The Butterfly Effect

by Julie McLaren

  To begin with, the interview was positive and I was pleased we had come. Detective Wilson, who insisted we should call him Ed, was friendly and took a great deal of care when examining everything we had brought with us. He asked if we had ever seen Greg, which we hadn’t, and then he tapped the end of his pen on his lips and sat back in his chair.

  “Do you mind if I leave you alone for a minute?” he said. “There’s something about this case I can’t put my finger on, and I want to talk to a colleague.”

  Of course we said we didn’t mind. We could hardly say otherwise, but an anxious feeling was creeping into my stomach and replacing the mild excitement I had been experiencing before. What did he mean? Was I in even more danger than we had thought? Or did he doubt our evidence?

  We waited for at least twenty minutes, neither of us able to make any substantial conversational sallies. I could see that Nat was almost as anxious as me, and I felt a great rush of affection and gratitude for him as he sat there, chewing the inside of his mouth. Look what he had given up for me – goodness knows how many days of annual leave, any chance of a decent social life or new relationship – and now he was sitting in a police station worrying that the police would not believe us, after all he had done to collect every tiny piece of evidence. If this failed, he would have failed, that’s what he was thinking, I was sure.

  “Nat?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I just wanted to say thanks, for, you know, everything you’ve done. I don’t know how I would have coped without you, and even if this doesn’t work, don’t worry. We will get there in the end.”

  “Of course we will,” he said, smiling and taking my hand. “I wasn’t worrying, just thinking.”

  Shortly after, Detective Wilson – I was struggling to think of him as Ed – came back in with a woman. She was quite young, and in casual clothes: jeans, a colourful jumper and boots. He introduced her as Marie Baranski and explained she was a graduate trainee who had completed a thesis on stalking whilst at university.

  “The problem is,” she said, “we are not convinced that the stalker is who you think it is. We went back to see him when you contacted us again, but he was abroad, on holiday with a girlfriend. We spoke at length to his parents, who admit that he has a tendency to have what they call ‘crushes’ on women and to assume that they feel the same, but he is otherwise leading a normal life.”

  This was a massive shock to both Nat and me. Instinctively, I reached out for his hand and held it tight, and it was clammy yet cool. This was too much to comprehend, and neither of us spoke.

  “Now we are not saying anything for sure, and we’re certainly not doubting your evidence,” said Ed, “but we have to look at this carefully. Mr Payne does fit some aspects of the profile of a stalker, and he has admitted to harassing you when your relationship ended ...”

  “There never was a relationship! I chatted to him after a gig, I had one drink with him and then he tricked me into eating at his parents’ house. We never even kissed!”

  “OK, I was using the word loosely, sorry,” said Ed, “but what I was going to say was this. You have been experiencing a continuing situation which has escalated over time. That is quite normal, if anything can be said to be normal with these people. The difficulty is that this escalation is usually matched by a deterioration and increasingly obsessive behaviour in the stalker. You would expect him to be isolated, living in his own world in which you, the object of his affections, are the centre. But here we have a man who has a functioning relationship with another woman, who is holding down his job, relating normally to his parents and showing no sign of any of the behaviours we would expect. We have to consider the possibility that your stalker is someone other than Mr Payne.”

  “But who could it be?” I cried, but before anyone could answer that I had to rush to the toilet. This was terrifying. At least I had known Greg. He was obviously deranged, but he was familiar. Now we were dealing with a complete unknown, someone who could be even more dangerous than we had believed Greg to be. What were the chances of being stalked twice?

  Back in the room, I reached for Nat’s hand again and he squeezed it.

  “Are you OK to continue?” asked Marie. “We have been discussing your use of forums, and we wonder if somebody picked up where Greg left off. Did you post on any stalking websites?”

  Well, yes I had. That had been in the days of my prolific use of social media and websites of all kinds. I wouldn’t have thought twice about posting what had been happening to me, and I did have a vague memory of telling my story, pleased that it had a happy ending. Maybe I thought it would be encouraging to other victims – yes, my boyfriend and his mate had a word with him and it all ended. Maybe someone read that and thought ‘we’ll see about that’.

  We left shortly afterwards. There was nothing else to say for the moment, and Nat promised he would do everything to keep me safe. In the meantime, we would go back over everything we could find to see if there were any clues. I didn’t have anything else to do, after all.

  “Well, what a load of rubbish!” said Nat, as we got into his car.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, honestly. All that stuff about profiles is fine, and we both know there’s masses of stuff online to back it up, but I’ve read about cases where the person doesn’t fit any of the standard profiles. Seriously, what’s wrong with them? He’s a bloody IT geek. He will have read all that too, and he’ll know how to throw them off the scent as well as cover all his tracks. And you’ve met the parents! They’re devoted to him. They’re bound to say everything in the garden is rosy. I think he is being very clever, but I’d be astonished if it wasn’t him. It has to be!”

  So, I suppose that was the point at which Nat and I began to look at things differently. He could not be swayed from his opinion that Greg was the stalker, and he started to take time off work so he could follow him and photograph him near my flat, or holding a package with my address on it. A couple of times he came round all excited, saying he had seen him near enough for it to need some explanation, but the photographs were never good enough when we downloaded them. The figures in the distance could have been Greg, but they could equally have been anyone else. That, however, did not deter Nat. Even if the evidence remained elusive, he was convinced he would catch him sooner or later, and the fact that he had seen him apparently turning the corner at the top of my road was enough for him.

  I did not know what to think. Was Nat seeing what he wanted to see? I remembered what it was like after Richie died – I saw him everywhere, even though I knew it was impossible. Then there would be the leap of the heart, followed by the crushing realisation. Nat wasn’t suffering in that way, but his brain could be tricking him into seeing what he was looking for. Or maybe not. Maybe it really was Greg lurking around, out of reach of the cameras but close enough to see what I was doing. Was I going out? Had I started working again? He wouldn’t have seen a lot at that time, but that wouldn’t deter the stalkers I had read about. Nobody could accuse them of giving up easily.

  In the end, I started to lean in favour of the idea of an unknown person who had read my posts and then become fixated on me. It actually seemed more likely than Greg, when I thought about it. Greg was on holiday with a girlfriend. He was working, he was getting on with his life. He was a bit odd, but was he really capable of sending all those terrible things that had blighted my life, scared me half to death, especially in the last six months? And if it was true, if it was somebody who had found out everything about me by hacking into my accounts, maybe he lived nowhere near me. Maybe he lived hundreds of miles away and was no actual threat to me at all. There had been no physical sighting of Greg or anyone else hanging around, and everything had arrived either by post or courier. It was not a comforting thought, far from it, but it was a different one and it began to affect the way I felt when I woke up in the morning.

  When I say ‘in the morning,’ that was often not the case. What was the point of waking
up when all that lay ahead of me was the tedium of daytime TV, trawling the stalking websites for any new stories or scanning the camera footage for that elusive shot that might prove Nat right and put and end to all this? That, and trying to force food into myself when I had no appetite at all was the sum total of my day, until Nat came round sometime in the evening to cheer me up.

  Coincidentally – or at least I assumed it was – there was a reduction in contact with the stalker, whoever it was, about that time. It was almost as if he had exhausted every possible way of terrorising me and had run out of ideas. Maybe it was that, or the fact that Christmas was only a few weeks away, or the idea that the whole experience did not necessarily originate with a person who lived within a short drive away, but I started to become restless. I realised that I wanted to go out, to go shopping, or to sit in a coffee shop like other people. I did not want Christmas to come and go again, and to be in the same position, or worse, as I had been in this time last year. Realistically, what was likely to happen? He could hardly pounce on me in the street, and did we really need to sit and watch every minute of the camera footage? Greg had not appeared in one single frame in all the time we had been doing this, so why would he slip up now? And that was if it was Greg in the first place. These things had made me feel safe for so long, but now I felt trapped.

  I said all this to Nat, one evening just before the end of November. The TV was on in the background, Coronation Street, followed by a drama and punctuated by Christmas adverts, but we were not watching it. Nat was shocked, horrified. He had obviously no idea what I had been thinking, and the panic on his features almost made me change my mind and say I hadn’t meant it. Almost, but not quite.

  Later, after he had gone, I felt terrible. He had begged me, pleaded with me to think very carefully about changing any of our procedures. He was absolutely certain that Greg was behind it all, and yes, he was very clever, much more clever than we could have guessed, but wasn’t I still alive? Wasn’t I still safe and in a position to pick up my life as soon as this was all over? Why would I risk everything now?

  I don’t know exactly what I said. I was crying a lot, and it all came tumbling out, all the emotion and frustration of it. I know I told him that I couldn’t carry on like this much longer, and I might as well be dead if this was all my life was going to amount to. I wasn’t living, I was existing, like some sort of museum exhibit, like an animal in a cage. If I didn’t start trying to rebuild my life soon I would go mad … and then it came to me, with a punch to the head that said why has it taken you all this time? I would move. OK, some stalkers had been known to track their victims all over the country and beyond, but Greg would never leave the safety of his parents, and if it wasn’t Greg, maybe if I left no trace of it online, it would be enough. I would never forget what Nat had done for me, but it was time for me to go.

  My head pounded with the stress, but beneath that there was a feeling of liberation. It was the nearest I had ever got to falling out with Nat, and he left abruptly, with a sad shake of the head that said there was no point in continuing this conversation, but I was certain it would be OK once he got used to the idea. We had been through so much together, become so close, our relationship would survive almost anything. And then, when I was living somewhere else – maybe in London where it was easy to hide, or somewhere on the coast, or in Manchester or Liverpool where I knew no-one and no-one knew me – Nat could come and stay with me, and I would look after him for a change. Tomorrow, I would start making plans.

  So that was how I came to be up and dressed hours before my normal time the next day, and how I came to spend a lot of time online but not on stalking websites. I didn’t come to any conclusions, far from it, but every town and city I researched seemed more promising than the last. I read about dozens, in case my activity was being monitored, and I began to see myself living in their streets, shopping in their centres and teaching in their schools. I began to see myself as a normal person, living a normal life. Of course, there was a huge difference between these dreams and the reality of my life, and I didn’t get further than the front door when it came to it, but there was a change. I could feel it, and it showed itself in subtle ways, like actually feeling hungry at lunch time or taking a bit more care over my hair.

  I had been worrying about what would happen when Nat came round later that evening, but that was silly, of course. He is the most forgiving person I have ever known, and although he had not changed his mind, he spent only a few minutes trying to persuade me that I was wrong. Instead, he suggested that we put the issue to one side for the evening and watch a film, so we did that and we watched it properly, not intermittently, distractedly, as had been our habit. We sat on the sofa, comfortably slumped together, companionable and calm, and I found myself thinking about how much I would miss times like this, but only briefly. A bird may miss its cage for a while, but only until it has remembered how to fly.

  My head was full of romantic imagery such as this in the days that followed. It’s a wonder I didn’t start writing poetry, there were so many metaphors for my possible freedom. However, that did not translate itself to any kind of action for over a week until, at last, I managed to leave the flat and walk to the corner shop about five minutes away. It was even more terrifying than I thought it would be. I jumped at every sound and spent almost as much time looking behind me as watching where I was going, but I did it. I don’t know how long it had been since I last felt the wind on my cheeks or the rush of air as a lorry thundered past, but I bought milk and a few more items I didn’t really need and hurried home again with no ill effect.

  I made other sallies into the outside world in the days that followed, but still my horizons were limited. Christmas was less than a week away and I wanted to send cards, to buy Nat a spectacular gift to thank him for all he had done. I wanted to let him know that I was not rejecting his protection, but that it had run its course. Nothing was going to happen to me in a physical sense, and I had to stop worrying about all the rest of it. Some of the letters were pretty horrible at the time, so I started to burn them without reading them. I didn’t tell Nat, as he would have said I was destroying evidence, but evidence had done nothing for me so far and I didn’t have to read them if I didn’t want to. Soon there was a little pile of fragile, wispy ashes in the grate, stirring a little when there was a draught. I’m sure I shouldn’t have been burning things there, as the chimney was blocked off, but I didn’t care and Nat didn’t remark on it, so maybe he didn’t notice or maybe he had just given up.

  Nat’s present was the main reason I had to push myself to go into town. I didn’t want to drive, as I had no idea whether the car would start and the prospect was alarming, but I could get a bus. Nothing could happen to me walking up to the bus stop, sitting there with other passengers then walking around the shopping centre with probably hundreds of other people. That’s what I told myself, and that’s what I told Nat. I was not comfortable with keeping so much from him, and I had felt him drifting away from me as I became more confident. Gone were the hours spent reviewing the camera footage or poring over the letters for clues. Gone were the evenings spent discussing our next move, or some new development in monitoring equipment that he had discovered. Now he still popped in to see me, but he stayed for shorter periods and, sometimes, we found it hard to know what to say to each other. It was strange and sad, and I needed him to be on side, to help me with this new phase of the campaign, even if it had not been his idea.

  I had thought he would be adamant in his opposition to the trip into town, but he did not say a lot. He had brought a bag of groceries, but when he opened the fridge to put the milk away there was a full bottle already there, and something flashed across his face.

  “I see you’ve been out again, then.”

  “Yes, only to the corner shop, but it’s OK, Nat, honestly. I’m very careful, and I always check the footage as soon as I get back to make sure nobody was following me.”

  “The camera doesn’t
follow you up the street, Amy. Of course he’s not going to stand outside the flat waiting for you. He’ll be hiding further up, you mark my words.”

  I really didn’t think this was true, and I said so. I actually thought Nat was becoming a bit paranoid, although of course I didn’t say that. But I did say that life was really a series of risks, if you think about it, and we don’t weigh up the likelihood of an accident before driving somewhere, or getting knocked down by a car careering out of control before we walk down the street. There may have been risks from Greg or whoever it was, it was possible that he would be hiding in someone’s front garden or would skid alongside me in a car and drag me in, but it just didn’t seem likely. My street was fairly quiet, but it took a matter of a couple of minutes to walk up to the main road where any attempt at abduction would be far too risky.

  Throughout this little speech, short but impassioned, Nat had been prowling around. He was looking in the kitchen cupboards, checking I had enough washing up liquid or enough tablets for the dishwasher, trying, it seemed, to find something I needed that he could provide. I felt so sorry for him, but really I had everything. At last he saw that the bin needed to be emptied and he started to tie the bag up, but I stopped him and made him sit down.

  “Leave it,” I said. “I’ll do it in the morning. It will keep until then. Nat, you are the most wonderful friend, but you have got to stop looking after me! I owe everything to you, but I have got to start standing on my own two feet, and that includes taking out my own rubbish and catching a bus into town all on my own!”

  So it was settled. I half-thought he would decide to take the day off work and go with me, which would have posed a problem as I could hardly choose his present with him beside me. Also, I was actually looking forward to doing it on my own. It would be an achievement and it would prove that there really was a future for me after all.