by Mark Edwards
‘Rachel . . .’
She ignored me. ‘This will be better than a broken back, though. I don’t really want you paralysed, Andrew, because then you wouldn’t be able to make love to me.’ She leant forward and kissed me on the lips. She ran her knuckles over my shrunken penis. ‘So beautiful. I could look at you all day. Soon, I will be able to look at you all day.’
She pulled a gag out of her holdall and strapped it around my mouth.
‘Don’t want you screaming and bringing the neighbours running, do we?’
She held up a scalpel.
‘When you’re blind, you’ll need someone to care for you. It’s going to be wonderful, living together. And it’s perfect because you won’t be able to look at any other women ever again.’
She raised the scalpel and held it above my left eye. ‘I’m the last thing you’ll ever see, Andrew. My face will be imprinted in your memory forever.’
She brought the blade towards my eye and I started screaming into my gag.
Forty-one
There is a fine membrane that covers the surface of the eye, called the conjunctiva. This membrane protects the sclera, or the white part of the eye. I knew this from staring at a poster in a waiting room at Moorfields. Iris, retina, pupil, cornea, optic nerve. These words tumbled through my brain at lightning speed, on rapid repeat—
iris, retina, pupil, cornea, optic nerve
—as I screamed and begged for Rachel to stop, screaming abuse, begging for mercy—
iris, retina, pupil, cornea, optic nerve
—every noise I made muffled by the gag in my mouth, the neighbours so close but oblivious to what was happening to me—
iris, retina, pupil, cornea, optic nerve
—and the hard pain of the clamps that dug into my eye sockets intensified as I tried desperately to buck and writhe and get a hand free from the cuffs. But I couldn’t move, not with Rachel straddling my body, not with the handcuffs that secured my wrists like a carpenter’s vice. And the drug she had given me had made me weak, my muscles heavy and pathetic. While my brain leapt and sparked and screeched, my body lay there like a newborn baby’s, stranded, helpless. At Rachel’s mercy.
With the calm precision of a surgeon, Rachel sliced through the conjunctiva of my left eye and into the sclera, then across, slashing through the cornea and pupil. She hummed something under her breath as she drew the blade across my eye.
I blacked out.
When I came to, she was still on top of me, dabbing at my cheek with a cloth.
The pain in my eye hit me like a tsunami and I almost went under again, craving oblivion. But she slapped my cheek, kept me awake.
‘Look at me,’ she said softly.
My left eye, the eye that the surgeons had worked so hard on to repair last year, was blind. My remaining good eye swivelled towards her, the clamp digging into the bone. It kept filling with tears which dripped down my face. I made a choking noise and she pulled the gag away from my mouth.
The first words I tried to speak came out as a rasp. She tipped some water down my throat, smiling kindly. I managed to speak. ‘I’m begging you, Rachel. I’ll live with you. I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t make me blind. Please.’
She carefully removed the clamp from the wounded eye and I squeezed it shut. The pain was like nothing I had ever known. Indescribable.
She leant forward and kissed the bloody eyelid.
‘Take a good look, Andrew,’ she said in that velvet-and-nails voice. ‘I want you to remember what I look like. I want you to be able to see me in your head when we make love.’
‘Please Rachel, please don’t blind me.’
She moved the blade towards my remaining good eye as I struggled and tried to throw her off. But I couldn’t get any leverage and my limbs were limp and useless.
I spat in her face.
She sat back, a look of stunned horror on her face. For a fleeting moment, I felt good. ‘I’d rather fuck a dog than fuck you,’ I said. But she smiled at me like I was a toddler who’d said something silly.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said, yanking my jaw and slipping the gag back onto my mouth, pulling it tight. ‘You’ve got to be a good boy. When I’m looking after you, if you do naughty things, you will be punished. Like this.’
She leaned away and slashed the scalpel across my chest. Compared to the pain in my eye, it was a scratch. I wanted to scream at her. Tell her to do her worst. I wanted to die, but more than that: I wanted her dead. I conjured up every bit of strength I had left and bucked and thrashed and struggled, but whatever she had given me meant I hardly moved, and she laughed.
She brought the blade back towards my eye.
The front door opened with a rattle and click.
Rachel sat up, looking at her watch, as if she had been expecting someone, but not so soon. I realised I had been holding my breath, and exhaled through my nose, relief flooding through me. Rachel dismounted me and picked up the butcher’s knife from the bedside table where she’d left it, moving slowly, careful not to make a noise. I shouted into the gag.
A voice called out. ‘Hello?’
It was Charlie.
I tried harder to shout, to warn her. But all I could do was turn my head and watch with my remaining good eye – Oh God, I was blind in one eye – as she came into the room. As she took in the scene – Rachel with the knife, me naked and bloody on the bed – her mouth fell open and she tried to back out of the room. But Rachel grabbed her by the arm with her free hand, pulling Charlie and throwing her across the room. She crashed into the chest of drawers and fell to her knees.
‘What have you done to him?’ she screamed, eyeing the knife and staying where she was.
Rachel panted, ignoring the question. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’
I guessed from this question that Rachel had been expecting Charlie. No doubt Rachel was planning to kill her too, but she wanted me blind and helpless first, so I would have to listen to my girlfriend – if she was still my girlfriend – die. Charlie was the one Rachel hated the most. Because she was the woman I really loved.
Charlie climbed to her feet. Through the tears pooling in my right eye, everything was blurred, colours and shapes swimming in the bright light.
‘How did you get here?’ Rachel demanded, jabbing the knife towards her.
A male voice said, ‘I gave her a ride.’
I turned my head. Rachel turned too. It was Henry. Huge, muscular, strong, tall Henry. Come to save us. Oh thank God, thank God. He stepped towards Rachel with his hand outstretched, a towering presence, his motorbike boots thumping on the floor. He opened his mouth and said, ‘Give me—’
Rachel plunged the knife into his chest.
I watched in stunned horror – everything in slow motion – as our apparent saviour slumped to the floor, hitting the ground with a thump.
I had barely taken this in when Charlie jumped onto Rachel’s back. My tormentor spun, sending Charlie flying backwards, colliding with the wardrobe. Rachel leapt on her with a yell, shifted the knife to her left hand and punched her in the face with her right. She grabbed Charlie’s cheeks and smashed the back of her head into the corner of the chest of drawers, a sickening cracking sound filling the room.
I tried to cry out. Charlie!
She didn’t move. Rachel stood over her, looking down, panting. Then she came back over and climbed onto me.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ she said, replacing the knife with the scalpel.
This was it. I was going to be blind. This was my punishment for escaping injury in the crash that killed my parents and paralysed my sister. A dark spirit had been stalking me, ever since that day. It had tried to blind me last year. Now it was going to happen. Justice was being done on behalf of the universe, of all the laws of fate, and there was nothing I could do abou
t it. Nothing.
Behind Rachel, I saw Charlie push herself onto her hands and knees.
I made a loud noise in my throat, thrashed my head, tried to make Rachel believe I was choking, swallowing my tongue.
Not wanting me dead, Rachel pulled the gag down.
‘Under the chest of drawers,’ I yelled to Charlie. ‘The knife!’
The knife that Charlie had thrown during her jealous rage about Sasha. It had spun under the chest of drawers. If fate really wanted me to go blind, it would have told Maria, my new, competent cleaner, to find it, remove it, put it back in the kitchen. If there was no such thing as dark spirits, the knife would still be there.
Rachel tried to get off me, to grab her butcher’s knife, and I used every shred of willpower I possessed to buck and knock her off balance as she got off. She stumbled and tripped over Henry’s body, landing face-first with a grunt, but still holding onto the knife.
It didn’t matter. Charlie had found my knife under the chest of drawers and scrambled to her feet with it. There was no dark spirit. No fate. No pre-destined blindness. Just luck.
Charlie stood over my attacker, over the woman who had tried to destroy our lives. Holding the knife in both hands, Charlie brought it down, with all her strength, between Rachel’s shoulder blades.
Forty-two
Hi Charlie,
I’ve wanted to email you for a while but have been putting it off. I suppose that’s silly, but maybe I’m right to be hesitant. I wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to hear from me again, if you have blocked my email address or if you drag this straight into your junk folder.
The other reason for the delay is that I’ve been dealing with the fallout of everything that happened. Adjusting.
But this email isn’t about me.
Tilly told me you’ve gone away for a little while, though she’s reluctant to tell me where, so maybe you’re not checking your emails. But I have been composing this message to you in my head for weeks and now I feel the need to share it with you. To explain to you some of the things that have happened since . . . well, since that terrible day. And, more importantly, to say I’m sorry.
I should never have believed you were capable of doing those things. You, the sweetest, most compassionate, life-loving person I’ve ever met.
How could I believe that you could be behind Karen’s death? Or the attack on Kristi? Or any of the rest of it? All you ever gave me was your love. You looked after me when I needed it. You made me happier than I ever thought possible, happiness that was off the scale. You came into my life like a great rush of joy. And what did I do?
I fucked it up.
Maybe if I tell you some of what happened, and what I’ve found out since, it will help you understand why I was so mistaken, so misled. That’s my hope anyway. I want you to understand that you were a victim of someone else’s scheme, of bad luck and bad decisions. I never meant to betray you, to let you down. If I tell you the story of everything that happened, maybe you will see that.
So let’s start with the person behind most of it.
Rachel.
DC Moseley came to see me in hospital. He said that three years ago a guy called Philip Ellis was tortured and murdered, along with his girlfriend, Sophie, in Birmingham. The police thought it was a murder-suicide at first, that Sophie had done it. But then they discovered that two of Philip Ellis’s ex-girlfriends had died in weird circumstances. They found Rachel’s fingerprints at all of the crime scenes. She was a friend of Sophie’s but there was no reason for her to have visited the exes.
By the time the police figured this out, she’d vanished. They realise now that she moved south, reinvented herself, worked as a cleaner at Moorfields, then got the job as Tilly’s PA after seeing me, becoming obsessed with me and getting information about me and Tilly from one of the nurses.
When they started to treat Karen’s flat as a crime scene, after I went to see them, they found Rachel’s fingerprints again. The results came up on their database while they were holding me at the station. It’s why they let me go. The police were out looking for her while everything was going on at my flat.
Rachel told me, while she had me handcuffed to the bed, that she had full access to my emails, messages and Facebook, because she had some software installed on Tilly’s machine to record keystrokes. She knew which underwear I’d bought for Harriet from an old email receipt in my inbox. She broke in and stole it. Maybe she planned to wear it herself. She knew everything about me.
Of course, I know now that it was her who went to see Karen. Remember how I texted you about slagging Karen off because of my work for her? The police think that maybe she killed Karen as a kind of offering to me because I was pissed off with her. Like a cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner. She told Karen that she was my girlfriend. Karen didn’t know what you look like, so Victor told me you had visited her.
The police reckon she went to see Karen twice. The first time was to have a go at her about the website work. I guess she must have decided Karen wouldn’t call me. In fact, Karen texted me but Rachel deleted it. That was the night I took the sleeping pills.
Moseley says Rachel got the heroin from one of Henry’s drug dealer mates and, the second time she went round, she gave Karen the same muscle relaxant she gave me, then injected her. The coroner didn’t bother looking for anything like that at first because it seemed obvious she’d died of a smack overdose. Moseley said that even though they reckon Rachel originally killed Karen as an offering to me, she soon saw the opportunity to, well, kill two birds with one stone. Get rid of Karen and frame you. So she put the heroin in your suit pocket when she stayed at my flat. I suppose she didn’t know I would find it. Maybe she planned to call the police herself once she’d planted the false evidence.
It’s hard to say how precisely Rachel planned everything. Some of the things that led me to suspect you were, I thought originally, coincidence. Like you saying that if you were going to murder someone you’d do it via a fake drug OD. But now I know that you said the same thing to Tilly, when you emailed her about that awful dinner party with Sasha. Of course, Rachel had access to all Tilly’s messages too.
And of course there was all the other weird stuff going on too. That feeling of being followed, for one. Well, now we know that Fraser was following you about because he was still hung up on you. Rachel encountered him on one of her trips up to London (she could travel quickly between here and Eastbourne on her bike). We had two stalkers, one each, and they joined forces in an attempt to break us up. He hasn’t admitted it but Rachel told me Fraser pushed me down the stairs of the Tube station. It was because she was hoping I’d end up in a wheelchair. I expect he thought you wouldn’t want to be with me anymore if that happened.
Other things that made me, stupidly, begin to feel suspicious about you . . . Well, of course, there was your jealousy. I was so shocked after that night I spent at Sasha’s and saw a different side to you. Now I know that that was all it was: jealousy. But being completely honest, seeing your anger that night made me wonder what you were capable of.
There was the small stuff too: I didn’t know if I believed you about losing my bag on the bus, thought you had deliberately got rid of my old photos; my female Facebook friends vanishing (that was Rachel); my photography book going missing . . .
Charlie, you should have just asked to borrow it – though if I’d known you wanted to cut it up for your artwork I’d have bought you a new copy!
What else? God, there’s so much. Victor being framed as a paedophile. Again, that was Rachel, though I’m not entirely sure why she did it. Was she worried about me working with and meeting other women? Or did she want me to have no money? Maybe she thought that if I was completely skint I’d have to leave my flat, go and stay with Tilly. Who knows what twisted logic went through her head?
Anyway, Rachel set up the page about Victor and paid one of
the temps in his office to plant the kiddie porn on his computer.
Finally, there was the attack on Kristi. I know that you tried to bribe Kristi to stop her being my cleaner. I don’t know exactly why you did that. Did you feel threatened by her or was it because you thought she was being exploited? Maybe a bit of both. But the police don’t think it was Rachel who attacked her. Moseley thinks it’s something to do with Albanian gangs.
So there you go. All the reasons why I betrayed you. It’s quite a list, isn’t it? The kind of stuff that would keep conspiracy theorists going for years! But I know I shouldn’t joke about it . . . It all contributed to my confusion and paranoia. It’s not an excuse. But it is the reason.
For the record, I never, ever suspected that Rachel was obsessed with me. She worked at Moorfields before you started there. Of course, I don’t remember seeing her there. Tilly says she never suspected anything either. She said Rachel talked about me quite a lot, but she didn’t think anything of it.
Somehow, I unwittingly attracted a psychopath, one who became fixated on me for reasons I will never fully know or understand. I read that approximately one per cent of people are psychopaths. In London, that’s 80,000 psychos. I think only a small number of them are dangerous. I was unlucky. We were unlucky. As were Karen, Sasha, Harold, Victor.
There was a profile about her in the paper. Like us, she was an orphan. But she was put into the care system, going from foster home to foster home. She kept running away, couldn’t settle anywhere. There was an interview with one of the foster mothers, who said that Rachel – or Tracey, which was her real name – became obsessed with one of her ‘foster brothers’, tried to poison him when he rejected her advances. This woman said she used to bring home stray cats, keep them in secret in her room. Once, she found that Rachel/Tracey had broken this cat’s leg so it couldn’t run away.
It turned out that her dad did similar things to her mum. Beat her so badly that she couldn’t leave the house because he was afraid she would leave him. One day the mum tried to escape but he caught her and killed her, then committed suicide. Rachel/Tracey saw the whole thing.