The Fear

by C. L. Taylor

  Wendy takes Mike’s phone out of her pocket, then presses the on button. The mobile flashes to life but the screen is locked. Wendy nibbles on her bottom lip. So tempting. So incredibly tempting. She laughs lightly. Oh who is she kidding? Of course she’s going to have a look. She taps the screen and guesses the four-digit code.

  1234.

  Despite being OCD, Mike is also incredibly lazy. She can imagine him going for a number that he wouldn’t have to try hard to remember. The display wavers from side to side. Incorrect.

  0000.

  Incorrect.

  9999.

  Incorrect.

  4321.

  Incorrect. Wendy gazes out of the window of the car and makes a soft grunting sound. What else would he use. His date of birth perhaps?

  0808.

  Sixteen colourful icons flash up on the screen making Wendy squeal with excitement. She’s in!

  Her heart flutters in her chest as she taps the messages icon and Mike’s text conversations load. Strange. There’s only one message thread and, instead of a name titling it, there’s just a telephone number. She taps to open it and reads the last the message sent.

  I can’t wait to spend the night with you either but please don’t call it sex. That’s intimacy without emotion. I prefer the term making love and I’ll show you how much I love you with every kiss and every lingering touch. You are my life, my everything. Never forget that. X

  Wendy wrinkles her nose in disgust. What is this? She’d prepared herself for a barrage of angry messages between Lou and Mike not this … this … revolting soft porn. She scrolls up and reads the previous message.

  I love u Mike and can’t wait to show u how much. I’m not ready to have sex yet but I do want it to be with u. xxx

  Confused, Wendy reads more of the messages but they’re all the same. Mike and Lou confessing their love for each other, calling each other pet names and discussing illicit rendezvous. She scrolls up and up and up the seemingly never-ending stream of messages, then gasps as a picture message appears on the screen. It’s a dick. A very excited dick. And she’s pretty certain it’s Mike’s. She almost laughs at Lou’s response:

  Wow. That’s huge.

  Huge? Mike might be a tall man, but she’d always found his penis to be disappointingly small. Not that she’d ever told him that of course. She flicks further up the messages.

  Her jaw drops as she reaches a photo of a pair of naked breasts and the message attached to it.

  I took this in the girls loo. Please delete it after uv seen it. I wd die of embarrassment if anyone else ever saw it.

  The message above the photo is from Mike and it says: Please send me a photo of your breasts. It would make me so happy. You’d do it if you loved me.

  With her heart in her mouth, Wendy scrolls up again. All of the messages are from Mike, cajoling and begging:

  Please let me see your body.

  I love your body

  I want to worship you.

  Don’t tease me. SHOW me.

  There are replies to each one:

  I can’t.

  I’m too embarrassed.

  Someone might see.

  And then there it is. The photo that makes Wendy retch, yank open the driver side door and puke onto the car park. A photo of a schoolgirl, her tie pulled to one side, her white shirt unbuttoned to reveal her bra and her breasts pushed together to reveal a generous cleavage. It’s been a long time since she last saw the girl but she recognises her instantly.

  It’s little Chloe Meadows.

  Chapter 41

  Wendy

  After vomiting in B&Q’s car park, Wendy begins to shake so violently she fears she’s about to suffer a stroke. When she finally calms down she reads the entire thread of messages. They started innocuously, with a message from Mike,

  Your dad gave me your number because he can’t give you a lift to Greensleeves after school. What time do I need to pick you up?

  And a tentative reply from Chloe,

  3.30 ok? You can’t park directly outside school. Most parents park a couple of streets away.

  And progress to,

  Are you ok? You looked a bit upset earlier.

  To which Chloe replies,

  Not really, but thanks for asking.

  Weeks pass without another message, then there’s a text from Chloe saying, Sorry I cried on you earlier.

  After that they pick up pace. Mike takes control, reassuring Chloe that, despite being friends with her dad anything she says to him will remain confidential. It won’t go any further, he promises her.

  I don’t like seeing you so sad. I want to help if I can. X

  It’s the first message to end with a kiss. Chloe doesn’t immediately reciprocate. Dozens of text messages pass between the two of them before she closes her message in the same way.

  Thank you for our chat today. I feel like you really understand me. x

  We’re a lot more similar than you think, Chloe, Mike replies. I know I probably look like an old man to you but I don’t feel one. In many ways I feel like I’m the same age as you. X

  Chloe replies immediately. I don’t think you look like an old man. X

  A middle-aged man? ;) x

  Is David Beckham middle-aged? I think you look a bit like him. X

  Do teenagers find David Beckham attractive? I thought they preferred his son Brooklyn? X

  I don’t. x

  The tone changes then. Not immediately but over the next dozen or so text messages Mike drops the supportive friend act and ups the flirtation. Wendy has to stop reading several times and open the car door because she feels so sick. And that’s before she gets to the picture messages again.

  She can still smell vomit, clinging to her hair and skin, as she drives up the track to Louise Wandsworth’s house but, for once, she doesn’t care about her appearance. As she pulls into the driveway, she scans her surroundings for signs that Lou has returned but there’s no little red Mini parked up outside the garage and no lights on in the house.

  ‘Good,’ she thinks as she parks up, opens the door and, clutching the phone and bolt cutters, steps onto the gravel. Dealing with Louise is a complication she doesn’t need right now. She needs to talk to Mike alone.

  She marches down the garden and opens the gate. Anger burns in her belly as she strides across the yard. Anger aimed at Michael but at herself too. He’s a paedophile – always has been. How could she not have realised when she first met him? How could she have been so naïve and trusting that she married him? She’d always prided herself on her judgement and Mike seemed so nice, so normal. Their sex life had been normal too. She’d slept with three men before she met him, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have anyone to compare him to. If anything he was the most vanilla of her lovers. He wasn’t into sex in public places or light bondage and he’d never asked her to shave down below or dress up in school uniform. Had he fantasised about younger women when they’d made love? Is that why he favoured doggy style, so he didn’t have to look at her lightly lined face?

  Wendy’s stomach clenches violently and she retches, several metres away from the barn. Nothing comes up but she continues to dry heave for several seconds before she straightens up again.

  He was so convincing, after his arrest, pleading with her to believe him. Swearing that he’d never laid a finger on the young woman who was accusing him of such terrible things. It wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to believe that he’d gone to France to keep her safe, because everyone knew that Michael Hughes was a good man. He gave free, private karate coaching to a young lad with special needs. He mowed the lawn for old Mrs Anderson at the bottom of the road. He’d nursed his mother through the final, terrible stages of dementia and then pushed himself to the absolute limit to run an ultramarathon to raise money for an Alzheimer’s charity. It wasn’t that Wendy needed to believe him, she did believe him. She knew there were girls at the club who’d developed crushes on him – he’d told her all about them. She also knew
how vindictive teenaged girls could be. When she was fourteen she’d plunged the sharp point of a badge into another girl’s airbed at Guide camp to pay her back for a bitchy comment. At fifteen she’d started a rumour at school about another girl having a sexually transmitted disease after she slept with the boy Wendy liked.

  Louise Wandsworth was an unstable, neurotic girl who’d created a fantasy world to try and escape from her unhappy home life. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother was a stuck-up city girl and neither gave her enough attention. She’d latched onto Mike because he was the only adult to show her any kindness. She tricked Mike into travelling to France with her, then threw herself at him. When he’d refused to sleep with her, insisting they should return to the UK, she’d cried rape.

  Only she hadn’t, had she? That was all a lie, invented by Mike to keep Wendy by his side while he went to court, to ensure he received his commissary every month, and he had a home to return to at the end of his jail sentence. How many more young women had there been since their divorce? He was a monster, a vile, perverted predatory monster luring young women into his arms and his bed. She shouldn’t have stabbed him in the leg with the knife. She should have aimed straight for his heart.

  She yanks open the door to the barn and storms in, a barrage of accusations and insults primed in her brain, ready for launch.

  She stops dead after a single step.

  Her brain scrambles to make sense of what she’s seeing. The cage still holds a prisoner but, where she expected to see the large, broad-shoulder shape of her ex-husband, there’s a decidedly thinner figure with long, slender limbs and mousey brown hair. In the split second it takes her brain to name her, Lou, lying on her stomach with one arm reaching through the gap in the bars, turns to look at her.

  ‘Wendy?’

  Lou darts away from the bars, scoots into the centre of the cage on her bottom and gathers her long limbs together, making herself as small and compact as possible. She reminds Wendy of a monkey, with her big fearful eyes and her tightly wrapped arms. She knows who she is. It’s written all over her face. If she still believed that Wendy was a potential client who just happened to have driven to her house and stumbled into her barn she’d have reacted with shock, then relief.

  ‘Wendy?’ Lou says again.

  Wendy stares at her and says nothing, then, as sudden and unexpected as a hiccup, she laughs. She’d braced herself for several different scenarios before stepping through the barn door. Mike morphing into a woman was not one of them.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lou scrabbles to her feet and points through the door of the cage. ‘But the key’s over there, by the wall. Please. Quickly. Before he comes back.’

  Wendy follows the angle of Lou’s outstretched index finger, crosses the barn, dips down and brushes the straw away from the wall. It doesn’t take her long to discover the key.

  ‘Quickly!’ Lou opens her hand, reaching for it, then glances towards the barn door. Her eyes are wide and fearful. ‘Quickly!’

  Wendy takes a step towards the cage, then pauses. She opens her hand and looks at the key. She should open the door and let Lou out. That’s what any normal person would do in this situation, so why is she feeling so conflicted? She looks from the key to Lou with her desperate, pleading face. Louise Wandsworth is as much Mike’s victim as Chloe Meadows, so why does she still feel a stab of anger when she looks at her?

  ‘I’m not a robot,’ Wendy says, more to herself than Lou. ‘I can’t just turn off my feelings.’

  Nor should she ignore them. She’s made a lot of rash, snap decisions recently and there’s something inside her, niggling away in her gut, telling her not to let Lou out of the cage unless she’s absolutely sure it’s the right decision.

  ‘Please.’ Lou presses herself up against the bars of the cage and extends her fingers. ‘Wendy, you need to let me out.’

  ‘No,’ she pulls back her shoulders and straightens her spine, pulling herself up to her full five foot six. ‘I don’t. I don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘Wendy, please. Mike’s dangerous. He tried to strangle me.’

  ‘Did he lock himself in the cage?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m just trying to work out which of you is the most dangerous. He was in that cage before,’ Wendy nods at it, ‘and I’m pretty certain he didn’t lock himself in.’

  ‘I … I did. I locked him in. I didn’t mean to, it was an accident. He tried to attack me and I defended myself. Please … Wendy … we haven’t got much time. You need to let me out.’

  ‘Again with the orders.’

  ‘I’m not ordering you, Wendy. I’m begging you. Please.’

  Wendy presses her fists against her face – one hand still clutching the bolt cutters and the mobile phone, the other holding the key – and closes her eyes. She needs to blot out Lou’s pleading face and think clearly but it’s all so overwhelming. There’s a part of her – a big part – that still blames this woman for ruining her life. If Mike had never met Louise Wandsworth, Wendy could be a mother now. He would have turned up at the clinic and given his sample and Wendy would have started her IVF. If it had worked – and she knows it would – her eldest would be doing his or her A-levels now. There might even be a second child, a year younger, desperately trying not to be eclipsed by their elder sibling’s shadow. But there aren’t any children. They’re a figment of Wendy’s imagination and they always will be. Meanwhile Louise Wandsworth has a loving boyfriend, enough time left to have children and a huge house to bring them up in. Less than an hour ago the imbalance in their lives was going to be corrected. Wendy was going to hand over the bolt cutters and phone to Mike and, in return, she would receive forty thousand pounds and Louise Wandsworth would be arrested for false imprisonment and blackmail. Their lives would be reversed – Wendy would have the nice house and Lou would have nothing. And Mike …

  Wendy screws up her face as an image of Chloe Meadows with her big, worried eyes, her awkwardly unbuttoned shirt and the deep line of her cleavage flashes up in her mind.

  Mike is the bad person here, says a little voice in her head. Lou hasn’t done anything wrong. You have to let her go.

  ‘Wendy,’ Lou’s soft voice cuts through the noise in her head. ‘Wendy, please listen to me. I know … at least I think I know how you feel about me. I ran off with your husband. I ruined your marriage. I sent him to jail. I’ll be honest, when it was all happening I didn’t give you a second thought …’

  Wendy flinches. She wants Lou to stop. She wants to scream at her to STOP TALKING but she can’t. Her throat is so tight, she can’t speak.

  ‘You were never a real person to me,’ Lou continues. ‘You were the bad guy, the annoying obstacle preventing me and Mike from being together. I thought he was my soulmate and I was his. I thought it was true love and that we were meant to be. I didn’t give you a second thought when Mike said he wanted to take me to France for the weekend. I was so excited, I thought we were going on a romantic getaway. But that wasn’t what he had planned, Wendy. He tried to abduct me. He told me we were never going back to England and we were going to live the rest of our lives in France, then when I tried to escape, he tied me to the bed and gagged me. He nearly killed the man that tried to help me.’

  Wendy shakes her head. ‘No, no it’s not true.’

  ‘It’s true. It’s all true. I’ve never told anyone any of this before because I was too scared. That’s why I didn’t testify against him. Not because I loved him but because I was afraid of him. I’ve spent the last eighteen years terrified that he’d come after me after he got out of jail. I didn’t go to university for months after he was released because I was so scared I’d turn round on the tube and see him standing behind me, or come out of a lecture to find him waiting by the door. I missed so many lectures I failed my exams and had to retake my second year. He never loved me, Wendy. He groomed me so he could control and dominate me. He strangled me during sex because he got a kic
k out of seeing me pass out.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘He’s doing it again, Wendy. He’s been grooming a little girl called Chloe. I tried to warn her. I gave her my diary so she could see for herself what a dangerous man he is but she’s too deeply under his spell to believe me. He’s going to abduct her and do to her what he did to me, or worse. We can’t let that happen. Please, Wendy. I know how hurt and angry you are. I can see it in your face. And I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry that Mike fucked up your life as much as he fucked up mine but it’s not my fault. I was fourteen years old. I was as much of a victim as you. If you’re looking for someone to hate, hate Mike. He’s a paedophile. He abuses young children and he’s doing it again. Please, I know you hate me but you have to open this door and let me go to the police.’

  Lou stops speaking and the barn falls silent. Beyond its walls a wood pigeon softly coos and thunder rumbles in the distance. Wendy doesn’t move. She can’t. The slightest motion and her legs will collapse from under her and she’ll fall to the floor. She feels like a statue, shattered by Lou’s words, and the only thing stopping her from falling apart is the glue of snot and tears that fills her clenched hands. The last couple of minutes were the most painful of her life but she has her answers now. It’s over, eighteen years of waiting, wondering and torturing herself. She never has to do that again.

  She raises her eyes to meet Lou’s. Forty thousand pounds is a lot to say goodbye to, but some things are more important than money. A lot more important.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Okay.’

  Chapter 42