The Intrusions

by Stav Sherez

  Geneva pulled out a chair and sat down. The seat was slightly wet but she ignored it. ‘You checked yourself in so you could hide from him?’

  ‘It’s worked, hasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s the only reason you’re in here? To get away from him?’

  ‘That and the fact I can’t function out there any more. I try. I try so hard, but something always happens, something he did to me, and I find myself waking up in a hospital room, a doctor stitching my wrists or pumping my stomach.’

  Geneva kept the Bali photo in her pocket for now. She wanted to hear Katrina’s story untainted by knowledge of subsequent events. ‘The man who did this to you is still out there. He’s doing it to other girls. Whatever you can tell us, no matter how small, will help us stop him.’

  Katrina stared at Geneva for a long time, a silent reckoning in her gaze. She put down the puzzle piece she’d been clenching and scraped her chair forward. ‘I wasn’t the type of girl this happens to,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t one of those girls you see on a Saturday night, so drunk they can’t even walk, spilling out of their clothes or passed out on the pavement.’ She closed her eyes for a few seconds. ‘But it doesn’t matter, does it? Whether you’re naive or drunk or wary?’

  ‘No,’ Geneva replied, thinking that for someone residing in a mental health ward, Katrina seemed surprisingly sane. ‘Not if he’s already singled you out.’

  ‘I still blame myself.’ Katrina tried to laugh it off. ‘I keep thinking that if I hadn’t left the bowling alley at that precise time, if I’d stayed for another round, if I’d stopped to buy those cigarettes . . . there were an infinite number of ways I could have avoided walking past that alley at that exact moment but only one possible route to lead me there. How does that make any sense?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Geneva admitted. ‘The things that should make sense rarely do.’

  Katrina reached out and picked up one of the many pieces in front of her and unerringly fitted it into the puzzle. ‘I left the bowling alley, I was feeling sick, thought maybe I’d had too much to drink or a dodgy curry. I was nearly home when I heard a baby crying, crying really hysterically, that annoying way babies do when you think they’re never going to stop. It was coming from inside this alley. Look . . .’ Katrina held up her hands. ‘I know this is the point where you say I was crazy to go in there, a dark alley at night, right? – but the baby was crying and no one was doing anything about it.

  ‘It took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust but by then it was too late. There was no baby. There was only a man holding a mobile phone in his hands. He pushed a button on the phone and the baby stopped crying. Then he attacked me.’

  ‘Do you remember anything after that?’

  Katrina nodded. ‘One minute I’m in that alley, the next thing I know I wake up and my head’s pounding like crazy, there’s this terrible taste in my mouth and I can’t move, literally cannot move. Panicking. Thinking I’m paralysed. The room starts to spin and I turn my head and realise I’m tied down to a large wooden table. The wood is rough and I can feel it chafing against my skin and it’s then I notice my legs are bare. I can tilt my head up just far enough to see I’m wearing a miniskirt that isn’t mine.’ Katrina stopped, counted to ten and back under her breath.

  ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘No, not his face. He was standing in the shadows,’ Katrina said as Geneva tried to hide her disappointment.

  ‘Did you notice if he spoke with an accent?’

  ‘I only heard him breathing.’

  ‘Breathing?’

  ‘When I was strapped to the table, he was standing behind me, breathing heavily as if he had a really bad cold. Then I felt a sting in my right arm.’

  ‘He injected you?’

  Katrina nodded and started to turn over all the unused puzzle pieces. ‘The first wave came about ten minutes later. I was short of breath, there was this awful buzzing behind my eyes like they were going to pop out of their sockets, the room rushing past me, my head splitting with pain, all these streaks of mad colour, being sick over and over again.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  Katrina laughed. She laughed for about thirty seconds too long. ‘There was no next. Whatever he’d given me made me lose all sense of time. Time slowed down until there wasn’t any difference between one minute and the next. I later found out I’d been missing for only three days.’

  ‘How long did you think you’d been gone?’

  ‘A year.’ Katrina looked down at the table. ‘I was certain a year had passed. I’d counted and lived through all those days and weeks. How could it have only been three days when I’d been in that room for months?’ She paused and counted under her breath. ‘Some days I’m convinced these past six months have been an hallucination and I’ll wake up and be back on that table and only five minutes will have gone by.’

  Geneva placed her hand over the girl’s. ‘You’re here. This is real. I’m real.’

  Katrina pulled her hand away.

  Geneva sat back and waited for the girl to settle down. ‘How did you manage to escape?’

  ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t have escaped. No way. After some time passed, maybe weeks, maybe hours, I don’t know, the door opened again. Something covered my eyes and I couldn’t see.’ She picked up one of the facedown pieces and flipped it and placed it in its rightful place. ‘I felt the sting in my arm again and woke up on a bench in Hyde Park.’

  ‘Did you report it to the police?’

  Katrina searched Geneva’s face for any hint of accusation. ‘I barely knew where I was. I felt sick and spaced out. I lay down on the park bench and closed my eyes and I was back in that room again and I could taste the drug in my mouth, hear him breathing, feel the grainy wood scratching the back of my knees. This went on for what felt, to me, like weeks. I later discovered it all took place in less than ten minutes.’

  She looked down at the floor and crossed her legs at the ankles. ‘It comes back every now and then. I’ll be in the middle of something else and then snap, I’m back in that room again and I don’t know if I’m a patient in a mental institution who’s having a flashback or if I’m still in that room, dreaming of being a woman who’s only dreaming this.’ She took Geneva’s hand, her fingers bony and sharp, and squeezed, the pressure turning Geneva’s skin white. ‘But the drugs couldn’t still be in my system? Not after a year? No way. Not unless it isn’t really a year and I’m still in that room and this entire conversation is only a dream I’m having.’

  ‘This isn’t a dream and this isn’t the first time he’s done this. It began in Bali.’

  Katrina shot back in her chair. ‘Bali?’

  Geneva took the beach photo from her pocket and laid it flat on the table. Katrina’s eyes turned wide as she grabbed it and brought it up close to her face. ‘Why are you showing me this? Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Do you recognise the girl on the far left?’

  ‘Of course. That’s Anna.’

  ‘The man who abducted you murdered Anna Becker several days ago. He also killed a girl in Bali – Lucy Brown. We think he followed you back to London.’

  Confusion wrinkled Katrina’s brow. ‘But the police, they said Lucy was killed by migrants. There was a trial.’

  ‘We have reason to doubt that version of events but we need to know what happened in Bali. He’s almost certainly stalking the next girl. I want to stop him. I want to make sure he can never do this again.’

  ‘You can’t stop him,’ Katrina said. ‘He’ll find you. It doesn’t matter where you hide.’

  Geneva pointed to the photo. ‘Tell me about Lucy Brown and I promise I will do everything I can to make sure this man gets exactly what he deserves.’

  Katrina bit down on her bottom lip. ‘What’s Lucy got to do with it?’

  ‘We believe she was his first. You were interviewed by the police over there. You can help us. Your friend was murdered.’

  ‘She wasn’t my friend.’


  A flutter in the girl’s tone made Geneva look up. ‘Who was she?’

  Katrina glanced at the photo and shrugged. ‘She was just this girl, that’s all. Always hanging around. It’s awful what happened to her but we had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘We?’

  Katrina picked up a puzzle piece. ‘There was a bunch of us girls – we weren’t even friends or nothing, just partied together. You know how it is on holiday – you’re not there for very long so you make friends quickly. Anna . . . Anna was part of our group.’

  ‘What about Lucy?’

  ‘Poor fucking Lucy. She always had the worst luck. She was. Fuck. She was a little, okay, slow. She was there with her brother. She should have been splashing in the kiddie pool or making sandcastles but instead she used to hang out, or at least try to hang out, with us.’

  ‘Try?’

  ‘She was, God, this sounds terrible now but you want to know what happened, right? She was always asking us to take her to clubs and parties, to let her join our group. She was sweet, but. You know. A couple of girls were a bit nasty to her. This Serbian girl would tell her to scram, leave us alone, go find something more suited to her mental age, but Lucy never quite got the message.’

  ‘And you didn’t try to stop this?’

  Katrina looked down at the table. ‘I was drunk, high, stupid. It seemed a bit of harmless fun, the kind of thing we’d experienced every day at school. It was just a silly game that got out of hand. We never intended for anything like that to happen.’

  The number of times Geneva had heard that. But the world didn’t give a shit for anyone’s intentions. ‘What took place the night of the full moon rave?’

  Katrina scratched behind her ear and crossed her arms. ‘Lucy was at the beachside bar as usual that afternoon and she kept pleading with us to take her to the rave. It was the biggest event of the season and tickets were sold out but we had a couple spare. We were all extra-fucked that day, drinking and doing other shit in preparation and the Serbian girl said sure and gave Lucy one of the tickets.’ Katrina picked up a peg and left it hanging in empty space near the middle of the puzzle. ‘The rave was a big deal, DJs coming over from Brooklyn and the Balearics. A lot of us were going home in the next few days. We were drinking a lot, partying on the beach. We got Lucy drunk and I don’t think she’d ever had booze before because she didn’t take it well at all. She was sick and stupid but all the time pretending to enjoy it.

  ‘We went skinny dipping at sunset. A bunch of Aussie boys had showed us this hidden lagoon the previous day. This Swiss girl made a special full moon punch. There was MDMA, Ketamine and coconut water in it. We all drank it knowing full well what it contained, we’d all done plenty before and knew what to expect – but Lucy didn’t have a clue and in her eagerness drank far too much. It only took about fifteen minutes. She started to scream What’s happening to me? What’s happening to me? Hitting herself in the head, scratching her legs, crying and panicking. Some of the girls laughed and took photos.’

  ‘And again, you didn’t try to stop this?’

  Katrina looked away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I did. I did try to stop it. I suggested we go for a swim, a swim would cool Lucy off and bring her back down but, fuck, why did I say that? We tore off our clothes and plunged into the lagoon. The Swiss girl thought it would be funny to hide Lucy’s clothes.

  ‘Lucy was last out the water, crawling over the sand, and we all watched as she tried to find her clothes, stark naked and senseless, scrambling and slipping over the rocks.’

  ‘And you left her like that?’ Geneva couldn’t believe the casual cruelty of it. Had too much reality TV and the Internet stripped the world of consequence for this generation? She thought about the theft of the clothes and what it might mean to the investigation. ‘You didn’t think leaving a mentally challenged girl naked, with a head full of drugs, might be a bad idea? That someone might take advantage of her?’

  ‘We just . . . no, you’re right, there’s no excuse. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I got here. All the things we could have done to stop it but we were so high by then we had no idea what was going on. We could barely take care of ourselves. We only found out what happened to Lucy when the police started interviewing everyone the next day.’

  ‘You gave him his first taste.’

  It had shocked her as Geneva had intended. Katrina scowled and turned back to the puzzle. She picked up one of the few remaining pieces and scrutinised it, then broke off a peg and slid it into place where previously it hadn’t fitted. It matched perfectly and you couldn’t tell it wasn’t meant to be there at all. She ran her hands across the surface of the puzzle and when she spoke, she spoke so quietly Geneva had to lean in to hear her.

  ‘If you find him . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Kill him,’ Katrina said and upended the puzzle onto the floor.

  49

  ‘Lucy Brown is your daughter?’

  ‘Was, Mr Carrigan. Was.’ Eleanor Harper frowned. ‘Why are you bringing this up now?’

  Carrigan sat back and thought about what Eleanor had just said. This particular scenario had never occurred to them and he knew it was his fault for narrowing the investigation’s parameters and that he’d missed a crucial link somewhere along the way. He could feel cogs turning, this new information reaching out and making connections, one more piece slotting into place, and he could almost see the shape of it now and understand how it had come to be.

  ‘You’re divorced?’

  ‘No. My husband died thirteen years ago.’

  Carrigan saw the loss briefly flare back behind her eyes. ‘Can I ask how he died?’

  Eleanor tapped her fingernails against the table. ‘He fell down the stairs. Pathetic, I know, but.’

  Carrigan acknowledged this with a tilt of the head. ‘What was Lucy doing in Bali?’

  Eleanor scooped hand cream from the jar and rubbed it into her skin in small circular motions. ‘My daughter had learning difficulties but that doesn’t mean she can’t go on holiday.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m used to it.’ Eleanor smiled, but her eyes were another matter. ‘It was my fault. I was supposed to go with her.’ She glanced down at the papers and files, the meaningless debris of her days. ‘But the evening before our departure we had a crisis at the office, a client was suing us because items had gone missing from his flat, and I had to stay behind.

  ‘My son, Robert, was spending the summer in China. I got in touch with him, explained the situation and told him to meet Lucy off the plane the next day. He complained a bit, of course, but he was already in the region, all he had to do was hop on a plane. It wasn’t a big deal.

  ‘I spoke to Lucy after she’d arrived and she sounded happy. And that was something I didn’t hear very often. I’d been so worried about sending her out on her own but she’d insisted. Two days later, I get a call from the Bali police chief.’ Eleanor stopped and rubbed a stray drop of cream from her thumb. ‘I remember it so damn clearly. I was leaving the office when the phone rang. I thought about whether to answer or let the machine pick up. People always talk about a mother’s instinct but it wasn’t that. It was just one less thing to do in the morning.

  ‘As soon as the man on the other end explained who he was, as soon as I heard the tone in his voice – polite and business-like, but as if he wanted to be anywhere else but on the other end of the line – I knew. He didn’t need to say it but he did and every hope I had that this was a mistake, a wrong number, vanished. He told me they’d found her that morning on the beach. That she’d been killed the night before, had wandered off in a druggy stupor and stumbled into a migrants’ camp. He said they were interviewing suspects. I didn’t say a word. Language seemed impossible. A week later he phoned back to tell me the killers were in custody and to arrange shipment of Lucy’s body back home.’ Eleanor wiped her cheeks. ‘Why are you asking about this now? The case was closed. They caught
and executed the men who did this.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a little bit more complicated than that.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘We believe they may have arrested the wrong men.’

  ‘Are you saying the man who killed Lucy is free?’

  Carrigan nodded. ‘Yes, and he hasn’t stopped. We think he was another tourist and he met this group of girls on the island. We don’t know exactly what happened but he obviously became fixated with them. He killed your daughter and he’s continued targeting them now he’s back home. One girl is missing and presumed dead, the other is Anna Becker.’

  ‘The girl who worked here?’

  ‘Yes. We’re still trying to understand how he got both Katrina and Anna to stay at the hostel. We think he might have emailed them discount vouchers. He knew once they were inside, he could keep an eye on them.’

  ‘Hostel? Which hostel?’

  ‘The Milgram.’ Carrigan explained about the Ratting and Twitter trolling. ‘We need to find out what happened in Bali, Ms Harper. Is your son still in China? We need to talk to him to see if he remembers anything. Maybe he knew this man? Maybe he met him at some bar or club?’

  Eleanor frowned. ‘I don’t understand? He told me you’d already spoken to him.’

  ‘We did? Where?’

  ‘At the hostel, of course. That’s where he spends most of his time.’

  50

  Geneva watched as Katrina got down on hands and knees and started to pick up the scattered puzzle pieces. When she offered to help her, Katrina ignored her, focusing on her task with a furious precision. Geneva felt torn between sympathy for the girl and a hot burning anger at what she’d done to Lucy Brown. She knew how cruel kids could be in groups, the anonymity shielding them from guilt and agency, but it was no excuse. She turned her back on Katrina and headed for the desk. The orderlies directed her to the main reception where, after showing her warrant card and explaining the circumstances, a nurse came to talk to her.

  ‘She seemed very sane to me,’ Geneva said.