A Summer Fling

by Milly Johnson

  ‘What do you want her number for?’ he asked.

  ‘Grace hasn’t come in. I’m a bit worried about her. I’m thinking of going round to her house if I can’t get hold of her.’

  ‘Christie, for goodness sake—’

  ‘Niki, you of all people know what I’m like.’

  ‘Yes, unfortunately I do,’ said Niki with an exasperated sigh. ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Thirty-two Powderham Crescent in Penistone.’

  ‘You shouldn’t really go up, you know. It’s not what a manager is supposed to do.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be going up as her manager, Niki. I’d be going up as her friend.’

  ‘Look,’ Niki sighed, recognizing that unnegotiable, stubborn note in his sister’s voice. ‘If you’re serious about going up, I’ll meet you there. I don’t want you getting into trouble or coming to any harm.’

  ‘I am going, but there’s no need for you to be there,’ Christie protested, but she knew he was as obstinate as she was. One of their ancestors was definitely a mule.

  Christie rang Laura’s mobile. It burred so many times she felt sure it would click into voicemail at any moment, but at the last second a female voice answered.

  ‘Hello,’ said Christie. ‘Look, you don’t know me, but I work with your mother and we’re a little worried that she hasn’t arrived yet. Do you have a contact number for her, so I can check we have the right one on file? And her mobile number, please?’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Laura hurriedly. ‘We’re just driving back from—’ Annoyingly, the phone cut off. Then, seconds later, it rang again in Christie’s hand. Laura dictated the home number, which was unfortunately the same as the one on Grace’s HR file, then Laura supplied Grace’s mobile number and just as she finished, the line cut off again and however much Christie rang back, she couldn’t get past the voicemail.

  She rang Grace’s mobile and that too went straight onto voicemail. Her lovely voice invited the caller to leave a message, which Christie did. ‘Grace, it’s Christie. I’m at work. Can you let us know that you’re all right? Can you ring me on my direct line?’ Then she left the number. She rang the home number again. It was still that flatline burring sound. Her intuition was strongly telling her that something was very wrong. Especially when coupled with that recent conversation she and Grace had in the office that all wasn’t well at home. She would risk being told that she was overreacting later.

  ‘I can’t get through. Anyone know where –’ she read again the address HR had just supplied ‘– Powderham Crescent is? No bloody postcode! Stupid sodding idiots in HR!’ Christie growled at the ineptitude of the department immediately below her feet.

  ‘It’s on that huge estate near Penistone,’ said Raychel. ‘Just before you get into the town after the big roundabout and it’s on the left. She told me that’s where she lived.’

  ‘I think I might just take a drive there,’ said Christie.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit . . . over the top?’ said Anna tentatively.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Christie. ‘But something isn’t right and I know it isn’t. Yes, actually, it probably is over the top but I won’t get any work done for worrying so I might as well go.’

  ‘So long as you don’t go barging in like the SAS to find her watching Morning Coffee,’ said Raychel. But she sensed as much as the others that Grace would never have taken a day off without letting anyone in the department know.

  ‘Here’s her daughter Laura’s number, just in case,’ said Christie, scribbling on a pad and ripping off the page. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Are you really that worried?’ asked Raychel, shivering with the sort of chill tripping down her spine that was said to denote when someone was walking over her grave.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Unfortunately there was no doubt in Christie’s voice. ‘If James asks where I am, tell him. If anyone else asks, tell them it’s none of their bloody business.’ Then she grabbed her coat and walked down the office towards the stairs.

  The estate was easy enough to find, but it was positively labyrinthine, and street signs seemed to be non-existent. Frustrated, Christie threw the brake on and hurried over to the nearest house.

  ‘I am so sorry to disturb you,’ she said to the householder, a woman in slippers mid-vacuum, ‘but where is Powderham Crescent? I’m looking for number thirty-two.’

  ‘You’re on it, love,’ said the woman. ‘It curls round in a big arc. For thirty-two, you’ll have to keep going to the other end. You’ll see a row of shops and it’ll probably be somewhere around there.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said Christie, getting back in the car and doing a perfect three-point turn to follow the directions she had just been given. The house numbers reduced to 74 then broke for the shops. She counted down and pinpointed a quiet little house on a corner, innocently standing there surrounded on three sides by a perfectly snipped lawn and five-feet conifers. Christie parked in front of it and walked tentatively down the path.

  She stretched her hand towards the door knocker, then pulled it back at the last second. She stole across to the front window and peered through. There was no sign of any disturbance. She would have liked to get around to the back but the tall side gate was locked. She returned to the front door and pressed the flap of the letterbox open. There was a faint noise of a radio and voices so soft that Christie wasn’t sure if she was imagining them or not.

  She heard a car draw up and turned to see that it was Niki, still in his white dentist’s tunic.

  ‘You’re too protective for your own good,’ she levelled at him.

  ‘I know what scrapes you’ve got yourself into since you were old enough to walk,’ said Niki. ‘You never did err on the side of caution.’ He took a long look at the house. ‘Nothing seems untoward. Are you sure she hasn’t just broken down in the car and can’t get a signal on her mobile to let you know?’

  ‘I hope that’s the case,’ said Christie. ‘But you know me and my intuition.’

  Niki nodded in the manner of a man who did indeed know about his sister’s intuitive feelings.

  Christie rapped on the door knocker and rang the bell at the side too for good measure. Through the door glass, she saw a flash of light as if a door at the end of a passage had opened slightly and closed again.

  ‘Someone’s in, I’m sure of it,’ she said and bent to the letterbox, pushed it backwards and shouted through it: ‘Grace, are you in there? Grace, are you all right?’

  Just then, a brand-new Volvo pulled up at the side of the road and stopped behind Niki’s bumper. A young man with a concerned look on his face hurriedly got out.

  ‘Hi. Are you Christie? I’m Paul, Grace’s son. My sister’s just rung asking me to call over and check on Mum, then her phone cut off and I can’t get her back again. What’s happening?’

  ‘Hello, Paul, I don’t know what’s wrong, if anything. Yes, I’m Christie, I work with your mother but she didn’t come in today and that worried me. There’s someone in the house, I’m sure of it.’

  Paul looked through the windows and tried the side-gate also. Then, with no other option available, he rapped on the door too.

  ‘Mum, Dad, let me in. It’s Paul.’

  A man’s blurry silhouette appeared behind a slim rectangle of patterned glass in the door and an impatient voice said, ‘Go away. What do you want?’

  Despite everything, Paul was relieved. It had been crossing his mind that his parents were tied up at the back, victims of armed robbers.

  ‘Dad, is Mum there? Let me in.’

  ‘Go away, you.’

  The relief was starting to slip. ‘Dad, what’s going on? Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course we’re all right,’ said Gordon. ‘Why shouldn’t we be?’

  ‘Mum should have been in work today,’ said Paul.

  ‘She doesn’t go to work any more.’

  Christie and Paul looked at each other.

  ‘Dad, what’s happening? Wher
e’s Mum?’

  ‘I said, go away and leave us alone,’ said Gordon, and his silhouette disappeared.

  Paul raked his fingers through his hair. ‘This is surreal,’ he said. Had he been watching this on the telly he would have been shouting at the characters, Why don’t you ring the police? Why don’t you smash a window? Why don’t you . . . do SOMETHING?

  ‘What now?’ said Niki, no longer thinking that his sister had overreacted.

  ‘I’ll ring the police,’ said Paul, even though it felt rather dramatic to do that, to ring the police about your parents. He shook his head at the scenario he was in the middle of as his finger landed on the first 9. He gave it another second for it all to make sense – it didn’t – then he dialled the remaining 99 and lifted the mobile to his ear.

  ‘God, this is weird,’ he said, as he waited for the call to connect.

  ‘I think you’re doing the right thing,’ encouraged Niki.

  Curtains were twitching across the road. Paul wished the police would hurry up. His mother would be mortified if she came out to find this spectacle at her front door. But she wasn’t coming out and he was scared stiff at what he would find when he got inside the house. These were his parents after all and, even though he knew what his dad thought about him, he would have fought tooth and nail to save him from getting hurt by anyone. He had visions of a man with a gun at his mum’s head telling his dad to get rid of the people at the door. Was the ‘Mum doesn’t work any more’ line a clue to tell him that they weren’t all right really? All sorts of awful, insane explanations were flashing through his mind. He tried talking through the letterbox again.

  ‘Dad, let me in. Is Mum OK?’

  There was no answer.

  Paul tried to climb over the solid wooden gate, but it was too high even when he dragged over the compost bin to stand on as Niki held it firmly in place for him, and it was too heavily locked from the inside to crash open with his shoulder. He could just see over into the back garden but there were no clues there as to what was going on inside the house; nothing disturbed, no broken glass. The three of them stood around listening, not sure of what to do in the ten minutes until a police car rounded the corner.

  A corpulent police sergeant and a younger male constable emerged from their car. Paul filled them in on the few details he had to hand. The sergeant checked for himself that the front door was locked and the gate could not be accessed. He called through the letterbox and rang the bell but there was no response. He made the decision on what to do then quickly.

  ‘Best get the number one key ready,’ he said, in the manner of a man who had been here many times before. The constable immediately went to the car boot where the large door ram was kept. He put on the protective helmet, goggles and gloves stored alongside it as the sergeant rapped hard on the door and called through the letterbox again.

  ‘Mr Beamish. It’s the police. Can you please open this door now, sir?’

  There was no response. The sergeant pulled out a steel ASP baton and flicked it down so it extended in readiness. Then he nodded to the constable and stepped aside. The constable crashed the ram next to the keyhole and the whole building seemed to vibrate with the intense noise it made. The door swung instantly open into a house so quiet it could have been deserted. The sergeant quickly checked the lounge for activity, then stepped cautiously forward to the kitchen door at the end of the hallway. He pushed it open, called out both Gordon and Grace’s names again and then, holding the ASP firmly in a position that was ready both for defence or attack, he moved forward, the young constable at his heels, Paul and Niki close behind, despite being urged to stay back.

  But the sight that greeted them was the most surreal part of it all. Gordon was sitting at the table drinking a mug of tea and reading a magazine, and underneath that same table was a barely conscious Grace, her arms tied in front of her to one of the thick wooden legs. Niki doubled-back down the passage and out of the house. He knew there was a surgery up the road. Grace needed a doctor, if not an ambulance, and quickly, that much was obvious.

  Gordon looked up at the people who had suddenly poured into his kitchen. His eyes scanned them and stopped at the young constable. He pulled himself up onto his slippered feet.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Come on, sir,’ said the sergeant as he saw Gordon’s fist begin to shape. Whatever he’d expected to find, it wasn’t this, thought the policeman. He quickly assessed the situation and grabbed the arm of the man he had thought he had come in to rescue and twisted him around whilst reciting his rights. Only when the cuffs slid on his wrists did Gordon start struggling, as if he had come back to the real world and realized what was happening to him, but he was no match for the big sergeant who pulled him easily out of the room as he muttered, ‘What’s going on? What do you think you’re doing? Get off me! Grace! Grace!’

  Paul and Christie sank to their knees around Grace and while they untied her, the constable spoke down his radio asking for another unit to come and take Gordon down to the station. Grace cried out at the sweet pain of being able to move her arms. Then Niki barged in with a doctor from the nearby surgery, who introduced himself to the constable as Dr Mackay and said that he knew Mrs Beamish because she was one of his patients. Paul and Christie moved away to give him space to tend to Grace. She was in a terrible state. Limp, bruised, her clothes in damp and suspicious disarray and her muscles crippled from being in one position for so long. Niki left the room, instinctively aware that Grace wouldn’t want to be seen like that by anyone she barely knew, least of all a male.

  ‘You need an ambulance,’ said Dr Mackay, pulling out his mobile phone.

  ‘I don’t need an ambulance,’ croaked Grace. ‘I just want some water.’

  Paul and Christie helped Grace gently to her feet and she immediately fell backwards onto a chair.

  ‘You’re going to hospital now,’ said the doctor in a soft but no-nonsense Irish brogue, putting his phone back into his pocket. He rubbed at her cold, stiff, aching hands. Grace doubted the blood would ever flow back properly into them.

  ‘Dear God, woman, how long have you been like this?’

  ‘What day is it?’ Grace asked. Her whole body throbbed. She could barely think.

  ‘It’s Tuesday morning, love,’ said Christie, lifting a glass of water to her lips.

  ‘Since yesterday then,’ said Grace breathlessly, gulping greedily at the drink. She had lost a whole night. ‘Yesterday afternoon.’ As soon as the water hit her stomach, she retched and Christie grabbed a towel and held it to her mouth.

  ‘Mum, I’ll get you some things for hospital,’ said Paul softly. He was wiping his eyes. The panic that anything could have happened to his father had turned in on itself and become something he couldn’t even define. His own father. He couldn’t absorb any of it. He just wanted to concentrate on his mum for now. He didn’t want to think about his father.

  ‘No, Paul, I don’t want to—’

  ‘You’re going, Mum. That’s an end to it.’

  ‘I’ll come and help you,’ said Christie.

  Grace pulled her clothes tighter around her, aware they were torn in places.

  Paul shook his head. It was as if he had been lifted out of this world and put in another where nothing made sense.

  ‘The ambulance is here,’ called Niki from the hallway. He couldn’t equate the smiling, elegant lady holding the hand of her jolly little grandson with the poor, pitiable, half-dressed creature he had just seen. He wanted to smash his fist into the perfectly plastered white wall behind him. How could a man do that to such a lovely woman? His own wife?

  The ambulanceman and the doctor started to lead Grace gently outside but her legs were so stiff that she had to surrender to the wheelchair they had brought out for her.

  Paul was answering the young constable’s questions but wanted to break off to go with his mother.

  ‘Stay, Paul, help the police,’ said Grace.

  ‘You can’t go by yoursel
f, Mum.’

  ‘Christie, will you come?’ It was pure instinct. She wanted a woman with her. A friend. She wanted Christie Somers.

  ‘Do you want me to come, love?’ Christie came rushing forward.

  ‘Please,’ said Grace.

  ‘I’ll follow on in my car,’ said Christie. ‘Niki, will you let the girls at the office know I shan’t be back today?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ said Niki.

  ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can, tell Mum that,’ Paul called to Christie. The police would be at the house for a while and he would need to sort out the front door which was shattered. At least he could do these practical things for her, so she had one task less to worry about. He had to keep his mind busy before it exploded.

  The second unit had arrived to take Gordon to the police station. A van with a caged facility in the back which horrified him when he was put in it. ‘I’m not an animal,’ he said with disgust.

  But first, the ambulance drove slowly away, followed by Christie in her car. Even Niki was shivering as he made the call to the girls in the office.

  In the hospital, Grace allowed her bruised face to be photographed, despite repeating that she didn’t want to press charges. But apparently that might not be her decision, said the policeman who came to take a statement. He very kindly and expertly explained that the incident had not been a simple domestic. Dictated and read back to her, her statement sounded like some poor soul’s story out of a downmarket magazine, not her own. She was ashamed that friends and neighbours and strangers had seen her in that state. Despite everything, Grace hadn’t volunteered the information that she had been drugged as well. She didn’t want to sully Gordon’s name with his children any more than he had done himself, but then a nurse took blood tests and Grace realized that the full extent of her husband’s control would probably come to light anyway.

  When Laura arrived, she burst into tears at the sight of her mother’s injuries. Like Paul, her emotions were ricocheting between anger and relief, confusion and hatred.

  ‘You can’t go back to that house. You must come and stay with Joe and me.’