The Watcher (57 page)

‘Oh! Really?’

‘You always just think about yourself,’ said Lucy. ‘You don’t care about my situation. I had to live with his rejection of me. Whatever I tried, he ignored me. He was obsessed with you. He waited at the garden gate for you to come home from school. His eyes followed you everywhere. I was invisible to him. As a woman, I mean. I cooked for him and did his laundry. I cleaned the flat, keeping the place nice and cosy. I took out of the housekeeping money as much as I could to buy pretty things. To look good for him. But he didn’t notice. He didn’t notice
me
.’

The humming in her ears increased.

‘You were a grown woman. I was a
child
!’

Suddenly, for just a split second, an expression of hatred was visible in Lucy’s eyes. ‘A child! A calculating little vixen, you were! You were young – and you took advantage of that! With your tight jeans, your clinging Tshirts. You enjoyed taking my place, as if I were some old bag. I was thirty-five! I wasn’t old. I was pretty. But of course I couldn’t compete with you.’

Tara didn’t notice that she had stood up. The kitchen was swaying around her. It was pointless. They were not going to work anything out. Not now. Not ever. Her mother was not going to regret anything. She did not even understand.

She thought that she was the victim.

‘I don’t think I can forgive you, Mum,’ Tara said.

Lucy got up too. She reached automatically for the tea towel hanging by the oven, as she always did, and wiped a small splodge of sauce from the tabletop.

‘Forgive what?’ she asked. She did not sound cynical or ironic. Not even bitter or hurt.

It just sounded like . . . a question.

And all Tara’s pain was present once again. The feeling of having been abandoned. Her despair. Her horror. Her helplessness. All her fear. The endless torment. The ebbing hope.

She realised that none of that had ever left her. And would never leave her. She would always feel completely alone in the world. As if she had no one. Betrayed by the woman who had been the first person in her life; the person who had given birth to her.

And in that moment her gaze fell on the red and white checked tea towel that her mother was using to wipe the table.

‘You still have this old tea towel,’ she heard herself say.

It was the moment when she lost control.

She could not have imagined how good it would feel.

She let out a cry of triumph. In the complete silence that surrounded her, it sounded louder than it probably was.

‘No way!’ she screamed.

She was holding the table leg in her hand. She did not know how much time had passed, but she guessed that it must have been a good three quarters of an hour before she had worked it free of the glue. Then she had shaken it back and forth for ages. And suddenly, just when she thought she had no strength left, when the sweat was pouring down her face and body, the screw gave way. Gillian could pull the table leg out of its place as if it had been meant to slip out like that all along.

I can’t believe it! It worked! It really worked!

Needing a minute to gather her strength, she sank down on the sofa, wiped the sweat from her brow and tried to calm her panting breath. Just for a moment. She did not have much more time. Tara might come back any minute. Tara was her greatest enemy now and the biggest danger she faced. And if she found her, she would not risk leaving her in the hut – admittedly, a hut almost as secure as Fort Knox – a second time and trust that the cold weather would finish her off. This time she would deal with her herself. Suffocate her with a tea towel stuffed deep down her throat. As she’d done to her mother. And to Carla Roberts and Anne Westley.

Earlier, Tara had leant against the stove and talked about the problem of failing to render assistance as Gillian sat, immobile, on the sofa. Not talked – lectured. Gillian had not had the impression that an answer was expected of her, so she had remained silent.

Failure to render assistance is not given serious enough consideration as a crime. Neither in our society or in court. Many people think it’s of minor concern. The perpetrator is the baddie. The person who just watches and doesn’t do anything . . . well, maybe they didn’t act quite as they should, but they shouldn’t be put on a par with the perpetrator. And that is why the person who stands by and does nothing is often ignored. People even feel some sympathy perhaps. After all, in all honesty, who knows how we ourselves would act in such a situation.

Gillian stood up and grabbed the table leg with both hands. She tried to gather her remaining strength for her first strike. She raised her arms and smashed the table leg into the shutters with as much force as she could muster. Nothing moved.

She paused, gathered her strength again. One more try.
Give it all you’ve got, Gillian! Come on! You can do it. You have to do it
.

The next powerful blow.

She heard something crunch. Maybe something gave too, but she could not see any change.

Of course a culprit should be punished and locked up. But normally it’s someone with a screw or two loose and you get the impression that the person is never going to be normal. The lives of these people, especially their childhoods, read like horror stories. Now, I’m not saying that someone is bound to be a serial killer because his mother was an alcoholic and his father abused him, but it’s . . . it relativises things, doesn’t it? But those people who just watch and don’t say anything, there’s nothing you could put on the scales in their favour. In our country parents let their children starve to death, or torture them to death, and their neighbours turn a blind eye. In our country women are abused by their husbands and everyone claims they never saw a thing. In our country pupils are bullied by their classmates to the point that they throw themselves under a train, but the teachers don’t intervene. These things happen everywhere, all the time. And it only happens because the majority of the population is too cowardly, too uninterested, too lethargic to do anything.

What had she been thinking about beforehand? She had imagined a battering ram before she had thought about using the table leg. Perhaps she was going about it the wrong way with her little blows. Perhaps she should try to ram the table leg against the shutters one single time.

She grabbed it with both hands and, taking a run-up, smacked it into the shutters.

The shutters shuddered. This time she
was
sure. She examined the hinges. There was a couple of millimetres between them and the wood now.

It might work. Perhaps she would finally be lucky on this terrible day. Breathing heavily, she paused. Her hands hurt. Just a short rest and then she would go on the offensive again.

Tara had told her Liza Stanford’s crazy story. Gillian did not know Logan Stanford personally, but she had often read about him in the newspaper. The man did not look all that nice in the pictures she saw of him, but she would never have guessed that he was so sick and violent. She had always had the impression that he was less interested in doing good than in being in the papers. But that had not bothered her. After all, the money he raised helped people in need, and that was what counted. Who cared about his motives? Perhaps it was better to do good because you needed recognition than to do nothing at all.

The fact that his wife was hiding from him, that he had tormented her for years – Gillian had been gobsmacked.

‘Charity Stanford? No way! Are you sure?’

‘I saw Liza. That evening in the hotel. Her black eye. And later she showed me her whole body. Scars, bruises, grazed skin. The honourable lawyer is a sadist. And a psychopath!’

‘And she let him do that to her for years?’

‘Yes, these stories are always hard to believe. Almost incomprehensible. But they happen all the time. The victims don’t say a word and hope that everything will improve if they can just fit in better. If they can find a way not to annoy the perpetrator. Because that is what they believe on some level of their consciousness: that it’s all their fault. That there is something wrong with them that forces their tormentor to act as he does. Logan Stanford as the victim, you see? That he had married an impossible woman. That it was Liza’s fault that he was angry and lost control.’

‘Was there no one she could have talked to about it? Who would have helped her to leave him immediately?’

‘Over the course of the years she confided in two people. A friend and her son’s doctor.’

‘And?’

‘Carla Roberts. And Dr Anne Westley.’

She understood immediately. As soon as Tara mentioned the names. Carla Roberts and Anne Westley. She understood the whole affair. Tara’s motive for the deaths of two apparently harmless elderly women.

‘The two of them didn’t help, right?’

‘No. Roberts was so wrapped up in her woes that she didn’t take much notice. And Westley was obviously so unsure about what to do that she ended up doing nothing. Neither of them intervened at all. Liza was not given the chance to accept help.’

Failure to render assistance. The theme of the public prosecutor’s life. Carla Roberts and Anne Westley had acted like Lucy Caine-Roslin: they’d shut their eyes. Anything not to take a closer look. Not to risk an awkward situation.

‘And that’s why you . . . the two of them?’

‘Believe it or not, I didn’t plan to. I was pretty angry with them. They had let down someone in a real emergency, which had only strengthened Logan Stanford’s hand. But I didn’t think I would kill them. I wanted to frighten them a little. To jolt them out of their smug, contented lives. I terrorised them. Liza Stanford lived in mortal fear night and day. I wanted the two of them to have some inkling, at the least, of what that felt like.’

‘I see.’

‘It was easy to tamper with the door to the block of flats where Carla lived. I could come and go whenever I wanted, whenever I had time. It was fun to send the empty lift up to her floor sometimes. That can wear a person down. As can a car turning up at night in the back of beyond where Anne Westley lived. Headlights gliding across the walls of her room. An engine cutting out. But no one appearing.’

‘I’m sure that was effective.’

‘Yes, it was. The two old women certainly got nervous. But . . .’

‘But it wasn’t enough for you?’

Gillian took a deep breath. The worst of it was that she felt weaker every minute. But she could not give up. She had got this far. She had a real chance now, if she could keep it up.

She thought of Becky. Becky needed her.

One last, desperate try. With all her energy, all her weight, holding the table leg in both hands, she threw herself at the shutters.

There was a deafening crack as one of them broke away from the wall. It flew out, pulling the other one after it. The two bolted-together shutters slammed against the hut’s outside wall, then hung there, immobile.

The window was open.

Gillian looked out into the night, at the snow. It took her a few seconds to realise that it had really happened. She had freed herself from an apparently hopeless situation. Her arms were shaking, her muscles screamed with pain from the unaccustomed effort.

She was free.

It was important to think about what she would do next and not rush into anything risky.

She stowed the valuable keys deep in her coat pocket, checking several times that they could not fall out. Then she put the water bottle, in which there was still a little water, into her other pocket. It was too big to fit in comfortably and felt awkward there, but it was important to have something to drink before she had to resort to eating snow. The torch, which had been of invaluable help already, went in the pocket with the keys. That was all she needed – at least it was all she could lay her hands on right now.

She heaved herself up on to the windowsill and jumped down the other side. The branch of a pine tree smacked her in the face, scratching her, but she barely noticed. She landed in soft, deep snow, picked herself up immediately and cautiously went round to the front of the hut. She peered round the corner.

There was no one in sight. The snow reflected light from the moon that shone through large gaps in the clouds. Gillian fought her way through the small wooded area and then stood still. From here she had a good view. Behind her and to her side lay the wood. In front of her lay the flat land that she and Tara had come along a few hours ago. She could even see their footprints in the snow. It would not be difficult to follow them back to the car.

What was less pleasing was that the plain offered nowhere to hide. Walking across it, she would be visible from afar as a clearly outlined dark form. If Tara was on her way back to the hut, she would be able to see her from a long way away. Of course, the reverse was also true.

Gillian examined the landscape carefully once more and considered following the edge of a distant strip of woodland, to remain concealed under the trees. Yet that would have meant a wide detour and the need to walk almost twice as far. And she ran the risk of losing her way. There were no footprints to follow and if she went astray she would not survive long in this cold. She decided to take the same path they had come on. She would see Tara early enough to give her time to think about what she should do. After all, she had one small advantage:
she
expected to meet Tara, while Tara would assume that she was out here on her own.

She set off, trudging through the deep snow. She knew that after everything she had gone through, she should really be afraid of not managing to cover the long distance through the snow. However, the euphoria of the moment of her escape had pumped a good dose of adrenalin into her body. From somewhere or other she found an energy that she should not rightly have any more.

I can do it. She won’t hurt me.