Alex mumbled a thank you.
Silence followed her as she made her way across the foyer to the exit. Nathan was nowhere to be seen. Silence accompanied her out into the darkness, but she could hear her attacker’s voice taunting her beneath his surgical mask. ‘What does “no” mean? It’s a simple question.’
Chapter fifteen
It was six weeks since that horrific night and one week since the doctors’ party. Any hope of thinking he no longer was a danger had fled her mind as soon as she’d seen her car. She was terrified that he was still out there and there was nothing she could do to prove it. As far as the police were concerned the message on her car was a prank. She was the butt of someone’s cruel joke.
She lifted the paper bag to her mouth and breathed in and out. She had to stop thinking about it, or else she would become a prisoner inside her own home. But it was so hard. Anxiety plagued her all the time. At work she parked as close to her department as possible. She looked at every man she passed keenly. The porters, the nurses and the doctors she came in contact with were now suspects. The male patients she treated, if there for minor ailments, were also considered suspects. And while she stood in their presence studying their features, it was their voices she concentrated on most. But none had his voice. How could they? The pitch of his voice had been distorted. Flattened.
What it reminded her of most was a tracheostomy patient who’d had a voice prosthesis inserted. When he spoke his voice sounded mechanical because air no longer passed through the vocal cords but through a tube instead. Could a man with a tracheostomy have taken her, she now crazily wondered. Someone who blamed her for the loss of his voice? She was going mad with all these wild speculations. He was sending her insane while destroying her life.
Patrick had stopped ringing. The last message, from three days earlier, was still saved. She played it over and over, listening for any insincerity, but his apology for hurting her sounded genuine. He should never have gone behind her back and talked to Caroline. He was out of order. He regretted it entirely, but he felt out of control over the situation surrounding Alex and felt he had let her down. By not believing her. He kept his composure right up until the end where his voice broke: ‘I love you, Alex. I want to marry you. Please, please ring me.’
The reason she didn’t call back was not because of him confiding in Caroline, though that hurt. It was because he’d admitted he didn’t believe her. Without trust and one hundred per cent belief in the person you were supposed to love, there was no foundation to build on. A long-term relationship like a marriage wouldn’t stand a chance. As far as she was concerned, their relationship, although not officially ended by either of them, was over.
Standing alone in her kitchen she wished she didn’t miss him. She wished a thousand times that everything could go back to those minutes when she first set out to meet him, and that now they were planning what to buy each other for Christmas.
But more than anything she wished she didn’t see him as someone different, someone weaker, someone she would never have fallen in love with. It was as if she had lost her Patrick and this new one replaced him, and with sadness she realised he probably felt exactly the same about her. They were lost to each other. Even if they searched really hard they would stay lost because they weren’t the same people any more. She had survived a horrific experience, which he believed she had imagined.
Six weeks ago she had a boyfriend she loved, a job she loved, and a life to call her own. In the space of a few hours her sane world had been whipped away. It was now splashed with uncertainty, anxiety and great big splodges of the unknown. If it wasn’t for her job and the help of little blue pills, she knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on.
*
Later that afternoon, berating herself for trying to do all her Christmas shopping in one day, she struggled back to the car park under the weight of John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Thorntons bags. She should have stuck to her original plan and given everyone vouchers instead. It would have saved her time and energy, and she wouldn’t now be exhausted and left with the thought that the gifts she’d bought were somehow not quite right. The shirt for her father now seemed too modern, and the dressing gown for her mother was a repeat of what she’d bought her last year. It had been a long day with no festive feeling. She hadn’t rung Fiona to remind her they were going shopping, because they hadn’t spoken since the party. She had not forgiven her yet.
With carrier bags all over the back seat of her car she joined the lane of slow-moving vehicles making their way to the exit, and hoped the traffic from Bristol back to Bath had eased since the morning. She wanted to stop at a garage and get her car washed; she could still see flecks of yellow paint on the windscreen, even though it had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life. A clean car was one less reminder. When she got home, if she could muster enough energy, she would give her flat a tidy. On the other hand, she had tomorrow off as well and could catch up with any household chores then. It would keep her occupied until she returned to work.
And then she could get back to the business of thinking about other people’s lives instead of her own.
Winter darkness had arrived by four o’clock as she drove down the ramp to the basement car park beneath her apartment building, and her mind was free of all these unsettling things. Her thoughts were on what she would have for dinner, the long soak in a bubble bath she was looking forward to, and the TV drama on at nine o’clock.
If she had been driving a fraction faster she would have driven straight over the woman. She slammed her foot on the brake and switched the headlights to full beam. The woman was lying on the ground, flat on her back in Alex’s car parking space, completely still. Instinctively Alex opened her glove box and pulled out various pieces of medical equipment that she kept on hand in the event of passing an accident. With a Guedel airway tube and stethoscope in one hand and a handful of bandages in the other she rushed to aid the woman.