“Me?” He looked genuinely astonished. I saw the anger building in the bunching of his shoulders. “OK, let’s backtrack for a moment here, shall we?” he said tightly. “When I took up that last posting everything was fine, yeah? I was out of touch for what, three weeks? Then I try to contact you and I’m told you’re on leave. Permanently on leave. It went on for months. I even rang your damned parents, not that I expected them to be helpful. And what was I told? Charlotte doesn’t want to speak to you again. Ever.” The bitterness welled up in his words, overflowed. “What the hell was I supposed to think?”
I wanted to stop him going on. To tell him he’d been wrong. To reach out to him, but I couldn’t seem to move. He threw me a single, dark unfathomable look, then went on.
“So, next thing I know I’m being hauled into the local company commander’s office and told I’m up on a charge for screwing one of my trainees. They told me you had failed the course, but when they’d RTU’d you, you’d started screaming about slapping them with a suit for sexual harassment against me, if not actual rape. I was told there’d been a court martial, and you were out, but not before you’d brought me down with you.”
“I didn’t,” I whispered, stricken. “Sean, I swear that’s not how it happened.”
“So, what did?” he threw back.
I swallowed, unwilling to tell him what had really gone on that dark, and miserable night. I opted for half-truth instead, and hoped that would be enough. “I-I was attacked,” I said at last, “the week after you left. A group of them jumped me and I was pretty badly beat up. That’s why I was on leave.”
That much at least was true. The secret of a believable lie was to stick as closely as possible to reality. There was less opportunity to stumble.
Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay. The names went round and round again. I shut them out.
“There was a court martial,” I went on, “but it went against me. They said I’d provoked them, made it out to be my fault. I tried to get hold of you, to speak up for me as one of my instructors, nothing more than that, but you never returned any of my calls. So,” I shrugged my shoulders, “I was out.”
“I never got any messages. They kept me moving around a lot, out of regular contact. I never knew you’d called me.” He shook his head, then looked up at me intensely. “And you let it rest there?” he demanded. “After what they did to you?”
For a moment my breath stopped, fearing he’d tumbled to it. Then I saw his eyes shift to my throat, understanding dawning, laced with compassion. I knew I should have told him he was jumping to the wrong conclusions about that, but I was too much of a coward.
“No, I didn’t. I wish I had.” The kettle boiled and clicked off, giving me the chance to turn away, fuss with pouring boiling water into the mugs, stirring them. “I went for a civil action against them. That was when it all came out about us. I don’t know who told them, but it certainly wasn’t me.”
“You never told anyone?” he demanded. “What about those two other girls on the course? What were their names? Woolley and Lewis. You all seemed to get on OK. You’re sure you never had any heart-to-heart girlie chats with them?”
I shook my head, not insulted by the question. “We were never that close, so yes, I’m sure,” I said.
In fact, Woolley, Lewis and I had never really liked each other. We knew we were in the minority, as women training for the job we hoped to do, and that we had to stick together. But, at the same time the three of us were in direct competition with each other. I knew without undue conceit that I’d been a better soldier. They knew it too, and they hadn’t liked me for it.
Woolley in particular had been struggling to keep up. She was supposed to speak up in my favour at the trial, but her carefully neutral testimony about my general behaviour had a damning effect. Afterwards, she’d left the courtroom without talking to me, unable even to meet my eyes.
I learned later that although Lewis failed to complete the course, Woolley passed it and went on to active service. In my more bitter moments I wondered if that was her reward for sinking me.
“However it came out about us,” I said, “I lost the case because of it. I went from model soldier to—” I broke off, aware of how close I’d come to letting too much slip. “Well, I’m sure you can guess.”
“That’s why you disappeared, changed your name?”
I nodded. In the army I’d been Foxcroft. In an effort to escape the hounding of the press afterwards, I’d shortened it to Fox. It had seemed like a good way to disappear, and it had worked.
“I did try to find you, you know, but I kept coming up empty. When I realised it was you the other night I’ve had my people working round the clock to find out where you were. I couldn’t believe it when they told me about this place. I never dreamed you’d ended up so close to home.”
I gave him a rueful smile. “If I’d known how close to your home it was, I probably would have gone somewhere else,” I admitted, holding his coffee out to him.
He stepped forwards, eyes fired. I froze while he peeled the mug out of my nerveless fingers and plonked it back on the worktop, grabbing hold of my upper arms. “I didn’t betray you, Charlie,” he said fiercely. “You have to believe that.”
“I-I do,” I said unsteadily, mildly surprised to discover that it was the truth. “I didn’t, for a long time, but I do now. They screwed us both over, didn’t they Sean? Madeleine told me they did their damnedest to get you killed afterwards.”
“Yeah, well,” he relaxed his fingers, took a breath, “it wasn’t the easiest of times, but I survived.” He picked up his coffee mug with a steady hand, took a sip and regarded me over the rim. “It seems we both have that knack.”
Seventeen
I lurched awake the next morning from a night’s sleep fractured by dreams of anger and betrayal, pain and death. I sat up abruptly on a raft of tangled bedclothes, and shivered at the rapid cooling effect of the sweat on my goosebumped skin.
It was a long time since I’d been hit by the nightmares, to the point where I even thought they’d gone away completely. I should have known my luck wasn’t that good.
They always followed the same pattern. I went through the rape again and again, unable to change a word of the dialogue, or a moment of the action. This time around events took place in a public arena, and they’d sold tickets. My parents were in the front row, eating popcorn and cracking jokes with my commanding officer. Woolley and Lewis were chatting together a couple of rows further back.
I could no longer clearly remember the faces of the four men who’d attacked me. They’d faded into that area of the subconscious that hides trauma from your waking mind. I had a hazy knowledge that Morton was short and wiry, and Clay had been built like a Challenger tank, but beyond that, they all blurred into one.
This time, though, there had been an unpleasant variation to the dream. This time, the quartet all had the same, familiar face.
Sean’s face.
I swung my legs over the side of the soft mattress, and stayed there for a while, gripping the edge, head bent, trying to catch my breath. When my heartbeat had slowed to something approaching a normal level, I looked up slowly, and found myself staring into my own haunted face in the mirror on Pauline’s wardrobe door.
I looked terrible. My eyes were sunk into shadowed sockets, my hair lank, and my skin had the waxy tinge of long-term sickness. I tried a smile, but somewhere along the line my nerves fumbled the message and it warped into a grimace.