Читать книгу Who Are You?: Part 2 of 3: With one click she found her perfect man. And he found his perfect victim. A true story of the ultimate deception. - Megan Henley - Страница 5

December 2009–July 2010

Christopher was furious about how things had panned out, and wasn’t going to let anything lie. The emails and messages continued, and I couldn’t settle. There was always a knot of worry in my stomach and I wasted far too much time wishing I’d never set eyes on him.

One night, I fell asleep on the sofa, exhausted by stress more than anything, much more than by the pregnancy. I don’t think I’d been asleep more than five minutes when I felt Vic shaking my arm.

‘Wake up, Megan,’ he whispered. ‘Stay quiet.’

My eyes were open in a second. They felt gritty and heavy, but the tone of Vic’s voice made me instantly realise that I couldn’t wallow in sleepiness.

‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed.

‘Someone’s outside. Get upstairs. Turn all the lights off. And hide. Get Ruby and hide. Don’t phone the police.’

‘Are you sure? Are you sure someone’s outside?’ I asked.

‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve been sitting here watching over you while you slept and I heard someone. Someone’s in the garden. They’ve been pacing around, checking the doors, so you just get upstairs, get Ruby and hide. I’ll deal with this.’

Ruby’s room was on the top floor so I went up there, quickly but quietly. If Vic had heard someone outside, I had no reason to linger downstairs with something bad maybe about to happen. I sat outside Ruby’s room in case anyone did get past him and came into the house; I’d protect Ruby to my last breath if I had to.

Vic had gone outside, to chase whoever was out there, but I could tell by the wind that he had left the back door open. I heard him shouting and was now terrified – I expected to hear someone come back in the house at any second; I just wouldn’t know who it would be. Sitting on the stairs, in the dark, fully prepared to hurt anyone who came near my child, pregnant and terrified – I wondered how my life had turned into a horror story. I wanted to call the police, I desperately wanted to call them, but he’d told me not to and I had to trust him. I sat there in the pitch black terrified for Ruby, for me, my unborn baby and for Vic, who had disappeared into the garden to find out who was there. I was sure it was my ex, or someone sent by my ex. I sat there absolutely petrified for what felt like an age, knowing that the back door was open, so if there was an altercation and Vic came off worse, then whoever was in the garden could come into the house and I would have no way of protecting myself or Ruby.

My heart was pounding by the time I heard the door bang and Vic’s voice shout, ‘Megan! It’s fine! All sorted!’

I belted down the stairs and threw myself into his arms. He was out of breath but seemed to be pumped up on adrenalin rather than fear.

‘What happened? My God, Vic, what happened out there?’ I asked.

He was breathing heavily as he told me. ‘When I got out to the garden, whoever it was ran down to the bottom. They got out of the gate and I chased him up the hill into the village. I managed to catch him there and … well, let’s just say he’ll be sorry he messed with me.’

‘You hit him?’

Vic nodded. ‘Of course I did. He was on my turf, Megan. Decking him was a lot less than I wanted to do.’

‘Where is he? Where did he go?’ I asked, then, ‘Vic – who was it?’

‘There was a car waiting for him – it must have all been set up, it wasn’t just someone chancing their luck as they went past. It was no bog-standard burglar looking for an open door, Megan.’

‘This has gone too far,’ I said, wiping some blood off his cheek. I picked up the phone and started calling 999.

Vic grabbed it out of my hand. ‘No, Megan – you’re right that it’s gone too far, but this needs to be dealt with by my family, not some poxy copper who sticks to the rules and doesn’t know what he’s really facing.’

I was still, at heart, a nice middle-class girl – for me, when things went wrong, or bad guys were involved, you called the police. ‘But Vic,’ I said, ‘we need to get the police involved so this can be stopped.’

‘It will get stopped, Megan, it will.’

‘Please, Vic, please let me call them,’ I begged.

He sighed. ‘I’m telling you, it’ll do no good but …’ he waved his arm at the phone, ‘go ahead – be my guest.’

They came round really quickly, checked the premises to see if there was someone hanging around – but we knew there wasn’t. Vic had said that he had seen a car that matched Christopher’s, but there was no sign of that either.

‘Can you tell me what happened, sir?’ asked one of the officers.

‘I chased a man wearing a balaclava out of the garden and across the road, caught up with the man and had a few words with him, then the man got up and ran down the hill to a car that was waiting with its engine running and then sped off,’ he told them, leaving out the fact that he’d punched him as hard as he could. The police could find nothing. It wasn’t surprising that there was no evidence, and it really just backed up what Vic had said – the police could do nothing.

‘I hate to say it, but I told you so,’ he said when they left. ‘I’ll never let anyone harm you. You mean the world to me, but you need to let me deal with it on my terms in the ways I know best.’

‘Vic, you already have so much to deal with – it’s just unfair that you have to cope with my psycho ex as well. Do you think he’s still out there watching us?’

‘No – I sent him on his way. But who knows what he might try next?’

We didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The next night the same thing happened. I had been putting Ruby to bed and dozed off – probably before her. I was so dopey with pregnancy hormones that I would drop off anywhere. I woke with a start when I heard a door banging downstairs.

‘Vic!’ I shouted.

There was no reply.

I crept downstairs and, again, the kitchen door was wide open. Not long after I got there Vic came back in, sweating and out of breath.

‘Same guy, I’m sure of it,’ he said. ‘Balaclava, same build as last night. He took the same route as well, but he was quicker tonight – he got away without a scratch on him, the lucky bastard.’

‘I’m calling the police,’ I said, grabbing my mobile. ‘It’s one thing to send nasty emails, it’s another to do this.’

Vic snatched the phone away from me. ‘Fuck the police. This has gone beyond the police now. This is going to be dealt with by my family. I’ll tell you again; it’s gone beyond the police, Megan – you must see that. Your ex isn’t going to listen to them; they’d probably never even catch him. This needs to be dealt with by my family. Understand?’ I was a bag of nerves. I didn’t have the strength to argue about it – what if this went on and on throughout my whole pregnancy? What if it was still happening when the baby got here? How far would Christopher go?

Vic put his coat on and left for the payphone. He always went into the village to call from there if he was dealing with anything dodgy or that he wanted to keep from me. I sat outside Ruby’s room, as was becoming my habit, and waited until he got back before venturing downstairs again.

All he said was, ‘It’s being dealt with.’

I felt as if it was all divided into goodies and baddies; it was ridiculous. On the good guy side, as well as Vic and the collective, there was also Uncle Alan. Brother of Vic’s dad, Alan couldn’t have been more different. He completely supported Vic’s attempts to break away and helped him whenever he could. He had a yard in Liverpool and I also suspected that he gave Vic money when he was really desperate. I could never make my mind up about Vic’s mum, Isabella. She turned a blind eye to everything his father did and I had a sense that Vic still really loved her. When he was a child, although she didn’t remove him from the situation, she would do all she could to make it better. Vic portrayed it as a very traditional gypsy set-up. What the man said went as law – her job was to clean and cook and serve. That was what she had been born into, so she didn’t see anything wrong with that.

They had been together since his mum was thirteen and his dad was fifteen. Basically, Jay came from a family of gypsies who were part of a travelling fair. They went all around Europe with it and were once in the Basque region of Spain. Vic’s mum, Isabella, was a local gypsy girl, and when she came to the fair his dad took a shine to her and a deal was done between the two families that she would go with them when they left. Vic was born not too long after that, which was shocking. After they got together, Vic’s dad left the fair and they all lived on a travellers’ site near London. She was only fourteen when he was born. Vic was born in a Westmoreland Star gypsy caravan, a beautiful place with glass and chrome, which cost a fortune and only the highest Roma could afford.

I didn’t really know too much about the good side of his family but I was aware that there were far too many of them on the bad guy list. That night, when he came back from the phone box, I knew that those on that list were involved.

Life carried on in a similar way, threats coming from left, right and centre, Vic having severe problems with the voices in his head, me in the last few weeks of pregnancy. It was a right struggle handling all this, it was like living in a gangster film, and it didn’t help that Vic had cut me off from all my friends. He told me that it was too dangerous to have people round who didn’t understand what was going on, and he also didn’t want me shouting my mouth off to all and sundry. I needed a break from him sometimes. I had several friends living in the town, but if I made plans to meet any of them Vic would suddenly take a turn for the worse, mentally, just before I was about to go, and I would be unable to leave him. It got to the point where I had no life at all, aside from him and Ruby.

The next big drama came in February. I had spent most of my pregnancy in fear and often only felt safe when I was in bed, reading. It was quite late at night when he came into my room – we were still in separate beds, in separate parts of the house, and I had accepted that was just how it had to be. I needed him for protection, and I had to make allowances for how he was. That night I could tell just from looking at him that he was suffering badly with his voices.

‘Are you OK, love?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been to church today, Megan Henley,’ he said, quietly.

‘Well, that’s nice,’ I replied. ‘Was it quiet?’

‘I lit three candles,’ he told me, solemnly. ‘One for Zack, one for Dina, one for Logan.’

I didn’t understand why he would light one for Logan, who was Kat’s second youngest child who was fifteen.

‘Is Logan poorly?’ I queried.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Why did you light a candle for him, then?’

‘I saw it, Megan Henley. He fell. I saw it.’

‘What? Today? You saw Logan fall today?’ I asked. I found it pretty unlikely that he had spent any time with Kat or one of her kids.

‘He fell, Megan Henley,’ he went on. ‘There was a big wall with a big drop on the other side and he fell. Logan fell. He’ll die, so I had to light a candle for him.’

It all seemed a bit far-fetched to me and I assumed he was just talking rubbish, but the next day I was on Facebook when Valerie popped up online.

Megan, I can’t get Vic online but I need to get a message to him. Can you tell him that there’s been an accident? His nephew, Logan, has been really badly hurt. He’s in hospital in Manchester. Ask Vic if he wants to visit – I’m sure Kat would appreciate it.

I was shocked and asked what had happened.

Logan fell off a high wall last night – God knows what he was doing. He’s broken his legs and pelvis, and has awful head injuries. He’s in a coma, Megan – Vic needs to know. Family comes first, no matter what.

This wasn’t possible! How could Vic have seen this before it happened? How could the voices in his head tell him all about it? He was wrong in that Logan hadn’t died, but everything else … I had no idea how this could be. It was as if he could never escape from his family. The investigation into Dina’s death was ongoing, and, on a few occasions, Vic had to travel to Manchester to be interviewed by the police, and give evidence at court hearings. It turned out that, shockingly, she had been found to have over two grams of cocaine in her system when she died. The poor driver who hit her gave evidence saying that she appeared from nowhere and ran straight in front of the car. There was no time to brake, and just before the car hit her Dina looked the driver in the eye and made the sign of the cross. It transpired, although this was something Vic had found out ‘behind the scenes’ rather than through court, that Dina’s own mother, Kat, was responsible for her death. Although she hadn’t been present at the time, from what I could gather Kat had arranged for Dina to be force-fed the drugs as some sort of punishment for bad behaviour. Although it appeared that Dina had run in front of the car herself, Vic hinted that she had been forced into doing this. Kat had skipped the country using a fake passport, and now that the investigation had come to such a horrifying conclusion she was wanted by the police.

And now there was Logan too. He was in hospital for a month in a coma. Tests showed that he too had high amounts of Class A drugs in his system when he had the fall. Through the grapevine Vic discovered that his sister Kat was behind this ‘accident’ too. It turned out that Logan had stolen a few thousand pounds from her, so this was her payback. From what I understood Logan had been injected with all these drugs, forced up onto the wall, then either pushed or made to jump.

As the weeks went on, I knew that Vic hadn’t been to see Logan. It was heartbreaking for him, but he had to make a choice.

‘My future’s with you and this little one,’ he said, gently stroking my growing bump. ‘I can’t go back, I can’t be dragged into it all.’

‘You are already,’ I reminded him, pointing out that he had been dragged back due to all the hassle with Christopher. ‘They have you already.’

‘That’s different,’ he claimed. ‘That’s to protect you and Ruby and the baby. I’ll do anything for you three, but, as much as I loved Logan, Kat has made her bed there.’

The next day, Logan had a massive heart attack and died. Vic had never seen him again. I started to panic about my unborn baby, fearing for the future for any child born into this horrifically dysfunctional family. All of Vic’s information was now coming through Valerie and Willow. Although he kept telling me that no one would ever hurt our baby, I didn’t feel safe, I didn’t feel I was being protected. From what Vic told me, Willow in particular had it in for me – when she wasn’t telling her mum that I was a whore, she was telling her grandmother. I couldn’t understand why they even had anything to do with their parents, given what had been done to Willow as a teenager. I felt totally unnerved, several children in this family having suffered horrible deaths. I was also very worried about ever meeting any of his family members – Willow and Vic’s mum certainly seemed to have it in for me, which was bad enough, but Vic’s dad and Kat were the ones I really didn’t want to meet by the sound of things, although I hadn’t had any direct threats from them. The stories about his dad were awful – he connected with criminals the world over, from Triads to Yardies. I hoped to be able to keep out of his line of fire for ever.

All the stalking by Christopher came to a head the next month. I had been having counselling every week – it was meant to be hypnobirthing sessions, as I was anxious about giving birth, but that worry had paled into insignificance compared to all the other stresses. For an hour every week I would just let go of it all and be in floods of tears about all these people who were out to get me, and the stress of having to deal with Vic’s mental health problems. Vic had been having Christopher followed for some time and knew quite a lot about what he got up to, and had also hacked Christopher’s computers to see what he was looking at. Vic told me that Christopher had gone to a swinger’s club in Birmingham and Vic had some of his ‘associates’ follow him there. They filmed him having sex with people, then sent the DVD of the footage to Christopher’s ex-wife, who was the mother of his three children. Vic believed that this would send a clear message to Christopher that we were not to be messed with and that it should result in him leaving us alone. If his ex-wife chose to, she could use the DVD to claim that he was an unsuitable father and possibly even stop him getting access.

When it didn’t actually do anything to stop him at all, Vic got angrier and angrier. I started to communicate again with Vic’s friend Martin, the forensic computer expert. He initially contacted me to apologise for the lack of contact and to explain what was happening re my own laptop.

Hello Megan – I was asked by Vic a little while ago to drop you a line re your computer. Sorry it has taken so long to respond but my workload of late has been, well let’s say strenuous! He mentioned you have some doubts etc re your stalker still possibly hacking into your account. Although I can’t really explain it in layman’s terms as it is very complicated, I will say there is no chance that this person can hijack any of your passwords etc; your computer is very safe. You may notice from time to time that, when you check your history, there may be a few extra items within the page – please do not worry, that is either myself doing some maintenance or what is known as a mirror draft; again, it is hard to explain but I can assure you everything is how it should be and, of course, if anything goes wrong please don’t hesitate to email me. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate yourself and Vic on your baby news. Fantastic stuff, hope all goes well when the little one gets here! Please say hi to Vic from me. All the best, Martin

I was reassured by his words, and glad to know that Vic had someone else looking out for me even when I didn’t know it.

Hi Martin, I replied, thanks very much for all your efforts so far, I really appreciate it. And thanks re the baby, we are both very happy about it and Vic is being very sweet and looking after me! Thought I’d better drop you a line as my ex is definitely in my computer again. Firstly I noticed a few days ago that a message that I was sent on Facebook was deleted before I read it, I only knew I had received it as a copy was sent to my Hotmail account and I saw it there. The same person who sent me that message had been deleted off my friends list, and I didn’t delete him and he didn’t delete me. My ex has been emailing Vic’s niece stirring all sorts of shit and trying to make out that I have been cheating on Vic. Luckily Vic knows this isn’t true but unfortunately now both Vic’s mum and his niece won’t speak to him unless he finishes with me because apparently I am a porn star and a prostitute among other things (news to me!), so it’s not good. Christopher is definitely still snooping around. Hope that makes sense, all a bit confusing! I know he has several computers and uses a Vodaphone dongle to use the internet most of the time, whether he has a broadband connection on his land-line, I am not sure. Also Valerie tells me that Willow told her that he is bugging my mobile phone. I had a quick look on the internet and there seems to be software you can download to do this with, do you know anything about this kind of thing and what I can do about it? Thanks again, Megan

The next message from Martin was entitled ‘Your Hacker’:

Hi Megan – sorry it has took me an age to reply to your last email but family commitments etc have got in the way of everything over the last few weeks. I see Vic has installed Windows 7 on your system and what a fantastic job he has done on it (I taught him well lol). There is no way anybody is going to get into your new system the way it has been set up. I only got in because Vic give me the relevant codes etc. What I would suggest though is that, although it is a right pain, delete your history at the end of each day, this stops any activity by hackers tenfold, and also if you have any photos music etc that have been installed from your old system onto your new one, it might be an idea to either put them onto an external hard drive, change the serial numbers on them or even delete them, these type of files and folders are a very easy way for hackers to store information about you. As regarding your hacker I have seen no activity within the last 3 weeks that he is doing anything to your computer at all so I am a little mystified on that one. I will have a closer look on Monday and let you know if I find anything. You need to be aware that hackers do pass information on and because there were such big holes in your last system unfortunately it has been open to abuse for any of these stupidly inclined people. As I mentioned earlier your new system is top drawer stuff. There is not even an encryption code for people to copy so I would feel a lot easier about using your computer. Cheers, Martin

The thought that Christopher was passing on all of my personal details to other nutters was horrible. I cursed myself again for not being a better judge of character. At least, this time, with Vic, I had someone who would fight my corner. Even when we were arguing between ourselves, I told myself it was just natural as we had a new baby on the way – the fact was, even when we niggled, he had my back. To begin with, he’d known nothing about computers, that was why he had got Martin involved in the first place, and now he had taught himself so much just in order to help me. Even Martin was impressed!

I didn’t have a chance to relax for long, though, as another message popped through a couple of days later:

Hi Megan – just to let you know there was some strange activity on your Facebook last night. Someone it would seem was trying to change your password. Don’t worry though they didn’t get past the first mirror and I have checked it this morning and it is all running fine. If you have any problems please let me know. Thanks – Martin.

‘Does this guy not know who I fucking am?’ Vic asked. ‘Why is he not getting the message? It’s time for this to stop.’ With this, he headed out to the public phone box again – in fact, for the next few days it felt like he was there more than he was at home.

Nothing was ever specifically said to me, as Vic didn’t believe I could keep my mouth shut, but all of the clues led me to believe that a big, covert gypsy operation was being planned and that Christopher was going to be bumped off. I couldn’t believe it had got that far, but it also seemed so far that there was no turning back, if that made sense. I was pregnant and vulnerable – and I kept my head down.

‘He won’t be bothering you any more,’ Vic told me one day, holding me tightly in his arms, and being more affectionate that I could remember in a long while. I didn’t dare ask how he could be so certain about that, I just felt a massive sense of relief that the months of being stalked by Christopher were over. Sure enough, Vic was right. An almost pleasant few months followed, from the spring onwards, where it seemed we were getting minimal bother from Vic’s family. I suffered really bad pelvic pain during my pregnancy, and Vic was a real help. I was pretty much unable to walk, but he would happily take Ruby to school and back so that I could get some rest. We were very definitely not in a conventional relationship, he had his room and I had mine, but the impending baby seemed to have given Vic a focus and a reason to not be mad, and his mental health problems were pretty much all better. I had a horrible feeling, though, that all this was the calm before the storm where his family were concerned.

The improvements in Vic’s mental health meant that he started up a business doing computer repairs. He’d learned so much from Martin when the online harassment had started from Christopher that he said it would be a waste not to do something with it. He put adverts and cards around the town and soon the work started coming in. Vic seemed able to fix computers that had been declared dead by other repair places, and had many happy customers. He told me that he would enter the BIOS settings of the computer and talk to it using code, which would entice it back to life – he explained that he had been able to learn it really quickly because of his autism. It was all another language to me, but it also seemed like a fantastic step on the way to a normal life.

There was one thing I found confusing about it all, though – Vic had told me that he had a condition called synaesthesia. This is a neurological condition which has a lot of different forms. In one type of synaesthesia, signs, letters and numbers take on the form of colours to the sufferer, and this is what Vic had. With this, for example, the numbers zero and one could be white and black, and the letter ‘A’ could be red. Vic had told me that it meant he could only read text if it was in certain colours, and the colour he found easiest was green writing on a red background. He told me that his own laptop had been installed with a programme which meant that he could read text on it and that he had been helped by a special support group for people who had synaesthesia. However, he seemed to have absolutely no problem in using other people’s computers for hours on end while he was fixing them; I couldn’t work it out, but assumed it was just part of the mental health issues he battled daily, and that I was privileged to not have to deal with such things in my own life.

I patted my belly as I thought about all of Vic’s troubles, and tried to ignore the awful things he had done just to keep us safe.

‘Soon,’ I told the little one growing inside me, ‘soon you’ll be here, and I’ll have the strength to concentrate on just making a wonderful life for you. Wonderful, but normal. Very, very normal.’

It was all I wished for. A healthy baby, a safe family life, and blissful normality. I might as well have been asking for the moon on a stick.