Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  And the job wasn’t done yet. Ash took his time over the coffee, pouring the boiling water carefully, adding the milk a dribble at a time. He wanted to give Saturday time to accept the fact that he knew before they faced one another again.

  When he’d done as much to a pint of instant coffee as was humanly possible, he returned to the table and put the Light a candle mug in front of Saturday. Ash gave an amiable smile as he sat down, but he said nothing. He didn’t intend to be the next one to speak. He studied the décor some more, and sipped his coffee, and waited for Saturday to respond.

  For perhaps a minute, which is longer than it sounds when there are only two people in a room and the atmosphere is suddenly electric, the boy seemed determined not to. Ash needed no imagination at all to visualise the thoughts in Saturday’s head chasing one another’s tails like a demented carousel.

  This wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. He’d taken the decision not to talk about it, and had stuck with that decision even when it seemed he might pay for it with years of his life. But Ash knew. He must know – God alone knew how, but this was what he did and he’d done it again. The lies Saturday had told, the story he’d worked out so carefully, hadn’t fooled him. And silence, he was beginning to feel as the minute ticked away, wasn’t a long-term solution. All that was left was the truth.

  When it finally came, his voice was so low that if Ash hadn’t known what he was saying, he wouldn’t have been able to hear it. ‘How long have you known?’

  Gabriel Ash looked at his watch. ‘About fourteen hours.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I found someone else Ford did the same thing to. And for the same reason – to avenge himself on a woman who rejected him.’

  Saturday didn’t want to ask. But he needed to know. ‘Another … Another guy?’

  ‘A fifteen-year-old boy. His sister thought Ford meant to marry her. When she realised that what he really wanted was to own her, she got away from him and went where she thought he couldn’t follow.’

  Saturday’s voice was a whisper. ‘She was wrong about that?’

  ‘No, she was right. But Ford didn’t need to find her in order to punish her. He raped her brother. The guilt she felt overwhelmed her, and she killed herself.’

  Saturday hadn’t a lot of colour at the best of times. Now his face was grey. ‘He told you this? The brother?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He’s a little older now. He blamed her, for a while, but he doesn’t any more. He knows who was to blame.’

  ‘He wanted to own her,’ Saturday repeated softly. ‘That’s what he was doing to Hazel, isn’t it? Taking control of her. Making her into what he wanted. Like she was a pet.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If we hadn’t brought her home …’

  Ash nodded sombrely. ‘She’d have been badly hurt. Instead of which, you were.’

  Saturday thought about that. About how much he owed to Hazel Best. About what he’d have been willing to do to protect her. About how she would feel when she learned what her escape had cost him. His eyes flared wildly, like a horse shown the whip. ‘Hazel must never, never know about this.’

  But that wasn’t realistic. ‘Saturday, she has to know. Mr Gorman has to know. He knows Ford didn’t get his injuries the way you said. He thinks you launched an unprovoked attack on him. He has to be told it was the other way round.’

  Saturday stared at the floor. In the stubborn whine of his voice was the suspicion of tears. ‘I don’t want people to know.’

  Ash reached across the table and took the boy by both hands. This was something he would not have done three months ago. But comforting upset and angry boys was now part of his repertoire, and he’d learned that physical contact was not something to be feared, that nothing calmed and reassured like the touch of a sympathetic hand. ‘And I don’t want you going to prison when you don’t deserve to. Hazel won’t want that either. She’s been desperately worried about you.’

  ‘She’ll blame herself …’

  ‘Perhaps she will. But she’ll know, when she thinks it through, that the guilt is Ford’s alone. She wouldn’t want you to spend another minute under suspicion to protect her from the truth.’

  Saturday’s thin muscles clenched as if he meant to pull his hands away. But he didn’t. ‘If you want the truth – the God-honest truth – I did go after the bastard with that cricket bat. He was finished, he was leaving. I could have let him leave. But I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kill him,’ he said thickly.

  ‘Of course you did. You’d been brutalised by a man who came into your home in the middle of the night. No one – not Mr Gorman, not the Crown Prosecution Service – is going to hold you responsible for what you did in the moments following that.’

  ‘They’ll let me go? You can make them let me go?’ The desperate hope in his young voice was heart-breaking.

  ‘I won’t have to make them do anything. Tell them what happened. Exactly what happened. No one will think that the public interest will be served by persecuting you. They will prosecute Ford, if he recovers sufficiently.’

  ‘But then everyone will know,’ muttered the boy unhappily.

  Ash shook his head decisively. ‘Apart from me and Hazel, no one you know will ever hear that you were involved. Rape victims have a statutory right to anonymity. The only people who will know are those who have to know, and they’ll be on your side.’

  Saturday was staring into the depths of his mug as if he might find some answers there. He said nothing for so long that Ash wondered if the conversation was over. But it wasn’t.

  ‘I should have been able to stop him,’ mumbled Saturday. ‘I keep thinking, I should have been able to stop him. It’s not like he’s a commando or something. He’s a talking head, for God’s sake – a TV celeb. I should have been able to fight him off.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ said Ash firmly. ‘He had all the advantages. He’s bigger than you, he’s older than you, he’s stronger than you, and he hadn’t been asleep five minutes earlier. He came to the house knowing what he was going to do. He’d done it before. He was prepared, and you weren’t.

  ‘Saturday, however strong you are, there’s always someone stronger. When you’re young, or if you’re a woman, half the human race is likely to be stronger than you. Mostly it doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people won’t use violence to take what they want. It’s a defining characteristic of civilisation. People like Ford are an aberration. They don’t understand that they can’t just do what they want – that other people’s rights are important.

  ‘You couldn’t have anticipated what he was going to do, and if you had you couldn’t have stopped him. If he’d come after me, I probably couldn’t have stopped him either. The advantage that a psychopath has is that there’s no internal voice telling him to think about what he’s doing, about the effect he’s having on his victim. But it’s that emotional blindness that trips him up in the end. Someone turns out to be braver, or tougher, or more resilient, than he ever imagined they could be. This time it was you.’

  The boy gave a moist sniff. ‘I don’t feel very brave.’

  ‘Well, you should.’ The coffee had gone cold. Ash finished it with a grimace. ‘I’ll get Mr Gorman to come in, shall I? So you can tell him everything that happened.’

  It was almost a bridge too far. He was still a seventeen-year-old boy who’d been so traumatised that he’d preferred to take whatever the legal system might throw at him rather than admit how he’d been abused. Ash was different: Ash was a friend, and anyway – somehow – he already knew. Saturday didn’t think he could find the strength to talk about it to the policeman. ‘I don’t want to,’ he whined.

  ‘I know,’ Ash said. ‘But you have to. It’s important. It’s important to Mr Gorman, because if Ford recovers, the police need to get him behind bars before somebody else stands up to him. But it’s also important to you. You have nothing to be ashamed of, and you shouldn’t be hiding as if you had. You were assaul
ted, the same as if he’d beaten you with his fists. Rape isn’t an act of sex, it’s an act of violence. But you are not a helpless victim. You can make him pay for what he did.’

  A sudden thought occurred to him, and he reached over and turned Saturday’s mug in the compass of his hands. ‘See that?’

  Saturday read the legend. He looked up, puzzled, and the savage grin on Ash’s face took him entirely by surprise. ‘So?’

  ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Do you know what’s even better?’ The boy shook his head. ‘Lighting a flame-thrower.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  The tears that Ash and Saturday had somehow got through their discourse without shedding were coursing freely on Hazel’s cheeks before the story was told.

  It was Ash telling it. He’d asked if Saturday wanted to, but the boy couldn’t face it. Nor had he wanted to be present. He’d pleaded exhaustion and gone to bed, leaving Hazel and Ash, and Patience, in the living room of the little house in Railway Street.

  When he’d finished Ash went through to the kitchen, to tackle a stack of washing up that had hung around long enough for new life-forms to evolve in the crusty remains. Hazel stayed where she was, trying to get her head around what he’d said.

  Twenty minutes later, pots disposed of, Ash returned to find Hazel’s eyes red and her damp hankie spread on her knee, but her distress finally under control. When she spoke, her voice only cracked a little.

  Her first question was the obvious one. ‘Why didn’t he say?’

  Ash sat down beside her. ‘He felt humiliated. He didn’t want anyone to know what Ford had done to him. He was happier for people to think he’d attacked Ford than for them to know that Ford had raped him.’

  ‘That is so …’ Hazel began the sentence in outraged exasperation. But halfway through she found herself empathising with the boy’s dilemma. He hadn’t been the first to face it, nor the first to react as he had. Everyone in law enforcement knows that rape is the great under-reported crime. What no one knows is the extent to which it is under-reported.

  ‘… Completely understandable,’ she finished lamely. ‘Isn’t it? What teenage boy inching towards manhood wants to tell people he’s been violated by another man? He saw a way out – an alternative version that was almost true, that only left out one significant detail. He thought it would put him in the clear without having to say what really happened.’

  Ash said nothing. Patience looked the other way.

  Hazel had known both of them long enough now to know that there was something she was missing. That Ash was hoping she’d put the pieces together without his help. The only reason for him to stay silent instead of explaining was that he didn’t want to hurt her any more.

  Once she’d got that far, it was only a matter of moments before she completed the jigsaw. Ash saw the last piece fall into place. Her expression froze. For a painfully long time, the only movement she was capable of was in her eyes, which stretched with shock and hollowed with grief and then filled afresh with the tears she thought she’d mastered.

  ‘It wasn’t people he wanted to hide the truth from – it was me. He didn’t want me to know how much my lack of judgement had cost him. He was willing to go to prison to keep me from knowing that my lover raped him to punish me!’

  Finally Ash nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gabriel – I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he said; and there was no unkindness in his voice, only certainty. ‘Saturday can, and so can you. You have to. Or – dead or alive – Ford has won.’ Patience stretched her long head across his knees. He stroked her ears while he marshalled what he wanted to say.

  ‘If Oliver Ford recovers from his injuries, he’ll stand trial for what he did to Saturday. He’ll be convicted, and he’ll do time. But he won’t just be paying for Saturday – he’ll be paying for you, for Rachid Iqbal and for his sister Safora. And maybe others that we don’t know about and never will. And when it’s all over you, and me, and Saturday, are going to take the ultimate revenge, which is to get on with our lives as if he never existed.’

  It wasn’t a big room, nothing larger than a two-seater sofa would fit along the longest wall. It was seriously snug with Hazel, Ash and Patience crammed onto it together. But the warm proximity of her best friends was a comfort to Hazel, and not for the world would she have tried to move.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she ventured at last. ‘I don’t understand why. I mean, I know Oliver likes women. So why Saturday?’

  Ash sighed. ‘I told Saturday – I shouldn’t really have to tell you. Rape is not about sex. It’s about power. It’s about grinding someone’s face into the dirt because they’re not strong enough to stop you. Ford knew he was stronger than Saturday. He also knew that he probably wouldn’t report the attack; and, even if he did, no one would take the word of a criminal-fringe street kid over that of a respected academic and television personality. Except you. Saturday is your friend, and you’d believe him, and you’d blame yourself.’

  ‘He hated me that much?’

  Ash thought about that. ‘I’m not sure hate is the right word. It suggests a range of emotions that may be quite foreign to him. Psychopaths have limited emotions of their own and struggle to understand anyone else’s. They act them out – some of them do it very convincingly – but they don’t really feel them. I don’t think he hated you any more than he was in love with you. I doubt if he was capable of feeling what normal people mean by those words. The only emotions that resonated with him were the egocentric ones of self-importance, acquisitiveness, and resentment when his desires were thwarted. He always and only thought of himself. He felt he was entitled to have what he wanted, to do whatever was necessary to get it, and to punish anyone who tried to thwart him. He was a deeply dangerous man.’

  ‘Do you suppose he’ll recover?’

  ‘He may well recover from the head injury. No one recovers from a personality disorder. Some people learn to manage them. What we know of Ford’s history suggests he isn’t one of them.’

  Later, after Ash and Patience had gone home, Hazel went upstairs. No light showed under Saturday’s door; still, on an impulse she could neither have explained nor ignored, she went into his room and sat quietly on the end of his bed. The boy didn’t stir.

  ‘It’s quite possible,’ she whispered, ‘that you are indeed asleep. After all, it’s’ – she pressed the backlight on her watch – ‘good grief, it’s quarter to three! And God knows you need a decent night’s rest, so I’m not going to wake you. But just in case you can hear me, I want you to know how sorry I am for everything that’s happened. And how angry I am, and also how touched, that you put my feelings ahead of your own best interests. If Gabriel hadn’t figured it out, God knows how things would have turned out.

  ‘But I will never, ever forget what you were willing to do for me. And one day I’ll find the courage to say all this again, with the light on.’

  Then she went to bed.

  The following day DI Gorman got the call he’d been waiting for. ‘Show him up.’ If there’d been anyone in his office just then they’d have noticed his odd, almost predatory smile.

  He was slightly put off his stride by the fact that Nicky Purbright wasn’t a he but a she. It made no difference. She was Oliver Ford’s London solicitor, and Dave Gorman had been looking forward to this interview.

  On reflection, he decided she was exactly what he should have expected: young enough to be striking, old enough to be experienced, wearing a sharp suit and her hair up in a stately pleat. They greeted one another courteously – Gorman had long outgrown the inclination to blame legal representatives for their clients’ offences – and sat down.

  Ms Purbright began. ‘Mr Ford is sorry he can’t be here himself. He’ll be in hospital for some time yet, and his doctors are limiting the number of visitors he’s allowed and how long they spend with him. But he feels it’s important to get things moving. As soon as he’s able to give a written
statement, he will do. In the meantime he wants me to assure you that he will be happy to give evidence about the assault on him. He doesn’t want you to worry that, when the case comes to court in six months or a year, he’ll decide the publicity might be detrimental to his career and want to let the matter drop.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dave Gorman.

  A tiny frown troubled Ms Purbright’s alabaster brow. ‘I’m assuming you’ll go for attempted murder rather than GBH. The severity of the attack seems to indicate that was the young man’s intention. And in fact, he almost succeeded. Mr Ford was in a coma for four days. He could have died. He could have suffered significant brain damage. It was only after he woke up that there was any confidence about his making a good recovery.’

  ‘Well now,’ said Dave Gorman judiciously. ‘The final decision, of course, lies with the CPS. But the evidence I have before me doesn’t seem to support attempted murder. It doesn’t seem to support assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. In fact, Ms Purbright, I don’t anticipate bringing any charges at all against Saul Desmond.

  ‘Your client, on the other hand, will be interviewed as soon as he’s fit about Mr Desmond’s allegation that Mr Ford entered his house in the middle of the night and raped him.’

  Of necessity, solicitors learn to keep their thought-processes off their faces. Nothing should be seen to surprise them: nothing their client says, nothing which is said about their client. Ms Purbright hardly blinked. But Gorman was sure that it was the first she’d heard about this. ‘I feel confident that my client will deny any such allegation.’

  Gorman nodded cheerfully. ‘Oh, so do I. I was a bit taken aback myself. After all, on the one hand there’s Oliver Ford, an important academic, a face everyone knows from their television screen; and on the other there’s a seventeen-year-old kid who was homeless until four months ago, who’s only recently got his first job stacking shelves in a garage shop, and who never mentioned any of this when we responded to the original call-out. I mean, it’s not difficult to decide who’s the most credible, is it?’