by Danuta Reah
His face immediately went blank. He tapped a couple of buttons on the keyboard and said, ‘Yes, more or less. I’m going to Newcastle in about a month.’ He wasn’t looking at her.
‘That means it’s … There never was any chance of any future in it, was there?’ Her voice sounded calm, the way she wanted it to, but she could feel anger under the surface.
He studied the screen for a moment. She waited. ‘I should have told you,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Debbie twisted a rogue tendril of hair round her finger. Her anger was starting to bubble up now, but whether it was with Tim, or with Rob for leaving her vulnerable to Tim’s malice, or with herself for being such a fool, she didn’t know. Her voice sounded sharp in her ears. ‘I wish you had. I had to hear it from Tim Godber.’ He looked surprised, but didn’t say anything. ‘Who else knows?’ Debbie persisted, at the same time telling herself, Stop it, stop being angry. ‘Everyone apart from me, I assume.’
‘No one,’ he said, calmly. ‘No one should know. I handed my notice in to personnel before Christmas.’ He looked at her. ‘Debs, we agreed …’
She felt the anger build up. ‘I know what we agreed. That doesn’t give you a licence to treat me like shit. That doesn’t give you a licence to lie to me.’ She wanted to shake him out of his calm – he had no right!
His eyes narrowed. ‘I didn’t lie to you, Deborah.’
That had got to him. ‘You weren’t exactly truthful, though, were you? Did you think it wasn’t relevant, something I didn’t need to know? Something else for you to be so bloody secretive about?’ She stood up. She was going to start crying in a minute, and she was damned if she was going to let him see that. ‘I’m going.’ She turned to the door, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
‘Listen, for Christ’s sake, will you?’ He was close to her, looking at her, and they were both silent for a moment. The anger that had built up exploded. She shouted incoherently and lashed out at him. He let go of her, and put his hand up to protect himself. She grabbed his arms and tried to shake him, digging her nails into his skin, saying, ‘Bastard, bastard, lying bastard!’ He fended her off easily and held her away from him. His face was white with anger. She tried to pull her hands free, but he was holding her wrists too tightly. ‘Just stop it, Deborah, just fucking stop it!’
Debbie waited, tense, breathing hard. He reached for the door behind her. For a moment she thought he was going to open it and push her through, but she heard the key turn as he locked it. ‘Just shut up,’ he said. She took a breath but he pushed her up against the wall, closing her mouth with his. He pushed her skirt up around her waist, slipping her pants aside. She felt his fingers inside her and pulled her head back, gasping, but he pressed his mouth down on hers again. The anger had become something else. His feet edged her feet apart, then his thighs were between hers, spreading her wider as he lifted her slightly. He slipped his fingers out of her and fumbled for a moment with his belt, then she could feel him guiding his penis into her, hard and deep. Her legs would hardly hold her and she gripped his shoulders. He slipped his arms round her and down, supporting her weight, and she wrapped her legs round him, digging her nails into his back, wanting to mark him, to hurt him, not wanting him to stop until she felt the warmth exploding inside her.
The anger had gone. He let her slide down gently, keeping his arms round her, supporting her against the wall. She pressed her face against his neck. ‘Debs …’ he said. ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry …’ The dead weariness was back, the expression of tired despair she remembered from weeks ago when he’d talked to her in the pub about his wife and his daughter. ‘I’m sorry, Debs.’ She wasn’t certain what he was apologizing for. ‘I’ve got to get away – I should have done it months ago.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’ve got to make a clean break. I’m going crazy here. Angie and Flora, they’re like burdens I have to drag round with me. Angie would have hated that, she would have given me six kinds of hell. I have to get away.’
‘Albatrosses,’ Debbie said. He looked at her.
‘I’m here for the next month,’ he said.
She sighed. It was tempting, but as Louise had said, she needed to survive as well. ‘I can’t. I couldn’t stand it knowing you were leaving.’ And she knew that once he was gone, he wouldn’t come back.
His face tensed and he started to say something, then stopped. There was silence for a moment. Then he nodded slowly in acknowledgement of her decision. ‘I’ll miss you, Debs.’ He touched her face. ‘Listen. Don’t forget I’m here. Call me if you need me.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’ But they both knew she wouldn’t. Clinically, briskly, she straightened her clothes, tidied her hair. She didn’t look at him. She Wasn’t sure what she wanted to see. Ten minutes later, she was walking through the outer office, aware of Andrea looking at her with curiosity.
So that was that. As Debbie packed her stuff away at the end of the day, she wondered what she was going to do. Work? That seemed a thin and unreliable comfort. Talk to her mother? That was gone. She didn’t want to think about her mother. When she was a child, she couldn’t imagine anything worse than her parents dying. Her life felt anchorless, pointless, grey. Pull yourself together, Deborah!
Louise breezed in, carrying a pile of textbooks. ‘I’m keeping these in here,’ she said, indicating the books. ‘They’re walking off the shelves of the stockroom. It’s my fault. I haven’t got time, so I say – Go and help yourselves – and then I don’t know where they’ve gone.’ She looked at Debbie. ‘Are you OK? You look awful.’
‘I’m just tired.’ Debbie managed a smile. ‘It’s worse than I thought, coming back.’
‘Take more time if you need it.’ Louise was concerned.
‘No. I need something to do.’ The thought of being at home all day horrified her. ‘I’m just tired,’ she said again. She pulled her briefcase from under the desk, then remembered. ‘Louise, I need a lift back on Thursday night. If I can’t find anyone else, could you …?’
‘Of course, no problem. Dan’s out, so I’ll come back and pick you up. Don’t bother looking for anyone else. I’ll do it.’
Thank God for friends, Debbie thought. She decided to give Fiona a ring and see if she wanted to come round for a drink. She needed to talk.
Fiona’s hair was the colour of ripe strawberries. She sorted through Debbie’s tape collection and found some guitar music. ‘It’s a bit folky for me,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you got any decent jazz?’ They had their usual music argument, Debbie trying hard to sound as though she minded. Talk seemed awkward, halting, until Fiona said, ‘What’s wrong, Debbie? You look awful.’
Debbie tried to be evasive, but Fiona persisted. ‘Brian keeps threatening to descend. He’s really worried about you. You’ve gone into hibernation since … well, we’ve hardly seen you, really. He only let me come round on my own because I said I’d be able to get you to talk more easily.’
Debbie realized she wanted to talk about it. She told Fiona about Rob, about the footsteps on the stairs, about his wife and baby, about how he’d supported her through Gina’s death, about his worry for her safety, about how he was just walking out on her without a word. ‘We agreed,’ she said, ‘we’d just take it in the short term. He didn’t make any promises. But I did think he’d tell me what he was doing.’
‘Maybe he was going to,’ Fiona said, after a moment.
‘I don’t know.’ Debbie shook her head. ‘It’s just – he knew he was going right from the start, and he didn’t say anything. I told him I didn’t want to see him again.’
‘Maybe it’s best. If he can’t …’ Fiona shook her head.
Debbie sighed. ‘I suppose I was fooling myself that it would go somewhere. I don’t know.’
Fiona, who had been thinking a bit more about Debbie’s account, said, ‘Just go back a minute. He thought what?’ She listened with obvious alarm as Debbie explained. ‘Someone’s stalking you? The Strangler is stalking you? Debbie …’
‘No. I don’t know.’ Debbie had her own confusions and doubts. ‘Rob was worried. Because of that article, and because of one or two other things. He just thought I ought to be careful.’
‘Well, he’s right about that.’ Fiona wasn’t completely reassured. ‘Why don’t you go to the police?’
‘Rob did. He told them everything but they didn’t think there was anything in it. And Rob said that they were right – there wasn’t really. He just felt it. He said it was his policeman’s instinct.’
‘He’s a policeman?’ Fiona might as well have said, He’s Pol Pot?
‘He used to be,’ Debbie said, not wanting to get drawn into one of Fiona’s discussions of the fascist state.
‘The main thing is, you’ve got to be careful. Don’t forget that Brian’s got a car. You know he’d give you a lift any time if you needed it.’
Debbie realized how little in the past few weeks she’d talked to the people she used to – still did – care about. She felt guilty, selfish. Maybe she was better off without Rob, if that was what he did to her. ‘I can’t start asking him to run me around. He’s got better things to do. Don’t worry. I am being careful. I’ve got lifts sorted out for my late night.’
‘I’ll tell you what I do.’ Fiona reached over for her rucksack. ‘I always have this in my pocket or in my bag.’ She rummaged round and produced a thin, rectangular piece of plastic. ‘Look, it’s like a Stanley knife, only you can slide the blade up and down.’ She showed Debbie how the cutting part consisted of a series of razor blades that could be broken off one by one and discarded. ‘Anyone tries anything with me, they’ll get one of those in them. Here, take this. I’ve got more. Put it in your coat pocket.’
‘Isn’t it illegal?’ Debbie asked.
‘Probably. Oh, not to own one. They’re perfectly legitimate tools. It probably is to carry one around. If I get caught, I’m going to play dumb. Oh, I wondered what I’d done with that! Might work.’
Debbie laughed. After Fiona had gone, she picked up the knife and slid the blade up and down. It was wickedly sharp. She couldn’t imagine attacking anyone with it but she dropped it into the pocket of her mac.
He should have been feeling relieved. It should have been a weight off his mind. Instead, he was restless, jumpy, unable to settle to any of the things he ought to have been doing. He tried to focus his mind on the sheaf of paper Pete Morton had sent him, but each time he read to the end of a page, he realized he hadn’t taken any of it in. He was tired. That must be it. He hadn’t had a lot of sleep this last two weeks. Though this was the first time he’d felt weary, or jumpy, or unsettled.
She’d been right to be angry. He’d done the one thing that could be construed as a violation of their informal, no-strings arrangement – of course she’d been angry. He hadn’t been able to think straight. He should have let her do what she so clearly wanted to do – smack him in the teeth – but instead he’d screwed her up against the office wall, excited beyond caution or fairness. Then she’d said goodbye and that had hurt. He hadn’t expected to feel like that, and he hadn’t known what to say. He thought he knew his own mind. And now, instead of feeling relieved, instead of getting on with what needed to be done, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
He’d got to the end of the page again and he still had no idea of what he’d just read. Angrily, he jammed the papers back into the folder and picked up his jacket. He was going out for a drink.
Something had been nagging in the back of Lynne’s mind ever since the briefing, when Berryman told them the Melbourne police had managed to contact Rebecca Wilcox. ‘I’ve got a copy of her statement that I want you to look at. The important thing I can see is that she did give Julie a lift into work for the period we’re interested in. She says that Julie asked her to keep it quiet. She used to drop her off on Station Road.’ There had been a sense of a minor puzzle being ticked off as solved, but Lynne had felt something jump in her mind. She hadn’t been able to pin the thought down, so in the end she’d left it, knowing from past experience that it would come back, and now something was tantalizing her with that on the tip of my tongue feeling. The Strangler had waited. He’d broken his pattern to wait for his victim. She closed her eyes. There was something important there. She almost had it … The phone rang, breaking her concentration, and she felt the pattern escape, elude her and vanish. Shit! She picked up the receiver. It was West to say he was bringing a set of files up.
Wednesday was a grey day, cloudy and dull with the threat of rain. The weather forecast predicted stormy days ahead. It was typical end-of-January weather. Debbie was an automaton who took herself into work, delivered her classes and collapsed into her chair in the staff room during breaks. She couldn’t make herself do anything she didn’t have to do, and was becoming uneasily aware of the bulging marking folder that was getting fuller and fuller as deadlines came nearer. She’d do it tomorrow. She’d do it at the weekend.
She stayed in the staff room that lunchtime as she didn’t want to risk running into Rob in the canteen, or into Tim, for that matter. She was listlessly taking a sandwich apart and wondering what had happened to her appetite, when Louise came through the door, weighed down by a large pile of folders. She dumped them on her desk, looked at Debbie and said, ‘Coursework folders. English language. Half each, swap next week?’ She and Debbie had to mark, and agree marks, for the work the A-level English students had done towards their qualification. It was a demanding process, and Debbie drooped at the prospect.
‘With a bit of luck,’ she said, ‘I’ll be made redundant.’
‘Don’t even joke about it.’ Louise looked at the pile of work. ‘Incidentally, I’ve just had Rob Neave giving me earache about you.’
Debbie paid close attention to her sandwich. ‘Oh yes?’
‘He wanted to know how you were getting home on Thursday. I told him to ask you and he went all evasive on me. First time I’ve ever seen that man at a loss for words. What have you done to him, Debbie?’
‘Did you tell him you were giving me a lift?’ Debbie tried to keep her voice light, but she knew it sounded toneless.
‘Yes.’ Louise looked at her for a moment, then changed the subject. ‘Let’s sort out a timetable for this marking. If we know what we’re doing and when we’re doing it, it’ll be a lot easier.’
Relieved, Debbie got out her diary, and Louise neatly and efficiently sliced their time into milestones and deadlines. ‘Right,’ she said when they’d finished. ‘You haven’t got a class this afternoon, you haven’t got any coursework marking to do because I know when you’ve got to do that. You’re leaving. You can go home, you can go shopping – buy yourself a book, buy yourself a new dress – you can go to the gym. But get yourself out of here and give yourself a treat.’
Debbie felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes for a moment, and had to pretend to sort things on her desk. ‘OK,’ she said after a moment. ‘Thanks.’
She took Louise’s advice and bought herself a book, then went home and ran a deep bath. She poured bath essence in until the bubbles came over the side of the tub. She forgot to shut the bathroom door, so she had to put up with Buttercup who tightroped along the edge of the bath, mewing anxiously, then spent the rest of the hour that Debbie soaked herself sitting on the taps trying to catch the drips. At seven o’clock, Debbie decided on oblivion, took a couple of sleeping pills and went to bed. She was vaguely aware of the phone ringing as she drifted into sleep, but she couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.
Neave put the phone down and wondered what to do. He’d dialled Debbie’s number on an impulse, and he wasn’t sure what he had planned to say to her. He’d been in a foul mood all day, and when he’d reduced Andrea to tears he decided it was time to go. ‘I’m not in tomorrow,’ he told Andrea, ignoring the Thank God she mouthed at her screen. ‘I’ve got to see those people in Manchester. I’ll be in on Friday, but phone me if anything urgent comes up.’ He knew he ought to apologize for upsetting her, but the fa
ct was, he wasn’t sorry. He wanted to upset someone.
He hadn’t slept well last night, and when he did sleep, he had vivid, unpleasant dreams in which he had to be somewhere urgently, to find something urgently, but kept getting distracted and delayed. He’d woken up sweating with anxiety, and had reached out to put his arms round Debbie. And there was no one there. It had taken him back to those mornings when he had reached out for Angie, and had had to realize that she wasn’t there, would never be there again. He’d felt tears filling his eyes and clogging his nose, and he’d leapt out of bed and under the shower, turning the water on full blast and cold.
The gnawing worm of anxiety had stayed with him all day, finally causing him to shout at Andrea when it turned out that some of the work he needed for tomorrow wasn’t done. He would have to do something about this. Whatever was happening with him and Debbie, it was unfinished business and he needed to talk to her again. He’d go round to her house when he got back from Manchester. When she got back from her evening class, he amended.
He turns off the lights. It’s done. He has been distracted, side-tracked – this has been the most difficult, the most arduous hunt – but everything is in place now, everything ready. She will be waiting for him – he knows it.
‘Shut up, you little shit, or you’ll get what the cat got.’
Whisper, whisper in the darkness. The trees are blowing in the wind. The child is afraid of the dark. But the hunter is not afraid. Hunters know the dark places, take them, use them, make them their own.
Lynne Jordan was checking through the latest names from the search through rail employees. As Berryman said, it was a massive task, and even with the new people, they were still understaffed. Lynne wondered how many people the Strangler had kept pinned down over the past two years. Berryman had set the search up so that more experienced officers would be looking at the most likely candidates, and looking at them first. She was looking for trigger events – what had happened to set the killer off? Previous convictions – anything that might suggest an escalating pattern of behaviour. Though, as Berryman pointed out, a lot of what they were looking for may never have come to light.
