The Book of You: A Novel (21 page)

Tuesday

Tuesday, March 3, 6:30 a.m.

This is where I belong, where I should be, the place that’s been waiting for me. I am climbing the steps of the rectangular stone building that Lottie spent so much time in. Behind me are half a dozen calmly parked cars and vans, ready for action, painted in their comforting Battenberg grids of yellow and blue blocks. Above me is a bright blue sign with the word
Police
on it. I take a deep breath, grab the handle of the metal-framed door, and step over the threshold.

The station is virtually deserted so early in the morning. Within a minute I understand the significance of this, staring in disbelief at the protective glass reception window with its notice that they are open for inquiries from 8:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. All at once I am deflated, on the verge of tears. I will have a fit of hysteria right here, and they’ll think I’m a madwoman in the grip of antisocial behavior and slap some kind of order on me and throw me in a cell. How can I not have thought to check something as basic as the opening hours?

I turn, searching for the door I used to enter, but I’m disorientated and lost and dizzy, like a child who has spent the last minute spinning in circles, which I suppose I have. They’ll charge me with being drunk and disorderly, too. I stumble along, trying again to find my way out, and a policeman wanders by, peering curiously at me. He must be ten years younger than I am. He says, looking concerned, “Can I help you?” and I think he means it, and that his question is not simply the polite rhetoric that millions of people reel off on autopilot zillions of times a day.

I stutter unintelligibly and hold up my huge bag of evidence as if that will explain everything. I know I need to tell him about you, at least a very quick version, so he will listen to me, so he won’t make me leave. But each time I try to speak I can’t get beyond the first word of my sentence. I don’t know where to begin the list of the things you’ve done. “He . . . He . . . He . . .” I sound like a broken record or a bad mockery of laughter. I try again, opening and closing my mouth, and though nothing comes out the policeman asks if I need to make a complaint. I choke out the words “I do,” and he says something about getting me into an interview room, and I somehow say, “But aren’t you closed? Aren’t I too early?”

He says that that doesn’t matter. They’re only closed to routine things, like people who want lost property. He speaks to me with the gentle sorrowfulness of a surgeon talking to a patient whose condition is inoperable. He says that it’s the job of the police to help those who are distressed or fearful, which isn’t something that can wait. He says that he’s going to get a detective constable to come and talk to me in a few minutes. Will I please follow him? He leads me through a door that is locked to the general public, a door that makes me think of the special gateway out of the jurors’ waiting room and into the world of Court 12. It is a passage that people do not pass through every day, but only at rare points in their lives.

Without quite knowing how it has happened, I am sitting down and there is a glass of water in front of me and I’m being offered a cup of tea, but I shake my head and mouth the words “No, thank you” without any sound coming out. A box of tissues is sliding along the table, pushed by a hand. The hand belongs to DC Peter Hughes, a very tall, very thin, very stooping man in his late forties with a shock of soft hair the color of steel and the thickest glasses I have ever seen. He looks tired toward the end of what must have been a long night on duty. He is drinking black coffee. I take some tissues and wipe my eyes and blow my nose, and then I clear my throat, but it doesn’t work, so I try again to clear it. I take a sip of the water. DC Hughes says, “No rush. Just sit quietly for a few minutes until you’re ready. I can see it’s been a big step for you to come here.”

The evidence of how wrong everything is must be etched on my face and rumbling beneath the words that are sticking in my throat. I must be visibly disintegrating; I’m about as solid as a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle. On the wall behind DC Hughes is a framed sign.

All victims will be treated with sensitivity, compassion, and respect by professional and dedicated officers.

Already, I can see that this is true. DC Hughes. The baby-faced policeman who brought me to this room and is now sitting almost invisibly, taking notes. Both of them seem to be all the good things the sign promises. But what of the word that describes my role in all of this?
Victim.
It’s a word I’ve resisted using about myself, a word that has unremittingly pricked at me from the leaflets and the trial. I do not want to start using it now. But that word is clearly what the young policeman and DC Hughes see when they look at me.

The chairs that the three of us sit on are made of fake plasticky wood. The matching round table between us is the only other piece of furniture. The floors are linoleum, so even DC Hughes’s calm voice sounds tinny and echoey as he asks me if I want to wait for a few hours until a female police officer becomes available to interview me, and I gulp out that I think I need to do it now, if that’s okay, and he says yes, of course. There is a large mirror that must be an observation window, though I doubt it is being used for me. I hope it will soon be used for you.

Despite my repeated derailments of his methodical processes and my impulse to blurt everything out in distraught chaos, DC Hughes is expert at taking me through it all in logical order. I tell him that I’ve tried to do everything right. I tell him what you know all too well: that I haven’t made it easy for you. Not at all. My urgent determination that DC Hughes should know this takes me by surprise.

I tell him that I don’t belong to social networking sites; I don’t advertise every intimate detail of my life or announce every journey I’m about to take. I tell him how Rowena’s electronic trail led you to gate-crash my already strained friendship with her; it wasn’t my own Internet presence, which is otherwise nonexistent. Such public exposure is against my nature, I say. I tell him that you don’t have my private email address—few people do—and that so far you’ve never pestered me through the university’s.

I tell him that I suppose you’ve had no option but to track me the old-fashioned way, doggedly hanging around the places you know I have to go, even though I’ve reduced them almost to the point of self-imprisonment. As I say all this, I see for the first time what should have been obvious all along. My computerized existence, small as it may be, doesn’t interest you at all. It is only physical contact that you want.

I tell DC Hughes about that night in November, explaining that I can’t remember much. I tell him of my certainty that you will say it was consensual, and my worry that you slipped something into my wine. Despite his unflappable professional kindness, I am waiting for him to look at me in derision and tell me there is nothing he can do. That isn’t what happens, though.

“The word consensual may well not apply here,” he says.

I remember Lottie’s eyes welling with tears when Mr. Harker told her that he didn’t dispute any of her evidence. I understand her stunned gratitude now in a way that I didn’t then. My own eyes are prickling with tears, but I blink them away, not wanting to stop DC Hughes.

“But even if we presume for the sake of argument that it does,” he says, “a night of consensual sex in the past, whatever its nature, doesn’t make this your fault, or give him the right to behave as he has since. We can’t prove anything about the drugs now, though. You would have needed a medical exam and urine tests at the time to establish that they were used and what they were. The tests aren’t conclusive, anyway. These substances aren’t all detectable, and many of them leave the body within hours.”

I know that DC Hughes has probably been on too many training courses to count. He seems so natural, though, so restrainedly but not overbearingly nice. So truthful. So trustworthy. I think his decency is real. I do not think it is merely the result of all those staff-development days on how to deal with the victims of sex crimes.

And now the moment has come that I can’t put off any longer. I take out the obscene photographs. I packaged them separately from the rest of your grisly things, uncertain even when I walked out my front door this morning about whether or not I’d be able to bring myself to hand them over. But I place them in front of DC Hughes, babbling that I have no recollection of your taking them, telling him of my fear that you will claim it was a consensual sex game, warning him of what that envelope contains. “It’s terrible enough”—my voice shakes—“being faced with you looking at them—with seeing you seeing them . . .” I trail off.

“I understand,” he says. “And I think you’re very brave.”

I remember Mr. Morden saying exactly the same thing to Lottie. The very last thing he said to her after all those days in the witness box.

I voice my fear about how many people will need to look at them.

“We’re very careful of such materials,” he says, but I note his avoidance of answering directly, and the vagueness of his reply.

DC Hughes’s face is expressionless. I think of a doctor performing a gynecological procedure, masking all thoughts and response to reassure the patient that there is no trace of desire; he is just doing his job. He slides out the pile of photos and glances briefly at the top one, the first one you sent me and the least terrible of them; the one before you tied me up and arranged all your props. Without looking further at it, or at the others in the stack below it, he puts your souvenir images away.

I am trying to keep myself as still as I can be, blushing fiercely from head to toe in front of this uniformed man, a stranger to me. Because of you, he has seen me unconscious in my lavender underwear. Because of you, he will see worse of me than that when he looks at the rest of the photos later. He does not want to mortify me further by doing so now, before my eyes.

I take another sip of water, and then he says, “It would be very difficult at this point in time to prove that you were not a willing participant, though I believe you when you say that you were not. But even if you had consented to his taking those photographs, the images are clearly not welcome to you now and you’ve made that clear. That is what matters about them.”

He excuses himself for ten minutes, taking the quiet young policeman with him. While they are away, I phone court to say I will be late. I tell them I have been detained by a family emergency. I tell them I will get in as soon as I can. I half expect to be kicked off the jury then and there, but they are entirely kind and understanding.

DC Hughes returns with cataloging and storage materials, again accompanied by the young policeman, who continues to operate his pencil so noiselessly I almost forget he is there. Only DC Hughes’s voice and mine are allowed to bounce off the bare white walls of this interview room. I know this must be a strategy worked out between the two of them so that I can feel as comfortable as possible in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, so that I don’t feel any more overwhelmed than I already do.

Every item I’ve brought is carefully examined and labeled. Your letters. Your handmade book. The desiccated flowers and disused communication devices. The heart-shaped box of chocolates with its matching card. The photos of me and Robert. The ring. Your magazine and the envelope it was posted in, which I’m again grateful to DC Hughes for not looking long at. The black notebook. The photos of you on my street, snapped with my camera phone, and the one I took of my reddened wrist after the park.

Already, under the Protection from Harassment Act, I have provided evidence of much more than the minimum two instances of harassment. I have convincingly documented your persistent obsessive behavior, and that the incidents have occurred relatively close together in terms of timescale.

More than enough grounds, DC Hughes assures me, to justify the visit he will be making to you later today. That, he says, is quite often all it takes.

I tell him about Laura’s vanishing, giving him the Bettertons’ contact details, mentioning that the police hadn’t been able to do anything to help them, asking if he can get someone to compare the magazine cover with one of her parents’ photographs of her. DC Hughes seems to sit up straighter at this, despite his stoop, and I think he actually looks worried. He plays with his heavy glasses, sliding them down his nose so I can see the red mark they’ve left, then up again—the first fidget I’ve seen from him in a very long morning. He seems to take a long time before speaking, considering his words with extra care. The police take stalking extremely seriously, he says. Though he cannot comment on another case, he says. But he will certainly retain the Bettertons’ details in my file for future reference, he says.

You will be given verbal and written warnings. The clear import will be that if you persist in unsociable conduct that causes me to feel harassed, alarmed, or distressed, then you will face prosecution and a restraining order. And if you breach that, you will be looking at up to five years in prison.

I tell him what you did to Robert’s car, and though DC Hughes makes a note of it, he explains that unless Robert makes a complaint himself, there is nothing the police can do about it. I say that I don’t think Robert will be going to the police, at least for now. I don’t say that this is because I am still hoping Robert will never need to know about you. For the first time, this seems possible.

By 11:00 a.m. I am finished, clutching DC Hughes’s card. He has written his mobile number on it, and a crime reference code. I fumble in my bag for the new notebook that is identical to the old one, all the way down to its black cover; I bought it just in case, though I hope its pages will remain blank as I slip the card between them. Then I curl my fingers around the personal attack alarm DC Hughes has given me and shown me how to use. He’s also issued me a Victim Care Card with the basic information about my crime and all of the actions and paperwork that will happen next. Lottie must have had one of these, too.
My crime.
The crime that belongs to me. As if you belong to me. And that word again. On the wall. On the card. In the leaflets. In the courtroom.
Victim.