Someone Out There

by Catherine Hunt

  Annabel’s brain refused to take it in. She couldn’t, wouldn’t believe what her eyes were seeing. They stared. Stared at a girl with shining, black, shoulder-length hair. A pretty, petite girl with a creamy, spotless complexion and pale pink lips parted now in a wide smile. And a stab of pure hate, visceral and primeval, went through her like a gunshot.

  Joe kissed the girl long and hard, the girl whose name was Laura Maxwell. Annabel knew it was a picture she would never ever be able to wipe from her mind. It was imprinted on her eyes for all time; she would see it as clearly on her dying day as she did now. The sounds of the crowd faded in her ears and she thought she might faint; she was going down in flames.

  She had to get away, from the two of them, from the hellish party. She stumbled out into the hall, and then Michelle Cullen and Jennifer Fleming were at her side. She couldn’t speak to them, couldn’t speak to anyone, she was desperate to find a quiet place, somewhere a million miles away.

  She headed towards the front door but the hallway was more crowded than ever and the two girls were crushed up against her. They smiled, they giggled, they whispered secrets to her, told her what a great dancer she was. Then they offered her some pills. They said the pills would make her happy, very happy, so happy she would dance all night. They said they were going to take some themselves, but they never did.

  Annabel hardly hesitated. She put two of the little white pills into her mouth and swallowed them with a gulp of wine. She would have swallowed anything then, even poison, especially poison, to get away from what she was feeling.

  Half an hour later she had her escape, but it turned out to be no escape at all for it led to a place of darkness and despair.

  Little rushes of happiness started to run through her, loosening the tension and the rage. In the next hour, the highs got bigger and longer and the nausea and disorientation she’d felt at first, disappeared. She was happy, euphoric, and the fact that she never usually felt this way, made it all the more potent.

  She saw no more of Joe or Laura Maxwell, and the thought of them became less painful. Her world became a wonderful, benign place as it had never been before. The people around her were her friends, her very close, very dear friends. She looked at them and was filled with a warm glow. She wanted to hug them tight.

  Jennifer Fleming touched her arm. It felt great, sensual, her flesh tingled with heightened sensation. She drew the girl towards her, embraced her, rubbed her face against her cheek and kissed it. Pleasure rippled along her skin. Standing behind, watching, she saw Maria Burns, smiling. Maria, who had not spoken a word to her for eight months, seemed to be looking at her now as if she was her best friend. Annabel was enchanted. To be friends again with Maria. Her heart swelled with the thought of it.

  They were dancing. All of them together as she’d always wanted. Anna and her friends. She loved them. The music pounded deep in her soul and she loved it. It sounded so good, clearer, more vibrant than she’d ever known it, as if she was dancing on the notes themselves. And she had discovered she had a talent. She could dance. Now that she knew it, she was never going to stop.

  She felt so up there, as if she was in heaven and so she failed to notice Maria Burns slip away from the dancers and head over to a group of older boys, failed to notice her giggling with them and pointing at her.

  Soon afterwards Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always love you’ came on. The bitter-sweet words rang loud in her ears and when the boy appeared in front of her and put his arms around her, she reached out to him and held him tight.

  She pressed herself against him, revelling in the intensity of touch that the drug brought with it. If she had known she had taken Ecstasy, she would have thoroughly approved of its name. When the song ended and he took her by the hand, she went with him. He was going to a club, he told her as he led her out of the house, going dancing, and he wanted her to come with him. How about a drink first? There was some in the car.

  There were two other boys in the car. They started kissing her, groping her breasts then pulling off the tight, Lycra top. To begin with they didn’t need to use much force because, by that time, the drug was working at full strength and Annabel’s inhibitions were long gone. She felt a bond with these boys – men, really, as they were all eighteen-year-olds – and she didn’t put up much resistance when they started to touch her. By the time her drugged brain realized something was going badly wrong and she tried to fight them off, it was way too late. They held her down, forced her legs apart, and they all had sex with her.

  They dumped her back at the party, on the front doorstep, confused and stunned. Violated. It was freezing cold but she didn’t want to go inside. The Ecstasy high was gone, abruptly chased away by what had happened to her. No gradual comedown, just a hard landing. She leaned against the wall of the house, sank to the ground, and began to sob, head in her hands.

  It was there, about ten minutes later, that Michelle Cullen’s mother found her when she came to pick up her daughter. She tried to talk to the traumatized girl, tried to get her up off the ground, but Annabel just yelled at her to fuck off and leave her alone.

  Annabel’s father got the same result. He had arrived shortly before and was waiting inside the house wondering where his daughter had got to. He stood in front of her, flanked by the Cullens and a growing number of interested onlookers, as his daughter screamed at him to go away. He looked at her; she was fast becoming a public spectacle and his concern mixed with embarrassment and, try as he might to suppress it, disgust. His eyes took in the low, too-tight top, now badly disarranged, the heavy smeared make-up, the hysterical behaviour. He grabbed hold of her left arm and pulled her sharply towards him. To his surprise there was no resistance. She stood up quickly, throwing her arms around him and almost overbalancing him. As fast as he could, he hustled her out to his car.

  She cried all the way home, refusing to answer when he asked what was wrong, shouting at him to let her be. He was used to her moods and he was used to ignoring them, but this was different. Usually she was sulky or gloomy, giving him monosyllabic replies and shutting herself up in her room. He had never known her cry and scream like this. He felt his nerves wearing thin. It was hard enough to deal with his wife’s depression; he could not cope with a crazy daughter as well. He had to fight down the urge to stop the car, slap her face and tell her to pull herself together, and just for once in her life, behave normally.

  In the days that followed, Annabel lived in a pit of despair. She was tired beyond belief, depressed beyond belief. She wouldn’t get out of bed because she didn’t want to take any more part in life. She simply wanted it to end. She never spoke about what had happened to her, even though she knew it would not have been hard to track down her attackers. But they would deny it or say she’d wanted it and she couldn’t bear the humiliation. The horror of the sex they’d forced on her was inextricably bound up in her mind with the horror of witnessing Joe, her Joe, kissing Laura Maxwell.

  She lay rigid in her bed, weeping. Sometimes it was noiseless and then, as the cruelty of life began to burn in her, the sobbing increased in intensity until she was choking with tears, her head throbbing and her chest aching. She felt as if some part of her had died and that she dragged it with her, a cold heavy weight, draining away all her strength.

  Her mother forgot her own problems for once and resolved to help her; now her daughter was having a breakdown, she felt drawn to her – a kindred spirit in the same kind of agony as herself. She tried her best, but her determination wavered as Annabel refused to speak to her or engage with her in any way, except for furious outbursts of hostility. She couldn’t cope with aggression and before very long retreated into her sad shell and handed over her child to the doctors.

  The GP suspected drug abuse but not sexual abuse, and since his patient would not talk to him or let him fully examine her, he prescribed sedatives and said he’d arrange for her to see a psychiatrist. The day after his visit, three days before Christmas, Annabel swallowed the wh
ole lot, plus some of her mother’s lorazepam tablets, and hoped to die.

  She didn’t even come close. Her father found her lying on her bed, comatose, and the hospital pumped out her stomach. She did better with the second attempt, a few weeks later. She was back at school and Maria Burns and Jennifer Fleming and Michelle Cullen were sniggering big time. Someone had scrawled ‘Slag’ across her school books. These things contributed to her suicidal state of mind, but none of them was the decisive factor. That came on a Friday afternoon when she saw Joe standing at the school gates. He was chatting to some girls; one of them was Laura Maxwell.

  Annabel had gone straight to the chemist to buy some razor blades before returning to the near empty school and that all too familiar girls’ cloakroom. She locked herself in a cubicle and slashed her wrists. It was the weekend, she thought, no one would find her this time.

  She watched the blood running down her fingers and on to the floor. It did not flow as freely or as powerfully as she’d expected but eventually, surely, her life must drain away. In a detached way, she wondered if the urge for self-preservation would suddenly cut in, but there was no sign of it yet. All she felt was a tremendous tiredness and relief – relief that this attempt was going to work.

  A short time later she started to feel sick and confused and couldn’t remember where she was. She opened the cubicle door and fell to her knees, began crawling across the floor towards the washbasins. It was there, underneath one of the basins, that she collapsed and lost consciousness. It was there that a conscientious caretaker, checking the cloakroom an hour later, flashed his torch beam. Pools of congealed black blood gleamed in the light.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Harry had always known his wife had a lover but he’d never come close to finding out who it was. The hidden cameras, the bugs, the spying – the man had eluded them all. He’d even employed a private detective who had cost thousands of pounds and come up with a big fat zero. After six weeks, Harry had fired him, convinced the detective was lazy or stupid or both. Because Harry knew, knew without a shadow of a doubt, that his wife was cheating on him. She’d just been too clever to get caught.

  He’d given up the chase a few weeks after Anna had left him. He told himself it was because he didn’t care anymore, but the real reason was fear. Fear that if he carried on snooping or followed her or staked out her new home, she would find out and tell Laura Maxwell and they would use it against him. It would give them ammunition to prove that he was a crazy obsessive, a danger to his wife and daughter.

  Now, at last, Harry thought he might have a clue. The name Martha had mentioned: ‘Joe’. He considered it. He knew two ‘Joes’, business acquaintances who his wife had met on a few occasions, but neither man could he ever imagine as Anna’s lover.

  On Tuesday afternoon, as soon as it was dark, he drove once more to the lane where his wife lived and took up position behind the hedge. There were lights on downstairs in what he thought was the main living room, but he couldn’t see anything as the curtains were drawn. He had never been invited into the house; whenever he collected Martha, he had waited for her outside in his car.

  There was a flower bed in the middle of the front garden with large, straggly shrubs in need of pruning, He slipped from the hedge and edged his way in among them. To his left was the driveway leading to a detached brick and timber garage.

  Harry Pelham waited, waited for the man called Joe to arrive. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best he had for now; if he stuck at it he might get lucky. His teeth chattered and his feet froze and he didn’t dare stamp them up and down for fear of disturbing the shrubs.

  He’d been there two hours when he heard a car coming up the lane. His wife’s black Peugeot pulled into the drive. An external lamp flashed on, bathing the garden in light. Harry shrank back among the plants. Doors slammed, women’s voices. Anna with Martha and a woman he didn’t know.

  ‘Thanks a lot for offering, Claire. I totally forgot it was tonight. I won’t be long.’ he heard his wife say before the three of them disappeared into the house.

  It sounded as if his wife was going out, and excitement stirred in him. Carefully, he extricated himself from the flower bed and took off back to his car. He turned on the ignition, got the heater blasting hot air on his feet, then slid down in the driver’s seat.

  Headlights on the windscreen. He sat up slightly, peered into the night, trying to be sure. Yes it had to be. It was his wife’s car. He glimpsed her behind the wheel as it passed by. He started up the engine and followed.

  The clock on the dashboard read 20.34. She had left the woman babysitting, he thought, while she went off somewhere. The boyfriend. She was going to meet the boyfriend. He blew air out through his teeth. Gotcha.

  Fifteen minutes later his excitement had become uncertainty. Twenty minutes later it was confusion and suspicion.

  The black Peugeot was parked at the end of a wide avenue called Chapel Road. It was under a tree, away from any street light, and Harry, who had been keeping a safe distance behind his wife, almost missed it as he turned into the street. He drove on by, teeth gritted, seriously upset. He knew this road, knew it very well indeed. He had been here only yesterday. It was where he lived.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Anna Pelham got out of the car and pulled the hood of her dark green Parka tight around her face. She didn’t want to be seen. She reached a gloved hand into the back seat, pulled out a plastic bag and zipped it inside the coat. It was bulky and it made the Parka bulge, but she didn’t care. She had put in as much as she could, every last bit she could get away with; the idea of being rid of it in this way was hugely cathartic.

  She set off quickly towards the other end of the road, straining her eyes for signs of the police or one of her former neighbours; she had a cover story ready but she didn’t want to have to use it. She wasn’t worried about running into Harry, she thought he would steer well clear in case the police nabbed him.

  The houses here were Edwardian, large and detached, set well back from the road, and no one was going to look out of their window and spot her. The risk would be from a car – if one of the neighbours happened to be going in or out as she went by. She had done this thing before, several times. So far she’d been lucky but she worried about the law of averages.

  No problem. Without incident she reached the long gravel drive that led to her old home. Her feet crunched on the gravel and a security light came on, but she was now out of sight, the house screened from view by a tall evergreen hedge. There were two lights on downstairs but she knew they were the ones Harry had on timers.

  Confidently, she strode to the front door. She took the key from her coat pocket. He had changed the locks when she’d left but he’d given a new key to Martha. Typical of him, she thought. Martha didn’t need it, she wasn’t likely to be coming or going on her own, but to Harry it was a symbol, a symbol that his daughter was still firmly part of his life. Martha had proudly told her how Daddy had solemnly presented it to her. It was a grown-up thing and Martha had been pleased. Anna had warned her not to carry it round with her in case she lost it. So she left it in her bedroom; the same day, her mother got it copied.

  Anna didn’t have much time. She’d told Claire some cock and bull story about forgetting that a friend of hers was having birthday drinks for her husband and that she’d promised to drop in. It was a chance. If Claire offered to babysit for a while she would put her plan into action; if not, so what, she would find another way.

  The plan had come to her that afternoon. She had gone through the Laura Maxwell collection, sorting it carefully, with the kind of meticulous attention to detail that hate can give. She put to one side the things Harry would have been unlikely to come by – the things from school, some of the Maxwell family details. The rest, including the scarf she’d stolen from Laura’s office, she put in a Sainsbury’s plastic bag.

  At the same time, she added one new item to Joe’s collection. She held it up, examined it, then l
aid it gently on the top. She had collected it only that morning after she’d had sex with him. It was a used condom.

  Now she planned to leave the Sainsbury’s bag in Harry’s wardrobe, together with a knife, which she took from his kitchen and used to score through Laura’s face in several of the photographs before adding it to the bag.

  She darted down the hall, glancing into the big living room with its cream and pale blue furnishings, then went into Harry’s office where a light was on. She smiled, remembering how Harry had changed his passwords as well as his locks, how she’d found his new ones written on a Post-it note stuck to his computer when she’d first revisited the house. With pleasure, she noted the signs of the police search and that the computer was gone. She would soon be sending the police another anonymous tip suggesting they search the house again. By now, they should have found the child pornography on his computer and would be happy to oblige. They would find no more porn, but they would find the collection and they would know that Harry had killed Laura Maxwell.

  Anna Pelham didn’t have much time, but she didn’t need it. She headed up the staircase and into the bedroom she’d shared with Harry, opened his wardrobe and shoved the plastic bag underneath a pile of his old sweaters, leaving it half hidden. Her previous visits to the house had been much more time-consuming – she’d had to send death threats to herself from the Paul Giles email address, access child pornography sites, and input Harry’s credit card details, and she hadn’t known for sure where he was or when he might come back and find her.

  She was back home at the cottage little more than an hour after she’d left it.

  ‘How was your birthday friend?’ Martha asked in a flat tone of voice she used a lot lately. The dark brown eyes regarded her mother coolly. She doesn’t believe me, Anna thought, not for the first time.