by Adam Croft
We got up at the crack of dawn this morning, ready for a quick breakfast and the drive back to mine. Dad wanted to start early to give him the best possible chance of getting everything in place for tonight. I woke up with an odd feeling of optimism. Maybe it was the act of getting up to watch the sunrise, having not had a single drop of alcohol the night before, or perhaps it was the recognition that I might actually be safer by the end of the day. Either way, I’m determined to embrace this positivity for as long as I can.
I try to get as much housework done as I can while Dad fits all the security gear, but I feel as though I ought to take an active interest in what it all is.
I head outside and walk round to my front path. Dad’s up a ladder, screwing a CCTV camera onto the front wall of the house.
‘So how do these work?’ I ask.
‘They’re wireless,’ he replies, grunting as he tightens the screws. ‘They’ll run off your wifi router. It comes with some software that you install on your laptop or smartphone to view the images.’
This doesn’t sound particularly secure to me. ‘What about if the batteries run out? Or if my internet connection goes down?’
‘It’s plugged into the mains. Only the connectivity is wireless. And they have SD cards in them as well, so they’ll still record even without an internet connection.’
‘And if there’s a power cut?’ I ask.
‘Backup battery. Trust me, they’re safe. They’re the best on the market.’
I trust him, but I’m living in a perpetual state of insecurity, so I’m not sure anything will ever totally convince me.
‘What about at night? Do they have lights in case something happens in the dark?’
Dad, as always, entertains my silly questions without ever making me feel stupid. ‘Sort of. They have infrared lights. It lights up the area as far as the camera’s concerned. You can see the video footage almost as well as you can in the daytime, but it won’t shine a visual light. Only the camera can pick up the infrared light. The human eye can’t. So all a human would see is these little red LEDs around the camera barrel. They’re what lights up the area for the camera.’
I make an impressed noise. ‘I’m almost done with these. I’ve already put one on the back and one on the side of the house. That’s all areas covered. Just got to set them up on the router, but I’ll probably do the alarm next while we’ve still got light.’
I go to ask him if I can help at all, but I must have already asked a dozen times and he’s not having any of it. This is man work, apparently.
‘You’ll have a box front and back,’ he says. ‘Both of them are full ringers. Most alarms only have a real one on the front and a dud one on the back, if that. Quite a few of them are dud on the front and the back, just to try and scare people off. They don’t actually ring out. Both of these do. And if the alarm does ring out, you can set up to ten emergency contacts. It’ll call them all and tell them your alarm is going off. I’ll put mine and your mum’s numbers in, and you should probably set it up for close friends, too. At least that way if it does go off you know there are people coming quickly. You can set it up with the emergency services, too, if you pay an annual fee. To be honest, though, we’d probably get here quicker than they would.’
He’s got a point. The budget cuts in policing are all over the news at the moment. A lot of forces are merging their emergency services. Fat lot of good a fire engine will be if I’m pinned to the floor with a knife against my throat. What are they going to do, hose him off?
‘I’ve also got sash jammers for your windows and magnetic bolts and a chain for your door. Always keep that on when you’re opening it, just until you know who’s there. Or, of course, you can look at the cameras on your phone.’
It all sounds very secure, I’ve got to admit. I feel more comforted. But there’s still an uneasy feeling as to what happens at night. That’s when I tend to feel most scared.
‘Can you put a lock on my bedroom door?’ I ask. ‘It’d make me feel safer.’
‘Sure,’ he says, without questioning it. ‘Although there’s no way anyone is going to be able to get in the house after I’ve finished with it. They’d have more luck trying to break into Fort Knox.’
I doubt that somehow, but the sentiment’s sweet.
A few hours later, he’s finally finished and he heads home. I lock the doors, engage the magnetic bolts and put the chain across. I sit and watch the security cameras for a little while, panning, tilting and zooming to my heart’s content, becoming familiar with their capabilities. They’re certainly impressive.
I’m starting to feel hungry, so I think about having something to eat. I really fancy making a batch of pancakes. Quick, easy, and damn nice, too. I stand up and head back downstairs, before remembering that I don’t have any milk. I used the last of it in a cup of tea before I headed out with Kieran the other night. With everything that’s gone on since, I hadn’t thought to replace it yet.
I go into the kitchen anyway, opening the cupboards and looking inside for inspiration for what I can have to eat. Pasta? No. A can of soup? No. I open the fridge and look around in there too, and it takes a good few seconds for my eyes to register the significance of the plastic container of milk, sitting unopened in the door.
I never buy milk in plastic containers. I have it delivered in bottles by the milkman. It’s something I’ve always done, probably because my parents always have.
My parents. I think about the possibility that Dad could’ve put it there. Maybe he thought he was helping me out. But wouldn’t that have been a glass bottle, seeing as they have theirs delivered too? Not necessarily. They’ll only have enough delivered for the two of them. Not enough to spare a bottle for little old me. Maybe he popped to the supermarket and left it there for me as a token that he’s looking out for me.
I go to text him and ask, but think better of it. One thing I’ve realised recently is that sometimes it’s better not to know.
59
I won’t pretend I had a fantastic night’s sleep, but it was an improvement.
First of all there was the milk incident. Even if it’s the worst case scenario and it was a sick joke from Toby, he must’ve done it at the same time as he tidied up downstairs. When I left the door unlocked. Either way, the new security measures draw a line under all that. He’s got no chance of getting anywhere near me now.
Secondly, I had to deal with my phone buzzing to let me know the motion sensor on my cameras had been triggered. The first time I almost shat myself, until I logged in and saw that it was just a couple walking past the end of my front path. I told myself I’d have to call Dad in the morning and ask him how to change the settings so it didn’t buzz at me every time someone walked down the road, but it did twice more during the night. The second alert was because a cat had walked across my back garden, and the third was a car which had pulled up onto the kerb outside my house briefly to let another car pass on the other side of the road. The way people park around here, all sorts of car acrobatics are needed just to get down the road sometimes. Another reason why I don’t drive.
By the time the sun’s up, I’m downstairs and making breakfast. I go for scrambled eggs — without milk, having poured the plastic container down the sink last night. As I finish, I get a phone call. It’s Dad.
‘Bit of a strange one, actually,’ he says, after we’ve done the usual hellos and how are yous. ‘After I got back from yours last night, I set the door bump alarms on our front door. I don’t usually bother if we’re home, to be honest. Not at night anyway, as I always think we’d hear someone trying to break in at night. But for some reason I set them last night. Maybe I was in a security-conscious mood after being at yours. Anyway, about four-thirty this morning, the alarm goes off. Makes a right racket.’
I feel my blood turn to ice in my veins. ‘What was it?’ I ask, already knowing the answer.
Dad, to his credit, remains calm and gives me the simple facts, trying not to alarm me.
> ‘We don’t know. My first instinct was to go downstairs and switch it off, but your mum jumped straight up to the bedroom window. She says she saw someone jogging back down our drive and off down the road.’
I swallow, trying to force back the bile that’s threatening to make its way up my throat.
‘What did they look like?’
‘A man, she reckons. Nothing else, though. He was in dark clothing, had a black cap over his head. She only saw him from the back. No chance of being able to do anything with that.’
Why is he telling me this? Is he trying to torture me on purpose? Make me feel guilty?
‘Do you think it was him?’ I ask.
‘No idea. Probably not, to be honest. Probably just a coincidence. First night I had the alarm on, and all that. Who knows how many people try bumping people’s doors open? If you don’t have an alarm, you’d have no idea if someone had tried breaking into your house.’
Unless they leave a calling card, or a photo, I want to say.
‘What, so you’ve called to tell me you were right and I was wrong, and that I’ve dragged you into all this now?’ I reply, my voice cracking as the tears start to roll down my cheeks. I have. I’ve dragged them into this too. Perfectly innocent people, having to deal with being targeted by Toby Sheridan, through no fault of their own. All because I’ve fucked it all up, because I made the police think I was some sort of nutjob. Because I couldn’t think clearly and handle my own emotions.
What have I done that’s so bad? Why is he doing this to me? To my family? How did he know I was meant to be at my parents’ house? Has he been listening in to my phone calls? Has he been watching their house? Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Maybe it was just a local kid trying doors. Either way, it’s wrecking me. He’s won. He’s won.
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Dad says. ‘We don’t think that at all. At least I don’t,’ he adds, making the subtext perfectly clear. ‘I just thought it was best to tell you. So you knew. In case it needed to come up at all. And anyway, look at the facts. My bump alarms are pretty cheap, basic things and they scared him off in seconds. He won’t come within a mile of your place with all the gear we put in yesterday. This guy clearly isn’t as big and clever as he thinks he is. If it’s him, of course, which I don’t think it is.’
That doesn’t make me feel any better. If it wasn’t Toby Sheridan trying to break into Mum and Dad’s house last night — if it was just a kid from a local estate — that doesn’t comfort me at all. It means Toby Sheridan could be perfectly capable of bypassing all the security measures Dad put in for me. We don’t know. He hasn’t been tested. It’s local-yob-proof, but is it Toby-Sheridan-proof?
This was all meant to make me feel more secure. It doesn’t. It’s given me more questions than answers, when all I desperately want is answers.
Dad makes sure I’m alright, and says his goodbyes.
I put the phone down, sit down in the middle of the kitchen floor, bring my knees up to my chest and let out the most pained sobs I’ve cried in years.
60
It’s almost midday, and I’ve already had four missed calls from work. I say missed calls; I mean avoided calls. I didn’t actually miss any of them. The fact of the matter is that I can’t face going to work. I don’t care if they sack me. I’ll find another job. I really don’t care. Work’s the least of my worries right now. I can’t even face leaving the house.
But I’m going to have to. I called Maisie Haynes about an hour after Dad rang this morning. I didn’t know what else to do. I can’t even understand my own thought processes right now, so I need someone who can. I need the therapist to untangle the threads, make sense of the spaghetti mishmash that is the lines of thought currently going through my head.
Maisie said she could fit me in at 12.30. That’s the best she could do, unfortunately. She was completely booked up until then. The wait is torturous. By the time I’d rung Maisie, I’d just about managed to psych myself up and convince myself that I could leave the house, only to find out I was going to have to wait another few hours.
I’ve been sitting in the living room with my shoes, coat and hat on for the past hour. I figure I can leave now. It’ll only take me three or four minutes to walk to the clinic, so I’ll probably arrive about half an hour early. I don’t care. I just want to get there, get it over with and get back home. I need someone to tell me I’m not going mad, but that at the same time I don’t need to panic and worry myself over what this man’s doing to me. I need someone to put it in proportion, to make it all okay.
Easier said than done, I know.
I do the walk in record time. I don’t fancy hanging about or walking slowly, and by the time I arrive I’m somewhat out of breath. Fortunately I’ve got enough time to get it back whilst I wait the best part of half an hour for my appointment time.
The waiting room is empty, except for me. It’s only small, but wide — probably eight feet deep by about twenty-five or thirty wide. It’s more of a partitioned-off section of Maisie’s main consultation room, but it’s eerily silent. There’s the occasional scraping of a chair that makes its way through the walls, or a particularly loud cough. But, generally speaking, it’s still. Tranquil, almost.
Until there’s a loud bang over my right shoulder that has me leaping up out of my seat, yelping like a small dog whose tail has been trodden on.
‘Sorry,’ the pensioner says as he enters the room, closing the door behind him. ‘I thought it was a “push” one. Turns out it’s a “pull” one.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say, hoping he didn’t spot that he’d frightened the life out of me.
We sit in silence for a minute or so, before I start to think. There’s about twenty-five minutes until my appointment, and the sessions tend to last forty-five minutes to an hour. I’m stupidly early myself, so what’s this guy doing here?
‘What time’s your appointment?’ I ask him, hoping that Maisie hasn’t cocked up the appointment times.
‘Oh, I don’t have one. I’m here to pick up my daughter. She should be finished soon,’ he says, checking his watch. I can tell by the look on his face that he’s realised he’s got here far too early as well.
The rest of the wait happens in silence. The old man sits scrolling through his smartphone while I read a magazine from the table to the left of me. I have great fun browsing through the TV listings from eight months ago and the adverts for sales that have long gone. Some of these companies are probably long gone by now, too.
Eventually, the door to the main consultation room opens, the man’s daughter greets him, they leave and I enter the room.
‘So how are you?’ Maisie asks me as I sit down.
I sigh. ‘I would say fine, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t fall for that.’
‘Well, most people who are fine don’t tend to book emergency appointments with me, no,’ she says, smiling. ‘Has something happened?’
Where do I begin? ‘I’m having a bit of trouble. Paranoia, mostly.’ I feel disingenuous telling her this, because I know damn well it’s not just paranoia. But I need to work on the assumption that it is, because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
He’s got into your mind, Alice. He left you alone when you saw him in the police station. You tidied up the house yourself but you don’t remember because you were too drunk. Either that or Kieran let himself in through the unlocked door and did it for you, but doesn’t want to admit it because he doesn’t want you to feel ashamed. And it was just a local kid trying doors at Mum and Dad’s last night. Toby Sheridan has got into your mind and every little thing that happens now is fucking with you. You can’t live like this.
I tell myself all this — and more — but me telling myself doesn’t work. I need Maisie to re-wire me, to get me thinking sensibly again.
‘There’ve been times when I hear noises in the night, and my brain tells me someone’s trying to break in, or someone’s trying to get to me. And occasionally I feel like I�
�m being followed or watched. I can’t... I can’t seem to handle the thought processes. I know I’m being daft, but it’s taking over my life.’
Maisie nods and scribbles down a few notes as she nods. ‘And is there anything that’s caused this?’
Why can’t I just tell her the truth? Why can’t I open up and tell her everything, tell her about Toby Sheridan, about the fact he’s a police officer, about what he’s been doing to me? I don’t know. Maybe it’s pride. Maybe it’s not wanting to sound like I’m insane. Or maybe part of me doesn’t quite believe it myself. Right now, I don’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t know who I am. And that scares me.
‘There was an incident I had, yeah. I wouldn’t quite say “stalker”, but that’s about the gist of it.’ Yeah, I would say stalker. I’d say a lot fucking worse than that, actually.
‘Was this recent?’ Maisie asks, her eyes narrowing, the subtext being Why am I only just hearing of this?
‘Yeah. Last couple of weeks. It’s all sorted now, but it’s just left me with this paranoia.’
‘That’s understandable. So what is it you’re thinking and feeling when these things happen?’
I tell her, as best I can. I tell her about the insecurity, the fright, the sheer dread. But I’m not expecting her to say what she says next.
‘I think, if I’m honest, we probably need to recommend you for some additional treatment. You’ve been down the medication route, and you’ve done the talking therapies — very well too, I must say — but they don’t seem to be working. With your permission, I’d like to recommend you for further evaluation.’