Try Not to Breathe (10 page)

T
he mirrored reflection of Alex’s heels raced to meet their originals, colliding with a loud click. The hospital had recently been the subject of a media-friendly “deep clean” and everything shined and whined as if polished beyond practical use.

Alex had called several hours before, and with surprising ease had been granted a little more time with Peter Haynes. She was already regretting the high heels, which pinched at her running blisters and slowed her walk to a slug slink.

She knocked on the closed office door, the space inside sounding hollow and empty. After a couple of polite coughs, followed by some not so polite coughs and a sharper knock, the door finally opened. The doctor was ablaze with mess. His hair seemed to be clambering over itself and his eyes were wild. As he showed Alex to the worn leather chair again, she noticed that the room was immaculate.

“I’m sorry, Alex, I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to find something but I don’t know where anything is anymore.”

Alex wondered if in this case, “tearing my hair out” was more than just a saying.

To no one in particular Peter Haynes muttered, “Bloody cleaners.”

He sat in the other leather chair, but fidgeted like a child with worms.

“Thanks so much for seeing me at such short notice, Peter.”

“That’s okay, but I really have squeezed you in, so I don’t have long. How can I help?”

“I just have a couple of questions about Amy, then I promise I’ll leave you in peace.”

“All right, Alex, shoot.”

“Well, after Amy was found, some of the newspaper reports seemed to contradict one another. A few say there was no evidence of sexual assault but others allude to recent sexual activity. That’s only via unnamed sources though, never official statements. More or less all of them say there were signs that she’d fought off her attacker. I just wondered if—medically—you know which story is correct?”

The doctor held her gaze for a few moments and then walked to a dull gray filing cabinet next to the brilliantly sparkling window.

Muttering, he opened and closed each of the four drawers in quick succession before returning to the desk empty-handed.

“I’d rather not do this on the computer,” he said, hovering his fingers above the keyboard, “but I can’t put my hands on the hard copies right now.

“Okay,” the doctor continued, “so let’s think this through. You need to know about the examinations that were undertaken when Amy was first found, yes?”

Alex felt her pulse quicken. “Yes, I suppose so, if that’s okay?”

“Well,” Peter Haynes began, “it’s rather a gray area. Amy has no known next-of-kin so she’s under the care of the health authority,” he paused, catching up with his thoughts, “and that means we can make decisions but we can’t be seen to abuse that control.”

He looked up and fixed his eyes on Alex’s lips. “I would never abuse any position of trust,” he said.

Alex sat in silence, unsure what she was supposed to say, meanwhile the doctor tapped cautiously at the keyboard, like he was cracking a safe.

He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t give this information out liberally, so anything I say needs to be handled with absolute discretion.” He paused, and Alex held her breath. The doctor was frozen, fingers over the keys. His eyes were locked on Alex in a way that made her wiggle awkwardly in her seat.

“Okay,” he lowered his gaze, half smiling, “I’m doing this for you because I think the more people know about these patients’ stories, the better. But that relies on you doing a sensitive job, so I’m taking a leap of faith.”

“I promise I’m not out to sensationalize, that’s not the kind of writing I do.”

Peter Haynes’s neck was newly flushed and he seemed unsure where to start.

“Okay.” Alex scanned her notes. “Was Amy a virgin?”

“No.”

“Oh, really? Had she recently had sex before she was found?”

“Yes, she had, sometime within the previous seventy-two hours, according to this report.”

The secret information thrilled Alex. It was at once revolting and exhilarating.

“Okay, so, were there signs of sexual assault?”

“There were no signs of trauma to the genitals.”

“So she’d willingly had sex?”

“It would appear so.”

“Were there signs she had fought off her attacker?”

“Oh God yes,” Peter Haynes looked Alex in the eye, furrowing his brow slightly. “I don’t need to look at the records to tell you that. She was still black and blue when she reached me, and I can remember what a state her fingers were in. Most of her nails were broken off and she had a missing tooth where she had tried to bite something. Or someone.”

Alex felt the exhilaration subside; now she just felt sick. Amy had managed to fight just enough to condemn herself to purgatory.

“And there were signs of strangulation?”

“Yes, strangulation, deep bruising, some internal injuries to the abdomen, splintered bones, several cracked ribs…”

“Was she beaten with something or did the examiner think he’d done it with his bare hands?”

“It doesn’t go into that here, but from what I saw, I’d say she’d taken everything he had. Kicks, punches, whacks with objects, who knows.”

“Christ. So Amy was as close to death as the papers made out when she was found?”

“Probably worse, there’s a lot of information on her record that was marked as confidential and wouldn’t have been in the papers.”

These details would have been gold dust to a prosecutor, thought Alex, and they wouldn’t have given them away in case that jeopardized a trial. It felt like just another quiet injustice that Amy never got her trial. “Do you think her attacker thought he’d killed her when he left the scene?”

“Who knows?” The doctor held her gaze. “I mean, really, who knows what a person like that thinks.”

Alex nodded. The uncomfortable facts were seeping through her notes like a dark ink blot. It appeared that Amy had willingly had sex with someone, and been attacked soon after. She was there, in part, through trust and choice.

“So she wasn’t raped or sexually assaulted, it was a non-sexual attack?” Alex clarified.

“That’s what it looks like on paper here, but there would be far more details in the police forensic reports. I’m just looking at the bare medical facts, just the stuff we needed to know to treat her.”

“Could the person she had sex with, and the person who attacked her, be two different people?”

“Yes, possibly,” Dr. Haynes said, looking at his watch. “It’s possible she willingly had sex with someone then toddled off and ran into someone else, who attacked her, but…”

“But no one ever came forward who’d had consensual sex with her,” Alex finished, “right?”

“Right.”

Alex continued: “So she had a boyfriend, but apparently they hadn’t slept together, so…”

“I can’t really help there. I wouldn’t have the first clue about my patients’ love lives. I can barely get my own on track.” Peter Haynes looked up briefly and then back down at his hands.

“Oh yes, of course,” Alex said, feeling her cheeks flush a little. “Just one more thing. Last time we spoke, you said that Amy had shown signs of brain activity. Does that mean there’s a chance she might wake up?”

“Well, she’s not asleep, Alex. That’s an important distinction; this isn’t a coma. She’s in there somewhere, to a small degree at least. But after fifteen years, and with such slow progress, I think it’s highly unlikely she’ll ever improve.”

“But it’s possible?”

“Well, it’s not entirely impossible. But it’s highly unlikely. Alex, I’m sorry to rush you, but I really need to get to another meeting.”

“No problem at all. And thanks so much, you’ve really helped iron things out. It’s been hard to piece together from news clippings alone.” Alex stood up quickly and grabbed her bag.

“Well,” said Dr. Haynes, extending a hand to shake. “You can’t trust everything you read in the newspapers.” And he smiled, holding Alex’s hand for a little too long.

The chill of Dr. Haynes’s touch stayed with Alex long after she’d left the office and made her way, blinking, out of the hospital and into the sunlight.

She walked with sore feet to her car, which was parked in the farthest corner, shaded by a thick tree. She sat down with a heavy “hmph” and placed her bag, notepad and phone on the empty passenger seat. She yanked off her shoes and lobbed them into the back foot well. For just a few moments, she closed her eyes in the cool quiet. Her head thumped and she was sweating last night’s Sauvignon Blanc.

Her conversation with the doctor had stitched together some assumptions—and scorched some guesses where they lay. As grotesque as she found the crime, the challenge of unpicking Amy’s final conscious moments stirred a small part of her, buried beneath the rubble.

Once upon a time she had been a bright young thing, a celebrated writer, a “voice of her generation.” She’d had fire and ambition and ideas…now most of the time she felt dry. Her moment had passed, and she’d spent it wasted.

Alex slipped her flip-flops on and headed home. Her mind churned over her conversation with the doctor as she drove slowly past the white villas of Tunbridge Wells’s moneyed “village” area.

Amy Stevenson was not a virgin. Apparently she’d willingly had sex in the run up to her attack and it must have been protected sex. According to the clippings, there was no forensic evidence, no semen. That word only used in biology class and sex crime reporting. He—they—must have used a condom, but that would have been long lost or long hidden.

Police had been satisfied that Amy and her boyfriend hadn’t slept together. So it looked like Amy had been unfaithful to him.
Poor kid,
thought Alex. Did he know one of her last decisions was to betray him? Would he have known that her “rape” wasn’t rape? Or perhaps he did find out, and was so angry that he attacked her? It seemed far-fetched, but it was foolish to discount anything.

It had become a standard phrase in the later newspaper clippings, “the rape and attempted murder of Amy Stevenson.” But that wasn’t the real story. The police couldn’t have known that when they brought Bob in, could they?

Alex shook her head, it was a far knottier story than she’d thought. The best article she could produce would be found in the kinks left behind from unpicking those dusty knots. She wished she could skip to the end and find out what those kinks looked like.

As she pulled up outside her brick terrace, heaved her bag out of its seat and walked along the path, Alex checked the time, 11:22 a.m. The deadline for her piece on Dr. Haynes loomed in a few days and she had thirty-eight minutes of work time left today.

Getting to sleep wasn’t a problem for Alex. Her eyes tended to shut as the final sip tingled her lips. It was often a battle of will over fatigue just to get the glass of water down her neck before passing out in a deep, throaty sleep.

It was staying asleep that was hard.

Since Matt had left, the witching hours were wakeful. As the tide of alcohol washed away, a heightened sense of self-preservation kicked in. Every night brought different creaks and groans to the little house, a variety of imagined terrors creeping in the shadows.

Alex’s night nerves were almost as irrational as her childhood fear of ghosts. It was always possible that someone could break in. If they did, it was possible they’d get up to something really sadistic, rather than look for easily pocketed, high-value goods. But it was incredibly unlikely.

By day, Alex recognized her paranoia for what it was. By night, she often spent the darkest hours rigid and dripping with sweat.

After a late supper of toast dipped into a half-eaten tub of hummus, she’d fallen into a hot, dreamless sleep at around 10 p.m., chickpea residue on her hands.

At 1:37 a.m., Alex burst into total wakefulness, on high alert, convinced that someone was in the house.

Downstairs, the polished floorboards creaked in rhythm with the wind and the trees tapped warnings on the windows.

She heard slow, deliberate movements around her living room. She heard the first three steps of the staircase sigh underfoot, then nothing. Alex remained paralyzed, making no moves to investigate or protect herself. She just lay prone, peeping from under the covers, coated in thick sweat.