Hope's Vengeance (4 page)

“That’s a big decision to make.”

“I know. I forced myself to accept that I just didn’t love Frank the right way, and marrying him would be lying to myself, lying to him.”

Dawn breathed an inward sigh of relief, her client did have some common sense after all. “How did he take it?”

“He was good. We talked it through, he still had his house in Newbury, he packed up, got a new job, and moved back down south. Our relationship was strained for a while, but we get on now, after all, we still have Penny together, it’s better for her if her parents aren’t at each other’s throats.”

Dawn nodded. “Yep, that’s good, keeping it real for the children. That takes maturity.”

Hope shook her head, her eyes scanning the carpet, sightlessly. “I was lonely after Frank left. I mean, I knew it was the right thing to do, but the walls still seemed to close in on me.”

Dawn sat up straight, leaning forward. “That’s an interesting thing to say. What do you mean?”

Her enthusiasm wasn’t returned, Hope shrugged, dismissive. “Nothing really, it’s just the way I describe being alone.”

Dawn knew it described more, but realised she was going to have to wait for further exploration until Hope was ready. “I guess Al’s number was burning my pocket. He was tall, big built, like he could protect me.” Again Dawn could see a significance, she was learning a huge amount about her client suddenly. “I phoned him. We talked for hours, he was clever, really intelligent. Had a great sense of humour, I hadn’t laughed like that in years. Soon we were talking every night, and after two weeks, he came up to stay with me.

It was like being hit by a landslide, that first evening we spent together. We just gazed into each other’s eyes, holding hands, talking, but oblivious to anything, everything else. I literally had to drag myself away to put the kids to bed. We slept together that night, and it felt so perfect, so right.” Hope’s dreamy eyes emphasized her romantic experience, the wistful voice trailing.

Keep the conversation going, keep Hope in the room. “How long ago was this?”

Hope tapped finger to finger, counting. “Three and a half years ago.”

“Right! Still quite recent, then.”

Hope nodded stoically. “Every Christmas had come at once for me, I gave my all to him. After a couple of weeks we decided to get married.”

“That’s not long to make a decision like that.”

“No, and, as my Mum said at the time, ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’. But I was in love, I was blinkered. And, if I’m honest, I guess I wanted to shock people.” Hope’s eyes met Dawn’s, she was looking for reassurance, understanding. She didn’t get it, Dawn was hiding her confusion, she wanted to discuss some of the session’s revelations with her boss. “We married three weeks later, he packed in his job and moved in with me.”

Dawn lifted the back of her hand to her forehead, brow furrowed, searching frantically for words. “Hope, bare with me. But why would you want to get married to someone you barely know to shock people?.”

A detached shrug, and Dawn could have sworn she saw a flicker of a smile. She suspected she was being played, she was going to have to learn not to react like this, it was feeding Hope’s fire. “No, forget that, I can see where you’re coming from.” She couldn’t. “So you were married. Your mother had already voiced her objections, what did she make of it?”

A wave of the hand and a snarl. “What fucking right did she have to comment, she married the fucking lesbian lover none of us knew about four months later.”

Dawn was taken aback, she’d not summed Hope up as being a prejudiced person, that anger needed to be explored. “What annoyed you most, the fact she’s a lesbian, or that your Mum didn’t tell you about her lover?”

Hope softened, the unexplored sorrow returning to her lowered eyes. “I don’t know. To be honest it was a lovely wedding, obviously not legally binding, same-sex marriages weren’t then, and Belinda does make her very happy.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?” Dawn and Hope both checked the clock simultaneously, they had twenty minutes left.

Hope shook her head. “No, save that for another day, I’ll get Al out of my system this week. Bastard.” She crossed her legs tightly, squeezing the calves together, the rape always predominant.

“Okay. Tell me more about Al.”

“He’d moved in, he was living at my house, I couldn’t get enough of him. Not just sexually, although we certainly got our fair share of that. I mean him, just looking at him, holding him, I always wanted to be touching him, his hand, his arm, his face. I felt like half a person when he wasn’t beside me.”

“You sound as if you were dependent on him.”

“I suppose I was, I wanted him to hold the world away, keep me from harm, from the nastiness.”

“And it turned out he was the one who harmed you the most, was the most nasty. That must have been difficult to take.” Dawn nodded, her tone sympathetic.

The familiar rueful smile flickered. “You haven’t heard the last bit Dawn, the nail in the coffin. I’m such a bloody mug, so fucking naïve.” She was retreating again.

“Tell me.” The prompt was futile, Dawn hadn’t coaxed her back. She tried again, louder. “He’s viciously raped you, he’s stolen the best part of a million pounds, what can possibly top that?”

“Bigamy.”

Don’t react! Don’t react! Don’t react! Dawn had to scream the words in her head, desperately keeping her expression blank.

“It was four months after he’d been arrested, he was on bail awaiting a trial by jury, he’d managed to get the case deferred by saying I was lying, and he’d had my permission to transfer the money. He said I’d signed the paperwork, and was lying now because I regretted giving him the money.”

“Surely a handwriting analysis…”

“He’d done an excellent job with my signature. Three independent graphologists, and each one refused to commit either way. It was his bastard lying word against mine.” The words were growled, the ferocity of the bastard and lying depicting where the anger lay.

“It was late one night, winter was approaching, it was cold. I got a phone call, it was a woman, she had a southern accent. Said she was looking for Alistair Brown. I was intrigued, some woman after my bastard ex, so I asked who was calling. You know, I laughed when she said his wife, thought it was a crank call. But she asked me why I was laughing, so I said ‘because I’m his wife’. I tell you Dawn, the language she used was ripe, torrents of abuse, swearing, shouting. Truth was, I was smoking a joint at the time, it makes me dead laid back, so I just sort of calmed her down.”

Dawn’s eyebrow was raised, and a fierce glare shot her surprise down. “Don’t you get judgemental on me, the law’s wrong on cannabis, it’s harmless.”

“Hey, you’re paying me for my counselling skills, not a lecture. It’s confidential in here. Say what you like.”

“I feel suicidal.”

Dawn could feel the intense blue of Hope’s eyes boring into her own, she refrained from returning the glare, irritated with her client’s flippancy, half terrified at her intelligence. “No you don’t. You just know that if you did I would be duty bound to inform someone. Don’t mess with me, Hope, it’s counterproductive.”

Hope chuckled. The charged atmosphere settled, and Dawn composed herself. “So you calmed the woman down.”

“We arranged to meet at a cafe in London the next day.”

“A long journey for what could easily have been a crank call.”

Hope leaned forward, her eyes sparkling joyously. “You don’t get it, if there was any potential she was telling the truth, that was it, he’d be nailed. I couldn’t recover all my money, he was an excellent liar, so this could be pure revenge.”

Dawn felt uncomfortable, she didn’t understand why, but the vehemence in the statement was almost vulgar.

“She was a little worn around the edges, Helen, but pretty, well, attractive. Older than me.”

“Have you mentioned her before? I seem to remember the name.” Dawn realised the source of her discomfort, it was the unusual confidence Hope suddenly had, she was uncommonly in charge.

“I think I mentioned the party she arranged last New Year’s Eve, the one where Lee proposed to Lucy.”

“Yep, that’s right. So you met up with her.”

“We eyed each other up, but neither of us were aggressive, wound up. We sat, had a coffee. Seems he’d married her five years ago, they had two kids. He’d told her two years before that he was moving to Norfolk for a job, and although she thought it strange to move north for work when salaries were so high in London, she was too busy with the kids to object much. She’d been easily pacified when he said he’d find a nice house and she could follow him later.”

Dawn was stunned, Hope was way too bright to be drawn into a scam like that, it didn’t make sense. “Surely he must have still seen her, otherwise alarm bells would have been ringing.”

A gentle snigger, but no smile registered in her eyes. “Yes, and I’m a mug too. He said he needed to go to London once a month to get his supply of weed, it was him who started me on it, I was always anti-drugs before I met Al. I’d give him a few hundred pounds, I mean, I didn’t know how much the bloody stuff cost, did I! I trusted him. I’m a bloody fool.”

“Do you still take it? Now you’re not with Al.”

“No.”

Dawn knew she was being lied to, she stifled a sigh. “So he was successfully towing you both a line!”

“Up to this point, yes. It was unnecessary, but she showed me a photo just to be certain we were talking about the same man. Then we talked, me and Helen, we talked for hours. Half of me wanted to hate her.”

“Why? She’d done nothing wrong, she was a victim too.” Dawn leant forward onto her arm, fingers drumming her lips.

Hope shrugged and sighed, a deep, reluctant sigh. “Truth? I think, even though he’d raped me, part of me still loved him. God! That’s the first time I’ve ever admitted that!”

“What about now?”

She shook her head. Then nodded. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I love the man I thought he was still. Maybe I’m flatlining, no vital signs, nothing. Some days I hurt like hell, some days I feel nothing.”

“How do you deal with the days that hurt?”

“I drink.” The abruptness left the room in total silence, and an oddly uncomfortable atmosphere put a barrier between the two women. Dawn realised Hope had overstepped her personal limits, this was a secret she obviously wanted to keep close. Did she ignore or pursue?

Ignore. Dawn reasoned that it’d come out later, once Hope really trusted her. “So did you contact the police?”

The relief emanated from Hope’s pores, her whole body relaxing, she’d got away with the blunder. “Of course, but there was more to it than that. You see, after having coffee, I went back to her place, she lived in Putney, where we’d seen the band, you know, the Hamsters. Her house was disgraceful, a right mess, completely run down, and it shocked me that she lived in such squalor.

Her kids, hers and Al’s, two little boys, they came running out to see her, she hugged them, and I felt an odd tenderness towards her. I mean, I already liked her, but now I felt compassion too for her circumstances. Dawn, I genuinely liked her.

Inside the house the wallpaper was peeling away, there was damp everywhere, and it stank of damp, of mould. There was a stack of inhalers on the table, and Helen told me that Dean, the youngest, was asthmatic. Something snapped in me, I really wanted to help her. So I made a suggestion, and the next thing, they were all coming back with me to Norfolk. I paid for the train tickets, and brought them all back to my house.”

“To live?”

“No, they stayed a week, like a mini holiday, but they’ve been up regularly since then. Helen loves it up here, she says the air’s cleaner, and Dean’s asthma definitely improves when he stays here, so recently she went on the housing list, she’s trying to get somewhere as near to my place as possible. She’s one of my best friends now. Strange, that, isn’t it?”

Dawn nodded, it was definitely an odd scenario. “Could she do a house swap, is that a way forward?”

Hope shook her head. “No, no, the house in Putney, it’s hers. Well, was. This is another thing the police are still investigating, you know, fraud. She bought it with Al before they got married, but he persuaded her it would be ‘financially beneficial’, apparently, to sign it into his sole name. She’s an idiot like me, she trusted him. He was so good at getting you to trust him. Cases like this are long and tough, difficult to prove, it’s ongoing.” Hope checked her watch, the minute hand had just reached the hour, she shifted in her seat.

Dawn laid the pad and pen on the table. “Right, that feels like a good place to end the session, is that okay with you?”

“Yes.”

They both stood, Hope stooping to retrieve her bag from beside the chair, whilst Dawn held the door open. As Hope passed her, smiling, Dawn laid a hand on her shoulder. “I think we covered a great deal of ground today.”

Session Four

Dawn filled two plastic cups from the water cooler, setting them on the coffee table before opening the window a crack. Although the coldness was definitely setting in, and the frost covering the roads and trees was only just beginning to recede with the stark warmth of the winter sun, the pumped heating overcompensated leaving a cloying atmosphere in the room. The timid breeze relaxed the oppressiveness, but suddenly a new warmth was inescapable. Hope was in the room.

Dawn’s smile was genuine, yet questioning, she’d not seen her client so happy in the month they’d been meeting, and a tinge of optimism, unsure what for, registered. Hope beamed her unsaid hello as she seated herself confidently, and they both basked in the contented air for a minute. Dawn leaned forward, her smile still wide. “It’s lovely to see you happy. What’s happened?”

“God, Dawn, I’ve been dying to tell you. My youngest sister, Happiness. She’s got a record contract.” The words tumbled out, eager and excited. “EMI, who Honesty recorded with before she was killed, they offered her a three album deal.”