Into the Darkest Corner

by Elizabeth Haynes

  She didn’t phone back.

  That night Stuart didn’t sleep very well. I lay next to him waiting for him to sleep, knowing that he was awake because of the things I’d told him. He deserved better than me. He deserved someone who wasn’t so fucked up, someone who wasn’t trailing a psychopath along with a whole host of other baggage. We lay in bed next to each other in silence, not touching. I wanted to talk some more, but there was no point.

  It wasn’t just a button. It wasn’t even just any red button, I was certain of that now. It was a button that came from a dress that I’d worn in another life, another time, with my heart on my sleeve. A dress I’d loved and then hated. And at some point after that, fingers that had once caressed the satin with such a curious, sensual reverence had taken hold of the tiny button and twisted it round and round with force until it had torn away.

  When I woke up the next morning, Stuart was already dressed and ready for work. ‘We should go away this weekend,’ he said.

  ‘Away?’

  ‘Just for a break. Somewhere out of the city. What do you think?’

  In the end we spent the weekend at a hotel in the Peak District, going for long walks during the day, eating too much in the evening and then holding each other in a magnificent four-poster bed, all night. It was a wonderful weekend, and, contrary to expectations, I had no need to fiddle with the curtains.

  It was the sort of weekend I would have talked over in great and extensive detail with Sylvia, in years past. Of course that won’t happen now. I sometimes wonder where she is, what she’s doing. It could be that she’s living just up the road from me, and that I pass her house every day. I don’t know where she is. I guess if I phoned up the Daily Mail I could probably find her, but a lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges now, and I don’t know if that is something I could do. Sylvia, although she was my best friend for a long, long time, is part of my old life – the life I was convinced I couldn’t go back to.

  I have a new life now, and it’s with Stuart.

  Gradually the panic about the red button faded, and going away for the weekend gave me a chance to think about it. To me, there wasn’t any rational explanation of how it came to be in my pocket, so I pretended it hadn’t happened. Maybe Stuart was right – maybe I’d even picked it up myself, in some kind of reverse-psychology absent-mindedness – maybe it was some perverse new symptom of my OCD.

  But when we got home I went back to checking, properly. I made a point of going into the flat every morning before work, checking and leaving everything in order, and then checking it when I got home, turning the lights on when it got dark, making it look to anyone who might have been watching from outside that I was home, even when I was upstairs with Stuart. I bought another plug socket timer, and I would turn on the television when I got home from work, leaving it to turn itself off again at eleven o’clock at night. Sometimes I managed to restrict the checking to three times, as per Alistair’s instructions; sometimes it was more.

  As for the feeling of being watched – that had never, ever really gone away. Now it was back properly. In every street, every shop, every time I went outside the house, I felt eyes on me. I knew it was my imagination; after all, he was miles away, wasn’t he? He might well have been released at the end of December, but if he was going to come looking for me he would have done it by now.

  Part of me wished he’d found some new person to be with, and another part of me hoped he hadn’t, for her sake.

  Friday 11 June 2004

  By the time I got to Heathrow, I had less than an hour to check in. The latter part of the journey, arriving at Euston, taking the Tube to Paddington, getting the Heathrow Express, dragging my stupid suitcase from place to place, had been hard. I was getting more and more fraught.

  I checked in at the American Airlines desk, and that was a defining moment. I was here, I was safe. I spent a few moments wandering around the shops in the terminal, thinking about spending money on things I didn’t need. I hadn’t bought any lingerie since before I’d met Lee. If I’d bought some for myself, he would have accused me of sleeping with someone else. I touched some delicate lace panties in the lingerie shop and thought about buying them. Then, looking out across the crowded terminal, I caught a glimpse of a figure that looked too much like him. I caught my breath, but the man turned and it wasn’t him at all.

  Lee was all the way back in Lancaster, I thought. He thought I was at work. He was five hundred miles away, and even if he found out I was gone now, I’d be safe on the plane by the time he got here. There was nothing at all he could do now.

  Still, I wanted to get into the departure lounge. There was no point whatsoever in hanging around now.

  Every step I took, I felt watched. Even here, miles from home, miles from Lee, I could see his face everywhere I looked. It was going to be so good to get away from all that.

  I joined the queue to pass through the checkpoint into the departure lounge, casting one last glance across the terminal at the sea of faces, faces going about their business, happy holiday faces and tired business faces. Suits and shorts, sunglasses and briefcases. I was nearly there. A few more steps, another couple of hours in the departure lounge, I’d be on the plane. I’d be free.

  And then, suddenly – there he was, walking past Tie Rack towards me. His eyes on me, his face impassive.

  The queue was still snaking round the metal barrier – I couldn’t stay here.

  I just ran, panicked, ran as fast as I could, towards a security guard, a man in uniform, who was strolling along the concourse without any idea what was about to hit him. I didn’t chance a look behind me. If I had, I would have seen Lee flashing his badge at the security guard whose eyes were widening as I flew towards him, my mouth open in some sort of soundless scream, some sort of ‘Help me, help me’… and instead of putting himself between me and Lee, instead of being my protector, my saviour , he grabbed me and threw me to the floor so my face and hands and knees smacked into the granite; held my arms back while Lee pulled out his cuffs and snapped them onto my wrists. And while Lee struggled to get his breath back and gasped, ‘You’re nicked, you are fucking nicked,’ the guard said nothing, just panted and sweated with the exertion and the excitement of being involved in something so dramatic on only his second day in the job.

  I heard myself sobbing, ‘Help me, please – this is all wrong, he’s not arresting me, I haven’t done anything…’ but it was no use.

  The guard helped Lee haul me to my feet.

  ‘Cheers for that, mate,’ Lee said.

  ‘No problem. You need any more help?’

  ‘No, mate, I’ve got back-up outside in the van. Thanks again.’

  It was all over within a minute. There wasn’t any back-up in the van, of course. There wasn’t even a van. There was just a car, an unmarked cop car, abandoned with its lights flashing just at the pick-up point outside the main entrance. Holding me tightly under one elbow, he frog-marched me out of the door.

  I could have tried to run again. But there wasn’t any point.

  ‘Be a good girl, Catherine,’ he said to me. ‘Be good. You know you want to.’

  He pushed me into the back of the car. I expected him to shut the door, climb in the front and drive off. But instead he got into the back with me.

  I don’t remember what happened after that.

  Friday 14 March 2008

  The next time I saw Alistair I told him that I was going through another difficult time. I told him about Lee’s habit of moving things, hiding things, and about the twisted scrap of red cloth and button I’d found in my pocket. I could tell by the expression on his face that he’d never come across a story quite like this one, even if he did his best to hide it. He probably thought I did it myself. He probably wondered whether actually I’ve got some sort of psychosis as well as an anxiety disorder.

  To his credit, he was both soothing and at the same time strict. However it happened, the button was just a button. It didn’t mean anythin
g. The world was full of red things, he said, and they didn’t cause us any harm. The red button didn’t actually cause me harm. It was in my pocket, I touched it, it made my anxiety levels increase, but other than that, it didn’t actually hurt me, did it?

  It wasn’t the button that was the problem, I wanted to shout, it’s how the fuck did it get in my pocket? But there was no point going over all that with him, he couldn’t help, and I was all too used to people not believing me. I needed to hear back from the police, to be reassured that Lee was safely still miles away. In any case, one thing was just starting to become clearer to me, a faint glimmer within the darkness. Whether I was picking up red objects to feed my own fears, or whether Lee was actually starting to stalk me again, what I needed from Alistair was the same. I needed to learn not to be a victim this time – of myself, or of anyone else. I needed strength, to deal with the bad things that life threw at you. I needed to take back control.

  For now, Alistair said we should concentrate on the PTSD. Working on the PTSD had a number of elements. When I had flashbacks, or thoughts about Lee, I should let them come, and let them go.

  I remembered being in the café in Brighton with Stuart when he’d said something similar about that man who had startled me. It was all about recognising the thoughts as being part of the disorder, rather than something that was defining me as a person.

  ‘I’d prefer not to have the thoughts at all,’ I told him, ‘never mind accepting them.’

  Alistair rubbed his hands together, sliding the middle fingers against each other in a regular pattern that was somehow soothing.

  ‘The thing you need to remember, Cathy, is that these thoughts have to go somewhere. They are in your head at the moment and they have no way out. That’s why they’re so upsetting. You have these thoughts and when you get them, you try and bat them to the back of your mind. You try to push them away, then they will have to come back because your mind hasn’t had time to process them, to deal with them. If you let them come, consider them, think about them, then you will be able to let them go. Don’t be afraid of them. They are just thoughts.’

  ‘You say that. They might be just thoughts, but they’re still bloody scary. It’s like living in a horror film.’

  ‘Think of them like that, then. They are part of a horror film, and sooner or later, no matter how scary they are, they will come to an end if you just let them come, and let them go.’

  His voice was calm and curiously soothing. I tried to think of Stuart in here, running a clinic, listening to people telling him about their misery, about grief, loneliness, about not understanding the world any more, about wanting it all to end.

  Then I went home to try to digest it all.

  As would be the case with any other addiction, on the nights when I was here alone, it would have been very easy to get away with indulging in my vice without Stuart or anyone else knowing. But checking didn’t give me any actual pleasure, it never had; it was more of a relief – a temporary absence of terror. Alistair gave me a number of things to try to reduce the stress caused by not checking properly, including the deep breathing, rationalising my fears, re-naming them so that they become not real, normal fears but just a manifestation of my OCD. They’re not good fears, they are part of my condition – why would I want to keep them?

  Earlier this evening, just after I got home from work, I had a phone call. My first thought was that it was Stuart, but it turned out to be DS Hollands. That sudden racing heartbeat – would it ever get any better? I thought she was going to tell me that Lee was missing, Lee had told someone he was coming to get me, one of the other officers had been tricked into telling him my home address.

  ‘I just wanted to let you know – I spoke to my colleague at Lancaster police station DA unit.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They sent someone round to check up on Mr Brightman on the morning after you called me. Can’t guarantee he hadn’t been round to see you, but it’s very unlikely. He was in bed having been working the night before. He’s working at a nightclub in the town. The officers checked it out and he was definitely at work the night you rang. So although it’s not impossible that he made a trip to London, it’s pretty unlikely. Do you have any other reasons for thinking he might know where you are?’

  I sighed. ‘Not really. Just that I know what he’s like. Isn’t he supposed to have some sort of licence, if he’s working as a doorman?’

  ‘He’s not a doorman; apparently he’s just a glass collector. Lancaster is going to check it out, though, don’t worry. Even though he’s not got any conditions attached to his release, I get the impression they’re keeping a close eye on him.’

  Can’t be close enough, I thought to myself.

  ‘I think you can relax a bit, Cathy. If he was going to come looking for you, I think he would have done it by now. And you’ve got my numbers, right?’

  ‘Yes, thanks, I have.’

  ‘And if you think there might be someone in your flat, just dial 999 straight away. All right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I wish I could shake off this feeling. It’s not a fear that one day he might come for me, it’s more certain than that. It’s not if he finds out where I am, it’s when. The only reason he has not put in an appearance yet, assuming of course that I did leave my own curtains open and I did somehow absent-mindedly pick up a red satin-covered button from somewhere, is that he doesn’t know where I am.

  But when he does, he will come for me.

  Saturday 12 June 2004

  The first thing I noticed was the light – bright light, into my eyes, which were closed.

  My mouth was dry; I couldn’t open it at first.

  Had I been asleep?

  For a moment I couldn’t feel my arms, then I realised they were tied behind me, tightly. Everything from my shoulders to my fingertips ached, suddenly and powerfully.

  Handcuffs.

  I forced my eyes open, panicking now, to see that I was lying on my side, the side of my face pressed into the carpet. Grey carpet, familiar. At home, then, in the spare bedroom.

  I twisted my face around as far as possible, but I couldn’t see much. It took a few moments for me to remember where I’d been going, and what happened, and when I remembered it, it came like a crushing, weighty blow. I’d been going to escape. I had been… so… close…

  There was no sign of him in here, at least, but I knew he couldn’t be far away. I had no idea how long I had before he came back, so I forced myself to think.

  My head hurt. I couldn’t tell, at first, if it was because of lying in such an unnatural position for so long, or if he’d hit me. Every thought felt laboured and painful.

  From the airport… back home… he must have driven me, in his car. I don’t remember it. It must have been several hours. I don’t remember any of it.

  I had no idea what the time was, and I couldn’t even tell if it was still daylight, because the overhead light was on. The curtains must be closed.

  I tried to stretch my legs out, but they seemed to be tied up to my wrists somehow. I was completely hogtied. I could not move at all. I tried to roll over onto my back but had to stop that immediately because every movement was incredibly painful. My head was swimming and for a moment I could see nothing but stars.

  What happened? I needed to think. I had to concentrate on this. It was too important.

  He said he was arresting me… the people standing watching, and some of them walking past as though nothing whatsoever was going on. He showed his warrant card to the security guards – then they were asking him if he needed any help. I must have been fighting. Dragging me away. I’d been shouting, trying to tell them that he was kidnapping me, he was going to hurt me, but of course they must have all just thought I was a raving mad woman. I would have thought the same, if I’d been in an airport, waiting for my flight to be called, off on holiday somewhere hot, somewhere exotic. Perhaps going on honeymoon, or just somewhere on a business trip. Raving mad woman, being a
rrested. Drugs, probably. A business trip. Maybe to New York.

  I wondered what had happened to my suitcase. They must have pulled it off the plane somehow. I bet the flight was delayed.

  How long would it be before I was missed? I wasn’t due to start work until Tuesday – three days. Before that, the landlady of Jonathan’s apartment would likely just assume I was getting a later flight. If she even noticed I wasn’t there. Lee could do a lot of damage in four days.

  Tears rolled from my eyes to my nose, dripping off the end and onto the carpet.

  How long before he came back? I couldn’t move. He couldn’t just leave me here, surely? I needed to find out what he was planning to do. If he was just going to kill me, I would be dead already. Whatever it was would probably be worse.

  Almost as I had that thought, I heard the sounds – the stairs creaking, the sound I remembered from lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, waiting for him to come upstairs, wondering if he would be in a good mood and if he’d leave me in peace.

  The door to the spare room was shut, and I heard a key turning, close by. I hadn’t even realised the spare room door had a lock. I’d never needed it before. Just one key, then.

  I felt him pulling at the back of my head, and it hurt – pulling my hair. He was untying the gag. I hadn’t realised I was gagged, but I was – with some sort of cloth. And underneath it, the corners of my mouth sore, crusted with blood. I felt fresh blood start to trickle when he pulled the cloth away. I tried to speak but all that came out was a groan. I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want to look at him. I never wanted to see his face again.

  ‘If I undo the cuffs, are you going to behave?’ he asked. His voice was calm, controlled. He wasn’t drunk, then. That was something.

  I nodded, my cheek scraping against the carpet. It still smelled new. I felt him grab one of my wrists and unlock the cuffs, the rasping rattle as they came away. My arms contracted and I cried out with the agony of the sudden movement.