‘Shut up,’ he said, his voice still calm, ‘or I’ll knock you out again.’
I bit my lip, the tears pouring. Now the cuffs had gone, I could stretch my legs out, although that too was incredibly painful. So much for fighting back, I thought. I could barely move.
After a while, stretched out on my side, I thought I could manage to sit up. I tried to raise myself on one elbow, opened my eyes. The room swam. I could see my arm, my wrist in front of my face, swollen, the skin grazed and raw where the cuffs had chafed.
He waited there, patiently, watching me while I struggled again and again to sit up. When I managed it, and looked at him, he was sitting on the floor with his back to the door, his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked pleased with himself. I wiped the back of one hand over my mouth. It came away bloody, but not much. My head still thumped. He must have hit me somewhere to knock me out.
I was still wearing the suit – the navy blue suit I’d chosen for the journey to New York because it wouldn’t crease. Well, it was creased now. The jacket was torn across one shoulder, I could feel it give as I moved. The skirt was undone at the back. Had he tried to undress me?
My ankles had rope round them, a blue nylon rope, not very thick, loose at one end. It must have been looped around the cuffs somehow. I wanted to reach down and untie them, but I had no energy at all.
‘D-did you drug me?’ I asked, my voice barely there. My throat was dry.
He laughed. ‘Is that the only question you have for me?’
I gave a barely perceptible shrug. It had seemed like a good question a moment ago, but it suddenly wasn’t relevant any more.
How did you find me? I wanted to ask. How did you know? How did you get down to Heathrow so quickly? And above all, why…? Why hadn’t my plan worked? Why wasn’t I on a plane, somewhere over the Atlantic? Why wasn’t I in New York already?
‘They’ll miss me,’ I said. ‘When I don’t turn up in New York they’ll report me missing. Someone will come looking for me.’
‘Who will?’
‘My friend. He’s going to give me a job in New York.’
‘Your friend? You mean Jonathan Baldwin?’
My blood ran cold at the sound of that name on Lee’s lips.
‘What? What did you say?’
He reached behind and pulled something out of the back pocket of his jeans, threw it towards me. It was a business card. I picked it up with numbed fingers. On one side, in neat black letters in a corporate design of green and gold, I read:
Jonathan Baldwin BSc (Hons), MBA, CHRP, CHSC
Senior Management Consultant
I turned the card over. On the back, in my handwriting, was written:
Change Management Conference, Manchester,
5–16 June, 2000
‘It was in your organiser,’ he said, ‘and you fucking fell for it, every bloody word of it. I always knew you were naïve, Catherine, but I didn’t realise you were that stupid.’
So there was no job in New York. No flat waiting for me. No escape. And nobody to notice my absence: nobody in New York, and nobody here either. It might be weeks, months even before anyone realised I was gone. By that time I would be dead. I felt a huge wave of despair, a black cloud which made it difficult to focus on anything other than the pain. This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t. I’d spoken to him, he’d emailed me, it hadn’t been Lee, it had been a different man, a deeper voice, a different accent. Jonathan was a real person, I remembered him. Lee couldn’t have done it. He couldn’t have.
‘You set me up?’ I sobbed. ‘You set all this up?’
‘In my last job, I used to do stings like this all the time. People who are committing crime are suspicious, they sometimes take ages to convince. But you fell for it straight away, didn’t you? And you didn’t even hesitate. You didn’t even think about whether it was the right thing to do. You just jumped at the chance to fuck off and leave me behind.’
So it was true. He’d played me, he’d taken my need to escape and used it against me. There was nothing I could do. All those moments when I’d seen blue sky, when I’d seen that hint of freedom, I had still been in the cage.
My question, the question, had formed itself in the black fog of my brain. ‘What are you going to do?’
That got him thinking. I didn’t want to meet his eyes, but I could tell he was concentrating.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said at last.
‘You can let me go,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said straight away. ‘You’re mine, you know that. You tried to leave me. I gave you chances, Catherine. I gave you so many fucking chances. And you let me down.’
‘You know you can’t keep me here forever. They will find out. You’ll lose your job.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, right. You mean if I’m planning to do anything, I’d better finish you off?’
I nodded.
‘You want me to kill you?’ he said, curiously.
I nodded again. All the fight in me had gone. I wanted it over with.
He got up, suddenly, stood over me. I started to feel sick. ‘You see, that’s what I fucking hate about you, Catherine,’ he said, his voice a growl. ‘You just give in too fucking easily.’
He nudged me with his knee and I toppled back onto the carpet, struggling back up to a sitting position, tears and snot running down my face into the corners of my stinging mouth.
I waited for the blow. I waited for the smack to the head, the punch, or the kick. I wanted it. I braced myself, but I longed for it too. I coveted the oblivion.
When he next spoke, it was through gritted teeth, as though he was so disgusted by me that he could hardly bring himself to speak. ‘You’re a piece of filth. You’re a dirty, slutty whore, Catherine. I can’t decide whether to kill you, fuck you or just piss on you.’
I let out a sob, as I heard the sound of his jeans being unzipped, and seconds later the warm wet splashing of his piss over my hair, the remains of my smart suit, the new grey carpet. I cried, trying to keep my eyes and my mouth shut so none of it would go in. The sound of it, the smell of it. I started to retch.
When he’d finished he left the room for a minute, leaving the door wide open. I started to crawl towards it, seeing the hallway outside, the bathroom beyond, but before I got there he was back. A bucket of cold water, the sponge that I used to clean the bath out, a bar of soap. The water smelled like bleach as he dropped the bucket onto the carpet.
‘Clean yourself up, you cunt,’ he said.
Then he left the room, locking it behind him.
I howled. But he hadn’t put the handcuffs back on.
Sunday 16 March 2008
I opened my eyes into the darkness, breathing fast, my heart pounding in my throat. For a moment I was disorientated, then Stuart moved in bed and I was there, with him, in his flat. It was just me and him. No Lee. It was another nightmare.
It’s not real, I told myself. It’s part of it. Let the thoughts come, let them go.
I considered waking Stuart up, but that wasn’t fair. I lay still for a while in the darkness, listening.
I could hear noises.
It took me a moment to realise that they were real noises, not part of the rhythm of the house, not the noise of my blood rushing through my head.
A bang, far away. Downstairs? No, it didn’t sound like it. It sounded further away. Maybe in the street. I couldn’t hear the noises of the street from Stuart’s flat as well as I could in my own. A car door slamming?
I looked across at Stuart’s alarm clock. It was ten to three in the morning, the coldest and darkest and loneliest part of the night. I should be asleep. I should go back to my nightmare. For a moment I wondered if actually I wasn’t awake at all, if I was still dreaming.
Another bang, followed by a scrape. A noise like something being dragged across a floor. Something heavy, inert.
I sat up in bed, straining to hear. For several moments, nothing. Just the noise
of Stuart’s breathing, deep, regular. The sound of the fridge humming in the kitchen. A car starting up outside, driving away.
Maybe that had been it – just someone going out to their car.
Stuart moved next to me and I lay back down, fitting myself into the curve of his body, pulling his arm around me, protecting me, keeping me safe. I closed my eyes and tried to think of good things, tried to fall asleep.
Saturday 12 June 2004
A few minutes later, he came and took the bucket away. I’d used it to scrub feebly at the carpet. Already I could feel the skin on my fingers burning from the bleach in the water. The patch of carpet that had been scrubbed was turning from pale grey to a dirty yellow.
After that, he didn’t come back for several hours.
I spent a while sobbing, but not much. I tried getting out – I tried bashing at the door, but it held. I tried hammering at the window, but it faced out over the back and there was nobody out there to see me, or hear me. He’d left nothing at all in the room I could use as a weapon, or that I could use to try to break the window.
Before I’d left for the airport, this room had held a single bed, a wardrobe, a desk with an old computer, a chest of drawers and a small portable television, along with various other smaller bits and pieces. Now it held nothing. The only decoration was the curtain pole and the curtains hanging from them, but I had nothing at all I could use to get the curtain pole down with. I tried pulling it down, thinking I could use the pole to smash the window, but it held my body weight easily, even when I bounced up and down.
I felt thirsty, wondered what the time was, what day it was. How long had it been since I’d had something to drink? Well, I wouldn’t last long at this rate. If he’d gone to work, if he was going to be away for several days, it would be dehydration that would get me first.
I tried screaming, ‘Help me! Help me! Help!’ over and over again, as loudly as I could, but all that seemed to do was leave me with a sore throat.
I sat for a while and tried to think of a plan. I considered using my stockings to make some sort of noose, so that I could try to put it around his neck when he came into the room, to try to choke him. That was about the best plan I could come up with. Thirst, fear and hunger were making thinking harder than it usually was.
I felt the back of my head gingerly and found a lump which hurt so much when I pressed it gently that I nearly passed out. The hair around it was matted with dried blood. He’d knocked me out, then. I wondered how long I’d been out for.
I wondered if I’d have any sort of strength left to fight him when he came back, and whether it was worth it. If I tried to attack him, he’d fight back, and then he would undoubtedly punish me for trying.
Well, I couldn’t just sit here and let him do whatever he wanted. If he killed me, at least this whole shitty mess would be over and done with.
I thought about tying my stockings to the curtain pole, or pulling the curtains into strips, and hanging myself. I thought about it in such detail I even began to picture myself, and his face when he found me. It would be a victory, of sorts. Although all my friends, his work colleagues, everyone, would think I committed suicide because I was depressed. He would get away with it – nobody would ever know how he’d treated me. And he would go on to do it all over again, to someone else.
I turned a corner, then, and I decided to try to fight. I had another go at screaming.
And that was how I managed not to hear him coming in through the front door, climbing the stairs and unlocking the door to the spare room, to my prison.
Thursday 20 March 2008
When I came in from work tonight, there was a bowl and a spoon and a cup on the draining board in the kitchen.
To any sane adult, the rational explanation would be that I’d washed up my bowl after having cereal for breakfast, and had left it to dry and gone to work.
In reality, though, I’d done nothing of the kind.
It was a measure of how far I’d come already that I didn’t descend into a panic attack. I didn’t even go back to the front door and start the checking process all over again. I stood there and stared at the bowl, knowing what it meant. My heart was thudding in my chest and I was almost too afraid to look round, in case Lee was there standing right behind me.
He wasn’t in the flat at all – I knew that, I’d already checked the whole place once. The front door downstairs had been firmly shut and latched, the way it had been every day since Stuart moved in. The flat door had been securely locked, and I’d locked it behind me and checked. The doors to the balcony had been locked, too. The flat had been fine – fine – until I’d finally come to the kitchen to start making something to eat.
I waited for the anxiety to subside, determined not to give in to it. First the button – now this
The red button with its attached scrap of cloth had been like a warning – less subtle than this new message. The first one had been like a flag, literally a red flag even though it was tiny, telling me he was back, he had found me. It was meant to be an alarm, a warning. He knew that anyone I chose to tell about it would look at me in an odd way, think about what sort of an attention-seeking person might rip a button off something, tuck it in her pocket and then have a panic attack about it. This time, though, he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone at all about it. What would be the point? No rational person would believe that a person would break in – leaving no trace – just to leave some washing-up on the drying rack.
I put the bowl, the spoon and the mug into the rubbish bin and took the bag outside to the landing. After that I made a cup of tea, giving myself time to think.
I should have moved out. I should have started looking for somewhere new to live, the day after the button appeared in my jeans pocket, almost a month ago. I realised it was too late to do that now – he would be following me, he would see me going to visit new flats and he would know where I was going to live even before I’d moved in.
Even if I ran, even if I just left everything and caught a train somewhere, he would still find me. And besides, I couldn’t just leave everything behind – my job, the flat, Stuart. The thoughts that had begun to form in Alistair’s office crystallised into a sense of resolution. What good would running away do? It didn’t work last time and it wouldn’t work now either. I was going to have to stay. I was going to have to get ready to fight.
Saturday 12 June 2004
The door slammed open with such force that it made me jump and stopped me mid-scream.
I was completely unprepared for what came next – his fist coming towards my face at speed, smacking my cheekbone and propelling me backwards, the back of my head, already fragile, hitting the wall as I fell.
I couldn’t move for a moment, stunned, but I didn’t have time to contemplate my next move anyway. He took hold of a fistful of my hair and hauled me back to an unsteady kneel, before hitting me again, harder. This time his fist connected with my nose and I felt the blood start to pour out of it, watched through dazed eyes as it formed a splashy puddle on the grey carpet. I gagged, sobbing, retching.
‘Shut the fuck up!’ he yelled. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, screaming like that?’
‘Let me go,’ I said, quietly, pleading.
‘I don’t think so, Catherine. Not now.’
This time I winced before it hit – my right eye, the bridge of my nose. My hand against my face, trying to protect it, and he pulled it away, placing it on the floor. I watched him stand on my fingers and heard a crack.
I bit back a scream, the pain going through me like a slice. ‘No, please, Lee – no more. Please.’
‘Take your clothes off.’
I looked up at him. My right eye felt strange, wouldn’t focus.
‘No, no… please.’
‘Take your fucking clothes off, you stupid, dirty bitch. Take them off now.’
Seated, I pulled my jacket away from my shoulders. My right hand wasn’t working properly, the fingers starting to swell. After a
moment he lost patience and pulled my jacket away, ripping it away from my aching shoulders. My blouse he just tore off. Then he dragged me to my feet, pulling away a handful of my hair as he did so, tossing it to the carpet and wiping his hand on the back of his jeans, then pulling my skirt down.
Then he stopped. The thought of him sickened me, but even so I raised my head. I wanted to see his eyes, to see if I could find out what he intended to do to me.
I tried as hard as I could to focus on his face. The leer. Oh, my God. Oh, shit – he was enjoying it. He really was enjoying himself.
As I watched, he reached to the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out the knife, the black-handled lock knife with a curved blade, partly serrated, about five inches long.
I found my voice again, begging, pleading, my voice rising into a wail. ‘No, no, no, Lee – don’t, please don’t…’
He reached forward and slid the blade under the fabric of my knickers at the side, slicing the fabric with a neat, crisp sound. I felt the coldness of the blade against my naked skin. I couldn’t move. Then the other side. He reached between my legs and grabbed at the material, pulling it away.
Then he took a step back and surveyed me. ‘You’re ugly,’ he said, a smile in his voice.
‘Yes,’ I said. I felt it.
‘You’ve lost so much weight you’re like a fucking skeleton.’
I gave a little shrug.
‘You’re so fucking skinny. I liked you before, when you had some flesh. You were so beautiful, so gorgeous I couldn’t stop myself looking at you, did you know that?’
I shrugged again. My right eye was starting to close, my head was pounding. I looked down at the blood which had splashed from my broken nose down the front of my body. Blood everywhere. Who’d have thought so much could come from one nose?
He sighed heavily. ‘I can’t fuck you like that. You aren’t even remotely attractive, you know that?’
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