Laura had forced herself to go into work. She’d woken up stiff and in pain, wanting nothing more than to stay under the bedcovers and swallow another sedative. But the fear from the night before still clung to her, and the worry that she had no time to lose nagged insistently at her.
She called Detective Inspector Barnes first thing and got through to him without a problem though she thought he sounded wary. Yes, he said, the sergeant had contacted him and he had been going to ring her. He had a note in front of him to do so.
She did it much better this time, told her story matter-of-factly; not neurotic, not melodramatic, she just stated exactly what had happened and left him to think about it. No assertions that someone had been following her, that someone was out to get her, no apparently crazy assumptions, no demands for action. To begin with he said nothing, but as she continued her unemotional account he interrupted with the occasional question. By the end, when she related how she’d recognized Ben Morgan in the street, he even sounded moderately interested.
Without her having to ask, Barnes said he would check out Ben Morgan with a view to finding him and interviewing him. Laura was encouraged and decided to push a little further, asking if he would go and look at the wire on the trees. He hesitated, said he’d see what he could do. It was the best she was going to get and she thanked him.
One other thing, he said, sounding uncharacteristically sheepish, on the matter of Harry Pelham. He had discharged himself from hospital on Saturday evening. His present whereabouts were unknown.
Laura felt alarm explode in her chest. Harry Pelham was on the loose, had been on the loose on Sunday evening when she’d felt sure she was being followed. Her scalp prickled.
‘We’re checking his house regularly to see if he’s there,’ Barnes said quickly, ‘and we’re letting his wife know, but please can you tell her anyway? I’ll keep you both informed.’
‘Please do. Can you phone me as soon as you find him?’
Barnes promised he would. He gave her his mobile number and the fact that he volunteered it made her more worried still.
Laura had rung Anna at once with the bad news, telling her to call Barnes immediately if she heard from Harry or was worried he might be watching the house. Anna hadn’t said much because Martha was with her, but asked if she could come in for a chat around lunchtime.
She had just arrived, looking anxious and defeated, and Laura invited her up to her office.
‘He just walked out of the hospital and no one tried to stop him,’ Anna said, spreading her arms in a hopeless gesture.
‘I know.’
‘The police told him to stay put. How bloody stupid is that? As if he was ever going to take any notice.’
‘The thing now is to find him. Can you think of anywhere he might go?’
‘Apart from coming after me and Martha?’ Anna gave a thin laugh. ‘Thank God, Martha’s going away for a few days over half-term to stay in London with a school friend’s auntie. She’s home on Saturday though, and he was due to see her then. He’ll still try to, that’s for sure. He won’t give a shit about the bail conditions.’
‘I’ll ask Barnes if he can put a watch on your house on Saturday,’ Laura promised.
Anna was sitting with her hands limp on her lap, her head and shoulders shaking nervously.
‘It’s me,’ she burst out, ‘I’ll always be a victim, I always have been and I always will be. Right back from when I was a kid at school. It’s never, ever going to change, is it, however hard I try?’
Anna covered her face and began to sob as she let the memories flood back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Christmas 1997
Anna wanted very much to kill herself. She tried first with her mother’s sleeping pills and then with a razor blade.
She had grown tall early on and she had grown heavy. At the age of twelve she was five-foot-seven and weighed thirteen stone. She felt huge and ridiculous and ugly next to her petite classmates, and they made it clear they felt the same about her.
She remembered it all vividly; remembered the bullying, remembered Maria Burns and Jennifer Fleming and Michelle Cullen and Lisa Handley and all the rest of them who had made her life hell for years.
Afterwards, when she’d been taken away from the school and was being treated in hospital, the psychiatrist had explained to her about bullying. She didn’t need it explained, she was already a world expert, but he liked the sound of his own voice and she was a captive audience. He told her theories about why it happened, about who did it and who they did it to. He told her that all sorts of people were targets, for all sorts of reasons. She mustn’t think that she had brought it on herself, had somehow invited it by being the odd one out. He gave her some case studies to look at. She read them and found what she already knew.
Girls can be mean. Girls can whisper. Girls can gossip, manipulate, isolate, target the weakest spot. Boys use physical strength to bully but girls are far more frightening. They use psychological warfare. They can destroy you from the inside.
There’s always that one person in every school. The one who gets made fun of and judged, even though no one really knows much about them. That person was Anna. Right from the start, she had been different. She had wanted desperately to fit in, but, try as she might, she never managed to.
The boys simply ignored her and the group of girls she tried to hang out with laughed at her and then persecuted her relentlessly. They sneered at her clothes, her hair, her weight, her face. They glared at her, refused to talk to her, called her names, gossiped about her and spread rumours. They would sit whispering to each other, staring straight at her. Every day she ate lunch by herself.
They failed to invite her to parties, sleepovers, get-togethers. She would sit in class listening to them talk about funny stories from the times they had spent together. She spent a lot of her school day locked in the toilet cubicle, crying. One day when she couldn’t stand it anymore, when she was so tired of being bullied and ignored, so sick of fighting back tears and being told by teachers to just ignore the other girls, she called her mother and asked her to collect her from school.
It was a sign of weakness, and from it, she learned never to show weakness again. They knew she was upset and their bullying fed off it. They knew, too, that her mother suffered from depression because once, as part of a doomed attempt to fit in, Anna had talked about her family and her mother’s problems. They began to act as if she was crazy. When they saw her coming they would make gestures, pretend to slit their wrists. Some would call her ‘pyscho’ and tell her they daren’t speak to her in case she messed them up and made them crazy too. If she sat down at the same table they would gather their things together and leave.
It went on like that for about three years and then, gradually, life began to improve. The group had its own fallings-out and realignments. New friendships were made, and a larger, wider circle formed. Although the bullying continued it was not nearly so bad, and gradually Anna became tolerated, if not wholly accepted. She even felt that a few of the girls: Maria and Jenny and Lisa, she might one day be able to call friends.
By December 1996, soon after her fifteenth birthday, Anna was enjoying life for the first time that she could remember. Other girls phoned her with invitations. She knew she was never their first choice, she was more a last resort person who they would call when no one else was around, but at least they called her. She even went to a couple of parties, stood silently next to Maria or Jenny, clutching a glass of fruit juice that lasted all evening. No one ever offered to get her another and she was too timid to help herself. It wasn’t exactly the height of social success but at least she was there.
It was soon after one of these parties that Anna made a mistake. It seemed a small enough thing at the time but it had big consequences.
She was trying to get more friendly with Maria Burns because she wanted Maria to become something she had always craved but never come anywhere close to – a ‘best friend’. Ann
a had learned by now that the surest way to put someone off you and to end up being ridiculed was to appear needy and clingy and desperate for a friend.
She had also discovered that girls liked you to be interested in them, liked you to make them feel superior, liked you to confide in them. And so she did all of those things and Maria, who was not the most popular of girls herself, began to see that a best friend like Anna, although a bit of a loser, might not be such a bad thing. Certainly she wouldn’t threaten Maria’s position or steal attention away from her. In fact, she would show up all the better by contrast. Maria started to include Anna in everything she did, and for a while it looked as though Anna would get what she wanted.
It was April and the general election was looming. John Major’s government pinned its hopes on the ‘feel-good factor’, hoping the economic prosperity that had followed the recession of the early nineties would be enough to distract voters from all the sleaze and the in-fighting over Europe. There was no feel-good factor for Maria. That month her father lost his job and the family were faced with selling their house. They would lose a lot of money; the house was in negative equity.
Maria tearfully confided all this to Anna one evening when they were babysitting Maria’s four-year-old brother. The following morning at school, in a weak moment, a moment designed to show off how close her friendship with Maria had become, Anna related the details to two other girls. By lunchtime everyone knew.
Maria came up to her, furious: ‘You cow, I can’t believe I ever wanted to be friends with you. Oh, and never forget how much I hate you.’
That was all she said. No shouting, no screaming or recriminations, just an understated fury. She never spoke to Anna again, on that subject or any other. Instead, she said a lot about Anna, behind her back, and the results were soon clear. The bullying came back, big time, worse than it had ever been.
She went to her locker and found pictures stuck all over the front of it; pictures of her with a group of her former friends but with her face cut out. She sat down at lunch and they moved away and threw food at her, taunting her for being fat. They would stare as she came towards them in the corridor and make mooing sounds as she walked past. There was always a laugh, a cough disguising an insult, a whisper or a rude gesture. She found a note left on her desk, which read, ‘leave, like seriously, just die.’
Phone calls at home were never for her. Friday nights and weekends she stayed in watching television or sitting in her room. She was an only child and had no one to confide in. Her mother had problems of her own and she wasn’t close to her father. She got on his nerves, she knew that. He made it clear that all she’d ever been was trouble and he had enough trouble already with his wife. Even if Anna had tried to talk to him, she thought he’d have had no idea how to help. She sank into depression.
It was around that time that she first noticed him. She’d gone shopping – on her own as usual – when she’d seen a crowd of boys, arguing. She stopped to watch, saw that one boy was being picked on by the rest, saw that he was thin and geeky looking, saw that he was crying. He was the one, she thought bitterly, the one they would instinctively target. He may as well have had the word ‘victim’ tattooed on his forehead. She winced with fellow-feeling as he was knocked to the ground.
Then a boy on the edge of the crowd moved forwards, stood in front of the victim waving his arms and pushing away the aggressor. There was a moment when it could have gone either way, when the ‘saviour’, as Anna always thought of him afterwards, could have been challenged and swept aside. She held her breath.
The saviour was yelling and a boy was yelling back and the victim was cringing on the pavement. Then it was over. The boy who had led the attack turned away and the crowd began to shuffle off. The victim shot to his feet and ran off at top speed.
She let out her breath. From across the street she gazed at the boy who had intervened. He had stood up for one of life’s victims, had stood up for someone like her. Fascinated, she followed him home. From that moment on she couldn’t get him out of her mind.
Anna had never had a boyfriend nor ever considered having one. They were one of the things she accepted a girl like her could never have. She belonged to an invisible group, the ignored girls; a group that boys didn’t seem to notice. But now she started to wonder what it must be like to be the sort of girl who was wanted by boys, who was competed for by boys, in particular, by boys like him.
Usually she didn’t have a lot to do with her spare time. That all changed. Every moment was precious because every moment was spent on him. She amassed information, gathering it stealthily, secretly, watching and following him.
He lived three miles away from her and went to the boys’ school on the other side of town. She learned about his friends, his family, his daily routines, discovered his passion for photography and films, and those things she made her passion too.
She didn’t dare speak to him. She was too convinced of her own grossness to do that. She lived in terror of actually meeting him. Instead, she wrote down her feelings in a notebook:
To me he is the perfect man. I adore him, almost like he is a god. If I could only make him notice me, make him like me just a little bit. No, that’s not quite right. If I’m honest I’m scared of him noticing me because if he did he would see all my faults. He certainly wouldn’t want me, or think I’m attractive in any way or even think of me at all for more than two seconds. Much better if he doesn’t notice me. Not yet, anyway, not until I’m ready. Imagine if he knew how they bully me, what they say and do. Then he’d feel sorry for me. Pity me. How awful would that be? I’m happy just to stay near him. To know that he exists, and that I can look at him, is enough for now.
One day she would be ready to meet him, she told herself, but not yet, definitely not yet. Her love for him was no less strong because it was silent. Perhaps it was stronger because he could never fall from his pedestal by making some crass remark. In all her schooldays, she had never spoken a single word to him.
Anna may not have talked to the boy but she talked with him. Imaginary conversations in her head that grew ever more real. They were written down in the notebook, a solid record of their relationship. And if sometimes she needed more, she would call his home, hoping that he answered, hoping for the brief thrill of hearing his voice before she put down the phone.
She had found his phone number in the dustbin along with all sorts of other personal information. There were two bins by the side of his house and some evenings, after dark, she sneaked across the back fence and went through the contents. She knew it was a bit crazy, but what harm did it do?
She aimed for Wednesday nights because the refuse men called on Thursdays. She fished out household bills, junk mail, discarded catalogues. Anything he might have touched, anything addressed to him, she treasured, locking it away in a suitcase under her bed. To have something that he’d owned, even if he didn’t want it, made her feel she was part of his life. One time she struck gold. She pulled out a shirt ruined with ink from a broken biro. She knew it wasn’t his father’s or his brother’s because she recognized it immediately as one of his. It became the centrepiece of the shrine that she built to him.
He loved photography and so she became an expert. She took hundreds of photos of him. She waited for hours with her camera outside his house, outside his friends’ houses, outside anywhere she could track him down. Sometimes she would see him come out of his house, three cameras strung round his neck, heading for the beach or the town centre. She would creep along behind, out of sight, and when he took a picture she would take the same one, studying the light and the composition in the same way she saw him do it. By doing so she felt that she was growing ever closer to him.
It was on one of these days – a blistering hot Saturday afternoon in August – that he spoke to her. Brighton seafront could have doubled for the south of France, were it not for the pebbles and the smell of burgers and onions. Visitors packed the town, sunbathers packed the beach, and in the m
iddle of them, set up between the two piers, was a bungee jumping machine.
It made a good picture taken from the promenade above – rows of bodies lying prone in the sun, others lounging in the ubiquitous striped deckchairs, and then another body plunging down into their midst. He spent a lot of time taking photos and when he finally moved away, Anna took his place. She was leaning on the rail, camera poised, waiting for the next man to jump, when she heard his voice.
‘Great shot eh?’
She froze, terrified, unable even to press down her finger and snap the picture as the man fell towards the crowds below.
‘Did you get him?’ the boy asked.
She could not answer. She stood, the camera clamped to her face, wishing that the burning sun would melt her and she could ooze away unnoticed into the ground.
‘Hey, did you get the picture?’ he asked again, louder this time, thinking that she hadn’t heard him above the noise of the crowd milling around them.
‘I can take one for you if you want. I do a lot of this,’ the boy said.
She could bear it no longer. She squeezed herself under the lower railing, dropped down onto the beach and ran off, scattering shingle as she went.
In her mind, and in her notebook, she endlessly replayed and rewrote the events of that day. And as she did so she came to believe that he liked her. Why else had he spoken to her and offered to take a photo for her? The incident inflamed her feelings and during the next few months, as she thought about it continually and followed him at every possible moment, she became convinced that, not only did he like her, but he wanted her and returned in full the feelings she had for him.
Why else did he go back so often to the beach and stand by the railings looking at the sea? In the hope of seeing her again, of course, in the hope that she would come by with her camera.
Someone Out There Page 13