Stop at Nothing

by Tammy Cohen

  Now he came forward to stand on the opposite side of the crossing. Eyes that even from this distance away I knew to be startling green. That same Come on, then, I dare you set of his head as in the ID tape.

  Fumbling with nerves, I pulled my phone out of my bag and took a photo through the glass of the café window, zooming in as far as I could. First, I focused on his meaty hands, imagining them folded into fists, pummelling my daughter’s head. Was that a glint of metal on his finger? I couldn’t be sure. I moved my attention to his face – the full mouth, lips moving silently in sync with whatever he was listening to on the headphones plugged into his ears. Stop, bitch, that’s what he’d said, and I pictured that cruel mouth saying the words. I couldn’t smell his aftershave from all the way back here but still I imagined how it would be, heady and overpowering.

  I put the phone down and followed his progress across the road until he disappeared from view in the direction of the Tube entrance. When I picked up my discarded coffee, the cup shook in my hand.

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Frances. ‘And poor Em. It must have been such a shock for her. On top of everything else she’s had to cope with.’

  We were sitting in the pub on Bounds Green Road, in the coveted window snug – a table that had been fitted into a tiny bay in the wall with padded seating following the contour of the glass.

  I nodded, for a minute not trusting myself to speak. Frances seemed to be offering sympathy entirely without judgement, and it almost overwhelmed me.

  ‘That’s why I didn’t want to show Em the photo,’ I said eventually. ‘It’s all so raw, and the last thing I want to do is give her more to worry about. I thought maybe you could take a look.’ I started rummaging in my bag for my phone. ‘So you can tell me if I’m going completely bonkers.’

  ‘Of course. Anything I can do to help.’ Frances took a sip of her lime and soda. She didn’t usually drink during the week, she’d explained. Liked to keep a clear head for work.

  I was grateful to her for coming at such short notice. I’d called her at work and when she’d said she could meet me on her way home I’d almost cried from relief. I’d watched her park her car – a pistachio-green Fiat 500 – from the pub window and felt as if an unbearably tight belt I’d been wearing had been suddenly loosened a notch or two.

  I called up the photograph of him. It wasn’t a great picture. The angle was strange and there was a blur of a car bumper in the bottom right. But when you scaled it up, there he was.

  Frances inhaled sharply when I showed her the image. First, her face drained of colour and then a pink stain crept over the contours of her cheeks.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ I said.

  She nodded, bit down on her lip.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said after she’d composed herself. ‘I don’t know what right I’ve got to be upset. It’s just such a shock seeing him. I still can’t get it out of my head, you know. That night.’

  I couldn’t either. Lying awake during the long, stomach-churning hours, I went through it again and again. What might have happened if Frances, driving home tired after a two-day work conference in Cambridge, hadn’t noticed what was happening on the other side of the road. Or if she’d carried on assuming, as she did at first, that it was two men having a fight.

  ‘I couldn’t have held out any more,’ Em had said. ‘If Frances hadn’t come …’

  That was our mantra now. If Frances hadn’t come.

  ‘So the doorway you saw him come out of was near the Tube, practically opposite the bus stop where he assaulted Emma?’ Frances asked now, her hazel eyes darting to the photo and then away, as if she couldn’t bear to linger too long on his face.

  ‘Yep, talk about shitting on your own doorstep.’

  ‘And the police won’t do anything?’

  I shook my head. ‘How can they? They can’t have a second identification. The guy hasn’t been charged with anything. They don’t have the resources to pursue it any more, that’s what Detective Byrne said. The case fell apart.’

  ‘When I got it wrong,’ said Frances wretchedly.

  ‘No. You mustn’t think that. Em couldn’t ID him either. It was the set-up that was so stressful. That bloody video suite. It was all so formal and so impossible to breathe in there. It’s a wonder anyone ever gets it right.’

  For a moment or two we sat in silence, sipping our drinks. I was in the window seat, facing the bar, and Frances was opposite, gazing past me at the now-dark street outside. She was wearing a brown polo-necked jumper that brought out the warmth in her eyes. She looked so downcast and I felt awful that she was blaming herself when she’d done so much to help.

  ‘So what will you do?’ she asked eventually.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Nothing I can do. I just wanted someone else to look at the photo, to prove I’m not going mad. I have trouble sleeping and some days I’m so tired I can’t work out what’s real and what’s in my head.’ I tapped the side of my skull to demonstrate.

  ‘Now you know where he lives it wouldn’t take much to find out his name,’ Frances said. ‘I could help you, if you like.’

  I was thrown off guard.

  ‘Why would I do that? What good would it do?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Frances, looking embarrassed. ‘Forget I spoke. You know, Tessa, I’m so impressed with how calm you are. If I were in your position, I’d want to march straight round there and confront him.’

  ‘Believe me, that’s crossed my mind.’

  I said goodbye to Frances outside the pub. She tried to insist on driving me home and looked almost disappointed when I said no, but it was in the wrong direction for her and she’d put herself out for me quite enough already. Besides, I wanted to walk, to clear my head.

  The walk from the pub took me past the Tube station and the crossing where I’d stood earlier that day. Had that featured in my refusal to accept a lift? The knowledge that I’d almost be passing the door he’d come out of? I’d like to say no.

  The Tube station at Bounds Green stands on a crossroads and has two entrances, one fronting on to Bounds Green Road and one on to Brownlow Road, a short distance from the café in which I’d sat earlier that day. If I stood just inside the Brownlow Road entrance, I had a direct view across the road to the mini-market and the fried-chicken shop.

  The thing was, I was in no hurry. Emma was at Phil’s and, really, there was nothing I had to get home for. True, it wasn’t exactly balmy out, but if I put my hands in the pockets of my jacket it wasn’t so bad.

  I noticed that the little row of shops had a road sign stuck up on the front wall above the window of the rental agents on the end. Taking my distance glasses out from my bag, I was able to read the letters: Regency Parade. The doorway the man had come out of earlier was a few doors down, of nondescript brown wood, with a thin, mean letterbox and ‘17A’ marked out in stick-on numbers. From looking at the other doors between the shopfronts – the kind you walk past hundreds of times every day and don’t even notice are there – I worked out that 17A was the flat above the mini-market.

  That didn’t mean it was where the man lived, though, I reminded myself. It could be anyone’s place – a friend’s, a relative’s. He could work there. It could be his girlfriend’s, or his drug dealer’s.

  Yet still I stood in that entrance, looking over at the first-floor window, which was set back from the level of the shop underneath, creating a kind of narrow terrace in front, on which two wooden dining chairs sat side by side. There were net curtains in the window, but the light was on behind them. I willed the window to open and for him to come clambering out. He looked like a smoker. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to sit on one of these chairs, light up a fag?

  Come on, I urged him in my head. Show yourself.

  But he didn’t appear. And when I next looked at my phone I was shocked to see that forty-eight minutes had gone past.

  9

  Back home, the house felt empty without Em. Even Dotty seemed
subdued, stretching out languidly on the sofa.

  I powered up my laptop and tried to concentrate on work. I’d just had a feature out in one of the homelier women’s monthlies that had gone down gratifyingly well, so they’d commissioned me to write a different one, on women who radically overhaul their lives. ‘We started over and look at us now!’ was the kind of headline they’d use. I could do this feature in my sleep. Except that, nowadays, there were so many criteria for the case studies they wanted me to find. No one too high-powered, but not downbeat either, and must provide a photograph so I’d know they were ‘the right sort’. ‘On the glamorous side of relatable,’ the features editor told me, straight-faced.

  Resolute, I went online to research new case histories, determined to make the most of Emma being away, being able to work without worrying about her up there in her room.

  Instead, somehow, I found myself googling 17A Regency Parade, N22.

  I was hoping for an entry from the electoral roll, showing the names of the occupants of the house, but I didn’t find one. There were a couple of estate agents’ particulars from a sale way back in the distant past, a planning-permission request for an extension to the shop downstairs.

  Then, halfway down the page, I saw an entry from Companies House, listing a business registered to that address: J. L. Stephens Painting and Decorating. Company Director, James Laurence Stephens.

  I stared at the name, waiting for something to jump out. Was this him, this James Laurence Stephens? Was he the man with the green eyes and the sinews thick as rope under the skin of his neck?

  I put ‘James Laurence Stephens, Bounds Green’ into the search box and waited. To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting much. It was a common enough name. The first entry that came up was an article from the local newspaper from March 2013 reporting on a match between Haringey Rovers FC and a team from Waltham Abbey. It didn’t look promising. So I wasn’t prepared for the acid rush that came when I clicked on it and saw the photograph of a young man in a football strip squatting on the grass next to a leather ball. ‘James Stephens: Man of the Match’, read the caption. The features were slightly slimmer, the hair longer. But still those eyes, still that arrogant tilt of the head. The cruel mouth. The chin. That sense of power in the breadth of his shoulders.

  I looked at the hand that rested on the ball, a chunky silver signet ring wrapped around one of the fingers.

  It was him. Number Eight.

  For a long time I stared at the picture of the man who’d attacked my daughter. I imagined him seeing her at the bus stop, thinking what an easy target she was. Em has always looked younger than her age, minimal make-up, in jeans and T-shirts. Did he look at her standing there and think how vulnerable she was? Was it that very vulnerability that excited him? I pictured him following her on to the bus. Sitting behind her, staring at the back of her head where sometimes she misses a bit with the hairbrush so it’s still rough and tangled from sleep.

  When she rang the bell to get off just after the Tube station, did he think this was fate, the fact that she was getting off at the same stop as him? Was it so opportunistic after all, his decision to grab her around the throat and try to drag her away? Or would he have done it anyway, staying on the bus after his own stop, waiting for her to make a move so he could follow her off?

  The questions clotted in my brain.

  I scanned through the accompanying text, which was mostly a recap of the match with a brief mention of Stephens at the end and his winning goal.

  I clicked off the photograph and read through the other search results. There wasn’t much. A couple of other football references after his team performed well in the local league and a few reviews of his painting-and-decorating company. He got a solid four-star rating on Yell.

  Respectful, professional, very accommodating, read one.

  James really goes the extra mile, read another.

  Only one two-star brought down the average.

  Can’t fault the work, but a word of advice. Make sure you have the money to pay up straight away. I had a slight cash flow problem and, fair enough, that was my fault but I saw a very different side of him. I’m a single mum and I felt quite threatened, to be honest. Something to be aware of.

  The initial rush of vindication – it was definitely him – was eclipsed by dread.

  All the things that might have happened. With a man like that.

  I looked again at the photo of him with the football, rigid tendons snaking across his biceps, and pictured him watching my daughter ring the bell of the bus, his breath quickening with adrenaline as he stood to follow her off.

  A pressure was building up in my skull, my brain being fed through a mangle bit by bit.

  I clicked off the link and went back to researching the magazine feature, but even while I was making notes and looking up experts online he was in the back of my head, pressing tightly on my chest. James Laurence Stephens. The naming of him had made him real, and now he didn’t want to be ignored.

  I started playing around with an introduction. Always best to go straight into a case history for an opening scenario – the most dramatic one – and then posit the argument in the second paragraph. But though I wrote and rewrote, the words wouldn’t flow.

  Getting up, I paced aimlessly around the house. I told myself I was stretching my legs after sitting for so long, but I don’t think it was an accident that I ended up in Emma’s room.

  I sat down at the desk where she did her homework. It was messy, piled up with text books and notebooks and a long printout made on a school printer that was clearly running out of ink held together by a large pink plastic paperclip.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d come to sit here in the twenty-two months since my marriage ended and I’d had to learn to share my daughter with another household where she had another bedroom, another desk, another life. Sitting where Emma spent so much time, touching her things, helped me feel close to her while she was away. Deep down, I was aware I was trespassing, but it was such a little thing, and I always left everything just as it was.

  I picked up a blue notebook. English literature. She’d written the title of an essay and underlined it but hadn’t got any further. Evaluate the view that Iago doesn’t destroy Othello, he provokes Othello to destroy himself. I thought about that one for a moment or two, wondering how much all of us ultimately bear responsibility for whatever happens to us, regardless of provocation and circumstance.

  There were some loose pages tucked into the back of the notebook. A letter from the head of English about a forthcoming theatre trip. I frowned when I noticed the form at the bottom, still not filled in. A history printout bearing the prominent instruction to STICK THIS worksheet INSIDE YOUR BOOKS. There was also a stiff sheet of paper folded over into thirds. When I opened it I recognized it as the letter Em had received from Victim Support soon after her attack, offering emotional and practical support to her as a victim of crime. Em had refused to call the number.

  ‘But wouldn’t it help you to talk about it?’ I’d asked.

  ‘I don’t need to talk about it,’ she insisted. ‘I just need to put it behind me.’

  When the letter disappeared I’d assumed she’d thrown it away, and yet here it was. More disturbing than the fact that she’d kept it were the biro markings on the page. Every incidence of the word ‘victim’ had been underlined twice, or sometimes three times, in blue pen.

  I could see more writing coming through the page and when I turned it over my heart shattered like an eggshell. In letters so deep she’d almost gouged a hole through the paper my beautiful daughter had written over and over: I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.

  Back at my laptop, I felt flayed, the surface of me left raw and exposed. Nothing strips a parent bare like the hurt of their child.

  Em was someone who internalized her feelings. I knew she’d been rocked by the divorce and the house move and then the rift between me and Rosie. How could she not be? The last two years had made
her anxious. She worried about me being lonely when she was at her dad’s and I had to make a big show of how much I was enjoying the freedom to meet up with friends or work late into the night.

  Perhaps if the attack had happened in a different context, where Phil and I were still together and life at home was stable, it wouldn’t have had the same effect, but coming on the heels of so much upheaval, it seemed to have lodged in her mind like a tumour. I knew she was cross with herself for not picking her assailant out of the ID parade, but this self-loathing rocked me to the core.

  Shaken, I clicked back on the tab for James Laurence Stephens’s Yell page and read through the comments again. Respectful. Extra mile. Nice guy. Then the lone two-star review and that word: threatened.

  I remembered Emma’s bitten nails, the skin ragged and bloody around them. I thought of the small bald patches on her head and the words gouged into the paper.

  He had done this to her. This thickset man who had seen a young girl on the bus and decided he had the right to hook his brutish arm around her neck and drag her along the street for the fulfilment of some perverted fantasy or need.

  I clicked on the link that said ‘leave a review’.

  James Laurence Stephens is a sex attacker.

  I stared at the words for a few moments while something screamed in my head. I’d typed them out as a way of releasing the rage that had built up in me, intending to delete them, but the screaming wouldn’t stop.

  So I pressed send. To silence it.

  If it wasn’t for Henry, I don’t know if I’d still be here.

  It sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. Knowing that you’re still out there, still walking around, still free after what you did, might have pushed me over the edge.

  One night I actually emptied a packet of paracetamol into my hand, popping them out of their foil blister packs one by one until I had a mound of white pills in my palm.