Untouchable (33 page)

He shrugs. ‘Like I said, you intrigue me.’ He leans back into his seat, stares out of the windscreen at the landscape ahead. No trees, only an expanse of indistinct countryside stretching off towards faint lights in the distance.

‘How do you know all this?’

Lennart’s top lip curls. ‘I’ve read the reports. The stuff you wrote up on him, the original parole hearing.’

‘When?’ I ask indignantly.

‘Way back. Before the party. It was my job to check you all out.’

I flash back to our first meeting, his look of recognition in the lobby. The teasing in the hotel room.

You’ve led such a dull life, have you?

This man will always be ten steps ahead of me.

‘Tell me about Michael,’ he insists. ‘It was going so well, wasn’t it? You built up a rapport. Farrish opened up to you, talked about his girlfriend.
He cried
.’

The ridicule in his voice is unmistakable, and I feel the stir of something. Anger. Irritation. ‘How on earth did you get your hands on—’

He holds a palm up to interrupt me. ‘Details, Grace. How does anybody get anything done? You call in a few favours, that’s all.’ He leans his head back on the headrest. I see a faint line of stubble around his cheeks. Part of me wonders when he last got to shave.

‘So you were pleased with his progress. Argued in favour of his release?’

I nod miserably.

‘And two days afterwards he called, on the mobile number you gave him – even though that broke every rule in your book.’

‘I wanted to …’

‘I know. You wanted to help, to be there for him.’ He looks at me. I can’t tell if his expression is sympathy or scorn. ‘Was that what you told yourself when he asked you to go round to his flat?’

I stare down at my hands. See they’re trembling. I feel suddenly hot, undo my coat, slip my arms free.

‘I’ve seen pictures, Grace. Farrish. He’s a disarmingly attractive man.’

I swallow again. Wish I had something to drink. ‘Where exactly are you going with this?’

He moves his face closer to mine, his voice low and quiet. ‘Do you want me to stop? Do you really?’

I look outside at the drizzle, at the distant shimmering lights. Consider getting out of the car and making a bolt for it, but I’m too tired to even attempt it.

Time to stop running, Grace.

Lennart puts his hand in his pocket. ‘Some things are simply very hard to resist, aren’t they?’ He pulls out a packet of cigarettes, flips open the lid and holds it out to me. I stare at the neat crowns of the filters. The urge to take one surges inside me. I haven’t smoked in five years and yet I’ve never wanted one more.

I shake my head.

‘It’s a bit late for self-denial, isn’t it?’ Lennart removes a cigarette and lights it from the car lighter. The tip glows in the gloom as he sucks it into life. He helps himself to a single puff then hands it to me. ‘Just one, Grace. It won’t kill you.’

My resistance crumbles. Like the condemned man, I think as I take it from his hand and put it to my lips. Take a long deep drag. And start choking again.

Lennart grabs the cigarette from me and waits for the coughing to abate. I feel sick and dizzy and slightly high as the nicotine swarms into my bloodstream, stirs up all those dormant receptors in my brain.

‘Better?’ he asks, and I nod.

‘So let’s see.’ Lennart sucks on the cigarette, releasing a plume of smoke into the car. ‘You go round there, telling yourself you’re there to help. Hiding the real reason from yourself for as long as you can. Only once you’re in that room the self-delusion evaporates and you’re helpless. Unprepared.’

‘Alex,’ I say weakly. ‘What is this for? Please, can we just let it go?’

He looks over. ‘Why? Have you got something you’d rather be doing?’ The hint of a smirk around his mouth.

I blink hard, remembering where all this has to be leading. ‘No.’

Lennart spins round and leans sideways into the leather of his seat, eyeing me directly. ‘There you were,’ his voice low, almost mocking. ‘Educated, married, successful. Fully trained in the inner workings of the mind. And none of it counted for anything when it came to it, did it?’

I lean forward, open the window and rest my head on the side of the car, letting the fresh air blow into my face. A few drops of rain land on my skin.

‘Did you resist, Grace, when he came on to you? Did you show him your wedding ring? Slap his face?’

I shake my head again. Tears run down my cheeks, merging with the rain. I turn and grab the cigarette from his fingers, take another drag and throw it out the window.

Then I face Lennart. ‘I fucked him, OK? You know that. Everyone knows that.
The whole fucking world knows it
. I let Michael screw me and I did it knowing I was destroying everything – my marriage, my career, my self-respect, everything.’

‘Grace.’

Just that. My name.

‘What?’ I sob, running my hand across my cheek. I feel I’ve been treading water for the last five years. That now I’m sinking, no strength left to resist. ‘What’s this all about? Humiliate me, before you …’ I can’t bring myself to voice it.

‘I’m not trying to humiliate you,’ Lennart touches the base of my throat with the back of his forefinger. ‘Far from it.’

‘So what then? Why all this?’

He withdraws his hand but ignores my question. ‘Did it never occur to you, Grace, that you were always too big for all that – the semi-detached house and the semi-detached life? That there was too much in you to ever fit into such a small space?’ He exhales. ‘You didn’t know it then and you still don’t. You’re still punishing yourself for not being small enough, ordinary enough.’

I stare out the windscreen. Try to stop crying.

‘Tell me,’ whispers Lennart, leaning in again. His voice nearly a hiss. ‘Tell me what happened in that flat.’

A noise in my throat. Like gagging. ‘You already know.’

‘Only the facts,’ he says. ‘Not the details.’

I listen to the rain. It’s picking up again, the faint echo of wind speeding across the landscape. I’ve lost all track of time. How long have we been here? One hour? Two?

It feels like for ever.

I give in. Close my eyes and let the memories overwhelm me. ‘I honestly didn’t believe …’ I stop. That’s not true. The real, ugly, painful truth is that I went there, knowing what would happen, yet denying it was even possible. Still denying it as he kissed me, moments after walking through the door. Still denying it as he undressed me and lay me down on that grubby mattress and fucked me entirely senseless.

I never wanted anyone less – or anyone more.

Lifting my hand, I pinch my top lip until it hurts. Blink back the tears and force myself to carry on. ‘He … Michael … Afterwards, we … afterwards, he got up and walked over to the window. He said …’

You really shouldn’t have done that, Grace.

The terrible weight of those words. The contempt in his eyes.

‘What, Grace?’ Lennart’s voice close to my ear, his breath on my skin. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said: “You’re all the same, you fucking bitches.”’

Michael wasn’t even looking at me when he spoke. He was staring out across the town, towards … towards where
she
lived.

‘And then I knew,’ I say hoarsely. ‘That he’d made it up – the remorse, the confessions, the tears, all of it.’

Lennart makes a small noise. Something between a tut and sucking his teeth. He doesn’t say a word for a minute or two. Nothing but the sound of my sobbing, ragged and tired, in the stillness of the Mercedes.

‘Forbidden fruit, Grace – always the sweetest. You accept that in others, yet condemn it in yourself.’ He sighs again, a deep heavy sound like disappointment. ‘Farrish knew you better than you knew yourself. All that time you were analysing him, peering into his mind, you were simply handing him the keys to yours.’

He turns to examine me again. ‘He exploited you, Grace. Manipulated you.’

I shake my head miserably. ‘I misjudged him. If I’d been any good, if I’d done my job properly … if I’d had more integrity, I’d have seen through him, I’d have …’

‘That’s a little naïve,’ Lennart snorts. ‘You know he’d have been released anyway. He’d completed the programme. The risk assessments showed he was unlikely to reoffend. Besides, the world’s full of ex-cons who played the rehabilitation game, only to end up back inside.’

‘Social and financial pressure, criminal culture, there’s many different reasons for recidivism …’

‘Spare me the psychobabble,’ Lennart cuts in. ‘I like you better in your new career.’

I shut up.

‘So what did you do?’ he asks, after another minute or two have passed. ‘When you realized the truth?’

‘Don’t you know?’ I don’t bother to conceal the bitterness I feel.

‘I’d like to hear it from you.’

I breathe in to a count of five. Breathe out to the same. ‘I went to the prison governor. Told him what had happened, what I feared about Michael. He brought in the police.’

‘You told them all you’d slept with him?’

‘Yes.’

I snap my eyes open before I recall the expression on their faces. The frown of surprise, then disgust. ‘But they said they didn’t have enough to go on. To arrest him.’

‘So you confessed for nothing.’

Lennart’s words echo round my skull. I raise my hand to my forehead, squeeze the skin between my eyes as if I can pinch out the past. ‘I was put on immediate suspension. And twelve hours later, when she went to the police, I was sacked.’

‘Alison Tennant,’ Lennart says thoughtfully. Even the sound of her name makes my chest contract painfully. ‘Only twenty-six years old, wasn’t she?’

I nod.

‘So …’ He waits for me to go on.

I inhale slowly. ‘After I left, he went straight round to her parents’ house, broke in when she wouldn’t open the door. Raped her twice.’

Lennart shifts his weight in his seat. ‘Only this time he covered it up. Used a condom both times, then dragged her in the shower to wash off any trace of his DNA, right?’

I nod again, aware of the pain building in my head.

‘So without any hard physical evidence, it was her word against his. Her crying rape, and him claiming he only went round there to talk. So you had to testify, try to convince the jury that he was lying. I can’t imagine that was much fun, Grace. Especially when it came out, your part in it.’

I stare back out the window. My stomach seems to have contracted into a tiny ball. I feel like I did then, back there in the witness stand, being cross-examined by Michael’s defence team.

As if I was the one on trial.

‘I can see it all, Farrish so charming and convincing, his girlfriend in pieces, hardly able to string a sentence together, and your testimony undermined by what happened. By what you did.’

I dig my fingers into my palms. ‘They couldn’t make the rape charge stick,’ I say quietly. ‘In the end all they could get him for was violating his restraining order and breaking into the house.’

‘So she knew he’d be out in a few years. Would most likely be after her again.’

I close my eyes. Remember the call from a colleague, telling me Alison Tennant had committed suicide five days after the trial. Hung herself in her parents’ garage with a bungee cord.

I didn’t need photos for that image to burn itself into my brain for ever. Wherever I go, whatever I’m doing, she’s there, lurking at the back of my mind.

Along with Michael.

I drag my attention back to Lennart. See his eyes glint in the growing half-light. Wonder again when this is all going to end. Where.

I rub my hand across my forehead. My head is starting to pound unbearably. ‘Your problem,’ says Lennart suddenly. ‘Your Achilles heel, Grace, is your own sense of being fundamentally flawed.’

‘Since when were you a psychologist?’ I snort.

Lennart shrugs. ‘It’s obvious. You convict yourself without trial. Now you’re living out the life sentence you gave yourself.’

I laugh. A brittle sort of laugh. ‘I could hardly be accused of innocence.’

‘Maybe not. But you might be a whole lot better than you believe,’ he says, looking at me. ‘Perhaps even good, Grace. A good woman who made a big mistake and now believes herself to be bad.’

He smiles and I can just about make out the mockery in his features. ‘Whereas I’m undoubtedly a bad man who believes himself to be much better than he is.’

I watch him, thinking how, in a different time, in different circumstances, we might have been made for one another.

Lennart shifts in his seat, toys with the car keys. I can sense this is drawing to a close, that he’s preparing himself for something. Fear starts to seep back into every nerve.

‘I know what you did with Harry’s money, Grace, if you could call it that. Most of it was actually mine.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Had you followed, of course.’ He smiles again. ‘For the record, I approve. And don’t worry, dear old Harry will pay me back. I’ll make sure of that.’

I clear my throat. I can’t bear this any longer. ‘So what happens now?’ I force myself to meet his gaze. ‘What are you going to do?’

Derision lurks at the corners of his mouth. ‘I could ask the same of you.’

We stare at each other. Another minute ticks by.

‘It seems we’re at something of an impasse,’ Lennart says finally. ‘So let me suggest a way out.’ He bends forward and puts a hand under his seat. A slight click and he sits up.

In his hand is a gun. Not the one he had before. This one is more streamlined, clearly a lot more sophisticated. And no doubt has a built-in silencer, I realize with a primal lurch of fear.

He studies it for a second or two, then looks out the window. It’s virtually light now. Sunrise, a thin strip of orange line visible on the horizon.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ he says.

48

Thursday, 16 April

Lennart opens the car door and steps out. I sit there for a second or two, knowing I have no choice but to follow. The back of my neck prickling, I swing out my legs and stand. One buckles underneath me, pins and needles shooting through my calf.