. “You just give in too fucking easily.”
He nudged me with his knee and I toppled back onto the carpet, struggling back up to a sitting position, tears and snot running down my face into the corners of my stinging mouth.
I waited for the blow. I waited for the smack to the head, the punch, or the kick. I wanted it. I braced myself, but I longed for it too. I coveted the oblivion.
When he next spoke, it was through gritted teeth, as though he was so disgusted by me that he could hardly bring himself to speak. “You’re a piece of filth. You’re a dirty, slutty whore, Catherine. I can’t decide whether to kill you, fuck you or just piss on you.”
I let out a sob as I heard the sound of his jeans being unzipped, and seconds later the warm, wet splashing of his piss over my hair, the remains of my chic suit, the new gray carpet. I cried, trying to keep my eyes and my mouth shut so none of it would go in. The sound of it, the smell of it. I started to retch.
When he’d finished he left the room for a minute, leaving the door wide open. I started to crawl toward it, seeing the hallway outside, the bathroom beyond, but before I got there he was back. A bucket of cold water, the sponge that I used to clean the bath out, a bar of soap. The water smelled like bleach as he dropped the bucket onto the carpet.
“Clean yourself up, you cunt,” he said.
Then he left the room, locking it behind him.
I howled. But he hadn’t put the handcuffs back on.