She took hold of the banister as if that could lend her any necessary strength and began to climb the stairs. She hadn’t reached the landing when she saw a crumpled sheet from a notepad lying on the topmost stair. She picked it up and unfolded it, having already seen that it was signed with Kathy’s name.
Dudley, I’ve done as I promised. All your meals are in the top freezer compartment. I’ve written what they are on them. You won’t see me all weekend or know where I’m staying, so please crack on with your writing. If this doesn’t help I don’t know how I can.
All my love,
Kathy (Mum)
XXXXXXX
How furious ought Patricia to be? At the very least Dudley could have saved her from feeling nervous; it was clear he’d read the note before dropping it or shying it away. He was standing with his back to her in a feminine bedroom that had to be Kathy’s. “Dudley,” Patricia said and stepped onto the landing.
“I’m here all right.” He swung around and thrust out his hand. She thought he was about to snatch the note, but the hand—a fist, to be precise—was directed at her face. “Let’s get properly introduced,” she heard him say, and the fist struck her chin. It felt like a knuckly club, and then at once like nothing, and so did everything else.
TWENTY-FIVE
As soon as Patricia regained consciousness she wanted to believe she had done nothing of the kind. Even the last thing she remembered—the fist slamming into her face to knock her into nothingness—was preferable to the state in which she began to find herself. It was so dark that she had to wonder if she was able to see at all. Her blood was throbbing in time with the waves of pain in her jaw, and the way its dull sound was crushed into her head made it apparent that her ears had suffered some damage too. She tried to reach for her jaw to learn how badly it was injured, only to discover that she had no hands. She might have cried out except for her lack of a mouth.
He’d removed it along with her eyes and ears. Her entire body was seized by a convulsion that felt like an attempt to give shape to a scream. Her knees thumped a cold slippery unyielding surface as her spine pressed against the opposite wall of the receptacle in which she was stored. She struggled to stretch out, but the top of her head bumped another wall, and whatever was left at the end of her legs—less than feet, its absence of sensation implied—collided with a fourth. She didn’t know if she could bear to find out any more about her situation. Every detail seemed to leave her more helpless. Perhaps she could only withdraw into herself so deep that Dudley couldn’t reach.
She remembered fighting Simon off—when words had failed to keep him at a distance, her nails in the backs of his hands and her knee in his groin had—but the memory reminded her that she was robbed of all those defences now. Worst of all was her inability to see or hear. She wouldn’t know when Dudley came for her until he set about his research, if he hadn’t already finished. All at once she felt as frail as her nerves, an impression that gathered into a mass of prickling on either side of the small of her back.
It was beyond her wrists. While it was growing close to unbearable, it showed she had hands after all. They were recapturing their circulation so as to let her know that they were bound together behind her. She strove to wrench them apart but merely succeeded in digging her knuckles into her back as her fingernails scraped the wall of the container with a squeal that she felt rather than heard. Her ankles were bound too, and as she remembered the parcel tape Dudley had bought she realised why she was unable to move her face. He’d wrapped up her head, leaving just her nostrils exposed. The oppressive darkness in which she was packaged meant that he’d used several thicknesses of tape.
She couldn’t open her eyes. When she tried, the adhesive tugged like tweezers at her eyelashes. Attempts to open her mouth simply made the skin of her lips feel in danger of parting from the flesh. She strove to open them with her tongue nonetheless until it retreated from the gluey taste. Her fingernails scrabbled in worse than frustration at the wall behind her, and all at once its hard smoothness let her identify her cramped prison. She was lying on her right side in a bath.
It had to be in the Smiths’ bathroom, but that was all she knew. She couldn’t even recall where the door was in relation to the bath. Nor did she have the faintest inkling whether the room was light or dark. Just because she felt utterly alone in the blackest hour of the night needn’t mean it had to be. All the same, she must have been unconscious for some time—perhaps long enough for Dudley to be asleep despite having captured her. Perhaps satisfaction had put him to sleep.
Or perhaps he was writing about her plight. She had to believe he wasn’t watching her if she was ever to move. If she stirred, she fancied he would let her know whether he was there. The prospect paralysed her like the nightmare that it was, and then fury at her panic gave her strength. As the prickling faded from her crossed hands she edged her feet down the bath.
Nothing prevented her. Dudley didn’t move or speak—she would surely have heard him, even through the clamour of her pulse—or touch her. However watched she might feel, she had to believe he was elsewhere. By pressing her toes against the far end of the oversized bath and her scalp against the near one she was able to twist into her back. At least she was fully dressed, although that meant a trace of moisture was dampening her T-shirt and jeans. She couldn’t take the weight on her hands for long, but neither did she want to rear up and catch her head on the tap. She raised the awkward lump of her bound feet to determine if the tap was at that end. They had just found a thin loose object that she understood to be a chain when they dislodged the plug, which fell into the bath.
She didn’t hear it fall, but she felt its impact, and the chain that trailed over her insteps on the way to sagging across her ankles. She had no idea how many minutes crawled by while she stayed immobile, wishing she could hold even the shaky breaths in her nostrils still. Her tongue bruised itself against her clenched teeth. When the ache in her trapped hands began to turn to agony as her knuckles seemed to grow embedded in her back, she managed to grasp that however long she waited, her sense of being observed mightn’t lessen. Surely Dudley would have intervened by now if he’d heard any noise. As gingerly as her blindness and deafness would allow, she eased her feet from under the chain. Once she was certain she was free of it, she set about inching up the bath.
How much noise might she be making that she was unable to hear? Perhaps her heels were squeaking against the surface on which they kept losing their hold. Surely nobody outside the room would hear that. There was no point in being afraid to make a sound. She ought to climb out of the bath as fast as she was able. She would have enough problems once she had.
She thrust herself backwards, clawing at the surface underneath her back for extra purchase. In seconds her spine was propped against the end of the bath. She bent her knees again and levered her shoulders over the edge. Another shove with her feet jerked her bound hands up to it. She clutched at it with her fingertips and felt her nails start to bend away from the flesh. Before she could raise her torso the inch that would let her take a firmer grip, her feet lost their hold and the base of her spine thumped the bath.
Her eyes and mouth struggled to widen inside the tape, which plastered tears against her eyelids. Even when the pain dulled and faded she sat still. She didn’t know how audible the impact might have been. Counting slowly to one hundred, and then to another, failed to dissipate the impression of being eyed like a specimen. If nothing would rid her of it, she mustn’t let it weigh on her. She lifted her torso as high as she could despite the renewed ache at the bottom of her spine, pressing her feet against the floor of the bath and heaving with all her strength. In a moment her fingers were clamped to the edge.
They started trembling at once. She couldn’t hold on for long. She gripped so hard that every finger throbbed, and so did the thumbs at the small of her back as she attempted to swing her legs over the side. The task was even harder than she’d feared. If she had been able to support
herself on one leg while the other made its bid for freedom she was certain she would have succeeded, but both legs bound together were more than twice as cumbersome. As she strained to hook them over the side of the bath she was suddenly afraid they would be blocked by the wall of the room. They fell short of the edge, and her left foot slid down the inside of the bath.
She managed to set it down with almost no impact. She took a breath that dragged smells of glue and plastic into her head. With a final effort that bruised her fingers she grasped the edge at her back and supported her entire body on them while she hauled it up. She was shaking from head to foot by the time her left ankle scraped over the side of the bath, but at least she’d encountered no wall. She was going to have to let herself down gradually onto the bathroom floor, otherwise there was far too much risk of alerting her captor. As soon as both feet were over the side she rested her ankles on it, though it dug into them, and settled most of her weight on her trapped hands. She had to bear the posture while she regained some strength, but she couldn’t stay like that for long. She was grasping the edge so that she didn’t topple helplessly onto the floor, and her hands were growing painfully numb, when she heard Dudley’s voice.
She redoubled her grip so as not to fall and strained her ears. He’d sounded so distant that she had been unable to distinguish his few words. Had his mother come home? The possibility felt so much like hope that Patricia almost let her feet drop to the floor to make her presence known. Instead she set about swinging her legs over the edge. She might not have shifted even an inch when an object settled on top of her head.
It was hard and rough. It was the sole of a shoe. It was Dudley’s, and as he pushed her down, the thought that he’d been viewing all her efforts was almost worse. Her position cramped her stomach into an aching lump until he kicked her legs into the bath. “Clumsy,” he said in her ear.
Did he expect a response? She thought his face was continuing to hover over hers. “Better try and get comfortable,” he said. “You won’t be going anywhere.”
His voice was both louder and somewhat more distant. Patricia emitted a mumble, mostly through her nose. Its inarticulacy didn’t matter; indeed, it might lure him close enough for her to butt him. Surely if she did so hard enough he might be knocked out until she somehow escaped. But when he said “Don’t understand you” his voice was still more remote.
Patricia struggled into a sitting position and tried again with even less of an attempt at speech. “Sounds like you’re buried alive,” Dudley said. “That’s a help. That could go in a story.”
This time she made all the vocal noise she could. It was high and protesting but not, she wanted to believe, as uncontrolled as a scream. When her breath gave out at last he said “I can put that in too.”
She repeated the protest and began to swing her feet back and forth, thumping the sides of the bath. However muffled the sounds were to her, mightn’t the neighbours hear them? Her hopes seemed to be confirmed at the same time as dashed when he trod on her ankles. “Can’t have you breaking anything,” he said. “Looks as if you aren’t as well brought up as you try and make everyone think. You’re like the others after all.”
As she felt him undoing her trainers she squeezed her feet together and threw her upper body forward in case she could injure him. It was no use; her legs were too outstretched. She couldn’t even prevent Dudley from pulling off her shoes. She heard a faint thud as he dropped them or flung them away, and then he finished treading on her ankles. “Thump all you want now,” he said. “Thump like a rabbit if you like and I’ll write it. Nobody’s going to hear you but me, however much noise you make.”
Patricia grew quiet and motionless, though very far from calm. If she gave him absolutely nothing to observe, might he be unable to work? Could that mean he would have to let her go, or would he torment her until she inspired him? The notion made her body clench around her stomach, and it was almost a relief to hear him speak until she understood what she was saying. “Don’t worry, you won’t ever be alone. I’m sleeping in here.”
Did he resent it? Just now the worst of being blind and virtually deaf was her inability to be sure of his tone or see his expression. It was pretty nearly as bad to have no idea of the time of day. Surely it was night if he was talking about sleeping, and so it couldn’t be long before her parents wondered where she was. If they rang her, might Dudley be careless enough to answer? She no longer had her mobile, and so he must have it. In any case, Vincent and Colin knew she had gone off with him and would be bound to tell the police when questioned. It couldn’t be long before the police came to the house. She did her best to believe this with such force that it fended off his voice. “I’ll never be far away,” he said. “I’ll be thinking up plenty this weekend.”
TWENTY-SIX
At last Kathy slept, but never for long. Far too many thoughts were jostling for space in her head. Watch Out For The Wife hadn’t proved to be the kind of comedy she was expecting. A young Liverpool woman drowned her violent drunken husband while they were on holiday in Tenerife, only to decide once she returned home that some of her friends’ husbands deserved putting down, and eventually husbands of strangers too. Although she was arrested in the end, she looked more than ready for a sequel. Quite a few of the women in the auditorium cheered her actions, and several of the couples around Kathy came out arguing. She supposed that might be the point, in which case it didn’t concern her. She was too worried that the film might make life harder for Mr Killogram.
Surely there was room for two films about Liverpudlian serial killers. The woman hadn’t convinced her half as much as he did. Kathy wished she knew how Dudley’s research was helping him. Visiting the scene of a death ought to have given him ideas, but would he be able to use them? Mightn’t he encounter the same problem he’d had with the girl at Moorfields? Kathy had switched on her phone as soon as she’d left the cinema, but there was no message—nothing from him.
She lay in the narrow bed under the hotel window that admitted shouts and the smashing of bottles and the labouring of taxis up the hill. She oughtn’t to keep feeling she was the only person Dudley could turn to. She mustn’t be jealous if he found a girlfriend. She was sure that he was more interested in Patricia Martingale than he thought his mother realised—and all at once she was wide awake and staring up at the mocking twinkle of a star. So much had happened since Dudley had found her work on his computer that she’d forgotten she had invited Patricia to the house.
They’d agreed that Patricia would wait for her call, but Kathy’s address book with the number in it was at home. Surely Patricia wouldn’t try to contact her until at least mid-morning if at all. Kathy had to head that off in case the girl phoned her house. She dragged her legs out of the hot tight bed and consigned some of the effects of her nervousness to the toilet before calling the first enquiry line that came to mind. The number for Martingale in Hoylake was ex-directory, a woman in India informed her.
They should know it at the Mersey Mouth. Would anybody be at the office yet? When she obtained the number, Patricia answered at it. She was only a machine, apparently too replete with messages to accept one. Kathy took refuge in the shower, but the cramped cubicle made her feel more imprisoned than refreshed. She dressed and tried the magazine again without success, then knelt on the bed as if to pray, in fact to watch the empty street extinguish its lights beneath long thin gilded clouds. Once the sun began to hurt her eyes she stood up.
In the basement a sullen waitress brought her tea and faintly tinted bread to represent toast, and more tardily a plate scattered with a sausage and a pinkish rasher, not to mention a fried egg with a burst yolk beside a partially flayed tomato. Kathy’s calls kept tasting of all this as she climbed the stairs and lingered in her room. She’d lost count of her attempts, and was wondering if she should walk across town to the office, by the time a live voice answered, though not one she had anticipated or was likely to welcome. “North and south, it’s Mersey Mouth. East
and west, we’re the best.”
“May I speak to Patricia Martingale?”
“I reckon she’s having a lie-in this morning. Are we expecting Pat?” Monty shouted, and translated an inaudible response into “We don’t think we’ll be seeing her today.”
“Then may I have her number, please?”
“Don’t know if we give them out. I’m not the receptionist, you may have noticed. I’m just the poet that picked up the phone. Do we tell anybody anybody’s number, Walt?” he asked in order to transmit “Who wants to know?”
Kathy saw that she ought to have foreseen this, and felt trapped and stupid. “Dudley’s mother.”
“It’s never Kath.”
“I should say it has to be. I’m the only one who went through having him.”
“I had a bit to do with it, didn’t I? As I remember I already said sorry for not wanting to let them down at the gig I was doing the night he came.”
“I’m sure you must have. Are you able to tell me the number? It could be quite urgent.”
“What are you after her for? Is it something to do with Dud?”
“It’s an arrangement I have to break.”
“Girly stuff, is it? Didn’t Pat want you having her number?”
“It isn’t to hand where I am.”
“All right, Kath, no need for your office voice.” Somewhat less to her he said “It’s Dud’s mam.”
“I guess it should be fine. Go ahead.”
After almost enough of a pause to goad Kathy into demanding the reason Monty said “We’ve got her home and a mobile, Kath.”
“If it isn’t too much trouble I’d like both.”
“Got some scribbling material?”
“Certainly.”
Secret Story Page 23