style="font-size:15px;"> She presses the button and lowers her window. ‘Can I help—’
A fist slams into the camera and the screen goes dark.
Alice hit pause. ‘I’m going to make another pot of tea, do you want some, or there’s juice, and I got biscuits too, do you like custard creams or jammie dodgers, stupid question really, who doesn’t love jammie—’
‘Surprise me.’
She nodded, collected the teapot and headed off to the kitchen.
The DVD case lay on the makeshift coffee table, beside her laptop: ‘WRAPPED IN DARKNESS ~ ONE WOMAN’S JOURNEY TO HELL AND BACK!’ The subtitle was about as melodramatic as the reconstruction.
Obviously the director really wanted to make a feature film of the story, but didn’t have the budget, or talent, to pull it off.
OK, so he’d got the idea more or less right, but the details? If Laura Strachan and her mate Steve had actually talked like that the day she went missing I’d eat my chair.
I fast-forwarded through some beardy type talking in front of a whiteboard while the kettle rumbled in the kitchen. Never trust a man with a beard – sinister devious bastards the lot of them.
Army ants marched in a line around the top of my left sock.
Bloody thing. I pulled my trouser leg up and raked my nails back and forward along the lip of the ankle monitor, scrabbling at the plastic edge. Blessed relief.
Alice emerged from the kitchen with the teapot and a plate of assorted biscuits. ‘You shouldn’t scratch it, I mean what if you break the skin and it gets all infected and then—’
‘It’s itchy.’ I pressed play again.
Laura Strachan – the real one, not the actress playing her in the reconstruction – has her hands dug deep into her pockets, the wind whipping her curly auburn hair out behind her, ruffling the ankle-length coat as she picks her way along the battlements of the castle. She pauses, looking down the cliff, across Kings River towards Montgomery Park and Blackwall Hill beyond. Sunlight glints on the broad curve of water, turns the firework trees into explosions of amber and scarlet.
Her voice comes in over the background music, even though her lips don’t move.
‘From the moment I was attacked, to the moment I woke up in Intensive Care, everything was a blur. Some fragments are clearer than others, some just … it was like peering into the bottom of a well, with something sharp glinting at the bottom. Sharp and dangerous.’
She leans on the battlement peering down. Then the camera switches so it’s looking back up at her.
The scene jumps to a bright white room, lined with what looks like clear plastic sheeting. It’s hard to tell – they’ve sodded about with the picture, making the highlights stretch vertically across the screen, as if everything’s in the process of being beamed up. The room throbs in and out, then lurches to one side until a large stainless-steel trolley sits in the middle of the shot, with the younger, prettier, actress version of Laura lying on it. Her hands and feet are tied to the trolley’s legs, two more bands of rope – one across her chest, under her armpits, the other across her thighs – hold her tight. Naked, except for a pair of strategically placed towels.
‘I remember the smell, more than anything else. It was like detergent and bleach, and something … a bit like hot plastic? And there was classical music playing.’
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata fades up.
‘And he …’ Her voice breaks. A pause. ‘He was wearing a white apron, on over … Over … It might have been surgical scrubs. I can’t … It was all so blurred.’
A man walks into shot, dressed exactly like Laura described him. His mouth is hidden behind a surgical mask, the rest of his face blurred – reduced to an unrecognizable mess by the video effect.
Then a close-up of a syringe, the needle huge as it moves towards the camera. Fade to black. Then we’re in what looks like a private hospital room.
‘The next thing I know, it’s four days later and I’m lying on a bed in intensive care. And I’m choking on the ventilator, and I’m wired up to half-a-dozen monitors, and this nurse is running around screaming that I’m awake.’
Alice poured the tea.
‘All my life, ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to have babies. A family of my own to love and cherish the way my father never did for me.’
I helped myself to a custard cream.
‘But the doctors said it wasn’t possible any more. The Inside Man took it away from me when he … When he ripped me open.’
Cut to a posh-looking office, lined in wood, with a heap of framed certificates on the wall. A thin balding man sits behind a big oak desk. He’s wearing a dark-blue suit and a bright-red tie. A caption scrolls across the bottom of the screen: ‘CHARLES DALLAS-MACALPINE, SENIOR CONSULTANT SURGEON, CASTLE HILL INFIRMARY’.
His voice is all public school pomp and barely concealed sneer. ‘Of course, when Laura came to me her insides were a mess. It’s a miracle she didn’t exsanguinate in the ambulance.’ A tight-lipped smile. ‘That means, “bleed to death”.’
Really? Wow, hark at him with his posh-boy big words.
‘Luckily, she’d had the good fortune to be on my operating table. Otherwise—’
Three short thumps broke in on Dr Patronizing’s monologue.
Front door.
Alice flinched. ‘Are you expecting someone, because I don’t—’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘—shudder to think. You see, her uterus was—’
I closed the lounge door behind me. Limped across the hall’s stained floorboards, walking stick clunking with every other step. Peered out through the peephole.
A bald head filled the lens with a swathe of pink and grey.
I undid the four security locks and opened the door. ‘Shifty.’
He’d obviously not shaved his head for a bit: a fringe of gunmetal stubble stuck out above his ears. More stubble shaded his collection of chins. Folds of skin drooped beneath watery bloodshot eyes. A bruise rode high on his left cheek. The smell of aftershave oozed out of him, mingling with the rotten oniony whiff of the day’s sweat.
A couple of orange carrier-bags sat on the floor by his feet.
Shifty blinked at me a couple of times, then a massive grin split across his face and he lunged, wrapped his arms around me, pinning my arms to my sides, and squeezed. Laughed. ‘About bloody time!’ He leaned back, lifting my feet off the floor. ‘How’ve you been? I’m gasping here. Any chance of a drink?’
Couldn’t help but smile. ‘Get off me, you big Jessie.’
‘Oh,
