Escape From Evil

by Wilson, Cathy

  I still couldn’t see the relevance until I saw the scratch on the gold.

  ‘It’s your mother’s ring, Cathy, the one that was stolen!’

  I turned it over and over. It really was. But how had it ended up in a pawnshop in Havant? More importantly, as I’d never even worn it and only kept it in the box, how the hell had Peter recognized it as mine?

  I knew there was only one answer. He’d stolen it in the first place. And, I realized, those must have been his jackets hanging up. He was the one living back at the burnt-out flat; he was the one who’d got rid of my clothes. But that still didn’t explain the missing Fairy Liquid . . .

  I was happy to get my ring back and I didn’t honestly lose much sleep over how Peter had acquired it. He’s never going to change.

  For his part, Peter carried on trying to impress me with more ridiculous things, including, once, a membership card to a local casino called Stanleys. He seemed pretty proud of it, although it meant nothing to me. I certainly had never gambled and I wasn’t aware he was interested in it either. As long as it didn’t affect his ability to look after my son, I didn’t really care.

  It’s funny how quickly things change. One of the first things I’d done to get myself financially straight was take a barmaid’s job at the Fox & Hounds in Denmead. That’s where I met the next man in my life, also called Steve. If Steve 1 had been the polar opposite of Peter personality-wise, Steve 2 was the physical antithesis. He was six foot tall, broad, blond and about four years older than me – superior to Peter in every way. He also had a Vauxhall Cavalier SRi, which I thought made him stand out.

  Steve worked for a small plastic fabrication company based in a couple of farm sheds. In theory, he could make anything out of plastic, but most commonly you would see his work in supermarkets, displaying the apples and magazines and everything in between. I offered to come in to help with selling and proved so effective at it that we decided to go into business together. A wealthy friend of his put up the money, but we would all be equal partners and directors: she did the books, Steve did the estimating and I sold. We were the perfect team and success found us very quickly. With accounts of the calibre of John Lewis and Waitrose soon coming our way, we felt justifiably proud of our efforts.

  It wasn’t long before I was beginning to earn decent money and I wanted to invest it in a home for my son and me. The first time I viewed the house in Liverpool Road, Fratton, my foot fell through the floor. The state of the rest of the property wasn’t much better, but the price reflected the house’s condition. I’m sure Granny thought I was mad, but I loved the idea of renovating that dilapidated old shell. I still remember so vividly that feeling of fantastic pride when I stepped through the door as the owner for the first time.

  I’ve done it!

  What’s more, I’d done it without help from any man. That was important to me. I’d missed out on so much growing up without a father that all my life, I realized, I’d been trying to prove I could cope without one. I’d taken a motor-mechanics course with the Army Cadets, aged fifteen, just so I would never have to rely on a man to help me with my Honda; I’d bought and sold second-hand cars; I’d decorated my Bathgate kitchen single-handedly. They were all attempts at proving I could do it on my own – whether I wanted to or not.

  Despite my enthusiasm, work on the house was slow, but I realized I had an eye for interiors and, by the time I’d finished you wouldn’t have recognized the place. By then Steve 2 had moved in with us. We were – dare I say – happy. Unfortunately, Peter was always around to keep my feet on the ground.

  We’d settled into a nice routine, sharing the childcare, and for a year it worked out just fine. Then, one Thursday night, the phone woke me up. When I saw it was one o’clock in the morning, I panicked. It had to be bad news.

  Daniel!

  It was Peter on the line, but he assured me Daniel was fine.

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘But I’ve called an ambulance. I think I’m having a heart attack. I need you to come and collect the boy.’

  He didn’t have to ask twice. I threw some clothes on, flew out of the house and reached Havant in record time. Since Daniel had been staying there I’d had a spare set of keys, so I let myself into the building. By the time I reached Peter’s door, they were just coming out. Peter had heard me rushing up the stairs.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, breathless, as Peter handed me a carrier bag of clothes and toys.

  ‘Probably nothing, but best to be on the safe side,’ he said and clutched his chest for emphasis. I was convinced.

  ‘Look, we’ll wait till the ambulance gets here.’

  ‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘You get that boy home.’ Then he kissed Daniel and said, ‘I’ve already kept him up long enough.’

  Peter was adamant we should go, so I scooped Daniel up and off we drove into the night. The next morning I rang the hospital and was told it had been a false alarm. Peter had imagined the symptoms. I was actually annoyed. All that worry for nothing. Then I remembered the pathetic attempts at cutting his wrists and the overdose of Amitriptyline.

  The man’s either a hypochondriac or an attention-seeker – or both!

  Over the course of about ten months, Peter called me out three times in the middle of the night on spurious ‘heart attack’ errands. So when the phone rang in the early hours one Wednesday night, I was almost resigned to the news at the other end.

  ‘It’s my heart again. I think this is the big one. Will you come for Daniel?’

  By now I didn’t even bother getting dressed. I just threw on a gown over my pyjamas, found my car keys and set off. It was only as I pulled up outside Peter’s building that I thought, I’ve left my keys at home. What if he really is ill this time? I hope he’s well enough to buzz me in.

  I shouldn’t have worried. As I ran up to the front door, I could see Peter walking Daniel down the stairs. He obviously wasn’t at death’s door, but as usual I offered to wait until the ambulance arrived.

  You never know – this could be the one.

  But Peter shooed us away. ‘Get that boy home,’ he insisted. ‘He’s had a long day.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘if you’re sure.’

  He nodded and kissed Daniel goodnight – just as he always did on these nights.

  As we pulled away from Peter’s block, I didn’t look back once. I was too tired, too annoyed by the man’s medical paranoia to care what he did when he wasn’t minding Daniel. If I had looked back, however, I might have seen Peter pretend to return to the building, then stop. I might have seen him wait until we were almost out of sight, then jump into his car and speed off in the opposite direction to us. And I might have wondered: why?

  NINETEEN

  All About Him

  Apart from Daniel being more tired than usual, the morning of 5 August 1993 had started out like just another normal Thursday. I was at my desk at half past eight and the phone rang at nine. It was Havant police, asking me to come into the station. At that stage, they wouldn’t tell me what it was about. Ominously, though, they said, ‘Bring someone you feel comfortable with. A friend or partner.’

  That was it. That was all the information I got. As I gabbled down the phone to Steve, I realized the police hadn’t told me anything at all.

  ‘You must have done something,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t, I swear.’

  ‘Well, is it Daniel?’

  ‘No, that was my first question. He’s at school. He’s fine.’

  So, heads spinning, we got to Havant police station about an hour later. The PC who took me into a back office gave nothing away. Then a more senior officer came in and broke the news.

  Peter Tobin, he said, had lured two fourteen-year-old girls back to his flat in Leigh Park, where he had plied them with cider and vodka and violently raped them. He had then tied them up and left the flat.

  What the policeman didn’t tell me then, but which I learnt subsequently, was that Peter had sodomized one of
the girls with a knife, beaten them black and blue, then turned on the gas and left them to die in the flat. He’d just jumped in his blue Metro and driven away, moments after handing my son over to me. Fortunately, one of the girls had wriggled free and called a neighbour for help.

  Later I would spend hours crying about those poor girls, but my initial reaction was utter disbelief. News like that is almost too big for the brain to process. At first my mind just went blank, but then the questions poured out.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I heard myself say, but I knew the answer even before it was confirmed.

  ‘Well, when did this happen?’ I said.

  ‘Yesterday. Last night.’

  I froze in my seat.

  ‘But my son was there!’

  And then, I’m afraid to say, all thought of those girls went temporarily out of my head. I just wanted to hug Daniel.

  ‘We don’t think he was involved, but we’ll know more when the victims are well enough to be interviewed. One of them is in a coma.’

  A coma! My God, Peter, what have you done?

  Even hearing the outline of the horrific events of that night had me in tears. There would be many, many more to come. But right now the police needed my help.

  ‘Your husband is on the run. Is there anywhere you think he might have gone?’

  ‘I don’t know what he does with his time.’

  ‘Please think: any friends, relatives, just tell us everything you can.’

  It was hard to concentrate on addresses while still trying to process everything that had happened. Apart from Peter’s access to Daniel, I had no interest in his life whatsoever. But I came up with some names and addresses – people like his friend John, his sister and brothers and a couple of pubs and cafés in Brighton and Portsmouth where we’d been a few times. In the end, I just handed over my address book.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ the policeman asked. I desperately wanted to help, but the answer was no.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about him.’

  Realizing that everything you know about someone is a lie takes some processing. When that person is your husband and the father of your child, it defies logic.

  I don’t know him at all. I never have.

  The truth was, however, that I had always known Peter was a man of violence. I knew too that he believed somehow that the world owed him a living and that he was entitled to take whatever he wanted. And I also knew, from my own experiences, that he relished imposing his sadistic will on younger women.

  That realization tore me to shreds. The idea that there might have been a chance I could have prevented those girls from being attacked was a heavy burden. But the more I tortured myself over my role in this, the more I realized how he had distorted everything.

  When he’d punished me for lazy cleaning or criticized my cooking, I’d always felt that it was my fault, that I’d driven him to it. It wasn’t a case of me deserving punishment, but there was a cause and effect in play. My behaviour was the cause. He’d conditioned me to accept the blame for everything. Whether I liked it or not, I was the reason he behaved in the manner he did. Even when he’d brought Lisa and the other girls into our home, that was in some way a result of my actions. I wasn’t sleeping with him, so he was forced to go elsewhere. That’s how he justified it to us both.

  And then there was Daniel. When I’d seen Peter hold my son above the staircase in Robertson Avenue, I truly believed that he was capable of killing. It was only when I’d escaped and had time to analyse events that I realized it was never about hurting Daniel. Daniel was just a weapon, a tool to control me with. Daniel was my weak spot and Peter exploited that. Everything he ever did during that relationship was just because he wanted to own me.

  It never, for one moment, occurred to me that Peter was capable of behaving like this to other people. He’d bullied and abused me for so long, I genuinely felt it was all about me. When, in fact, it was all about him.

  From the moment the police told me about the events of the previous night, I had only one thought on my mind. I have to get Daniel. I was assured he was safe, that if Peter had wanted to harm him, he would have done the night before. But that wasn’t the point. I needed to be with him, to wrap my arms around him. I didn’t know at that point half the things he’d witnessed, but I did know he would need my help to get over it.

  Daniel’s school was in Havant, so it was a short journey to pick him up. Even so, I still had plenty of time to curse myself for not noticing anything the night before. Were there clues? Had I missed anything? I’d put Daniel’s silence down to tiredness, which was natural, and again that morning. But had there been blood on him? Had he been scared? Had he tried to tell me something? We were in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed anything.

  When I reached the school Daniel was ready. As soon as I picked him up, I immediately felt him go stiff. He never did that. By the time I got him back to Liverpool Road, I was convinced something was wrong. He was aggressive, shouting things he’d normally say nicely – ‘Where’s my drink?’ ‘I need that!’ – and the moment he got inside the front door, he hit me. My son had never hit me before in his life.

  ‘Daniel, calm down! What’s wrong?’

  But I already knew the answer.

  When the police were able to interview the girls, the full story emerged. The fourteen-year-olds had knocked on Peter’s second-floor door to ask if he knew when their relative – his neighbour – would be back. ‘Any minute now,’ Peter had said. ‘Come in and wait.’ He even suggested they could play with Daniel, which, of course, put them completely at ease. And so began sixteen hours of torment and torture that neither girl would ever forget.

  As soon as the door was closed, Peter pulled out a sharp breadknife and forced the girls to drink vodka, wine and cider and swallow pills – or else. One of them passed out quickly. The other was sick, then tried to fight. That was when Peter turned nasty. He’d raped the girl, then sodomized her.

  The only good thing from my point of view was that Daniel was sent to his room first. Apparently, he’d watched The Terminator, which normally I would have hated. On this occasion, it was better than what was going on in the room next door.

  But that hadn’t been the end of it for him. The girl who’d fought back had managed to twist Peter’s arm so the breadknife cut into his calf. That’s when he called for my son, my precious son, to fetch ice from the freezer to stem the bleeding. Peter could have gone himself, I know he could. When I’d seen him later that night there was nothing wrong with his leg. But for some reason he wanted my terrified four-year-old to come out, to see what was going on, to be involved. Daniel had to go right over to where the naked girl was writhing and sobbing in agony and watch while his dad shouted at her to be quiet. He had to stand there, shaking, while Peter clumsily packed ice onto his wound. And all the while he couldn’t take his eyes off the knife in his dad’s hand.

  Apparently, the girl begged him for help. But what could Daniel do? He was four years old and traumatized by what he saw. As soon as he could, he ran back into his room and tried to drown out the screams with Arnie Schwarzenegger.

  The guilt at not picking up on any signs my son had shown was nothing, though, compared to the anxiety that filled me over what might have been. If Peter was capable of stabbing and torturing strangers, then he was more than capable of doing it to family. What would have happened if the girls hadn’t entered Peter’s flat? Would the bloodlust have still been there? Would he have found someone else?

  Or would he have taken it out on Daniel?

  Not knowing is a dangerous place to be. Your brain needs information that you just don’t have. So you start to invent things, nightmare scenarios that get worse and worse with every run-through. You start to obsess about the ‘what ifs’ and then you start looking for the clues that were never there. At a time when I should have been concentrating on my son and the future, my only thought was for the past. It was typical of Peter that, two years after I�
��d left him, he still had the power to completely screw up my mind.

  However, it was Daniel’s mind I was most concerned about. No human being should witness the things he’d endured, much less a child. He was four, so he wouldn’t understand rape and alcohol. He saw the girls crying and screaming and he knew they were hurt. But imagine how it looked to him. Every child instinctively believes their parents are right. Look how I’d blindly followed my mother’s crazy plans and been completely unaware that how we were living wasn’t normal. I’d laid lino, rolled joints, skipped school till I was seven and I didn’t have a clue it was wrong. It was the same for Daniel, but far, far worse.

  Daniel hated seeing those girls get hurt. It felt wrong hearing their cries, but Daddy wouldn’t do anything wrong, would he? That’s how we’re programmed to think. Daddy was trying to stop them crying. He was angry that they kept screaming. But the girls wouldn’t stop.

  There are so many things to hate Peter for that it’s hard to separate them. Even suggesting to Daniel that what he was doing was okay was unforgiveable, but that was something we could get over in time.

  The thing I still to this day can’t forgive Peter for is making Daniel feel guilty. Without him, without the bait of playing with him while they waited, those girls might never have gone into that flat. Maybe Peter would have come up with a different temptation, we don’t know. But the girls had naturally assumed that a father of a young boy was safe, someone they could trust. They’d taken one look at my son and decided he might be fun to look after – and look where it had got them. Daniel had to live with that. Thirteen years later, however, the tables would be turned.

  I had no idea when I’d picked Daniel up from Peter’s flat in the dead of night that that would be the last time my son would ever see his father. How I wish I’d made the decision earlier. I still had full legal custody. If I’d wanted to, I could have enforced the court’s exclusion zone. But there was always that fire in me to give my son the father I’d never had. It was a mistake and one I will never forgive myself for. I can only say that I did it for the right reasons.