'Then we'd have sex.'
'Consensual?'
'Sorry?'
'He didn't force you?'
'Yes, of course.'
'Against your will?'
'Yes. No. I mean, not really. But in the game, the game we were playing, yes. He'd hold me down, tear, you know, some of my clothes
'Hit you?'
'Not usually, no. Not hard.'
'Nothing more?'
'What do you mean?'
Karen was looking at the scar on Jane Forest's face and Jane turned her head away and touched the tips of her fingers faintly to the pale, raised line.
'Sometimes, not often but sometimes, he would have a knife. It was big, broad, a sort of carving knife. This black handle with – what do you call them? – rivets through it. My butcher's knife, he called it. Want to make good and sure I don't butcher you.'
She was starting to shake now, first her arms, the upper half of her body and then the rest. Karen took the bottle of water from her hand before it fell.
'One night, it was my birthday, he said, 'I've got something special for you, a celebration.' He tied my hands behind my back. He… he put the point of the knife… inside me… and when, when I started to scream, really scream, he punched me in the face and when that didn't make me stop he cut me. Cut my face.'
'Here,' Karen said, moving an upturned crate away from the wall. 'Here, sit down. There. Now put your head down towards your knees. That's it. That's right.'
A blue tit alighted for a moment on top of the gate that led out from the yard into the alley behind, yellow beneath cobalt-blue wings.
'Afterwards,' Jane said, barely raising her head, 'as soon as it had happened, he was so upset, he really was. Almost beside himself with worry. And really gentle, caring, you know? He took me to the hospital, the Royal Free. Casualty, A amp; E. We said I'd been sleepwalking and stumbled over something, fallen against the window breaking the glass.'
'They accepted that?'
'They seemed to. They stopped the bleeding and then stitched me up. Steve, he held my hand the whole time.' She looked at Karen. 'He was so sorry, genuinely sorry. He knew he'd let it get too far, out of hand. He said he wouldn't blame me if I never wanted to see him again.'
'And did you?'
'At first I thought, yes, it would be okay. Him being so nice and everything. But after that night, I don't know, it was different. I mean, we never… it wasn't just that we stopped, you know, those games, we never had sex at all. He didn't… he wouldn't even touch me. And then, after a while, he told me he was seeing someone else.'
She looked away.
'It's happened again, hasn't it?'
'We think so.'
'Has he… did he… oh, Christ!' She let her face fall forward against Karen's waist and for several minutes Karen held her, stroking her hair, touching once, inadvertently, the ridge of scar tissue running down across her neck.
Together with another officer, Vanessa Taylor had spent two hours that afternoon interviewing a cocksure, snotty-nosed nine-year-old about throwing stones and doing serious damage to trains and train staff. The nine- year-old and his father and his social worker, neither of them speaking to one another but both quick enough to interrupt and intercede. The boy's mother had left home eighteen months before, taking two of his younger siblings with her and leaving the boy and an elder sister behind. The father's response had been to go running to social services claiming that he couldn't cope: result, the boy was taken into care, the girl went off to live with an aunt. Some time in the following months, she drifted back and then, after almost a year and two bouts of short-term fostering, the boy followed. Social services, meanwhile, were worried that the relationship between dad and thirteen-year-old daughter was inappropriate to say the least.
In the run-up to Christmas, the boy was excluded from school and a week later stabbed his home tutor in the back of the hand with a ballpoint pen, alleging the man had tried to molest him.
Armed with this background at the case conference beforehand, Vanessa began the interview feeling sympathy for a young person whom life had dealt a raw hand; thirty minutes later she wanted to use the same hand to slap the smirk off his ratty face. Sullen, even tearful when it suited him, he was quick as a trained solicitor to proclaim his rights and privileges, taunting them with their relative powerlessness over him.
By the time the interview was over, the boy released back into his father's care, the social worker chewing her way through a roll of mints as she wrote up yet another report, Vanessa was more than ready for a drink.
Two pints and a vodka and tonic later, she wandered into Nandos with a beat sergeant she vaguely fancied and devoured peri-peri chicken and rice while listening to him rabbiting on endlessly about Thierry Henry and glories to come once Arsenal had settled into their new 60,000-seater stadium at Ashburton Grove.
Scratch him off the list.
Nine fifteen. Too late to catch a movie, too early to go home.
There used to be music, she knew, at the Bull and Last. Sometimes it was jazz but sometimes it was okay. Tonight, when she pushed the door open into the bar, it was nothing, just the electronic jingle of a few brightly lit machines and a television mumbling to itself above the bar. Fairly busy all the same, mostly men sitting singly or in pairs. A trio of clearly underage girls wearing next to nothing, more slap than clothes.
She could have turned round and walked out again, but instead she asked for a vodka tonic and carried it over to an empty table near the middle of the room, a few faces turning to watch her progress but not many.
She hadn't been there more than a few minutes before she was aware of someone leaning over her from behind.
Steve Kennet, smiling, drink in his hand, jeans, check shirt and short leather jacket, still trailing the faint scent of aftershave. He was sitting down next to her almost before she could react.
'Regular bad penny,' he winked. 'That's me.'
39
Vanessa didn't move. Didn't return Kennet's smile. 'What are you doing here?' she said.
Kennet shrugged. 'Same as you.' Affable enough.
'Why here?'
He glanced around. 'Not a bad pub. Quiet. Except on music nights. Or when there's some band on at the Forum. Packed out then.'
'You come here a lot then?'
'Wouldn't say a lot, but yes, once in a while. Steady.'
'You're not following me?'
When he laughed, his head jolted back, Adam's apple pushed out against his skin. 'That what you think?'
'I don't know. The other night on the bus, now this.'
Kennet shrugged. 'Small world.'
'Not that small.'
'Coincidence, then.'
