The Doll's House

50

Ruby’s hands shook as she rifled through the pile of papers, digesting every horrifying word. She had read cards, letters, confessions from three women now – Roisin, a Pippa somebody and another girl who simply signed herself ‘I’. Three women who had been torn from their loved ones and dragged away to this strange Hell.

Roisin’s birthday card to her four-year-old son had made Ruby cry. She didn’t know this woman – had never met her – and yet even in spite of her own suffocating sense of terror, she had been moved by Roisin’s plight. It must have been horrific for her, lying down here alone, imagining her little boy calling for a mother who didn’t come. Did the boy think that his mother didn’t love him any more? That she had abandoned him? It was clear that Roisin had begged to be given a pen and paper, so she could write to her young son and explain her continued absence. But the cards and letters that she’d written had never reached the intended recipient. The cruelty of her captor’s actions in keeping Roisin here took Ruby’s breath away.

‘Pippa’’s testimony was in diary form. She had less to say, she was just marking the passage of time, trying to keep herself sane by detailing the different phases of her life down here with her captor. There had been arguments, abuse and, worse still, rapprochements. Pippa had clearly hated herself for what she had to do down here, what she had become, and Ruby could see why. In the end, she had had to put Pippa’s diary down – it presented a vision of her future which she wasn’t strong enough to contemplate.

Grim curiosity drove her on to ‘I’’s writings, but they turned out to be the worst of the lot. They were dated a little over a year ago and were obviously written after she had discovered Roisin and Pippa’s hidden letters and cards. This discovery had been a sledgehammer blow for ‘I’’s morale, robbing her of any resistance or hope. Her letters thereafter were a mixture of apologies to people she’d loved and wronged in her old life and long, rambling descriptions of her suffering and incarceration – records which she hoped would be found one day.

‘I’’s deepest fear was that her fate would never be known. That her parents would remain for ever in the dark about what had happened to their little girl. The last letter, dated from May, began in bleak mood, ‘I’ declaring her avowed belief that she would die in this cellar, before going on to offer her final thoughts, her final expressions of love, as she faced the end of her short life. Horrifically, she never managed to complete her goodbyes to her family – the green felt-tip pen that all the girls had been using finally running out before she could write her last words.

Each letter was like a physical wound to Ruby. Each word a death knell. Ever since her abduction, she had feared she was going to be her captor’s slave. Now she knew she was going to be his next victim.