The Facts of Life and Death (24 page)

‘And what did
they
do?’

‘Mostly nothing. Mostly just a whack here and there. But this one time I got out of the bath and peed in the water before he got in.’

Ruby laughed heartily, and Daddy gave a little smile. ‘It
was
funny to start with. He chased me all through the house, bare-arse naked.

Ruby giggled. ‘Were you scared?’

‘You bet I was! I was only seven and he was so angry! He caught me in the kitchen,’ said Daddy. He stopped for a moment, and adjusted his hands on the steering wheel and looked in the rear-view mirror. Ruby waited eagerly for him to go on, a smile near her lips.

‘He caught me in the kitchen,’ said Daddy again, ‘and held my face down on the hot stove.’

Ruby’s smile froze.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

Slowly she looked up at Daddy’s face. For the first time she read the scars not as random puckers, but as three rough pink rings. She thought of the heat coming off the spiral plate, and shuddered.

‘I thought a dog bit you,’ she whispered.

He shook his head. ‘We just told people that because we didn’t want the police coming round. Still, I got a month off school, so it wasn’t all bad.’

He winked at Ruby, but she didn’t feel like smiling.

‘What was his name?’

‘Kevin,’ said Daddy. Then he frowned and said, ‘Or Steve. Or Dave. One of them. They all had hands.’ He laughed again, but Ruby didn’t.

‘Did your Mummy break up with him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I told you!’ said Daddy impatiently. ‘It was
my
fault. I was always winding them up. That’s all I’m saying, Rubes – don’t wind people up. When people say leave it, then just
leave
it, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Ruby quickly, even though her brain was bursting with questions. She glanced at him every few seconds, gauging his mood, waiting for a thaw. But Daddy kept staring at the road ahead, his hands tight on the wheel.

Then – after a mile or two – Daddy went on talking, as if they’d never stopped.

‘We needed him to stay, see? Because we didn’t have anything and he took care of us.’

Ruby nodded, although she didn’t understand. Not one little bit.

‘Women can’t help it,’ shrugged Daddy.

Women can’t help it.

Daddy had said the same thing about Mummy, the night they’d fought over the Jingle Bobs and the job and the fancy man.

Ruby nodded. She still remembered what it was that women couldn’t help.

Being whores.

By the time the car bobbled to a halt on the square, Ruby was asleep again.

Daddy got out and came round to her side. He took her hand and tugged gently, and she followed her arm out of the car and on to unsteady legs. It had stopped raining and the wind had dropped, and Ruby could taste the sea. If she kept her eyes shut, then maybe she could make it all the way to bed without really waking up.

To her surprise, Daddy picked her up, with one arm under her back and the other behind her knees. Ruby let it happen. She turned her face into his shoulder and put an arm around his neck, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d been carried like this. She wished it could last for ever, this swaying, jogging feeling of being lifted and held like a baby again.

He carried her across the cobbles and up the short hill to The Retreat.

When they got to the step, he put her down carefully and opened the door.

‘Don’t wake Mummy,’ he whispered.

She nodded sleepily and whispered back, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Just to clean out the car.’

Ruby hugged him. ‘Love you hundreds, Daddy.’

‘Love you hundreds, Rubes.’

He closed the front door behind him.

Ruby hauled herself up the narrow, curved stairs. Her legs were heavy and her arms swung like wet ropes. She didn’t do her teeth; she didn’t have a pee. She didn’t even touch Lucky for luck.

In the few seconds before she fell asleep, Ruby only had one thought.

I have to hold the gun.

STEFFI COLE WAS
almost home when she stopped being a person and became a means to an end.

Just past the Boat House restaurant, something hard jabbed her in the back, and when she turned to be cross with some joker, a man with no face hissed, ‘Keep walking. This is a gun.’

So Steffi kept walking. She tried to keep thinking, too, but she had to keep walking while she was thinking, because of the gun.

Was it robbery? She could cope with robbery. She had sixty-five quid in her jeans. She wouldn’t volunteer it, but if he found it, he could have it.

Was it rape? She braced herself mentally. If she had to, she would cope with a rape. As long as the man didn’t hurt her, she could cope with anything, she realized.

Funny how your perspective changed as fast as the circumstances.

The man kept jabbing her in the middle of her back. She tried to decide whether it felt like a gun. As if she would know! It was probably a lie. Nobody had a gun. Nobody in Instow, anyway.

But could she take that chance? Steffi thought about the possible consequences of failing to outrun the man. Of him shooting her in the spine before she’d gone five paces.

Life in a wheelchair, peeing in a bag.

She thought of falling, of being caught, of making him angry. She thought of the
embarrassment
of running in terror – in case it
was
a joke after all and she looked like an idiot.

Even as part of her mind was screaming at her to slow down and stay close to the houses and pubs, so the alleged gun forced Steffi away from them. An obedient, self-destructive auto-pilot had been switched on inside, and she had lost manual override. And before she came up with any practical way to escape, she simply ran out of time.

‘In here.’

Another sharp jab in her back, between the shoulder blades, and Steffi turned left and stepped on to the fine sand of the dunes.

She went up the first of them, her feet sinking deep into the white sand.

‘Where are we going?’ she said.

He didn’t answer for a few strides, and then he said, ‘We’re going to call your mother.’

Steffi’s stomach lurched as if she were on a rollercoaster.

She knew exactly what he meant.

Not robbery. Not rape. She felt hollow and disbelieving. Not ten minutes ago she’d picked up her wages and told her boss she’d see him tomorrow, and now here she was, with a gun in her back and being prodded towards what the
Gazette
promised was ‘unspeakable horror’.

She also couldn’t believe she’d kept walking along the sea front as if everything was normal. She should have just run.
That
was an escape plan.
That’s
what might have saved her. But she’d thought too hard about it.

Thinking hard was natural to Steffi. Putting sweets in bags and scooping ice cream at Paul’s was just a casual job for her. Her real life was studying for a B.Sc. in computer science. She was in her second year at Bristol, absolutely nailing modules in ethical hacking and counter-measures.

Counter-measures.
The word mocked her now as she stumbled in the soft sand and hauled herself up the slope by a tuft of tough beachgrass. She’d never taken self-defence classes; never watched a Jackie Chan film. Not even ironically. And she’d refused a ride all the way home when she was offered one – out of sheer complacency. She could
kick
herself. Her whole future was about outsmarting the opposition and yet here she was, on a dark and deserted dune with what was probably a murderer.

If he
wasn’t
a murderer, she’d be fucking furious. If this was some sick ruse to get her to a beach party with her friends, then this guy was a dead man. The second he pulled off that silly balaclava and said ‘Surprise’ she’d punch his bloody lights out.

Scream.

That was
another
thing she could’ve done while she was still close to the houses, Steffi realized too late.

Run. Scream. Both required instinct, not logic.

Her logic might cost her her life, and Steffi filled up momentarily at the unfairness of that.

Then she got a grip. She mustn’t stop thinking, just because she was playing catch-up on her animal instincts. Logic dictated that she could still find a way out of this. They were almost at the top of the dune. Steffi knew these dunes like the back of her hand. She’d played here as a child, walked the family dog here, had her first kiss here. It was with Barry Stoodley. He’d been too spitty, and she’d been too worried about being seen.

Another five or six awkward strides and she’d be at the top.

That
would be the time to run. When she could get up some instant acceleration down the other side, while the
arsehole
behind her was still struggling on the ascent. Steffi felt excitement confirm that it was the right thing to do. She visualized it, the way she did with her tennis serve. That was the secret to sporting success – visualization. So she knew the exact moment when she would attain the peak of the dune. At that very second she would run down the slope of sand. She would have thirty feet on him before he could even reach the ridge and start down after her. That would be enough. Even if he
did
have a gun. It was dark and the sand gave no good footing, and she recalled reading somewhere that most people couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces with a handgun; it was harder than it looked, apparently.

If she could just get that first run down the dune …

She knew all the paths and shortcuts – the sharp right turn and then the little dogleg that would look as though she was heading back to safety – back to the lights of the Boat House. But then there was the clever little loop that would let her double back through a narrow gorge in the dunes and come out a hundred yards away on flat, hard sand, which was so good for running.

And this time she
would
run—

‘Stop here.’

‘What?’

‘I said stop.’

Steffi stopped, staring up at the dune’s dark horizon, jagged with grass and tantalizingly close.

He wasn’t going to let her reach the top.

‘Take off your clothes.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Take off your clothes.’

Steffi’s fear made her angry and her anger made her brave. She decided to take control and put a stop to this before she became inert with terror. It wasn’t nipping it in the bud – the bud had already opened so it was too late for that – but calling a halt could be done at any time, and she needed to use her calm, scientific brain if she was going to change this situation to her advantage. She needed to act like a B.Sc. undergrad, not some disposable extra in a murderous teen flick.

She mustered all the calm confidence that she could.

‘I’m just going to turn round, OK?’

‘No you’re not.’

‘I’m going to do it very, very slowly,’ she said reassuringly.

She started to turn and he hit her hard in the face.

Steffi fell down, although because the slope was so steep, she didn’t have far to go, and landed sitting in soft sand, facing the man.

‘Now give me your phone and take off your clothes.’

She looked up at him in a weird, jerky daze. He did have a gun – he hadn’t lied about that. But was this the same man who had killed that Frannie girl? She hadn’t been
shot.
She’d been strangled or something like that, hadn’t she? Something manual. Through the pain in her cheek and nose, Steffi wondered which was worse – to be shot or to be strangled. Logically, she’d rather be shot because it was over in a second and there was a quick end to the fear – but with manual there was always a chance you’d find a way out of it. Something might happen to come and rescue you. There was more chance of rescue or a miracle.

Manual
must
be better.

Steffi was starting to realize that logic had no place when it came to murder.

It was too late now anyway. The gun was what had kept her walking like a sheep when she should have been running and screaming and getting away. And that was all that mattered.

She gave him her phone and she took off her clothes. As she folded her green and white striped blouse, she wondered whether someone would soon be identifying her by that awful photo on her Students’ Union card. That would be as humiliating in death as it was in life.

Taking off her jeans in front of a stranger felt like a point of no return. There was no miracle: no knight in shining armour; no swooping Hollywood rescue; no beach-bum wino stumbling into view to scare the man away. Nothing happened to stop Steffi sliding the rough denim down her thighs and wobbling as she stood on one leg to step out of them.

Nothing to stop her crying.

She tried to stop stripping at her knickers, but the man stared at her until she was naked. She shivered and sobbed and tried to cover her privates and her breasts, but he didn’t seem that interested in them anyway, so she hugged her arms instead.

‘I’m cold,’ she whispered.

He laughed. ‘Not as cold as you’re going to be.’

Steffi felt a whirring panic in her head and belly. She still didn’t believe that
this
was how her life was going to end, but she needed to do something fast and she didn’t know what. She had a future. She had
plans.
She was only twenty. She had a sister called Maggie, and a cat called Mouse, and she hadn’t bought her father a birthday present yet. She’d been a bit short last month and had put an IOU in a card.