Career of Evil

Men in sleeping bags glared at him as he moved far closer than members of the public usually dared; twice he startled cats out from behind dustbins, but the man in the beanie hat was nowhere to be seen.

21

... the damn call came,

And I knew what I knew and didn’t want to know.

                         Blue Öyster Cult, “Live for Me”

Robin woke next day to a sore head and a weight in the pit of her stomach. In the time it took to roll over on unfamiliar, crisp white pillows, the events of the previous evening seemed to come crashing down on her. Shaking her hair out of her face she sat up and looked around. Between the carved posts of her wooden four-poster she made out the dim outlines of a room barely illuminated by the line of brilliant light between brocade curtains. As her eyes became accustomed to the gilded gloom she made out the portrait of a fat gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers, framed in gilt. This was the kind of hotel in which you took an expensive city break, not where you slept off a hangover with a few hastily snatched clothes in a holdall.

Had Strike deposited her here in elegant, old-fashioned luxury as preemptive compensation for the serious talk he would initiate today? You’re obviously in a very emotional place... I think it would be good if you took a break from work.

Two-thirds of a bottle of bad wine and she had told him everything. With a weak groan, Robin sank back on the pillows, covered her face with her arms and succumbed to the memories that had regained all their power now that she was weak and miserable.

The rapist had worn a rubber gorilla mask. He had held her down with one hand and the weight of a whole arm on her throat, telling her she was about to die as he raped her, telling her he was going to choke the fucking life out of her. Her brain a scarlet cavity of screaming panic, his hands tightening like a noose around her neck, her survival had hung on her ability to pretend that she was already dead.

Later there had been days and weeks when she had felt as though she had in fact died, and was trapped in the body from which she felt entirely disconnected. The only way to protect herself, it had seemed, was to separate herself from her own flesh, to deny their connection. It had been a long time before she had felt able to take possession again.

He had been soft-spoken in court, meek, “yes, your honor,” “no, your honor,” a nondescript middle-aged white man, florid in complexion except for that white patch under his ear. His pale, washed-out eyes blinked too often, eyes that had been slits viewed through the holes in his mask.

What he had done to her shattered her view of her place in the world, ended her university career and drove her back to Masham. It forced her through a grueling court case in which the cross-examination had been almost as traumatic as the original attack, for his defense was that she had invited him into the stairwell for sex. Months after his gloved hands had reached out of the shadows and dragged her, gagging, into the cavity behind the stairs, she had not been able to stand physical contact, not even a gentle hug from a family member. He had polluted her first and only sexual relationship, so that she and Matthew had had to start again, with fear and guilt attending them every step of the way.

Robin pressed her arms down over her eyes as though she might obliterate it all from her mind by force. Now, of course, she knew that the young Matthew, whom she had considered a selfless paragon of kindness and understanding, had in fact been cavorting with a naked Sarah in his student house in Bath while Robin lay on her lonely bed in Masham for hours at a stretch, staring blankly at Destiny’s Child. Alone in the sumptuous quiet of Hazlitt’s, Robin contemplated for the first time the question of whether Matthew would have left her for Sarah, had she been happy and unharmed, or even whether she and Matthew might have grown naturally apart if she had completed her degree.

She lowered her arms and opened her eyes. They were dry today; she felt as though she had no tears left to weep. The pain of Matthew’s confession no longer pierced her. She felt it as a dull ache underlying the more urgent panic about the damage she feared she might have done to her work prospects. How could she have been so stupid as to tell Strike what had happened to her? Hadn’t she already learned what happened when she was honest?