by Paula Hawkes
The instant the video started she wished she had never clicked on the file. Mark’s flat came into stark focus, as seen from the corner of the room where his Nikon camera usually sat upon its tripod. China’s hand went to her mouth but she was unable to make a sound. At that moment her brain could not conceive of any possible way that Philip would have this on his computer. She watched the video play in stunned silence. Esta sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap. When China saw herself walking into the frame escorted by Mark she gulped, suddenly feeling very sick. She wanted to throw up but she couldn’t turn away as she watched the recent event from her own, personal, private history, from a different viewpoint to that which she remembered. It was all there. The whole sordid session. After she saw herself leave the room she watched as Mark walked over to the camera to switch it off, with Esta smiling at him in the background.
“What the fuck?” She couldn’t think of anything more constructive to say. Her mind was in turmoil and completely unable to make any sense of the situation. She knew that Philip should obviously not have this video in his possession. She hadn’t even known there was a video of her private session with Mark and Esta. They had obviously both known as he had filmed the fucking thing, and she had watched him switch the camera off. It was quite likely, China thought, that Esta had switched the camera on just before China had entered the room. And she could make a kind of perverted sense of that. She wasn’t happy about it but it did actually make sense. Maybe Mark had lured her into a relationship, with the help of Esta, to film some pornography to upload to the Internet. But China knew there was a whole lot of porn on the Internet, so it was almost inconceivable that Philip would just happen across this specific video whilst randomly surfing for titillation.
It finally occurred to China what the other thing bothering her was. Her elusive suspicion from earlier. The conversation at the end of the holiday in Italy, where Philip had told her very specifically that she would make a good lap dancer. She had known that the way he said it revealed a bit too much. Now she could see that Philip already knew that she had met with, and done a lot more with, a certain young lap dancer. One who was now dead. No wonder he had looked so shocked himself.
She checked out the other two videos. Both were taken in Mark’s flat and both starred China Dark. She gulped again, the acid taste of bile reaching the back of her mouth, and she thought she really was going to vomit. At the end of the final video she slammed the laptop lid down. She ought to be fuming at this betrayal but she was too shocked to feel anything other than nausea.
She only just reached the toilet before she spewed the contents of her stomach. She hadn’t eaten anything much since the morning before, so the spasms soon turned to a painful dry heaving with nothing to bring up. As she sat there next to the bowl, slumped on the floor, saliva drying on the side of her chin, her eyes were watering with the effort of vomiting but there were no real tears. The rage was growing within her. She might not be able to explain yet how Philip had managed to find videos of her with Mark and Esta but she knew that he shouldn’t have them. Their presence on his computer indicated a far bigger lie than she yet understood. For them to be there something must be very wrong, and she was going to damn well find out what it was.
Her anger overruled her previous grief and enabled her to start to plan what she needed to do next. First she would confront Mark. He was the source of the material so she would at least get out of him where he had uploaded that material, and then she could try to find out how it had ended up on her husband’s laptop. Finally, once she had that information, she would confront Philip about his part in all of this.
She let the fury take over, driving her determination, because this was easier than dealing with the sadness that was threatening to drown her. She left the house without tidying anything up. A large part of her wanted Philip to return home and find his laptop out on the floor by the chair. She wanted him to panic over what she might have discovered. Before she left she had tried calling Mark’s mobile number from her home phone. Right now she didn’t care about Philip checking the list of numbers called that month. It wasn’t like her liaisons with Mark would be a surprise to him now. The line had rung for half a dozen rings and then switched into the standard network, robotic voicemail message. She didn’t feel like leaving a message though, she wanted to talk to the bastard.
As she rode the tube into town her anger bubbled just below the surface. She needed to calm down, to work out what she was going to say to Mark when she found him, but she was struggling to gain control of her fire. Her first port of call would be his flat. If she could catch him there, off guard and without other people around he might be less defensive, more honest, however unwelcome that truth might be to her.
Chapter 40
When she arrived at Mark’s place the main entrance leading to the flats was already open so she went straight in and climbed the stairs, two at a time, to his front door. She was a little surprised to see that the door was slightly open, so she hesitated, listening. Silence. For the first time she felt an icy trace of fear. Esta was dead, murdered, probably by the same person who had murdered several other girls. Mark was associated with Esta. Doubts crawled like hairy spiders from the dark recesses of her imagination. If Mark had been involved in the killing of these girls, China was doing a very stupid thing here, and she should be going to the police instead. But she couldn’t believe that Mark was a killer and she wanted, no needed, an explanation. She may not know him very well, but shouldn’t she have been able to tell if she was having sex with a serial killer. She knew this was what a lot of people in the past had said about their husbands, partners, sons. She had never believed that they really couldn’t have known about the cold-blooded killer they were living with, but it was a common theme. She had always put this denial down to wanton self-delusion and a diversion of blame. However, right at this moment insistent doubt was worrying at her fear, shaking it like a terrier shakes a half-dead rabbit. She listened a little longer, her heart beating fast in her chest, but there was no sound coming from the other side of the door.
There was enough anger coursing through her to steel her determination. Cautiously she pushed the door open and peered into the room. None of Mark’s meagre belongings were there. She quietly stepped into the room, and could almost physically feel the emptiness. A room with bland, anonymous furniture but no evidence of any living person. Looking over to the corner, she noticed that the camera and tripod had also gone, which was no surprise. It was plain to see that Mark had left, and it didn’t look like he had any intention of coming back. She was part relieved that the anticipated confrontation was not going to happen, but she also felt denied an important right of justified accusation. There was no point in searching the flat further, there really was nothing to see.
As she descended the stairs, her disappointment feeding her anger, she suspected that the only way she was going to find out what was going on was to confront her husband. She would go to his work and call him outside. She didn’t want to be discussing certain personal aspects of their private lives in front of other people, no matter how satisfying it would be to publically denounce Philip for his knowledge of her video humiliation. How many other people had seen the videos of her? If Philip had shared them with someone, if anyone else she knew had happened across them on the Internet… it didn’t bear thinking about.
As she walked past the only door on the ground floor she could hear faint but unmistakeable sounds coming from within, sounds that chilled her and crystallised her fears. They were the sounds of sexual activity, panting, cries of passion, and she recognised those sounds from her own viewing of the video earlier. She knocked loudly on the door and shouted. “Hey. Open up. I can hear what you’re doing in there.” She didn’t know what else to say. She felt powerless, angry, sad, mortified. She needed to do something, but she had no idea what it would be.
The sounds coming from within the flat paused. China knew who would be living here. It could onl
y be Tony, Mark’s landlord.
When the door was edged open she aggressively barged in, knocking Tony backwards, a startled and very guilty look upon his face. When she threw open the door to the main room she saw Mark’s laptop on the table in the centre of the room. Tony looked at her horrified rushing past her to the far side of the room. He had obviously not been expecting to see China. The real China, not the digital one that had been recently humping on the screen of the laptop on the table. He froze.
She looked at him in disgust, wanting to scream at him, rush at him and rake her fingers down his fat, screwed up face. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that was not why she was here. She wasn’t ready to accept that just about everyone might have now seen her at her most vulnerable. She didn’t want to even think about the intimate secrets that Tony had just uncovered, what he might be imagining now that she was here in the flesh.
“Where’s Mark?” she shouted.
Tony was so flustered that he had failed to hide the blatant erection that was tenting his tracksuit bottoms. He tried to stutter out a reply, coughed once and then said, “I haven’t seen him for a few days. He just disappeared and hasn’t been back here.”
“But his computer is still here.” She looked pointedly at the item on the table.
Tony was starting to regain his composure. “His rent was due two days ago. That’s why I took it.”
“So his rent is due. I don’t care. And I don’t suppose that gives you the right to be looking through his personal stuff.”
“If he doesn’t pay his rent, his personal stuff will be my personal stuff.”
Now she really wanted to hurt Tony. She didn’t care if he repossessed all of Mark’s other belongings, but not the content that Mark had saved on his computer. That was also her personal stuff, and she wanted it deleted.
“Maybe,” she said. “But the police might be interested in what he’s been up to. And what you’re looking at.”
Tony looked flustered again at the mention of the police. Apart from his transgressions as a landlord, sneaking through his tenant’s belongings, and China couldn’t see the police being very interested in that, she wondered what he was really worried about. That was a card she should play. She pulled out her mobile phone and made as if to call the police.
Tony jumped across the room towards her, knocking the laptop on the floor. “No, don’t” he said, pleading with her. “Look, why don’t you check if Jim in the pub has seen him recently. He’s probably owed wages so he would come back for those.”
“Give me the laptop.”
He looked back at where it lay on the floor, as if calculating what to do next. China was scared. What if he decided to attack her? She was relatively fit, but she would be no match for this man, no matter how out of shape he was. She wished she had thought to bring something she could use as a weapon, but then she hadn’t expected to find this.
Finally, Tony reached down to retrieve the laptop and then held it out towards China. “Take it. Just don’t call the police. There’s no need for that. I could do without the hassle.” His voice was filled with sadness, maybe she even detected a little remorse. China took the laptop from him, being very careful not to physically touch him, cringing as their fingers nearly made contact. Her concerns over being attacked by him faded.
She looked around his room for the first time. The walls were covered in fantasy artwork. Semi-naked girls with unbelievably generous figures were riding dragons, wielding swords, embracing demons. Despite the lurid, unashamedly puerile content, they were beautifully executed. A skilled artist had produced these, probably for an intended audience of teenage boys and their wet dreams, but he was an artist nonetheless. On the table where the laptop had been were some scattered, half-finished sketches. China could hardly believe it, but it was apparent that the same artist who had painted the works on the walls had likely produced these pencil drawings. The style was unmistakeable. And what was even more surprising was that some of the sketches had China’s face. Her body had been distorted by the artist’s imagination into fantastical proportions, but her face was delicately and almost lovingly reproduced.
She looked back at Tony and saw the sad man cowering. He looked at her and then the sketches on the table, looking like a man whose innermost secret had just been ripped from him for public display. His eyes were damp and his mouth worked at words that wouldn’t form. He just didn’t have the emotional skills to say what he was feeling at that moment, couldn’t articulate what it was he was wanting from China. She didn’t want to think about this right now. Although she now suspected that there were depths to this sad, ugly man, her mind needed to focus on why she had come here, to find out the truth.
Eventually Tony seemed to compose himself. He pulled a crumpled envelope from his back pocket and handed it to her. “This is for you,” he said in an almost bashful voice.
She took the envelope without looking at it, turned and ran out into the street clutching Mark’s laptop and the envelope. Once outside, she took some deep breaths. What was going on here? It appeared that Tony was rather obsessed with her, his delicate drawings told her that. But if he had wanted to harm her, it would surely have happened there and then, when she was vulnerable, alone in in his room, witness to the evidence of his voyeuristic intrusion into her life. Whatever secret desires were harboured by Mark’s landlord, she knew that he was right about one thing. She should check the pub next.
She stuffed the computer into her bag and tried to sort her confused thoughts out as she headed in the direction of the Dog and Duck, clutching the envelope but not wanting to look at it yet. She wanted the explanation from Mark’s own mouth, rather than some carefully calculated words edited and reworked for just the right effect.
The simple, indisputable facts were that Mark had been recording their sexual liaisons. Esta, the most recent victim of a local serial killer, was in the videos. Her husband had copies of those videos on his laptop. So Philip had known about Mark, China and Esta before the Italy trip. That would explain his shock at seeing the story of Esta’s murder in the newspaper. Philip hadn’t killed Esta in a jealous rage, as he was in Italy with China. But Mark had disappeared. She didn’t see any reason that Mark would kill Esta, but she realized she really knew far too little about him to accurately judge, and she was now seriously regretting the danger she may have put herself in. Even if she could perceive of Mark killing Esta, didn’t that then also make him a prime candidate for the serial killer? And what about Tony? He was enough of a creep, but he hadn’t taken an easy opportunity to deal with China. But maybe he had feelings for China. His drawings would appear to support that.
She shuddered and wondered if she should just go straight to the police. But how could she explain what had happened without exposing her own humiliating shame? Could she really just tell them that she had had an affair and been stupid enough to let her lover film her having sex with him, including a lesbian encounter with the recent murder victim, and that somehow that video had got out and her husband had seen a copy? Now, the Esta angle they would be interested in, but to admit to having a lesbian session with the Romanian stripper would be mortifying. And then they would see the video of her evident enjoyment of that session, adding enormously to her shame. She would have to go to the police, she knew that, but she needed to think about it, work up her courage, be ready to deal with the embarrassment. And she wanted to talk to Mark first, to find out more about what was going on. She would rather go to the police with the full facts, it might not completely dispel the shame, but it would give her some armour to deal with it.
She stormed to the pub, confident that she would be safe in such a public place. As she entered the richly dark cave of the pub, the smell of damp bar cloths and stale beer ever present, even this early in the day, she noticed a new person working behind the bar. Jim had obviously employed a new young girl to work the bar, maybe because Mark had left she wondered. The girl was a statuesque, raven haired beauty. As the girl�
�s amber fire look fell upon China it felt like the delicate, intimate tickle of snowflakes on her skin. She could hardly breath as the girl walked over to her and asked her what she would like to drink.
China gathered her thoughts, puzzled as to why this girl affected her so and hoping her activity with Esta hadn’t been rather more life-changing than she had thought, and she asked for the manager.
As the girl strutted away China couldn’t help but stare after her. ‘Now she is really beautiful’, China thought. This was the kind of woman that she had always believed that men really lusted after, a fundamentally sexual allure projecting from every inch of her perfect body and hair. She had always compared herself to such beauties and found herself wanting. But somehow, maybe China could believe that she was in the same league as this gothic beauty. There was no doubt that she had managed to ensnare some quality admirers herself lately, acquiring her own small following. It was strange to be thinking of herself in the same category as this stunning woman, but she really did now.
When the landlord came out to the bar from the back room he told her that he hadn’t seen Mark for a few days, but when he had last been at the pub he had informed Jim that he was leaving. That’s why Jim had hired Lilith, the new barmaid. “The police were also asking for Mark yesterday. I hope he’s not in any trouble. I liked Mark.”
She sat in the corner of the bar, alone at a glass-ring stained table and stared at the envelope that Tony had given her. Tony had obviously opened it, and rather unsubtly tried to reseal it. She was almost afraid of what she might find written within. She took a deep breath and opened it to find a neatly written note.
‘China, I don’t know how much you will know by the time you read this. All I can say is that the only thing I am guilty of is my atrocious treatment of you. That’s not to belittle what I have done to you. But please believe that I haven’t physically hurt anyone, despite what might be said or insinuated. It all started as a game, but I soon learnt that my feelings for you were no act. And now Esta is gone. First Zilda, now Esta. All the people I cared about are gone, except you, and I know that I will lose you now. I’m sorry, China. The laptop’s yours. Please take it, and please don’t judge me too harshly once you see what’s on it. Mark x’
