Into the Darkest Corner

by Elizabeth Haynes

  ‘He was wearing different clothes. His hair was shorter. Okay? Happy?’ I wriggled away from him and got out of bed, pulling my clothes back on.

  He watched me with that expression he has, part amusement, part curiosity. ‘Remember when you asked me, months ago, why I couldn’t be the one to help you?’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘Well, this is why.’ He caught my wrist and pulled me down onto the bed next to him, tickled me until I couldn’t help laughing.

  Then he stopped, and looked at me seriously. ‘Move in with me,’ he said.

  ‘Give over. I practically live here as it is.’

  ‘So move in. Save some money. Be with me all the time.’

  ‘So you can protect me?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Sudden realisation dawned. ‘You think it was him,’ I said.

  He’d been caught out. ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Not necessarily? What the fuck does that mean?’

  He hesitated for a few moments before answering. ‘It means I think you’re a rational person. We know Lee was released from custody a few months ago. We still don’t have an explanation for that button finding its way into your pocket. But besides that, I think you’re aware of your condition now to the extent that you know when something is unlikely to be part of your brain’s processing, and you think it might have been him, ergo, I think it might have been him.’

  ‘Stop talking like a fucking psychologist,’ I said, hitting him with a pillow.

  ‘If I were to agree to that, how would it make you feel?’ he said with a wry grin.

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, when I was wrapped in his arms again. ‘This time it was different. So we can reach one of two conclusions – the most likely being that you saw someone who reminded you of him, but was simultaneously different enough for you to be unsure, which is unusual.’

  ‘Who was staring at me from one side of the supermarket to the other,’ I added.

  ‘In other words, a considerable distance from where you were.’

  I didn’t want to think about what the second of the two conclusions might have been. I tried to distract him by kissing him, a long, slow, deep kiss that lasted for minute after minute. He was very good at kissing, without having any agenda – he could just kiss me without ever demanding more.

  ‘Are you going to do it?’ he asked, at last, quietly, his face close to mine.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Come live with me.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. I don’t think he had honestly expected much more than that.

  Sunday 13 June 2004

  He left me alone for most of the day. From time to time I wondered if he’d gone out, and then I would hear a noise from some part of the house and realise he’d been there all along. Banging, from somewhere outside – the garage? What was he doing?

  I spent some time looking out of the window, willing someone to see me. I looked over into the next-door neighbour’s garden, desperate for them to come out, so that I could bang on the window. I tried banging on the glass with the handcuffs, but the noise was so terrible I was afraid he would come up the stairs. It was pointless anyway. There was nobody to hear, apart from him.

  The weather had turned, and it was rainy and windy. More like October than June. I sat with my back to the wall, waiting for him to come for me. I stared at my wrists, at the scabs that had formed, thin and tight, over the scrapes the cuffs had made yesterday. If I moved too much the wounds would open again, so I sat still. The three middle fingers of my right hand wouldn’t bend. The skin was purplish, mottled, but the swelling had subsided a little. I was glad I didn’t have a mirror. My eye was still mostly closed, my ear still buzzing.

  When it started to get dark I felt the exhaustion and thirst getting the better of me, and I lay down again, the blanket around me. I must have slept, because when I woke up he was there, standing over me, and despite itself my broken nose was detecting something.

  ‘Get up,’ he said, his voice firm but not angry. I struggled against my aching limbs to sit. On the floor, from the light of the hallway, I could see a packet of chips wrapped in paper, and a bucket of water. It didn’t smell of bleach. I fought the urge to put my head into it and drink the whole thing.

  He turned and locked the door behind him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I called, my voice hoarse, before I tipped the bucket and began to pour it into my dusty mouth.

  The light went off, the door was locked. After a few minutes I lay on the carpet, pulling the blanket around me as best I could, and smelled the scent of piss and blood and bleach. I thought about Naomi and wondered how long I had left.

  Monday 14 June 2004

  When I opened my eyes, my first thought was this: Today I’m going to die.

  I knew this because of the pain. It was at a different level, coming at me like a train from the moment I opened my eyes. I was sweating and shivering, and, although I must have been drifting in and out of consciousness for hours, I suddenly came round to reality and I knew.

  Between my legs, under the thin blanket, the blood had flowed out of me during the night with such excess that I thought he must have ruptured something internally, and that I was simply going to bleed to death in my spare room. He wasn’t going to have to do anything else. I was simply going to die from what he’d already done.

  Despite the food he’d given me, I was too weak to move, and shaking too much to be able to get a purchase on the floor and raise myself up, so I lay there, the pain everywhere, all at once, but most of all across my belly, inside of me.

  I drifted in and out for a while, once even dreaming that I’d made it to New York. I was asleep in a huge bed, plate-glass windows looking out over the Statue of Liberty and Central Park, the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam all at once. My tummy ache was because I’d eaten too much, and I had a hangover, and I just had to sleep for a while and it would go away.

  So when he came in – was it hours later? It might even have been a day – I wasn’t even really sure if he was there or not. Maybe I was dreaming him too. Maybe I was dreaming when he lifted my head up by my hair and dropped it back onto the carpet. I felt as if I was flying.

  ‘Catherine.’

  I heard his voice and I smiled at it. He sounded funny, like he was underwater.

  ‘Catherine. Wake up. Open your eyes.’

  He was on the floor next to me, and suddenly through the remains of my nose I could smell it – the alcohol. Or maybe I was tasting it as he breathed out, close to my face.

  ‘Catherine, you whore. Wake up.’

  Oh, God help me. I laughed then. It became a cough which hurt.

  ‘Open your eyes.’

  Only one of them opened, and then only a crack. And then all I could see was something silver and black, which swam into focus gradually and became something long, something shiny. Beautiful, almost.

  In the end, I only really knew it was a knife when he cut me for the first time. I didn’t make a sound. He wanted me to cry out, but I couldn’t any more.

  The second cut, my left upper arm, hurt a little bit, but what I felt more was warmth on my cold, cold skin.

  When the next one came, and another, and another, I could hear him, sniffing, crying maybe, and I forced my eye open again, struggled to focus on him. He was going to kill me like this. Why didn’t he just cut my throat? My wrists? Something to make it quicker. Not like this.

  I didn’t fight him off. He moved the blanket off me as he started cutting at my legs. ‘Jesus,’ I heard him say. I wasn’t even aware that he’d stopped, but I guess at some point he must have.

  I lay there and felt the wounds open, just small ones. My arms, my legs, the blood that was left inside me leaking out, the carpet under me now a long way from the pale grey.

  Tuesday 8 April 2008

  Caroline and I have finally started the process of interviewing for the warehouse operatives at the new distribution sit
e. The interviews, yesterday and today, were going well, until about ten o’clock when Caroline went downstairs to fetch the next candidate.

  I was scanning his application form – Mike Newell, aged thirty-seven, little previous experience with warehousing, but his application form was legible, well-written and considered, which was more than most of them that we’d had to discard. No children, lived in south London, gave his interests as world history and electronics. The reason we’d invited him for interview was the sentence in response to the question ‘Why do you think you would be able to fulfil this role with Lewis Pharma?’ – ‘Although I have limited experience in warehousing, I feel I would be able to bring enthusiasm and a willingness to learn to the role, and I would be able to offer my full commitment to the organisation’ – enthusiasm, commitment, willingness – all things we could do with more of.

  Caroline was talking to him as the door to the interview room opened, and I stood, preparing my welcoming smile, ready to greet the fifth person we’d interviewed that day.

  My heart stood still.

  It was Lee.

  He gave me a warm smile and shook my hand, Caroline told him to take a seat and make himself comfortable, while I stood there with the blood drained from my face and my mouth dry.

  Was I seeing things? He was here, wearing a suit, wearing a comfortable, friendly smile, and his eyes had barely met mine. He was acting completely as if he hadn’t recognised me. As if his name was Mike Newell and not, actually, Lee Brightman.

  I considered bolting for the door. I wondered whether I was actually going to throw up. Then I thought about his demeanour here, how he was acting completely normally, and I wondered if I’d actually flipped, gone completely mad, and this was some sort of peculiar hallucination.

  ‘So, Mr Newell,’ said Caroline briskly, ‘I’ll just explain a bit about the organisation and the role, and then we’ll ask you a few questions to get to know you a bit better, and at the end if you have any questions for us, we’ll be able to answer them then. Does that sound alright?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’ It was Lee’s voice, but the accent was different – Scottish? Northern somehow, anyway.

  Was it him?

  While Caroline went through the practised explanation about Lewis Pharma and the current period of expansion, I watched him with a sort of fascinated horror. His hair was darker, slightly, and shorter; he was paler – well, that would figure – and he had aged a bit, wrinkles around his eyes that hadn’t been there before. That would make sense, too. He was watching Caroline closely, nodding at the right moments, looking as though he was taking everything in. I’d never seen him wearing a suit like that before, either – it didn’t really fit him properly. He looked as though he’d borrowed it. I couldn’t imagine Lee wearing something that didn’t make him look immaculate. Unless of course he was undercover, in which case he’d wear those filthy clothes that smelt as if he’d been sleeping rough.

  I felt a momentary doubt that it was him.

  It had been nearly three years since I’d seen him, in the dock, listening to the evidence. I hadn’t been there for the sentencing, of course. Three days before the end of the trial was the second time I ended up sectioned. While he was being sent down, I was dosed up with tranquillisers and spending most of my day staring at a stain on the wall.

  I tried to summon up a picture of his face back then, and it was confusing. I’d tried so hard to block him out. In my nightmares, even in those moments when I caught sight of him, out on the street, in the supermarket, he was a faceless shape now.

  Was it him?

  Caroline was coming to the end of her speech, and any minute now it was going to be my turn.

  I realised that, without meaning to, I’d been breathing deeply and slowly, calming myself with every breath, coping, because I had to. I tried to think about my anxiety levels. At least sixty, possibly seventy. I couldn’t fall apart here. I needed this job badly – they’d taken a chance on me, and I couldn’t blow it. I waited for the fear to subside. It was going to take a while. I was going to have to deal with it.

  ‘So,’ I said, realising that somehow I was working on some kind of auto-pilot, ‘Mr Newell.’

  He looked across at me and smiled. Those eyes – they were wrong. They were too dark. It wasn’t him, it couldn’t be. I was imagining it, the same way I’d imagined seeing him all those other times.

  ‘Can you tell us a bit about your last role, and why you decided to leave?’

  I found myself listening to the words and not taking them in. Caroline’s pen scratched across the surface of her notepad, which was good, because I wasn’t going to be remembering anything about what he’d said. Something about him working overseas for the last couple of years, running a bar in Spain. Helping out a friend. Of course we’d check his references, but if it was Lee, he could fake something like that easily enough.

  Internally, I was veering away from complete utter horror that I was sitting here opposite the man who’d nearly killed me, who’d beaten me and raped me. I was listening to him telling me about his career, how he’d moved from various jobs having been in the army – surely we could check that? There would be records, wouldn’t there? And he was telling us his name was Mike Newell; that he’d grown up in Northumberland – not Cornwall – but spent most of his working life in Scotland. There was no mention of Lancaster. There was no mention of a criminal conviction for assault. No mention of a three-year prison sentence.

  Caroline took over again and offered him the chance to ask us any questions.

  ‘I just wondered,’ he said, in that voice, that curious mixture of accents that I couldn’t place, ‘if there was anything you’d be looking for in your ideal candidate that I haven’t been able to demonstrate for you today?’

  Caroline looked across to me, trying not to let the amused smile show. ‘Cathy? Could you answer that one?’

  It was one of the best questions I’d ever heard anyone ask in an interview. ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, ‘it would have been preferable if you’d had experience in warehousing, but it isn’t essential. We’ve seen a number of very strong candidates in the last few days and we are hoping to reach a decision on the roles available by tomorrow lunchtime.’

  He gave me a smile. His teeth were different from Lee’s – whiter? More even? Now I looked at him again, really he was quite different. It wasn’t just the eyes. The teeth, the hair – the build; he was certainly less muscular than Lee had been. Even with the badly fitting suit, I remembered the way his biceps had filled the sleeves of whatever he wore. It was all just slightly, off-puttingly different.

  ‘Thank you very much for coming in, Mr Newell,’ I said, shaking his hand. His grip was firm, warm, not sweaty – the perfect handshake for someone you’d want to employ.

  Caroline took him back downstairs, leaving me alone in the interview room, my thoughts racing. Was it him? I scanned the application form – neat handwriting, capitals – it didn’t look like his handwriting, although he could have got someone to complete it for him, for heaven’s sake, that didn’t mean anything. He could be wearing contact lenses. He could have had his teeth fixed. He’d not been able to work out while he’d been inside. And as for the last job, two years in a bar in Spain? He’d got friends out there; anyone on the end of a phone would provide him with a reference and we’d be none the wiser. And he wasn’t exactly tanned.

  From outside the door, I could hear Caroline bringing the next candidate in for interview, and I prepared my welcoming smile. Behind my temples, the mother of all headaches was preparing its sting.

  As soon as the interview was finished, I told Caroline I was going to get a drink and some tablets. We had a break after this one, and then three more interviews before home time.

  Caroline wouldn’t stop talking about Mike Newell.

  ‘I think he’s easily the best one today, don’t you? Even though he’s not worked in warehousing before, he’s clearly intelligent and willing to
learn, isn’t he? And that question at the end – I’m keeping a note of that one for the next time I’m an interview candidate. You gave a brilliant answer – I had honestly no idea at all what I was going to say. And I know it’s unprofessional, but my God, he’s a bit easy on the eye, too, isn’t he? And really charming…’

  ‘I’ll see you in a minute, okay?’ was all I managed in response, grabbing my bag from my desk drawer and heading out towards the rear doors of the building.

  I got my mobile phone out, and the scrap of paper which still contained DS Hollands’ phone numbers.

  The mobile was turned off, so I tried the other number. ‘Public Protection, DC Lloyd speaking, can I help you?’

  ‘Er – hi. I was hoping to speak to Sam Hollands?’

  ‘DS Hollands is in a meeting at the moment. Can I help?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I need someone to help.’ Oh, God, how to explain all this in just a few sentences? How to tell someone how urgent this was, and yet not give them a reason to think you’re a complete nutcase?

  ‘Hello? Are you in any danger right now?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I could feel the tears starting. Please, I thought, don’t be kind to me, I don’t think I could take it.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Cathy. Cathy Bailey. I was assaulted by a man called Lee Brightman, four years ago. He got three years for it, and I was told he was released at Christmas. This was up north, in Lancaster.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the voice.

  ‘DS Hollands told me he’d been released. I thought I saw him a few days ago, here in London, and I spoke to DS Hollands, she got Lancaster to check on him, and they said he was still there.’

  ‘And you’ve seen him again?’

  ‘I work as a personnel manager, and I think I’ve just interviewed him for a job at the company I work for.’

  ‘You think….?’

  ‘He looked different, but not much. He was calling himself Mike Newell, but it looked so much like him – same voice, everything. I was wondering whether someone in Lancaster could check on him, like, right now? Because he’s only just left here, about half an hour ago. So if it was him, he won’t be in Lancaster.’