by Cerys du Lys
The connections, all falling into place. How Danny must have leaked Jeremy’s whereabouts: the look in his eyes that morning when the police had come. The news of Jeremy’s ‘accident’ was no surprise to him: he’d known already.
They knew she was lying, and the more she lied the more she wrapped herself up in Jeremy’s criminal double-life. Bradley was a master at leading her deep into a tangle of untruths and then pointing out how none of it hung together and she might as well tell him the truth. It was a game to him, and one he’d played many times before, while she was a complete novice.
They knew she’d been helping Jeremy. That she’d been to visit him at the boat moored by the Marchess. She had known he was being investigated by the police. She knew he’d been planning to flee the country under a false identity.
She couldn’t deny that she’d protected him, and that she had knowledge of at least some of his crimes. He had never explicitly told her what he had done, but looking back, it had been obvious: he’d used the word ‘trafficking’, and you don’t traffic in antiques or macramé.
Every tiny admission was a chink in her defense.
Yes, she’d known he was a wanted man.
Yes, she’d known he had a criminal life.
She didn’t know the details but... yes, he’d mentioned trafficking.
Yes, she’d known he was planning to leave the country, and that he had a false passport.
Was she planning to join him? He’d asked her to. So was that a ‘yes’? She didn’t know. But it wasn’t a ‘no’.
“There was someone else,” she said, at one point. “Someone he was scared of. Someone above him. That’s who he was running from. Not the police. Not just the police...”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Someone who didn’t want him to go on trial. Someone who would rather have him dead.”
“It was an accident. It’s been investigated. Your husband panicked and decided to leave. He was heading for a ferry. He was driving fast and lost control.”
“He was murdered.”
“If you know who would want to do that, you must tell us.”
“I don’t. I don’t know who it is.”
Over and over and over again.
It was all a blur.
A massive blur with just a few details that stuck in her mind.
A blur that had become a nightmare that had made her the changed, damaged, vengeful woman she now was. A woman who blinded herself to risk, who threw herself into the single-minded pursuit of revenge, and exposed herself to...
La Casa Blanca
1
Her room had a view that must have cost a fortune. Out across the terraced rooftops of the town, as they tumbled away down the hill, to the Mediterranean beyond. She could see the narrow white strip of the beach, those thatched umbrella shades stuck into the beach, the cluster of tower-block hotels that were just along from La Taberna.
She could even see La Taberna itself, or at least the strip of restaurants and bars with canopied frontages tucked in at the top of the beach.
If she stretched against her chains, she could see down to the garden below her room, all spiky palms and cacti.
The room itself was simply appointed. The bed consisted of a double mattress on some kind of block. There was a bedside chest of drawers with a stylish, angular lamp, and an archway through to an en suite bathroom. Everything was white, giving the light a dream-like atmosphere.
She could reach none of the furniture, of course, because the chains attached to cuffs on her wrists only extended far enough from their anchor points on the inner wall to allow her the choice between standing and sitting.
Now, she sat. One leg was tucked under her, the other drawn up, so her chin could rest on the knee.
She was naked, but even so... the heat!
Up here on the hill, the house was like a trap for the sun’s heat.
She didn’t know how long she had been here.
She didn’t know what had happened, what had been done to her.
Her head was fuzzy, confused. She felt sick and dizzy, and unwashed.
They had drugged her – but was that at the bar, when Rob had summoned her outside and Danny appeared from the shadows? Or later?
She did not know.
She could not think.
She drifted again.
§
She just had to survive. To get through.
She’d been recklessly stupid.
So damned naïve! Blinded by her own anger and need for revenge. Those were things that had got her through prison: you would survive anything when you have such a rage giving you reason to survive.
But now... they had blinded her to all risk, and put her in this position.
She needed to drink. Everything was so dry.
But there was nobody, and the plastic water bottle on the floor beside her was long since empty.
§
“You fucking psycho bitch!”
Danny was leaning in so close to her that every word sent a spray of spittle across her face.
She was standing.
They’d made her stand, even though her legs felt like rubber and she must collapse at any moment.
Rob was out on the balcony, the floor to ceiling glass doors slid open so that a delicious breeze stole into the room. He had his back to her and Danny, as if he was trying to shut them out.
Danny was in long shorts and a muscle shirt, revealing his thick, tattooed arms. Suddenly, he swung one arm back and then whipped it forward, the flat of his hand striking her face in a stinging blow that sent her reeling to her knees, thumping back against the wall, her head ringing.
“Hey, easy,” said Rob from the balcony. “She’s not yours to–”
“Shut it, barman,” said Danny.
There was something in his look, in the way he held himself, and in a moment of clarity she realized...
“Still sore?” she said.
He tensed, ready to strike her again, but then checked himself.
“You fucking wait,” he said. “I’m going to fucking break you.”
Then he came to squat before her and, calm and controlled, he drew his arm back and then sent a short, stabbing punch to her belly.
She doubled over, retching and gasping for air, knowing from bitter experience that in a calculated beating like this there would be another carefully-judged blow, and then another.
When she managed to peer up she saw that Danny was standing and Rob was there, one arm across Danny’s chest. Not physically restraining him – Danny would have broken free in an instant if Rob had tried to do that – but his arm a psychological barrier, a reminder.
“She’s not yours,” he said softly into Danny’s ear.
Slowly, the tension slipped away from the shorter man’s body until he turned and walked away, out to the balcony where he circled like a trapped animal.
Rob stood there, uncertain. His eyes met El’s and then he looked away.
Now, Danny came back in and squatted once more.
For a moment, El thought he was going to hit her again, but he didn’t.
He was smiling.
“You know what this place is?” he said, in an almost conversational tone. “La Casa Blanca. It’s a luxury home, surrounded by walls and high-tech security. Nobody can get out without permission, and nobody can get in. It’s like a separate country. The rules are different here. In fact there’s only one rule: you do what the man wants. You know what I mean?”
The man. The man.
“I want to meet him,” she said. “The man.”
That’s why she was here. The only reason.
She had to see the man.
2
Danny came back to her later, alone.
He came to her and he had sheer murder in those blue and green eyes of his.
She’d been dozing, hunched up against the wall.
She couldn’t lie down, so she had to sit like this, propping herself into the least uncomfortab
le position.
At least the drugs numbed her to the pain and discomfort.
§
She woke when he took a fistful of her hair and jerked her head up.
She cried out and opened her eyes and he spat in her face. She could smell the saliva, feel it running down her cheek, pooling in the crack of her tightly closed mouth.
She went to wipe it off and he released her hair and cuffed her hand away with the back of his fist, hitting her so hard she thought for a moment that her wrist might be broken.
The room was in darkness, lit only by what spilled in through the balcony doorway, starlight and light from the rest of the villa. Enough for her to see the evil glint in his eyes, the tight smile on his face.
He squatted down low in front of her. “You want to know what’s going to happen when the man gets back?”
Until then she hadn’t known that he was away.
She said nothing, just sat there, her legs drawn up defensively, and waited for him to go on.
“He’s going to have to decide whether he wants to keep you, or sell you on, you know what I mean?” He reached for her long copper hair again. “All this...” he went on, “well, it’s got to have a bit of value, hasn’t it? There’s some parts of the world they pay a fortune for blondes and redheads.” He laughed. “I reckon he’ll sell you on. He’d get a kick out of that. He’s got plenty of toys already.”
She tried to shut him out. She couldn’t let herself think about the future. She had to just get through this.
He moved his hand to her cheek, fist clenched so he could run his knuckles down the line of her jaw.
“You scared?” he said. “You should be. You should be very scared right now.”
She couldn’t let herself think. He was toying with her. She couldn’t let him win.
“You want to know what’s going to happen now your barman boyfriend is safely out of the way?”
His tone was so light; he could have been talking about the weather.
His knuckles pressed harder. She met the pressure, unwilling to give ground of any sort.
“Are you going to hit me again?” she asked. “Is that what you like doing?”
She couldn’t stop herself. Chained, naked and drugged, she still had to provoke him like that.
He shook his head. “Rob was right,” he said. “I can’t go damaging the goods.”
A sudden chill took her.
“You’re going to rape me...”
He stood, turned away, went across to the window. There was a tension in the way he moved, a tightness.
“You can’t can you? Did they manage to fix you? Are you still out of action?”
He looked like he was about to explode, rocking from foot to foot, fists clenching and then unclenching.
Then she went on: “You killed Jeremy, didn’t you? Just as much as if you’d been driving the car that forced him off the road, you killed him. You tricked me into saying where he was and then you killed him.”
Then she pulled against her chains, tipping forward, and spat at him.
A long trail of spittle arched out, but didn’t reach him. He looked down, then back at her.
“You fucking psycho bitch,” he said, and then he walked past her, out of the room.
§
Danny Taylor was a known quantity.
He was a violent man who lived life on a short fuse. He was devious and he had the deceptive cover of coming across as far less clever than he really was. She’d fallen for that more than once.
But she had his measure.
Right now he was holding himself back. He’d said he didn’t want to ‘damage the goods’, and maybe that was at least part of the truth. But he was scared, too: the subtext beneath everything he’d said was that the goods weren’t his to damage.
They belonged to the man.
It wasn’t until the morning that she started to see just how much she should fear that man.
§
She woke to sunlight angling in from the balcony doorway. The sky was deep blue once again, and the heat in the room was already building.
It wasn’t the sunlight that had woken her, though. There was someone in the room.
She twisted, and as her eyes adjusted to the relative gloom by the doorway she saw a shape there, a person.
It was a woman, dressed bizarrely in fishnet stockings, suspenders, black lace thong and a push-up balconette bra from which her nipples poked out. She was a schoolboy fantasy of a slutty sex siren, a caricature.
The woman’s skin was a honeyed mid-brown, her hair long and black, and her mouth... It was hard to see properly in the shade, but there was something very odd about the way she held her mouth open like that.
“Hello,” said the woman, her words strangely distorted. “Can I get you anything? Water?”
This woman must have been here before, El realized. Until now she hadn’t seen who had been replacing her bottled water and emptying the plastic bucket she peed in. She’d been too drugged to notice almost anything.
Stepping into the room, the woman came into the light more and now El saw what was wrong with her mouth.
Someone had cut it and stitched the wounds back together again so that her mouth took on the permanently open ‘O’ of a sex doll.
Was this a warning? Danny perhaps? Sending this mutilated woman in to show El what lay in store?
The woman was carrying a plastic bottle. She stooped, squatted, and placed the bottle by El. Then she paused and looked at her. “They drug the water, you know,” she said. Her words were distorted, her lips unable to close. “They drug it to subdue you. If they want to keep you, they use needles.” She turned one arm and El saw track marks on her wrist and the inside of her elbow.
Then the woman added, “My name’s Keira, by the way. They said you were asking questions about me at the bar.”
El stared.
Then, slowly, she reached for the bottle, flipped the lid and took a long swallow.
She needed the water, but more than anything she needed that fuzzy blanket to descend across her senses. Something to stop her thinking, to stop her seeing.
Something to stifle that crystal-clear comprehension of just how bad a situation she had put herself in.
3
Rob came to her later that day, some time past the peak of the heat.
She was lying there, delirious with thirst, and with the drugs they put in what little water she had. She slept, and dreamed of a Keira further mutilated, new orifices carved into her body. In the dream Keira had been sitting right here in this room, on the bed, eyes fixed on El while she drove a needle into her arm.
When El woke, she had lost the ability to distinguish between dream and reality. At first she believed that Keira had actually been here, injecting herself, showing off her new wounds. And then, slowly, she reassured herself that she had been dreaming, delirious, and that Keira had not been here since that early morning visit.
That was worse, though.
That reminded El of what she had seen, of the real, mutilated Keira.
The image of that distorted mouth trying to speak haunted her when she was awake, and when she was asleep.
She tried not to think. Tried just to get through.
§
She’d reached a kind of blankness by the time Rob entered the room.
Not quite awake, not quite asleep. Just sitting there, her back to the wall, her legs drawn up so her chin could rest on her knees.
Her mind empty.
Nothing.
She heard the door open, then close again.
Sensed a presence, someone moving into the room.
There was movement in her peripheral vision, and now she began to stir. Her brain started to work, her senses; she started to process images.
Rob. Barman, beach bum Rob.
Standing there in leather flip-flops, frayed denim knee-length shorts, white t-shirt with some kind of faded print across the chest. His stubble was shorter, his hair as tousled
as ever, his silver-blue eyes examining her.
“You okay?” he asked.
She said nothing.
He made to hand her a bottle, then put it down next to her when she didn’t respond.
She ignored it.
She needed water, but... They drug the water, you know.
“Can you stand?”
She looked up at him. He was reaching towards her. She didn’t know what he wanted.
He stooped, found the cuffs on her wrists, did something and then they sprung open.
She allowed him to help her to her feet.
It was hard to stand, and she had to lean into his embrace to support herself.
He turned her, helped her walk through the archway to the bathroom.
Water started to run. A shower.
She shrugged him off, and stepped under the spray.
The water was barely lukewarm, deliciously cool on her body after the heat of the bedroom.
She stood, her hands flat on the tiled wall in front of her, jets of cool water coming down from a wide showerhead.
She started to come to her senses. Started to focus.
She tipped her head back and let the water run down over her face. Opened her mouth and let the water pool before she swallowed. Delicious, clean water.
She turned and he was in the archway, standing with his arms folded, watching her.
“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” she managed to say. She’d thought at first that he might be here to save her.
He shook his head. “Where would you go?” he said. “Where would I go?”
“You’re that scared?”
He shrugged, his stock response.
“Or are you just as bad?”
He looked away.
“I’m in it too deep,” he said. “Which I guess makes me just as bad.”
She turned away from the wall, so she could face him. His eyes went everywhere, then flitted away, then came back to meet hers.
“I’m in too deep, too, aren’t I?” she said.
He didn’t need to answer.
