Читать книгу White Bodies: A gripping psychological thriller for fans of Clare Mackintosh and Lisa Jewell - Jane Robins, Jane Robins - Страница 15

8

I like getting home. My flat feels like a normal place after the mental onslaught of Central London. It’s on the first floor, and has a small bedroom at the back of the building, overlooking a neglected garden that I’m not allowed to use. I don’t mind. I can open my window to let the fresh air in, and I like the clatter of the trains on the railway track that runs behind the trees. Because of its connection with the outdoors, this is my favourite room and it’s a good place for thinking.

The other part of the flat is the kitchen-sitting room, which is dark because of the bottle green walls that I want to repaint, but somehow never do. It has a breakfast bar and a two-seater sofa and a TV (with DVD player), and a little window facing the bricks in the wall of the next-door house. I cook in that room and watch reruns of Miss Marple and Poirot on television, and Scandinavian crime dramas. But I spend most of my time in the bedroom, sitting at a little table that I found in a skip and put under the window. I eat my meals there and use my laptop – which is what I do the minute I get home after my encounter with Tilda, because I’m eager to go online. I have made friends in the internet forum I told Tilda about – controllingmen.com. They are called Scarlet and Belle, and are both experienced with dealing with abusive relationships. Scarlet joined only a week or so ago – but seems to know a great deal. Belle has been around for ages.

I eat the remaining half of my banana, which is squished now, and I log on, seeing that Belle is online already, but not Scarlet. She notices me immediately.

Hey, Calliegirl. Welcome back.

Hey Belle. Interesting day. Need to talk.

Me 2!!!

I realise I’ll have to hear her news before I can talk about Tilda; sure enough, in an instant, Belle is telling me all about meeting her friend Lavender at Starbucks that morning. They had ordered cappuccinos, she said, and granola bars, and had just put their tray down on a table when, before they had even sat down, Lavender’s husband showed up ‘to keep an eye on the conversation’ so that Lavender couldn’t discuss anything personal.

Classic controlling behavier, Belle writes.

Definitely.

Belle is a geriatrics hospital nurse in York and Lavender is her best friend from school. Belle has shared all the grisly details of Lavender’s life and marriage. Her husband forced her to give up her job because he was worried she would meet another man and now he phones her at home five times a day ‘just to say hello’, and he’s accusing her of loving the kids and not him. Belle thinks their relationship is reaching a crisis point.

Lavender cd not speak. But I no she is READY to leave!

She’s really energised because she thinks Lavender might make a break for it with the children, and go to live in her mother’s house.

All our conversations are anonymous, for obvious reasons. So Lavender is a made-up name and so is Belle. Like me, she is a Befriender – her job is to help a friend, support her in whatever way she can. And Lavender, like Tilda, is Prey – a woman in a relationship with a dangerous, controlling man. The Prey have onscreen names that are colours, and I gave Tilda the name Pink because I regard pink as optimistic. And we call all the men, the Predators in our language, X. So, online, Lavender’s husband is called X, and I always refer to Felix as X. When Scarlet is around, she chats as though she is a Befriender like Belle and me, but actually she is Prey, trapped in a relationship with a control freak (although it’s complicated – she enjoys the weird sex games they do). At first the system seems odd, but you soon get used to it. And I’m Calliegirl, because I got involved before I knew you were supposed to disguise your true identity, and I haven’t told Scarlet and Belle that Callie is my real name.

I’ve been bombarding both of them with questions about Felix, about the way he has come between Tilda and me, about those bruised arms, and the day that he pushed her to the bottom of the Thames, so casually, like it was a normal thing to do. Sometimes I think I’m prey to sinister imaginings, that I’m getting carried away, but Scarlet is direct and analytical, and says that, taken together, the signs are clear – Felix is a danger to Tilda. Belle, also, has no doubts.

Eventually she says:

Whats ur news?

Saw Pink today and spoke to her.

!!???!!?? Is she ok?

Not so good. Very thin. Starey eyes, cut lips. Worried X is somehow starving her.

Xtreemly likely. Easy to do. Make sure NO food in the house. Withhold money. Typical Predator Tactics!!

She went out to buy cigarettes.

Easy 4 Prey to have skewed priorities. Maybe Pink has a few pence and craving nicoteen more than food!!

She will come to my workplace tomorrow and we will have lunch together.

!!! Without X????

Yes. At least, she didn’t mention him. I’m hoping we’ll be able to have a proper chat about the danger she is in. About an Exit Strategy. And how I can help.

It isn’t long before I remember why it is I prefer chatting to Scarlet. Belle’s spelling choices and random punctuation marks are distracting, and I can’t help wondering what she’s like at work in the hospital, on the old people’s wards. ‘Hey Dude!!! It’s suppository time???!!!’ or ‘No WAY this is going to HURT Mr Rumbelow!!!?!!’ Belle is a kind person, though, and she’s always looking out for Lavender, being protective, and also telling us work stories like, I sang the whole of the ‘Sound of Music’ to Mrs Prakash, because it was her favourite, but then she went and died!!! Scarlet is the opposite – always serious, always holding something back, so that I never feel that I know her well. Just as I’m thinking this, she pops up on the screen.

Hello Belle. Hello Calliegirl. Can’t stop, X about to appear – wanting x-rated attention – but can we meet in The Zone at 7.30pm tomorrow?

Off COURSE!!

Yes, fine with me. Seeing Pink tomorrow, so I can report back then.

Good. Watch the News tonight. It will be informative, S

It’s typical of Scarlet to have that commanding tone – telling us what to do. And I’ve noticed that these days she often redirects us to The Zone, which is a separate message exchange for the three of us to use when we don’t want strangers joining our conversation in the controllingmen forum. We use it when we have private information to share, like Belle’s work anecdotes and Scarlet’s sex life. I understand her concern, because it often happens – a man comes on the site to tell us that women can be controlling, too, or to swear at us and become aggressive, although the Mediator deletes the worst abuse pretty promptly. But we have to be so vigilant – because it’s easy for a Predator to infiltrate the forum as a spy. So we quiz new people hard, weighing them up. One time someone called Destini seemed genuine and for several weeks joined in our conversations, but then started to say that if the Prey were more ‘feminine’ and ‘appreciative’ their ‘gripes’ with Predators would disappear. Not subtle. And when he was challenged, he used horrific swear words at us.

Our topics can be specific, like giving advice to Prey and Befrienders in disastrous situations, and the same predictable old stories keep coming up, of Predators suspecting their wives and girlfriends of being unfaithful, or about to leave, or of disrespecting them. The surprising part is the Predators’ creative ideas about punishments. Violet has to ‘submit expenses’ when she buys the household groceries, and keep receipts for a bag of tomatoes or a box of eggs. And Sienna told a story of saving up to buy a dress in a silky yellow fabric. When she put it on, and did a twirl, X told her she was mutton dressed as lamb, then he unzipped her and carefully cut up the dress into squares, for dusters. And we’re all worried about Lilac because she’s not allowed into her converted loft room. X has put a combination lock on the door and he spends most evenings in there, busy with some mystery hobby that requires hammering and moving furniture about. Belle’s exclamation marks go crazy when she thinks about all the possibilities.

We also discuss news stories that are relevant for our forum, and there are so many of them, even in these past few months. Like Steve Chase, the Swindon cab driver with ‘a winning smile’, whose wife Sheree told him she wanted a divorce, so he chopped her up with an axe before he killed his children, four-year-old Lauren and two-year-old Bradley, and hanged himself in the garage. It’s gruesome stuff, but it keeps happening, so often, in fact, that the Chase murders didn’t even make the newspapers’ front pages, and were item seven on the BBC News website. In controllingmen we realised that the signs were there all along. Sheree’s sister told the press how, at first, Steve had been a romantic boyfriend, showering Sheree with gifts, whisking her off to Amsterdam, turning up at her workplace with white roses. After the wedding, he had stayed in command – buying Sheree’s clothes for her, dictating when she could or couldn’t see her friends, forbidding her from driving the car.

Then there was the Topeka kidnapping case. In the photos, Wez Tremaine looked horrible, with his demented hair and monumental beer gut, but so did all his mates, the regular guys whose eyes went blank and bewildered when they spoke to TV reporters. Wez had had a couple of run-ins with the police for beating up Jaynina, the wife who had run away in 2004 after he knocked out two teeth and cracked six ribs, and it was common knowledge that he had a dark side. But no one guessed that he had two teenagers chained up in the cellar. There was no back chat from Leeanne and Joelle, no sneaking-off for an x-ray when he showed them who was boss, no excuses when he wanted sex. Wez did make front-page news, of course, all over the world because, after three years in the Tremaine hell-hole, Leeanne and Joelle escaped, and everyone loves it when someone comes back from the dead.

I’ve had so much help from Scarlet and Belle, and others on the controllingmen forum, giving me advice about Felix, analysing his actions to see how closely he fits the typical Predator profile by being controlling and judgemental. I’m not surprised by the general agreement with my view, which is that Felix is isolating Tilda and taking over her life. I have the impression that he’s constantly monitoring her behaviour. Also, it seems suspicious that Tilda hasn’t taken on any new work recently. Before Felix, she was always talking about the new roles she was considering; since Felix, nothing.

Of course, I’m relieved that Felix hasn’t persuaded Tilda to marry him, or made her pregnant. But when I mentioned to Scarlet that I hoped Tilda would find a way of leaving Felix, she pointed out that because my sister is famous, he will always have a good chance of finding her. Someone will post something on Instagram saying they spotted her in a café or lying on a beach. Scarlet’s right, and sometimes I’m at my table under the window half the night, coming up with solutions. I wonder whether Tilda would be prepared to give up her acting career and take another identity – cut her hair short and dye it black, and move with me to Mexico or Australia. Or maybe take a French name and move to a big city like Marseilles or Bordeaux. Then I go online to check whether a change-of-name is a public document, wondering whether Felix would be able to track her down.

I’m busy with this sort of internet research when I remember that Scarlet has told Belle and me to watch the news, so I go to the BBC website and see that this morning a young woman named Chloey Percival was working in the perfume department in Debenhams in York, when a guy in a hoodie came in and commenced his attack, throwing bleach at her face then stabbing her in the stomach. A middle-aged couple, Sandra and Trevor Abbott, happened to be shopping and did their best to pull him off and hold on to him, but he broke free and ran out of the store into a crowded street. The police are now looking for a suspect named Travis Scott, and Chloey is in intensive care in York hospital.

I can see why Scarlet wanted to alert us. Her boyfriend is paranoid about some other man taking her away from him because she’s so pretty (she told us that in a matter-of-fact way, but I’ve never actually seen a picture of her). She could have been an actress or a model, she says, but X wouldn’t allow it, and made her give up trying. Like Chloey Percival, Scarlet works in a public place, doing tanning, waxing and nails in Manchester. X often shows up at her work, unannounced, and Belle thought it was hysterical to ask: Has X ever stormed in just as ur getting STUCK IN on a chalanging BIKINI WAX??!!

But it’s not funny at all, and I suspect that Scarlet is feeling spooked by the Chloey Percival case, terrified that she’s next.