by Sarah Till
I stood up and turned to leave.
“Well, you know where I am, don’t you? You have my mobile number. Just call me anytime, any decisions to be made. I need to get rid of that house as soon as possible.”
Henry nodded and I left. I walked outside the building and reeled at the latest contorted piece of information from the police. I leaned against the cold wall and craved nicotine. I could taste the harshness of my first cigarette and the silky smoke in front of my face as I exhaled. I scanned the road for a shop and set off for a newsagent and was stalled only by my mobile phone ringing. I zipped open my bag and ducked into a doorway.
“Virginia Munro?”
I used my work voice in case it was someone from the office being nosey.
“DI Payne, Virginia.”
I gulped again.
“Oh, hello. What can I do for you? Detective Inspector.”
I mimicked Henry’s addressing tones, hoping it would make me seem less of a victim.
“We have some CCTV evidence that we would like you to look at. I just spoke to your solicitor and he told me that you were thinking of going on holiday.”
I frowned. Was he trying to stop me?
“Yes, this afternoon I’m off to somewhere far away where no one can bother me.”
He paused slightly and I could hear him breathing hard.
“Well, as I said, I have some CCTV footage of the night you disappeared and I wondered if you have an hour just now to run through it. I could meet you at your local station in about twenty minutes.”
I sighed. I didn’t really want to do this right now, but what harm could it do?
“OK. But I can only stay two hours at the most. It’s eleven now and I have to be back at home for one o’clock.”
“OK. I’ll see you at Westminster Police Station in twenty minutes.”
The phone clicked off and I started to walk. My legs were still heavy, but I figured that the sitting down in Henry’s office had rested me enough to walk to the police station. I took it slowly and in no time, I stood in front of the double doors. DI Payne was in the reception area.
“Virginia. This way.”
He led me into the bowels of the station and we sat in a stark room, almost identical to the one where I had been told of my mother’s death. A WPC sat in the corner of the room.
“What’s this CCTV?”
I was eager to get away the moment I sat down. DI Payne fidgeted with the remote control and a frozen image eventually lit the screen of the overhead TV.
“So how long do you plan to be away? We might need a statement from you.”
I turned to face him full on.
“I will be away about a week. And I won’t be giving you a statement as you have arrested the wrong people.”
DI Payne’s expression changed from irritated to angry.
“Look. We have evidence to support our arrests. And there is nothing to implicate either of the people you have accused of this crime. As I told your solicitor, we have eliminated them from our enquiries. Now, if you can just watch this footage and see if you recognise anything or anyone.”
I folded my arms and the screen flicked into life. I watched as a few people passed the static camera that gave an overview of the station opening, including the toilet door. The station was quiet and the digital readout on the bottom of the screen read 01.05. Payne speeded up the footage and at 02.15 I saw a man walk from under the camera dragging a person. It was a few minutes before I realised that the limp figure was me. The man was medium build and had dark features shielded by a woollen hat, pulled down over his eyes. His complexion looked swarthy and dark and despite dragging the lifeless body he kept his head down. He wore light trousers and a long, dark jacket. He dragged me over to the toilet and pushed the door open. Fifteen minutes later he emerged. Two people had been in and out in that time. The man walked toward the cameras, his head down and his shoulders hunched. My blood ran cold as I recognised the swagger, even in the dim light.
“That’s Steve. That’s Swiss Steve, my ex-husband.”
DI Payne turned to me and drew back his lips in disgust.
“Virginia. Throughout this case you have tried to blame everything on either John Baxter or Steven Munro. Yet both men have perfectly good explanations of where they were when all the crimes were committed. I understand that you have been through a terrible ordeal...”
I interjected here.
“So, at least you’re not saying I tried to top myself?”
He sighed and made a clicking noise with his teeth. The WPC shifted uneasily in the chair.
“No. Virginia. I accept that you have been assaulted. I simply don’t believe that it was either John Baxter or Steven Munro who did it.”
“But that’s Steve there. I was married to him for fifteen years. I would recognise that walk and that build anywhere. And it’s certainly within his range. And that would explain the... the...”
Payne shook his head.
“Go on. Let’s hear it all then.”
I became serious.
“The assault. It would be something to get back at me. While we were married, I didn’t often have sex with him. So he... beat me. Not after the children. Because I knew he had been with someone else. Well, lots of women. I could smell the perfume and see the stray hairs. I didn’t think it was my fucking mother he was seeing, but there you go.”
Payne looked at me. He needed no words to convey his feelings. Written all over his face was ‘and is it any wonder?’
I stood to leave.
“Well, seeing as we have nothing in common in this investigation, that we can’t agree on anything, I think I should go. Once again, John Baxter and Sandra Reid killed my mum. Then they drugged me and left me for dead. Then Steve joined them to cover it up. But you, on the other hand, seem to think that it was some kind of Al-Qaeda plot to rid the world of two generations of Masons, and all because of a letter my mum wrote to the Times. Do you actually have any forensic evidence?”
Payne reddened and opened the door.
“I’ll be in touch. Have a nice holiday.”
I walked down the corridor unsteadily. It had been Steve. Why had I ever doubted it? I flashed involuntarily back to the many arguments we had about sex. Like any newly married couple, we had gone at it hammer and tongs for about six months. Then, with my realisation of what Swiss Steve actually was and with his realisation that he was bored with me, his sexual demands became ever increasingly bizarre. I struggled to keep up with him. With my new-found eagerness to be a good wife, I tried to meet his demands but I was so tired and sore that it became impossible and I eventually produced a roll-call of excuses in my mind not to sleep with him. Of course, we did have sex occasionally and produced two children and they were my saving grace. Swiss Steve knew nothing about childbirth and believed me when I told him that we couldn’t have sex for a year after each birth.
Even so, as the children got older and Swiss Steve developed a penchant for cocaine, his demands grew and soon he was spending all his nocturnal hours watching porn then begging me to replicate the scenes. He insisted that I watched it with him, but to me it was either a badly constructed comedy or a sick display of the oppressed women.
By the time the children were school age I was sexually confused. I had expected us to be making love, having a growing sexual relationship where we would please each other. Swiss Steve was out for all he could get. I had never experienced an orgasm, although I had faked them many times, using the porn films as my guideline for the expressions and random noises I was supposed to make. It was strange to remember this time now, so alien to me, where I lived in fear of my husband touching me. His sex was rough and he would tell me how much I liked it in a drug-fuelled, chuntering conversation with himself as I lay there, unable to escape for fear an argument might wake the kids, or worse, he would be angry with me. It went on for years, with no way to stop him. I argued with myself every day, telling myself I would tell someone what was going on, knowin
g it was wrong to put myself through it, but on searching my resources, I found no one who would understand.
Breaking point came when Swiss Steve arrived home, white as a newly washed sheet, and became hysterically angry. His clothes were blood-splattered and he hid them under the floorboards. I asked him over and over what was wrong, what had he done? In the morning, when I switched on the radio and heard about the shooting, I knew immediately. I knew he had killed someone. I told him that I knew and he didn’t answer. We watched the television news with Shiralee and Jupiter and the woman whose husband had been shot held her three young children and cried in front of the camera. Steve ran upstairs and we could all hear him retch as he vomited in the bathroom.
We didn’t have sex for nine months following that. Each time the situation arose, I turned away, adamant in my own mind that I would never sleep with a murderer but unable to vocalise my opinion. After all, now I knew what he was capable of. Finally, he crept into our bedroom one night when I was asleep. His drug-induced chattering to himself woke me and I lay there frozen, pretending to still sleep.
“Frigid bitch. Frigid bitch.”
He sat up on the bed and I looked at him. His eyes were wild and he seemed delirious. I thought about leaving him and taking the children. I thought about my life without him.
“I want a divorce.”
He laughed loudly at my statement.
“Frigid fucking bitch.”
“I want a divorce, Steve. I want you out of this house. Leave me alone.”
Swiss Steve gripped my arm tightly.
“With pleasure. You’re a fucking waste of time. But don’t think you can have the children. I’m having them.”
I gasped.
“They’re not objects, Steve. Anyway, how will you look after them? They belong here with me.”
“Have it your way, Jinny. But I’ll get you one day.”
He stood over me. I knew that he could have bashed my brains in there and then, as it was within his range. I also knew that he wasn’t threatening to beat me. Swiss Steve knew that to intimidate me he would have to threaten me with the unspoken possibility that had reigned over our marriage; his ability to assault me over and over again and get away with it.
At the time, I had fantasised over how I would eventually tell the police, how, when we divorce, I would tell him that I would report him to the police if he ever came near me again. Every time we met he had leered at me, much to Ellis’ annoyance, and I knew full well what was in his mind. It was the silent threat of what he was capable of. On the day of our divorce, I didn’t attend court. Henry told me that Swiss Steve attended and stood silently as the decree absolute was declared. He had come around to the house later and taken the children out to a fast-food restaurant. When he dropped them off, I could hardly face him, but he grabbed my arm and guided me out onto the front step. His face changed in a second from the doting father to leering lunatic as he pressed himself against me. I felt his hand between my legs and I flinched.
“I’ll get you, Jinny, this isn’t over. I’ll get you.”
The amazing thing, I mused now, was that I had never shared this experience with anyone. It was solely between Swiss Steve and me. In all the time he had slept with other women, abused me verbally in front of people, had an affair with my mother, corrupted my children and now sided with my mother’s murderer, I had never found the courage to tell another person what he had done to me. The shame of the abhorrent sexual acts, the fact that I went along with it for so long, the truth that I concealed his murderous guilt and the effect it would have on my future relationships, should it come out into the open, scared the shit out of me. I had buried it deep in my psyche with all the insane information about my mother and father. When people asked my why we divorced, I told them about the superficial arguing and the fights over the children. After all, this was enough to justify a divorce. What if I told them the truth?
I never did tell anyone the truth. Now, this would make it more difficult for someone to believe me. I reasoned that the right to report a crime should be open-ended, but I also knew that in the real world, this wasn’t the case unless you were prepared for a huge legal battle. No one in their right mind would want their sex life to be revealed to a prying courtroom, and Swiss Steve was right on the button with this knowledge. This didn’t help my cause now. I knew it was Swiss Steve who had helped John Baxter, who had carried me to the toilets and assaulted me.
As the moment became clearer, I realised that it had been obvious all along. Of course John Baxter hadn't carried me to Victoria station. Of course he hadn't shot me up with heroin. If he had, I would be dead. He had trusted Swiss Steve, so obviously full of bitterness and hate, to dispose of me. When it came to the crunch, Swiss Steve just couldn't resist carrying out his darkest promise. He got me. In the most bizarre of circumstances when I wasn't even conscious, completely unable to defend myself, he got me. He carried out his sick promises, probably too full of drugs himself to rape me. He had used just enough heroin, but not enough to kill me. This new level of Swiss Steve's deprivation made me reel. As the reeling intensified, it turned to dread as I momentarily entertained the thought that he didn't kill me because he couldn't. In his warped mindset of 'me and him', where he had refused to break off our relationship despite our divorce, he was still in love with me. Had I mistaken his despising me, his thinly disguised threats and his eternal monopolisation of our offspring for something it was not? All this time, all the time I had berated him for murdering a man, for his addictions, for corrupting the children, for sleeping with my mother, had I taken an equal part in this relationship where he had, finally, been given a chance to kill me but could not? To be fair, with all his underworld connections, I could have been sinking to the bottom of a river at any given moment. I had assumed that he liked his little game, that he was enjoying seeing me squirm away from his sweaty, alcohol-ridden grasp.
I had never envisaged that he was in pain and that he still harboured any positive feelings for me. Bitterness, nipping at his desire for me and for our relationship, hatred in the long term and the final battle over the ground of who could hurt the other most. When it came to the final scene, he just couldn't do it. He had done what he could to appease his base desires, 'his right as my husband' that he had imposed on me for so many long years, then left me not for dead. He must have known that I would realise it was him, but was relying on my silence, just like I had been silent all these years. I couldn’t prove it and the police didn’t believe me. He had fulfilled his promise to get me and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. He knew, I knew, but no one else would believe it. Even Ellis was sick of the sound of his name.
I started to walk towards the tube and the whole episode threatened to slip through the mesh of my consciousness and drop back into the container that lay on the underside of my soul marked ‘unmentionables’. I didn’t want to go back over the annals of my failed marriage, picking at every time I should have left when I didn’t. I didn’t want to retrace my parenting skills, the times when I should have been firmer with Shiralee and Jupiter, when I should have insisted that they didn’t go off with Swiss Steve on his endeavours to mould them into casts of himself. I’d managed to hide the problems away until now, only resurrecting them when I absolutely had to, as if they were solely my fault. Swiss Steve had made me feel that they were my faults.
Once again, the tears threatened and I seriously considered letting them flow down my face in the middle of a London Street. I felt hopeless. No one believed me. I was trapped in a corner where even Ellis was censoring me, albeit unknowingly. I clung on with both hands to the knowledge I had, refusing to allow it to descend into the pit of anonymity, where so much of the pain and suffering of my life lay, never to be resurrected. It made me mad as I realised that, in fact, the reason for the dark pit was that it was pressed down. Like rotten leaves and broken stems, it was left to decay simply because it was all too strange and unspeakable to utter in the normal range of e
xperience. Merging into each other, the secrets I had hidden from the view of respectability had transformed into a deep-rooted ball of puss which was threatening to erupt at any minute. Straining at me, I felt it force a tear out of my eye, which I wiped away with the back of my hand as the escalator carried me to the tube train home and my holiday.
Heaven
It seemed that I was past fear now. What did you do when no one believed a word you said? The flatness of my unimportance made my anger defuse as I reached the turnstile and passed my return ticket through. From some subconscious corner of my mind that still cared a little, I involuntarily glanced up at the CCTV cameras, imagining John Baxter’s eye behind the lens. The train was announced and I hurried to the platform. I noted that a man with a newspaper suddenly folded it as I approached him and jumped on the train behind me. I had walked about one stop from Henry’s to the police station, so I had four stops to go before I reached Victoria. I stood in my usual spot and hung onto the plastic loop above my head. I stared at the man with the newspaper for a moment and realised that I didn’t care if he was following me or not, then turned around and caught my grubby reflection in the stationary train’s window.
The first movement jolted me and my journey was underway. I marvelled at my ability to relax under pressure as my body felt limp and less painful. Now I was equipped with all the facts. Now I had a better idea of what happened in the lost hours I spent in the toilets. I toyed with the idea of telling the police the whole story. I almost smiled as I imagined the expression on Payne’s face as I told him that my coked-up ex used to try to fuck me and that I had now made a tenuous link between that and the attack. The thought that it shocked me even now and I admitted it all seemed bizarre. The thought of not actually speaking the words scared me and I knew that, if the time ever came, I would have to push them forcefully from their hiding place. We were all used to hearing superficial tales of how marriages went wrong, overarching diatribes of the arguments and the general reasons for the failure of a relationship. I hadn’t even told Ellis about Swiss Steve’s sexual misdemeanours. It had seemed somehow a betrayal. As if I was grassing him up for something we had both partaken in. Actually, I reluctantly admitted to myself, I had been so afraid that I had been paralysed. Surely, the moment for spilling the unsavoury truth would have been straight after it happened? But I just didn’t have the bottle. I just didn’t have the courage to tell anyone about that, or the drugs, or the way he corrupted my son and daughter, turning them against me. On the surface, Swiss Steve was a gent, a cheeky cockney chappy, a small-time criminal who leaked anecdotes and an odour of exaggeration. No one knew how sadistic he really was.
