Safe from Harm

by RJ Bailey

  ‘Of course.’

  It was a Saturday, but Mrs Sharif wanted Nuzha dropped off at a friend’s place and she had a Pilates class that she wanted me to drive her to.

  ‘You’re very good at all this,’ I said. ‘Really. I don’t think I could—’

  ‘It’s not that I’m good,’ she said quickly, pulling her hair back from her face. ‘It’s that most people are so rubbish at it. Just be flexible. My mum was a social worker for a while. I know all about being flexible.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘Oh, this and that. He was a City trader, then opened a bar, lost everything, became a cabbie, met my mum, now he runs a minicab firm in Woking. They’re not together, though.’

  ‘And you have a boyfriend?’

  She glanced down at her food. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ She looked up and I could see her cheeks had coloured slightly. ‘I sound old again? I thought they were still boyfriends.’ Or did young men and women only have fuck buddies these days?

  ‘No. I hooked up with someone while I was travelling.’ Now that was a term I was never sure of the exact meaning of. Hooked up. It seemed to encompass a range of options. ‘I’m trying to save enough money to get out to see him and for us to go travelling together.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Queenstown. New Zealand. Teaching bungee jumping. Which is a worry because in some ways he is the most irresponsible person I have ever met.’

  She gave a knowing smile to show she wasn’t entirely serious. It made her look her years, suddenly. There were times when I looked at that flawless, unlined skin and bright eyes that I thought I’d employed someone not much older than Jess. Now, though, she felt closer to my age. Well, OK, within hailing distance. With a very big megaphone.

  ‘Have you decided about whether Jess can go to Indonesia?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m waiting on the official letter. The one that tells me it is well organised and safe. Jess will just have to be patient.’

  Her brow furrowed and she leaned forward. When she spoke, her voice dropped into a basement register. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking something. It’s . . . a bit awkward.’

  ‘Is it about Jess?’

  She nodded and I braced myself by taking a hit of the wine.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Have you seen her naked recently?’

  She caught me just on the swallow and I choked a little. ‘What?’ I croaked.

  ‘Have you seen Jess with no clothes on lately?’

  ‘Not really. It’s been a while since she started bolting the bathroom door. Why?’ I asked, trying to keep the alarm I was feeling from creeping into my voice. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I was doing her hair the other day . . . yesterday, and I noticed . . .’ She chopped at her upper arm with the edge of her hand, like an axe blade. ‘And I think down here.’ The same movement at the top of her thighs.

  ‘What?’ I asked, although the boiling acid bath in my stomach indicated I already knew before Laura spoke.

  ‘I think Jess is self-harming.’

  Jack woke me from a fitful sleep that was barely worthy of the name. I must have sounded rough because he offered to call back, but I told him to go ahead.

  ‘OK, I have the address on that mobile. It’s on the City Road. One of those shiny new developments.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yup. The City Towers. Apartment eighteen.’

  ‘But that’s not that far from here.’ It was my way of saying too damn close. ‘And don’t they sell for stupid money?’ Or: How the fuck could my feckless ex-husband afford to live there?

  ‘I dunno,’ said Jack. ‘I’m not Foxtons, am I?’

  ‘Thank God. What about the plate numbers?’

  ‘Nothing yet, I’m afraid. Which is odd.’

  ‘Odd how?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, my man – who is actually a woman – tells me they must be part of a group insurance scheme. Someone who owns a lot of vehicles and lumps them all in together. Don’t worry, she can crack it. But it being Saturday . . .’

  ‘I understand. Thanks, Jack. I appreciate it.’

  ‘You sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Just had a bit of a family shock, that’s all.’

  Shock? It was like a punch to the solar plexus followed by a kick in the kidneys. It was all I could do not to be sick. I couldn’t finish my meal, that was for sure. All I could feel was shame and the cold hand of failure on my shoulder. How could I not know?

  Because you are a bad mother.

  Laura had tried her best to disavow me of that, even though every avenue of thought appeared to lead to that cul-de-sac.

  Laura had carefully explained about her own problems with bulimia and her mother’s baffled and horrified reaction to it. Although she hadn’t realised it at the time, her illness had been a reaction to her parents’ divorce. The pain and discomfort of throwing up had helped her forget the emotional ache. But what was the trigger for Jess’s cutting? Was it me going back to work? The return of Matt? A delayed reaction to Paul’s death?

  Laura said even Jess might not know. That we had to play the long game. We should not rule out bullying, she said.

  One thing she was certain about – a sudden confrontation was not the answer. Hysteria, of the kind Laura had suffered at the hands of her mother, would only drive Jess deeper into whatever sort of shell she was creating. Plus, if Laura was to retain Jess’s trust, I would have to contrive another way to ‘discover’ the marks. If she thought Laura was a snake – apparently the current incarnation of a snitch or grass – then she would turn against her and Laura would not be in any position to do any good.

  So act as if nothing is wrong?

  Yes, she had said. And suppress the urge to go in and try and shake some sense into your daughter. That transparent, eh? I had asked. Completely see-through, apparently. Laura said if she had a chance she would look through Jess’s internet history to see if she had visited any of the websites which instruct young girls in the art of subterfuge – cutting in places that parents, teachers and friends would not notice – and her text messages to see if she had any that might indicate a conflict somewhere in her social life. ‘But,’ Laura had said knowingly, ‘you have to be aware that girls that age always have some form of conflict on the go at a low level. Jade was seen snogging Jenna’s boyfriend. So Jade gets a shit-storm of trolling for a while until Jenna gives Josie’s boyfriend a blowjob and they switch.’

  I must have looked shocked. But she added: ‘You have to understand, blowjobs aren’t what they were back in your day.’

  I assumed she meant in terms of taboo and mystique – I was pretty sure the mechanics hadn’t changed – and that a kind of sexual inflation had made the act more workaday than when I was a teenager. It had the status of gold, frankincense and myrrh in my nice middle-class school – something to be bestowed only on very special occasions. Not quite when a star appeared in the East, maybe, but close.

  So what do we do? I had asked, like I was the hapless youngster and she the wise mother.

  ‘Knowing is half the battle,’ Laura had said. ‘And there is help out there. Jess is hardly alone. But for the moment, do nothing.’

  Doing nothing was not in my temperament, but I knew she was right. So we all said our normal goodnights and I retreated to my bed with my laptop and the rest of the wine and did the one thing Laura warned me against – going on the internet. Trust me, you don’t want to be on Mumsnet or the NSPCC at two in the morning. Or ever, really. But I did discover that more than half of all fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds had either self-harmed or knew someone who did. Main reasons? Low self-esteem, bullying, cultural isolation, bereavement. It seemed to be a close relative to various eating disorders and, most distressingly, suicide attempts.

  I lay there, tossing and turning, wanting to go in and cuddle Jess and tell her whatever it was – whatever – I would fix it. At three in the morning, too tired and too
emotional and more than a little tipsy, you are willing to kill for your child. Well, I was.

  I had slipped my hand down the side of the mattress for the reassuring feel of the Eickhorn knife and it wasn’t there. I began to scramble around in my panic. And then I saw the image of Jess with that wicked blade, drawing it slowly over her upper arm, relishing the pain as the blood welled thick and dark red from the split on her skin. And that was when I stabbed myself.

  It was still here. The Eickhorn had just slipped further down and eased out of its sheath. I had managed to catch the tip of my index finger on the couple of centimetres of exposed edge. I hadn’t cared, I had sucked at the blood, happy that it was my pain, not Jess’s.

  So by the time I had finished with Jack, breakfasted and dressed, I was feeling pretty bushed. The bathroom mirror confirmed this. I spent fifteen minutes putting on a false face – and a plaster on my finger – and I looked OK. Not tip-top, but I’d do.

  But I couldn’t stop my mind churning, that was beyond even Bobbi Brown’s capabilities. I rang Nina and asked if we could have a chat that morning. She could tell something was wrong, but sensed I didn’t want to talk on the phone. I said I’d come over to Stoke Newington.

  I’d like to think, even to this day, that it was the distraction of my inner turmoil that enabled them to take me so easily.

  TWENTY-THREE

  No excuses. The shields should have been up. As soon as you leave the house you should be focused on the job. There could be a shit-storm going down in the hallway, but the moment you step over the threshold you lock it in and forget it till later. But it’s hard to stay in the zone when you take your daughter breakfast in bed and clock the long-sleeved T-shirts she has taken to wearing of late without you really noticing. And the knife through the heart when she won’t catch your eye. And when the job in hand is to drive a pampered woman to stretch her already perfect body . . . I suppressed that thought as quickly as it popped up. PPOs can’t afford to be judgemental about clients.

  I was thinking it would only take me fifteen minutes or so to get over to Nina’s, when the hood slipped over my head.

  On a better day I might have noticed two men crouched down apparently inspecting the tyre of a Volvo estate. Or realised that I had seen the white VW Transporter that burbled into the edge of my vision before. But this wasn’t a better kind of day. My world disappeared in a rush of thick black cotton and something hard pressed behind my left ear.

  I tensed, ready to push back when my bag was ripped from my shoulder. But then a retaining strap snaked round my middle body and was jerked tight, pinning my arms to my sides, like a makeshift straitjacket.

  ‘Come quietly, yes?’ the voice hissed sibilantly in my ear. ‘Or we’ll go inside to get your little girl. I’m not sure you’d like to watch what happens next. Think about it. Nod if you understand.’

  I nodded. What I really wanted to do was shout and kick and scream. But I nodded. Then I let myself go floppy as they frogmarched me between cars heading, no doubt, for the van whose sliding side-door I heard rumble back to receive me.

  There was one lecture, back when I was doing my SIA-accreditation training with Colonel d’Arcy, that baffled most of us. It was like a cross between a Brian Cox documentary and an episode of Casualty. It was about trauma and time, and how certain events can speed up or slow down what the lecturer called the temporal momentum of the situation (TMS, naturally). He delved into quantum physics and the way people remember car crashes – the ones that happen in slow, treacle-bound motion and those that seem to occupy a blink or a heartbeat, leaving you wondering what just happened.

  The point of the exercise was to try and persuade us to keep track of real time, not to fall victim to its elastic nature. Step one: stay calm. Step two: try and find a reference point, some internal clock. Heartbeats, he warned us, were unreliable, as panic – our biggest enemy – would cause it to elevate. But if it is all you have, use it.

  It was all I had.

  The terror, the sheer the-lift-cable-has-snapped sense of falling into the abyss, has to be compartmentalised. Because what you are going to need are your senses, to know where you are going and how you are getting there. Listen, smell, stay alert. Don’t drift off into self-pity. Or give in to lurid imaginings of what might happen to you or your loved ones. The irony was, this was all the shit that I told my Principals. Who ever heard of the PPO being snatched? Not on home turf, anyway.

  They were fast. Fifteen seconds or so and I was in the VW, strapped into a seat, the door was slammed and I jerked back as the van took off. I was aware of bodies slumping down on either side of me. A hand brushed across my shoulder, down to my breast and squeezed. Hard. I tried not to flinch. He twisted until I let out an involuntary gasp. Then, even through the dense fabric of the hood, I could feel his hot breath against my ear.

  ‘Still got those armoured titties, eh?’

  I couldn’t keep this particular wave of fear and panic back. My heart rate jumped and I felt acid burn my throat. I knew who had taken me.

  The fucking Russians.

  As far as I could estimate it we drove for twenty minutes, through stop-start traffic. My guess was we had travelled east, but it was only that. A guess. In the movies people can reconstruct a journey by the hoot of a factory whistle, the rumble of trains or the cobbles on a road. Mostly, that is only possible in the movies. I tried hard to listen, but mainly I could hear my ventricles pumping, the breathing of the men on either side of me and a radio or CD coming from the front, playing something that sounded like a turbo-charged snake charmer who had discovered House music.

  After a while I gave up trying to act as a human sat nav, as the effort was making me feel dizzy. I shut down a little, trying to conserve my energy. I was going to need it. But, for all my training, it was hard to stop little spikes of adrenaline leaking into my bloodstream.

  Bad mother and now a bad PPO.

  We pulled up with a sharp jab of the brakes that thrust me against the seat belt. One of the men flanking me, the one on the left, pushed me back. Of course, they weren’t actually fucking Russians. Not all of them. The man who had whispered those charming words was Bojan, the Serbian I had clobbered.

  And now he wanted to get even for his humiliation.

  The Serbians, I recalled as my belt was unbuckled, were world-class grudge-holders. They made the Northern Irish look like masters at turning the other cheek. The Serbs were still incandescent about something that happened in the fourteenth century with the Turks. So it didn’t surprise me that Bojan was pissed off. But even by Serbian standards, this abduction was an over-reaction.

  As the van shuddered to a complete standstill I was pulled to my feet, thumping my head on the roof, before they pushed me down onto a pavement. ‘Stairs,’ Bojan said as I stumbled. They hauled me up the stone steps and I heard the creak of a door ahead.

  How long before Nina gets worried that I didn’t turn up? How long before someone finds the bag I had dropped in the street when they snatched me? How long before Mrs Sharif complains to Ben at the agency about his unreliable fuckwit employee? How long would I have to endure whatever they had in mind for me?

  As we entered the building I was aware of the long delay of the sound of our footsteps. It was a big space. A warehouse maybe? And there was the smell of . . . what? Beeswax. Sawn wood. A touch of damp and something old and musty.

  I was pushed into a sitting position and let myself fall into an unforgiving high-backed seat. As the hood was removed my initial impression was of a fractured, watery world of blues and greens, until I realised I was staring at a stained-glass window and my eyes were filmed over. I blinked rapidly to clear them. I was in a church. All around me were stacks of pews, floorboards, panelling, pulpits. Obviously deconsecrated, it was now being used for architectural salvage storage.

  There were three men in front of me: Bojan, the Serb; Gregor Mitval, the Russian who had invited me down to the gym; and another man in a black MA-1 flight jacket. H
e was fair-haired with carefully trimmed stubble, and in other circumstances I might have thought him handsome, like a tidier version of Roman Abramovich.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you are doing?’ I asked Bojan. ‘Can’t you take a beating like a man?’

  Roman snorted at this.

  ‘And can’t you keep your big mouth shut?’ Bojan replied, before hitting me.

  It wasn’t a hard slap. More a flick with the tips of his fingers, but it still stung for several seconds. It was also a good question. Sometimes that army-bred snarky defence mechanism of mine makes things worse. I’d have to watch that.

  Mitval spoke next, calm and reasonable. ‘What Bojan means is, having made your point, why did you have to go crying to Daddy?’

  ‘I am supposed to answer that or keep my big mouth shut?’ Here we go again.

  Mitval smirked. ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’

  ‘So you didn’t tell Mr Asparov what happened in his gym?’

  I looked from one to the other. ‘Why would I do that?’ I had told Ben not to send anyone else to be ‘interviewed’, and suggested Asparov be put on The Circuit’s black list, but that was all.

  ‘To cost us our jobs, maybe?’ Bojan asked.

  ‘He sacked you?’

  ‘Immediately,’ said Mitval. ‘On the spot. With no compensation.’

  ‘But he was in Moscow,’ I said.

  ‘You can sack people by Skype these days,’ said Mitval. True. And you can organise delivery of a case of money remotely, too.

  ‘There’s tribunals for that sort of thing,’ I offered, like some sort of trussed Citizens Advice Bureau.

  ‘We don’t believe in tribunals,’ said Bojan.

  ‘Not those sort anyway,’ added Mitval.

  Roman laughed. I wasn’t quite sure what Roman’s grievance was in all this, but I didn’t really care. I also didn’t care for the way he was looking at me. If he was a dog I’d have him muzzled and chained up. In fact, it didn’t seem a bad idea to do it anyway.