Someone Out There

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Laura Maxwell, you are an evil bitch. You destroy lives. You feed off men’s misery – you take their daughters away from them. Understand how much I hate you. I think about it all the time, how to put a stop to you, how to settle the score. I’m not planning on settling in court. I have other plans for a final settlement. Better watch out.’

It was not the first time in her career that Laura had been called a bitch and threatened; in fact, she’d been called a lot worse and had had to grow a tough skin over the years. Really, she thought, the posting should not have rattled her as much as it did. But the last twenty-four hours had left her jittery.

Laura watched Joe as he read the message; saw his expression change to one of outrage. They’d been together for five years now but she never got tired of looking at him. He was distractingly handsome; tall and muscular, without being too beefy, he had thick black hair and a broad smile that brought dimples to his cheeks. His eyes, framed with long lashes, were blue and dazzling.

‘Charming. Any idea who sent it?’ he said.

‘I’m wondering if it could be this guy Harry Pelham. I’m representing his wife and he’s been sending her death threats. Maybe he’s lashing out at me too.’

They were sitting on the sofa after dinner, cosy in front of the TV, half watching a programme about the hotel industry. Joe had wanted to see it as it featured a hotel he knew further along the coast but he’d lost interest, complaining it was rubbish and only interested in negative, headline grabbing stuff. Laura took the chance to raise her own problems. She didn’t often discuss her work with Joe but tonight, just for once, she had an urgent need to spill it all out. She’d had a night and a day from hell and it had left her feeling anxious and vulnerable. She reached for the wine bottle on the table and poured herself another glass.

‘Have you talked to the police?’ he asked.

‘I got some info from them this afternoon. Harry Pelham was arrested this morning but now he’s in hospital for some reason. He’s under arrest there apparently, but I couldn’t get any more out of the duty officer and can’t speak to the guy in charge until tomorrow.’

Laura wished she had more contacts in the local police and could use the back channels to find out more details, but she hadn’t been around long enough to get to know many of the officers. The name of the man running the Pelham investigation, Detective Inspector David Barnes, meant nothing to her.

Joe picked up the remote and turned off the sound on the TV. He put his arm around Laura’s shoulders and kissed the top of her head.

‘Sounds like the crazy Mr Pelham needs locking up permanently.’

‘Fat chance. Best I’ll get is a restraining order to keep him away from his wife.’

‘If he’s threatening you too now, they need to do something.’

‘The trouble is Sam says it’s impossible to prove who posted the message. Whoever it is has hidden their tracks well.’

‘So it might not be him at all.’

‘No, it could be one of my other admiring fans.’ Laura forced a laugh and snuggled up against him, touching the cleft in his chin, then running her fingers down to his chest.

She told him about Mary Hakimi and how Morrison had behaved, and Joe called Morrison a pathetic old wanker and then did his impression of him which made her laugh for real. It was good to be able to talk to Joe about work for a change. He hardly ever asked about it and she knew he found it a difficult subject. She had had, was still having, a very successful career. He had not. Of course, he’d chosen the most precarious and unpredictable of jobs. He’d wanted to be an actor, and although he had the looks of a Hollywood leading man, he’d never made it. His biggest claim to fame had been playing, if that was the right word, a corpse in Holby City. Now he was playing second fiddle to his younger brother in the family hotel business.

Laura understood why it might bother him and never gloried in her own success. She thought it was not her success that rankled with him, he was not that petty, but his own failure, at the age of thirty-five, to have done much in the world, to have made any kind of mark. She hoped his reinvention as a businessman would change things. As a mark of faith she had invested a substantial sum of her own money in the Greene hotel chain. She loved him very much and it had been one way of showing that love.

Joe had resisted joining the business. Since his father died ten years ago, his mother had run it with the help of her younger son, Peter. Helen Greene had been an iron lady, managing the family’s four hotels with tremendous energy and sound business sense accumulated over more than thirty years. But two years ago, when she was only fifty-nine, she’d had a stroke. It had paralysed her and she’d recovered only a bit. She could talk but her mental sharpness was gone and she could walk no more than a few steps. The hotels would have to soldier on without her for Helen Greene was not coming back. Now she lived in a nursing home on the South Downs, a few miles out of Brighton.

Joe had been forced to give up his job as a director with a small experimental theatre in London and become Peter’s business partner. It had made up Laura’s mind. She was burning herself out working for a big London legal firm and beginning to wonder why. Yes, she had a big salary and a glittering CV and great prospects, but she was into her thirties now and she wanted other things in life, was keen to have a family. She had been happy to scale down, move out of the fast lane. She would aim for a partnership in the provinces and maybe become a big fish in a regional pool.

Joe had not been so happy. He loved the theatre and found it hard to knuckle down to the hotel business. He’d had a few run-ins with Peter but Laura was keeping her fingers crossed it would work out in the end.

She felt his hand massaging the back of her neck, soothing and reassuring.

‘If he did post that message, maybe he also had something to do with what happened last night?’ she said.

‘I think that was just some scumbag who thought it would be fun to scare the life out of a woman in a sports car.’

‘I guess so. Probably worrying about nothing.’

‘Of course you are, hon. You’ve had a lousy day and it’s no wonder you’re stressed out.’

He was right, she thought, and felt some of the tension leave her. She sat up, pushed her hair back behind her ears and took another large swig of the white wine, draining her glass. She picked up the bottle and frowned at it. It was empty too.

‘I think we might need one of the Greene specials.’ Joe grinned and went to get another bottle, one of the good ones he liberated from the hotel supplies. By the time she had drunk another glass or two, the cares of the day – and the night before – had slipped from her shoulders. She leaned her head on Joe’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and began to giggle.

‘What’s the joke?’ he said, laughing too.

‘I was thinking. Married couples – the awful things they do to each other.’

‘And that made you laugh?’

‘I know. Not funny. Sad. Did I ever tell you about this guy, this husband with really, really long hair who came in wanting a divorce? They’d been having problems for a while but the thing that brought it all to a crunch was when his wife told him he couldn’t have a cat. So he said, right, I shan’t cut my hair until you let me have a cat. And so it went on. No cat, no haircut, until by the time I saw him he had hair down to his waist.’

‘Sounds a bit of a shaggy cat story to me.’

Laura opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Love you,’ she said.

CHAPTER NINE

Detective Inspector Barnes called Laura at work early the next day and told her what she had expected – that Harry Pelham would not be held in custody. He also told her what she hadn’t expected – that Harry was suspected of being a paedophile. That was the main reason for the raid on his home though the emails were also being investigated. They’d seized computers from the house and from his offices in Hove, which they’d raided simultaneously.

She pressed the policeman for more details, but either he didn’t know any more or he wasn’t going to say. He agreed to tell her when Harry was well enough to be questioned again. Doctors at the Royal Sussex had not been able to find anything obviously wrong with him, but he was being kept in for observation for the next few days. At the moment, Barnes said, officers were guarding him but he didn’t have the resources to leave them there for long. It was likely Harry would be given bail later that day and the officers would be withdrawn.

Laura pushed for conditions on the bail preventing Harry from going anywhere near his wife or threatening her in any way and Barnes agreed to consider that. He told her that after they’d finished questioning Harry and looked at what was on his computers, they’d decide if there was enough evidence to charge him, either over the child pornography or the death threats. If there was, in either case he’d most likely get bail. Regarding the pornography, it would depend on the seriousness of the offence – was he part of a paedophile network, had he been distributing the material, was it for his own use, how much did he have and how long had he been doing it. But it would have to be very serious for him to be locked up; just downloading and possession of indecent material would not be enough.

It was the same story with the death threat emails. If the police could prove that Paul Giles was in fact Harry, by finding evidence on his computers, they would charge him with harassment. But it wouldn’t warrant a custodial sentence – a restraining order only, would be the likely result. There was a silence on the phone. The conversation was over unless she had any more questions. She hesitated. She told Barnes about the website posting but decided against mentioning the car chase. She was afraid he might think her a little over-anxious.

Laura had slept well after the wine and a couple of Nytol and she felt a whole lot better today. The car incident didn’t seem so threatening. She liked that description – the ‘car incident’. It minimized the whole thing, brought it down to manageable proportions. The thought of it didn’t make her heart beat as fiercely as it had.

Twenty minutes later, after talking to her friend Emma Fletcher, Laura felt better still. Emma always cheered her up, right back from when they were at school together. Laura’s mum had used to call Emma ‘Mrs Brightside’ because she was always so positive.

Emma’s life had been very different from Laura’s – she had a husband and three sons and a part-time job as a primary school teacher – but the two women had stayed close friends and now Laura had moved back to Sussex, they saw each other a lot.

‘I agree it sounds like a random piece of bad luck,’ she said, when Laura told her about the chase. ‘Joe’s probably right that it was some nutter who wanted to frighten a woman in a sports car. Why not go green and trade that gas guzzler in for a smart car. No one will be chasing you then. Not even Joe.’

Laura laughed, said she’d give it some thought, and Emma suggested meeting up on Sunday to go shopping. Her husband was taking the boys to Speedway and she’d have most of the day to herself.

That suited Laura well because she wanted to chat to Emma about her father. He had been in touch again, asking to meet up, and Laura wasn’t sure what to do. She hadn’t seen him for nearly seven years, not since her mum’s funeral, and most of her didn’t want to see him now or ever again. But a part of her did, an annoying, nagging part; despite everything he had done to her mum, he was still her dad.

Michael Maxwell had never been aggressive towards his daughter, he loved his little girl and, although Laura heard his verbal attacks on her mother, she never once considered he might be hitting her. He made sure none of his bullying and abuse happened in front of Laura, not the shouting, not the humiliating, and certainly not the punching. He did it in the evening, after dark, when he thought his daughter was safely tucked up in bed. He was not the only wife beater to act that way. Anna had said the same about Harry Pelham – he only hit her when Martha was not around to witness it.

But from her bedroom, Laura could hear her father’s hectoring, intimidating voice. She would get up and creep closer, listen to him rant at her mother, telling her how stupid and worthless she was, laying down the law about who she could talk to, and where she could go. It upset Laura but it also irritated her. She wished her mother would fight back, would stop letting herself be such a victim. If she would only stand up for herself, her father would back off, Laura was sure.

She felt guilt flood her, the way it always did when she remembered her young, self-righteous self. She should have done more to help her mum, she should have confronted her father. She should have understood. She had never been able to forgive herself for not realizing how serious the abuse was. She had never heard anything that sounded like violence and her mum had done her utmost to hide it, but that was no excuse. She should have known.

A memory came to her, stark and raw, of the morning a starling had fallen down the chimney and got trapped in the living room. She called out for her mum to rescue it, but when there was no response, ran upstairs to find her. Her mum was in the bathroom and nine-year-old Laura burst in just as she was getting out of the shower. Her buttocks, hips and breasts were covered in yellow, black and blue bruises. She saw the shock on her daughter’s face and immediately related a story of how she had tripped at the top of the library steps and fallen heavily down them. She must have had the story ready always, just in case. Laura knew that now but at the time she hadn’t questioned it, had all but forgotten it in the excitement of freeing the panicky bird. Laura’s mum never again left the bathroom door unlocked.

It was years later that Laura had to face the truth and it left her in bits. She was living in London and in the middle of her law exams when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor who found it also found serious bruising, vaginal and anal scarring and signs of old injuries. She had rung Laura, and the police, to say she suspected domestic abuse.

Jenny Maxwell left her husband but refused to give evidence against him and he was never charged. She came to live with Laura for nine months while she sorted out her life and beat off the cancer, but she would never speak about the violence however gently her daughter raised it. Just once, when Laura was going cautiously round the houses trying to approach the subject, she interrupted sharply, ‘Never let yourself be a victim. Never. That’s all I’ll say.’