He Said/She Said(98)
I let myself back into Ling’s house. Wet towels carpet the bathroom floor and I find myself picking up after Juno like I did when she was a baby. I need a shower and clean clothes but home no longer stands for sanctuary. I fuss some more, straightening the pictures on Ling’s walls and unloading the dishwasher until it occurs to me, as I plié inelegantly to retrieve the plates, that I’ve got an idiot-proof way of checking Beth’s whereabouts: her landline and Antonia’s programmed into my mobile. I call Beth from Ling’s house phone, withholding the number. It rings out three times and then there’s a digital beep as she picks up. I cut Beth off before she’s got to the first groggy syllable of hello, free to go home. Even with a direct train or clear motorways, she can’t get to me before Kit.
Chapter 53
KIT
11 August 1999
The eclipse itself was respite from Beth. I had a conviction, very shortly to be brutally disproved of course, that during the shadow all extraneous human activity and motivation was put into a kind of suspended animation. Even though we were clouded out, the shifting violet light on the horizon surrounded us, and with the sky restricted I felt it with my other senses in a way I never had before. And Laura was by my side, which made all the difference.
After fourth contact, we climbed down and picked our way back through the desolate car park, where vital-looking components of fairground equipment littered the ground. Back on my guard, I was too busy looking over my shoulder to notice the purse on the floor. But Laura saw it, and could no more walk past it than most people could an abandoned kitten. I took the opportunity to scour the trees around me for a pair of watching eyes, but there was no one.
Laura was gone for longer than I’d thought, and I remember the first stirrings of frustration. When I called her name there was no reply, and frustration turned to dread, or is that just something I’ve decided with hindsight? I re-trod her path into the caravan park, past an old bumper car and a sinister carousel horse.
The man I would later come to know as Jamie Balcombe walked backwards into me, treading hard on my toe. I could feel even in our brief collision his strength relative to mine. At my shout of protest, he leapt as though he’d been electrocuted. Laura stood, ashen, in the dark corridor between two trailers. What had he done to her?
‘There’s a girl.’ Laura cut into my nascent horror with a trembling voice. ‘I think she’s been . . .’ She gulped down air. ‘I think she’s been attacked.’
‘Is she hurt?’ I asked. Laura gave me a withering look. ‘You know, is she hurt in a first-aid sort of way?’
I don’t know why I asked. Neither of us knew first aid.
Of the woman, whose body was folded into a caravan doorway, I saw nothing but a bent and bloodied white knee. The poor, poor girl. It was appalling that anyone would assault a woman at any time, but baffling that it could happen during a total eclipse. It was like some throwback to the dark ages where people ranted and raved at the shadow. What weird timing, what a waste.
I think – and maybe this is hindsight again, because from this point on things happened so quickly that I only had time to react in retrospect – that I disliked Jamie instantly. When he told Laura to calm down, she looked to me for protection; she had never done that before.
‘If you haven’t done anything wrong, you haven’t got anything to worry about,’ I said. It was supposed to ease the rising tension but Jamie must have interpreted it as a threat. ‘Would you fucking say something so we can all get on with our lives?’ he snarled over Laura’s shoulder. He looked at me as if for solidarity. I only stared. I had a camera across my shoulder but it didn’t occur to me to use it; instead, I found myself trying to memorise him for the photofit, but he looked all wrong. The patchwork mugshots you saw on TV were always of square-jawed, broken-nosed thugs. It seemed inconceivable to me that the files would even contain the components of such a boyish jaw, such a smooth brow, which lowered when he realised he had no ally in me. ‘Fuck this,’ he said, and walked off, his pace slow but his gait far from casual. While his face was boyish, his build was not. His shoulders were twice the width of mine. I recognised the deceptively lean rower’s physique; you met them all the time in Oxford. Bodies slightly overdeveloped at the expense of their brains. Already out of my depth, I sank a little farther.
‘Kit, don’t let him get away!’ said Laura. Her hands waved wildly in the air. ‘Go after him!’
It was almost funny. What was I supposed to do? Get him in a headlock? Fight him? As I stalked him through the maze of vans and trailers, I tried not to think about the consequences of someone like me taking on some nutcase surging with testosterone. He would pulverise me. Then I pictured Laura, remembered the trembling bloodstained knee and the two images seemed to blend together. I found that imagining Laura as the victim lit a dark fire inside me, and that I could, after all, summon the strength I needed to give chase.
When I lost sight of Jamie in the camping area I was almost relieved, but then my peripheral vision was snagged by a lone figure dancing through the tents, picking his way almost comically over the interlocking guy ropes. My heart in my boots, I followed him. Naturally I went flying at the first attempt, a slapstick pratfall over a tripwire. By the time I was on my feet, Jamie was on the far side of the field, approaching the fence of trees. There was a small but dense crowd surging past the trees and it absorbed him instantly.