A Sentimental Traitor (18 page)

A young woman living on her own was – well, on her own. And vulnerable. Jemma made no bones about the fact that sleeping with Harry in Mayfair had attractions that far
outstripped the appeal of returning to her modest top-floor apartment in a Battersea apartment block. Every time she returned the carpets somehow seemed to be more faded than she had remembered,
and the paintwork a little more chipped. She recognized what was happening, of course. As much as she took pride in her sense of independence, she didn’t really want to come back at all.

Yet here she was, again. She kicked her shoes off the moment she walked in, dropped her bag, punched the button to listen to her messages as she passed, and headed straight for the kitchen. She
hadn’t eaten, but discovered she had nothing but yoghurt in the fridge. Too much time with Harry – and too many evenings on the road. She had a job to do in finding out more about the
crash victims that was not only important, it was for Harry. And the quicker she got it finished, the more time she could spend at Harry’s side. She wanted to fight the election with him, and
for him. But there were times when she thought that chasing after the bereaved to ask them questions about those they had lost was not only painful but utterly pointless. She didn’t know what
she was looking for, couldn’t see why any of their loved ones might have become targets so vital that it justified blowing a plane out of the sky. She’d just come back from visiting a
middle-aged woman who had lost not only her husband but also her elderly mother – he had flown to Brussels to bring his mother-in-law back as a Christmas surprise. What the hell was there
that would justify mass slaughter?

She devoured two tubs of yoghurt and threw them in the bin. She looked around her. Her home seemed sad, strange. The plates that had stood neglected on the draining board for a week and a half
stared at her, accusing her of betrayal. This wasn’t her any more. ‘Time to move on, girl,’ she whispered.

She cast off her clothes one by one as she headed for the shower, wanting to wash away the weariness, but it didn’t work. The shower curtain clung to her in complaint – damn it,
Harry had a wet room! – trying to wrap itself around her and demand attention. She turned the shower off.

It was as she was dripping, naked, struggling to make sense of the plastic curtain, that a knife slashed it through with a single stroke. Before she could reach for a scream it had been ripped
to one side, and when at last she tried to scream she found her lungs paralysed. Standing in front of her were two men. Hoods. One had her carving knife in his hand.

‘Make noise and you will never make noise again,’ the knife man said in accented English.

A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind, and then a thousand more. She had no doubt she could end up dead. How she reacted was crucial to whether in ten minutes’ time she would still
be alive, but that told her nothing. What should she do? Scream? Be compliant? Fall on her knees and sob? But she was totally vulnerable, naked, her body shaking as she tried to take in her
situation. Would they rape, or were they here simply to steal? But she was just a hard-up primary school teacher, for God’s sake, she had nothing worth stealing. So she knew they would rape
her.

Submit? Struggle? Get it over with, or try to show them that she was better than them? Someone had once told her that letting her bowels loose would put off an attack, but she couldn’t
control a muscle. She was astonished at what thoughts sped through her mind.

‘What . . . do . . . you want,’ she uttered eventually, shaking.

They said nothing, but took an arm each, dragged her from the bath and threw her onto the bed. She lay there, didn’t protest, her legs spread apart, didn’t bother trying to close
them. This wasn’t a time for gestures, she had to concentrate on what might make a difference. They used a silk scarf and the cord for her dressing gown to tie her hands to the white metal
bedhead. She tried to study their eyes, their weights, body shapes, their smell, hoping she might recognize them again.

Once she was secured, Knife Man leaned over her, his blade flashing in front of her eyes. He put it to her forehead, she could feel its cold bite. ‘You want knife here – or
here?’ He dragged it, very slowly, down her body, the blade hesitating at her most vulnerable points, her eyes, lips, breasts, until it was resting between her legs. He used it to shave
her.

Then, for the first time, the other man spoke. ‘Jemma, let the dead rest in peace.’

That was when she knew they were going to kill her. Yet neither of them moved.

‘You understand?’ he continued.

The other man shaved her a little more, and more roughly.

‘They do not need you knocking on their doors.’

Suddenly she knew. They were warning her off. The plane crash.

‘I . . . understand.’ She couldn’t manage more than one word at a time.

‘Excellent.’

They stood back. Knife Man was admiring his handiwork. She had never felt more naked in her entire life.

‘If you mention this to the police, we will come back and hurt you,’ the other man said. There was no emotion in it, all a matter of everyday fact, as if they did this every night of
the week and were almost a little bored.

She was shaking now, her body trembling on the bed. They weren’t going to rape her after all?

‘A warning. You understand?’

She nodded her head.

‘Good. Friends.’ He nodded to Knife Man, who sliced through the silk scarf, leaving her secured only by the heavily knotted cord.

And they left. They didn’t even bother closing the front door. She could hear them laughing as they went down the stairs.

When eventually she managed to unravel the knot, she lay on the bed and cried as she hadn’t done since the day her brother had died.

Harry rushed to her, a man pursued by demons he thought had gone from his life but that had been resurrected by her phone call. He threw a twenty at the taxi driver,
didn’t wait for the change, and took the stairs three at a time. Her door was still open. Experience told him to pause before he burst in, to look for signs, in case they were still there,
but there was nothing. Then he saw Jemma sitting on the end of her bed. Her head was bowed, her dressing gown wrapped roughly around her, its cord on the floor. He threw himself down on his knees
in front of her, tried to embrace her; she sat stiff, rigid, as though hewn of rock. Her voice, when it emerged from its hiding place, was no more than a whisper.

‘They told me to keep away from the crash.’

The words hit him like a sledgehammer. ‘Did they hurt you? Jemma! What did they do?’

Slowly,mechanically, she drew back the folds of her dressing gown to reveal the mess they had made of her most intimate parts, then she let the gown fall back again.

‘Jem, Jem, I’m so sorry . . .’

But she wouldn’t say any more. No tears, not yet, no further words, everything locked away deep inside.

He said he was going to call the police but suddenly she snatched at him, held his arm with ferocious strength, and shook her head.

‘Why not?’ he asked, but he already knew. She was terrified they would come back. It was reckoned that the vast majority of sexual assaults on women go unreported in the London
Metropolitan Police area. This would be another. She fell back on the bed and began to shake uncontrollably.

He went to the kitchen, found a tub of hot chocolate, made a mug and loaded it with extra sugar, then sat with her as she sipped it.

‘Would you recognize them again?’ he ventured, knowing he had to ask, not wanting to make her relive the nightmare.

‘I tried, Harry,’ she began, revived by the chocolate, ‘to see if there was anything about them that was different.’ She shook her head, it seemed too much, but then:
‘One had blue eyes. Both were young. And fit, very strong.’ They had left raw marks on her wrist where they had dragged her to the bed. ‘And they were foreign. Accents.’

‘Try to remember precisely what they said.’

‘One of them – the one with the knife. Awful grammar. Kept dropping the definite article. “The” or “a” or whatever he should have said.’ She was still
trembling, and struggling, fighting to recapture every word before they became scrambled in her mind, while Harry tried to smooth encouragement into her hands with his thumbs. ‘They laughed
as they went down the stairs. Joking. About my body. My breasts. I could hear them.
“Dermo,
we should have
tranoot her,”
that’s what the one with the knife said.
Words I didn’t understand, but I can guess what they meant.’ Suddenly, she drew back from him. ‘Hey, you’re hurting me!’

His thumbs had dug themselves deep into the palm of her hands. ‘You sure? Are you sure that’s what they said? Jem, this is very important.’

‘Of course,’ she said, resentful, pulling her hands away. ‘I spend every hour of my working day trying to figure out what five- and six-year-olds are saying. You get an ear for
it. Of course I’m sure.’

He pulled himself from the floor and came to sit on the bed beside her. ‘Damn them,’ he muttered.

‘Damn who, Harry?’

‘Dropping the definite article. And those words.
“Trahnouti”.
Means “fucked”. It’s Russian.’

‘But I don’t understand.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘But what are you saying – Ghazi, Russians, Brussels? What the hell does it all mean?’

He shook his head. He hadn’t a clue. Jemma had been assaulted and terrified – but for what?

Now she started to cry, releasing the anger and humiliation through her tears that fell onto Harry’s shoulder and stained his jacket. He sat beside her, holding her, trying to give her
comfort, finding none for himself. This was his fault. And, as he looked into her eyes, he could see that she thought so too.

To destroy a good man, it is only necessary to take his reputation. And that is what Patricia Vaine had decided to do. Her attack on Harry had started as a means of defence, of
protecting herself, but she had begun to enjoy the aroma of power and it had caused her to cross a line without her realizing she had done so. It was some time before she would accept that pursuing
Harry had become a professional pleasure. That pursuit was made all the easier because Harry had no idea that he was even a target, not until he discovered that his credit card had stopped
working.

In its rush to clear up as much business as possible before the election, Parliament was sitting ball-breaking hours, beside which there were a thousand other distractions, with demands from his
constituency, when most of all he wanted to be with Jemma. It didn’t help that Jemma showed a marked reluctance to spend much time with him, saying she wanted time on her own, to heal, to
reflect. That only made his sense of guilt worse. Torn in three directions. Even Harry Jones wasn’t up to that.

And in the game of battleships and broadsides that make up every constituency campaign, Zafira Bagshot had landed a direct hit. Harry was woken up early one Thursday morning by a call from the
chairman of his constituency party, Oscar Colville.

‘Who pulled your chain, Oscar?’ Harry grumbled, scrabbling for his wristwatch. Six-thirty. And he hadn’t got to bed before two.