The Party. Lisa Hall
temple, and then I follow Carrie along a corridor towards the back of the police station, and realize that this must be the rape suite – a block of three rooms, one for examination, another room similar to the one I have spent the morning in, and a bathroom, complete with shower. Carrie explains that after the medical, I can have a shower and she’ll give me clean clothes to wear home, if I want them.
‘Where are the clothes you wore that night, Rachel?’ she asks, as another officer photographs the bruises that stain the skin on my arms.
‘At home,’ I whisper, ‘in the laundry basket. I haven’t washed them yet.’ Carrie tells me she’ll come and collect them, that I don’t need to worry, just put them in a bag and she’ll drive over tomorrow to pick them up. She leads me into the examination room and I start to slowly slide my clothes off behind the paper screen, my heart thumping double time in my chest. Even the realization that the doctor examining me is a woman doesn’t stop the fear from clogging my throat, and I lie on the examination table, my muscles so tense they hurt. Finally, endlessly, it is over and I slide from the table, wrapping the paper gown Carrie has left out tightly around my body and dress in my own comfortable, familiar clothes, ignoring the jogging pants and sweatshirt provided by the staff. Back in the room, Carrie perches on the end of the coffee table, talking to Gareth, both of them looking up startled when I appear in the doorway.
‘All done?’ Carrie smiles and gets to her feet, moving towards the door. ‘Rachel, you’ve been fantastic – really helpful. I’ll be over tomorrow to collect the clothing, and as soon as I have any further information for you I’ll be in touch. Here’s my number, you can call me any time, OK?’ She presses a business card into my hand and I whisper my thanks. I don’t want her to come over tomorrow. I don’t want to have to call her. I just want this to never have happened.
We drive home in silence, the claustrophobic kind that you could cut with a knife. I have no words left to say, and after a few feeble attempts at starting a conversation, it seems that Gareth has run out of sympathetic phrases, something that I’m more than a little relieved about. Once back home indoors, he offers to take Thor for a walk, somehow sensing that I don’t want to leave the house, and he grabs the lead from where it hangs by the back door.
‘Will you be OK if I take the dog out? I won’t be long.’ He doesn’t look at me as he fusses with the lead, not quite managing to clip it in even though Thor isn’t moving.
‘What were you talking to Carrie about when I was in the examination room?’ I didn’t want to ask, but the look on his face when I re-entered the room puzzled me, and I want to know what was said. He sighs and ruffles a hand through his hair before he answers.
‘I asked her if it made a difference, the fact that you’d had a bath as soon as you got home that morning.’
‘And what did she say?’ My heart starts hammering in my chest and my mouth goes dry. I twist my fingers together to hide their shaking, but I already know what the answer will be, I knew straight away when I saw her face when I answered the question.
‘She said it probably did. That it will have massively reduced the chances of them recovering any useable DNA.’ He stands and clicking his tongue at Thor strides towards the back door, slamming it closed behind him. I stare after him, my breath coming in frantic huffs as I fight back tears, at the realization that despite seeming so supportive on the surface, perhaps my husband doesn’t really believe me.
LATE AUGUST – THREE AND A HALF MONTHS BEFORE THE PARTY
Ted slides a warm hand up my thigh under the table and I push him away half-heartedly, feeling guilty at the little thrill that runs through my veins at his touch.
‘Don’t, Ted. What if someone sees?’ I look over my shoulder but the people at the other occupied tables are engrossed in their own lives, no one is paying any attention to us. We are sitting in the beer garden of a pub twenty miles outside of West Marsham, chosen for its tucked away location. Over the past two weeks things have escalated between Ted and myself, starting when he called me two days after the barbecue, seemingly to check how my hand was. We’ve met for coffee twice, just to chat, and now … now, we’re sitting in a pub, tucked away from prying eyes, and Ted’s hand is on my thigh. I have cancelled this afternoon’s clients, a risk in itself, in order to be able to meet Ted and I have butterflies in my stomach at the idea that something more might happen, alongside shredded nerves.
‘That’s why we picked this place, isn’t it? Because it’s little known and secluded, so no one would see us?’ Ted turns his blue-eyed gaze on me and stares intently. I look away, feeling suddenly shy. Feeling noticed. My stomach flips as I breathe in the scent of his aftershave and for a brief second, I long to feel his mouth on mine again, before I pull away, reaching for my wine glass.
‘We can never be too careful.’ Smiling, I tip my glass towards him before taking a sip of the cold, crisp white wine, perfect for the warm summer afternoon. Despite the buzz of spending time with Ted, there is always the niggle of fear that someone will spot us at the back of my mind. ‘Where is Angela today?’
‘Apparently she’s at work. But she took her yoga mat and she was wearing her leggings, so I strongly doubt that that’s the case, unless she’s going in after her “class”.’ A shadow crosses his face briefly, as Ted makes air quotes around the word, convinced as he is that Angela isn’t going to yoga so often to work on her flexibility. Despite the rumours, and what Ted told me that day in the bathroom, Angela is still living at the family home. ‘What about Gareth?’
I shrug and bury my face in my glass to buy myself a few seconds. Who knows where Gareth is today? He’s stopped telling me anything about the business, dealing with all the properties himself, and now that he’s taken on an actual, proper secretary he doesn’t even need me to do his paperwork any more, all under the guise of leaving me ‘more time for your aromatherapy’.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ I confess, draining the last of my wine. ‘He’s always either out somewhere, or closeted away in his office at home.’ Even when he’s only in his office, the emotional barrier he’s put up between us means he might as well be a million miles away.
‘So, things haven’t improved much between you recently?’ Ted asks, his hand moving from my thigh to rest lightly on the table, a respectable distance away from my fingers.
‘Not really. They’re worse, if anything. I mean, we’ve barely spoken since the night of the barbecue.’ I flush a hot red at the thought of that night, the night this … thing between Ted and I started. ‘Every time I try to talk to him he tells me he’s too busy and he’ll speak to me later.’ Of course, later never comes. I quite often have clients come to me after they finish work, meaning that I spend most of the evening in the log cabin at the end of the garden that serves as my treatment room, and then I’m usually asleep by the time he comes up to bed, if he even comes to bed at all, and he’s gone by the time I wake up in the morning.
‘You don’t have to put up with it, you know, Rachel.’
‘The same way you don’t have to put up with Angela sleeping with her yoga teacher?’ Immediately the words leave my mouth I feel like a bitch, even more so at the way Ted’s face crumples slightly. He pulls it back quickly though, I’ll give him that, and the look is gone before I’m even really sure I saw it in the first place.
‘Rachel, I know that my marriage with Angela is over. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think that. I wouldn’t have let anything happen at the barbecue if I wasn’t sure that Angela was about to leave me.’ Ted’s voice is quiet, and deadly serious. His forehead creases in a deep frown as he speaks, as if it hurts him to say the words out loud. I wish I had another drink that I could nurse, a barrier that I could hold between us, so things don’t feel quite so intense. ‘Angela is sleeping with Devon, or Cornwall, or whatever the bloody hell his name is. I’ve found the evidence – she’s not exactly tried to hide it – and much as it pains me to admit it, she’s going to leave me …