The Butterfly Effect (17 page)

***

I wonder what Olga would do, if she were here now instead of me? Would she be moping around, thinking about all she had lost, her head almost permanently in the past? Or would she be up on her feet, fierce and determined that he would never get the better of her? I think I know the answer to that, but I have also heard of incredibly strong women who have been worn down by a stalker, so it is simplistic to transfer the Olga I knew into this situation and imagine that she would be unaffected by what had gone before.

However, I can imagine her now, standing with her hands on her hips, rousing me to activity.

“For God’s sake, girl,” she says, “get off your arse and do something! Are you going to sit here quietly and submit to whatever he has in mind for you?”

No, of course I don’t want to do that, but it’s dark outside and I’m tired. Can’t I sleep now? Surely he won’t come this late in the day? But then I think maybe that’s exactly what he will do. I remember with a jump that it is Christmas Eve. I remember how important today must be in his house, and I think about all the things his parents will want him to do. Or maybe he will still be at work. Lots of firms continue right up until lunchtime or even later, and then there may be social events to attend. Greg will have to behave exactly as he has on every other Christmas Eve, if he’s not already in custody of course, but the evening may be his. He could still come now, and those screws are not secure, so I pull myself to my feet and get on with it. I have no choice.

It is incredibly hard. My fingers are still sore and the coin is so tiny, that each screw moves only a fraction of a turn before I have to let go, and then the coin drops and I have to find it again. The head of one of the screws is so mangled that I have to give up with that one, but the others are still worth the effort, if only my fingers hold out. Sometimes I scream with the misery of it, my voice sounding strange and detached as if there is another prisoner in here, screaming with her own pain. Sometimes I will myself into a kind of trance, push and turn, push and turn, this screw for a while, then that. At those times I get more done, or at least it feels that way, but when I finally have to stop, to let the pain subside, I see that there is still a way to go. The two screws in the door frame are almost fully inserted, but the two in the door have at least a centimetre to go and that means the slats are still wobbly, but it will have to do.

I have come to the end of my resources, so I run the cold tap and hold my hands in the freezing cold water for as long as I can bear, then wrap them in a towel and lie on the bed. Christmas Eve. I thought last year was about as bad as it could get, but it seems however bad things are, there is always the possibility they will get worse.

***

I never told Nat about what happened. Of course he knew that Olga had visited, as the camera footage showed her on the front step, showed the two of us hugging, but I didn’t tell him we had parted in what seemed like such a final way. All the same, he was such an empathetic person he could tell I was unhappy, and although he didn’t ask, he made an extra effort to keep my spirits up that evening, staying with me to watch a film I’m sure he never would have chosen, and keeping my mind off it all with little stories and jokes. By the end of the evening I was convinced that I had made the right choice, and the next few weeks provided further proof if ever I needed it, as that was when Greg started to get really nasty.

It was quite possibly the next day, but if not it was very soon afterwards that I started to receive the next round of unsolicited goods. I had heard of this happening to other victims, the pizza delivered late at night and so on, but this was different, as everything I received was related to my impending death. It started with a series of literature and visits from salespeople wanting to sell me life insurance. He must have put me on some sort of list, as it was unending for a while, and I had to stick a notice on the door explaining that I was the victim of a hoax and did not want to buy any form of insurance at all. So that stopped it, but then there was a whole barrage of funeral-related material, with emails about making plans for my death, links to will-writing services and a visit from the local Co-op funeral home. The poor man was very embarrassed, as the person he had been informed was dead actually opened the door, but he couldn’t have felt any worse than I did.

By the end of October I had reached such a state of despair that I hardly opened the door at all, unless it was to Nat. I could guarantee that any visitor would have been sent by Greg, as there was no-one else left to visit. I had no social life, no job, next to no interaction with the outside world. In many ways I may as well have been dead, and this was a thought that occurred to me from time to time, but I never got closer than thinking about it. Sometimes, I would open the bathroom cabinet and look at the bottle of paracetamol, and I would get a feeling almost of comfort. Not today, but one day, if it all gets too much, I could do it. There would be a way out if I wanted it.

It’s very strange that it was Mum and Dad who triggered some kind of a change in me. Given that they had been pretty useless parents, certainly since I reached adolescence, and any support I had received had been cold, distant and practical rather than emotional or loving, they would have been the last people I expected to come swinging into action. But that shows how wrong you can be where people are concerned.

It was just after lunch and I was debating whether I should bother getting dressed at that stage. It would only mean another set of clothes to wash and there would be nobody to see what I wore, apart from Nat and he didn’t mind. But then it would give me something to do, as I had only a minuscule quantity of washing up to occupy me until the round of afternoon TV quizzes started. This was how small my life had become, but then suddenly, before I’d had the chance to make any decision, the door bell rang and my laptop screen flickered to life.

It took a few seconds to register who they were. They looked older, less upright, less sure of themselves than I remembered, but it had been a long time since I saw them away from the comfort and security of their own home. My home, it had been, but I had long since stopped thinking of it in that way. It always surprised me how many of my friends talked about ‘going home’ when referring to visits to their parents’ homes, so I suppose I must have been the unusual one. My home had always been wherever I was living at the time, and never more so than now, when its walls were also the horizons of my life.

But what were they doing here? Although it was hardly more than a twenty minute drive from their house to my flat, I had barely seen them since Richie’s death. Mum tended to phone every couple of weeks, and I would ask about their various medical conditions, she would ask about my job and that would just about exhaust our resources unless there was a cousin getting married or having a baby to tell me about, which she would do with a suitable degree of irritating wistfulness. So, when I stopped working, one half of our conversational repertoire disappeared, just like that. Our exchanges became punctuated by so many pregnant pauses – the only things likely to become pregnant – that eventually I suggested that I would call next time I had some news, an offer that she seemed to accept gratefully. By news, I meant a job of course, as she would not be interested in anything else I was likely to acquire, but I didn’t tell her there was no chance of that, as I could not leave the flat in order to attend any interviews. Somehow, the fact that I was being stalked by a man whose intentions became more frightening by the day would end up being my fault, so I kept it to myself and told her jobs were hard to come by at the moment, with all the cuts to public services.

It didn’t even occur to me not to let them in. Although the prospect of anything enjoyable or positive was much less likely than it had been when Olga stood in the same place, I suppose the old filial deference kicked in, as it does. You can’t leave your parents standing on the doorstep and pretend not to be at home, can you? I couldn’t, anyway, so I opened the door as quickly as I could and ushered them inside. To be fair to them, they made a better job of hiding their surprise at my appearance than Olga had done. However, it was clear that they did have some normal, parental feelings for me after all, as Mum was having a hard time hiding her tears and Dad was white as a sheet.

At least I didn’t have to explain, as it seemed they already knew just about everything. They would not say who had told them, but the amount of detail they had led only to Nat or Olga, and my money was on Olga. Nat, having had a chequered and fragmented childhood, was less likely to see parents as a source of support, but Olga came from a large and close family. I suspected she had sought out my parents to see if they could succeed where she had failed.

And, to an extent, they did. They were not passionate as Olga had been, but they asked questions, in that way that we teachers do, and some of them were questions I found hard to answer. How long was I prepared for this to continue? What was the endgame? Why hadn’t the police been kept informed as the situation had evolved?

Of course I found answers at the time, answers that were founded in the many conversations I’d had with Nat, night after night, often with a film playing in the background and a bottle of wine on the table, the film barely watched but the wine always finished. We never stopped talking about the time when all this would be over, when we would be able to present the police with the irrefutable proof that Greg was the stalker and that he was a real and physical threat to my safety. But there were no timescales as such, and this played on my mind after they left. Was I really going to live – exist – like this for the foreseeable future? Nat was wonderful in many ways, especially where technology was concerned, and if it hadn’t been for him there is no telling what might have happened, but it was possible that he, too, had become trapped in a certain way of thinking. It was time to go back to the police.

So that’s what we did. Nat was not at all certain it was worth it as, he said, all we had was a greater body of evidence – quantity rather than quality – and none of it led directly to Greg. But still, I had enough spirit left in me to insist, so we gathered it all up, contacted the detective I had met on the last occasion, and kept our appointment one rainy morning in November. It was November 13th, as it happened, but that did not bother me unduly. With the sort of luck I’d had in the past couple of years, I couldn’t see how numerical superstition was going to make it any worse.

To begin with, the interview was positive and I was pleased we had come. Detective Wilson, who insisted we should call him Ed, was friendly and took a great deal of care when examining everything we had brought with us. He asked if we had ever seen Greg, which we hadn’t, and then he tapped the end of his pen on his lips and sat back in his chair.

“Do you mind if I leave you alone for a minute?” he said. “There’s something about this case I can’t put my finger on, and I want to talk to a colleague.”

Of course we said we didn’t mind. We could hardly say otherwise, but an anxious feeling was creeping into my stomach and replacing the mild excitement I had been experiencing before. What did he mean? Was I in even more danger than we had thought? Or did he doubt our evidence?

We waited for at least twenty minutes, neither of us able to make any substantial conversational sallies. I could see that Nat was almost as anxious as me, and I felt a great rush of affection and gratitude for him as he sat there, chewing the inside of his mouth. Look what he had given up for me – goodness knows how many days of annual leave, any chance of a decent social life or new relationship – and now he was sitting in a police station worrying that the police would not believe us, after all he had done to collect every tiny piece of evidence. If this failed, he would have failed, that’s what he was thinking, I was sure.

“Nat?”

“Hmm?”

“I just wanted to say thanks, for, you know, everything you’ve done. I don’t know how I would have coped without you, and even if this doesn’t work, don’t worry. We will get there in the end.”

“Of course we will,” he said, smiling and taking my hand. “I wasn’t worrying, just thinking.”

Shortly after, Detective Wilson – I was struggling to think of him as Ed – came back in with a woman. She was quite young, and in casual clothes: jeans, a colourful jumper and boots. He introduced her as Marie Baranski and explained she was a graduate trainee who had completed a thesis on stalking whilst at university.

“The problem is,” she said, “we are not convinced that the stalker is who you think it is. We went back to see him when you contacted us again, but he was abroad, on holiday with a girlfriend. We spoke at length to his parents, who admit that he has a tendency to have what they call ‘crushes’ on women and to assume that they feel the same, but he is otherwise leading a normal life.”

This was a massive shock to both Nat and me. Instinctively, I reached out for his hand and held it tight, and it was clammy yet cool. This was too much to comprehend, and neither of us spoke.

“Now we are not saying anything for sure, and we’re certainly not doubting your evidence,” said Ed, “but we have to look at this carefully. Mr Payne does fit some aspects of the profile of a stalker, and he has admitted to harassing you when your relationship ended ...”

“There never was a relationship! I chatted to him after a gig, I had one drink with him and then he tricked me into eating at his parents’ house. We never even kissed!”

“OK, I was using the word loosely, sorry,” said Ed, “but what I was going to say was this. You have been experiencing a continuing situation which has escalated over time. That is quite normal, if anything can be said to be normal with these people. The difficulty is that this escalation is usually matched by a deterioration and increasingly obsessive behaviour in the stalker. You would expect him to be isolated, living in his own world in which you, the object of his affections, are the centre. But here we have a man who has a functioning relationship with another woman, who is holding down his job, relating normally to his parents and showing no sign of any of the behaviours we would expect. We have to consider the possibility that your stalker is someone other than Mr Payne.”