The Backs (2013) (28 page)

‘Sex was important to him and while I was with him I tried to make myself into the ultimate “hot girlfriend”. I dressed up for sex and watched porn with him, we drank too much, did coke and roofies.’ Carmel’s unabashed openness about their relationship suddenly faltered; there was no obvious break in the words but the tone of her voice changed. She now sounded distant. ‘But quietly I was wondering when we’d reach the limit of whatever he wanted to try out. So I asked him, and he laughed and just said, “You love me, don’t you? And I love you?” I said yes of course. And he said, “And we’re having fun, aren’t we?’ and I wasn’t going to say no. You don’t tell a bloke you’re in love with that you’re not having fun, without expecting it to be over. Right?’

Wrong.
‘So what happened?’

‘He asked me to marry him.’

It wasn’t an answer Gully could have anticipated.

‘Of course I was thrilled, thinking finally he was going to calm down. I wanted the big wedding, to invite the friends I hadn’t seen for months, all the family too, and make it something really special. But he was keen to push ahead with it and, in the end, we booked a time at the Cambridge Register Office for the end of that month. And then he had this boat . . .’

The speed of Carmel’s speech had accelerated through the last few sentences, but stopped abruptly at the word
boat.
She reached for the mug of tea; it had to be cold by now, but she gulped down several mouthfuls very quickly.

Marks waited for a few seconds longer than it took for her to drain the mug, then he prompted her, ‘You mean the boat at Point Clear?’

She nodded as she placed her mug back on the table. ‘I’d never actually been there. I imagined . . . well, certainly not that. It was in the run-up to the wedding and he said the weekend away would do us good.’ Her voice faded momentarily, but then came back firmly. ‘The thing was, sometimes when we had sex he was great, other times he’d get this dead look in his eyes, like I wasn’t even there or something. On the way to the boat he was flirting, told me how he’d been fantasizing, that it was to be a surprise. He said something like,
You’re always up for playing with me, aren’t you, Car?
And I just laughed like I was flirting too. But that was when I noticed the dead look on his face. I don’t remember much else then until the morning. I woke up naked on the floor of that squalid little boat. It was cold and damp and I could barely move.’

‘You’d been drugged?’

‘He claimed I’d chosen to take them. It’s possible I might have done. But it wasn’t just the drugs that stopped me moving, because I was shackled, ankles and wrists. He had me on a lead, too, calling me his dog.’ She tapped her temples. ‘I couldn’t reason with him, he was a different person. My head started clearing and then I started hurting for real. I had bite marks on my breasts, back and shoulders. Not love bites, but teeth marks. He’d actually broken my skin.’

Gully’s gaze automatically dropped to Carmel’s body; if any mark still remained, it was hidden by her clothing.

‘He gagged me and made me stay on the floor like that, only pulling me up on to the bed when he wanted to have sex with me.’

‘You could have pressed charges,’ Gully argued. ‘Or at least called off the wedding.’

Carmel glared. ‘No, I couldn’t. I told myself it was a one-off.’

Oh, for fuck’s sake, when was it ever?
Gully felt a wave of anger, but it wasn’t at Carmel, just at the situation. Carmel had been subjected to the three steps that Gully associated with classic domestic bullying and abuse: isolation, manipulation and control.

‘Actually, because of that I had to wear a different dress for the wedding, one that covered my shoulders. He laughed about it in his speech, pointing out that most of my mates had never seen me ever wearing so many clothes. Most of my “mates” weren’t even there, by then. Just a bunch of his own friends and their wives laughing at me. I had a fake smile on my face the whole day. I can’t even look at the wedding photos without remembering how small I felt.’ Carmel strummed her fingers on her knee, trying to find her next sentence. ‘Overall it was a good marriage, though. He gave me everything I needed, but we didn’t have the same tastes in sex.’

Gully had once heard that if a frog was dropped into too hot water it would jump straight back out; but drop it into cold and heat it gradually, and it would stay there until it boiled to death. Carmel had been in that water for years.

‘How often did he make you do things you didn’t want to?’

‘He didn’t make me. I let him.’

‘With coercion?’

‘I’d known what he liked before I married him. So he said we should find a compromise.’

‘Which was?’

‘ “Special weekends”, once in a while.’

‘On the boat?’

She nodded. ‘No limits – whatever he wanted. He didn’t care if I was off my head on coke or something, as long as I’d gone through the pretence of asking him to take me there, and thanking him at the end.’

Gully wiped her hand across her brow, screwing her eyes shut, then reopened them while controlling the urge to visibly recoil. ‘How often did this happen?’

‘Probably twice each year. I skipped a couple of times when each of the kids was due to be born. He didn’t want sex at all when I was pregnant, and I was worried that he’d go off with someone else. But he didn’t.’

That was lucky, then.
Gully shifted in her seat. ‘You mentioned prostitutes – is that when you think he started seeing them?’

Carmel raised her eyebrows, pulling an expression that made it look as though this was the first time she’d ever considered the idea. Clearly it wasn’t. ‘That was definitely the first time I thought he wasn’t getting enough at home. He said I had an issue with jealousy. He caught me going through his phone, but I never found anything.’

Gully had no doubt that would have come with some form of punishment. ‘Was that why he broke your nose?’

‘No, the nose was later – spring last year, I think.’

Marks glanced at his notes and nodded. ‘It was March.’

Gully had never doubted that he’d been listening to every word, but she could tell that his voice had now distracted the other woman. ‘Carmel? What triggered it?’

‘Paul had been stressed over work, and I knew it had been longer than usual since we’d been to the boat. It always went better if I asked him first. I had the feeling that it was time I asked him again, and the thought of him getting angry was making me uptight. So I suggested it, but when we got there, I realized that he’d changed things: different bedding and carpet, and he’d repainted all the woodwork.’

Gully could feel her own frown deepening and forced her face back into neutral. ‘And this caused a fight?’

‘The cabin had always been deliberately squalid – not at all like this.’ She indicated that she meant the house in general. ‘He liked the boat that way: dirty. I didn’t even know he’d been to visit it, but he’d clearly been down there cleaning it up. It was obvious to me that he had taken someone else there and had needed to clean it up. So I got angry. Suddenly I didn’t want to go through with the sex either and, when I refused, he knocked me to the floor, tied me down and did it anyway. The punch in the face came straight after he’d finished.

‘Because you’d been reluctant?’

‘Because I hadn’t thanked him. It wouldn’t stop bleeding. That’s when he drove me to the hospital.’

‘And was that the last time you went to the boat?’

‘Yes, it was. And it was the only time he was ever violent towards me, too.’

‘Apart from the sex?’

Carmel tilted her head enquiringly and stared ahead for a few moments, before blinking Gully’s comment away. ‘He said he was sorry he’d hit me, and then told me he’d got rid of the boat. He’d always been a great dad but, after that, he spent even more time with our children. And finally we felt like a normal family. Until my jealousy messed it up.’

‘Really?’

‘I couldn’t believe he’d had such a turnaround. I should have left well alone, but I was suspicious. First, I realized he was hiding money from me, then later I found he had a second mobile and, whenever I could, I checked it. He was texting women to find out what services they offered. Eventually there was one being contacted more than the rest. Someone called Andie.’ Carmel took a deep breath. ‘A student prostitute.’ She said those three words in a tone that implied she was disgusted with him. ‘And for the first time I wondered if I still loved him.’

Gully had once seen a Jackson Pollock exhibition at the Tate. She’d been unexpectedly drawn to it, even though she couldn’t understand how art that must have made sense to the artist, could be so totally incomprehensible to her. Carmel Marshall was having a similar effect on her now.

‘I really didn’t know about him using the boat until that other detective came, but then it all added up about the missing money, as five grand sounds about right.’

‘For carte blanche? For permission to rape?’

‘No, five grand for fifty hours.’

‘What else did you know about this “Andie” before then?’

‘Her?’
The marriage-wrecking-whore tone was back in her voice. ‘I kept my eye on the texts between them. He’d arranged to pick her up outside the Man on the Moon, so I hid in the deli across the road. He dropped her home afterwards and I followed her.’ A small but triumphant smile touched her lips. ‘I know where she lives.’

The relief that spread through Gully was palpable. Carmel hadn’t closed down at the last.

Marks had offered to make some more tea, but Carmel had gone into the kitchen instead. ‘I need to phone Parkside,’ he said to Gully, ‘and get back there now, too. Stay and take a full statement. I’m going to send a rape counsellor over here to assess her. We’ll take it from there.’ He touched her arm. ‘Well done, Sue. You’d better go and join her. Stay close just in case.’

Gully pushed open the kitchen door to find Carmel sitting on the floor, leaning back on the sink unit. She wasn’t crying, but Gully guessed it was too soon for that. She finished making their drinks, then sat down next to Carmel and passed her the mug of tea. The sound of Marks leaving the house reached them as she did so.

Carmel sipped her drink. ‘I’m starting to see how fucked up it all is.’

Neither of them spoke for a while after that, then Carmel made her full statement, patiently re-explaining everything she’d told Gully and Marks the first time round.

Gully guessed she’d always find it hard to warm to the sort of woman that needed the eye of an in-house corporate designer to match her curtains with the correct side table, but on this occasion she’d just about managed it.

The roads behind the Crown Court in East Road formed the area of Petersfield Ward. The streets had once been packed with like-for-like Victorian terraces, but most of these had eventually been replaced in waves of redevelopment, with splashes of Edwardian, inter- and post-war commercial and residential buildings now lining the streets. St Matthew’s Street ran through the heart of it all, and Andie Seagrove lived in the only remaining terrace at the Norfolk Street end.

Goodhew knocked on her front door, then immediately stepped closer, listening for any activity inside the house and half expecting to encounter another individual only prepared to grant a reluctant conversation through the letterbox. Instead the voice came from somewhere to one side of him: ‘Are you from the police?’

She’d opened a small front-room window that was level with the upper part of the front door. She must have been standing on the window ledge inside. He caught sight of a tuft of blonde hair.

He held up his ID.

‘Can you pass it to me?’

He slipped it through. ‘OK,’ she said, but didn’t pass it back. ‘You can’t come in.’ She sounded neither timid nor aggressive, just matter-of-fact.

‘OK, but we do need to talk to you.’

‘About what?’

‘I’m not going to explain it out in the street.’

‘Say it so I understand then.’

‘Andie, I know about the boat.’

She didn’t reply straight away.

‘It’s important we talk.’

‘We are talking, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, we are, but talking through a window isn’t standard procedure.’ Despite everything a small smile crossed his lips. ‘Or you can phone Parkside station and check on me.’

‘And I suppose I can use your phone for that?’

He called up the number for DI Marks, then held the phone up to her. ‘That’s my DI. Press “call” and he’ll confirm my identity.’

She didn’t take hold of it, though. ‘What are the options here?’ she asked.

‘Either talk to me or another officer here, or to me or another officer at the police station.’ For the first time he thought seriously about the protocol of their situation. Now he’d located her, he ought to inform Marks before anything else. ‘It would have been better if I’d contacted you first and offered you support from a female officer. And I must contact my DI and let him know. But I just found your address and came straight round. Is there anyone else in the house with you?’

‘No, the others went home for the summer.’

‘Look, Andie, I’m glad we’ve located you, but I’m now going to call for another officer.’

‘Don’t bother, I’ll come out. Give me five.’

She actually took less than two, and Goodhew heard her at the door as he was in the middle of phoning Parkside.

PC Kelly Wilkes picked up. ‘Can you get a message to Marks?’ he had begun. ‘Let him know I’m with an Andie Seagrove . . . Hang on, Kelly.’

Andie just then opened the door, without the chain, and stood a few inches back from the threshold. Perhaps she always looked pale, but her blonde hair and magnolia skin tone made her look more faded than he’d imagined from the CCTV snap.

Andie first passed him back his ID. A sweatshirt covered her wrists but he could still see the yellowing of old bruising that discoloured her skin down to the base of her thumb. ‘Are you coming outside, then?’ he asked her.

‘You can’t come in, remember, so I’ll come to Parkside with you.’

He nodded to himself, but spoke into the handset. ‘I’ll be in shortly. Miss Seagrove will be with me.’ He hung up. ‘We’ll be walking, but it’s not far.’