The Bed I Made (40 page)

‘He wouldn’t have got caught on that himself. Where would he have been climbing to to mean he would fall there? The windowsill’s easy for him to get on to and it’s not even close. It’s not like there’s even a trellis or anything.’ He ran his fingers over the network of scratches. ‘Someone did this,’ he said.

The vet was a friend of Pete’s and told him to take Victor round. I stayed at the cottage and paced. As soon as I’d seen him hanging I’d known it wasn’t an accident. Pete’s cat, my house: someone had done it, and whoever it was knew about us.

The vet told Pete that Victor was lucky his neck hadn’t broken. His windpipe was badly bruised, however, and he wouldn’t have survived much longer. His life, I thought, had been slipping away when I found him. A couple more minutes and that would have been it. I got the blanket out of the wardrobe and folded it into the seat of the armchair. Pete laid him down and stroked his flank until he fell asleep, exhausted by pain and panic.

‘Who would do it?’ he said, back in the kitchen. ‘What kind of sick . . .?’

‘Whoever did it knows, don’t they? About us, I mean.’

‘You think it was Tom?’

He looked at me but I found I couldn’t hold the eye contact. ‘I don’t know. Who else could it be?’ Cold washed over me. ‘He’s always in trouble, isn’t he?’

‘We’ll have to talk to her – now. If it is him, it’s gone beyond a joke.’

Mill Road was deserted, not a soul visible, and though it was still only seven, the light just softening, not yet fading, the blind in her kitchen window was drawn. Pete knocked and we waited. A minute or so passed. ‘Perhaps she’s out,’ I said, thinking of the evenings last week when I’d come here myself.

‘I don’t think so.’ He knocked again, harder this time. There was another minute and I thought he’d got it wrong but then there were footsteps inside and the door opened.

It was obvious immediately that she’d been crying: her nose and eyes were very swollen, the lids bruised-looking. The tendrils of hair that curled around her face were damp. She was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of wide cotton trousers that bagged at the knee and tied with a drawstring around her tiny waist so that the extra material billowed out over her hips. She looked fragile.

She didn’t seem surprised to see us. ‘Come in then,’ she said in a clogged voice, shrinking away into her kitchen. I saw her notice Pete touch my back as he stood aside to let me go first.

I’d been dreading the pulse of bass through the floor but the house was silent. It was as stifling as ever, the heating on full-bore even in April. Sally had backed herself into the far end of the room and was standing with her arms braced against the bar of the cooker as if she was expecting to have to spring out and defend herself.

‘It’s Tom we wanted to talk about,’ said Pete, and I was sure I saw her shoulders drop a fraction.

‘What’s he done now?’ she said.

‘This afternoon, Kate found Victor hanging from a nail in her yard.’

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t an accident – he’d been deliberately hung up by the collar.’

‘Shit. Oh, the poor thing. Is he all right – alive?’

‘He’ll survive. Look, Sally, we all know you’ve got problems with Tom and I know you do your best but this has to be the end – something’s got to be done. We don’t know for sure it’s him yet but he’s the only candidate, and that speaks volumes.’

‘He knows that we – me and Pete – have started . . . seeing each other,’ I said. ‘I think that’s why it happened.’

She looked at me and her mouth hardened, her teeth catching her bottom lip as if to stop it. It was fleeting but unmistakable: if we had been alone I thought she might have just come out and said it: ‘Why you? Why does he want you?’ In a moment, it all fell into place. I remembered how she’d introduced herself to me in the corner shop, just after she’d seen me speaking to Pete for the first time. She hadn’t been buying anything – she’d followed me in specially. And when I’d asked her about him she’d been so emphatic about their closeness, and how perfect he and Alice had been for one another. She’d been trying to close them away in a bubble, exclude me. At the café, the times she’d been so keen to hear my news, she’d been fishing to see whether I would talk about him. Why hadn’t I seen it before? She loved him.

‘It wasn’t Tom,’ she said, turning back to him.

‘Sal . . .’

‘It can’t have been – not if Victor was hurt this afternoon.’

Despite the heat in the room, I felt a touch of icy cold on the back of my neck.

‘He got up at lunchtime and we had an argument.’ She looked down, hiding her face momentarily, and I wondered whether he’d told her about Pete and me then. ‘He went storming off, saying he was going to his dad’s in Lymington. It’s what he does when he wants to hurt me. He’s on the mainland. Gavin rang ten minutes ago to let me know he was going to stay the night.’

The cold was spreading in waves from my shoulders down my arms and I put a hand on the worktop to steady myself. The edges of my vision were pixilating; for a moment I thought I was going to pass out.

‘I need to go,’ I said, my voice too high. I yanked the door open and rushed out into the street. The cool air outside was a relief but there was no strength in my legs. I half sat, half fell on to the step of the house three doors down and put my head between my knees. When I closed my eyes, there was a picture of that morning. I saw myself lying among the crumpets and milk, the carton of orange juice inches from my face as his fingers stabbed and his sour breath filled my nostrils.

‘Kate – can you hear me? What’s going on?’

I slowly lifted my head and saw Pete towering in front of me. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said, putting my face back into my hands. ‘I just felt dizzy – it was hot.’

His feet scratched on the tarmac as he crouched in front of me. ‘Look at me.’

‘I’m fine – it’s just the shock of earlier.’

‘I don’t believe you.’ He tipped my chin up and made me look at him. ‘If something’s wrong, I should know. Come on, I’ve told you everything, all my stuff.’

I hesitated but he was right: he had been honest with me; I owed him the same.

‘I think it might be Richard,’ I said quietly. ‘My ex. It might be him who hurt Victor.’

‘What? Are you still involved with him?’ He drew back.

‘No.’ My voice had gone high again. ‘I hate him. I’m terrified of him. I came here to get away from him – to hide – but even here, he’s in my head. I changed my number but he sends these emails.’

Pete’s face was stony. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They come all the time. He thinks he owns me. He said that if I met anyone else, he’d kill me.’

‘Jesus.’ He put a hand over his mouth. Several seconds passed. ‘Is it real? Do you believe him?’

‘He tried to rape me, the day I ended it.’ I was just going to say it; I couldn’t lie to him any more. ‘He was married. I didn’t know at first but then I did and I carried on anyway. This is punishment – I deserve it.’

He bent his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. I wanted to yelp with the pain: I’d ruined everything – destroyed it before we’d even had a chance. Time seemed to stretch and with it a force-field between us.

‘Do you think he’s here?’ he said at last. ‘Really? Or has he got you running so scared you can’t think straight?’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘How would he have found you?’ he said. ‘Who knows you’re here?’

‘My dad and my brother but he never met them and they would never tell him without asking me. The only other person who knows is Helen.’

‘And would she tell him?’

‘No. She wouldn’t – she promised. But I think he’s got to her. That’s why I went to London. I’d been ringing her, leaving messages but she never answered. It’s never happened before. I went to her office but she wouldn’t talk to me. She’s involved with him, I know it – I just don’t know how.’

‘But she must know what he’s like?’

‘Not everything. Not until Friday.’

There was a man coming down the lane with a dog, looking at us with blatant curiosity. I waited until he was out of hearing. ‘I think Richard’s a psychopath,’ I said. ‘I don’t just mean that he’s crazy – frightening. I mean literally – in the medical sense. It took me so long to see it. Everything’s about control. The whole of his life is a power game. That’s why he won’t let me go – he hasn’t broken me yet. It’s nothing to do with love; it’s possession. Dominance.’

He stood up again and took steps away from me, turning his back. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me any of this before.’

‘Why do you think I didn’t?’ I said, desperate. ‘Because I’m ashamed. Because there’s so much in the way of you and me anyway. I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to think I was the sort of person who . . . I wanted it to be – clean.’ I stood up, feeling the ground spin. His back was like a wall between us.

‘You should have told me,’ he said at last. He turned round and came towards me, pulling me against his chest, pressing my face into the wool of his jumper. ‘You still should have told me.’

Victor was asleep when we got back to the cottage but he opened his eyes when Pete smoothed his head. He seemed a little better, his eyes less pained, and when I poured him a fresh saucer of milk and put it next to him on the blanket, he drank a small amount. I went round the cottage drawing the curtains and pulling the blinds. Even with Pete with me, I couldn’t shake the thought of Richard out there, moving closer, taking shape in the darkness.

We sat at the table in the kitchen and drank large glasses of brandy. ‘Even if Helen is seeing him – worst-case scenario,’ Pete said, breaking the silence. ‘It doesn’t mean he knows where you are.’

‘I didn’t tell you the truth earlier,’ I said, making myself look at him. ‘About having to work on the translation. I was going to go to London again. I left her messages on Friday, telling her everything – all the stuff that I’d been too ashamed to tell her before. I haven’t heard from her, not even a text. Something’s wrong.’

‘I’ll come with you. Not tomorrow; I can’t miss these meetings. We’ve been working on the models for over a year and we need the account – it’s a question of people keeping their jobs. But Tuesday. Ask Mary; tell her you’ll swap a day. We’ll go up and we’ll stay there till you’ve talked to her.’

St James’s struck a muffled three o’clock. I tried to resist the urge to turn over again. It had only been a mild day but the air in the bedroom was as soupy as Sally’s overheated cottage. I’d already been up once to open the window and Pete had stirred in the bed behind me then but now the glass on the bedside table was empty and I would never get to sleep unless I had some more water. Gingerly I folded back my half of the quilt and eased myself out. Afraid that the light would wake him again, I crossed the tiny landing without switching it on, averting my eyes from the darkness that thickened at the corner of the stairs. I drank at the sink then inched my way back.

I put the glass down as quietly as possible, got into bed and lay down again. I’d thought that I’d managed it but he moved over and put his arms round me, fitting his body behind mine.

‘You can’t go on being frightened,’ he murmured. ‘You have to confront it.’

‘I know.’

His breath played over the back of my neck, exposed where my hair had fallen sideways on to the pillow. A fluttering sensation spread out over my skin, down my spine and my arms. He touched his lips to the bone at the top of my spine and I felt his nose move through my hair, gently inhaling. ‘Don’t leave the Island,’ he said. ‘Stay. Come and live with me.’

Chapter Thirty-five

Pete stood on the doorstep, Victor in his arms. The ivy on the wall behind him moved with the breeze, a shifting carpet of leaves. I suppressed a jump of fear at the thought of him being away for the day, tied up in meetings.

‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably be on the last boat but I’ll come round when I get back. If anything happens – anything at all – ring me. If I can’t answer, I’ll call you straight back as soon as I can.’ He leaned in and kissed me. ‘Bye. Don’t forget to ask Mary about tomorrow.’

After he’d gone, I locked the door behind him and went upstairs. I stood at the bedroom window and looked out. The early sun was playing over the estuary, working with the breeze to create a shifting, sparkling scene. I narrowed my eyes and it reduced to speckling points of dark and light, as though painted by Klimt. I tipped my head towards my shoulders, first one side, then the other, stretching tendons taut with the stress of yesterday. Yarmouth moved sleepily on the other side of the glass. There were a couple of cars coming over the bridge, and on the wall near the harbour, office men were loading fenders on to the back of a truck, taking their time. Now, in daylight, with the immediate shock passed, the fear that Richard had found me began to seem less grounded. It was impossible to imagine him in the scene in front of me – it would need two worlds to collide. There must be another explanation for what had happened to Victor – either it really had been an accident or Sally was wrong about the time Tom had gone over to the mainland. Surely that was it.

There was still more than an hour before I was due at the café so I lay down on the bed again for a few minutes, my head on Pete’s pillow. I breathed deeply for the smell of his hair. It was three days, not even that, since I had gone running up to find him and yet everything was different. I was going to move in with him. It seemed incredible but I hadn’t needed to give it a second thought. When he’d whispered the words over my shoulder, I’d felt a surge of joy sing through me. It was a real life, here, with him, and I had never wanted anything more.