An Unexpected Gift

by Lily Zante

  Daniel was the only pleasant memory she had from it all but she had pushed him out of her thoughts too.

  She threw the unopened chicken salad into the dustbin and went back to work. But she found herself flitting from her email, to her phone, checking for texts and getting up every now and then to get some water.

  After an hour of unsuccessfully trying to get any work done, she told her boss what had happened and he ordered her to get herself to the police station right away. He could see that she was fearful and sad once again.

  An hour later Caitlin found herself sitting at Bishopsgate Police Station face to face with DCI Osborn. He looked at her with his saggy, baggy eyes, his leathery face loose and weather worn, just like the old Mac he was wearing.

  "It wasn't a random attack, I have to tell you." He went straight into it, no sugar coating or drawing her in gently.

  Blood drained from Caitlin's face. She gripped the handle of the hard chair she found herself in. She didn’t even remember sitting down. "What do you mean?" she asked, her voice ragged.

  "Meaning that this man deliberately targeted you that night." The detective watched her closely. She was such a small and tiny thing. Beautiful and yet so delicate. He was certain she would have come to serious harm that night had the stranger not saved her as he did.

  Caitlin felt her stomach churn. She had a vague notion where this was heading. "I don't understand what you mean. I don't recognize him. I saw his eyes but that’s all. I'm certain I've never met him before."

  "Does the name Carl Summers mean anything to you?" He knew it would evoke the reaction that he was now saw.

  Caitlin felt her hands go limp. Her body flopped back against the chair.

  Yes, she knew that bastard alright.

  She would always regret ever setting eyes on him.

  Her heart lurched and she felt queasy. Just the mere mention of his name bought a bad taste to her mouth. She felt as though she was going to be sick but she knew she hadn’t eaten anything for lunch. She was going to have to face this. "He...was....my ex boyfriend," Caitlin whispered slowly, staring back at the DCI, her shoulders low. She had hoped she would never hear that name again or see that man ever again but he had found a way of wheedling his sorry self back into her life once more.

  "The man who attacked you goes by the name of Alex Ryedon.” The inspector looked at Caitlin, “Do you know him?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Have you ever heard of his name before?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a low life petty criminal. And he has confessed that Carl Summers paid him to attack you on the night of the nineteenth of December. You might not have noticed it but that man was following you that night from the moment you left work."

  Caitlin shivered involuntarily. Now she definitely felt that she wanted to throw up. She put a hand to her mouth, trying to hold it all in.

  The DCI moved his chair closer to hers and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. His eyes seemed saggier than ever as he looked at Caitlin with concern. "Would you like a glass of water or tea?" he asked.

  Caitlin shook her head. "No thank you."

  "I realize this must come as a bit of a shock to you."

  "It's a huge shock," countered Caitlin, "I was hoping never to see or hear from him again. He's a nasty piece of work. I wish I'd realised it sooner."

  "He didn't come to us of his free will. This Alex Ryedon is a petty criminal. He was caught on a charge of a violent street mugging, later that same night. When we hauled him in we tied him to the attack on you that night. We found a key ring that he had dropped at the scene of your attack and when he was arrested after the mugging a short while later it proved that he had been at both places. He owned up. But he also told us that he had been paid to ‘rough you up’ – his words not mine."

  The thought that Carl would do this to her sent shivers down her spine. "What about Carl Summer's? What happens to him?" She wanted to know that she would be safe from him forever.

  "We need to get evidence to prove this is true. We can't take it on Alex Ryedon's word. We're working on getting that evidence and when we have it, we'll charge him too."

  "Will I need to see him?" asked Caitlin. She was fearful for her life.

  "We'll need to take a full history of your time together but chances are you will have to end up going to court to testify against them both."

  Her first thought was of her parents. This news would devastate them both. So she wouldn’t tell them just yet. Her second thought was for her own safety. Her brown eyes misted over but she wouldn’t let the tears fall. She’d have to deal with this herself. He wasn’t going to ruin her life all over again.

  She nodded at DCI Osborn. “Do you want me to go through it all now?”

  He arched an eyebrow at her, “Are you sure you want to talk about it now or later?”

  “Now.” Caitlin said, sitting up in her chair and blowing her nose. She looked at the inspector with defiantly. “Let’s get it out of the way now.”

  As Caitlin started to talk, DCI Osborn started making notes.

  Almost an hour later, a very pale faced and visibly distraught Caitlin left the police station. All her hopes of starting this year afresh had already started to fade and it was only the first week in January.

  Chapter Six

  “How useless are you?”

  It had been Carl’s stock phrase throughout their short time together. Sometimes he used it as sentence, other times it was a statement.

  Why can’t you ……….

  Don’t wear that………

  Stop staring at him………..

  Who are you staring at………..

  You don’t need to do that………

  Why would you want to……….

  The initial shock that a man could behave in such a way soon vanished as she struggled to find a semblance of the big, cuddly giant of a man she had first met.

  Very quickly but too late for her, she realised that their relationship was based on his desire for control. He seemed to relish putting her down and making her feel inferior at every possible opportunity. Even making a cup of tea was put under the closest scrutiny and he would always, always have something nasty to say.

  “You’re useless aren’t you? Can’t even make a decent cup of tea.”

  The more she watched him the more she drew the conclusion that the constant bullying was driven more by his own feelings of inadequacy than by anything she had done.

  He was a fitness trainer who worked at a gym near Old Street. He told her he also had a couple of clients that he personally trained. In saying this, she got the impression that he was slightly overwhelmed by her. As a senior graphic designer working for a web design agency, she remembered Carl saying her offices, close to Covent Garden were a “bit namby pamby” on the one and only occasion when she had asked him to meet her outside work one evening. She never asked him again.

  From early on in their relationship, she always made it a point to go and meet him in Old Street. And though they never discussed salaries, she got the impression that he begrudged her her career choice, the idea that she might be earning more than him and that she lived in a beautiful part of London.

  At first she put it down to him having had too much to drink. Not that that was an excuse. The first time she had noticed that Carl was not the man she had thought him to be was when they had gone to his friend’s party, about two week’s after they first met. It was a barbeque in a house in Hoxton. Everything had been going well. She had met his friends and started talking to them. Then, right out of the blue, he had stormed up to her, grabbed her roughly by the wrist and taken her off to a corner of the small garden. Even now, looking back, she cringed when she recalled the embarrassed faces of his friends as he marched her off. She remembered standing there confused and dazed. The threatening tone of his voice, his bullying manner and the red mark around her wrist where he had squeezed it tightly, had all scared her.

&nbs
p; She wasn’t used to this behavior at all. Even worse, she had no idea what she had done wrong to be at the receiving end of his wrath. He had accused her ignoring of him and talking to everyone else instead. She had been silenced by his remark because she was in shock by what had just happened. Humiliated and embarrassed, she had somehow plucked up the courage and had shouted back at him, once the shock of his accusation had hit home. For a moment she had seen the flash of anger ignite in his eyes and then it had subsided, just as quickly. And just like that he had calmed down. He’d smiled his charming smile and said he was sorry. He had apologized over and over for his behavior blaming it on the drink. He’d had too many beers, he said.

  So she forgave him for that first episode because she had wanted to obliterate the memory of the horrible scene that had just taken place. He had turned into that Carl again. The one she had first met at the pub, just a few weeks ago.

  She had fallen for the well built and funny charmer at a pub in Covent Garden. She and Kerrie had been with a group of friends stopping for a drink at a pub after seeing “Mamma Mia!” Carl was sitting with a group of his friends at a table nearby. While Carl’s friends got chatting to Kerrie and a few other girls from their group, Carl and Kerrie found themselves left out, sitting like loners on their respective tables.

  Carl had smiled at her and struck up a conversation. It hadn’t been love at first sight but she had fallen for his jokes and he had made her laugh.

  He had been so funny and charming back then. It had been hard to reconcile that first Carl with the monster who had slowly emerged through the course of their relationship. She had no inkling then of how quickly and suddenly he could turn into a cold, uncaring and sadistic man who enjoyed inflicting cruel emotional pain on her. He hadn’t been physically abusive towards her but she had the uneasy suspicion that, had she stayed with him much longer, she would have experienced that side of him too.

  It became a frequent occurrence, not his drinking but the vile temper and the snide remarks he would make. Bit by bit she started to see the controlling part of him slowly emerge.

  First he started telling her he didn’t want her wearing short skirts. Then he would get possessive, starting a fight with anyone who looked her way and shouting at her when they got back home to the flat that he shared with two others.

  She had never bought him over to hers, sensing earlier on that this might set him off again, since he felt insecure as it was around her.

  With relief, she now looked back and realised this was the smartest thing she had done in the three months she had wasted with him. Two months actually. She spent the third month trying to escape from his needy clutches. And it had been hard.

  Her honeymoon period, which she referred to as the time when she only saw the nice Carl, lasted about a week. She had the company of the nice Carl, the muscled and fit golden blond boy for about two weeks. After that, the verbal abuse started and slowly chipped away at her self-esteem, dampening her feisty personality until, after a few months, she was a walking whimpering wreck of her former self.

  She managed to keep the show going and to hide him away from Kerrie and her parents. She hadn’t told her parents anything about the emotional abuse she was suffering.

  But Kerrie had seen the change in her and one night, after a particularly destructive evening with Carl, Caitlin had confessed all. It was Kerrie who had given her the strength to end it. And in November, she had done exactly that.

  She told him in a public place that it was all over. And she had had Kerrie waiting for her outside the pub. Kerrie had stepped in when he had taken her roughly by the hand and shouted that she couldn't do this to him or else.

  "Or else what you big bully?" Kerrie had shouted back at him, unable to watch any longer. She had stormed into the pub and taking Caitlin by the arm, she told Carl to get stuffed and to never contact Caitlin again.

  That was when he had turned really nasty.

  He texted her, emailed her and phoned her incessantly. At first she used to read his emails but they were nasty, full of swear words and threats. After the third or fourth one, she started deleting them without reading them. She ignored his phone calls and deleted all his voicemails when he left messages.

  In the flat Kerrie used to delete all the messages when he left them and they left the ringer on silent. Then she had blocked his number. He started writing horrible, nasty emails to her. She'd closed her Facebook account because he was posting nasty comments on her wall.

  And when she hadn’t heard from him for most of December, she believed that she was finally over the worst of it. Her initial thought was that he had found another woman whose life he was going to make miserable. She hoped that he was out of her life forever.

  But today DCI Osborn had shattered her hopes of rebuilding her life with the news that her ex-boyfriend had gone to the trouble of finding and paying someone to attack her.

  She quivered at the thought of what he would do next.

  The bastard. I wish I could turn back the time and erase the moment I first set eyes on him.

  As soon as Kerrie arrived home from work, Caitlin told her the awful news.

  "You poor thing," said Kerrie pensively. "I always knew he was trouble."

  "What do I do now? The police want me to file charges.”

  "You are going to aren’t you?” asked Kerrie, suddenly anxious that her friend was going to back out and whimper down in defeat. “You have to Caitlin, you can’t let him win. He won’t stop pestering you. You have to do something.” Kerrie paced the floor, unable to contain her anger or her energy.

  "Or something," mused Caitlin, sitting on the sofa, deep in thought. "Like getting a hit man." They both glanced at each other.

  Caitlin’s eyes were shadowed against her pale face. "I hate him so much. He's messing up my life all over again. I thought I'd managed to get shot of him." She buried her face in her hands.

  Kerrie placed her hand over her friend’s. "You will. Be positive. The police are onto him now. They'll find the evidence they need. Don’t forget you’ve also got the nasty emails he sent you and I’m sure the police can retrieve the texts he sent you, even if you deleted them. You can get in touch with Facebook and they might have your account archived off somewhere so you can still show the police how he hounded you on there." Caitlin's face softened a little as she listened to Kerrie.

  "I still don't want to tell my parents anything. They’re so worried about the attack as it is. They'll be mortified if they know that the bastard was behind it all."

  The bastard. It seemed to be an appropriate name for her ex-boyfriend.

  “We’re going shopping tomorrow. Just as we planned, remember.”

  Caitlin began to protest, “No, I really don’t feel up to it Kerrie. Really I don’t.”

  “So you want to stay at home and hide under the duvet? Do you really want to let that bastard ruin your life more than he already has? Every time he chips away at your self-esteem, he wins, remember that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Caitlin, you can and you will. See if I don’t drag you out myself.” Kerrie was having none of it. She wasn’t about to let Caitlin sit at home and drown in her sorrows. What had happened to her was awful. And that perfect pig of a man had managed to wreak even more havoc into her life. But she wasn’t going to let her childhood friend suffer alone in silence.

  A shopping trip in London along with lunch was what they were going to have tomorrow.

  The fight-the-January-blues plan was very much going to happen, whether Caitlin liked it or not.

  Chapter Seven

  Shopping in Oxford Circus and Bond Street was exactly the tonic that Caitlin needed to get over the shock news from yesterday. Nothing could put a smile on a young woman’s face faster than a leisurely browse through Top Shop.

  Arms overloaded with bags on either side of them, they made their way to Wagamama’s, popping into shops along the way and adding more bags to their already heavy arms.

&nb
sp; “I love our bargains.” said Kerrie, stopping momentarily to re-shift her arms and get a more comfortable grip on the bags.

  Caitlin didn’t say anything. She walked with her head down, shoulders hunched together and the weight of the world, not just the shopping bags, on her.

  All around them people were jostling to get by. She was so wrapped in her own world that she wasn’t looking properly where she was going.

  As they passed the Gap store, they heard a shout. “Caitlin? Caitlin!” Caitlin looked around expectantly, hearing her name but not knowing where the voice came from.

  She stopped abruptly, impeding the way of others behind her. Kerrie pulled her out of the way of the stampede of people rushing by and whistled to herself as she caught sight of the man who had recognized Caitlin and had called out her name. She didn’t know who he was. But he was tall, blue eyed and blond. Lean and well groomed, he was staring at Caitlin with a slow smile on his face. He had with him a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old.

  Kerrie turned Caitlin around so that she was face to face with the man.

  “I thought it was you,” he said and the smile never left his face.

  “Daniel?” Caitlin’s heart surged with the same feeling she often got from getting a bit of static on her hand. When she looked up at him, a feeling of happiness engulfed her.

  Of all the people in all the places, how odd and yet how wonderful that she would bump into Daniel today and right at this very moment. She looked from him to the young boy at his side and guessed it must be his son. “Hi” she said to him sweetly. The boy smiled shyly at Caitlin, dark blond and with blue eyes too, their features were so very similar.