Into the Darkest Corner

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d go by train. I thought you were going to drive all the way down to Heathrow. When I couldn’t find your car on the motorway I just hammered it all the way down there. Do you realise how close you came to getting on that plane? If I’d not gone as fast as I did you would have been on that plane and away.’

  I didn’t want to think about it, how close I’d come to being free. It hurt too much.

  ‘What about the CCTV in the airport? Won’t they have seen you pretending to arrest me?’

  ‘I’m not bothered about the CCTV. You know there are cameras everywhere at the airport – all the shops, all the entrances and exits, every square foot of that place is covered. But it’s all owned by different companies, half the cameras aren’t working at any one time, or the quality is too shit to make anything out, or the tape’s overwritten every twenty-four hours because they’re too tight to pay for more tapes. Often the person in charge of it is on holiday and nobody else knows how to work the system anyhow. Even if you could collect it all up, it would take someone years to review all the footage from that one day alone. And as long as you know who to call, you can deal with whatever’s left. I was more worried about the ANPR, to be honest.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Automatic number plate recognition. It would prove the car went all the way down to Heathrow on a day when I was supposed to be reviewing surveillance logs in the office. Or it would have done – I switched the plates on the car.’

  This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I wondered how long it would be – how many days I could endure.

  After the cup of tea, and a sandwich that he made me, we watched some television together in some sort of pretence at normality. At eleven o’clock, he told me to strip my clothes off. I did so without argument, although it was difficult doing it one-handed. When I was wearing just knickers, he told me to hold out my arms in front of me and I complied whilst he clipped the handcuffs back around my wrists. Instantly the cold metal sliced at the raw skin and the pain started again. He took me back upstairs to the spare bedroom, and threw a blanket in there after me.

  I sat down on the floor whilst he stood in the doorway, thinking that he would leave, but after a few moments he shut the door behind him and sat with his back to the wall opposite.

  ‘I never told you about Naomi,’ he said.

  Saturday 29 March 2008

  I got up early on Saturday and went for a run.

  I tied my hair back into a bunch, since it was at that annoying length – long enough for the wind to blow it all around my head and into my eyes, too short to do anything stylish. The bunch at the back of my head was about the size of a Brussels sprout, and all I had to tie it back with was one of those infernal red elastic bands dropped on the step outside by the postwoman. It was too early to be busy, still a bit chilly, when I started to run. I set off at a nice even pace towards the park, the pavements wet under my feet. It was cloudy now, but it might turn into a nice day later. I could go and do some shopping. I could actually try to find some new clothes. I’d not bought anything new for a long time. And I would do some work, too. I would work on the OCD. Alistair said to keep doing it, keep challenging myself, don’t let the anxiety go away completely. Get used to it. Get used to letting it go away by itself, without appeasing it by checking.

  When I got back to Talbot Street I deliberately went straight in, without my usual detour through the back alley. That felt really strange, and when I’d checked the front door, and Mrs Mackenzie’s door, the first thing I did in the flat was check the curtains, from the inside this time. They were fine. I checked the flat door, it was fine. I checked the rest of the flat and missed out the bathroom, fine.

  I kept thinking I should go outside and check the flat from the back alley, but now I was inside it seemed a bit pointless. Nevertheless, I was anxious.

  I got dressed in jeans and a jumper, and, as I was performing my checks ready to go out, I decided I was going to stop checking the cutlery drawer. I wanted to do it one last time, just to be sure, but I resisted. To make up for it, I concentrated hard on the flat door. That was probably cheating, really, replacing one safety behaviour for another, but even so it didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.

  By the time I was on the bus, I tried to assess my anxiety and worked out that I was probably about forty or so. That wasn’t half bad. Especially considering that, realistically, I was spending most of my day in a state of tension anyway, always on the lookout for him, always waiting for something bad to happen. In fact, even after not checking the bathroom and not checking the cutlery drawer, I was probably feeling better than I usually would, going out at the weekend.

  I couldn’t believe this was actually working. I couldn’t believe I was actually feeling better.

  The bus took me towards Camden, and I got off at Camden Lock and started to wander around the shops. I’d thought about going into the city, to Oxford Street, maybe, but that really would be scary. This was a good start.

  I knew what I was looking for, what I wanted to buy, and when I finally saw it in a vintage shop I knew I’d have to get it.

  It was red silk, just a camisole top, not unlike the one poor Erin had got me for Christmas. It was a size ten. I stared at it for several moments, feeling my body responding to it, everything telling me to turn away, run away from it. It’s only a top, I told myself. It’s a piece of cloth, stitched together. It’s not going to hurt me, it can’t hurt me.

  After a few moments I touched it. It was soft, very soft, and surprisingly warm to the touch, as though someone had just taken it off.

  ‘Want to try it on?’ I looked round to see a small girl with short black hair streaked with bits of electric blue.

  ‘I’m just looking, thanks.’

  ‘It’s your colour,’ she said. ‘Go on. It can’t hurt.’

  I actually laughed. She was right, in so many ways. I took the hanger and went to the changing room, just an alcove at the back of the shop with a cotton curtain hanging from a rail on three rattling metal rings, my heart pounding.

  Don’t think. Just do it.

  I pulled my jumper over my head, my back to the mirror. I took the top off its hanger and slipped it over my head, my eyes closed. I felt a bit queasy, dizzy, as though I was on some wild fairground ride. Now you’ve done it, I told myself. Now you’re going to have to open your eyes and look.

  I looked. Not in the mirror, just down at myself.

  It was a different shade from the red dress. It was pinker, cherry-red, rather than the blatant scarlet of the dress. The top was peachy in texture, a beautiful thing really, a thread of gold running through the bottom edge.

  I’d had enough. I took it off, replaced it on the hanger, pulled my jumper back over my head. The urge to go and wash my hands was very strong. I put the hanger back on the rack where I’d found it, and left the shop straight away, before the assistant could say anything.

  Further on, there was a bench. I sat down for a few moments while people walked past, thinking about how scared I was, waiting for it to go away. I already knew what I was going to do, and the thought of it was keeping the fear there. I don’t know when I suddenly got this brave. It’s not something I’ve been good at in the past, is it?

  When I felt at about level thirty, I got up again and carried on wandering around the shops. It was busy, but not enough to make me afraid of all the people. I found a spice shop, and bought some Mexican spice blends for Stuart. Next door was a second-hand book shop, and I spent a while browsing in there, looking through novels and travel books and even, for a while, the self-help section.

  After that, I sat in a café and had a pot of tea. Normally I would go to the back of any coffee shop, as far from the door as possible, out of sight, so that I could see anyone coming in before they saw me. I made myself sit in the window. Fortunately there were tables outside with people sitting at them, so I didn’t feel completely exposed, but even so I wasn’t exactly
comfortable.

  Stuart had sent me three texts already, presumably between patients. How was I doing, what was I up to, that sort of thing. I sent a reply.

  S, I’m in Camden shopping. Can you believe it? Anything you want me to get? C x

  His answer came back quickly.

  Does this mean we can go shopping together next weekend? S x

  I laughed. He’d been trying to get me to go shopping for ages. The only way he could do it was disguise it as a day out, the way he’d done the day we went to Brighton.

  I watched the people going past, expecting to see someone who looked like Lee. In fact I was almost hoping for it, so I could test my response. Every man that passed, everyone with his physique, none of them seemed to trigger the fear.

  It was time to start heading back.

  I didn’t think too hard, I just went back. I walked into the shop. The assistant smiled at me. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I had a feeling you’d be back.’

  I smiled back at her. ‘Couldn’t resist,’ I said, taking the top and putting it down on the counter.

  ‘What shoe size are you?’ she asked, looking at me with her head appraisingly on one side.

  ‘Six,’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve just had these brought in.’ She lifted a shoebox from behind the counter and lifted the lid. Inside, a pair of red suede heels, slingbacks with a peep toe at the front. Rich, cherry-red suede. They were new; they even still had the tissue paper balled into the toe. ‘Try them on,’ she said. ‘It says they’re a five but you never know.’

  I pulled off my trainers and my socks and slipped my feet into the shoes. They fitted well. It felt strange standing in heels again. I looked down at my feet. How weird this all was. How strange to be wearing shoes like this and feeling alright – a little light-headed perhaps, but alright.

  ‘I’ll take them,’ I said.

  ‘Does a tenner sound okay? I’d not got around to pricing them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Taking the top home, and the shoes, in a large bag, was strange too. I thought about Erin’s present and how I’d had to get rid of it without so much as touching it. Now I’d gone and actually bought a top, a red silk top. The bag felt heavy and I put it on the seat next to me on the bus. I didn’t look at it. I would have to be brave and take it with me when the bus got back to the High Street and I got off it. All the way home, my anxiety levels were high, probably about forty or fifty. I waited for them to subside, but they didn’t go down by much.

  I took a detour through the alley, but I didn’t linger. I just looked. I was scared now, scared of what I’d done. I checked the front door, Mrs Mackenzie’s door, all the while my shopping bags sitting on the bottom stair waiting for me. I could picture the red top, throbbing like a living thing.

  I was just fabric, I thought. It couldn’t hurt me.

  Nevertheless I took the bag all the way up to the top floor, to Stuart’s flat, and left it just inside the door.

  When I got home and checked, everything was fine. Already I felt better. I left the cutlery drawer alone, left the bathroom unchecked, had a drink and a biscuit, and felt alright.

  It was a start.

  Sunday 13 June 2004

  I didn’t sleep much. I was so cold. No position was comfortable; every part of me ached. When I saw the light behind the curtains I realised I must have slept a little, but I didn’t remember it.

  I sobbed, quietly, for the person I’d become. I’d lost the will to fight. I wanted to give in now, I wanted it all to be over with. I was covered in shame.

  And now, as if things weren’t dreadful enough, all I could think about was Naomi.

  ‘Naomi?’ I’d said.

  ‘She was a job. A source. She was married to someone we were after. I recruited her – sweet-talked her into working with us. She was going to feed us information so we could bring him down.’

  He looked down at his knuckles, the bruising on them, flexed his fingers and smiled. ‘She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I was supposed to be working on her, but instead I fucked her and fell in love with her. They didn’t know, they thought I was just doing what I was being paid to do, but after the first time I couldn’t control it. I was going to leave the job, I was going to buy her a house, miles away, somewhere she’d be safe from that shit of a husband.’

  ‘What happened?’ I whispered.

  He looked at me as though he’d forgotten I was there. Flexed his fingers back into a fist, looking at the skin around his knuckles turning white. ‘She was screwing me over as well as screwing me. All the time she was giving me intelligence about what he was up to, he was busy telling her what to say.’

  He leaned his head back against the wall with a heavy sigh, then banged it back against the brickwork. And again. ‘I can’t believe I was that fucking stupid. I fell for everything she said.’

  ‘Maybe she was too afraid of her husband,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that was her mistake, wasn’t it?’

  I considered this for a moment. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘There was an armed robbery, just like we’d been waiting for, except we were waiting for them on the wrong side of town. We were all sitting there parked up like idiots, while another jeweller lost a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of stock and a shop assistant got her skull opened up with a baseball bat. Just when I was wondering what the fuck had gone wrong, I got a text from Naomi asking to meet me. I went to the usual place, opened her car door, and there inside was her old man. He was having a good old laugh about it. I’d served my purpose, he said. They’d both completely fucked me over.’

  He brought his knees up and rested his bruised hands on them, loosely, all the tension gone.

  ‘A week later I had a phone call from her. She was in tears, told me all this shit about him putting her under pressure, how she was scared, wanting to know if I meant what I’d said about getting her away from him. I told her to pack her bags and meet me in the usual place.’

  ‘You helped her escape?’

  He laughed. ‘No. I cut her throat and left her in a ditch. Nobody reported her missing. Nobody even looked for her.’

  He stood up, stretched as though he’d just told me a bedtime story, opened the door and left me behind, turning the light off and plunging the room into darkness.

  Saturday 5 April 2008

  I thought I saw him again today.

  It was almost a relief, in the end.

  Stuart had worked late, so I left him asleep and took myself off to the High Street to pick up some shopping. It started in the Co-op – the normal feeling of being watched, but stronger than usual. The shop was pretty busy, lots of people in each aisle, and everywhere I went were faces that looked familiar, people I thought I’d seen before.

  When I was queueing at the checkouts behind three other people, the feeling became more acute. I looked up, and he was standing by the fruit and vegetable section, across the other side of the store, staring right at me. I had no doubt that it was him, although he looked different in some way; I couldn’t work it out at first.

  I told myself it was okay. In the checkout queue I practised breathing deeply, regularly, making each breath the most important thing in that moment, even though I really wanted to scream and run away.

  It isn’t real, I told myself. This is part of the OCD. This is your fertile imagination catching up with you. He’s not real. It’s just some man who looks a bit like him, you know all this. He isn’t here.

  When I looked over again, he had gone.

  I got home with my bags of shopping, checking all the time to see if I could see him anywhere – shop doorways, the front seat of passing cars, crossing the road behind me, walking away, all these were places I’d seen him before.

  Nothing more. Maybe I’d imagined it – someone who looked a bit like him?

  At home I checked the flat before I went upstairs to Stuart with the shopping. I started at the front door, worked my way around the whole flat, fi
nishing up in the bedroom. Everything was normal. I was almost desperate to find something wrong, something out of place, that would prove that he had been in here, but really I hadn’t been gone long enough. Not if he had been out there watching me; after all, even Lee couldn’t be in two places at once.

  I woke Stuart up with a cup of tea and a kiss. When he opened his eyes and yawned, he pulled back the duvet and gave me an inviting smile, so I could climb into bed next to him. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more right at that moment than to take all my clothes off and snuggle up to my warm-skinned, naked boyfriend.

  I wasn’t going to tell him about seeing Lee, but afterwards, when I lay with my head on his shoulder, he suddenly said, ‘You’re not your usual self today.’

  I raised my head to look at him. ‘Aren’t I? What do you mean?’

  He rolled onto his stomach and propped himself on his elbows so he could look at me. He took my hand and kissed the palm, then slowly stroked his fingers up my arms, across the scars, looking at them intently. ‘Something happened?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not really. I thought I saw someone I knew in the shop, that’s all.’

  ‘You mean Lee?’

  Unlike me, he had no issues with saying his name. Stuart was always very good at facing fear, naming it, dealing with it and moving on. Something I was just starting to learn.

  ‘I thought it was. But it was only for a moment.’

  He studied me with that intent green-eyed gaze he has, as though I’m the only person in the whole world. ‘You see him all the time,’ he said. It wasn’t a question. We’d talked about this before.

  ‘This was different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  I didn’t want to do this, I didn’t want to admit to it, because talking about this made it real. If I kept it to myself I could still pretend I’d imagined it. But there was no point at all in trying to end this conversation – he wouldn’t let it go until he’d probed me to his complete satisfaction.