The Victim



  The Victim

  Copyright 2015 Aaron Gales

  Chapter One

  “I was raped.”

  Dr David Locke looked up from his papers and took in the woman in front of him. Her words had caught him off guard and it was only when she spoke that he realised he hadn’t really paid her any attention when she had walked in.

  Miss Anna Green was a beautiful woman. In her early thirties, she had flame red hair and the brightest green eyes he had ever seen.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, acknowledging what she had said.

  “Ok,” he said, somewhat lost for words. He stood up and she flinched slightly. He held up his hands in a lame attempt to show he was no threat to her.

  He sat back down, reclining awkwardly in his chair.

  “When did this happen.”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Did you report it?”

  Anna shook her head. He sighed, frustrated. She picked up on his feelings and he saw tears well in her eyes.

  The doctor chastised himself, got up again and moved slowly towards her. Tears were now falling silently down her face.

  He reached out his hand and when she didn’t recoil he rested it gently on her shoulder. She sunk her head into his midriff and let out a low guttural sob. She cried like this for fifteen minutes.

  He didn’t say anything, just let her get it out of her system.

  When he felt her take several deep breaths he pulled up a chair and sat in front of her.

  “What would you like me to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied.

  “You know it will be too late to get any DNA evidence from a rape kit?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you have anything from what happened? Any clothes? Anything at all?”

  She shook her head.

  “I burned everything, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  He understood. He hadn’t dealt with many rape victims in his life but he had done a lot of research into them. He knew how the trauma of what they had been through could make their actions impulsive.

  He stood up and moved back behind his desk.

  “I can get you in to speak to someone who should be able to help. He comes highly recommended.”

  He wrote down the details of the person she could contact and handed the piece of paper to her. She lifted her hand, which he noticed was trembling, and took the piece of paper from him, slipping it into her pocket.

  She got up, smiled gently at him and walked out the door.

  He stayed sitting for a second, before getting up and going after her.

  “Wait,” he said loudly, attracting the attention of a couple of people waiting.

  She stopped.

  He felt himself blushing as the eyes of one of his more annoying patients burned into him. She walked back to him.

  “Everything will be ok you know,” he said.

  “I know it doesn’t feel like it now but you will get past this. Talk to the right people, don’t lock yourself away from family and friends and things will get better. I’m not saying that you’ll get over it because what happened to you was a terrible thing, but one day you might be able to wake up in the morning and it won’t be the first thing you think about.”

  He tried his best to look sympathetic. She seemed grateful for his kind words, and without speaking, turned and left.

  David turned back to his waiting room, called in Mrs Jones who had watched this whole scene with gleeful interest and buried himself in work for the rest of the afternoon.

  Chapter Two

  The rest of the day was a busy one. So much so that he was surprised when his last patient left and he hadn’t thought about the raped woman at all. In the quiet of his office she returned to his thoughts.

  Had he dealt with things in the right way? You could never be sure in those situations. Each one was unique. All in all he thought he had done well, but like any good doctor he thought there were lessons to be learned should he find himself in a similar situation again.

  He went to the small sink in his office and splashed his face with cold water. After patting himself dry, he stared at his reflection in the mirror.

  Even at forty years old, the man staring back at him was a handsome one. He had light grey eyes, dark hair that was becoming increasingly peppered with streaks of grey and a smooth face with few wrinkles.

  He turned and started changing into his gym kit. As he bent over, something caught his eye out the back window. Stopping halfway through unbuttoning his shirt, he moved closer, peering out the half opened blinds.

  The back of the surgery looked out onto a forest. Flicking the blinds aside he stared out. All was quiet.

  He finished changing, turning the lights off as he left the building.

  His run home was a strong one and sweat was pouring off his body as he opened the front door. Their home was large, but cosy, his wife’s design skills evident everywhere you turned. The warmth of the hallway fire hit him immediately and he sat down and removed his trainers.

  He could hear his wife Ruth moving round in the kitchen and the delicious smells of a tomato and garlic sauce wafted up his nostrils. His stomach grumbled loudly.

  He called out to her and she came out to him with a large glass of crisp white wine in her hand. He took a sip, taking in the sharp fruity flavour.

  Ignoring the sweat she kissed him lightly. His tongue darted towards her mouth, wanting more but she shook her head at him smiling.

  “No thanks Mr. Shower first, then dinner, then we’ll see.”

  He laughed, bounding up the stairs, leaving items of clothing in a pile behind him as he walked to the bathroom. He turned the shower on cold first, struggling to catch his breath as the freezing water pounded his body. He slowly increased the temperature, removing any last trace of the run home.

  He climbed out, dried himself and dressed casually in a t-shirt and jeans. He walked into the kitchen just as Ruth was draining the pasta. He snaffled a tomato from the salad, and a slice of garlic bread before pouring himself another glass of wine. She set the plate down in front of him kissing him gently on the forehead as she did so.

  He fancied his chances with his wife tonight.

  Even after fifteen years together he still found her as attractive as on the day they first met. While they didn’t have sex as much as they did in the early days they were still intimate three or four times a week which he knew was well above average for couples their age.

  He ate his pasta slowly, savouring the rich flavours as she told him about her day. She was an English literature lecturer at the local college and she loved her job. As long as he had known her she had always had a passion for books and writing. He had encouraged her with her work but low confidence had always held her back. She didn’t know that he had recently sent off some of her latest work to a publisher friend of his who had been extremely complimentary about what she had written and had asked for a meeting. He was just waiting for the right time to tell her.

  When she had finished talking to him about a particularly difficult student that she was having trouble with she asked him how his day had been.

  “It was different,” was his considered response.

  “Different how?” she asked curiously.

  “I had a woman come in today who had been raped.”

  Her face dropped in sympathy, the concern evident in her eyes.

  “Was she ok?” she asked.

  “I don’t know really. I mean she obviously wasn’t ok, but she seemed calm about the whole thing. She did break down. I don’t think she expected me to do anything. I think she just wanted to tell someone and for them to listen without judging her.”

  “I’m sure you did great,” h
is wife said kindly.

  “I don’t know how I did. I’ve never really had to deal with a situation like that one before. I just felt a bit helpless really and referred her to another doctor.”

  “Has she reported what happened to her?”

  “No she hasn’t and it happened over two weeks ago, so there will be no physical evidence left of what occurred. There was nothing I could really do for her.”

  “Could you report it?”

  “Not really. I’m bound by client confidentiality and I’m not convinced it would be the right thing for her anyway. I think she knew that it had all been left too late and just wanted to unburden herself on someone.”

  He looked down at his plate of pasta, now slowly turning cold. He had lost his appetite completely now. His wife seemed to notice and quietly removed the plates.

  Coming back to the table, she took his face gently between her warm soft hands and forced him to look up into her kind brown eyes.

  “I’m proud of you. I know you did the best you could for that girl. Don’t torture yourself about it.”

  She kissed him gently on the lips then, before pulling away and staring intently into his eyes. This time she didn’t reject his advances, kissing him more passionately now, her tongue exploring his mouth. He picked her up gently before ascending the stairs to their bedroom.

  After they had made love he lay in bed, staring out of the open bedroom window. A cool breeze wafted across his body, his chest covered in goosebumps. His wife was asleep with her head on his chest. He knew that he was going to have a sleepless night. He kept playing the conversation he had had with the girl over and over in his head, wondering what he could have said.

  He had always been like this. Too caring. It was one of his worst traits in his personal life but it was also what made him so good in his professional one.

  He hoped that he would see the girl again. If she did come in he promised himself that he would do more to help her.

  Chapter Three

  A couple of weeks passed. The girl never came in again and his schedule was so busy that she retreated to the background of his thoughts. It was only during the brief quiet moments in his day that she would pop into his head and he would wonder how she was doing.

  He reasoned that no news was probably good news.

  For some reason ever since that day he always had the uneasy feeling that he was being watched. When he was sat at his desk filling out paperwork, he would feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and he would turn around quickly. There was never anybody there but he always felt as if someone had just fled the scene.

  This unnerved him so much on some days that he was reduced to closing the blinds behind him when he was sat alone in his office. He always felt a bit cowardly when he did so but that was a small price to pay.

  He had started running more and more lately and his body had started to see the results. He was in better shape now than he had been ten years ago and his wife seemed to have noticed. Last night she had surprised him, joining him in the shower after his run home.

  Things between them were better now than he could remember for a long time. They had managed to get over the heartache of not being able to have children of their own and had resolved to just enjoy their lives as much as they could. They had lots of nieces and nephews on both sides of their family which had gone some way to filling the void.

  He was distracted from his thoughts by a knock on his office door. It was his secretary dropping off the day’s post. Fiona had been with him a year or so now and they had a good relationship. She was a very attractive woman, which he had to admit was one of the reasons he had hired her. Their relationship had been extremely flirty to begin with and had almost gone too far one evening after drinks but he had always been loyal to his wife and had resisted the temptations Fiona had offered. He had put things straight with her the following Monday and they had enjoyed a healthy professional relationship ever since. He had heard from other members of his staff that she had a boyfriend now which probably explained why the flirting had died down.

  She left the room and his eyes flickered up, appreciating the wiggle of her hips as she walked out. He scanned through the letters she had brought through to him. Nothing of interest.

  The hairs on the back of his neck stood up again then and he turned quickly, cricking his neck painfully as he did so. There was nobody there. It was a miserable day, rain lashing the window. He grabbed his jacket, running round to the back of the building. He sprinted across to the sanctuary of the trees and looked back at his office window. It was then that he noticed a disturbance on the ground. Someone had been here recently.

  He moved into the spot and realised that this was the perfect place for someone to spy on the back of the building without being seen. Through a gap in a couple of large oak trees you could see straight into his office.

  But who was watching him?

  He returned to the spot the following day. He didn’t think anybody had been back here since. He had spent a small fortune on surveillance equipment and spent nearly two hours getting it all rigged up, before returning to his office and turning on his laptop. He typed in a website address and amazingly he was given a video feed from the camera that he had just set up. It gave him a perfect view of the area where he thought he was being spied on. He left the feed open on his screen and got back to work.

  The person didn’t return that day and as he ran home that night he wondered if he was just being paranoid and had wasted a lot of time and money on a fool’s errand.

  He didn’t tell his wife about his concerns, though she could tell he was distracted. She tried to coax out of him what was wrong but when he insisted he was fine, she gave up and went to run herself a bath, taking a pile of essays that needed marking with her.

  He retired to his study, opening his laptop. Although the camera was being lashed by rain and wind the picture was still clear and showed nobody there. He closed the laptop, took a book off the shelf and started reading.

  Chapter Four

  It was the next day, when he was listening to one of his more dull patients, that the person came back. As he was desperately trying to continue paying attention something on the screen caught his eye.

  There was someone watching him after all. It was a woman. He tried to maintain his composure. He felt sure that she would stay there watching him if he didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.

  He prescribed a couple of weeks rest for his patient, ushering her impatiently out of the door and moving back to his desk. She was still there. She was just watching him through the window. He got up from his desk and left the building, completing a wide circle that took him to a dirt road running through the middle of the woods.

  He ran along it trying to stay as quiet as possible. He cut through the trees cursing every break of a branch beneath his feet.

  Then suddenly she was less than fifty feet in front of him.

  He crept forward another thirty feet before she turned and saw him. She grabbed her bag from the floor and broke into a run. There was no way she was going to get away from him though. All the hours spent pounding the streets paid off and he swiftly caught her. She wasn’t going to stop so he had no choice but to tackle her. She started screaming. He rolled her onto her back putting his hand across her mouth.

  He gasped in surprise. It was the girl, the rape victim. She looked at him with fear in her eyes.

  “Are you going to scream if I remove my hand?” he asked. She shook her head vigorously. He believed her and took his hand away slowly.

  “Why the hell have you been following me?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He realised then that he still had her pinned to the floor. He stood up quickly and she sat up.

  “There’s a quiet pub five minutes down the road. Go there, get yourself cleaned up and I’ll meet you there in half an hour.”

  She nodded vigorously and hurried off.

/>   “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath. What the hell was going on? Was she some crazy stalker? Should he report her to the police?

  Then he remembered what she had been through. It was natural that she might be behaving irrationally. He would go and speak to her like he had promised and then make his mind up what the best course of action would be.

  He walked there and spotted her immediately at a quiet table in the corner. He bought himself an orange juice and joined her. He sat across from her and was once again reminded how taken he had been with her beauty the first time he had seen her all those weeks ago.

  “I’ll ask you the question again, why have you been following me?”

  “I just wanted to see you,” she replied.

  “Why didn’t you make an appointment, I would have happily seen you again.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” she said.

  He looked at her confused.

  “Then what do you need?”

  “A lover,” she replied.

  He almost spat his orange juice across the table.

  “Excuse me?” was all he could manage.

  “You heard me.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Was this some kind of joke? If it was, it wasn’t a funny one and he felt himself getting slowly angry.

  He started to get up and leave.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again,” he said, cruelty evident in his voice. “If I catch you following me again I will call the police.”

  But something about her eyes drew him back to her.

  “What do you really want?” he asked her.

  “I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you through,” she said.

  “The time since I was raped has been the toughest period of my life. I didn’t think I would ever want a man to go near me again. But you were kind to me. Gentle.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he protested. “I should have helped you more.”

  “I didn’t need you to help me, I just needed to talk to somebody and you let me do that. You were kind and compassionate. But if you still want to help me you can.”

  “How?”

  “I want you to have sex with me.”

  “Out of the question,” he protested. “I’m married.”

  “Look I know I shouldn’t ask, but for some reason you’re the only person I trust. I know you will be a gentle lover. If I’m ever going to have a proper relationship again with a husband and children I need to get past my fear of being intimate with a man again. You’re the only person who knows. I need you to help me.”