by Keane Jessie
‘Thanks,’ she whispered.
‘Feeling better?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Take some aspirin. And lots of water. Flush it all through, yeah?’
She nodded.
‘You staying on here?’
Another nod from behind her hair.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I know it’s been bad. But it’s going to get better now.’
Milly said nothing.
‘Right. I’ll leave you to it then. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said, then looked up at him. ‘Thanks,’ she said, but he had already turned away, gone out of the bedroom door and down the stairs.
Minutes later, she heard the front door close behind him.
114
Time passes fast sometimes, when you’re having fun. When you’re not, it drags its heels and you just want it to go, to be over. That was how Belle felt when she woke up. She was in a single bed, one of a pair. A threadbare towel was draped over the pillow beneath her head. She was still wearing her rag of a summer dress. It was dry now, stained all to hell, and stiff with her blood. Her head throbbed and her face was awash with pain all down the left side. Sooner or later, the pain would go; but for now, she was in the thick of it, gripped by it, consumed by it.
She thought of her mum and cried. The tears stung her face like a hot brand. She raised a hand to touch her left cheek, then dropped it again because she was too scared to go there. Sore-eyed, agonized, she lay there and watched the first faint threads of daylight penetrate the thin curtains at the bedroom window.
It will pass, she told herself.
But right now? She didn’t believe it. She was wide awake and in pain again. Sleep was better, you couldn’t think when you were asleep. You were out of it. She wanted so much to be out of it.
‘Oh, you’re awake.’
It was the bearded man, standing in the half-open door. As he stood there, the dog slid past him and came into the bedroom.
‘Trix,’ he said warningly.
The dog bounded up onto the bed, turned in a circle and lay down at Belle’s feet, tail thumping the coverlet.
‘Looks like you got a fan,’ he said.
Belle didn’t answer. She was watching the man warily. He could be anyone. He could be a fucking serial killer, how the hell would she know? Maybe he got off on stitching girls’ faces up. Maybe he bloody enjoyed it.
‘I’ll get you some painkillers,’ he said, and was gone again, leaving the door ajar.
He was back within minutes, carrying a glass of water and a strip of paracetamols. He came over to the bed, sat on the side of it. ‘Here,’ he said, and pushed out two tablets from the silver strip. As Belle struggled to sit up, he put a hand behind her head and helped her.
‘Open,’ he said, and Belle obeyed, putting out her tongue. He put the tablets on it and handed her the glass of water. Belle took it unsteadily, washed the pills down. Lay back down, exhausted by this simple act.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ he said, and he stood up and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Belle looked down at the dog. ‘Hey Trix,’ she said feebly.
Her voice sounded more like her own again. That was good. Half your face hanging off, you weren’t going to sound good, now were you? Trix’s tail thumped the cover once, hard. Then she put her head down on her paws, her dark liquid eyes on Belle’s face, with one ear erect and the other, which looked half-chewed, flopping over. A dog was staring at Belle, and she didn’t like it.
‘How do I look?’ said Belle. ‘Good, yeah? Miss Universe, what do you think?’
With sore eyes she looked around the room. There was a padded nursing chair between the two beds, and what looked like a dressing table – but the two struts at the back of it that had drop-down hinges fitted were intended for three mirrors. There were no mirrors hanging there. There was an old-fashioned silver vanity set on top of the dressing table, two brushes – but no hand mirror. Wasn’t there always a hand mirror with those things?
Had he taken them all away so that she couldn’t see herself in them?
Oh holy Christ, how bad is it?
But she already knew the answer to that. She just wasn’t allowing herself to take it in, not yet. She couldn’t.
Once again she raised a shaking hand to her left cheek. It took every ounce of courage to do it. Her fingers touched painful swollen flesh, and the hard raised nubs of the stitches. Flinching, she quickly put her hand back down.
Belle thought of the wreckage of her life. She thought of her mum, dragged from the gatehouse and . . . and what?
And Dad! Where the hell was he?
Belle started crying again. She cried until she had no more tears left. Then she fell asleep.
115
‘What do you mean, you can’t find her? Fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you morons?’ asked Harlan, who was walking around Nula’s sitting room in irritation, glaring at Nipper and Ludo.
Everything should have been neat and tidy, but this was a loose end and he didn’t want any of those. All this hassle with Belle was holding him up. He was due back on the manor, he had business to conduct. The Air Accident people were phoning, asking to meet and discuss Charlie and Nula’s crash. Another distraction. This was all such a fucking nuisance.
‘It’s like we say, boss,’ said Ludo with a shrug. ‘We’ve looked all over the grounds, everywhere. We been up the lane, both ways. We knocked on farm doors.’
‘How many?’
‘You what?’
‘How many farm doors? There’s at least twenty smallholdings around here and a lot of larger farms too.’
‘Well not that many, I grant you, but . . .’
Harlan walked up to Ludo and he fell silent at the look in Harlan’s eyes.
‘You get out there and find that bitch, OK?’
‘She couldn’t have walked far. She was bleeding,’ said Nipper.
‘Yeah, that happens when you been in a tankful of caimans. As you useless fucking articles might find out if you’re not very bloody careful. She should never have got out of there. You silly fucker, Nipper, I told you, you should have stayed there and made sure the job was done right.’
‘We’ll keep looking boss. Don’t worry,’ said Ludo.
Harlan’s gaze held his. ‘You better check the hospitals.’
‘But, boss—’
‘If she’s managed to get some help, managed to get herself checked in somewhere, then she could start talking and it could be a problem. We don’t want that, now do we? Check the hospitals.’
116
Days were passing, Belle supposed. She’d lost all track. Trix stayed on the bed except for when she went out into the kitchen to be fed, or outside to do her business. The bearded man fed Belle cool soup, mashing up bread in it so that it was soft and didn’t pull at her stitched cheek. He made her tea and gave it to her cool, through a straw. Fed her more painkillers. She dozed and woke and dozed again, hearing sounds of someone working with tools nearby, maybe unscrewing something, but it didn’t matter.
When she began to get stronger he helped her across the room to the loo with its built-in shower cubicle and waited outside the door to be sure she wasn’t about to faint in there. While she was in there she saw what the noises had been. The bathroom cabinet door was missing.
Bet that had a mirror on it.
When nearly a week had gone since Harlan’s boys had thrown her to the caimans, the man came in carrying some clothes, Trix following in high excitement, her tail going into overdrive as Belle reached out a hand to pet her.
‘What’s all this then?’ asked Belle as Trix jumped up onto the bed, did her usual performance of treading around to get comfy, then lay down at Belle’s feet, her face fixed in a grin.
‘Clothes,’ the man said, laying them out on the counterpane. ‘They were my mum’s, might as well get some use out of them. There’s a couple of nightdresses, some dresses and a cardigan. Some underwear. A pair of h
er old jeans and – yeah, a couple of my shirts. I dunno. Probably none of it will fit.’
Belle thought the shirts definitely wouldn’t. Despite not being particularly tall, he was very broad across the shoulders, like he’d been doing weights.
‘I thought that today if you feel well enough you could get in the shower, wash your hair, put on some clean clothes. It’ll make you feel better.’
Belle stared at his face. He had very fierce eyes, dark blue. His expression could be scary, stone-hard, and the dark beard didn’t help. When she watched him move around the room, she was struck by a lean physicality about him. At first, she’d thought he was older; now she knew he wasn’t. He couldn’t be more than late twenties, early thirties.
Belle was staring at his face.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack Tavender.’
‘I’m Belle Barton.’
‘Good God,’ he said, staring at her.
‘What?’ Belle turned her right cheek toward him, uncomfortable at being stared at.
‘You’re the girl in the red BMW. The racer.’
Belle did a double take. The dark beard, the eyes with that unnerving thousand-yard stare. The look of chilly contempt that tractor driver had given to her and Harlan on the day when he had chased her along the lane in his Porsche.
‘The man on the tractor,’ she realized in surprise. ‘It was you.’
‘You and that bloke were racing along the lane like bloody fools.’
‘We weren’t racing,’ said Belle. ‘He was chasing me. He’s always been chasing me.’ She raised a hand, indicating the ruined side of her face. ‘And finally he caught me.’ Her voice broke. She should have known that with Harlan it would either end in her domination or her death. But she’d ignored the danger signals and she’d ended up like this. ‘His name’s Harlan Stone.’
Jack nodded slowly then stuck out a hand. ‘Hello, Belle.’
Belle took his hand: it felt warm and dry, and his grip was strong. ‘Hello, Jack. And thanks. For everything.’
He shrugged that off as if it was nothing.
‘Why are there no mirrors on that dressing table?’ asked Belle.
‘I didn’t . . .’ he started.
‘And the bathroom cabinet door. There was a mirror on it, yes? And you took it off.’
This time, he didn’t even attempt an answer. Their eyes locked. Belle lay back tiredly on the pillows. ‘It’s really bad. Isn’t it.’
‘Don’t think about it. It will get better.’
‘You’re a rotten liar.’
‘There’ll be scarring. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s no infection. It’s healing fine.’
‘My leg feels OK,’ said Belle.
‘That’s fine too. There might be some scars. Nothing too bad.’
Belle almost smiled. But she couldn’t manage it. The stitches felt tight when she tried, pulling her face to one side. She must look like the Joker in Batman, she thought. Oh Christ.
‘Must have given you a fright, a girl turning up ripped to shreds on your doorstep,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘You’re not ripped to shreds. You’re here and you’re alive. Everything from here on in is a bonus.’ He paused, eyeing her face. ‘Who’s this Harlan Stone then? Any relation to that Charlie Stone character who moved into the big house? The one who died along with his missus in the helicopter crash? That damned thing was a bloody nuisance, zipping in and out, worrying the livestock.’
Belle nodded. ‘Harlan’s their adopted son. He’s crazy and he’s sadistic and he keeps a lot of pet apes around him, real nasty bastards.’
‘Are you ready yet to tell me about what they did to you? And why?’ he asked.
Belle gulped down a breath. Oh Christ in heaven. The black waters closing over her head. The pressure and the pain as the caimans struck. The terror.
‘If you can’t yet, don’t worry,’ he said.
Belle took in a calmer breath, then let it go. The panicky feeling abated. But she wanted to tell him, tell someone. ‘I can do it,’ she said.
‘If you’re ready.’
‘I’m ready,’ said Belle, and she started to speak, started to tell him all about Charlie Stone and her dad who worked with him, and Charlie’s twisted viper of an adopted son, and how Harlan had pursued her all her life. When he’d finally seen her as a threat, he had thrown her in with the caimans, expecting them to finish her.
‘But they didn’t,’ she said at last. ‘I got away.’
His eyes had narrowed while she spoke. ‘You think this fucker’s going to keep looking for you? He didn’t know you managed to get out, did he?’
‘I don’t think so. It’s a miracle I did. I just kept going. But then I started to get weaker and weaker and I knew I couldn’t go on and I saw the sign for Beechwood Farm, so I came through the gate and walked up toward the house, and then I felt like I was going to pass out for sure so I went into the big barn and that’s where you found me. Or Trix did, anyway.’
He was silent for a moment, taking it all in.
‘Go and have your shower,’ he said. He stood up, Trix trailing after him, and left the room, leaving her alone.
117
They still weren’t finding her after over a week of searching. They’d checked all the hospitals for miles around, and no Belle Barton had been admitted to any of them. So probably, Nipper said – and Harlan was tempted to agree – what had happened was this: she had fallen into a deep ditch or a culvert or some damned thing, it had been raining heavily at the time and she could have been swept away, downstream, into the river and out to bloody sea, who knew? And so she wouldn’t ever be found.
‘I don’t like loose ends,’ said Harlan for about the thousandth time. ‘And I don’t like fuck-ups. It makes me nervous, thinking that people I’ve put my trust in are not performing as they should.’
‘She’s dead,’ said Ludo with a weary shrug, thinking that if Harlan had stuck around personally to see the thing finished, then they wouldn’t be having all these damned problems in the first place. Which he would not say. He liked breathing. It was fun. ‘Come on, she’s gotta be dead.’
‘Yeah, probably,’ said Harlan.
Shit, he had other things to take up his time anyway. Deals to be done, changes to be made. But Belle was a thorn in his side. He’d lusted after her for so long and now all he wanted was a neat conclusion. Belle had decided she wasn’t interested, and – worse – she’d dug up dirt on him and might blab about it. So she had to go. Sad but a fact. Fuck that bitch. Now he just wanted proof that she was gone for good.
‘You keep looking,’ he told them. ‘I got business to conduct on the manor and that’s what I’m going to carry on with right now.’
‘Sure, boss,’ said Nipper.
‘Yeah, right,’ agreed Ludo.
118
The shower did make Belle feel better, but it was odd, not seeing her reflection. She caught a faint misted glimmer of it in the showerhead but averted her eyes straight away. She wasn’t ready for that yet.
It floated into her mind again, the horror of her situation. Everything’s gone. My family. Even my looks. Everything that ever mattered, all gone, all snatched away by Harlan fucking Stone.
When she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a big towel, there was a hairdryer on the dressing table and a pair of beige loafers on the floor beside the bed. From the pile of clothing she selected a too-big black bra and some practical unsexy Sloggi underpants, then sorted out a pale blue chambray shirt and a pair of Jack’s mother’s jeans to put on. They didn’t really fit – his mum had been a tall lady, that much was clear – but they were OK around the waist, so it was fine. She turned them up at the ankles by a couple of inches, scuffed on the loafers. They didn’t fit either, they were loose on the length and narrow through the instep. She went back to the bathroom and padded the toes out with toilet paper.
Bette
r.
She picked up the ruins of her dress. It was thoroughly caked in blood, filthy with dirt. She remembered putting the thing on just weeks ago before everything had gone crazy. Remembered turning back and forth in front of her mirror in the gatehouse bedroom, admiring herself. She’d always done that, didn’t every woman?
But now she was afraid. If she saw her reflection and some monster was staring back at her, what the fuck would she do?
Freak out. She knew she would.
She went out into the kitchen. Jack was making tea, slipping bread into the toaster.
‘You want some?’ he said, turning and seeing her there.
Trix, laid out in front of the roaring fire, grinned a greeting at her.
He paused, taking in this new Belle in jeans and shirt. Belle turned her head away, hiding her cheek. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Thanks. What should I do with this?’ She held up the ruined dress.
He put two more slices of bread in the toaster. ‘We can wash it.’
Belle shook her head. She’d be reminded of what happened, every time she wore the thing. ‘I don’t want to keep it.’
‘Then put it on the fire.’ He indicated the grate, where the flames were leaping up from the crackling logs.
Belle walked forward, patted Trix and threw the dress into the fire. She watched the expensive fabric curl and burn. It was like destroying her past, watching that. Saying goodbye to the old life and maybe allowing for a new.
Allowing for what though?
For being scarred? For being ugly? She felt a shiver of apprehension, despite the fire’s heat.
