Ben looked at her in absolute disbelief.
‘This one.’ She gently palpated a new bruise on her arm. She thought about the hatred that had caused it – Kelvin’s need to harm. She wondered how her life had got so twisted that she’d ever imagined doing the same thing to herself. ‘This was done this morning.’
‘How?’
‘When I was raped.’
There was a long, long silence. Then Ben dropped his head forward, put his hands on his temples and screwed up his eyes as if he had the world’s worst headache. She thought for a moment he was going to get up and leave. Then she realized he was crying soundlessly, his shoulders shaking. After a few moments he wiped his face angrily with a palm and raised his eyes to her. There was an expression of such grief, such loss, such fury in his eyes that she had to turn away.
She went and sat down at the table, put her hands between her knees and stared at her thighs, mottled with bruises. She felt every inch of her sore body – the tiny, intense jets of fury at all the places where Kelvin’s fingers had come into contact with her skin. There was a creak and Ben got up from the chair. He came to the table and dropped to a crouch next to her. He laid his hands gently on her knees.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t be kind, please. I can’t bear it.’ She couldn’t get her throat to open enough to explain. ‘It’s all right. I mean, it’s not your fault. How could you have been expected to know that I was the most pathetic excuse for a human being that ever walked this planet?’
‘It’s not true. Something’s happened to you – but you’re not to blame.’
She shook her head, bit her lip. A single tear came out of her eye and ran down her cheek. ‘Ben,’ she said, with an effort, ‘you’re going to have to listen. And you’re going to have to forgive.’
Chapter 39
As Sally got into the car outside the school, still trembling, a figure in a waterproof, hood up against the rain, stepped out towards her from near the school wall. It was Nial. He looked odd. Determined, but nervous. He glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure no one was behind him, then hurried over to her.
‘Mrs Cassidy?’ He bent and peered at her through the driver’s window, raised his fist and mimed knocking on the glass. ‘Can we speak?’
Sally rolled down the window. ‘Nial? What is it?’
‘I’ll give her a lift home. I’ve got the van – it’s parked round the corner.’
She stared at him. The gel in his hair and the way he’d knotted his tie, instead of making him look grown-up and cool, just made him seem younger and smaller. Even more inadequate.
‘What?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. That would be very kind. I’ll pick her up from yours. About seven.’
She started to wind up the window, but he gave a small polite cough. ‘Uh – Mrs Cassidy?’
‘What?’
He bit his lip and glanced over his shoulder again, as if he was sure someone was listening. ‘Millie’s …’
‘Millie’s what?’
‘Honestly? Don’t tell her I told you, but she’s scared.’
‘Scared? She’s got nothing to be scared of.’
‘She says you’re acting weird and she’s got it into her head you’re being threatened by someone. Is that why you don’t want her going home on the bus?’
‘Why on earth would she think that?’
‘I don’t know – but she hasn’t stopped talking about it all morning. She thinks someone’s messing you around.’
‘Listen to me, Nial. Millie doesn’t need to worry about me, about anything. All that’s wrong is I can’t get here by five to collect her. That’s all. Everything’s fine.’
‘OK,’ he said, unconvinced. Then, ‘Mrs Cassidy, I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I can tell you this. If anyone ever tried to hurt Millie …’ he shook his head, sadly, as if he regretted having to say this ‘… then they’d have to get past me first. Nothing and no one is going to get to her as long as I’m around.’
Sally forced a smile and reached for the ignition key. She was getting a bit impatient with his hero act. He was too young to have any concept – any proper way of grasping the truth – of the awful, overwhelming reality of Kelvin Burford.
‘Thank you, Nial,’ she said patiently. She was tired. Very tired. ‘Thank you. I’ll pick her up before seven.’
Chapter 40
Nothing in Lorne’s bedroom had been touched since Zoë’s last visit. She could tell that from the still, shuttered weight of the air. It needed stirring, needed human breath in it. She pushed her sunglasses on to her head, knelt, opened the lower drawer and began peeling away the layers of clothes. It was gone six o’clock and the rain had passed over the town. The lovely trees outside Lorne’s window dripped with water. Beyond them was the driveway and, at the end of it, Sally waiting in her little Ka. She’d driven Zoë here and now she was as anxious as Zoë was to get this stage of the process right. Sally, little Sally, who was turning out not to be weak-willed and spoiled, but tougher and smarter than Zoë would ever have guessed. And then, good God, then there was Ben …
In spite of everything that had happened at Kelvin’s, the part of Zoë that had been aching for years and years softened a little at the thought of Ben. He was … What was he? Too good to be true? A reality she couldn’t push away with a sarcastic ‘Yeah, right’? Earlier, at her house, instead of speaking, asking questions, he’d simply sat with his arms round her, his chin on her head, listening to the whole story. Everything. And afterwards – when she’d expected him to cough awkwardly, mutter something stiff about how her secret wouldn’t go any further, that maybe she should think about counselling – he’d shrugged, got up, clicked on the kettle and said, ‘Right, got time for a cuppa before we nail the dickhead?’ Now he was in the car somewhere, on the way to Gloucester with a list of Kelvin’s known associates in his pockets. She sighed. With all the wrong she’d done in the world, how had this right come to her so easily?
She shut the drawer and opened the next. There were some books in the back, and behind them a few oddments Zoë was sure Pippa hadn’t paid much attention to when she’d done her hurried inventory of the room after Lorne’s disappearance. She pushed aside a bra and knickers – Lorne’s underwear had been found so that was no use. She examined a grey peaked cap with diamanté studs in it – no, too distinctive, someone would have remembered her wearing a hat like that. Then she saw an orange silk scarf.
She sat back on her heels and rested the scarf across her knees. It could have been tucked under Lorne’s pink fleece that afternoon when she left the house and no one would have necessarily noticed it. It was distinctive enough – didn’t look like something you picked up in Next, more like something that had come from a holiday. She checked the label. ‘Sabra Dreams’, it said. ‘Made in Morocco’. The pin board above the desk had a photo of Lorne on a family holiday in Marrakesh. Pippa would remember her buying this.
Zoë put the scarf in her jacket pocket and zipped it up. She closed the drawers, put the sunglasses back on, and went downstairs. She found Pippa sitting, bizarrely, on the chair in the hallway next to the front door. The chair was meant for coats and handbags and oddments to be thrown on to it, not to be sat on: it was in the wrong place. Pippa looked as if she was neither in nor out of the house. As if she was permanently waiting for something.
‘Did you find what you wanted?’
‘I just needed to look around again. I thought there was something I missed. I was wrong.’ She stopped at the bottom step and studied Pippa.