My guardian angel’s name, I later found out, was Mr Martindale. I would be forever grateful that he’d been brave enough to shout, rather than just going off to call the police and not saying anything, because I’d have been dead if he’d done the latter. The strike of the knife had already severed several major veins in my hand; if I hadn’t got out then, I’d have bled to death.
Mr Martindale had heard the thuds and my muffled moans from the interior of the van as he took his corgi out for its middle-of-the-night constitutional. They were both elderly and insomniac. A war hero, even aged eighty-four he wasn’t afraid of confrontation, of speaking out when something was wrong. And it was clear that something was very wrong.
I would never forget the sound of Mr. Martindale’s voice, the firm, ‘Hello? Anyone still in there?’ to which I heaved and groaned and made whatever noise I could through my gaffer-tape gag, even though stars were exploding in my vision and black was creeping across my brain as I struggled to stay conscious. The pain in my body where the man had kicked me was nothing compared to the volcanic new agony of the knife piercing through my bones and sinews.
Mr Martindale shoved the shutter higher and shone his torch inside the van. I remembered his gasp at the slick crimson puddle illuminated in the beam, and the gentlemanly but heartfelt imprecation that he uttered when he saw me, gagged and chained by the ankle to a metal ring bolted into the side of the van, the knife still sticking through my hand. The bastard had plunged it in with such force that the tip was showing through my palm. I had neither strength nor stomach to try to pull it out, or to think about the reality that if my hand hadn’t been in the way, the knife would instead be residing in my jugular, or my eye, or my heart…
I was too far gone to think about anything by then. Fading fast, I watched two Mr Martindales heave themselves stiffly up over the lip of the van, valiantly ignore the crimson puddle, and rush towards me in duplicate, before slipping in my blood and ricocheting off the van’s other side like a grim sort of comedy double-act. Double-vision act…
‘Oh my dear girl,’ they were both saying, tears of shock and panic in their voices. ‘What is your name? Don’t go to sleep! There’s a phone-box on the corner, I’ll call for help then come straight back, I promise…’
I didn’t want him to leave, even though he was going for help. I was so terrified that the man was going to come back and kill us both. But I must have passed out then, because I didn’t know anything else until I woke up in St Thomas’ Hospital.
Several days later, Mr Martindale asked permission to visit me, and I agreed. He was the only visitor I’d had the whole five days I was an inpatient. I missed Pete more than I had at any point over the decade we’d been estranged. But I just couldn’t bring myself to ring him; not yet. I was too afraid he’d reject me.
Mr Martindale turned up with an African violet in a little pot and a box of chocolates, those horrible sickly seashell ones I couldn’t stand. His kind eyes and compassionate tones were the things that made me lose it and break down, and I sobbed in his arms for the whole duration of his visit. He didn’t even seem to mind that I left snail-trails of mucus all over his Fair Isle tank top. It smelled of potpourri and tobacco – exactly as my dad would have smelled if he’d still been alive. When I had that thought, I howled so much that the policewoman who sat outside my door came in, thinking that Mr Martindale had done something awful. She saw him patting me tentatively on my hospital gown-clad back with his veined and shaky hand, and withdrew again tactfully.
Reece Martindale was my undoing and simultaneously my future strength, the only one who kept me going. The awareness that I owed my life to someone was an overwhelming and inexplicable sensation. All I knew was that every time the horror revisited me, followed by the terror that my intruder would one day find me again, I saw Mr Martindale’s face swim into my mind, and his steady, rheumy eyes calmed me. I really did think he was an angel. What, after all, were the chances of him happening across me in the van, in that remote part of Clapham Common – for that was where it turned out the man had taken me – at 4.00 a.m.?
Mr Martindale died a few months later. Heart attack. I never did find out what happened to his corgi. I still think about that dog occasionally. I should have offered to take it in. It was a nice dog, like he was a nice man.
When I was well enough, I moved out of London, to a tiny thatched holiday cottage in Minstead, for no other reason than it was a small village where nobody knew me. I didn’t leave the house for weeks.
Several months later I sold my London place, for tens of thousands less than the market value. I lied to the band, telling them I’d had enough of fame and had emigrated to New Zealand to start a new life.
Iain McKinnon was the only one who knew about the attack – the police had arrested and interviewed him about his threats that night. He had a solid alibi though – a woman in the pub he’d picked up and taken home that night after I refused his offer. He was released, after being sworn to secrecy. It behoved him to keep quiet about it, because he and I both knew he’d get the sack if it came out he’d tried to blackmail me.
The police never managed to track down my abductor, despite many hours of interviews, trying to ascertain who might hate me enough to orchestrate such an attack. They liaised with their Kansas City counterparts, who went to interview an apparently very indignant Professor Samantha Applebaum in her office at the University of Kansas. She hotly and vociferously denied ever writing a letter demanding hush money from Big World Records in exchange for keeping her secrets about me safe, and had no idea who else even knew about our relationship, apart from Pete and the boys in the band.
‘Preposterous!’ was, reportedly, her reaction, and the police believed her. The letter had a UK postmark on it, and Samantha had been teaching in Kansas at the time it was sent. ‘After all,’ she pointed out, ‘if I wanted to make money in a sordid way, I’d have sold my story to the British tabloids instead, wouldn’t I? I have a good job and, more importantly, a good reputation. I would never risk that.’
Part of me hoped that this might prompt her to try and get in contact with me, perhaps apologise for her desertion – but only a small part. I was in too much of a state to care about that anymore.
The detectives went over and over every detail of the attack, but in the end all they could conclude was that my assailant was a mentally ill person with an imaginary grudge – a spurned fan, perhaps. Possibly Green-Paint Guy, but there was nothing to link them, apart from a similar build. None of us had a clue who might have written that letter, if it wasn’t Samantha. I half suspected Iain himself. Perhaps he had somehow managed to uncover Samantha’s name and the details of our love affair – perhaps one of the band had let it slip in conversation, but I very much doubted it. They weren’t the sort for idle gossip, and they didn’t like The Pointless I much either.
I had trauma counselling, and we managed to keep it out of the papers. It wasn’t that difficult in the end, because of the police’s failure to catch the perpetrator. They made appeals, of course, for witnesses to the ‘serious kidnap and torture of an unnamed female victim’, but nobody apart from my rescuer had seen anything; not the man’s van, not his arrival or departure from my house, nor his escape over Clapham Common. CCTV picked up the van in a couple of places en route, and detectives were able to confirm that it had been stolen from a scrapyard in Falmouth three days earlier, but that was about as far as they got. CID left the case open and, off the record, admitted to me that it had probably been a ‘random nutter’.
Finally, a few months after I moved to Minstead, I plucked up the courage to do something I wished I’d done years before: I got hold of Pete’s phone number. I rang our old next-door neighbour in Salisbury, who confirmed that Pete had moved to London and that she had a number for him.
Another week later, I dialled it, my heart pounding in my chest, the fresh scar on my hand throbbing.
‘Hello?’
I started crying at the sound of his voice. ‘Pete, it’s me … I’m so, so sorry, for everything. I’ve been a selfish bitch. Please forgive me?’
‘Of course,’ was all he said, a tremor in his own voice. ‘I’ve missed you so much, Mez.’