Personal Protection Read online

  “This is not the way I’d hoped to be introduced,” she admitted, sticking out a hand. The voice from the telephone. “I’m Tori’s mum.”

  I accepted her hand and shook it firmly.

  “You must have flown to get here.”

  “I came as quickly as I could. Please, where is she? Can I see her?”

  She nodded and beckoned me to follow. The house was long and low, big for all that. The corridor she led me through doubled back on itself like the letter J before terminating in a set of loft ladders leading to a conversion, an addition to the building.

  “We had it done when Victoria came along. She was a late child, not expected, loved all the more for that.” It was as if she read my mind. Or perhaps she just needed to talk.

  “She hasn’t told us much. She won’t let us call the police. She says she can’t bear to go through all that being poked and probed, doesn’t want to be humiliated any more.” She bit back a sniffle.

  “I’ll speak to her about it,” I promised.

  “She doesn’t know I called you. But I couldn’t think of anyone else.”

  “Thank you for trusting me.”

  “Now that I’ve seen you I think I did the right thing.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “That bolt might be on. But it’s loose. I dare say a good push might do the trick…

  I squeezed her hand and climbed the ladder, leaving her at the bottom watching me hopefully. I knocked gently on the trap door. There was no reply to my first overture. I knocked again more loudly. A muffled sob and an equally muffled “Go away” were my reward.

  I tried the door and found it bolted as her mother had suggested. Hoping that she hadn’t decided to haul a piece of furniture over it to ensure her privacy, I turned my head, retreated a step then applied my shoulder to it. The door smacked back satisfyingly.

  Tori gave a shriek of fear.

  This was not the best way to make an entrance after what had just happened to her. I ducked the candlestick she threw only just in time. When nothing else followed, I climbed up the rest of the ladder into the tiny bedroom.

  I could see why she had retreated to this place: perfect for a child, low-roofed, cosy. Memories of its security must have been very strong. She was curled up on the rumpled single bed, surrounded by bedraggled stuffed toys, illuminated by a single anglepoise lamp on a child-sized formica desk. Her auburn hair lay in a tangled snarl across a lace trimmed pillow. She’d made a vain attempt to peacock-tail it, as she must have done when she was a child. A sparsely bristled hairbrush on the rug covered wooden floor testified to her attempts to turn back time. To when things were innocent and safe. And here I was recalling her to the present. I wanted to go to her and hold her, but I had no idea how welcome I’d be.

  “Tori, it’s me.”

  I ducked the low beams and walked slowly across the floor toward the bed, showing my open hands, the same way I would a sniper in a hostage situation. And was this really any different? Tori might be the victim, but she was every bit as volatile.

  I knelt down in front of the bed, picked up the hairbrush and set it aside. I offered her my hand. Tentatively her fingers crept across the coverlet towards the warmth of mine.

  Sensibly, I didn’t move. Like any frightened animal, I let her make the choices, let her come to me. I was careful to have nothing on my face, in my eyes, but how much I loved her. Whatever had happened, that wouldn’t change. She was no different in my eyes unless she chose to be. I didn’t want her to think of herself as soiled, or responsible for what had happened. I needed her to know she was not to blame.

  “Tori?” I whispered, putting all of that into my voice as best I knew how. With a sob she fell into my arms.

  I held her uncomfortably like this, without complaint, until the first storm of weeping had passed. Then I climbed over her on to the bed, wedged myself beneath the eaves so that she wouldn’t feel trapped, so she could go at any time, and lightly put my arms around her waist, letting her decide how tightly she wanted to be held.

  She snuggled into me, her head under my chin, her arms around my neck, even though her body was stiff against me and only just touching mine. I didn’t know whether that was usual or not. I had never personally dealt with a rape victim before.

  I could smell something earthy in her hair, a tantalisingly unpleasant but familiar cologne – not hers – along with the sharp scent of blood. She hadn’t washed, just fled straight here after her ordeal. Though I was desperate to know what had happened, to find someone to blame and hurt for this, I steeled my anger with patience. I waited. She would tell me when she was ready.

  Afternoon turned to evening through the skylight. She drew strength and courage from my undemanding comfort. Then, between one moment and the next, from silence came a torrent. The words rushed out of her without pause for breath or punctuation. Sorting out the tangle of the tale took all my skill.

  “Walking and walking and walking… Singing and walking. ‘Hello Mr Postman, nice to see you! I didn’t think you still did this round…’ So very old, see how grey his hair is now! Old and grey. Like a merry Santa… Bungalows… low, flat and… No! Don’t want to! Don’t want to see! NO! Hurts! Worse than a migraine, worse than concussion, worse than… DON’T! PLEASE!”

  I was deafened by a blood-curdling scream. God knows what her parents and the neighbours must have thought. I stroked her filthy hair and crooned nonsense words to her until she stopped whimpering and the monologue cut in again with frightening clarity.

  “If you like pricks so much, then have some!”

  The words of her rapist. I shivered. Had one of the clients at the dance club followed her? That’s what Dean had suggested, and he would be unbearable if he was proved right. I cursed myself for thinking about that at a time like this. But how do you stop? Even when somebody else’s life hangs in the balance, you can’t help thinking about how that death will impact upon your own life. Rape was no different.

  “Rubber and wood, metal and vegetables...”

  At first I didn’t understand what she was saying, then the chilling realisation hit me. She’d been raped, but not in the conventional fashion and not with anything DNA typing would be able to convict the perpetrator with. Pseudo penis? Dildo? Phallic objects, sharp and blunt. My mind shrank from enumerating the possibilities.

  “Tori?”

  “Fucked and fucked and fucked…

  “Tori, who did this to you?”

  “Fucked and fucked and…

  “Tori?”

  Her voice degenerated into sobs.

  This time I did hold her tight. And told her over and over that I loved her and that I’d get the bastard who did this and make them pay.

  Somewhere amid this litany I started to cry. A mixture of anger and frustration, pain and horror, pushed me over the line from big bad bodyguard to as much a victim of this crime as she. All of us would have to live with this; in the aftermath we all became victims.

  Then I found myself comforted; she was kissing my tears away and stroking my face. Sanity had come back into her eyes.

  “You won’t make me go to the police?” she whispered in a small voice.

  “I’ll never make you do anything, Tori. I promise you that.”

  “But you think I should go.”

  “I won’t push you to tell me, but without knowing more about what happened I don’t know if that would do any good.”

  She looked away.

  “Let me help you. You know I’d do anything for you! If you don’t want the police involved, fine, we won’t involve them. Tell me what you know. I’ll deal with it for you.”

  She reached down. Drew the gun from my waist holster, synched behind my back for driving. No, I’m not getting paranoid. I’d been expecting to hear from a client while I worked at D & C’s. That’s why I was wearing the pager. That’s why I was carrying the gun. Thanks to my original sponsor’s clout, I can legally carry a concealed weapon. (Don’t ask; it’s complica
ted.) I have a Glock 26, subcompact. With the full magazine of fifteen 9-millimetre parabellum rounds it’s no lightweight.

  She held it between us, pointed towards the roof. The unaccustomed weight of it made her small wrist tremble.

  “Would you shoot them for me?” she whispered.

  I went cold inside. Would I? Could I? The Glock was distinctive. I couldn’t get away with it. She probably knew that too. She wasn’t really thinking straight. Hell, I can’t say I was.

  “You said you’d do anything for me.” She threw my own words back at me.

  I flinched. “Do you hate me that much?”

  The question brought her up short. It wasn’t what she was expecting.

  “Of course I don’t hate you! What..?” Then she looked at the gun. “Jesus.” She swallowed hard and nodded her understanding. “This… this is not America. There are only so many guns in the country… Your licence is for this..?”

  I nodded. “It would only be a matter of time before they found me. Then I’d spend the rest of my life in prison. I don’t think I could live like that, Tori.”

  I really couldn’t. I’m not good with authority.

  “What’s the euphemism? You’d eat your gun?”

  “Yes.”

  On my black days, I had more than once contemplated that particular form of suicide. It was quick, if you knew what to aim for. I do.

  She saw the look in my eyes and caught her breath. “But if I asked you, really asked you and meant it, asked you to kill them?”

  “Yes, I’d do it.”

  She shivered and slid the gun into the holster at my back. “You’re scary.” She cuddled into my shoulder and this time laid the full length of herself against me. “Tell me again why it is that I love you, scary lady.”

  “Because I love you. Because we have good sex. Because I’d do anything for you. Any or all of the above.”

  She sighed, almost contentedly. “It doesn’t make the pain go away, but it does make it easier to bear. Thank you. Thank you for dropping whatever you were doing and coming here. For making me that offer. For being you.”

  “I wish I could have been there to stop it. I wish it wasn’t just comfort and consolation I have to offer you.”

  I felt her smile against my shirt. “You’d have kicked her ass but good.”

  “Her?”

  She looked up at me. “I thought it was. Now I’m not sure. You probably think I’m useless…

  “No! No, it’s shock.” And not wanting to remember. I couldn’t blame her.

  I let out an explosive breath. It was a reasonable assumption. Who else would use a fake prick? Smell of perfume? God, maybe it was one of her exes! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. This is why I’m the brawn of our outfit.

  “You thought it was one of the men from the club?”

  I hated to disappoint her, but now was a time for honesty. “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “That’s what Mum and Dad thought too. I couldn’t talk to them. How could I explain that another woman might have done that to their daughter when I was coming here to talk to them about you? You’ve probably met my dad. You can see what he’s like. If he knew who’d done this… She shivered.

  I could sympathise. Coming out to your parents is always difficult. Many of us leave home to avoid the necessity. I did.

  “I just wanted to get in a cab and go home, but I wasn’t in a fit state. Anyway, whoever it was stuffed me in a sack and dumped me on the doorstep so it wasn’t as if I had any choice. They even rang the bell.” She began to giggle hysterically.

  I held her again, until the laughter turned to tears then faded away.

  “God I hurt,” she whispered wretchedly.

  “There is something we can do about that. Get you in a bath.”

  “I don’t want to do that here. I want to go home. Will you take me?”

  “If that’s what you want. But I think you’ll find it uncomfortable to sit in a car so soon after…” I bit off what I was going to say.

  “I have to deal with it.”

  “But not so soon. Please, Tori, take a bath here. You can have another one when you get home, if that’s what you want. You need to feel better about yourself. You can’t do that if every time you look in a mirror what happened to you looks back.”

  “I don’t have any clothes here,” she protested. But her resistance was weakening.

  “You can have some of mine; you know I always keep spares in my car.”

  “In case of blood and bullets.” She swallowed back giggles that would have become as hysterical as the last.

  “Yes,” I agreed simply. Why varnish the truth?

  “All right,” she agreed.

  Then another thought struck her. “I don’t know what I’ll say to Mum and Dad.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  I have an idea now what police officers have to go through when they make house calls to tell people that their loved ones are dead. Sitting in that pristine living room, facing Tori’s homophobic father and partisan mother, I told them as much of the truth as I thought they could stomach. That their beloved daughter had been molested: abducted, bound, gagged. I didn’t specify her attacker’s gender. I said they’d done it with implements other than what nature gave them.

  Her mother cried and her father raged. When I left them to fetch Tori my spare clothes they were both crying, feeling as helpless as I had, confronted by the truth and the fact that they had not been there to save her. Most parents never think of you as anything but their baby, no matter how old you grow. It is a mark of their love when they still want to protect you from the evils of the world, no matter how you might have disappointed them. While I didn’t have that luxury, Tori was fortunate. Her parents thought the world of her, had always supported her, no matter how they disagreed with her choices.

  It might have been wrong to let them think that the attacker was a man. But the opportunity to give Tori their complete support for what she was, why she’d chosen as she had, was a chance not to be missed. I had no desire to make her father feel that his gender was evil, that he was the same by default. I truly hope that was never what he thought. Having come so far along the road towards acceptance, not to drive the bolt home just when she needed them most would have been a crime bigger than the one she’d just suffered.

  I knocked at the bathroom door, thinking that she’d been in there too long. There was no bolt on this door. She was squatting in the water, crying and bleeding into the bath.

  “Tori, you have to come out, let me get you dry.”

  “N…n…no! I… There are things stuck in me!” she cried.

  I scrubbed a hand across my face. Shit, shit, shit. “Then I’ll get them out,” I told her.

  There followed one of the most harrowing episodes of my life. Tori, on her back on the bathroom floor, my jacket raising her lower back and beautiful behind in the air, legs spread as if for a cervical smear, while I employed tweezers, water, a magnet and my fingers until we were sure there was nothing left inside her that could harm her.

  Then I stripped myself and put her under the shower, washed her hair and scrubbed her until she was clean, until both of us were wrinkled like prunes and the water was going cold and there could be no further reasons not to come out.

  “I’ve ruined your jacket,” she said quietly as I towelled her dry.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters to me!”

  I stopped what I was doing. “Then you can buy me a new one.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes, I will.”

  “OK.” I went back to drying her.

  Her mother was just coming down the loft steps when we came out of the bathroom. Bed linen lay in a heap at the foot of the stairs and the light was out above.

  “I’ve remade your bed, love. If you need to come back, you know we’ll be here.”

  She hugged her mother tightly and managed not to cry.

  “Thanks, Mum, I will,
I promise. How… How’s Dad taking this?”

  “You know your father. He’ll get over it. It’ll take a while, but he will. Don’t fret about it.”

  Then she saw my gun. Her eyes opened wide. “You really are a bodyguard.”

  “I feel like a pretty useless excuse for one today.”

  She gripped my hand. “You couldn’t have known. None of us could. You hear about this sort of thing on the news, but it doesn’t come home that it’s real until it happens to you. Won’t the person you’re guarding be wondering where you are?”

  “I was on call. He didn’t call.” Of course it was that moment that the bloody pager went off. I didn’t even look at the number. I quite deliberately plucked it off my belt, turned it off and dropped it into a pocket of the ruined jacket. Tori’s mother’s hand gripped mine even tighter.

  “Go and say goodbye to your father. Let him see that you’re all right.”

  Tori swallowed hard, then, steeling herself, walked into the living room and closed the door behind her.

  “Thank you for coming. For telling us everything.” I nodded. I couldn’t exactly say it had been a pleasure.

  “You’ll take good care of her, won’t you?”

  “Count on it. I only have one job right now, that’s protecting Tori.”

  Now it was her turn to nod. She looked at a scuffed bit of wallpaper and smoothed it back against the wall. “You’re going to get them for her, aren’t you?”

  “If I can.”

  “Does she know who it was?”

  “She’s still in shock. She might remember more later. It’s too early to say.”

  “Will you come and tell me when it’s done?”

  I nodded. Tori came out. She had been crying again, as had her father. I hadn’t expected anything else. I didn’t expect him to take my hand, though.

  “You take care of my little girl.”

  I realised I was being given the sacred trust. Father to son-in-law, acceptance, the passing on of responsibility. Tori heard it in his voice and caught her breath. I returned the pressure on his hand with a little more than my accustomed force, showing him my strength, my worthiness of the faith he was placing in me.