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‘Oh, those are lovely!  But you really shouldn’t have!  I believe in being a good neighbour for its own sake, you know.  But tell us, why were the police here?  Surely you weren’t burgled again?’

‘No, nothing like that.  I just saw a strange man hanging about outside and panicked a bit.  I suppose I’m still a bit jittery after last night’

Brendan nodded comfortably, ‘Of course.  Well, you would be, wouldn’t you, after a scare like that?  Would you like to stay with us again tonight?  You know we have the room and you’d be more than welcome.’

‘No, I’ll be fine, thanks.  A friend of mine fixed the door and had a burglar alarm installed so I’m perfectly safe now.’

Brendan nodded again and Lucy smiled, saying a touch archly, ‘Oh, I saw that friend!  And very handsome he was too!  I hope these flowers weren’t from him?’

Kate forced a smile, ‘No, of course not.  I got them for you myself.  And thank you again.’ 

She turned and fled, hating the smile on Lucy’s face and the knowing look in her eyes.  Interfering old... Surely she hadn’t spoken to Peter earlier?  Before she
had gotten home?  That would be just great!  He had always been a big hit with elderly women, and God knows what he’d have told her about their relationship.

She reached street level again
and was just about to go down to her own apartment when a dark figure some distance up the street caught her eye.  She froze for a second but instantly realized, with relief, that this was not the same man who had been lurking outside earlier; this guy was much taller.  So why had he caught her attention like that?  He was moving away from her and at that moment he walked under a street light and provided her with the answer; it was Trevor Jordan.  She stared at his retreating figure for several seconds; what the hell was he doing out this way?  He was a northsider, a Swords man.  And he clearly wasn’t here to visit her because at that moment he turned left and vanished from sight around the corner towards the main road.

She was baffled but there was no point in standing out there in the cold all night wondering about it so she hurried ins
ide and locked up.  No doubt there was a perfectly innocent explanation but she couldn’t imagine what it could be.  She shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it and began turning off all the lights.  Then she walked into the bedroom and flung off her clothes, so tired and bemused that she abandoned the habits of a lifetime and just dropped them on the floor before almost collapsing into bed.  But before she fell asleep her last thoughts were of her mysterious caller, and what he could have wanted with her.  And, of course, the really important question of
would he be back?

    Kate was lying fast asleep in her bed when a noise woke her.  Her eyes snapped open and she sat up with a start, instantly alert and with her heart pounding. 
Wha
t
wa
s
tha
t
?
 
She sat in the silent blackness for some time, straining to hear any fugitive noise, any sound that did not belong.  But there was nothing, and after an endless minute her heartbeat slowed and she began to wonder if she had only imagined it.  Or was it Peter, coming home unexpectedly and creeping about so as not to wake her?  Then she heard a small, furtive noise outside her bedroom door.  Suddenly the fear returned in a huge wave, filling her senses even as her mind struggled to assert that there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation behind the sound.  It could even be a mouse or something.

Suddenly she was a child again rather than an adult, and could only sit and face the horrors of the night with a so
undless scream trapped in her throat.  She could not move, could not alter her fate; whatever would happen would happen
to
her, and she was too weak and powerless to prevent it.

The bedroom door burst open with a crash and a man charged into her room,
growling
like an animal in his hatred and rage.  Her paralysis vanished and Kate screamed and rolled to one side, trying to get out of the bed, trying desperately to escape now that it was too late.  For the man was too quick.  He flung himself full-length onto the bed, on top of her, driving the breath from her body with a painful gasp, and he was strong, too strong for her to fight.

She tried,
though, tried with all her might. She screamed and lashed out at him and struggled frantically to get away.  And she almost succeeded in getting out of the bed as he momentarily recoiled from her ill-aimed but frantic blows and sharp, raking nails.  But she could not get clear of the duvet quickly enough and he grabbed a handful of her long hair and hauled her back with an ease that spoke of terrifying strength.  Then his right fist smashed into her face in a punch of stunning power, a punch that broke her nose and drove her back down onto the bed, dazed and bleeding and barely conscious, her arms and legs still moving but weakly, no longer the struggles of a woman fighting for her life but the feeble paddling of a drowning swimmer.

‘
Bitch
!’ he hissed furiously, his furious, demented eyes clearly visible to her even in the near total darkness; indeed they seemed to blaze with an inner light of their own.  ‘Little
cunt! 
Little
whore! 
You’re going to get it!  You’ve been asking for it and now you’re going to fucking well
get
it!’

He punched her again, and again, until a steady stream of blows was hammering down onto her bruised and bleeding face and her struggles ceased as she started the slide into unconsciousness.  Only when she was fully subdued and barely conscious did he stop hitting her, his mind turning to other things.  Even through a dull fog of pain she felt him pull away from her up onto his knees.  She felt the duvet being dragged off her but could not move to try and stop him, could not move at all
in her shock and fear and confusion.  She felt his rough, strong hands tearing at her nightdress, ripping it to shreds and dragging the pieces off her helpless body.  And all the time she heard him muttering frenziedly, ‘Little
bitch! 
You want it and you’re going to
get
it!  And you’re going to
like
it!’

Don’t do it, Daddy!
she thought dazedly, badly concussed and only semi-conscious,
Don’t do it. Mummy will hear and it’s
wrong! 
It’s
bad
and you know it!  You know it, you know it, you know it!

So why do you keep doing it?

The man was tearing off her underwear, her old bra and the huge, thick underpants that she somehow could not bring herself to throw out and only wore when she knew she was going to sleep alone.  His jagged, broken nails and rough hands scraped across her body as he simply tore them asunder, ripping them off her without apparent effort, his nails leaving deep scores on her soft, pale flesh.  The night air felt cold on her bare skin and goose bumps instantly rose on every inch of her body, though these were not caused by cold alone; fear too was shocking her flesh.

Got to get up,
she thought in confusion,
can’t let him.  Have to fight.  Fight. 
But she could not.  She could not move at all as his hands mauled her body, roughly crushing her soft breasts before hauling her slim legs apart.  She felt him paw at her, hurting and
exposing
her, and then he rammed his fingers inside her and that
really
hurt, a foretaste of the far worse pain that was to come.  And still she could not move, nor could she lose consciousness though now she desperately wanted to, wanted to be somewhere else, wanted to be lost in the black and
away
from here.  Away from
him.

She felt him ram himself inside her and he felt
huge,
impossibly huge and rough and hard and it hurt her like she had never been hurt before, and there was slick wetness which she knew to be her own blood.  He leaned forward and she
felt
as well as smelled his hot, foul breath on her face,
felt
him calling her filthy names as well as heard them, and then his hands were on her throat, throttling her, and she finally, gratefully, began sliding towards the sheltering blackness, knowing that she was about to die and feeling only relief at the thought.

Kate woke with a start and shot upright in the bed, a scream tearing itself from her fear-constricted throat.  She thrashed around desperately but was caught in her bedclothes and was unable to free herself immediately.  She was covered in sweat and her mouth was working frantically but after that first scream no other sound came, just as none had come
that
night.  And then she stopped, confused.  It was morning, not night, and she could see from the light filtering in through the heavy green velvet curtains that she was alone, that no one was attacking her.  Not this time.

She collapsed back onto the bed, a long, shuddering moan shaking her entire body. 
Just a dream!  It had been just a dream. 
But of course that was not strictly true.  It wasn’t
a
dream, it was
the
dream, the same dream that had plagued her every night for months after the incident, and which even now returned every week or two to haunt her.  To persecute her.  And it was not a dream at all but a memory.

The man who had attacked her was called Arthur Straub.  He was a b
rutal serial rapist with a history of violent assaults on women, and two years before Kate had helped the Oxford police -who had arrested him with little evidence but absolute certainty of his guilt- to finally convict him for one of his crimes.  Kate had been the one who had talked to him endlessly after his arrest, working her way deeper and deeper into his sick world, remorselessly questioning and probing and
plaguing
him until finally he had revealed something he shouldn’t have known about his latest victim.  It was the fact that she had a Chinese character tattooed in the small of her back, and Kate had instantly seized on his slip and used it like a pry bar to open him up.  Finally, and with genuine hatred for her, Straub had cracked and screamed out the initial admissions that later led to a full confession.  A confession that had sent him to prison for five years for the rape and battery of a pretty teenage girl, a girl who had no longer been pretty when Straub had finished with her.  Though confession was a misleading word; when she had finally angered him enough, had pried through his defenses, Straub had
boasted
to her of his exploits, had reveled in the fear and pain he had inflicted on others.  He had wanted to reveal his triumphs to her, the lasting damage he had dealt to innocent women, and the lives he had blighted.

Kate sighed and slowly pushed back the bed covers.  She went out to the bat
hroom and sat on the cold toilet seat, remembering the night Straub had come after her with a sickening, fearful clarity.  When Straub had been interrupted she had been only a minute or so from death.  She remembered also, at the time, wishing that she
ha
d
died.  Because oblivion would have been preferable to the fear and shame, to the bottomless hatred and, worst of all, to the strange, unreasonable guilt
. 
And to the dreadful feeling of being
defiled
that would not go away.

Chronic o
vercrowding of the British prison system meant that Straub had only served twenty-five months of his five-year sentence for raping the teenager, and while in prison he had not forgotten Kate.  She had almost forgotten him, and if she thought about him at all it was with a certain satisfaction, the warm glow of a job well done.  And with every woman’s pleasure at a rapist being jailed, though she considered the sentence far too light in view of the seriousness of his crime.  It was ironic really; if Kate had not gotten him to confess, and hence to plead guilty at his arraignment, he might in the end have gotten a longer sentence.  But then, of course, without the confession he might not have been jailed at all; during her work with the British police she had seen too many guilty men walk free to be under any illusions about the good guys always winning, or the bad guys always going to prison.

Straub had remembered
her
far more clearly, and with a hatred that had grown with every day that had passed and every prison beating he had received, with every time he was spat on or discovered faeces or broken glass in his food.  And after his release he had come back to repay her for her part in his conviction.  With interest.

He had located her
simply by watching the Thames Valley police headquarters until she turned up there for work, whereupon he had followed her home.  As with his previous victims he had watched her for days, finding out where she lived and learning her routines.  And savoring the anticipation, the build-up to the final act as he patiently awaited his revenge.  And then one night, when Peter was away, he had broken in to her house with the intention of killing her in the most brutal fashion he could devise.  He would have succeeded, too, if Peter had not returned unexpectedly from Leicester in the middle of the night, and walked in on Straub even as he was strangling her.  He had dragged Straub off Kate with only moments to spare and had given the rapist the beating of his life.  Worse even than the punishment Straub had inflicted on
her
.  The only thing that had stopped Peter from killing him with his bare hands was his concern for Kate, his fear that she might die while he battered her attacker.  He had stopped hitting Straub only to ring for an ambulance, and in the end both had survived.  Though Peter had almost finished Straub off when the paramedics had tried to take them both to hospital in the same ambulance.