Beth felt like the world was splintering under her feet, one wrong step and it could fall apart. She wanted to get out of the room, away from all the damn staring eyes but first they had to take care of Joanne. Putting a hand on Megan’s shoulder, she said, ‘Listen, this isn’t the time for explanations or recriminations. We need to clean Joanne and get some dressings on those cuts, okay?’
Megan looked like she was going to argue but instead, she looked to the door. ‘I’ll go and get a bowl of hot water.’
A bowl of hot water? Beth wanted to snap that Joanne wasn’t bloody well pregnant but shut her mouth on the words and let Megan go. As soon as she heard her footsteps on the stairway, she reached a hand down to Joanne. ‘You think you can stand if I help you?’ She waited patiently for a hint that she was able to move and when she saw the almost imperceptible nod, took a bloody hand in hers, reached down to put a supportive arm around her back and with a grunt, helped Joanne to her feet. When she swayed, Beth was forced to compensate, shifting her weight, holding her body closer. A nauseating combination of smells wafted from Joanne. A noxious mix of blood and body odour that made Beth gag. She swallowed. ‘Let’s try to get into the bathroom, Jo,’ Beth said.
It took a couple of minutes to go the short distance. Beth crooned encouraging nonsensical words every time Joanne slumped, struggling to keep her balance as she led her forward. The bathroom door was open, Beth pushed her through and used her hip to manoeuvre her down onto the toilet seat. The shower, Beth was relieved to see, was modern and spacious with an inbuilt bench to sit on. She switched on the water, adjusted the temperature, left it running, and turned back to Joanne. Her breath caught; in the light of the bedroom, Joanne had looked shocking. In the glaringly bright whiteness of the bathroom, there was a nightmarish zombie-like quality to her blood-streaked body, the matted ropes of hair, the pale dirt-streaked face.
Beth gazed down at her bloodstained hands. Her life was already a nightmare before she came there. Now it was like she was living in a horror film. Leaning over her friend, she started the difficult job of gently removing the stained clothes. ‘Move your arm, Jo,’ she said patiently, moving it herself when there was no reaction. It was awkward, exhausting but, finally, it was done. ‘Okay, my friend, let’s get you into the shower.’
Putting an arm around Joanne’s naked waist, Beth took a deep breath and helped her to her feet. ‘Well done,’ she encouraged, pressing her forward and helping her to negotiate the step into the shower. The water quickly soaked both of them, bloodstained water hitting the glossy white tiles and filling the shower tray. Beth was struggling to keep her balance as she tried to persuade Joanne to lower herself to the bench when Megan came in, a bowl of hot water in her hands, looking pathetic.
‘Help me,’ Beth said sharply, afraid Joanne was going to slip and fall. Megan dropped the bowl of water into the sink, the water sloshing over the side to drench the floor even more. With Beth holding one arm, Megan took the other and, between them, they persuaded Joanne to sit.
Water running down her face and dripping from her hair, Beth spluttered, ‘Get some clean clothes for her while I shower the blood away, and see if you can find something to use as dressings. Tear some clothes if you have to. Hurry!’
Beth used half a bottle of shower gel to wash Joanne’s matted hair and filthy body, using a separate shower attachment to hose the debris away. Once most of the blood was washed away, she was pleased to see that the damage wasn’t as bad as she had first thought. Some of the lacerations on Joanne’s arms were deep and were still oozing blood. Without being sutured, they were going to leave some interesting scars that Joanne would find difficult to explain, but none were serious enough to be worried about.
Switching off the water, Beth grabbed one of the big white bath towels that lay across the towel rail and wrapped it around her friend’s shoulders. Grabbing a second, she rubbed her hair, and wrapped a towel around her head. ‘You’re going to be okay,’ Beth said repeatedly, soothingly, as she worked, wishing the dead look in Joanne’s eyes would go away.
Megan returned with her hands full. ‘I guessed pyjamas would be easiest,’ she said, handing her a soft pink cotton top and bottoms. ‘They’re stretchy and the arms are fairly wide. And I thought we could wrap these around her arms.’ She unfolded two crisp white pillowcases.
‘Good,’ Beth said with an approving nod. She put the pyjamas on the towel rail and, taking the first pillowcase, wrapped it around Joanne’s right arm, tucking the end in to keep it in place and then repeated with the other on the left. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best she could do.
It took several minutes to get Joanne dry and into the pyjamas, every action, every movement a struggle as she seemed unable to understand what they wanted her to do. The makeshift dressings around her arms came undone while they tried to get the pyjama top on and needed to be redone.
By the time they were finished, Beth and Megan were exhausted and their clothes bloodstained and wet. ‘Are there more pyjamas?’ Beth asked. When Megan nodded, she said, ‘Get a pair for both of us. We’ll get Joanne downstairs and then we can take turns to shower and change, okay?’
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Thirty minutes later, dressed in pyjamas, the three of them were sitting in the lounge, Beth and Megan in the single armchairs, Joanne in the middle of the sofa opposite.
Beth, shocked and exhausted, was unable to get her thoughts past what they’d witnessed. She turned to speak to Megan, but her stunned eyes and tightly shut mouth told Beth she was having the same struggle.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
When Beth saw the dead look in Joanne’s eyes replaced by desolation, she crossed the room to sit beside her. She checked her arms, pleased to see that most of the bleeding had stopped, only a slight ooze from some of the deeper cuts showing through the white cotton.
‘I’m going to check to see if there’s anything to eat in that sterile-looking kitchen of yours,’ Beth said, tucking the pillowcases in more securely. She wasn’t feeling hungry, but she guessed Joanne hadn’t eaten since before Capel-le-Ferne and hoped she might be tempted if food was prepared for them all.
There was nothing of any use in the fridge; some milk that made her grimace when she sniffed it, some limp lettuce and hairy tomatoes. She had more luck in a freezer stocked full with ready meals. Taking out three lasagnes, she looked at the instructions and placed them, criss-crossed, one on top of the other, into the microwave.
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Fifteen minutes later, Beth returned to the lounge with a tray holding the hot food, cutlery and three plates.
It looked as if neither Megan nor Joanne had moved or spoken since she left. She put the tray down on the coffee table and glanced from one to the other. ‘Before we talk about anything,’ she ordered, ‘we’re going to have something to eat, okay?’ She dished up the lasagne and handed it out, refusing to take no for an answer. ‘You need to eat,’ she said to Joanne, settling the empty tray on a pillow on her lap, putting the plate on top and a fork between her fingers. ‘Can you manage or would you like me to feed you?’
‘I can manage,’ Joanne said, proving the point by lifting a forkful of lasagne to her mouth.
But none of them ate much. They pushed the food around, an expectant silence lying heavily between them. Beth wasn’t surprised when Megan put hers down, barely touched, and fixed her eyes on Joanne. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What did you do?’
Beth paused with food halfway to her mouth. Joanne, who was making a feeble attempt to eat, dropped her fork and pushed the cushion off her lap, sending the tray tilting, the plate sliding and a splash of red sauce shooting across the white fabric of the sofa. It was the same shade of red as the blood that seeped through the pillowcases wrapped around Joanne’s arms. Beth gulped and her appetite, small as it was, vanished.
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Joanne kept her eyes averted as she spoke to Megan, her voice a dead monotone. ‘As I said, we’d all gone to Capel-le-Ferne in separate cars, because we were heading to different places afterwards.’ She waited a few seconds as if to let them all drift back in their heads to that day, twenty years before. ‘Beth and I were concerned about you driving home to Wales on your own after your… ordeal.’ She laughed, a short bitter sound. ‘Of course, now we know the ugly truth, you weren’t being brave at all, you were being deceitful.’
Joanne’s eyes lost focus as she went back to that night, unable to understand why neither she nor Beth had seen the lie. She shifted her gaze to where Megan was sitting, transfixed, tears rolling down her cheeks; she would have thought her incapable of such deception. But she knew better now. She and Beth had been spectacularly fooled. Joanne spoke again in the same slow monotone. ‘You didn’t want to tell the police and you made us promise not to.’ Turning her head slowly, she fixed Megan with a piercing look. ‘But I couldn’t let it go. I had to make sure he was punished.’
What little colour had been in Megan’s cheeks leeched away.
‘I could do with a drink,’ Joanne said to Beth, tilting her head to a small cupboard under the window. ‘You’ll find some brandy in there, would you mind?’ She waited while Beth found the bottle and three shot glasses, filled them and handed them around. She lifted the glass with difficulty and took a mouthful, coughing as the alcohol hit the back of her throat. ‘I didn’t go home that morning as I’d planned to do,’ she continued then. ‘Instead, I waited in my car until the pub opened and asked the barman where Matt Peters lived.’ She raised her glass to take another sip. ‘I made up some ridiculous story about having promised to give him something, I needn’t have bothered, the barman told me where he lived without the slightest interest.
‘He wasn’t there, of course, but it was his wife I’d wanted to see, not him. The woman who opened the door was a skinny plain-looking woman with kind eyes and a welcoming smile. I told her I had something important to tell her and persuaded her to let me in. Children’s voices were coming from a room at the back of the house. I remember being relieved that she didn’t bring me into the same room. Instead, she opened the door into a small stuffy sitting room that looked as if it were seldom used and invited me to sit.
‘And there, in that twee over-furnished room, I told her exactly what her lovely husband had done; how he’d raped my friend and left her traumatised. I was so determined to make him pay, that I embellished the story and told her about all of the disgusting perverted things he’d made you do.’ Joanne’s smile was cruel. ‘She didn’t believe me at first, you know, but when I told her to check with the bar staff who would swear they saw you leaving with him, I could see doubt flicker in her eyes.’ Joanne stopped speaking for a moment, the silence only broken by the sound of Megan’s sobs.
‘I felt sorry for her,’ Joanne said. ‘Sorry for any woman who had been so badly fooled. I told her you didn’t want to go to the police but that I wanted to make sure she knew what a rotten filthy bastard she was married to. By the time I was finished, she was sobbing.’ There was ice in Joanne’s eyes when she glanced at Megan. Her voice scathing, she added, ‘Much in the way you are now.’
‘Enough!’ Beth said. ‘Stop it, Joanne. She’s paid for her mistake.’
Joanne’s eyes bored into Beth’s. ‘You think so, do you? But then, I haven’t finished my story, have I?’ She drained the glass and held it out for more, waiting until Beth poured before continuing. ‘I organised to have the local Capel-le-Ferne newspaper sent to me. It’s online now but it wasn’t back then. I was convinced, you see, that a man who would rape so violently would do so again. When he did, when he was arrested for it, I was going to cut out the news story and send it to you, Megan, so you could finally, as I thought, get closure. Instead, a week later, what I saw was one of those clippings upstairs. Local Man Missing. I thought it was a good photo of him, he seemed so full of life.’
This time the silence lasted several minutes. Megan had stopped sobbing and there was no sound except their heavy breathing.
‘It must have been a photograph that his wife particularly liked because they used it again in the next article, several weeks later. It was the report of his body having washed up on the shore.’ Joanne swallowed a mouthful of brandy, the alcohol giving her strength to go on when all she wanted to do was sleep. ‘The coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure. His wife explained how he loved to walk the cliff path and must have slipped.’ Joanne took a deep breath. ‘But I knew… I knew… he’d killed himself because I’d told his wife about the rape. And I was glad!’ Joanne’s voice rose and she looked at Megan with a glint in her eyes. ‘Glad he was dead.
‘Everything I’ve done since, has been built on what I believed happened to you in Capel-le-Ferne, do you know that?’ Joanne’s smile faded as her lips narrowed and her eyes turned hard. ‘Neither of you know what I really do for a living. I felt so sorry for his wife that day, not guilty for telling her, you understand, but sorry that she’d been fooled by her bastard rapist husband and I swore no man was ever going to treat me that way. Some men use sex as a power trip. I decided I could do that too. And I’ve done it very lucratively ever since.’
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Beth squeezed her eyes shut and took a noisy breath between gritted teeth. She should have known, and perhaps somewhere, she had. That business website of Joanne’s, for instance, hadn’t she always thought it looked a little racy and more than a little ambiguous. Megan, she could tell, was oblivious, blank eyes looking from one to the other as she tried to understand. Feeling suddenly sorry for her, Beth took pity and said, ‘I think what Joanne is trying to tell us is that she works as an escort.’
Megan still looked puzzled.
‘I’m a hooker,’ Joanne said bluntly, ‘a prostitute, if you prefer that term. I sell my body for money.’