34

I had no idea where I was or what had happened to me when awareness came back to me, peeling away the darkness that was like a lead blanket weighing me down. I was alone and I was lying face down on a hard surface, but I couldn’t make sense of what I was able to see out of the one eye that was working. This was not my bedroom, nor any bedroom I had ever slept in before. I stared at the corner of the room, which stubbornly refused to turn into something I might have expected to see. Perhaps I was still dreaming, I thought, and made to sit up. Even before the pain shrilled through me, catching me in a hundred places with hooks as sharp as talons, I knew it was a mistake.

Maybe I would stay where I was for a while.

The second time I tried to move, I was more cautious. Slowly, I began to raise my head. That wasn’t going to be possible, I registered after trying for a few seconds, and not because my muscles were complaining: I was physically stuck. I slid one hand towards my head, ignoring the fact that my fingers felt heavy and swollen and didn’t seem to want to bend. After a few minutes of delicate exploration, I worked out that my hair was glued to the floor and that I needed to free myself before I could sit upright. I picked at it, freeing it one strand at a time, my eyes closed against the dim light that filled the room. I was lying on the living room floor, I finally concluded, and I was hurt. That was as far as I got. The rest of the facts were standing outside a door I slammed in my mind because I wasn’t ready to know them.

Eventually I’d unpicked enough hair to be able to lever myself up. Unthinking, I tried to put some weight on my left elbow to support myself and lost the breath from my body at the pain. Worse than the discomfort was the horrifying sensation that something was adrift further up, something integral. Wary exploration produced a flare of agony as I probed my collarbone: broken, I guessed, and therefore not doing the job of holding my shoulder in place or letting my arm be of any use. My ribs sang their own song of pain, and everywhere there were bruises. I sat staring stupidly at the dried blood that had soaked into the carpet, at the bruising under the skin all the way down the outside of my right thigh, at the red and swollen fingers that had possibly been stamped on … and I hadn’t even seen my face yet, to find out where the blood had come from, but it felt taut, the skin stretched. Some injury or other had swollen to seal one eye closed completely. I sniffed, trying to clear my nose. No joy.

Well, I could breathe through my mouth. And eventually, when I was able, I would get to my feet, and begin the process of calling for help. I would need to go to hospital, I thought, to get checked out.

I would have to tell them what had happened to me.

I closed my one working eye and allowed myself to feel utterly dreadful for a little while.

Prosaically, what got me off the floor was that I needed the loo and I wanted to cling on to whatever dignity I still possessed, so I had to get to the bathroom. I puzzled over what that simple need meant as a distraction while I gathered myself for the titanic effort to get to my feet: I must have been unconscious for a few hours. I wasn’t wearing a watch and the blinds were all down in the living room, but it was still light outside. I was quite glad of the dimness as I levered myself up and found a friendly wall to lean against while the room stopped spinning. Hobbling the short distance to the bathroom was an awkward, gruelling struggle, and I got through it by saying as many rude words as I could remember, and by propping myself up on the wall. Later I’d realise I had left a long dragging smear of tacky blood behind me as I moved, but at the time I was oblivious.

I waited until after I’d used the loo to look at myself in the mirror, and when I did I wished I hadn’t. My hair was matted from a deep, jagged cut on my hairline that had bled spectacularly, coating the side of my face and my ear. I had a black eye, as I’d anticipated, but the cheekbone below it was wildly blown out, the skin shiny. My nose was swollen and the nostrils were black with dried blood. Fuzzily, I tried to wipe the worst of it away, then gave up. The sundress had had it: blood stained the front of it and one shoulder strap had been ripped away. I undid the buttons down the front and let it fall at my feet. I would never wear that dress again, I thought, and felt utterly bereft because I was not the person I had been before, when I put it on, when I sang for the fun of summer and being happy.

Small triumphs: I had done laundry that morning so there were clean yoga trousers to step into and a loose T-shirt that I managed to get on, supporting my left elbow to make up for the jangling discomfort from my collarbone. Getting my arm through the sleeve required another round of swearing, but I felt marginally better once I was dressed. I was operating a long way below my normal cognitive level, but I could manage a phone call to the ambulance service, I thought, and to remember my address, and there was every chance I could make it down to the front door to open it for the paramedics so no one would have to put the door in.

My first problem: the last time I’d seen my mobile it had been in five or six pieces. My second problem: when I went looking for them in the living room, they were gone.

So was the landline, and the router for the WIFI.

So was my work phone.

And so was my radio, along with all of the personal protective equipment I carried on duty.

I spent far too long creeping around the flat, searching, losing track of what I was even looking for. I was forgetting what I’d done with them, I convinced myself, and then, as the truth seeped into my mind, I refused to think about what it might mean. It was the third or fourth time I hunted through the flat that I made myself face up to the fact that he had taken all of my means of communicating with the outside world.

I would have to leave, I thought, and started searching for my keys, and then for the spare keys, and then, with rising panic, for a key to the back door. I had to be mistaken, I told myself, and took a long, shuffling, unsteady trip down the steep stairs to the hall, where I turned the latch and absolutely failed to open the door.

It was locked, from the outside.

I couldn’t get out.

I could only wait until he came back.

I’d like to say that sobbing in the dimly lit, poky hall behind a door I couldn’t open was the worst I felt on that endless day, but it wouldn’t be true. When I eventually dragged myself back up the stairs I forced myself to return to the living room, to pull up the blinds. I was in the middle of London, not walled up in a prison cell. I was resourceful and determined and OK, yes, everything was taking a long time and I couldn’t seem to coordinate my movements properly and I was swinging between exhaustion and terror, but I could still call for help the old-fashioned way.

Except that when I went to open the blinds, I found he had nailed them down, driving small tacks through the material to hold them in place, and no matter what I did I couldn’t manage to open the window. I wasn’t strong or coordinated enough to drag the blinds down off the wall, or rip them free. With the blinds secured as they were, I couldn’t even break the window glass.

It’s a mark of how utterly destroyed I was that at this point I simply gave up. Helplessness gutted me in a way that pain could not. I had been out-thought, out-manoeuvred, out-done. I hadn’t been able to fight him when he hit me, despite all of my training, because he had caught me off guard. I had simply submitted to the punches and kicks, hoping it would end, preferably before I died. Now, when he wasn’t even there, I was still in his power. I wasn’t able to leave, or call for help. I was cut off from anyone who might be able to help me. By chance he had all the advantages, from the fact that the neighbours were away to the two clear days off Una Burt had allowed me. No one would be looking for me until Tuesday morning at the very earliest. It was Sunday now, drifting towards evening I guessed, given the warmth and angle of the light that glowed through the blinds. That left me a whole day and two nights to survive.

That gave him a whole day and two nights to come back.

I couldn’t begin to guess what he had been planning to do when he locked me in, but I had every reason to think he intended to finish what he’d started.