Nonetheless he’d apologized profusely afterwards, and hesitantly explained how much slapping her had turned him on. For which he apologized even more. She could not now believe how unconcerned she had been. There was just nothing about Kurt, so courteous, so apparently gentle, so obviously in love with her, to prepare her for the nightmare to come.
However, the slaps became more severe every time they had sex. Always he was apologetic afterwards, but always he seemed to go a little further than the last time.
The night when he finally punched her full in the face would be engraved upon her soul forever. Her head had rocked back on her shoulders, her nose began to bleed and her lip split open. The force was such that she was momentarily concussed. Even so she could not to fail to notice the sexual frenzy evoked in Kurt. His penis was rock hard and enormous when he lunged into her, and it hurt almost as much as the punch. There was no foreplay. His foreplay had been quite simply to cause her pain. She lay sobbing beneath him, and the greater her distress became, the more enhanced, it seemed, was his pleasure.
One half of Lilian still remained unable to accept that any of this could be happening to her. After all, hadn’t she been the bright young thing of her year at school, sailing off to university to study literature, effortlessly entering the world of journalism?
But even that had not gone quite the way she had originally imagined, of course. She’d seen herself as a hard-hitting investigative journalist putting the world to rights. She’d ended up as the features editor of a monthly magazine called Keyhole, a showbiz glossy, a kind of downmarket Hello, with more smut and less airbrushing.
By the time she reached her early thirties Lilian had begun to harbour some serious regrets. She’d wondered if those other so important things in life, like a family, and having children, had passed her by.
Then she had met Kurt, at the Keyhole-sponsored wedding of a South-African-born supermodel, and when he had proposed marriage, only weeks later, she’d had no hesitation in accepting.
Lilian had found him irresistible. Not least because he seemed to want everything that she did. Neither of them had been married before. Kurt, at forty-three, was ten years older than her. They joked that they had saved themselves for each other. Only it wasn’t entirely a joke.
In the beginning it wasn’t Kurt who had pushed Lilian to walk so entirely away from her old life. It was she who’d expressed her willingness, even her eagerness, to give up her job and concentrate entirely on her forthcoming marriage and on having a family. She had no wish to be Ms Lilian Cook any more. She wanted to be Mrs Kurt St John. She wanted to take her man’s name and to be taken into his world.
Lilian resigned at once from Keyhole and her editor agreed to waive her notice period. It was perhaps the greatest irony of her life that she had felt so wonderfully free when she’d settled into the first-class apartment of an aircraft bound for South Africa on her way to marry the handsome charmer at her side.
Even now she could remember clearly how happy and excited she’d been. In stark contrast, her present plight seemed like a terrible dream. It wasn’t though. It was grim reality.
Twenty-One
Dr Lamey left after completing her examination of Gill Quinn. She would be submitting a written report later. But she had already made her prognosis clear. The dreadful injuries Gill had suffered were burns, deliberately inflicted and almost certainly with a lit cigarette. No other conclusion was possible.
Gill had mercifully stopped sobbing. Saslow took Greg into the kitchen to make his mother a cup of tea, leaving Vogel alone with Gill. And Vogel took the opportunity to ask her about her relationship with Wynne Williams.
‘He’s my headmaster,’ she responded quickly. ‘That’s all. Why are you asking me about him?’
Vogel ignored the question. ‘Is he not something rather more to you than that?’ he asked.
‘No. Well, yes. He’s a friend.’
‘Just a friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your husband thought he was rather more than that, didn’t he?’
‘Thomas was always jealous. Usually of nothing. That’s what led to... Well, all too often it led to him doing... uh, doing things to me...’
‘We have spoken to Mr Williams today,’ Vogel continued. ‘He told us that he was in love with you. Indeed that he is still in love with you. He wanted you to go away with him, and he told you that. Isn’t that the case?’
‘I don’t know. Well, y-yes, he did say things like that. I never thought he meant it. Like I said, I just thought of him as a friend. And my boss, of course.’
‘Mr Williams also told us what happened in the pub on Friday evening. He called it “your special place”, by the way, yours and his. He told us how your husband turned up in a fury and dragged you away. Very nearly literally.’
‘Well yes, like I told you, Thomas was so jealous. He was very angry that night.’
‘Mr Williams said you looked afraid.’
‘Of course I was afraid. I knew what was in store for me.’
‘Was it after that incident that he attacked you? That he inflicted those awful burns on you?’
‘Yes. Almost as soon as we got home. H-he’d done it before, of course.’
‘That much is quite clear. And this was a regular occurrence, was it not? We do have a doctor’s opinion.’
‘Yes, it was. But only relatively recently. His violent outbursts had got worse and worse over the last year. He couldn’t cope with lockdown at all. His business was in trouble, too, although he wouldn’t admit it.’
‘I understood that your husband was a very successful businessman, and that he’d made a lot of money, particularly during lockdown, is that not so?’
‘I think he did at first. But there was some big property deal that went wrong. He couldn’t get planning permission or something. And I think he’d invested millions. Possibly money that he’d borrowed. He kept getting these phone calls, I don’t know who from, but they seemed to scare him. He hated being stuck at home with me, of course, but I suspected it was his business troubles that sent him into such terrible rages. Thomas couldn’t ever accept that he’d failed in anything. He didn’t make mistakes. It was always somebody else’s fault. But I was pretty sure things were going wrong even before Covid, whoever’s fault it was.’
‘Thomas also abused you in other ways, didn’t he? By controlling you, bending you to his will.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Why on earth didn’t you leave him, Gill?’
Vogel wasn’t sure he should have asked that, not even in an informal interview. He just couldn’t help himself.
‘Leave him?’ Gill replied. ‘Leave him for what? To go where? We married young. I was twenty and pregnant. Tommy, that was what he was always called in those days, was a year younger. I was at university in my home town, Plymouth, and I lived at home. Tommy was my first. He swept me off my feet. He was always a charmer when he wanted to be.’
‘Not lately though, Gill, judging from those scars of yours.’
Gill smiled wryly. ‘No, but it really was only since Covid that he turned into... well, he did become a monster. And I did think about leaving him. Several times. I also thought, when we all got back to normal after Covid, Thomas would get back to normal too. And I could cope with his normal. It wasn’t all bad. I have some good memories too. You’re like Greg. You could never understand.’
‘You’re probably right, Gill. I don’t think I could ever understand. Funny thing is though, I can understand you wanting to kill him.’