“And then?” asks Mr. Wright, needing to prompt me now to make sure I remember all of it. But we’re nearly finished.
“He switched off my phone and put it near the door where I couldn’t reach it. Then he took a scarf of mine out of his pocket—he must have taken it from the flat. He tied it around my mouth, gagging me.”
As he gagged me, panicking thoughts filled my head, one bashing into the other, a six-lane highway of thoughts, all happening simultaneously, backing up, bumper to bumper, unable to get out, and I thought that some would be released simply by screaming, others by crying, others if I was held. Most of my thoughts had become primal and physical. I hadn’t known before that it’s our bodies that think most powerfully, and that was why it was so cruel to be gagged. It wasn’t because I couldn’t shout for help—who’d hear me in an empty building in the middle of a deserted park? It was because I couldn’t scream or sob or moan.
“Then his pager went off. He phoned the hospital on his mobile and said that he’d be on his way. I suppose it would have looked too suspicious not to go.”
I hear myself catch my breath in the darkness.
“Beatrice?”
“I worried that Kasia was in labor and that was why he was leaving.”
Mr. Wright’s hand feels solid in the darkness. I am reassured by the definition of his knuckles in my soft palm.
“He checked the gag and the ties around my wrists and legs. He told me that he’d come back and remove them later, so that nothing would look suspicious when I was found. He still didn’t know I’d spat out so many of the pills. But I knew that if I was still alive when he came back, he’d use the knife, as he did on Tess.”
“If you were still alive?”
“I wasn’t sure how many pills I’d swallowed, or how much sedative had dissolved in my saliva—if it was enough to kill me.”
I try to just focus on Mr. Wright’s hand holding mine.
“He left. Minutes later my pager went off. He’d turned off my phone, but he didn’t know about the pager. I tried to persuade myself that Kasia was paging me for something trivial. After all, her baby wasn’t due for another three weeks.”
Yes, like you.
Mr. Wright strokes my fingers, and the gentleness of it makes me want to cry.
“And then?” he asks.
“He’d taken the flashlight with him. I’d never been in such total darkness.”
I was alone in the black. Pitch black. Pitch that is made from tar.
The blackness smelled rotten, putrid with fear. It smothered my face, going into my mouth and nose, and I was drowning and I thought of you on holiday in Skye, coming out of the sea, spluttering and pink cheeked—“I’m okay! Just seawater going up the wrong way!”—and I took a breath. The blackness choked my lungs.
I saw the darkness move—a monstrous, living thing, filling the building and out into the night beyond, no skin of sky to contain it. I felt it dragging me with it into a void of infinite fear—away from light, life, love, hope.
I thought of Mum in her rustling silk dressing gown, smelling of face cream, coming toward our beds, but the memory of her was padlocked into childhood and couldn’t lighten the darkness.
I wait for Mr. Wright to prompt me further. But there is no further to go. We have finally arrived at the end.
It’s finished now.
I try to move my hands, but they are bound tightly together with a tie. The fingers of my right hand are tightly clasped around my left. I wonder if it’s because I am right-handed that my right hand has taken the role of comforter.
I am alone in the pitch black, lying on a concrete floor.
My mouth is as dry as parchment. The harsh cold concrete has seeped into my body, numbing me through to the bone.
I begin a letter to you, my beloved younger sister. I pretend it’s Sunday evening, my safest time, and that I’m surrounded by press all wanting to tell our story.
Dearest Tess,
I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice. How can touching and seeing and hearing—all those sensory receptors and optic nerves and vibrating eardrums—be substituted by a letter? But we’ve managed to use words as go-betweens before, haven’t we?
I think back to boarding school and the first letter you ever sent me, the one with invisible ink, and that ever since kindness has smelled of lemons.
And as I think of you and talk to you, I can breathe again.
23
Hours must have passed, so he will surely be back soon. I don’t know how much sedative I swallowed, but all through this night I have felt a torpor of exhaustion sucking the warmth from my body and the clarity from my brain. I think I have slipped in and out of consciousness; in total darkness how could I tell? But if so, in my unnatural forced sleep I was still talking to you and maybe that was when my imaginings became peculiarly vivid.
Now I feel wide awake, all senses tense, buzzing and jittery; it must be adrenaline, a fight-or-flight hormone that’s powerful enough to restart a heart after a cardiac arrest, surely powerful enough to startle me into consciousness.
I try to move, but my body is still too doped and numb, and the bindings are too tight. The darkness feels almost solid now—not velvety like storybooks, not smooth and soft, but with spikes of fear, and if you prodded it, you’d find hard, jagged evil crouching behind it. I can hear something inches away from my face as I lie on the concrete. A mouse? An insect? I have lost sense of auditory perspective. My cheek feels sore; it must be pressed into a little unevenness in the concrete.
What if it isn’t adrenaline that’s keeping me awake, but I am properly conscious now? Perhaps I swallowed less sedative than I feared or have somehow come through the other side of the overdose and survived it.
But it makes no difference. Even if my body isn’t fatally drugged, I am tied up and gagged and William will be back. And then he’ll discover that I’m alive. And he’ll use the knife.
So before he returns, I need to make things clear to you. Everything happened as I told you, beginning with Mum’s phone call telling me you’d gone missing to the moment William left me here to die. But my ending will be the same as yours, here in this building, untold. I didn’t have the courage to face that, or maybe I just love life too much to let it go so quietly. I couldn’t fantasize a happy ever after, but I did imagine an ending that was just. And I made it as real as I could, my safe fantasy future, all details in place.
I worry that you’ve been waiting for DS Finborough to save me, but I think you felt a judder in the story when I told you about our lunch in Carluccio’s. It was only a comforting rug of a daydream to lie on instead of cold concrete, and it wasn’t admirable or courageous of me, but I know you understand.
And I think you’d already guessed, a little while ago, that there was no Mr. Wright. I invented a lawyer not only so I could play my part in a just ending—a trial and guilty verdict—but because he would make me keep to verifiable facts and a strict chronology. I needed someone who would help me understand what happened and why—and who would keep me from going mad. I’m not sure why being sane as I die is so important to me, just that it is, overwhelmingly. I do know that without him, my letter to you would have been a stream-of-consciousness scream, raging despair, and I would have drowned in it.
I made him kind and endlessly patient as I told him our story, and bereaved so he would understand. Maybe I’m more Catholic than I realized because I also made him my confessor but one who, even when he knew everything about me, may in some fantasy future have loved me. And during the long hours he became more real to me than the darkness around me, more than just a figment of a desperate imagination, acquiring his own personality and whims that I had to go along with, because he didn’t always do my bidding or serve the purpose I asked of him. Instead of helping me paint a pointillistic painting of what happened, I made a mirror and saw myself properly for the first time.