The Girl I Used to Be(63)

Her head shot up. “What?”

“Or that he took my knickers home with him?”

She looked horrified.

“I woke up in different underwear than the ones I wore to bed,” I said. “The underwear I was wearing that night had gone.”

“Gone?”

“He sent them to my home address a few days ago.”

I could see her mind racing, trying to make sense of it all.

“I don’t remember anything after I got back to my hotel room.” And then it dawned on me. Finally. What an idiot I’d been. “He drugged me, didn’t he?”





FORTY-SEVEN


    GEMMA


“NO,” SAID RACHEL. “No. You were drunk. Really, really drunk. I saw you, don’t forget. You nearly fell over when you got out of the lift at the hotel.”

It was as though she wasn’t there. “He must have drugged me,” I said. “I wondered why I couldn’t remember anything.”

“Gemma, you walked up to your hotel room all right. You weren’t drugged.” Her voice was desperate. “You drank two bottles of wine!”

“No, I didn’t! We ordered two bottles, but I didn’t drink all that. I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t drink much, Rachel. I haven’t drunk that much for years.” I couldn’t look at her. “The next morning I felt awful. And yes, I know I would have felt bad just from the alcohol. I would have expected a hangover. But I’ve never drunk so much that I couldn’t remember what I’d done the night before. Never.”

“Except when you were eighteen,” she said spitefully. “You did that night.”

“Do you really think I can’t remember what happened that night?”

She flushed.

“But the night I was in London . . . I can’t remember anything after I left the restaurant. I paid the bill, I remember that. David said his room was on the tenth floor. We went up in the lift and I nearly fell over getting out. And I remember when I got to my hotel room he kissed me and I turned away and I saw someone there.” I paused, remembering. “How did I not know that was you?” I knew the answer, though. I was completely out of it.

“You were drunk,” she said.

“I’ve told you; I don’t drink like that. Or I haven’t since my early twenties, anyway. I had a few years after . . . after I left school when I hated myself. I drank then, just to forget. But now, now I don’t see the point. And I can’t remember any of it. It’s not as though I remember going into my room and brushing my teeth or anything like that. I can’t remember a single thing until I woke up the next morning.”

We sat quietly. I was trying to remember what had happened that night; a glance at Rachel told me that she was wondering the same thing.

“So when did you get the photos?” she asked. “The other ones.” She grimaced. “Not the one through the post.”

I stood up and went to the door to fetch my bag. Inside was my mobile and I sat back down next to Rachel and opened my e-mails.

“Last Saturday. Here’s the e-mail with the voyeur address. I’ll open the link.”

She quickly shook her head. “No.”

I ignored her. “You need to know what you’re dealing with.”

I opened the link and showed it to her. She scrolled down past video stills of women in the shower, on the London tube, at work. She paused at a photo of a woman who could be seen through the opaque glass of her bathroom window and closed the screen, a look of disgust on her face.

“I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.”

I didn’t know anything anymore.

She looked down at the e-mail address that had been used to send the link. “I don’t recognize this.”

“I wrote back,” I said. “It bounced. It must have been set up just to send that. And there’s another, too, from a different address.” I opened the e-mail containing the timer gif and showed her. The timer had stopped at 00:00:00.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What is it?”

“It was a timer.”

She looked startled. “What do you mean?”

“It was ticking when I opened the e-mail. It was counting down to midnight.”

Realization dawned on her. “What happened at midnight?” she whispered.

“I didn’t stay to find out,” I said. “It was the night before Joe and Rory came back and I was on my own in the house. I thought someone was going to break in. I went to a hotel.”

She winced. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

“Was he with you that night?”

“He’s usually with me. Which night?”

“Last Tuesday.”

She nodded. “He was at home with me.”

“Were you awake at midnight? Did he do anything? Was he using his phone or iPad or something?”

She looked away. “No. He wasn’t doing anything.”

One glance at her was all it took to know exactly what he was doing at midnight. I shuddered at the thought of him having sex with her while he knew I was terrified something was about to happen to me. He was getting a kick out of this.

“So you met David again after your mum died?”