The Nightmare Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

thing is, it really doesn’t matter in terms of what I’m here for. So I can tell myself anything. I can imagine he was making it all up, or that he just drifted off to sleep and was totally fine.’
    Richard nodded to himself.
    ‘And frankly,’ he said, ‘when I get that sort of call, that’s exactly what I do.’

Four

    ‘All right,’ I told Julie Kennedy.
    But she had just finished giving us her account of what had happened, and even as the words left my lips, I flinched at them. It was too easy a thing for me to say – blasé, almost – and I should have been more careful. Because it wasn’t all right. And however well she recovered from her ordeal physically, nothing was really going be all right for her ever again.
    If Julie noticed my indiscretion, she didn’t show it, and perhaps I was simply compounding my mistake by making it all about me: by imagining that, after everything she’d been through, she would even notice my choice of language, never mind be offended by it.
    Right now, she was sitting upright in her hospital bed, looking away from me and Chris, towards the drawn slats on the blind. The covers were pooled at her waist, and her hands – one of them encased in plaster, hiding the broken fingers and wrist – rested on her lap. The small room was illuminated only by a soft lamp on the drawers by the bed, but the visible injuries were still apparent. The far side of her face was wrapped with bandages, while the other side was swollen, the skin bright and discoloured, and criss-crossed with lines of bristling stitches.
    After a few moments of heavy silence, her chest inflated slowly, and she gave a steady sigh that seemed to last an age.
    ‘I wish I’d fought back,’ she said.
    She’d already told us that, while relating the details of the attack. I repeated now what I’d told her then.
    ‘You shouldn’t wish that. There’s every chance he could have killed you. You can’t blame yourself for things you didn’t do, especially when they’re things you shouldn’t have had to do. Look at me, Julie.’
    After a moment, she turned her head slowly, and I stared her in the one eye I could see.
    ‘The only person to blame here is him,’ I said.
    ‘I was just too scared.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘And he was so big. So strong.’
    ‘I know.’
    It had been two and a half days since Julie Kennedy had been attacked in her home. The details were written down on the pad in front of me, but I didn’t need to refer to them; it felt like her quiet voice, every word of it from the last half-hour, was still somehow echoing in my head. Julie was our fifth victim. Four other women had come before her, and she had just told us much the same story as they had. Mercifully for her, her memory was fractured and incomplete, much of the attack stored away in the nightmare place, but she remembered enough.
    The attack had taken place in the early hours of the morning, when she had woken to find a man standing beside the bed. He was dressed entirely in black, and wearing both a mask and gloves. Julie said it seemed like he entirely obscured the curtains, which was impossible, and was presumably either a trick of perspective or else an exaggeration born from fear. But then, other victims had reported something similar. The man was little more than an enormous silhouette – a monster – his presence instilling terror even before the assault began. During the attacks, he never spoke. One woman had called him a concentration of hatred; another said that he smelled of violence. They were bizarre, ephemeral descriptions on the face of it, but they made a degree of sense to me. In each case, I’d watched the woman trying to talk about the man in ways beyond words, because in her head, that was what he’d become.
    Like the previous victims, Julie had been raped and savagely beaten. For hours after the man had left she had drifted in and out of consciousness, and at five a.m. she had managed to phone the police before