Kitabı oxu: «Who Are You?: Part 2 of 3: With one click she found her perfect man. And he found his perfect victim. A true story of the ultimate deception.»

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

6 Danger

7 Silence

8 Happy birthday

9 Living again

10 ‘Do you really think you can just go?’

11 Crystal clear

Moving memoirs eNewsletter

About the publisher

Chapter 6
Danger

December 2009–July 2010

Christopher was furious about how things had panned out, and wasn’t going to let anything lie. The emails and messages continued, and I couldn’t settle. There was always a knot of worry in my stomach and I wasted far too much time wishing I’d never set eyes on him.

One night, I fell asleep on the sofa, exhausted by stress more than anything, much more than by the pregnancy. I don’t think I’d been asleep more than five minutes when I felt Vic shaking my arm.

‘Wake up, Megan,’ he whispered. ‘Stay quiet.’

My eyes were open in a second. They felt gritty and heavy, but the tone of Vic’s voice made me instantly realise that I couldn’t wallow in sleepiness.

‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed.

‘Someone’s outside. Get upstairs. Turn all the lights off. And hide. Get Ruby and hide. Don’t phone the police.’

‘Are you sure? Are you sure someone’s outside?’ I asked.

‘Of course I’m sure. I’ve been sitting here watching over you while you slept and I heard someone. Someone’s in the garden. They’ve been pacing around, checking the doors, so you just get upstairs, get Ruby and hide. I’ll deal with this.’

Ruby’s room was on the top floor so I went up there, quickly but quietly. If Vic had heard someone outside, I had no reason to linger downstairs with something bad maybe about to happen. I sat outside Ruby’s room in case anyone did get past him and came into the house; I’d protect Ruby to my last breath if I had to.

Vic had gone outside, to chase whoever was out there, but I could tell by the wind that he had left the back door open. I heard him shouting and was now terrified – I expected to hear someone come back in the house at any second; I just wouldn’t know who it would be. Sitting on the stairs, in the dark, fully prepared to hurt anyone who came near my child, pregnant and terrified – I wondered how my life had turned into a horror story. I wanted to call the police, I desperately wanted to call them, but he’d told me not to and I had to trust him. I sat there in the pitch black terrified for Ruby, for me, my unborn baby and for Vic, who had disappeared into the garden to find out who was there. I was sure it was my ex, or someone sent by my ex. I sat there absolutely petrified for what felt like an age, knowing that the back door was open, so if there was an altercation and Vic came off worse, then whoever was in the garden could come into the house and I would have no way of protecting myself or Ruby.

My heart was pounding by the time I heard the door bang and Vic’s voice shout, ‘Megan! It’s fine! All sorted!’

I belted down the stairs and threw myself into his arms. He was out of breath but seemed to be pumped up on adrenalin rather than fear.

‘What happened? My God, Vic, what happened out there?’ I asked.

He was breathing heavily as he told me. ‘When I got out to the garden, whoever it was ran down to the bottom. They got out of the gate and I chased him up the hill into the village. I managed to catch him there and … well, let’s just say he’ll be sorry he messed with me.’

‘You hit him?’

Vic nodded. ‘Of course I did. He was on my turf, Megan. Decking him was a lot less than I wanted to do.’

‘Where is he? Where did he go?’ I asked, then, ‘Vic – who was it?’

‘There was a car waiting for him – it must have all been set up, it wasn’t just someone chancing their luck as they went past. It was no bog-standard burglar looking for an open door, Megan.’

‘This has gone too far,’ I said, wiping some blood off his cheek. I picked up the phone and started calling 999.

Vic grabbed it out of my hand. ‘No, Megan – you’re right that it’s gone too far, but this needs to be dealt with by my family, not some poxy copper who sticks to the rules and doesn’t know what he’s really facing.’

I was still, at heart, a nice middle-class girl – for me, when things went wrong, or bad guys were involved, you called the police. ‘But Vic,’ I said, ‘we need to get the police involved so this can be stopped.’

‘It will get stopped, Megan, it will.’

‘Please, Vic, please let me call them,’ I begged.

He sighed. ‘I’m telling you, it’ll do no good but …’ he waved his arm at the phone, ‘go ahead – be my guest.’

They came round really quickly, checked the premises to see if there was someone hanging around – but we knew there wasn’t. Vic had said that he had seen a car that matched Christopher’s, but there was no sign of that either.

‘Can you tell me what happened, sir?’ asked one of the officers.

‘I chased a man wearing a balaclava out of the garden and across the road, caught up with the man and had a few words with him, then the man got up and ran down the hill to a car that was waiting with its engine running and then sped off,’ he told them, leaving out the fact that he’d punched him as hard as he could. The police could find nothing. It wasn’t surprising that there was no evidence, and it really just backed up what Vic had said – the police could do nothing.

‘I hate to say it, but I told you so,’ he said when they left. ‘I’ll never let anyone harm you. You mean the world to me, but you need to let me deal with it on my terms in the ways I know best.’

‘Vic, you already have so much to deal with – it’s just unfair that you have to cope with my psycho ex as well. Do you think he’s still out there watching us?’

‘No – I sent him on his way. But who knows what he might try next?’

We didn’t have to wait long to find out.

The next night the same thing happened. I had been putting Ruby to bed and dozed off – probably before her. I was so dopey with pregnancy hormones that I would drop off anywhere. I woke with a start when I heard a door banging downstairs.

‘Vic!’ I shouted.

There was no reply.

I crept downstairs and, again, the kitchen door was wide open. Not long after I got there Vic came back in, sweating and out of breath.

‘Same guy, I’m sure of it,’ he said. ‘Balaclava, same build as last night. He took the same route as well, but he was quicker tonight – he got away without a scratch on him, the lucky bastard.’

‘I’m calling the police,’ I said, grabbing my mobile. ‘It’s one thing to send nasty emails, it’s another to do this.’

Vic snatched the phone away from me. ‘Fuck the police. This has gone beyond the police now. This is going to be dealt with by my family. I’ll tell you again; it’s gone beyond the police, Megan – you must see that. Your ex isn’t going to listen to them; they’d probably never even catch him. This needs to be dealt with by my family. Understand?’ I was a bag of nerves. I didn’t have the strength to argue about it – what if this went on and on throughout my whole pregnancy? What if it was still happening when the baby got here? How far would Christopher go?

Vic put his coat on and left for the payphone. He always went into the village to call from there if he was dealing with anything dodgy or that he wanted to keep from me. I sat outside Ruby’s room, as was becoming my habit, and waited until he got back before venturing downstairs again.

All he said was, ‘It’s being dealt with.’

I felt as if it was all divided into goodies and baddies; it was ridiculous. On the good guy side, as well as Vic and the collective, there was also Uncle Alan. Brother of Vic’s dad, Alan couldn’t have been more different. He completely supported Vic’s attempts to break away and helped him whenever he could. He had a yard in Liverpool and I also suspected that he gave Vic money when he was really desperate. I could never make my mind up about Vic’s mum, Isabella. She turned a blind eye to everything his father did and I had a sense that Vic still really loved her. When he was a child, although she didn’t remove him from the situation, she would do all she could to make it better. Vic portrayed it as a very traditional gypsy set-up. What the man said went as law – her job was to clean and cook and serve. That was what she had been born into, so she didn’t see anything wrong with that.

They had been together since his mum was thirteen and his dad was fifteen. Basically, Jay came from a family of gypsies who were part of a travelling fair. They went all around Europe with it and were once in the Basque region of Spain. Vic’s mum, Isabella, was a local gypsy girl, and when she came to the fair his dad took a shine to her and a deal was done between the two families that she would go with them when they left. Vic was born not too long after that, which was shocking. After they got together, Vic’s dad left the fair and they all lived on a travellers’ site near London. She was only fourteen when he was born. Vic was born in a Westmoreland Star gypsy caravan, a beautiful place with glass and chrome, which cost a fortune and only the highest Roma could afford.

I didn’t really know too much about the good side of his family but I was aware that there were far too many of them on the bad guy list. That night, when he came back from the phone box, I knew that those on that list were involved.

Life carried on in a similar way, threats coming from left, right and centre, Vic having severe problems with the voices in his head, me in the last few weeks of pregnancy. It was a right struggle handling all this, it was like living in a gangster film, and it didn’t help that Vic had cut me off from all my friends. He told me that it was too dangerous to have people round who didn’t understand what was going on, and he also didn’t want me shouting my mouth off to all and sundry. I needed a break from him sometimes. I had several friends living in the town, but if I made plans to meet any of them Vic would suddenly take a turn for the worse, mentally, just before I was about to go, and I would be unable to leave him. It got to the point where I had no life at all, aside from him and Ruby.