Someone Out There (16 page)

‘Is that what he thinks?’

‘He thinks I’m being neurotic; irrational was the word he used.’

Laura drank the rest of her wine. The bottle was empty and she ordered herself another glass. She would have got another bottle but Emma said she needed to get home without being totally pissed.

‘It’s not like it used to be. Joe’s different,’ she said, and told Emma her worries.

‘Sounds like it’s just what happens to everyone after a while.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ Laura said.

‘Wait until you have a kid, that will really put sex on the back burner,’ Emma said, grinning, then told what she hoped was a funny story about one of the ups and downs of her own fifteen-year relationship with Steve.

Laura was only half concentrating. She kept glancing towards the door and out of the window to the street outside. Maybe her attacker was waiting for her, ready to strike again. Her fingers picked at the pizza in front of her, slowly shredding it to bits.

‘You’re supposed to eat it, not mutilate it,’ Emma said.

Laura gave a weak laugh. She took a bite of the pizza but it seemed to swell up inside her mouth and she needed some wine to be able to swallow it.

She looked at her watch. Gone 8 p.m. ‘Em, you should get going. I shouldn’t have kept you so long.’

Reluctantly, Emma gathered her bags together.

‘I wish I wasn’t going away. You take care and try not to worry too much. Make sure you text me what happens with the police.’

Laura promised that she would and Emma kissed her goodbye, remembering not to hug. She set off to catch the bus that would take her home to Saltdean. Laura watched her go then stood looking nervously round the street, staring at the faces coming towards her and peering into the shadows.

Her head was fuzzy with the white wine but fear was clearing it fast. A wave of threat hit her like a blast of cold wind blowing up the road. Her enemy was here, somewhere close by, she knew it in her gut, and terror filled her. This time he wouldn’t care that there were witnesses; she saw herself stabbed and dying on the pavement, her blood running into the gutter.

Laura started running towards the taxi rank, regardless of the pain, blessing the lights from the Royal Pavilion that lit the way to safety.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

There was an atmosphere. Definitely hostile. Definitely involving her. Laura noticed it as soon as she walked in on Monday morning. Monica, on the front desk, was definitely off with her. Laura knew that if there were any office gossip Monica would know about it because she always made it her business to find out.

Monica was in her early fifties and had worked at Morrison Kemp for thirteen years – full time for the last six since her children were now grown up. With a lemon-sucking face she had watched Laura arrive from her big London job, knowing, before meeting her, that she would be too big for her boots. Now her lips were set in disapproval, her needle-sharp nose lifted in distaste. She could hardly manage a curt ‘Hi’ before turning away to talk to her colleague.

Mid-morning, Laura attended the weekly review meeting. Morrison chaired it and made sure there was the usual sky high level of praise and self-congratulation for the firm’s overall performance. No mention was made of the Hakimi debacle. Morrison simply remarked, casually, that Sarah Cole had now ‘gone to pursue career challenges elsewhere.’ No-one said anything but Laura sensed frosty eyes upon her and felt herself blush.

Shortly afterwards she ran into the young, studious trainee, Alex Marshall, who had shared an office with Sarah, and his manner towards her confirmed her feeling that something was wrong. Alex was only twenty-five but he was going on forty. He loved legal textbooks and obscure facts and he always tried to follow the exact letter of the law. It got him into trouble with Morrison who often ticked him off for being too pedantic and for getting so hung up on legal details that he couldn’t see the bigger picture. As Laura knew only too well, Morrison was a man who cared about the end result and was none too fussy about the means of achieving it.

She attempted to chat to Alex about a course he’d been on recently. It was entitled ‘overcoming probate challenges’ and mention of it and its fascinating mix of up-to-the-minute facts about wills, trusts, and inheritance tax planning would usually have guaranteed his attention. Probate and wills were one area of the law that Laura would have gone a long way to avoid, but she knew Alex found it interesting. He could become quite animated discussing it. But not today. Today he couldn’t wait to get away from her.

He mumbled that it had been fine and hurried back to his office and she wondered what Sarah had said to him on Friday afternoon as she’d cleared her desk. She guessed it had been about her and it had not been nice.

Laura had forced herself to go into work. She’d woken up stiff and in pain, wanting nothing more than to stay under the bedcovers and swallow another sedative. But the fear from the night before still clung to her, and the worry that she had no time to lose nagged insistently at her.

She called Detective Inspector Barnes first thing and got through to him without a problem though she thought he sounded wary. Yes, he said, the sergeant had contacted him and he had been going to ring her. He had a note in front of him to do so.

She did it much better this time, told her story matter-of-factly; not neurotic, not melodramatic, she just stated exactly what had happened and left him to think about it. No assertions that someone had been following her, that someone was out to get her, no apparently crazy assumptions, no demands for action. To begin with he said nothing, but as she continued her unemotional account he interrupted with the occasional question. By the end, when she related how she’d recognized Ben Morgan in the street, he even sounded moderately interested.

Without her having to ask, Barnes said he would check out Ben Morgan with a view to finding him and interviewing him. Laura was encouraged and decided to push a little further, asking if he would go and look at the wire on the trees. He hesitated, said he’d see what he could do. It was the best she was going to get and she thanked him.

One other thing, he said, sounding uncharacte‌ristically sheepish, on the matter of Harry Pelham. He had discharged himself from hospital on Saturday evening. His present whereabouts were unknown.

Laura felt alarm explode in her chest. Harry Pelham was on the loose, had been on the loose on Sunday evening when she’d felt sure she was being followed. Her scalp prickled.

‘We’re checking his house regularly to see if he’s there,’ Barnes said quickly, ‘and we’re letting his wife know, but please can you tell her anyway? I’ll keep you both informed.’

‘Please do. Can you phone me as soon as you find him?’

Barnes promised he would. He gave her his mobile number and the fact that he volunteered it made her more worried still.

Laura had rung Anna at once with the bad news, telling her to call Barnes immediately if she heard from Harry or was worried he might be watching the house. Anna hadn’t said much because Martha was with her, but asked if she could come in for a chat around lunchtime.

She had just arrived, looking anxious and defeated, and Laura invited her up to her office.

‘He just walked out of the hospital and no one tried to stop him,’ Anna said, spreading her arms in a hopeless gesture.

‘I know.’

‘The police told him to stay put. How bloody stupid is that? As if he was ever going to take any notice.’

‘The thing now is to find him. Can you think of anywhere he might go?’

‘Apart from coming after me and Martha?’ Anna gave a thin laugh. ‘Thank God, Martha’s going away for a few days over half-term to stay in London with a school friend’s auntie. She’s home on Saturday though, and he was due to see her then. He’ll still try to, that’s for sure. He won’t give a shit about the bail conditions.’

‘I’ll ask Barnes if he can put a watch on your house on Saturday,’ Laura promised.

Anna was sitting with her hands limp on her lap, her head and shoulders shaking nervously.

‘It’s me,’ she burst out, ‘I’ll always be a victim, I always have been and I always will be. Right back from when I was a kid at school. It’s never, ever going to change, is it, however hard I try?’

Anna covered her face and began to sob as she let the memories flood back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Christmas 1997

Anna wanted very much to kill herself. She tried first with her mother’s sleeping pills and then with a razor blade.

She had grown tall early on and she had grown heavy. At the age of twelve she was five-foot-seven and weighed thirteen stone. She felt huge and ridiculous and ugly next to her petite classmates, and they made it clear they felt the same about her.

She remembered it all vividly; remembered the bullying, remembered Maria Burns and Jennifer Fleming and Michelle Cullen and Lisa Handley and all the rest of them who had made her life hell for years.

Afterwards, when she’d been taken away from the school and was being treated in hospital, the psychiatrist had explained to her about bullying. She didn’t need it explained, she was already a world expert, but he liked the sound of his own voice and she was a captive audience. He told her theories about why it happened, about who did it and who they did it to. He told her that all sorts of people were targets, for all sorts of reasons. She mustn’t think that she had brought it on herself, had somehow invited it by being the odd one out. He gave her some case studies to look at. She read them and found what she already knew.

Girls can be mean. Girls can whisper. Girls can gossip, manipulate, isolate, target the weakest spot. Boys use physical strength to bully but girls are far more frightening. They use psychological warfare. They can destroy you from the inside.

There’s always that one person in every school. The one who gets made fun of and judged, even though no one really knows much about them. That person was Anna. Right from the start, she had been different. She had wanted desperately to fit in, but, try as she might, she never managed to.

The boys simply ignored her and the group of girls she tried to hang out with laughed at her and then persecuted her relentlessly. They sneered at her clothes, her hair, her weight, her face. They glared at her, refused to talk to her, called her names, gossiped about her and spread rumours. They would sit whispering to each other, staring straight at her. Every day she ate lunch by herself.

They failed to invite her to parties, sleepovers, get-togethers. She would sit in class listening to them talk about funny stories from the times they had spent together. She spent a lot of her school day locked in the toilet cubicle, crying. One day when she couldn’t stand it anymore, when she was so tired of being bullied and ignored, so sick of fighting back tears and being told by teachers to just ignore the other girls, she called her mother and asked her to collect her from school.

It was a sign of weakness, and from it, she learned never to show weakness again. They knew she was upset and their bullying fed off it. They knew, too, that her mother suffered from depression because once, as part of a doomed attempt to fit in, Anna had talked about her family and her mother’s problems. They began to act as if she was crazy. When they saw her coming they would make gestures, pretend to slit their wrists. Some would call her ‘pyscho’ and tell her they daren’t speak to her in case she messed them up and made them crazy too. If she sat down at the same table they would gather their things together and leave.

It went on like that for about three years and then, gradually, life began to improve. The group had its own fallings-out and realignments. New friendships were made, and a larger, wider circle formed. Although the bullying continued it was not nearly so bad, and gradually Anna became tolerated, if not wholly accepted. She even felt that a few of the girls: Maria and Jenny and Lisa, she might one day be able to call friends.

By December 1996, soon after her fifteenth birthday, Anna was enjoying life for the first time that she could remember. Other girls phoned her with invitations. She knew she was never their first choice, she was more a last resort person who they would call when no one else was around, but at least they called her. She even went to a couple of parties, stood silently next to Maria or Jenny, clutching a glass of fruit juice that lasted all evening. No one ever offered to get her another and she was too timid to help herself. It wasn’t exactly the height of social success but at least she was there.

It was soon after one of these parties that Anna made a mistake. It seemed a small enough thing at the time but it had big consequences.

She was trying to get more friendly with Maria Burns because she wanted Maria to become something she had always craved but never come anywhere close to – a ‘best friend’. Anna had learned by now that the surest way to put someone off you and to end up being ridiculed was to appear needy and clingy and desperate for a friend.

She had also discovered that girls liked you to be interested in them, liked you to make them feel superior, liked you to confide in them. And so she did all of those things and Maria, who was not the most popular of girls herself, began to see that a best friend like Anna, although a bit of a loser, might not be such a bad thing. Certainly she wouldn’t threaten Maria’s position or steal attention away from her. In fact, she would show up all the better by contrast. Maria started to include Anna in everything she did, and for a while it looked as though Anna would get what she wanted.

It was April and the general election was looming. John Major’s government pinned its hopes on the ‘feel-good factor’, hoping the economic prosperity that had followed the recession of the early nineties would be enough to distract voters from all the sleaze and the in-fighting over Europe. There was no feel-good factor for Maria. That month her father lost his job and the family were faced with selling their house. They would lose a lot of money; the house was in negative equity.