The Nightmare Place Read online

  ‘Hello.’ Her voice was surprisingly strong. ‘This is Mayday. How can I help you today?’

  There was no reply at first, but the line wasn’t empty. She could hear the man breathing – a slow, heavy sound that made her wonder if this was going to be a sex call. They’d been told about them during training, but nobody in her group had received one yet. She’d get one eventually, but God, she thought, please not now. That would be a baptism of fire.

  Finally, the man spoke. ‘My name’s Gary.’

  ‘Hello, Gary.’ She didn’t have to give her real name, but she decided to. ‘My name’s Jane. What would you like to talk about?’

  ‘I don’t know really.’ He sniffed. ‘I’m not sure why I even bothered calling. I just took the number with me.’

  ‘You took our number with you?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ The sound changed slightly, and it took her a moment to realise that he’d started crying. Or an approximation of it, at least. ‘I didn’t really bring anything else. I’m not going to need it. I’m in a hotel.’

  I’m not going to need it. That was the moment when Jane recognised the nature of the call she was receiving. Her stomach dipped, and she looked around the small booth dividing her off from the rest of the room, fighting down the panic that was beginning to rise. Right now, she’d have given anything for a sex call. Instead, she was about to be faced with what the Mayday trainers called a ‘SIP’. A suicide in progress.

  Keep calm, she told herself.

  You can do this.

  ‘Please take your time, Gary. We can talk about anything you want. There’s no hurry.’

  ‘I want to talk about Amanda.’ He sniffed. ‘Sorry – that’s no use, is it? You don’t know Amanda. Or maybe you do, for all I know. No idea who you are, have I?’

  ‘Just take your time, Gary.’

  ‘I know her, though. Better than anyone. She just doesn’t realise it.’

  ‘That’s fine. We can talk about Amanda.’

  ‘I’ve known her for years. We worked together, and then we – you know. Hooked up. Christ, this time last year we were living with each other.’

  That brought a fresh round of tears, and Jane felt a ghost of the man’s emotion mirrored inside her. It was just enough to bring on the familiar sliding sensation of empathy, that movement towards understanding another person. Jane had always been good at that – too good, perhaps – and she took hold of the connection now. This time last year. She had plenty of her own examples to draw on. Her father’s death. Peter.

  You can do this.

  ‘It can feel strange, can’t it, looking back?’ she said. ‘You remember how different things were only a short time ago. It’s sometimes hard to believe.’

  ‘Yes. Exactly that.’

  ‘You just take your time, Gary.’

  As the story came out, in stops and starts, whatever Gary had taken – alcohol or drugs, or some combination of the two – began to cause him to slur his words. After a few minutes, Jane’s palm grew sweaty, and she had to swap the receiver between hands. Throughout, she did her best to stay calm: to put herself in his place and imagine what he was going through; to help him, as much as she could.

  For most of the call, that seemed to involve remaining silent. The longer Gary spoke for, the more obviously superfluous her presence was. He just wanted to know that there was someone on the other end of the line, listening to him.

  Amanda and Gary had been in a relationship for several months, and for a time, it had been wonderful – or so he claimed. But then things had cooled. Amanda had started going out by herself more, and Gary hadn’t trusted her. He’d check her text messages and emails, and find things: nothing directly incriminating at first, but enough to pass the baton from one suspicion to the next and send it running on towards another.

  ‘She was texting her ex. They’d always been in contact. I fucking hated it. Sorry. But she said I had to accept it, and I wanted to trust her. I tried to.’

  Jane imagined this wasn’t the whole truth, but did her best to suppress the thought. It was important to resist the urge to judge, or even to interpret the story he was telling her. Instead, as Gary recounted the details of the break-up, and the way Amanda wouldn’t return his calls and texts, she concentrated on empathising with him: pulling similar feelings from her own experiences, emotional playing cards that she could match with Gary’s own. It wasn’t difficult. Breaking up with Peter had been an unhappy time. Even if she had known that it was right for both of them, the feeling of loss had seemed insurmountable at times. There had been genuine grief for the relationship, as though it had been a living thing, and the final few weeks a prolonged period of watching it suffer and die. Jane knew how much it hurt. As she listened to Gary now, she felt it again.

  ‘She’s on holiday.’ The first words came out like sheezon. ‘Here with him. Last year we were living together and now she’s here with him, and so I’m here too.’

  ‘You’re there too?’

  ‘Yes. Same hotel. It’s on the coast. So when they find me, she’s going to know how much I cared about her. She won’t be able to ignore me then, will she?’

  Jane licked her lips, thinking quickly. She understood now what Gary was planning to do. Not just take his own life, but do it close to his ex-girlfriend. After all the unanswered calls and texts, he was going to force Amanda to listen to him.

  It sent a frisson of horror through her – but then, she wasn’t here to judge. She wasn’t here to stop him, either. It was against the rules of the helpline to intervene; she could only do so if he explicitly asked her for help. Even if she’d wanted to, there was no obvious way of doing so.

  She thought carefully.

  ‘Do you want to tell me which hotel, Gary?’

  ‘I saw them earlier.’ His words were increasingly slurred: hard to make out now. ‘This morning – from out of the window. There’s a settee in the room here, and you can just sit. They were walking down the promenade. Hand in hand. I don’t know when they’ll be back. I don’t care any more.’

  ‘Gary,’ Jane said. ‘I have to ask. Would you like me to call someone for you?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said quickly. ‘Not without your permission. But if you change your mind about what you’re doing, I can get someone out to you very quickly.’

  ‘It’s too late. It feels good.’

  Jane’s heart was beating too fast, and she forced herself to breathe slowly. Sensing that there was nothing more for her to say, she allowed the silence on the line to stretch, imagining Gary filling that space with whatever he needed to.

  ‘It feels good,’ he said eventually. ‘It feels far away.’

  And a moment later, the line went dead.

  Jane felt light-headed as she walked out of the open booth and rejoined her training group. She’d been too lost in the call to notice, but reality had set in now, and her whole body felt feathery and strange. She sat down carefully.

  The volunteers were divided up at random at the start of each session. This evening she was with Simon, Brenda and Rachel. Rachel – a small, punky PhD student in her mid-twenties – was the only one she’d really talked to before, and she gave Jane a smile now, along with a small thumbs-up from the hand resting on her thigh.

  Jane smiled back weakly.

  A moment later, Richard emerged from a second partitioned-off space, beside the one she’d been seated in. He was holding the sheaf of papers he’d been reading from.

  ‘Well. That was pretty intense, wasn’t it. Are you okay, Jane?’

  She nodded. ‘I think so. But … yes.’

  ‘Intense. You did really well, though. That was a difficult one, and I thought you handled it brilliantly.’ He sat down with the volunteers. ‘Okay – questions from the group. Do any of you have any thoughts? Anything Jane might have done differently?’

  Jane looked around the group, nervous. While talking to ‘Gary’, she’d been able to suppress the nerves and self-doubt a
nd disappear into the conversation. It had been like she didn’t exist, but now she was very much present again, and the other three were looking at her. She could already feel herself blushing, and her eyes began to water slightly.

  Don’t look at me.

  Rachel said, ‘I thought she was perfect, actually.’

  Jane dared a look at her, and the girl gave her another smile, then looked away. It was a nice gesture, Jane thought, offering encouragement but not wanting to put any pressure on her. It was like when a friend called to check you were okay but knew enough not to stay on the line too long.

  Simon and Brenda both tried to offer more substantive criticism, but it was clear they were struggling. Richard listened and nodded anyway, because that was what they did here at Mayday, but Jane was surprised to find that the dissection of her performance was considerably shorter than the others’ had been, and at the end, Richard gave her a big smile of his own.

  ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘That was really good.’

  No it wasn’t, she thought.

  But at least she didn’t say it out loud. Even just a few months ago, she had still been doing that: throwing people’s compliments back in their faces. So that’s progress, she thought. She was getting better.

  After the training session was over, the volunteers either mingled with the other groups, drinking coffee and chatting, or else headed off. Jane was usually one of the first out of the door, but tonight, she dawdled a little. The conversation with ‘Gary’ had stayed with her. Of course, she’d known all along that it wasn’t a live call, but still, it had felt like one at the time. And just because it hadn’t been happening then and there, it didn’t mean it wasn’t real. The names had been changed, she knew, but all the test scenarios were roughly based on real calls the trainers had received.

  Before she left, she spotted Richard wiping down one of the tables, moving plastic cups to one side. She hooked her bag over one shoulder and plucked up the courage to approach him.

  ‘Richard?’

  ‘Jane. Yes, hello. Oh – are you off?’

  ‘Yes.’ She felt awkward. Richard was in his fifties, and tall, with a halo of short grey hair. Although he was friendly enough, there was an intensity to the way he looked at you that she found disconcerting. It was as though maintaining eye contact was a matter of life and death for him. ‘I just wanted to ask about that call.’

  ‘Yes, you handled it really well.’

  ‘Thank you.’ That’s real progress. ‘I suppose I was just wondering … was there really nothing else I could have done? At the end, I mean.’

  ‘Ah. Right. I see what you mean.’ He stopped cleaning the table and turned to face her properly. ‘There wasn’t, no. And the thing is, I know you want to help them, believe me. But you just can’t. What you have to remember is, it’s a confidential service. And if it wasn’t, you’d never be in a position to help them anyway.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  It was true. If someone like Gary had suspected that she would – or even could – find and stop him, he’d probably never have made the call in the first place. There was almost a paradox there, in a way. Richard looked at her kindly, and she could tell that he wanted to put a hand on her shoulder and reassure her. A fatherly gesture. He didn’t, of course.

  ‘It won’t ever stop being distressing,’ he said. ‘What you have to remember is that the caller is an autonomous adult. They’re responsible for their decisions and actions. Not you.’

  She nodded. It had all been covered in the earlier training sessions; she had made notes on each one. Even so, her conscience was ticking.

  Richard sighed, sensing her conflict.

  ‘Do you know one thing I do,’ he said, ‘which I find really helps me cope with the more difficult calls? I tell myself they’re not real.’

  ‘Not real?’

  ‘Exactly.’ He spread his hands. One of them was still holding a tea-stained tissue. ‘You won’t ever really know if these people are telling the truth when they call. We have callers who tell the same story each time they phone, just changing a few details. You know they’re making it up. But even the ones where it isn’t obvious, you never know.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The real Gary,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what happened to him, and I never will. But the thing is, it really doesn’t matter in terms of what I’m here for. So I can tell myself anything. I can imagine he was making it all up, or that he just drifted off to sleep and was totally fine.’

  Richard nodded to himself.

  ‘And frankly,’ he said, ‘when I get that sort of call, that’s exactly what I do.’

  Four

  ‘All right,’ I told Julie Kennedy.

  But she had just finished giving us her account of what had happened, and even as the words left my lips, I flinched at them. It was too easy a thing for me to say – blasé, almost – and I should have been more careful. Because it wasn’t all right. And however well she recovered from her ordeal physically, nothing was really going be all right for her ever again.

  If Julie noticed my indiscretion, she didn’t show it, and perhaps I was simply compounding my mistake by making it all about me: by imagining that, after everything she’d been through, she would even notice my choice of language, never mind be offended by it.

  Right now, she was sitting upright in her hospital bed, looking away from me and Chris, towards the drawn slats on the blind. The covers were pooled at her waist, and her hands – one of them encased in plaster, hiding the broken fingers and wrist – rested on her lap. The small room was illuminated only by a soft lamp on the drawers by the bed, but the visible injuries were still apparent. The far side of her face was wrapped with bandages, while the other side was swollen, the skin bright and discoloured, and criss-crossed with lines of bristling stitches.

  After a few moments of heavy silence, her chest inflated slowly, and she gave a steady sigh that seemed to last an age.

  ‘I wish I’d fought back,’ she said.

  She’d already told us that, while relating the details of the attack. I repeated now what I’d told her then.

  ‘You shouldn’t wish that. There’s every chance he could have killed you. You can’t blame yourself for things you didn’t do, especially when they’re things you shouldn’t have had to do. Look at me, Julie.’

  After a moment, she turned her head slowly, and I stared her in the one eye I could see.

  ‘The only person to blame here is him,’ I said.

  ‘I was just too scared.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And he was so big. So strong.’

  ‘I know.’

  It had been two and a half days since Julie Kennedy had been attacked in her home. The details were written down on the pad in front of me, but I didn’t need to refer to them; it felt like her quiet voice, every word of it from the last half-hour, was still somehow echoing in my head. Julie was our fifth victim. Four other women had come before her, and she had just told us much the same story as they had. Mercifully for her, her memory was fractured and incomplete, much of the attack stored away in the nightmare place, but she remembered enough.

  The attack had taken place in the early hours of the morning, when she had woken to find a man standing beside the bed. He was dressed entirely in black, and wearing both a mask and gloves. Julie said it seemed like he entirely obscured the curtains, which was impossible, and was presumably either a trick of perspective or else an exaggeration born from fear. But then, other victims had reported something similar. The man was little more than an enormous silhouette – a monster – his presence instilling terror even before the assault began. During the attacks, he never spoke. One woman had called him a concentration of hatred; another said that he smelled of violence. They were bizarre, ephemeral descriptions on the face of it, but they made a degree of sense to me. In each case, I’d watched the woman trying to talk about the man in ways beyond words, because in her head, that was what he’d become.

 
; Like the previous victims, Julie had been raped and savagely beaten. For hours after the man had left she had drifted in and out of consciousness, and at five a.m. she had managed to phone the police before collapsing. The subsequent two days she’d spent here in the Baines Wing of the hospital in a critical condition. For us, that period had been spent collecting evidence from her house, interviewing neighbours, pursuing leads.

  ‘Julie,’ I said. ‘I know this is difficult, and you’ve done very well. But I want to talk about what happened before the attack.’

  ‘Before? I was asleep.’

  ‘No, before that. When you went to bed.’

  She tried to frown, but the stitches in her face wouldn’t let her.

  ‘It was … just the same as always.’

  ‘Did you check the door was locked?’

  ‘Yes. I always do. Locked, chained, sash jams.’

  She was emphatic about that, and I believed her.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  I didn’t bother to kick myself this time, as I was concentrating on how to frame the next question. You have to be careful in this sort of investigation. You need to know, which means you have to ask, but this line of inquiry is always in danger of toppling over into blaming the victim. After everything Julie had been through, I had no wish to do that. But we needed to know how our man was getting into his victims’ houses.

  ‘All right,’ I said again, rubbing my hands together slowly. ‘What about the windows?’

  ‘She claims the window was closed,’ Chris said.

  We were walking back through the warren of hospital corridors. I was brimming with a residual mix of anger and frustration, and while none of it was directed at him, that was how it came out.

  ‘No. Get it right. What she said was that she didn’t know. She said she thought so, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened it. And she was hesitant about that.’