Then You Were Gone (20 page)

Over the course of two years, while Simone was in the sixth form, Jed gradually but relentlessly ground her down into his idea of the person she ought to be. She lost weight for him, even though she barely had any to lose. She listened only to the kinds of music that were on a secret ‘approved’ list, known only to him and entirely unpredictable. It was easy to anger him by inadvertently commenting that a certain band had produced a good record. The same applied to books and films, only these were at least more predictable. Anything available in the town’s WHSmith or for hire at Blockbuster was out; pretty much everything else was in. Simone longed to go with her friends to see ‘Die Hard 3’ or to watch the Stereophonics at one of their big stadium gigs, as the majority of the upper sixth did on a minibus one weekend. By then, though, Simone was only invited as something of an afterthought. She rarely saw her friends any more, unless it was a rare night when Jed was busy doing something else, and she could feel them gradually drifting away from her. It was as her final A-level exams began to approach that the reality of her situation began to dawn on her. Jed had not done A-levels; ‘Who needs them?’ he would say, ‘I’ve got a decent job straight out of school, I’ve got money in my pocket, I’ve got the freedom to do what I want. You don’t need to go away to university to enjoy life.’ Simone had not told him that she had applied to university at all, still less that her first choice was Exeter, hundreds of miles and a six-hour train journey away. For a while she had been telling herself that she was only applying to university as a way of keeping her options open, that she was not necessarily going to go, so there was no point upsetting Jed by telling him about it. And she had only chosen Exeter because it was the best place for her chosen course, its distance from her home town and everyone in it was entirely irrelevant. But then, the morning of her first Chemistry exam, Jed had phoned her in a breathless panic. He was ill, he told her; he was in agony, throwing up, feverish. He was worried it was appendicitis or something worse, so he needed her to take him to the hospital right away. Suddenly, and for the first time, Simone had seen with complete clarity what the rest of her life would be like if she did not leave Jed. She would never be able to have anything of her own, not a qualification, not a job, not a friend, not a liking for a particular song, and she realised, just in time as she now saw it, that she could not live like that. She told Jed to call an ambulance, went to school and sat her exam, then that evening phoned him to break it off. He had been at home, fit and well, as she had known he would be. His medical emergency was not mentioned.

Breaking it off, however, was not easy. Indeed, for a time it had seemed as though it would be impossible. Jed simply refused to accept that he and Simone were not together any more. Thankfully it was before she had a mobile phone or, god forbid, Facebook, but he would phone the house constantly, knowing that Simone’s mum and dad would happily pass the phone over to her, and would never lie for her about her being out, never knowing the cold threats and vile names he was whispering down the phone to her, never hearing his promises to break into her room and harm her when she was sleeping. They knew that she had split up with Jed but, it seemed to Simone at the time, they were very much of the opinion that Jed was the wronged party. They just could not understand how Simone could do this to the poor lad when they had seemed so happy together. Sometimes she would come home from school or her waitressing job and find Jed drinking tea with her mum at the kitchen table as though nothing had changed.

Even when she had gone to Exeter, there were a couple of occasions when Jed had turned up at her student house, late at night after a seven-hour drive, and banged on the door demanding to see her. If it had not been for Jazzy, answering the door in his dressing gown and steadfastly refusing to let Jed in the house, he would probably still be following her to this day.

‘You can’t blame Jed for the fact that I can’t get a boyfriend,’ Simone protested now. ‘It was a long time ago. I can’t get a boyfriend because there’s obviously something wrong with me.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Louise said fondly. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. I mean, look at you. You’re gorgeous, you’ve got a good job, your own little flat…’

‘I rent the flat,’ Simone put in pedantically.

‘You’ve still got the place to yourself though, haven’t you? More than I’ve got.’ Louise gestured at the kids’ toys everywhere and Danny’s fishing magazines and Stephen King paperbacks. ‘And you’ve got loads of friends. There’s nothing wrong with you,’ she repeated. ‘I mean, think about it, think about the stuff that’s wrong in your life, which is basically two things; the fact that you’ve not had a boyfriend for the best part of fifteen years and that you don’t really get on with Mum and Dad.’

Simone sighed and nodded her assent.

‘And both those things are everything to do with Jed.’

‘How?’ Simone asked, genuinely indignant. ‘I’ve tried – really hard – for
years
to get to a point where I don’t think about him any more, where I’m not worried any more that he’s going to come back, that he’s been waiting all these years and that if I saw him again I’d, I don’t know, fall back under his spell or something. Either that or he’d kill me. I did think that, for a really long time, but I honestly don’t any more.’

‘I know. But just think, it’s only now – now you’ve finally allowed someone in who’s kind and decent and gets you, now you’ve seen what it can be like when you’re with someone who’s not a dangerous psychopath – that you can see that Jed was the reason you held everyone else off for so long. It’s not like you haven’t had offers over the years is it?’

Simone shook her head. A lack of offers had never been the problem. It was that she had never found a man who did not scare her, even a little bit. If he was big and strong and macho, all she could think of was how easily he might overpower her. If he was small and weak, she worried that he would compensate for it by being cruel. If he acted kind and solicitous and charming, she assumed he must be hiding his true self. She had not been able to say – still could not say – quite what it had been about Mack that had allowed her to trust him, there was just an immediate sense that he understood. That he knew what it was like to be afraid, to hold the world at bay, and that together they would no longer have to do that.

‘And the thing with Mum and Dad – I mean, I know as well as anyone they can be hard work at times. All that stuff about what so and so’s daughter is doing now and how well-paid her husband is and how big their house is and did you know Rachel Iverson from school is running a hotel in Dubai now.’

‘And did you know so and so’s married now with quadruplets and she sells her own cupcakes on the internet?’ Simone put in with a laugh. Louise always could make her laugh.

‘Yeah,’ Louise laughed too, ‘exactly. But they’re only saying it because they love us and they want the best for us. And they’re really proud of us too, especially you – you should hear Mum when she gets on the phone to her mates –
Oh, our Simone’s too busy to come up and visit very often, what with her career and her Oyster card and her master’s degree. Did I mention she lives in London and is very, very clever?
They just want to be part of your life, Simone. And I know that you think they took Jed’s side, but they didn’t. As far as they were concerned he was a nice lad who you gave the elbow, he got a bit upset about it but then you went away to uni and he got over it. They were just being polite to him, like they are to everyone. They never knew about the things he said and did to you. I did, because you told me, and because I knew his sort from the day you brought him home. But to them, it’s nothing, it’s years ago and they barely even remember him. You can’t keep punishing them for not understanding when you’ve never given them the chance.’

The tears sprang back into Simone’s eyes. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said, sniffing and trying to suppress a bout of hiccupping sobs. ‘I know it’s not their fault. I know I shouldn’t blame them, but I blame everyone. I blame them, and I blame Jed, and I blame myself the most. But you’re right. I need to stop.’

Louise nodded and squeezed her tight. ‘You’re already stopping. You’re with Mack now, you’ve found someone you love. Now all you need to do is find the fucker.’

They both laughed and Simone wiped away the tears for what she hoped was the final time that night. ‘You know,’ Louise went on, ‘I missed out the third thing that’s been wrong in your life.’

Simone looked at her quizzically.

‘Jazzy,’ Louise said, waiting for a response.

Simone shifted her gaze away from her sister. ‘Jazzy is not a thing that’s wrong in my life,’ she said tightly. ‘Jazzy is one of the best things in my life. He always has been.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Not really.’

‘You met Mack at Jazzy’s wedding, didn’t you?’ Louise pressed. ‘So does that mean that now he’s married and he’s got a kid you’ve…’

‘I’ve what?’ Simone snapped. Her head felt fuzzy and as the day’s adrenaline ebbed away the heavy weight of exhaustion was beginning to creep in.

‘You’ve… you know, you’ve accepted that he’s… Well, that he’s your friend. And that’s it.’

‘Jazzy is my friend,’ Simone said, ‘and that is it. OK? Now I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

Chapter Twenty

‘You can drive, can’t you?’ Jessica asked Joe. He had seemed far from an accomplished driver on the long journey north their first night together, but she had been so confused and frightened that she had almost hoped that they crashed so that she might be able to escape. Afterwards, when she had thought about it at all, she had assumed that he must have been tired and in a hurry.

Now though, it was broad daylight and still he was driving like a pensioner with ailing eyesight. He would creep along at forty for long periods, then erratically speed up, only to hesitate for whole minutes at a junction, occasionally stalling the old blue Volvo as he pulled out. It surprised Jessica to see Joe like this, it seemed so at odds with the slickness and confidence he exhibited normally.

‘Course I can drive,’ he muttered distractedly. They were on a long straight stretch of almost-deserted A-road, so Jessica had decided it was safe to talk to him without fearing she might cause a head-on collision. ‘I mean, I’ve got a licence. I’ve just never had a car so I don’t have a lot of practice.’

‘OK. So when was the last time you drove anywhere before you brought me here?’

Joe appeared to think about this, while simultaneously changing down a gear, then almost immediately changing back up again. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said eventually. ‘A while ago. Quite a while.’ He glanced across at her but she looked the other way so he would not be tempted to leave his eyes off the road for very long.

‘Why did you bother passing your test then if you were never going to actually drive anywhere?’ Sitting side by side with him in the front of the car and not having to look him in the eye was giving Jessica a level of confidence in speaking to Joe that she had not yet felt. ‘My mum got me some driving lessons for my birthday and they cost a bloody fortune. I’ve used them all up because I wanted to try and pass before the baby’s born,’ she touched her stomach self-consciously, ‘but I’m still nowhere near ready to do my test.’

‘Yeah, well it’s a lot harder now than it was when I learned. I was probably about your age, someone – a family friend – got me them as a present. I made sure I passed my test because I wanted him to think I appreciated the gift, but I’ve never had any need to drive since. I’ve always lived somewhere where I didn’t need a car.’

Not long after they got on the A1 south-bound, Joe pulled over at a rather crummy little services. ‘I’m desperate for a coffee,’ he said. ‘I feel like a wrung-out dishcloth already and we’ve got another couple of hundred miles to go yet.’

Jessica sat in a sweaty plastic bucket-chair in the coffee concession while Joe went to the toilet, and she realised that for the first time she could, theoretically at least, escape from him. She could make up a sob story and hitch a lift with a kindly-looking family. After all, what kind of person would leave a young, pregnant girl stranded? If it came to it she could hike over the fields to the nearest village or town and catch a bus or a train south. But she found that now the opportunity was presented to her she did not want to take it.

She only had Joe’s word that he had emailed Savannah for her. He had refused to use his iPad, even though the cabin had a wifi connection; something about it being possible to track where in the world a message had been sent from. So he had made her write out what she wanted to say, then tramped down to the library in the village, tramped immediately all the way back again once he found it was closed until the following day, then tramped back again in the morning. He told her he had set up an anonymous email account and written to the address Jessica had given him for Savannah, typing out her message word for word. That morning he had gone back to the library to check for a reply; he had made her pack all her stuff and come along in the car with him, so confident was he that they would have received the reply they wanted, and he was right. Savannah had passed her message on to Connor, and he had asked for Jessica to visit him in prison.

‘He says that if you go tomorrow his lawyer can get you in to see him,’ Joe had told her as he frantically punched details into his car’s Sat Nav.

But she had never seen any of these messages that had supposedly been passed between them, and she was placing all her faith in Joe to actually take her to the remand wing where Connor was being held and not to dump her in a ditch or worse. And yet she found herself believing in him almost unquestioningly. He had never been unkind to her, and more recently there had been moments where he had seemed to be regarding her fondly, almost tenderly. And besides, she reassured herself, nobody who drove that incompetently could be an evil man.

Chapter Twenty-One

The sharp rap on the door jerked Jazzy into terrified wakefulness, but Ayanna slept on, her steady snores sounding absurdly calm against the turmoil in Jazzy’s mind and body. He leapt to his feet automatically, stumbling around for a few seconds as he processed why he was in the lounge and why the sun was blazing through the curtains. He surmised that the faint light outside and the low angle of the sun must mean it was now morning, and he knew that he had to be afraid of something, but it took half a minute before he was able to remember what that was.