I looked at him in dismay. ‘What if I need to go to the toilet?’
‘You won’t be able to, so I suggest you go now.’
‘But how long will you be gone?’
‘Two or three hours. Four, maybe. And just in case you’re thinking of calling for help from the balcony, I advise you not to. I’ll be around, watching and listening. So don’t do anything stupid, Grace, I’m warning you.’
The way he said it made a chill run down my spine, yet once he’d left, it was hard not to give in to the temptation to stand on the balcony and scream for help at the top of my voice. I tried to imagine what would happen if I did and came to the conclusion that even if people did come running, Jack would too, armed with a convincing story about my mental state. And although someone might decide to look further into my claims that I was being held a prisoner and that Jack was a murderer, it could be weeks before anything could be proved.
I could repeat the story he’d told me and eventually the authorities might find a case of a father beating his wife to death which matched the version I had told them and track down Jack’s father. But, even if he said that it was his son who had committed the crime, it was doubtful he would be believed some thirty years after the event and the chances were that he was already dead anyway. Also, I had no way of knowing if the story was true. It had sounded horribly plausible but Jack could have made the whole thing up just to frighten me.
The balcony I was to spend the next few hours on gave onto a terrace at the back of the hotel and, looking down, I could see people milling around the swimming pool, preparing for a swim or a spot of sunbathing. Realising that Jack could be anywhere down there watching me, and would be able to see me more easily than I could see him, I moved away from the edge of the balcony. The balcony itself was furnished with two wooden slatted chairs, the uncomfortable kind that left marks on the back of your legs if you sat on them for too long. There was also a small table but no cushioned sunbed, which would have made my time there more comfortable. Luckily, I had thought to bring my towel with me so I made a cushion of it and put it on one of the chairs. Jack had given me just enough time to gather together a bikini, suntan lotion and sunglasses, but I hadn’t thought to take one of the many books I had brought with me. Not that it mattered—I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, no matter how exciting the story was. After only a few minutes on the balcony, I already felt like a caged lion, which made my desire to escape even stronger and I was glad the room next door was empty because the temptation to call over the balcony for help would have been too strong to resist.
The next week was torture.
Sometimes Jack took me down to breakfast in the morning, sometimes he didn’t and it became obvious, from the way that he was treated by the manager, that he was a regular visitor to the hotel. If we did go down for breakfast, Jack would take me straight back to the room once we had finished and I would be locked on the balcony until he came back from wherever he’d been and let me into the room so that I could use the toilet and eat whatever he had brought for me for lunch. An hour or so later, he would force me back onto the balcony and disappear until the evening.
Terrible though it was, there were a few things I was grateful for: there was always a part of the balcony where I could find shade and, because I insisted, Jack gave me bottles of water, although I had to be careful how much I drank. He never left me for more than four hours at a time, but the time passed excruciatingly slowly. When everything—the loneliness, the boredom, the fear, the despair—got too much to bear, I closed my eyes and thought of Millie.
Although I longed to get off the balcony, when Jack did decide to take me out, not because he felt sorry for me but because he wanted to take photographs, they were such stressful occasions that I was often glad to get back to the hotel room. One evening he took me to dinner in a wonderful restaurant where he took photo after photo of me at various stages of the meal. One afternoon, he booked a taxi and we crammed four days’ sightseeing into four hours, during which he took more photos of me as proof of the lovely time I was having.