His hand left her. She was half aware of another, different movement. Then the stick fell across her back breathtakingly sharp, sending a shooting pain through her body. As she turned to defend herself he hit her again, blows, she now saw, from a pliant bamboo cane. She was screaming in pain as the first blow struck her across the face and she fell forward on to the bed. Too weak to speak she lay there across the crumpled red silk coverlet as Quatch poured cognac. Breathing heavily he put the bottle down on the floor and straightened up, watching her with his head cocked to one side.
Her mind was still working, however uncertainly. She was chained but she had seen that the blows, the very pain she suffered, was for him an absorbing sexual experience. And a man sexually absorbed was off his guard.
‘I could teach you many things,’ he said. ‘But it would take time I no longer have.’ She watched him while he lifted his glass and drank the cognac. ‘You must beg,’ he said. ‘Plead with me.’ He paused, his lips formed thoughtfully in a round. ‘Perhaps you are more wilful than Bernadette,’ he mused. ‘I would like to think so.’
She moved, taking the weight off her left arm, her free arm.
‘Bernadette,’ he said, like a schoolmaster reviewing a former student, ‘was not naturally submissive. But she grew, before long, to be appreciative of the things I taught her.’
A moment’s inattention on his part would enable her to reach the only weapon available to her, the heavy, almost full bottle of cognac. She moved, her knee protruding through the torn pyjamas. Her free hand stole towards the bottle. He watched, savouring the movement of her legs. She swung the bottle. It bounced off his shoulder and rolled back towards her.
With a grunt of surprise, he had fallen to his knee, his head hanging forward within range of another blow. She swung again, crashing the bottle against the side of his head. He screamed, half rose and fell forward, face down upon the coverlet beside her.
Nan Luc twisted her body to look down at him. He was groaning, barely conscious. The back of his head, where the black hair thinned across the skull, was at her mercy. Panic thoughts surged through her mind. One more blow, she knew, could kill him, could deliver her from this horror. Trembling madly she lifted the bottle, hesitated, lifted it again. One more blow to kill a man. To kill a man like Quatch.
Exhaustion sapped her resolve, her hatred. Her arm fell. She watched Quatch roll clumsily away from her as her aching hand released the bottle.
At the end of the bed he crouched, his hand to the side of his head. Breath soughed from his rounded mouth, sour enough to reach her across the foot or two that separated their faces. Pushing himself to his feet he stumbled to a chair and lowered himself into it to sit, his small, glittering eyes never leaving her.
He beat her. Rested, and beat her again. Tore off the last shreds of her clothes and beat her again.
Half blind with pain she lay crouched on the bed in a foetal position until the blows finally stopped. She had begged him and pleaded with him and screamed in pain. Now she lay back looking up at him and their eyes locked together. The thought that he might kill her hung between them.
He spoke and the words meant nothing to her as she faded in and out of the most compelling need to escape into sleep. Hours or minutes fused. Minutes or hours. Sometime, as her eyes opened, she was aware that he was crouched over her, pushing her legs apart, grunting like an animal.
His face was just inches away, sweat pouring from his forehead, the breath hissing through his broken teeth, the eyes red with madness. Somewhere in the room she could hear her own voice, pleading…
He was reaching for something now, something behind her head, fumbling past her shoulder as he thrashed from side to side on her body. When his hand rose it rose with the glint of steel. In the soft lighting from the lamps, the blade glowed yellow.
Paralysed, as he pushed inside her, she watched the angled wrist and the yellow glowing blade. Then his exultant scream filled her consciousness, and she saw, without understanding, the spurt of blood and the bloody hand stabbing and stabbing the blade into his own neck.
Through the night, from every moment’s sleep she woke in terror as blood dripped and burbled from his body across her shoulders and face. Through the night she pushed and struggled to roll him off her, his inert weight a deathlock, an embrace she fought to break; until at last his body rolled from her, thudding to the floor on the far side of the bed.
Standing now, straining on the chain attached to her wrist she could see no more than his crooked arm and bloodied hand. Her legs ached and trembled. She looked at the mound of sheeting and twisted blankets on the bed, soaked and stained black-red to almost pink. She wondered how two bodies could have so much blood.
On the floor beside the bed, the bamboo cane lay. With it she reached out to where Quatch’s jacket was draped across a chair. Hooking the coat through the air until it fell on the bed, she searched the pockets until she found a slim folded wallet of keys. Awkwardly she began to try them on the lock of the metal cuff that clasped her wrist. At the third or fourth key the lever turned and the cuff fell away.
Without thinking, almost as if it were now the most important thing in her life she went to the desk in the salon. Using the wallet of keys she opened the centre drawer. The passport lay on top of a pile of papers. For this soft pale cover with its red cross she had passed the night.
She found she alternated between surges of almost manic energy and almost complete exhaustion. Each time she forced herself to move she became aware of a dry sobbing deep in her chest, far from tears. Again the image in the mirror shocked her. She knew that unless she washed off his blood, the blood of both of them, she was in danger of complete collapse. The thought steadied her. She walked carefully, one foot placed in front of the other, into the bathroom.
She had showered the blood from her and wrapped herself in a thick bath towel when the knock came at the door. She looked at herself slowly in the long mirror as her grandmother’s voice called her from outside. She looked, she thought, almost unharmed by the violence of the night. Most of the stripes from the cane were now covered by the towel. Her face was pale and the jaw from some angles, swollen. Her hands too were lacerated as she had tried to defend herself from the cane.
She felt a century older. For a few moments she stood utterly still, drawing deep breaths while the voice of Bernadette pleaded outside. Then she walked slowly to the door and opened it.
Her grandmother’s face smiled up at her eagerly. ‘Did you get it?’
Nan Luc’s hand rose to hit her, but she had no strength to spare. She opened wider the door and gestured to where she had left the passport. With a squeal of pleasure Bernadette crossed the room and snatched it up. Pressing it to her lips, she slid it into the waistband of her black peasant dress and turned to her granddaughter. ‘He’s not still here, is he?’ she said, dropping her voice.
Nan gestured to the open bedroom door. ‘No need to whisper. He can’t hear you,’ she said.
‘He’s gone? Good. Monsieur Quatch can keep ahead of any police force.’
She stopped. Then came forward and laid her hand on Nan’s arm. ‘Was it perhaps not too bad, cherie?’
‘Not too bad,’ Nan Luc said, throwing off her grandmother’s hand.
Bernadette’s excitement blinded her to the disgust in Nan’s gesture. ‘I know he’s not an… easy man,’ she smiled brightly. ‘No, not an easy man. Your cheek’s a little swollen I see.’ Nan Luc turned away. ‘What you did for me last night, cherie, will never be forgotten. However far away…’