She tells him everything then. “My mum was the kindest person you could ever wish to meet, and she rarely laid a hand on me; though I deserved it sometimes.” Her lips tremble on the pitiful smile they try to form. “I was the child from hell,” she tells him frankly. “No matter what she tried to do with me – be it puzzles, or reading stories, or taking me out to the park – it was never enough to satisfy me. Although physical activities, like swimming and track running, did help as long as I drove myself hard enough to reach near exhaustion.”
Even that had been a short-term solution.
He glances over at her. “I think I remember reading something about that, though not strictly in the same context,” Logan tells her. “It had to do with children who had Attention Deficit Disorder and how to channel all that extra energy they seem to have into positive, rather than destructive activities.”
Catherine nods in agreement. “I suppose there are valid comparisons to be made. After all, I did have an attention deficit, the fact that it was caused by mind numbing boredom didn’t change the outcome of it. I was still loud and angry, or subdued and shutdown, for most of the time. I could go from one extreme to the other in minutes; my poor mum didn’t know which way to turn.” Her voice has grown quieter, her memories harder to bear. “I loved her so much,” her lips tremble but she will not give in to the tears. Stiffening her resolve, she asks Logan, “How much do you already know about me – you did a background check, so you must at least have the basics?”
“The ‘basics’ is about right,” he tells her. “I didn’t go further than your senior educational background really. That gave me your age and the fact that you transferred schools a few times. Any more than that is just hearsay; like Arthur and Robert, they both speak very highly of you.” He frowns over at Catherine, “I really did just do a surface run and only because I was curious, and wanted to get to know you.”
Wanted. Yes, I’ll soon be in the past tense once I get through telling you what a nut job you’ve hooked up with!
“That’s it?” She asks. “You didn’t look into my family background or my earlier education?”
I don’t know why I’m even bothering to ask. If you had you’d have run a mile. Maybe you still will. Oh, Jesus!
“No,” he reiterates softly. “What would I have found if I had?” Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Catherine brace herself and knows that whatever she is about to say is going to hurt her deeply.
“You were thirty six a couple of months ago,” she states matter-of-fact. “That would have made you twenty when I was still nine going on ten.” Catherine doesn’t notice his heavy sigh at hearing that bit of revelatory math, she is too busy putting her remembered facts into some relevant order. “Do you remember hearing about the murder of a woman named Sara Colson? It was a deliberate home invasion; he came prepared so it was obviously premeditated.”
Logan pales visibly. “Good lord! I didn’t put it together – she was your mother?” he gasps.
Catherine nods; it will help that he already knows the gist of what happened. “The newspapers were pretty graphic in their reporting,” she states unemotionally, “so you must know that she was raped and tortured to death.”
And I did nothing to stop him! Fucking coward!
Logan cannot believe his own stupidity, it had been all anyone had talked about for months afterwards. His own father had become very protective of his mother, ferrying her to this place and that and always insisting on picking her up afterwards. “Yes,” he admits, a note of deep disgust in his voice, “it was sickening just to hear about; I couldn’t bring myself to actually read it.” Though, the ghouls who’d enjoyed reading every detail also enjoyed talking about it. This meant he hadn’t been able to escape the vile gossip.
“Well…one thing you wouldn’t have read about is the fact that I was there, the whole time.”
Sick bastard!
Her face and tone become stony, totally detaching herself from her emotions.
Logan’s hands tighten on the steering wheel; his head reeling with shock. He pulls the car over at the first opportunity and sits in stunned silence.
When he eventually speaks, it is to ask a question more out of hope than to hear the answer. “You mean you were hiding somewhere in the house and he didn’t know?”
Yes, that would make a much nicer, more sanitised tale.
She doesn’t turn to look at him, already knowing what she’ll see if she does. “Yes…and no,” she replies cryptically. “I did hide, under my mother’s bed, but he found me. In fact, he dragged me out by my feet after he’d finished raping my mother on her bed.”
“Oh god!”
Is that disgust? I’m not surprised
. His head falls forward to rest his forehead on the steering wheel. “Did he hurt you – I know he didn’t rape you – but did he hurt you?”
Catherine finds the strength to look over at Logan and is actually shocked to see the depth of his pain on her behalf. Reaching out a hand, she prises his off the steering wheel and holds it in both of hers. “If you mean did he do to me what he did to my mother, no, he didn’t.”
Logan looks over at her, and knows there is more to come. “You don’t have to tell me, Catherine. I don’t want to put you through any more pain.”
She gives his large hand a squeeze, managing to offer him some small comfort. “The pain will be there whether I tell you or not; maybe it’ll even help to finally talk about it.”
I’ve never been able to get the words out, and never wanted to tell the authorities, they hadn’t really cared about my mum!
“But surely, you must have told the police, and no doubt the social workers, everything that happened?” Logan frowns quizzically.
She shakes her head. “I didn’t speak a word to anyone for two years,” she explains. “And, as I’d attacked the social worker they brought in to look after me, they locked me up in a psychiatric unit – they thought the trauma of it all had sent me loopy,” she scoffs scathingly, remembering the psychiatrists discussing her like she wasn’t in the room, assuming she couldn’t hear just because she couldn’t speak.
Fuckheads!
“I’m so sorry, Catherine, I had no idea.” He is looking at her, and he can see that she is searching his face for any signs of pity. “You are, without doubt, one of the strongest, most resourceful women I have ever had the pleasure to meet. You astound me!”
If only I could believe, you will still feel that way after you hear all of this.
“I need to finish this, Logan,” she states quietly. “I have to get it over with while I have at least a modicum of control…” she squeezes the hand she is still holding, “…and you give me that.”
For now, at least.
He uses that hand to pull her towards him; putting his arms around her and wishing he could transfer all his strength to Catherine, knowing she is going to need it. “I don’t know about you,” he smiles, and drops a kiss on the top of her head, “but I really needed that.”
Catherine smiles, and puts her hand on his cheek. “I don’t know how or why, but you’ve become my rock and yes I needed that too.”
Very much
.
They sit back in their seats, still holding hands. “Ok,” she breathes. “So, now you know that my mum’s name was Sara and that she was murdered in the worst way imaginable.” After a couple of steadying breaths, she continues. “Now I’m going to tell you what the newspapers couldn’t. After he’d finished raping my mother he reached under the bed and grabbed my ankles, then hauled me out and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of spuds.” Her eyes go distant and Logan knows she is seeing it all again. “He probably didn’t care, but from that position I could see my mum – he’d used duct tape to bind her hands and feet, one to each corner of the bed and a piece across her mouth to keep her quiet. But it didn’t,” she recalls. “Even while I was hiding under the bed, too witless to do anything to help her, I heard her screams while he raped her; and I would hear them a lot more throughout that night.”
I still hear them.
Catherine rubs her free hand over her eyes and squeezes them together as if trying to erase the memory. “I thought he was taking me to my bedroom; was terrified he was going to do to me what he’d already done to my mum,” she meets Logan’s eyes then, “but he didn’t. He just picked up the chair at my desk and carried it and me back to my mum’s bedroom. Then he made me sit on it and used the duct tape to fasten each of my ankles to the outside of the two front legs of the chair,” she swallows hard, “I was totally exposed, though I still had my pants on, but he looked directly up my skirt and laughed. Then he pulled my arms to the back of the chair and bound my hands so that I couldn’t move, and all this time I hadn’t made a noise.”
She blinks rapidly and stares at Logan. “I don’t remember making a noise even when I was under the bed, but I suppose I must have for him to have known I was there.” She gives herself a mental shake to bring back her focus. “We were both helpless, now, so he could move about the house as he pleased. My mum looked over at me, tears streaming from her eyes, and I knew she was trying to tell me that she was sorry.” She laughs derisively then. “Can you believe it, I’m the one who did nothing to help her and she was apologising to me!”
Forgive me, mum…because I can’t. I never will!
Logan puts his hand to her face and gently turns Catherine to face him. “Neither you nor your mother are to blame for anything that monster did!” he tells her quietly but firmly. “And you were nine years old, what the hell do you think you could have done that would have changed anything? He was a madman; if you had caused him even the smallest grief things could have taken an even nastier turn than they did – do you honestly think your mum would have wanted that?” he asks, deliberately referring to her mother as Catherine did.
“I tried,” she tells him, and a single tear escaped her eyes to tumble unnoticed down her cheek, “when I heard her key in the door I heard myself screaming to her to get out, but my voice was only in my head – it wouldn’t come out, no matter how I tried, it wouldn’t come out.”
“And you didn’t speak again for two years?” he asks.
Catherine shakes her head. “I don’t know if I could have, I never tried. There was no reason to anymore,” she states softly, “and what would I have said if I had. My head was full of remembering – the table he brought into the bedroom, the way he laid out all his instruments of torture in perfectly neat rows, and the way he described to me exactly what he was going to do with each one before using it so brutally on my mum.” Her face looks quizzically at Logan, then. “He actually enjoyed every moment of my mum’s pain and was ecstatic when I peed my pants; said it was a sign that he’d achieved ultimate terror.” Catherine closes her eyes and shakes her head, “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never understand the why of it.”
Catherine is exhausted; Logan can see it all over her. She can barely hold herself upright in her seat. He reaches across her to check the tension on her seatbelt then says, “I’m taking you home, Catherine. You’ve been through enough, now.” She makes to protest but Logan is adamant. “Look at you, you’re dead beat; and don’t deny it,” he warns. “I’m taking you home and you’ll get some rest. Then, if you think it’s necessary, you can fill me in on the rest.” However, he hopes earnestly for her sake that the worst is over.
“Oh, it’ll be necessary,” she tells him, a cold edge of steel lining her voice.
Well, he had asked for it and Catherine had told him, all of it. Even down to that distinctive voice, she had thought she recognised on the terrace of Lakelands.
No wonder Catherine was paralysed with fear to the point where she lost control of her bladder. The very thought that a man like that was anywhere near-by would have been enough to terrify anyone.
But surely, it couldn’t have been Charles Llwyd she had witnessed torturing her mother to death as a child. He’s known Charles for years; had sold him his current home in the neighbouring village of Upper Stanton. Logan sits in the drawing room of his large detached home, contemplating the almost unthinkable possibilities.
Charles is in his early sixties now, so, that would have made him in his late forties fifteen years ago when Catherine was nine. Though she said that she’d been almost ten, he recalls, wanting to get the facts straight in his mind. But the man Catherine described had been much younger – so had she been wrong? Had she remembered the attacker’s voice wrong, after so many years and having been so young and traumatised when she’d heard it in the first place? But then he has to consider Catherine’s brilliant memory. Perhaps it isn’t just facts and figures that her brain absorbs so readily. Perhaps she has perfect recall of other things, too.
Catherine has not been home or to her office for over a week. Not since Logan drove them, back from Lakelands and insisted that she at least stay the night. Settling Catherine in her own room, Logan insisted that she hang the clothes she brought back with her, up in the wardrobe.
Now she is restless; Logan has had to go into his office today and she is left on her own to continue their work on finding the animal that murdered her mother. Perhaps I ought to phone Ben again she ponders a frown drawing her brows together, and moans aloud at the prospect. She couldn’t blame him; when he learned that she’d been back for three days before she had even thought to ring him, he’d been righteously pissed! He hadn’t quite handed his notice in, but she is sure it had been a close run thing.
“Well here goes,” she says to the empty room, and picks up the phone in the lounge to call him. “Ben, hi,” she greets him cheerily, though it sounds forced even to her, “I thought we could catch up over lunch,” she offers, “If you’d like to?”