There was a momentary silence and then Sadie whispered something inaudible to her assistants on either side. Each nodded in turn, then she looked up at us all and smiled condescendingly.
‘I’m afraid we can’t do that,’ she started. ‘Until the results of the nationwide . . .’
‘Yes, you can!’ Deirdre barked at her. ‘You can because my client has large legal and tax bills to settle and if she goes bust because you owe her half a million, we will sue the bank for the amount the company was worth at the time of liquidation as well as compensation.’
Sadie, who I had known for many years, turned a strange shade of mottled grey.
‘Just give me a minute,’ she said quietly as she got up. Then she hurried out of the room. Her two advisors quickly followed after her and at that moment I wondered what would happen next. Everything hung on this meeting. If I didn’t get the money, Mayfair and I were going to go under.
It took another fifteen minutes before Sadie reappeared.
‘Okay, I think we can go a long way to accommodating your requests,’ she said. ‘Of the structured collar loan, we can repay up to £100,000 by close of business today, but the rest will have to wait until after the full compensatory investigation. We’ve also looked into that Silverbridge loan. We’ve calculated the compensation is worth £25,000, including the interest. Again, we can get that to you by the end of the day. Would that be enough to stabilize your client’s business?’
Deirdre looked at me. ‘Is £125,000 enough for now?’
I took a long time to think about it. Then I looked at Sadie sternly and said: ‘Only just. I suppose it will have to do until the rest of the compensation is settled.’
‘Yes, my client thinks that is acceptable for now.’ Deirdre was equally severe but I could tell that everyone was palpably relieved to have come to an agreement. I left the accountants and lawyers to settle up the details while I went outside to make a call.
Once I had rounded the corner, I let out a tiny squeal of delight.
‘We’ve done it!’ I breathed down the phone to Bryce. ‘We’ve got enough money to keep the company afloat.’
‘And pay back the £50,000?’ Bryce asked.
‘Yup, and pay them back too! Deirdre was amazing. We’ve got £125,000 going into the company account by the close of business today!’
‘Congratulations! Dawn, I’m so proud of you.’
‘Thanks Bryce. I’m proud of me too!’
And I really was. For the first time in ages, I felt strong. Now I had enough money to pay off my dodgy debt as well as refurbish the empty properties on my books in order to let them out. That would bring in some extra income to keep the company ticking over.
I had won another battle; a crucial battle. Wresting back control of Mayfair and securing the company were both vitally important in giving me the means to keep fighting Stuart as he tried to steal everything I’d built from under my nose. And with each victory, I became a little stronger.
That night, I threw away my whole stash of co-codamol and tramadol. I wasn’t going to let this bloody divorce destroy me from the inside. I knew I could do this without the drugs. The fact was, I had been to the very bottom and now, with a little bit of fair play and good luck, the tide was turning.
I was getting stronger and stronger every day. Stuart had done his very best to destroy me – but I was still standing.
And, now, I wanted revenge. Now, I wanted to make him pay.
Chapter 27
Going Nuclear
‘How can she say that?’ I whispered, tears trickling down my cheeks. I swiped them away with the heel of my hand. I couldn’t believe what I was reading – every single word was like a stab to my heart.
I had just received the latest case documents from my solicitor, signed affidavits that Stuart’s side had logged with the court. Though it had now been two and a half years since I’d asked my husband for a divorce, I felt no closer to gaining my independence than when I’d got on that plane to Cyprus. So far, this long and bitter affair had seen us back and forth to court every few weeks for various hearings. I could cope with Stuart and his lies, but this was a different sort of attack from my own family and it made my blood run cold. Now I read through the formal statements of my mother and her sister Jenny in stunned silence.
They said, in sworn affidavits, that I had seduced Stuart as a sexually promiscuous teen and then duped him into marriage by falling pregnant. Stuart hadn’t stood a chance, apparently. The poor man didn’t know what he was dealing with. According to them, I was a fifteen-year-old femme fatale who had set out to destroy Stuart’s marriage, ruin his relationship with his son and drive a wedge between him and his cousin. Stuart had been a successful businessman and I was just a silly teenager. In conclusion, both statements said I had brought nothing to the marriage and my settlement should reflect this. These were legal documents, documents that would be used against me in my divorce.
By the time I had finished reading, my jaw was nearly on the floor. I could hardly begin to process the scale of this betrayal. This was going further than I had ever imagined in my very worst nightmares.
And there was even worse to come. For in my mother’s statement, drawing on shameful secrets that I had confessed to her in complete confidence, she claimed I had been sexually active since the age of twelve and that I had therefore set out to seduce this man and destroy his marriage.
I flung the statements at Bryce, too disgusted to read any more.
‘Sexually active at twelve?’ I exploded, pain making my voice ragged. ‘Lying bitch! I was raped by my own brother at twelve years old. I see she conveniently forgot to mention that it was him. And it was fucking rape! It wasn’t consensual!’
‘Calm down!’ Bryce was now used to watching me fly off the handle. But I had every right to be angry. My mother and her sister were using the abuse I’d suffered as a child as a weapon against me in my own divorce. It was reprehensible.
‘That’s it,’ I spat out fiercely. ‘I’ve had enough of watching my reputation being dragged through the mud for something that was not my fault. That poor excuse of a mother failed to protect me as a child, then she persuaded me not to go to the police as an adult, and now she is actively using that abuse to hurt me again. I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to set the record straight.’
‘Think about this,’ Bryce said solemnly. He knew what I was planning. We had discussed this many times before; it was what we jokingly referred to as the ‘nuclear option’ because, once it was done, it could not be undone. Was it finally time to go nuclear?
‘It’s all I’ve got left.’ My mind was made up. ‘I don’t need to protect him anymore, I don’t need to protect anyone but myself. And this is the only way . . .’
Despite my strong words, that night I lay awake for hours, mulling over my situation, asking myself if this was a battle I was prepared to lose; if it was one I had the strength to fight to the very end.
But this isn’t about fighting anymore, I realized with a jolt. This is about telling stories. A court case is about so much more than facts and fighting.
For the past two years, I had been constantly on the defensive because the stories the other side had told about me made such a compelling narrative. Stuart was the victim, the spurned older husband, while I was the young, adulterous temptress and a gold digger to boot. The backstory that Mum told about me being a ‘sexually active’ pre-teen fitted perfectly with all of that. No, I would always be fighting a rearguard action if I let them tell my story.
When it came to judging this divorce and deciding who was telling the truth, it wasn’t just about who had the best evidence, it was also about who made the most sense. And at this moment, even I could see that, on paper, with the way their side had twisted the facts to suit their narrative, Stuart and my mother’s story made the most sense.
I only had one way to change the story now – and that was to tell the truth. I had to go on the offensive.
It wou
ld mean being honest – the most honest I had ever been in my whole life. It would mean dropping all the safety mechanisms I had built up over the years to try to keep myself safe; the safety mechanisms I had used, over and over, to stop myself from thinking too hard about what I had been through. For the first time, I would be shining a light into the darkest places in my memory, and I knew that light could well hurt me as well as the monsters who lurked there.
But I had nothing to be frightened of now. I had to do it. I wanted to do it. I had stayed silent far too long.
So, at 8.30 a.m. the following morning, I walked into my local police station. My palms were sweating, my hands shook . . . but I was more determined than I had ever been in my life.
The young man with the goatee on the front desk signalled for me to wait a moment while he took a call about a missing mobile phone. It was a banal, run-of-the-mill exchange and I waited patiently, allowing myself to bask in the surrealness of the moment. I was on the very brink of exposing the darkest secret of my life and this guy was trying to describe the cover of a Samsung Galaxy! Finally, when he had finished, he asked how he could help.
‘I would like to make a report about sexual abuse,’ I said levelly.
‘Right, is that someone you know, something you witnessed or is it about yourself?’
‘Sexual abuse against myself.’
‘And when did this happen?’
‘In 1974 and 1984.’
And, with that, he rolled his eyes. He actually rolled his eyes! I couldn’t believe it, but I didn’t say a word. Instead I just stood there, holding myself perfectly upright and unblinking, as he said: ‘Okay, if you hang on a minute, I’ll get someone to come and talk to you.’
Then he closed down the little shutter in front of his window and made a call. A few minutes later, a policewoman opened the door from the main station into the waiting area and, smiling, said: ‘Hello, please do come through.’
She led me through to a small interview room and offered me a cup of tea. Then, when she had got herself settled down with a cuppa and a large A4 pad, she asked me to tell her about the abuse.
‘You say it started in 1974,’ she prompted. ‘Can you tell me about that?’
‘Yes, it was my brother,’ I said, frankly. It was odd: now the moment had come, it wasn’t hard to tell the truth. I found I could do so in an almost matter-of-fact way. Perhaps my mind was still protecting me, preventing me from engaging with the facts emotionally, but whatever the reason, I was calm, considered and concise in my statements. They had to take me seriously, so I was solemn and straight in how I spoke. ‘He started abusing me when he was fifteen and I was five and it went on for about two years. Then it happened one last time when I was twelve.
‘The 1984 abuse, that wasn’t my brother.’ I paused for a moment, on the brink of something huge. My resolve never wavered for a second. I was now a woman who understood the wrongdoings of older men who chased and abused young girls. I had been a pawn in Stuart’s sick games and I understood now that what he did to me all those years ago was criminal. I thought about that time in the car in London in front of Wolfie, Pete and the Vauxhall van man. I thought about the cowed, scared and weak young girl who had suffered such an appalling humiliation and knew I had to finally speak for her. After all these years of silence, I had to stand up for her.
‘I was abused by a man called Stuart Kelly at fifteen. And the fact is, I got trapped by pregnancy and we ended up in a long-term relationship, but there’s no avoiding the fact he was with me when I was fifteen – so now I want to report him.’
‘I see . . .’ The woman made a few notes in her pad, then said: ‘Well, let’s take this one step at a time, shall we? When was the first occasion your brother sexually abused you?’
It took six hours to tell her everything about John and Stuart, during which time she asked me very explicit questions about what they had done to me. I had never spoken in such detail to anyone before and I can’t deny that it was harder than I had imagined. For years I had tried to keep it all locked up, shut away so it couldn’t hurt me anymore, but now it all had to come out. She asked me what sexual positions we had done, where my brother had ejaculated, where we had been at the time, how long it had lasted and even how I could remember the details.
This was harder than I imagined it would be. All those awful details that I had locked away for so long were now wrenched out of me, and I squirmed uncomfortably at the words that came out of my mouth, shocking myself at the thought of those squalid encounters. How could I have believed that he loved me? I felt so stupid and ashamed telling a stranger all of this, but I tried to keep hold of my emotions, sipping occasionally from a plastic cup of water when I felt my voice beginning to crack. Still, despite my embarrassment and shame, I was determined to tell my story, determined to tell the truth as I should have done years before.
The policewoman, Joan, was a plump, grey-haired woman in her mid-fifties and had a motherly, matronly air about her. She spoke softly and kindly offered me several cups of tea throughout the interview. Nevertheless, there was something odd in her manner, as if she didn’t quite believe me. The questions she asked, it was like she thought I was making it all up.
‘Who else knew about your brother’s abuse?’ Joan asked.
‘My mother, aunt and my sister,’ I told her and gave her their full names.
‘And what about the abuse by Stuart?’
‘Everyone! His ex-wife, the police, the school, my family . . . There must be records from the time. I was arrested and taken in handcuffs to the police station for having underage sex. Of course I didn’t confirm it at the time but then, what did I know? He told me to keep quiet; he told me he’d go to prison if I said anything and I thought I loved him, I wanted to protect him. God, I was only fifteen! I thought I knew it all, but I didn’t know a bloody thing.’
‘He knew about the abuse by your brother?’
‘Of course,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘I trusted him, I told him my most shameful secret and he said that what my brother had done was awful, really terrible, but that sex itself wasn’t a bad thing and if it was with someone you loved then it was a very beautiful thing. And that’s how he made me believe that it would be different with him, that because he loved me, it was all okay.’
‘In other words, he groomed you,’ Joan added.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s the classic technique of an abuser: grooming. It’s when someone builds an emotional connection with a minor to gain their trust for their own sexual gain, like your husband Stuart. A sexual predator engages his victim, gains the minor’s trust, breaks down their defences, and manipulates them into performing or permitting the desired sex act. That’s what Stuart did with you, he groomed you. He told you he was your friend, your only friend, and he made you think you could trust him. Knowing you had been sexually abused from a young age made you an easy target for him to start grooming for his own sexual gratification. First, because it meant you knew what sex was. Second, because he knew you could keep a secret.’
I sat back and let this information sink in. I was groomed; it was a momentous insight to me. Until this time, I had thought all my choices had been my own, that the decisions I had made as a teenager were based on my own thoughts, desires and interests. It had never occurred to me that because of the abuse I had suffered as a young child, Stuart was able to manipulate me for his own ends. Now it was all falling into place and, for the first time, I felt able to connect the jagged pieces of my life.
‘So you’re saying that if it hadn’t been for John, I might never have fallen for Stuart?’
‘Hmm . . . it’s possible, I suppose, but unlikely. Can I ask you something, Miss McConnell, have you ever had counselling?’
‘No, not yet at least,’ I said. ‘I’m too angry for that. Right now I want to see justice done and I don’t think any amount of counselling is going to cure me of all this anger inside.’
‘Why now, though?’
she probed gently. ‘I mean, what prompted you to come here today?’
What to tell her? That I wanted revenge on them both? That I was sick of being portrayed as a teenage temptress? That I wanted my husband to stop trying to screw me in the divorce? It was all true – all of it – and now there was a new reason.
‘Closure,’ I said finally. ‘I want closure.’
‘Alright,’ said Joan. She closed her notebook firmly; she had filled two of them with her notes on my interview. ‘We’ll start looking into it and I’ll be in touch as soon as I have some news.’
Staggering out into the sunshine that day, I felt utterly drained and exhausted – all my words used up, all my energy gone. I had dragged up the most excruciating encounters from my past to a complete stranger and God, it was hard. And yet . . . and yet . . . here I was! Still alive. Still standing. The world hadn’t collapsed. Somewhere inside I felt a shining sense of euphoria. I had begun to shape my own destiny, to take control of my future. I knew I was on the road to healing. No more shame, no more hiding. I had started to let it go.
It was two whole weeks before Joan called, asking if she could come to the house to update me on her enquiries. When she walked in the door, I tried to read her face for clues but she had obviously perfected her ‘poker face’ over many years in the job. However, once I showed her through to the lounge, she quickly got down to business.
‘I want to deal with the claims against your husband Stuart Kelly first. Look, Miss McConnell, we’ve tried to find reports from 1986 and I’m afraid there aren’t any. No records. None at all. I’m really sorry. Nothing in the police files or from the school. And I’m sorry to say but because you married him, it doesn’t add any strength to your case.’
I Own You Page 31