by Bourne, Sam
Above all, though, Maggie could see now that Mindy was never going to fail. Because that day, over glasses of lemonade in the garden, this fourteen-year-old girl would have become the project of Virginia ‘Peggy’ Winthrop. Earlier, Maggie had wondered why Peggy had never had children of her own. Now she understood that that was the wrong question. For on that summer afternoon, aged – what, sixty, sixty-five? – she had at last given birth. Not to a baby, admittedly, but to a new person all the same. One armed with the name of a great-niece who had just been taken from her, one who would ensure that that branch of the family tree would not shrivel and die, but would live on, one with the grit and determination to bring glory to a dynasty that dated back to the birth of the republic. A new person called Natasha Winthrop.
Maggie looked at Peggy and could picture the two of them, together that day and every day thereafter – both alone and both lonely, both without families of their own, united in grabbing a little piece of life from the death and pain that surrounded them. What a bond that must have been. No wonder Natasha called her every week. She was her mother and father, her brother and sister, her sun and her moon. She had given her life.
And now, without really planning to, Maggie spoke out loud. ‘The thing I want to know is,’ she said, almost surprised to hear a human voice after all that silence. ‘Why did she say you were dead?’
Peggy did not snap out of her reverie; she did not speak straight away. She moved her head slowly, as if emerging from deep rest. A slight smile formed on her lips as she said, ‘What was that, dear?’
‘Why did she say you were dead? She made a point of it, when we met. She’s said it in interviews too. Very insistent: “I have no one left.” “My last surviving relative died several years ago.” Why would she do that?’
Peggy smiled at that too, as she smoothed the sheets that were covering her. ‘It’s the same reason we agreed I should leave Pilgrim’s Cove and disappear here a few years ago, once she was sufficiently established to take over the house. It’s easier to keep a secret if there’s no one left to tell it.’ She twinkled and then added, ‘It worked too. Neither of us ever breathed a word.’
‘Until today.’
‘Until today.’
Maggie got up and made for the door. She was about to leave, when a last question came to her.
‘Did Natasha ever mention someone called Judith?’
‘Who, dear?’
‘Judith. Did Natasha ever mention that name to you?’
Aunt Peggy brought her forefinger to her mouth, as if thinking. ‘Was that the name of a friend of hers?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Recently or in the past?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
‘Hmm. I’m sorry, but it doesn’t ring any bells at all. At college I think she had a friend called Julia, who she mentioned once or twice. But no Judith.’
‘OK.’
‘I’m sorry not to be of more use.’
Maggie went back to her room and collected her things. It was November and the idea of driving through the night along empty, sea-swept roads in such a remote part of the country made her heart sink. Staying inside in the warm, hiding in that single bed even for just a few hours, appealed much more.
But she knew she had to leave. Now that she understood who Natasha Winthrop was, she knew exactly where she had to go.
Chapter 38
Chicago, Illinois, one day earlier
Afterwards she would think: what if I had left a minute later? Or two minutes earlier? What if I had missed that subway train and got the next one? None of this would have happened.
But somehow that had been the moment she decided to leave the bar just off Franklin Street. That precise moment. She’d been thinking about her exit for at least twenty minutes. She hadn’t wanted to make it obvious, by checking her watch: the international sign of boredom and a desire to get away. Thankfully, these days, you could disguise it. You just had to pull out your phone and pretend to be checking a message: no one had to know that your eye was on the clock at the top of the screen. But maybe her colleagues were wise to that. Maybe they did it themselves.
Besides, she had done the statutory hour. Surely there was a law written down somewhere that said attendance at a colleague’s leaving do was compulsory for sixty minutes, voluntary thereafter. She had complied in full. From now on, she was free to make a getaway.
The awkwardness was the excuse. She could not claim, as some of her co-workers could, that she had children to put to bed: she had no children. Nor could she cite the needs of her ‘other half’, as her colleagues regularly did: she had no ‘other half’. There was no mystery about it; that was who she was in the office: the single, middle-aged woman. Her workmates knew too that her family lived on the other side of the country, so there could be no invoking of an elderly mother who needed accompanying to a medical appointment early the next morning. All that left was, ‘I’ve got an early start in the morning.’ The flaw there was that, first, her colleagues knew that Carolyn Savito had no work-related reason to have an early start in the morning and, second, ‘I’ve got an early start in the morning’ was second only to checking your watch as an unambiguous sign that you’d had enough of drinking white wine with your co-workers and wanted to go home.
In that sense, the minute of her departure was preordained. And so she had put on her coat, said her goodbyes, accepted with a smile the borderline mocking remark of Glenn in Development – Ooh, somebody got a better offer! – and headed out to walk the three blocks to catch the Red Line. She had not seen the man on the platform who, according to later police reports, had latched onto Carolyn Savito at that point, if not earlier. He didn’t get into her carriage, but the next one along: he positioned himself near the end, by the connecting door, so that he could ‘keep an eye on her’.
He watched as she scrolled through her phone, reading a couple of articles, and kept watching as she leaned back, resting her head against the glass and closing her eyes for a minute or two. He watched as she collected her things at North/Clybourn Station and when she got up to get off at Fullerton.
He followed her through the turnstiles, keeping about fifteen yards back, and up the stairs to street level. His eyes stayed fixed on her as she turned right on Fremont, where the pedestrian traffic dropped sharply. That was his cue. Once there were fewer people around, that was the moment to increase the pace and narrow the distance.
Perhaps thirty seconds passed before she became aware of him. Was it the sound of his footsteps becoming nearer or that sixth sense that every woman develops soon enough, of a man getting too close? Afterwards, she would decide it was the latter: that she felt his presence before she heard it.
She glanced over her left shoulder and understood the danger immediately. Chiefly because he did not look away, or have his head in his phone, but met her gaze. Maybe there were some places in the world where a strange man walking behind you, and then failing to look somewhere else when looked at, would not be a danger sign, but Chicago was not one of them. She quickened her pace and so, unmistakably, did he.
Now the calculations began. How much further did she have to walk to reach her building? Was it better to press on till she got there, or should she seek some alternative refuge, aiming to duck into a bar or restaurant or convenience store? Trouble was, these were residential streets. There was nothing on her way home, unless she broke from her usual route and changed course. But if this man had been watching her, studying her from a distance after work each night, he would know she’d improvised. What was more, it could lead her into new danger: she might accidentally head down a dead-end street. Should she break into a run, or would that be to discard the one advantage she had: namely, his presumption that she did not understand the threat he posed?
She was approaching the left turn, the last one she would need to make. This, she decided, would be her
pursuer’s final chance to prove his innocence. If, when she turned off, he kept on walking, she would know it had been a false alarm: he’d have confirmed himself as a weirdo who didn’t observe the usual social cues, but he wouldn’t be a rapist. But what if he made the turn?
Her feet did the work, controlling themselves well, she thought. They didn’t convey the panic that was making her chest thump, that was making her light-headed. They were acting the part of a normal, self-assured woman walking home from work. With no instruction from her, they turned left.
A combination of her peripheral vision, her ears and her sixth sense told her he had made the turn with her. Now her heart thumped louder. She was perhaps two minutes from home. She began calculating and then instinct took over. Her legs decided to run.
As soon as she did it, she knew it was a mistake. There was no one on this street to see her, to realize that she was in danger. She could hear him running too, the thud of his tread on the sidewalk no louder than hers, but heavier, the vibration of each step palpable to her. It was obvious: he would catch up with her soon enough. She was too far away to get to her front door before he caught up.
She increased her speed, the memory of running at pace on school sports days coming back to her from decades earlier. Any second now he would outstrip her, pulling her down to the ground or grabbing her by the back of the neck.
And then, the very second she thought of it, she felt it – as if the imagining had willed it into reality. A hand brushed past her shoulder. It must have been a lunge at her, his first attempt, a hopeful arm stretched out.
From somewhere she found a new reserve of energy, enough to make her run faster still. She cursed the bag on her shoulder and these ridiculous shoes . . .
That’s when it happened, at such speed and in such a blur her brain could not process it. She suddenly heard a new noise behind her, a commotion, a scuffle. She kept running, only daring to turn around three or four seconds later. What she saw astonished her.
Her pursuer was no longer running. Instead, he himself had been grabbed, by a gang of four figures, all clad in black, who now surrounded him. Carolyn assumed they were police. But then she saw them bundle the man into the back of a black minivan that was waiting, its side door open, by the kerb. His arms were flailing as they shoved him inside, but he couldn’t land any blows. He was outnumbered. He kicked out once, making contact with one of the four who let out a strained yelp. A second later he was in the van, the police, if that’s who they were, piling in after him. The door slid shut and the van immediately went into a turn and sped off, in the opposite direction.
Carolyn watched it all from perhaps thirty yards away. She was panting; her lungs felt like they were bursting. But though she was desperate to put her hands on her knees and catch her breath, or even crumple in an exhausted heap on the ground, she remained standing, staring at the same spot, even after the van had gone. Because it had turned around, she never saw who drove it. She never caught the licence plate. All she could tell the police afterwards was that there were no markings on the van at all. And, now that she thought about it, there were no markings on the uniforms of the four who had apprehended him. Nor did she ever see their faces. They seemed, she would say in her sworn statement, to be wearing ski masks.
The van drove a circuitous route, turning right and right again, doubling back, then making a loop, and repeating similar moves at intervals. That, along with the radio tuned to a metal station playing at close to full volume, filling the vehicle with tearing, serrated sound, to say nothing of the blindfold, seemed to do the job, ensuring the captive had no idea where he was being taken. By the time they reached their destination, the four captors, together with the driver, were confident that their hostage was suitably and sufficiently disorientated. He would know nothing more than that he had been bundled out of the van twenty-five minutes after he had got in it, and that after just a few paces outdoors he had been led downstairs, below street level.
He couldn’t see it, but he was in a basement, consisting of a concrete floor and empty, unplastered walls. There was next to nothing in here, besides a table, two or three hard plastic chairs, some metal tools, a computer, a loudspeaker and several yards of cabling. The room was cold and damp, a barely visited underground store. The captors kept their ski masks on, so that they were unrecognizable even to each other.
The man’s wrists were still cuffed behind his back, secured by the cable-ties his captors had attached seconds after ambushing him just off Fremont Street. Now he was shoved down onto one of the chairs and his wrists tied again, this time to the back of the chair. His ankles were manacled by locked metal chains to each other and to the legs of the chair.
He didn’t call out, or rather he didn’t call out with words because he had been gagged, by means of a red ball attached to a leather strap buckled around his head. He had been making muffled sounds since the start of the journey here.
Now a pair of hands unbuckled his trousers and, with some effort, given the way he was seated, pulled them down. The hands did the same to the underpants. The clothes gathered around his ankles, as if he were sitting on the toilet. He was still blindfolded.
Now a voice addressed him, over a loudspeaker.
Do you know what it is like to be touched against your will?
The voice was not human, though not quite robotic either. It sounded metallic and distorted. The captive made no sound.
Do you know what it is like to be touched against your will?
The captive produced a grunt.
Now there was a sound of activity as two of the figures in black approached the chair. One of them was carrying a thin cord, somewhere between string and rope. The texture was rough.
Calmly, like a doctor conducting a medical examination, a hand reached for the man’s scrotum, identifying one testicle and separating it from the other. Next, the hands moved to tie the cord around the individual testicle, pulling the string to test that it was secure. The man let out a cry, but again the sound was muffled by the gag.
Now the second figure held the man down by his shoulders, while the first took a few paces back, cord still in hand. The captor, the one who had tied the initial knot, jerked on the cord, producing a long, protracted howl from the captive, although once more the sound was stifled by the ball in his mouth.
Do you know what it is like to be touched against your will?
Even as the metallic, distorted voice – unnaturally deep, like a record played too slow – filled the room, the sound of the howl lingered in the air. Whether because the captive was continuing to cry out in pain or because the original noise was reverberating, like the sustained note of a piano, in this dank, empty basement, it was not easy to tell.
The robotic voice, dull and expressionless, spoke again.
Even though you are making the sound of pain, we think you want it really. So we will carry on.
There was another tug on the cord, pulling, so that it gave the man the sensation, or the fear, that his testicle was about to be separated from the rest of him. He was bellowing into the gag covering his mouth. Tears were streaming down his face.
Even though you are crying and begging for us to stop, we will carry on.
The pull was so hard this time that the man made a gasp, which was followed by silence. One of the captors wondered if the testicle had been removed, if the captive had been castrated. Liquid was pooling around the chair. The captor stepped forward, to check if it was blood. It turned out to be urine. The captor concluded that, in his terror, the man had wet himself.
The captor bent down and loosened the cord. The captive let his shoulders slump in a gesture of relief. But the captor did not move away. Instead, the rope was now reapplied to the man’s penis, tied hard around the base, so that it cinched it, like a belt around a waist.
He let out a high squeal of pain.
We think you are saying
no. But no sometimes means yes.
The captors repeated the previous drill. One pressed down on the captive’s shoulders, while the other moved away a few paces until the cord was taut. Finally there was a sharp tug, generating more muffled noises of agony.
You are protesting. But we don’t care about your pain, because this is what we want. What we want matters more than your pain.
The captor pulled the cord several times, until the man moaned rather than howled. Eventually two of the captors came forward and untied the cord. The base of the captive’s penis was circled by a deep red welt, ringed with blood. His penis was flaccid and limp, a piece of useless flesh. Now the voice spoke again.
Do you know what it is like to be touched against your will?
This time, and with apparent great effort, the captive made a weak nod of his head. He murmured something that seemed like assent.
There was a pause for ten or eleven seconds. Then the voice sounded once more, through the loudspeaker.
You know what it is like to be touched against your will.
Another pause. A feeble nod.
But you do not yet know what it is like to be violated.
There was a dull silence in the room. The captors looked at the captive, trying to detect a reaction. One captor met the eye of another. The voice spoke again.
You do not yet know what it is like to be violated.
Now the same two captors stepped forward and, while taking care to ensure the captive’s hands and ankles remained immobile, they untied him from the chair. They then pushed him off the chair, so that he fell forward, landing on the ground on his knees. One captor took the chair away, while the other shoved at the captive’s back. He fell further forward, so that he was now on the ground on all fours, like a dog. His trousers and underpants were still bunched around his ankles, though now they were soaked in urine, the underwear especially.