by Cara Hunter
I hear the intake of breath. ‘Actually, sir, I don’t think it can.’
* * *
‘We drove off really fast. Not for long though – just a few minutes. Then we stopped again and he dragged me out of the back. First we were on something hard and then on grass – it was uneven and all squishy in the rain. I could feel my feet getting wet. And then he pushed me inside somewhere and I heard a door shut and it went dark.’
‘It must have been completely terrifying,’ says Somer softly.
Faith looks down, her lips trembling. ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’
There are tears spilling down her cheeks, and Somer reaches across the table and takes the girl’s hands in her own. ‘You are being incredibly brave. Not much more, I promise.’
Faith takes a deep breath. ‘He pushed me on the floor. On my back. It was cold. Gritty. Then I felt him pulling my skirt up. I was screaming and kicking but he grabbed hold of my legs and held them down while he dragged off my knickers.’
The tears are falling fast now and her cheeks are red.
The two women exchange a glance. It’s what they feared. And they have no choice: they have to press her.
‘Faith,’ says Somer gently, ‘I’m about to ask you something very sensitive. Very personal. I’m sorry I have to ask, and please believe me that I wouldn’t if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.’
There’s a pause; she holds the girl’s hands a little tighter. ‘Can you tell me – have you had gender reassignment surgery?’
Faith isn’t looking at them. She shakes her head. ‘Not yet. Later, maybe.’
‘Do you think the person who did this – do you think it’s possible he knew?’
Faith looks up at them now. Her eyes widen. ‘You mean, was he surprised? You’re actually asking me that?’
Somer feels her face flush hot. ‘I’m so sorry, Faith – I didn’t mean that to sound as crass as it did. But you know why I’m asking – it would make a difference. To what sort of crime it was. To how we narrow down who might have done it.’
Faith wipes her tears away with the back of her hand. They wait, give her time. Somer can hear barking, somewhere outside. High-pitched. Petulant. Probably that bloody chihuahua again.
‘Who else knows you’re transgender, Faith?’ says Everett at last. ‘Apart from your family?’
Her voice breaks a little. ‘No one here. I haven’t told anybody.’
‘Not even your friends? Your best friend?’
She looks away. ‘I don’t want people looking at me and seeing a boy dressed as a girl. Staring at me trying to work out which bits give it away. I want them to see me.’
‘What about where you used to live. Basingstoke, wasn’t it? Did you keep in touch with anyone there?’
She shrugs. ‘I wanted to start again. Leave all that crap behind.’
She doesn’t need to explain: both women can imagine what it must have been like.
Faith is fiddling with her necklace again, running her fingers along the letters of her name.
‘It was a great choice,’ says Somer, gesturing towards it. ‘It’s a lovely name. Unusual.’ She almost says like you, but stops herself. She’d have meant it as a compliment but it might not have sounded like that.
The girl blushes a little. ‘Mum would have liked Danielle. Or Dannii, like Dannii Minogue. She said it’d be easier if it wasn’t such a big change. But I wanted it to be a big change. I wanted everything to be different.’ There’s pride in her face now. And defiance. ‘That’s why I chose Faith. It was about being true to who I really am.’
‘And there really isn’t anyone in Oxford who knows?’ says Everett. ‘No one who could have targeted you because of your past?’
Faith shakes her head, ‘No. No one.’
The two women are avoiding each other’s eyes but they’re both thinking the same thing. Was the attacker as convinced as everyone else by the way Faith looks? Or did he know her secret and target her for that very reason? Either way, does Faith know how close she came – how much danger she could have been in?
But the look on the girl’s face answers that question. She knows full well. She’s known all along. This is a reality she’s lived with half her life.
‘So can you tell us what happened next? After what you just told us?’ Even Ev, who’s been doing this sort of thing for years and has specialist training in dealing with the victims of sex crimes, shies away from the actual words.
Faith slips her arms round herself, pulling the jumper tighter. Her hands are shaking.
‘Did he hurt you, Faith?’ says Somer softly.
Faith shakes her head. ‘Not – like that. But I thought he was going to. I felt him coming close – I could hear the breathing and then he grabbed at my hair and it really hurt and I could feel some of the extensions ripping out and I started kicking again and I felt it – the knife – on my skin – running down my stomach – and –’
She’s crying again.
‘It’s OK, take your time.’
She blinks away the tears, wipes her eyes and looks up. Her lip is trembling but she holds their gaze. ‘I wet myself, OK? I thought he was going to hurt me – down there – and I wet myself.’
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
12.17
Alex pours me a glass of juice and leans back against the worktop. The remains of her lunch are on a plate on the draining board. Chicken salad: brown rice, lean protein, leafy greens – she’s ticking all the boxes. But there’s too much left on the plate and her face looks thin. Thinner than I’d like.
‘The health visitor just texted me to say she’s running late so as long as the mysterious Mr Asante is on time, we may just wing it.’
She’s goading me now. She’s been curious about Asante ever since I first mentioned him.
‘He’s not mysterious, Alex. He’s just not that easy to read. Not like Gislingham –’
Her smile broadens; she’s very fond of Gis.
‘Or Quinn.’
A grimace this time. ‘Thank the Lord for that. This town ain’t big enough for more than one Quinn.’
I move over to the kettle; Alex’s current beverage of choice is cherry bakewell green tea. We must be draining Waitrose dry.
‘I’d just prefer not to have anyone from work coming here right now. I haven’t told anyone yet – about the baby.’
Alex squints down at her belly. ‘OK, I’ll make sure I stay sitting down.’ She makes a rueful face. ‘Let’s just hope he’s not much of a detective.’
‘I’m sorry – I know it’s a bloody pain in the neck, but he insisted on coming –’
She reaches out and touches me gently on the cheek. ‘Don’t look so worried. I was joking.’
By the time the doorbell rings Alex is curled up on the sofa with her tea. She grins at me as I go past, and pulls a cushion on to her lap.
Asante is on the doorstep. He has a laptop under one arm. Immaculate suit, white shirt, deep-red woven silk tie. I can see the edge of the label: Burberry. It occurs to me suddenly that a lot of Quinn’s dislike may be nothing more than preener’s envy.
I step back to let him in, and he waits, courteously, for me to close the door.
‘We’ll go through to the kitchen.’
I steadfastly refuse to look at Alex as we go by, but I sense a minute slowing of his pace behind me, and then he says, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you.’
‘Occupational hazard,’ she says; I can hear the laughter in her voice.
In the kitchen Asante refuses tea but accepts water, and I find myself reaching for the bottle in the fridge rather than just running the tap. I suspect he has that effect on people quite a lot.
He sets up his laptop on the island and the screen opens to the same bland factory-issue screensaver I have on mine. Gislingham has his toddler son, dressed in a Chelsea strip; Ev has her cat; Quinn has some tropical beach he’d like us all to think he’s been to. But Asante’s is quietly an
d deliberately anonymous. Another fact for my mental file.
He pulls up a stool and I realize suddenly that I’ve left the ultrasound picture the midwife gave us on the island, barely three feet from where Asante is now taking a seat. I reach for it quickly and put it in my back pocket. If Asante notices, he gives no sign.
He finishes with his keyboard and turns it towards me. It takes a few minutes for it to hit me, what exactly it is I’m reading. But when it does it’s like an iron bar to the throat.
* * *
The wind has got up again by the time they park the car. Everett turns round and looks at the girl. She’s in the back seat, looking out of the window. She’d agreed to come, but now they’re here she looks less sure. Though at least there’s hardly anyone else around: it’s the middle of the day and the Marston Ferry Road allotments are practically deserted. The only life Ev can see is two elderly chaps in almost identical caps and sweaters, sharing a thermos and a vape on a bench by the skips.
‘Are you still OK to do this, Faith?’ she asks.
‘It’s fine,’ she says quickly, pushing open the door. ‘Let’s just get it over with before Mum gets back and I have to start explaining where I’ve been.’
Somer, meanwhile, has got out of the car and is examining the ground. A few yards away there are deep tyre tracks where someone has driven off fast. And recently. She looks up at the clouds – they’re lucky these marks are still here and they’ll need their luck to hold for just a bit longer: forensics need to get a record of this before it rains again. She gets her phone out and walks a few paces away to put in a call to Alan Challow. The ground around her is thick with sandy red mud. The same mud they found splattered over the shoes they now have sealed in an evidence bag in the back of the car.
Faith is staring. At the upturned wheelbarrows, the ramshackle sheds, the bare earth, the dull twiggy plants. Everything seems either dead or withered.
She shivers suddenly. And it isn’t just the wind. ‘I think I know why he let me go. I remember now – there were sirens – I heard sirens – they were getting closer and closer. That’s when he left.’
So that explains it, thinks Everett. Out here, with no one around to hear or help, it’s little short of a miracle Faith’s attacker didn’t finish what he started. The driver of that emergency vehicle is an accidental hero.
Somer walks slowly back towards them, her boots crunching on the patches of gravel. She nods a message to Everett: CSI are on their way.
‘So what happened after you heard the siren?’ asks Ev.
Faith glances at her. ‘I heard him open the shed door and a few minutes later the sound of an engine and then the van drove away. Fast. Like the wheels were spinning.’
‘And then?’
Faith takes a deep breath. ‘I just started screaming, hoping someone would come. I didn’t know where I was – I didn’t know no one could hear me.’
Somer tries not to imagine what that was like – lying there, the bag around your face, no underwear, the panic as you struggle to breathe –
‘It wasn’t on that tight,’ says Faith, guessing her thoughts. ‘The bag.’ She bites her lip. ‘I thought, afterwards, that he can’t have wanted me to die. Not really. Not if he left it that loose.’
Or perhaps he just didn’t want it to be over too quickly, thinks Ev. She feels her jaw tighten; they need to find this bastard, and fast.
‘How did you escape?’
‘I managed to squirm about against the ground and drag the bag off that way. That’s when I realized it was a shed. There was garden equipment and stuff. I looked about a bit and managed to find a pair of secateurs. I wedged them against the bench and tried to cut the ties but I kept dropping them. It took ages.’
‘Which shed was it, Faith? Can you show us?’
‘It was that one,’ she says, pointing. ‘Over there. The one with the barrow outside.’
‘What about the bag – do you know where it went?’
‘It’s probably still there – I didn’t take it. It was a Tesco one. If that helps.’
Somer pulls out her gloves and starts towards the shed.
‘We need to preserve the scene,’ explains Everett. ‘There might be DNA. Or fingerprints.’
‘I think he was wearing gloves,’ says Faith gloomily. ‘His hands felt all plasticky.’
‘Like rubber gloves, you mean, those Marigold things?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, sort of fatter than that. Bigger. Perhaps gardening gloves or something.’ She sighs. ‘So there won’t be any fingerprints, will there.’
‘He’ll have messed up somehow, just you wait. And that’s how we’ll catch him.’
‘I kept hoping someone would come,’ says the girl softly. ‘But no one did. No one ever does, do they? Not when it matters. Not when you really need them.’
* * *
* * *
Adam Fawley
2 April 2018
14.05
When I get back to the incident room there’s a map up on the board. Thumbtacks show where Faith lives, where she was abducted, where she was found. Mute but insistent.
Asante is sitting quietly at his desk. I asked him not to say anything until I got back, until all the team are here. But now they are.
I catch Asante’s eye and he gets to his feet.
‘OK, everyone, can I have your attention, please. There’s something we all need to see.’
People look up, register the fact that Asante is linking his iPad up to the projector. Ev’s curious, Baxter’s sceptical, Quinn’s downright irritated and doing very little to hide it.
Asante fires up the screen and navigates to the page. I don’t look at it; I don’t need to. I’ve seen it already. But I watch their faces change as they realize what they’re looking at.
Seen that titbitch on TV? – another roastie riding the cocksucking carousel
submitted 2 days ago by supremegentlemen89
17 comments share hide report
Only good femoid is a dead femoid spread their legs ok then no wot I mean
submitted 2 days ago by suckingthatblackpiller
10 comments share hide report
We need to scare these sluts – I mean acid-in-your-fucking-face TERRORISE the c*nts
submitted 1 day ago by justyouraveragecumpanzeee
35 comments share hide report
The fukking game is rigged from the start – 20% of Chadfukkers getting 80% of the fux
submitted 1 day ago by proudtobeaunowot
24 comments share hide report
Dont have to be that way mate – all these whores and feminazis fantasize about getting raped. Ud be doing them a favour
submitted 17 hours ago by furiousmadomegger
22 comments share hide report
U know whats worse – those fucking shemales that’s who – they deserve everything they get
submitted 16 hours ago by downwiththegynocracy
35 comments share hide report
No kidding – my mate grabbed a hot cunt only to find she was packing a dick
submitted 9 hours ago by YeltobYob
6 comments share hide report
* * *
‘How the hell do you get to know about this?’ says Gislingham. He can scarcely believe what he’s looking at, and I can tell you now, he’s not the only one.
Asante shrugs. ‘We had an incident last year in Brixton. A twenty-three-year-old woman was attacked by a bloke who’d asked her out and been knocked back. He was a bit of a loner, obsessed with gaming, you know the type. Turned out he stalked her for weeks afterwards, online and off, and when we checked his PC he’d been logging on to known Incel sites all that time. I was on the case, so I ended up knowing a certain amount about it. That’s how I found this – I knew where to look.’
Quinn gives him a look that says smart arse, and I give Quinn one that says takes one to know one.
Baxter meanwhile is frowning. Thus far the internet has been his uncontested domain an
d he’s clearly more than a little miffed at this sudden incursion.
‘Incel as in what, precisely?’ he asks.
‘Involuntary Celibate,’ says Asante. ‘Men who can’t get enough sex – or any sex – and blame women for withholding it from them. As well as the alpha males who get more than their fair share. That’s what the bloke on this board is referring to. Incels call men like that Chads.’
Quinn flushes a little at this, but if he starts getting called Chad in the canteen I suspect he’s not going to be doing much complaining.
‘And of course their own pathetic chauvinist inadequacies have nothing whatsoever to do with it,’ says Ev acidly.
There are a couple of half-hearted laughs at this, but Asante’s face is like stone. ‘This is way beyond casual sexism.’ He gestures at the screen. ‘This is just a sample of what’s out there, and believe me, there’s a hell of a lot worse if you know where to look. The hosting sites keep closing these boards down, but they just spring up somewhere else.’
‘Don’t you just love the internet,’ says Somer bitterly. ‘Helping psychopaths make new friends.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ says Asante, holding her gaze. ‘Our attacker in Brixton – he wasn’t just having a harmless vent with other losers. It’s like any other type of radicalization – these people egg each other on. Each round of replies got angrier and more violent. Right up until the day he threw a can of bleach at the girl, after one of his online pals told him to “burn the cum-dumpster – let’s see how many fucks she gets if she’s got no face”.’
Somer has gone pale; Everett has her hand to her mouth. They don’t say anything; they don’t need to.
‘So what makes you think our man is part of this shit?’ says Quinn. ‘I mean, it’s disgusting and all that,’ he says quickly, ‘of course it is. But the scum who spend their lives on these boards – it’s all bloody talk. That story about his “mate” – it’s just a load of bollocks. Doesn’t mean he actually did anything –’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Baxter darkly. ‘Sounds suspiciously like “asking for a friend” to me.’
Asante turns to him. ‘I’ve seen at least one Incel talking about abducting a woman and holding her captive to rape and torture. And no, that doesn’t mean he went ahead and did it, but the line between fantasy and actuation can get very thin here.’