The Book of You: A Novel (17 page)

Wednesday

Wednesday, February 25, 8:07 a.m.

You are not at my house, so I know you’ll be at the station. It will be too much of a treat for you, seeing my reaction to your latest gift. You won’t be able to resist that. You won’t be able to wait for that.

I am right. As soon as I get out of the taxi, you’re walking next to me. I wish I weren’t right. I wish I didn’t know you as well as I do.

“Do you like the mementos of our night together, Clarissa?”

I do not look at you or speak. You know I will not. We don’t surprise each other anymore.

“We can get more elaborate later, Clarissa. Like the magazine. So much inspiration in that, don’t you think?”

I make the mistake of glancing at you, briefly. Your lips may be thin and pale, but they are clearly glistening, as if you have just licked them.

You are wearing the leather gloves you wore in the park. I see now that they are like the glove on the cover of your magazine. The skin on my right wrist bristles, remembering the twist of your Indian burn, though the marks and tenderness went over a week ago.

You lean toward me. “You loved it, being tied up like that. I had to gag you, to stop your neighbors hearing. The gag made you even crazier. And the blindfold.”

I shove my elbow into your side, hard, satisfied by your grimace of shock and pain. “Get away from me.” The words escape as if I have been holding my breath for too long and cannot stop myself.

“There are other photos, Clarissa. There was a lot of foreplay. I’m considerate that way. Would you like to see them? Do you think the fireman would like them? I know where he lives.”

I push through the turnstile, not looking back, expecting you to follow. You don’t, but I can hear you, calling out from the other side of the barrier as I turn to walk through the tunnel. “I’m only teasing, Clarissa. I’ll keep my souvenirs to myself. You know I’ll never share you.” You are laughing. It is a rare thing, to hear you laugh, though your laugh is bitter and full of hate and I think you are cursing me with it.

C
LARISSA SQUEEZED HER
eyes shut, but couldn’t stop seeing herself, a nightmare creature from the pages of his magazine or a gruesome S&M film. She forced herself to concentrate and tried to resist stabbing herself any more with the pencil. She wondered if the police looked at magazines like his to try to find criminals and victims, to try to solve crimes.

She wrote in her index:
Betty Lawrence, Forensic Scientist, 146.
Annie tapped the paper and shook her head in mock despair at the number of pages Clarissa’s notes were running to. Robert sometimes teased her, too; he’d filled a handful of pages at most.

Mrs. Lawrence was explaining DNA profiling. Clarissa imagined crime scene investigators around her bed, taking swabs, snapping more photographs of her. He had turned her into a spectacle, into something grotesque. Somehow, she had to resist letting that overwrite the way she saw herself.

“I examined items of clothing belonging to Carlotta Lockyer,” Mrs. Lawrence was saying.

Clarissa tried to sit straighter and close down the image of herself. She tried not to imagine the revulsion Robert would feel toward her if he ever saw it. She imagined it displayed to a jury on a screen like the one to her right, and prayed it never would be.

“These included a pair of pink bikini underwear found behind a cupboard in the bathroom of the flat where Miss Lockyer alleges she was held. There was a significant amount of blood staining on the underwear. The blood was Miss Lockyer’s.”

She imagined her own shredded underwear: their shell as one numbered exhibit, found in her flat; the crotch as another exhibit, retrieved from his house—perhaps discovered in a display case. What would a forensic scientist uncover on his souvenir? She tried to quell her humiliation at the idea of somebody studying the stains on it. His semen on a slide. Her fluids under a microscope.

Wednesday, February 25, 1:15 p.m.

I want to resist hiding. I hate that you make me hide. I am queuing in an overlit mini market to buy a pot of yogurt.

I am absurd to think I can do something as ordinary as going to a nearby shop. I am stupid in my desperation to breathe fresh air, just for a few minutes, to walk there and back. I am foolish in my refusal to give up on normal acts. I am feeling very, very sorry for myself, and I know I absolutely have to stop this.

I hear you before I see you. Your voice is so low it is only for me. Your warm breath is in my ear. “I didn’t actually get to use the whip on you, Clarissa. Not properly, anyway, though you did enjoy the beginnings of our experiments with it. Next time.”

Escalation. That’s what the checklists in the stalker leaflets all warn of. That’s what they all say will happen. When I first read that word, I didn’t let myself properly imagine what escalation might feel like, what escalation might mean in real life, the particulars of what you might do to escalate things. I didn’t let myself properly inhabit that word. Your hands on me in the park. Your vile pictures.

I shove the yogurt onto a shelf as I flee the shop. I am a terrible runner. Within seconds I am breathless and there’s a stitch in my side. People stare as I weave through the crowds, running my ridiculous flapping run through the outside market to rush back to the safety of the jurors’ waiting room. All the while I’m hoping like mad that Robert isn’t among them and doesn’t see. I check behind me as I round the corner into the street where the court building is, panting, tripping and only just catching myself, but you aren’t following. You must realize how obvious it would be that you were chasing me if you came after me at speed.

I
T MUST HAVE
been the intensification of the sick terror that was with her all the time now. That must have been what made her think of the Bettertons again. She found a quiet corner of the jurors’ room and dialed. The woman answered.

It was a pitch; she had an instant. “I need to know what happened to Laura,” she said.

“So do we.” The line went dead.

She tried again. “Please talk to me,” she said. “Please.”

“Leave us alone.” It went dead again.

She tried a third time. There was no answer.

If they didn’t want to be phoned and asked about Laura, why weren’t they ex-directory? Why had it been so easy to find them? She’d left her number unblocked each time she called, in the hope that they’d be less suspicious of her then, or even that they’d call her back, though deep down she knew that they wouldn’t. So why were they continuing to pick up?

H
ER ADRENALINE WAS
still pumping at the end of the day as they waited in the annex room for the usher to escort them downstairs. She was trying to reassure Annie, who was wondering why Clarissa looked as if she’d been bleached around both eyes.

Grant’s booming voice came as a welcome diversion. “Why was there so little of Tomlinson’s semen? It don’t make sense. If he came in her face and then she wiped it off on the shirt and jeans like she said, there’d be more.”

“The quantity of semen varies between men. As little as one milliliter is considered normal, and as much as five.” Clarissa’s voice sounded calm. It wasn’t how she felt. “The fact that the forensic people only found a few small areas on the clothes doesn’t mean Miss Lockyer was lying.” She caught Grant’s eye and felt color rush to her face. “He may just not make a lot of it.”

C
LARISSA AND
R
OBERT
had taken to lingering at the end of the court day, then walking out the door together. She did truly enjoy being with him in his own right; the fact that he made her Rafe-proof, that he made her walk to the station entirely safe, was only a bonus.

She was pretending not to be waiting for him to come out of the locker room. As if it were urgent that she commit them to memory before leaving, she was dutifully reading the stern warning signs above the jury officer’s desk. No jury tampering. No taking photographs. No talking about what happens in the deliberation room because that’s a criminal offence punishable by a fine or even prison—a rule that lasts forever.

She solemnly repeated these important precepts to Robert when he appeared. He nodded in mock-stern appreciation at each one.

“Did you see Grant’s face when you started talking about semen?”

“I deliberately refrained from looking.” That was a big lie. They both smiled.

“They shouldn’t be, but most men would be uncomfortable hearing that,” he said.

She wondered if he was right.

“It was an important thing to say,” he said. “How do you know about it?”

“I’m good at human biology.”

“I’m sure you are. But I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Too many failed IVFs. What they call severe male factor infertility.”

“Ouch,” he said.

This time her straight gaze was aimed at him as she spoke. “I know more about semen than I ever wanted to.”

He laughed, but then quickly turned serious. “It didn’t work?”

“No,” she said. “No baby.” She tried not to look sorrowful, but feared she did anyway. “Henry made me swear never to tell anyone why we needed treatment, but I think the confidentiality clause has expired.”

It wasn’t a betrayal, she told herself: Robert would never meet Henry; the truth was that she didn’t want Robert to think the fertility problem was hers.

“Babies weren’t what drew us together, anyway. He’s not the kind of man who coos over them. But he agreed to it for me because he knew I wanted a child so badly.”

“Would you have stayed with him if he hadn’t?”

“I wanted to be with him very much, so yes,” she said slowly. “But Henry made me a promise early on that we’d try for a baby. I’m not sure the relationship could have survived his breaking it. As it turned out, it couldn’t survive his keeping it. He was terrified of how a baby would disrupt his writing.”

“That’s understandable,” Robert said.

She nodded. “He was secretly relieved each time the IVF didn’t work. It was an unspoken thing between us, but I knew that’s what he felt.”

She remembered a note Rafe had sent, just before the trial, now with the other things that she hoped Mrs. Lawrence would never inspect.
I could give you a baby, Clarissa. Let me.

“I’m sorry for you,” Robert said.

“I’m not sure I deserve it. I didn’t let myself stop and properly take in how ambivalent Henry was about the whole thing. I was too scared to let myself see it, scared that it would get in the way of what I wanted. I told myself he’d love the baby once it was there and be glad of it. I got too obsessed. I’d even bought patterns for baby clothes and nappies.” She rolled her eyes in embarrassment.

“He must have cared for you a lot,” he said, “to have done that for you, if he’s as you say.”

“He’s—he was complicated. But he didn’t want to try anymore. All that failed baby-making was too much for him. For us both, really, though I couldn’t admit it then. He felt . . . bad, and angry—as much as Henry could express such a feeling—watching me take those drugs, seeing what they did to me, when it was all because of him, and for something he didn’t even want.” She tried feebly to joke. “I rivaled Lottie for needle use.”

He didn’t laugh. “You were sad.”

“I was.” Her eyes were on the pavement. “I was very, very sad. I’d so wanted a baby, to be a mother. It made me lose sight of Henry. I wasn’t fair to him.” She was relieved to have told Robert something true about herself; she wanted to see what he did with it.

“Do you mind my asking why you two never married?”

She did mind, though only because she hated to think about it. “His wife was Catholic. She didn’t want a divorce. Said they were married forever in God’s eyes. Henry felt too guilty about her to push it. So did I.”

“Sounds like they’ll die married.”

“It’s five years now since they separated and he still hasn’t divorced her.”

“So he was ready to have a baby with you, and put you through all of that medical intervention, but not marry you.”

“That’s what my mother used to say.”

“Glad to know I remind you of your mother.”

“My mother is wonderful.” They both smiled. “I always thought, always told myself, that if I got pregnant that would change things. That he’d push for a divorce if he had such a powerful reason.”

“Maybe.” Robert didn’t sound convinced.

“I think perhaps he was too scared to marry again. He’d already failed at it once. He also felt that the important thing was our being together. All that stuff about not needing a piece of paper. There’s truth in that, I think.”

Robert was looking ahead of them, onto the other side of the road, and frowning. She didn’t doubt that Rafe was there. She slipped on blackened snow that had melted to ice, and Robert steadied her.

She couldn’t squander an opportunity to make Robert look for danger. “Did you see something?” she asked. She wanted to solidify any awareness he had that something was off-kilter; she wanted to make sure he was ready to protect himself.

He shook it off. “It was nothing.”

She wasn’t sure if she was more frightened of his denial, or of what it would mean for her if he were to admit that he’d noticed Rafe. She made herself press the point. “I thought maybe you saw something that was worrying you.”

“I told you I don’t worry about things.”

“But you should. Everyone should, sometimes.”

“You don’t need to worry about me. That’s not your job.” She must have looked stung—he seemed to force himself to smile. “I think you’re too hard on yourself about Henry,” he said, changing the subject. “And about his wife. People can’t always help who they fall in love with.”

She was too anxious about Rafe to take in what he’d just said, though she replayed it later. At the time she could only wonder if there was something else she could do to alert him, but she soon gave up in the face of yet another failure.

“Will you tell me what happened to your wife?” She felt he’d licensed her to change the subject, too; and to something difficult and personal, given his questions about Henry.

“It was a road traffic accident. Late morning. Another car veered onto the wrong side of the road and hit her head-on. She’d have died instantly. I’d come off nights and gone straight to bed. I’ve no idea where she was going. I wasn’t aware she’d left the house.”