“I’m not a hundred percent certain, no.”
“I think it’s very unlikely—after all, does he know you’re in London? Does he know where you work?”
“I hope not.”
“Thing is, he’s not under any license conditions, which means that technically he’s free to go anywhere he likes without supervision. My colleagues in Lancaster can check up on him from time to time, but they can’t keep harassing him if he hasn’t done anything to warrant it.”
“He nearly killed me,” I said, my voice coming from a long way away.
Sandra Lloyd had a tone of voice that suggested she was sympathetic most of the time. “Yes, but that was a long time ago. Chances are he’s moved on, in more ways than one. Now I know Lancaster will be keeping an eye on him as best they can, so try not to worry.”
“Yes,” I said, lamely, “thank you.”
I wasn’t even surprised. They hadn’t believed me last time; there was no reason at all why they should believe me now.
If it wasn’t him, and I was just having spectacularly real hallucinations, then I was just going to have to learn to deal with them until I was better. If it was him, then I wasn’t going to be able to prove all by myself that he wasn’t back up in Lancaster being a good boy.
I was going to have to wait for the moment he decided to reveal his cards, and I was going to need to be ready to play his game.
When I got back to the office, Caroline had her jacket on.
“Come on,” she said, “we’re getting out of here.”
“Are we?” I said. My headache was making it difficult to focus.
“We are. We need to get out of this place, come on.”
We walked out of the main entrance and around the corner to the pub just by the entrance to the business park. It was busy with office workers having a drink, but we managed to find a table at the back by the kitchen. It was dark back here.
Caroline put our drinks on the table. “You look completely wasted,” she said.
I laughed. “Thank God for that.”
“Seriously,” she said, “what’s wrong?”
I looked at her face, my friend, the only friend I really had here in London, apart from Stuart.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I’ve got time.”
I took a deep breath. This was so difficult. Telling this story never got any easier. I felt tears, tiredness, exhaustion, fought them all. I wasn’t going to break down, not here.
“Four years ago, the man I was with attacked me and almost killed me. He was arrested and, after a long investigation and a court case, he was sentenced to three years in jail.”
“My God,” she said. “You poor girl. You poor, poor girl.”
“I moved to London because I knew he’d be out soon enough, and that he’d come after me. That’s why I’m here.”
“Was this where you were before, then? Lancaster, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I wanted to be far away when he was released. Just in case he decided to come looking for me.”
Caroline looked alarmed.
“Do you think he will?”
I gave this a bit of serious consideration. There was no way of dressing this up as anything other than the horror that it really was. “Yes. I think he will.”
Caroline breathed out. “So—he should be out soon, then.”
“He’s already out. He was released at Christmas.”
“Oh, my God. No wonder you’ve been looking so pale. You must be completely terrified.”
I nodded. I felt like crying, again, but what good would it do? I just wanted to go home and be with Stuart.
“That man. Mr. Newell.”
“Yes?”
“He looked like him. I thought it was him. That’s why I looked so peculiar. You said I looked like I’d seen a ghost—I thought I had.”
I looked at her, warm and motherly with her dark red glossy hair, all done professionally, her neat gray suit. She had tears in her eyes. “You poor, poor girl.”
She gave me a hug and held me longer than I thought she would. I felt the tears just behind my eyes. I would save them for being alone.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she said, quietly. It wasn’t a reproach—she wanted to help.
“I have difficulty trusting people,” I said.
When I finally got home, I found myself checking the door, twice. It wasn’t unlocked; it was firmly shut, and the flat door looked fine, too, but it clearly wasn’t. I was going to have to check properly, again. It wasn’t the OCD. It was self-preservation.
My cell phone rang just as I’d finished and put the kettle on. I thought it might be Stuart, but the number that I’d programmed in earlier just said “HOLLANDS.”
“Hello?”
“Cathy? It’s Sam Hollands, Camden PPU.”
“Yes. Hello.”
“I gather you spoke to my colleague earlier today?”
“Yes, that’s right. She was very helpful. Have you heard any more?”
There was a pause and a rustling of paper. “I had a call from Lancaster. They put in another call to the address we have for Mr. Brightman about fifteen minutes ago, and he was arriving at the address just as they were knocking on the door.”
I did a quick bit of mental arithmetic—the interview had been at one-thirty, had finished just before two. It was just possible for him to have caught the train, no delays, and be back in Lancaster just as the police turned up at the door.
It was starting to feel a bit unlikely, though.
“I don’t suppose they said what he was wearing?”
“No, they didn’t. DC Lloyd said he turned up for an interview?”
I found myself smiling. She believed me, she really did believe me. “Yes. I really did think it was him, but I haven’t seen him for three years. He looked like he’d lost weight. But then I guess he would, wouldn’t he?”
“And he didn’t acknowledge you?”
“No. He just acted like anyone else coming for an interview—a bit nervous, a bit keen. But then he was always good at acting. Don’t forget he was holding down a job all the time he was beating me up.”
I didn’t mention what the job was. She already knew about that, after all.
“And where are you now?”
“I’m at home. I’m fine, I feel fine. Thank you. Thank you for believing me.”
“No worries. Listen—if you need help, call again, okay?”
“Yes. I will.”
“Another thing. Think of a code word, something you could say without arousing suspicion if he was there, if you were in trouble.”
“Um—what, now?”
“Yes. Something innocuous. How about ‘Easter’?”
“‘Easter’?”
“Yes. If I speak to you, and you’re in trouble, ask me how Easter was. Pretend I’m a friend, a work colleague. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure you won’t need it. But just to be on the safe side, I’ve put a marker on your home address on the system. If you call in, all calls are going to be treated as urgent. This will stay on the system for three months, and then will automatically come off if you haven’t called in. If you just need a chat, or some advice, call me on the cell.”
“Yes. Thank you, Sergeant. You’ve been brilliant.”
“Sam, call me Sam. And save my number on your phone as ‘Sam’ so that you can call me if you need to.”
I hesitated. “You think I’m in danger?”
“I just think it’s always a good idea to be prepared. If he’s happily going about his business in Lancashire and has no intention of paying you a visit, then we’ll none of us have lost anything, will we?”
I ended the call and made my cup of tea, adding milk until it was just the right color.
It took more than an hour of thinking, and after that I’d reached a decision.
I started up the laptop that I’d brought home, pulled up the spreadsheet of all the candidates who’d been selected for interview for the warehousing positions, and scrolled down until I found him. Mike Newell. An address in Herne Hill. A telephone number.
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if I could wait for Stuart. I wasn’t planning to speak to Mr. Newell. I just wanted to hear the voice. If I heard the voice again, I’d know. I would know for sure. And, of course, if he was in Lancaster, he couldn’t also answer the phone in Herne Hill.
Of course, when I heard the voice, I was shocked to the core; a second later realizing that, actually, I’d anticipated this all along.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, one I knew well. One word, and it told me all I needed to know.
I paused, thinking, and the pause was long enough for her to say, “Hello? Hello, who is it?”
I found my voice. “What are you doing?”
Now it was her turn to hesitate. Her “telephone” voice—somewhere between the northwest of England and Roedean—turned chilly. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”
I wondered if my voice conveyed the confidence I needed it to. “When you speak to him—and I know he isn’t there—you can tell him I’m not afraid of him anymore.”
I put the phone down. Betrayed, again.
These days, being awake ridiculously early felt good. I liked waking up and seeing the dawn, the sky pink and alive with promise, the birds singing their hearts out.
Stuart was asleep, in his bed, in his flat, next to me.
He looked wonderful. His face was so peaceful, the skin pale and thrown into stark shadows in the early light, those beautiful eyes closed. I wondered what he would say if I woke him up just to see his eyes open and look at me. His hand was lying across the empty space in the bed where I’d been until a few moments ago. That strong hand, the fingers supple and knowing, getting so good at turning me on.
Last night he came up to the flat, surprised that I was already there. He took my hand and led me into the bedroom before I could do anything, say anything. He removed my clothes and every time I tried to say something he stopped my mouth with a kiss—in the end, I realized how hungry I was for him.
After that, lying together in the tangle of duvet, the breeze from the open windows in the living room breathing gently over our skin and turning it into gooseflesh.
“What happened to you today?” he said, simply.
I wondered how he knew.
I didn’t answer at first, wondered how to tell him in such a way that he would believe me.
“Do you remember me telling you about Sylvia?”
“The one you saw on the bus? I remember.”
I got up and wrapped myself in Stuart’s shirt, discarded on the floor just outside the bedroom. It smelled of him, of his day at work, his aftershave and his sweat. In the kitchen I took a bottle of white wine from the fridge. Inside the bedroom I pulled the windows down—it was starting to get chilly.
He was sitting up in bed, his eyes tired. When he saw the bottle, he smiled. “You were a complete abstainer until you met me,” he said.
“I know—great, isn’t it?”
We took turns swigging from the bottle. It was icy cold.
He waited with infinite patience for me to find the words, despite the fact that he’d been at work for an appalling number of hours, and all he wanted to do was sleep.
“She made a statement to the police. She told them that she thought I was losing it. She said that I’d become obsessed with Lee, that I’d thought he was having affairs with people. She told them that I used to go berserk if he came home late from work. She put down in her statement that I used to cut myself with razors.”
He looked at me and waited.
“I never, ever self-harmed. Even though I loathed myself after all this happened, I never did that. Before or after. It would have felt like failure. It would have been like giving up.”
“I don’t get it. Why would she do something like that?” He took a long drink from the bottle and handed it to me.
I felt my cheeks warming as the alcohol spread into my bloodstream. “He was sleeping with her, I think.”
He took the bottle out of my hands and put it carefully on the bedside table. “You never told me about what it was like going to court,” he said.
“No. In many ways it was worse than the actual assault.”
“I guess it would be,” he said.
“I didn’t last through the whole trial. I think it was the third day I didn’t make it into the court; the day after that I was sent to the psych ward. But from what they told me afterward, they had an internal investigation and decided that he was going to be charged with grievous bodily harm. And something about perverting the course of justice, because they proved that he’d lied about something the first time they interviewed him.”
“Surely he tried to kill you, though? What about doing him for attempted murder?”
“Lee was a detective sergeant. He’d been working as a covert operations officer for nearly four years. Before that he’d worked in their intelligence unit providing technical support for covert jobs. Before that, he was in the military, although he never told me what or where. He had a completely spotless record. When they investigated what I’d told them, he provided a whole counterstory about how I’d stalked him, how I was making things difficult for him, how he should really have reported me before now but he felt sorry for me, all this crap.”
Stuart shook his head slowly. “That’s—but what about your injuries?”
I shrugged. “He said most of them were self-inflicted after he’d walked out. He admitted that he’d restrained me, for my own safety and for his, and he admitted that he’d gone about things in the wrong way but said that he’d only done it because he genuinely cared about me, didn’t want to see me getting into trouble for what I’d done. He said I must have broken my nose when I’d tried to head-butt him. It wasn’t much of an explanation, but all it needed to do was sow the seeds of doubt in their minds.”
“And they had Sylvia backing up his story?”
“Exactly. And before they called me to give evidence, I was committed. They never got to hear what actually happened. They never heard my side of it.”
“Even so—didn’t anyone give medical evidence?”
“The only medic who gave evidence was the nice psychiatrist who told them that I couldn’t come and give evidence because I’d been forcibly taken away for my own safety and was in a closed ward having a breakdown.”
“But physically—not mentally. You were injured, for goodness’ sake . . .”
“When they first took me to the hospital I weighed ninety-two pounds. They estimated I’d lost four pints of blood through more than one hundred and twenty lacerations on my arms, legs and torso, and through the miscarriage that was already starting.”
He shook his head slowly. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me for one moment. “How the hell could they even think that it was self-inflicted?”
I shrugged. “Once he’d finished with the knife, he wiped it down and then put it into my hand. None of the cuts were in places that I couldn’t have reached on my own. In the end, the only injuries that he admitted to were the bruises on my upper arms where he’d gripped me, and the bruises to my face that he’d said were made in self-defense when I’d come at him with the knife. Oh, and he admitted we’d been enjoying what he called ‘rough sex’ before he said I’d flipped and started attacking him.”
“But anyone who knows anything about self-harming could tell that the cuts weren’t made by you. Nobody self-harms like that. They just don’t.”
I reached across him for the bottle, and sat cross-legged on the bed, taking a drink. This was harder than I’d thought it was going to be.
“I know it sounds ridiculous. I’ve been over this whole thing countless times in my head—how unfair it all is, how they could do this to me. But it doesn’t help. When you break it down, it was his word against mine. And he was there, wearing a spiffy suit, in his own comfortable law enforcement environment, using their language, telling them how it all went wrong but his intentions had always been good, and how sorry he was. And I was in a secure ward having a breakdown. Who were they going to believe? It’s a wonder they prosecuted him at all, really. It’s a wonder they didn’t send him away with a fucking medal.”
Even through the pleasant, warm haze of more than half a bottle of wine, I could tell he’d heard enough. I could see that look in his eyes, the one I’d seen in Caroline’s eyes earlier. It wasn’t disbelief, thankfully. It was just—horror.
I knew that this was enough for now and that I couldn’t tell him the rest of it. I couldn’t tell him about seeing Lee today. It was all getting just a bit too much, as though the nightmares he saw every day at work were suddenly starting to invade his life at home.
“Look,” I said, putting the bottle back on the bedside table, “I am better, Stuart. Look at me.”
He looked.
Even in the half-light, my scars everywhere were visible, a pattern of destruction on my skin.
“I’m not bleeding now. I’m not hurting anymore. It’s over, all right? We can’t change what happened, but we can change what happens from now on. You’ve taught me such a lot about that, about healing. It’s only good things from now on.”
He reached out a hand and ran his fingers down my body, from my shoulder, across my breast, down my stomach. I moved closer, close enough that his mouth could follow the path that his fingers had taken.
There was nothing more to be said.