Perfect Ten

by Jacqueline Ward

  She told me that he did all this when Jamie was there, but he fitted a lock to his bedroom door so that when you were having ‘Daddy time with Mummy’ Jamie would stay in his room. That she could hear him crying. That she’d asked Jack to stop, but every time she asked things got worse. He made her feel like shit. He ‘suggested’ that Jamie should come to stay for ‘two weeks or a month’. That Missy was his Nana and he loved her.

  So she carried on sleeping with him. She got pregnant again and told him, but he simply opened his wallet and gave her 500 pounds to ‘get rid of it’. Then, when she did, he resumed sleeping with her. And she was only doing it because she thought he would come back in the end and that they would be a family, like he promised. That she knew how stupid that sounded now, but then, in her tired, hormonal, confused state, it seemed real.

  I listen attentively, because these are the things that I have never wanted to say, I’ve never had the strength. These are the things that happened to me too. Private things between me and him, so horrible that I couldn’t articulate them and now, when I think about them, even to me they don’t seem real. But I have the strength now. For me and Katy.

  When she’s finished she’s breathless. Neither of us cries. I simply say, ‘He did that to me too.’

  I know we’ll be friends for life now. What I didn’t know was that DS Percy was standing behind me.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  She’s been listening since Katy began to tell me that Jack carried on sleeping with her. I heard fucking Rover but I didn’t realise we’d left the door open. She’s here with another policewoman and she coughs gently. Katy jumps.

  ‘Sorry. We didn’t mean to scare you.’

  Katy stands up quickly, but I am calm.

  ‘Come in. Have a seat. What can I do for you now?’ I can hear the sharpness in my voice from Katy vocalising my deepest hurt, and I try to swallow it down. She’s staring at Katy. ‘This is Katy Squires.’

  Katy extends her hand.

  ‘We spoke on the phone. You told me to …’

  DS Percy sits down in front of me. She looks very tired. Her nails are bitten to the quick.

  ‘Yes. Yet here you are.’

  I interject.

  ‘We’re here for each other now.’

  I wonder how much they heard before we saw them.

  DS Percy sighs.

  ‘OK. This is DC Lincoln. We’ve been following up the Premier Inn robberies.’

  Katy’s eyes widen.

  ‘What’s this got to do with you?’

  I shrug.

  ‘Nothing. Except I slept with them before they were robbed. So I’m the link. So how can I help you? Did we miss something?’

  DS Percy gets out her little notebook.

  ‘Two things. This and your ex-husband. But I’ll come to that in a minute. I just wanted you to know that we’ve arrested someone for those photographs of you.’

  I hold my breath. Both DS Percy and DC Lincoln study me intensely. At first I think it’s a trap and they’re waiting for my reaction. Then I realise that they’re waiting for me to say something.

  ‘Oh. Thank goodness. You’ve got him, then.’ It’s over. It’s finally over. Thank goodness. DS Percy has managed to solve the case herself and I didn’t need to jeopardise myself after all. She visibly relaxes.

  ‘Yeah. We arrested the perpetrator outside your house and he admitted it straight away. It turns out that someone was paying him to follow you.’ It’s not fucking over. They haven’t arrested Jack. They’ve got the wrong person. I can feel the colour drain from my face. I can see DC Lincoln looking around at the Amazon boxes and the days’ old food. There are pieces of crime scene tape left from the search and the remnants of ripped-up boxes. DS Percy continues. ‘I have to warn you that he had some more photographs of you with him. Rather compromising ones. Some of them from a while ago. This guy had been following you for a long time. We also found a stolen watch from one of the rooms.’

  I quickly gather my thoughts. This is wrong. A ghost of a pissed-up memory permeates reality and filters into the possibility that I could have been wrong about Jack setting this up. Auto-suggestion isn’t that rare in criminal cases.

  I was so sure. But it gives me some leeway.

  ‘Right. Only I heard something the other night. That’s why I went to the hotel. I was scared. Someone creeping around. The dog barking.’

  Katy strengthens my case, hands over her mouth.

  ‘Oh my God. After everything Jack has done to you, and now this.’

  DS Percy nods. She’s agreeing with Katy. Sympathising. Thank goodness. I might be on the way back to myself but I’m not in the clear yet.

  ‘The thing is, he might get bail. It might be better if you find somewhere to stay. Just until we know for sure. And we’ll be looking into who put him up to this.’

  Katy jumps in.

  ‘You must stay with me, Caroline. You must.’

  DS Percy is taking it all in. She knows what has happened. She’s read the journal. She’s listened to Jack moaning on, telling her how I’m persecuting all the women in his little book. How I’m mentally unstable. Yet here I am with one of them, best friends. She’s offering to let me stay at her house where she lives with Jack’s child.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know; I don’t want to impose …’

  Katy shakes her head.

  ‘I absolutely insist. All girls together, and all that.’

  I see DS Percy’s expression change. No doubt she’s sick and tired of #allgirlstogether and #cheatingbastard.

  ‘About that. As you can imagine, Mr Atkinson has made further complaints. He’s claiming that he is being harassed. His solicitor is in the process of issuing an injunction against any libellous or defamatory statements from social networking.’

  I stare at her. It’s unbelievable that he would go to those lengths when it’s clear that he is guilty. The evidence is right there, all over the internet, yet he is still trying to defend himself. I suppress laughter. I imagine his bent fucking solicitor’s face when he tells him he wants to prosecute everyone who has insulted him. Everyone who has commented on those posts. I imagine him scrolling through the social networking, pages and pages of it.

  My natural thought process leads me to what is really at the nub of this matter. What he is suggesting does sound ludicrous, but is it more ludicrous than serial adultery and the cruelty Katy and I have endured? I focus in and realise that what he really wants to do is stop whoever is doing this. Stop them exposing him in public. Stop them. In fact, stop me. It still comes down to him and me, even now?

  I know him. And he knows me. He’s worried about his reputation. Naturally. But now it’s all out there he hasn’t stopped. He knows that I will never give up and I know that he will never give up, but neither of us can sustain this for ever. Now it’s escalated out of our control, it’s a natural impasse. He’s not stupid. Far from it. He knows when he’s onto a loser. What he is proposing now – mass injunctions – will cost him everything.

  Why, when there’s nothing more to tell? When the world knows everything? Because there’s something else, isn’t there? Something that wasn’t in the journal. Something that we must be very close to discovering if it makes him so nervous.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I’ve been at the back of beyond with a … friend. You can check. I have his number …’

  ‘He’s absolutely adamant that you are posting the pictures.’

  I take what she thinks is the bait.

  ‘But wasn’t it Missy? Isn’t that what you said?’

  ‘Some more have been posted. Of your sister. And a video of another woman.’ I’ve never been good at acting. But I summon up the horror I felt when I first saw Paula’s pussycat face pouting at Jack. Katy puts her arm around me.

  ‘He slept with my sister?’ I rush over to my own laptop, which has been dormant since I was last here. I make a show of switching it on and logging onto Facebook with my password. I load the history. ‘Here.
You can look. I haven’t even been on Facebook.’ We all sit there in front of the laptop in silence. I push it as far as I can. ‘So where is it, then? Where is it?’

  DS Percy leans forward and finds Monica’s profile. All the photographs load, with Paula’s at the bottom. It’s a complete triumph. He’s there, in all his #cheatingbastard glory. Katy is horrified.

  ‘Oh my God. I’d only seen the other page. The one with the hashtags. I hadn’t seen this. Bloody hell.’ She looks more closely. ‘Are there any of me?’

  I want to tell her that I spared her because she came clean, but I don’t. I let DS Percy scroll up and down through the women. She’s seen the journal so she knows exactly what he recorded about Katy. While she scrolls and Katy and DC Lincoln watch mesmerised, I wonder who this stalker guy is.

  From time to time something happens that makes me wonder if I really am mad. If he was right and I’m just deluded. Like when he left. I was sure that it was just a blip. That he would call me and tell me that he was sorry and that it had all been a mistake. When he didn’t, I knew that I had seriously misjudged what was going on. That I was completely wrong.

  Now I realise that I was more wrong than I thought I was. He left me long before we Officially split. I’m fairly sure that we were still together when we married, but even that is hazy now. I can’t be sure that he wasn’t seeing someone for the whole of our relationship.

  He left me almost as soon as we got together. We probably never even made it past the three-month honeymoon period – he was ogling Paula Pussycat well before that. Even before Christine fucking Dearden and the Chanel incident, he was distracted. I told myself that it was OK to look but not to touch. That all men look at women, but he had chosen me. I suppose he had really. Chosen me to be his mug.

  Every blip in the matrix, every suspicion, every little slip or unusual receipt was met with stony-faced silence. If pursued, an indignant statement would follow. Don’t you trust me? What’s this about? What’s wrong, Caroline? I’d been living in a container where he projected exactly what he wanted me to see on all four sides. I was trapped. I suppose there had been hints from our friends. Lowered eyes, shaking heads, sad looks, all before they dropped out of our lives. But I was so committed that someone would have had to hit me over the head with it.

  So what am I not seeing now? The journal is exhausted, the pictures are published, Jack’s reputation is in tatters. None of this can possibly have escaped the attention of most women. It’s been on the national news. It’s time to give up, but he’s not giving up. I just have no idea what else there could be?

  But that’s how manipulation makes us. It makes us doubt ourselves. Or grow too sure of ourselves. I was completely sure that he was living with Louise Shaw. What else have I been wrong about?

  Chapter Thirty-three

  DS Percy is chomping at the bit. She’s fuming. Katy is obviously shocked and DC Lincoln doesn’t know what to make of it all. I have to remember that, as far as they are concerned, I haven’t seen the journal. I still have the flash drive of pictures in my pocket and it feels dangerous. I decide to ramp it up.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to just arrest me, then? You keep telling me that Jack is making complaints against me. So wouldn’t that clear things up?’

  She sighs. I can tell that it’s been a very long week for her.

  ‘We don’t have any evidence. Look, Caroline, this has got completely out of hand. When it was just a domestic issue, with the missing holdall, it was bad enough. But now it’s much bigger. And public. It’s all going to come out in the end, so if you know anything about this, now is the time to tell me. I could understand why you would have kept that bag. And the book.’

  I wrap my fingers around the flash drive. It would be so easy to tell her. Let it go. I could plead diminished responsibility and probably get away with it. Everyone would be on my side now they know what he is like. But I wouldn’t get the children back. I wouldn’t be able to meet social services on Tuesday and at least put my case to them. I’ve made some good choices since all that business, stopped myself acting on impulse. I can only get stronger now.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I can’t actually believe that you know what I’ve gone through and you can still accuse me.’

  She sighs again. She looks at her empty coffee cup.

  ‘I’m not accusing you. I might as well be honest with you. I know that you have gone through a lot. I’ve seen it all in black and white. And I heard what Katy said before, which, by the way, would add to the harassment charges I urged you to bring and you still could. But you don’t come out of this snow-white either. If it carries on I won’t be able to keep this case and the Premier Inn robbery case separate.’

  My stomach snarls up into a knot.

  ‘What? You mean that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants, but I’m not allowed to have a bit of fun?’

  She nods.

  ‘No. We can all see that your ex-husband’s bit of fun hasn’t gone down well at all. But this guy who has been stalking you – his name is Allan Parrott. Do you know him too, Caroline? He’s got a comprehensive record of what you’ve been up to over the past year or so. You know, the men. Once that gets out you’re not going to be the woman scorned. You’re going to be the woman who picked up married men in Premier Inns.’

  Her mouth curls in disgust and DC Lincoln shakes her head.

  ‘That’s not how it was. I was …’

  ‘Yeah. Course. But that’s what everyone says. Everyone’s got their reasons, haven’t they? So those pictures on the screen could just as well have been you with those men. I’m just trying to diffuse this before that happens.’

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. She isn’t trying to fucking diffuse it. She’s trying to make me panic. What she hasn’t bargained for is the fact that I’m used to this. I’m used to people giving me misinformation, pointing out what the consequences of things are to me like I’m a fucking child. I’m used to it because Jack did it all the time. But not any more. No. And I would like to avoid what was me in a very bad state becoming tabloid fodder. Unfortunately I can’t admit to what I haven’t done.

  It’s stalemate. She’s shown her hand. She hasn’t got anything on me, just a load of suspicion and a testimony from my ex.

  ‘OK, have it your way. But when this breaks it’s going to get ugly. And, if Allan Parrot gets bail, dangerous. So I’m just doing my job and advising you to get out of here now.’

  They leave and Katy sits in stunned silence. I throw all the excess packaging and piles of dirty plates into the skip. We tidy up the best we can. Katy’s looking around with a this could have been me in a year look. I pack up my laptop and push the remaining clothes in the tumble dryer into a holdall. When we’ve finished I find Katy in the lounge, staring at the family picture still on the wall.

  ‘You know, it all looks so normal on the outside, doesn’t it? But we’ve both got ourselves into a right situation. What the hell is the story with the stalker?’

  I sit down heavily on a huge pile of newspapers.

  ‘I was getting pissed all the time. I probably can’t remember most of it. I certainly don’t know who Allan Parrot is. And this lot. Again. Pissed. Late-night ordering on Amazon Prime.’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘We could never have known, could we? When I went out with Jack, I just thought people were basically good. It never occurred to me that he would lie. But you were here with your children waiting for him. And that Louise. She was at the other end.’

  ‘He had her arrested, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. He told me. It was a warning without actually saying it. Warning me that if I tried anything that’s how I would end up. There must be something wrong with him. Compulsive liar or something.’

  That’s what I used to believe. Compulsive liar. I scoured psychological case studies to find a condition where someone lied constantly about where they had been and what they had done. Where they believed their own hype. It’s a symptom of
lots of psychological pathology. I guess he got so caught up in the endless lies that he could never have put it right.

  Now I believe that he didn’t want to. Katy is an earlier version of me and, just like Louise Shaw said, people must be wondering why she doesn’t let it go. To someone on the outside it looks like we are holding on in the hope of reconciliation, but in reality Jack is forcing us not to let go, because we have invested so much in keeping him that we might let go of ourselves.

  I did let go of myself. I became out of control and put myself in danger. I slept with people I didn’t know. I could have caught an STD or been killed. It just seemed like pissed-up fun mixed with danger. Now I realise that I was fraternising with people who are transient and searching for danger themselves. Misfits. Hanging about in bars night after night, sleeping with each other on a fucked-up circuit of middle-aged hell.

  I literally had no idea that Allan Parrott, whoever he is, was following me around. Taking photographs. A shiver runs through my body. What if he’s been tracking me over the past week? What if he has photographs of me going into Frances’s tea shop, taking her phone? It’s too late for guilt now. It’s Sunday tomorrow and I only have to make it to Tuesday to present my case to social services.

  If I lay low at Katy’s I might be able to avoid all this fucking mess being linked to my pissed-up promiscuity and Jack’s perfect ten. The last place anyone would look for me is Jack’s babymother’s house.

  We go upstairs. Katy helps me to pull the slashed mattress outside and into the skip. We gather up the remnants of my wedding dress and the twisted tiaras and push them into a bin bag. The last rites of my wedding day finally laid to rest. Eventually, the bedroom is tidy again and all that remains is the chipped wood of the doors and the bare bed base and the scrawling on the wall.

  We go downstairs and get ready to leave. I look around, unsure when I will be back here. I promise myself that if it goes well on Tuesday and I am allowed to see Charlie and Laura, I will spend every last penny sorting this place out.