The Facts of Life and Death

32

STEFFI COLE WAS almost home when she stopped being a person and became a means to an end.

Just past the Boat House restaurant, something hard jabbed her in the back, and when she turned to be cross with some joker, a man with no face hissed, ‘Keep walking. This is a gun.’

So Steffi kept walking. She tried to keep thinking, too, but she had to keep walking while she was thinking, because of the gun.

Was it robbery? She could cope with robbery. She had sixty-five quid in her jeans. She wouldn’t volunteer it, but if he found it, he could have it.

Was it rape? She braced herself mentally. If she had to, she would cope with a rape. As long as the man didn’t hurt her, she could cope with anything, she realized.

Funny how your perspective changed as fast as the circumstances.

The man kept jabbing her in the middle of her back. She tried to decide whether it felt like a gun. As if she would know! It was probably a lie. Nobody had a gun. Nobody in Instow, anyway.

But could she take that chance? Steffi thought about the possible consequences of failing to outrun the man. Of him shooting her in the spine before she’d gone five paces.

Life in a wheelchair, peeing in a bag.

She thought of falling, of being caught, of making him angry. She thought of the embarrassment of running in terror – in case it was a joke after all and she looked like an idiot.

Even as part of her mind was screaming at her to slow down and stay close to the houses and pubs, so the alleged gun forced Steffi away from them. An obedient, self-destructive auto-pilot had been switched on inside, and she had lost manual override. And before she came up with any practical way to escape, she simply ran out of time.

‘In here.’

Another sharp jab in her back, between the shoulder blades, and Steffi turned left and stepped on to the fine sand of the dunes.

She went up the first of them, her feet sinking deep into the white sand.

‘Where are we going?’ she said.

He didn’t answer for a few strides, and then he said, ‘We’re going to call your mother.’

Steffi’s stomach lurched as if she were on a rollercoaster.

She knew exactly what he meant.

Not robbery. Not rape. She felt hollow and disbelieving. Not ten minutes ago she’d picked up her wages and told her boss she’d see him tomorrow, and now here she was, with a gun in her back and being prodded towards what the Gazette promised was ‘unspeakable horror’.

She also couldn’t believe she’d kept walking along the sea front as if everything was normal. She should have just run. That was an escape plan. That’s what might have saved her. But she’d thought too hard about it.

Thinking hard was natural to Steffi. Putting sweets in bags and scooping ice cream at Paul’s was just a casual job for her. Her real life was studying for a B.Sc. in computer science. She was in her second year at Bristol, absolutely nailing modules in ethical hacking and counter-measures.

Counter-measures. The word mocked her now as she stumbled in the soft sand and hauled herself up the slope by a tuft of tough beachgrass. She’d never taken self-defence classes; never watched a Jackie Chan film. Not even ironically. And she’d refused a ride all the way home when she was offered one – out of sheer complacency. She could kick herself. Her whole future was about outsmarting the opposition and yet here she was, on a dark and deserted dune with what was probably a murderer.

If he wasn’t a murderer, she’d be fucking furious. If this was some sick ruse to get her to a beach party with her friends, then this guy was a dead man. The second he pulled off that silly balaclava and said ‘Surprise’ she’d punch his bloody lights out.

Scream.

That was another thing she could’ve done while she was still close to the houses, Steffi realized too late.

Run. Scream. Both required instinct, not logic.

Her logic might cost her her life, and Steffi filled up momentarily at the unfairness of that.

Then she got a grip. She mustn’t stop thinking, just because she was playing catch-up on her animal instincts. Logic dictated that she could still find a way out of this. They were almost at the top of the dune. Steffi knew these dunes like the back of her hand. She’d played here as a child, walked the family dog here, had her first kiss here. It was with Barry Stoodley. He’d been too spitty, and she’d been too worried about being seen.

Another five or six awkward strides and she’d be at the top.

That would be the time to run. When she could get up some instant acceleration down the other side, while the arsehole behind her was still struggling on the ascent. Steffi felt excitement confirm that it was the right thing to do. She visualized it, the way she did with her tennis serve. That was the secret to sporting success – visualization. So she knew the exact moment when she would attain the peak of the dune. At that very second she would run down the slope of sand. She would have thirty feet on him before he could even reach the ridge and start down after her. That would be enough. Even if he did have a gun. It was dark and the sand gave no good footing, and she recalled reading somewhere that most people couldn’t hit a barn door at ten paces with a handgun; it was harder than it looked, apparently.

If she could just get that first run down the dune…

She knew all the paths and shortcuts – the sharp right turn and then the little dogleg that would look as though she was heading back to safety – back to the lights of the Boat House. But then there was the clever little loop that would let her double back through a narrow gorge in the dunes and come out a hundred yards away on flat, hard sand, which was so good for running.

And this time she would run—

‘Stop here.’

‘What?’

‘I said stop.’

Steffi stopped, staring up at the dune’s dark horizon, jagged with grass and tantalizingly close.

He wasn’t going to let her reach the top.

‘Take off your clothes.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Take off your clothes.’

Steffi’s fear made her angry and her anger made her brave. She decided to take control and put a stop to this before she became inert with terror. It wasn’t nipping it in the bud – the bud had already opened so it was too late for that – but calling a halt could be done at any time, and she needed to use her calm, scientific brain if she was going to change this situation to her advantage. She needed to act like a B.Sc. undergrad, not some disposable extra in a murderous teen flick.

She mustered all the calm confidence that she could.

‘I’m just going to turn round, OK?’

‘No you’re not.’

‘I’m going to do it very, very slowly,’ she said reassuringly.

She started to turn and he hit her hard in the face.

Steffi fell down, although because the slope was so steep, she didn’t have far to go, and landed sitting in soft sand, facing the man.

‘Now give me your phone and take off your clothes.’

She looked up at him in a weird, jerky daze. He did have a gun – he hadn’t lied about that. But was this the same man who had killed that Frannie girl? She hadn’t been shot. She’d been strangled or something like that, hadn’t she? Something manual. Through the pain in her cheek and nose, Steffi wondered which was worse – to be shot or to be strangled. Logically, she’d rather be shot because it was over in a second and there was a quick end to the fear – but with manual there was always a chance you’d find a way out of it. Something might happen to come and rescue you. There was more chance of rescue or a miracle.

Manual must be better.

Steffi was starting to realize that logic had no place when it came to murder.

It was too late now anyway. The gun was what had kept her walking like a sheep when she should have been running and screaming and getting away. And that was all that mattered.

She gave him her phone and she took off her clothes. As she folded her green and white striped blouse, she wondered whether someone would soon be identifying her by that awful photo on her Students’ Union card. That would be as humiliating in death as it was in life.

Taking off her jeans in front of a stranger felt like a point of no return. There was no miracle: no knight in shining armour; no swooping Hollywood rescue; no beach-bum wino stumbling into view to scare the man away. Nothing happened to stop Steffi sliding the rough denim down her thighs and wobbling as she stood on one leg to step out of them.

Nothing to stop her crying.

She tried to stop stripping at her knickers, but the man stared at her until she was naked. She shivered and sobbed and tried to cover her privates and her breasts, but he didn’t seem that interested in them anyway, so she hugged her arms instead.

‘I’m cold,’ she whispered.

He laughed. ‘Not as cold as you’re going to be.’

Steffi felt a whirring panic in her head and belly. She still didn’t believe that this was how her life was going to end, but she needed to do something fast and she didn’t know what. She had a future. She had plans. She was only twenty. She had a sister called Maggie, and a cat called Mouse, and she hadn’t bought her father a birthday present yet. She’d been a bit short last month and had put an IOU in a card.

IOU One Birthday Pressie (when I get my student loan). Kiss Kiss Kiss.

She’d thought it was cute. He’d thought it was cute. It wasn’t cute, she realized now; it was selfish. She had money for cigarettes, didn’t she? She had money for a bus to Barnstaple to see the latest Johnny Depp film. But she didn’t have money for a birthday present for her own father.

Where was the logic in that? There was none. She sobbed harder.

He made Steffi sit down.

He made her call her mother.

It was a blur. A numb blur of horror. Her mother was so close. If Steffi hadn’t been crying so hard, she could have picked out the porch light from the electric kaleidoscope that Instow had become. Steffi could barely speak; she was one big shake. Her teeth chattered and her hands trembled so badly that the man had to hold the phone.

‘Say goodbye now,’ he said.

Steffi’s mother was pixellated by hysterics. Steffi tried to calm her. Tried to calm herself. Still thinking there would be a way out. Still not believing.

But then the man gripped her hair in his left hand and started to force her face down towards the sand.

Frannie Hatton had been suffocated. It came back to Steffi in a jagged flash. The word conjured a pillow, but it could have been anything; it could have been sand.

This was the man. This was the killer.

She stuck out her arms and tried to brace herself away from the beach, but the man kicked the inside of her elbow and it collapsed like a hinge.

He bent her almost double, pressing her nose and mouth into the choking sand, his knee in her back, one relentless hand in her hair, the other holding the phone so her mother could see what she’d done.

‘You see?’ he kept saying. ‘You see?’

Steffi finally believed it was possible for her to die here in the dunes, with the beach in her teeth, not a hundred yards from her home.

Her bladder surrendered, and so did she.

With the last strength she had left, she twisted her head so that her mouth could draw one final breath…

‘Tell Daddy I’m sorry about the present.’

Then she drowned in the sand.

And nobody would ever find her.