The Facts of Life and Death

8

‘CALL YOUR MOTHER.’

The woman sat in the woods. Cross-legged on her hands and a bed of red-brown pine needles, soft and prickly under her naked thighs.

She squinted up at the man.

‘What?’

He waggled the phone at her again. ‘Call your mother.’

He didn’t know it, but her name was Katie Squire. She was twenty-six and she’d been walking the South-West coastal path alone for twenty-four days without experiencing anything worse than a blister between Fowey and Kingsands. Completely preventable; she’d forgotten to wear two pairs of socks.

She was wearing them now though – two pairs of red hiking socks, and nothing else.

She stared at the hand holding her phone. Apart from his lips and eyes, it was the only part of the man Katie could see, and the fingernails were bitten and dirty around the cuticles. The thought of those fingers touching her skin made her feel hot and shivery.

‘Call your mother.’

‘No,’ she told him. She hadn’t called her mother for months; she wasn’t going to start now with this.

Whatever this was.

She was shocked by how calm she was. It was too bizarre to take seriously, she supposed. She’d been walking through an unexpectedly lovely tunnel of trees, with the sea sighing softly somewhere to her left. The only warning she’d had was a loud rustling in the undergrowth – and the time between that and this (whatever this was, she thought again) was an iron grip on her arm and a surreal blur of stumbling and shaking and standing on one leg, trying to unlace her walking boots, while her skin raced with goosebumps and her teeth chattered like a joke skull.

But now she was calm.

Numb, possibly.

He’d said he had a gun but she didn’t see one, and it was too late now.

Above them, it was raining, but here on the forest floor it was dry. Only the sound of the drops on the canopy overhead gave the rain away. Katie had been to a spa once and they had played the sound of raindrops while she’d had a massage. This was a bit like that – apart from there was no massage.

And she was naked in the woods with a pervert.

Apart from that.

The man fiddled with her phone and then held it up. She heard the fake shutter noise and blinked in the flash, then he turned the phone so that she could see her own stark image – as pale as a frightened ghost on the bed of terracotta needles.

‘I’ll send that to your mother. Then she can see.’

Katie said nothing.

He looked at the photo and his teeth grinned through the hole in the black wool. ‘For a young maid you’ve got right floppy old tits.’

It wasn’t true but it stung. This, of all things, brought tears to her eyes. Katie fought them. She wasn’t a crier. She hadn’t cried when he’d forced her to walk off the path. She hadn’t cried when he’d forced her to strip. And what did she care what this weirdo thought of her breasts?

But she did care. It made no sense, but she did.

And then the wrongness of that caring made her angry. She shook her straight dark hair out of her eyes defiantly and glared up at him. ‘How would you know? I bet you never even touched a breast. Is that why you force women to strip off in the woods? To get your jollies?’

‘Shut up.’

‘You shut up.’ Katie had three brothers, so ‘Shut up’ was home turf to her, and she drew strength from a row that suddenly seemed very familiar, despite her nakedness and his balaclava.

‘I want my clothes back. I’m freezing.’

‘I want you to call your mother.’

‘Why?’ she said suspiciously. ‘Do you know her?’

He hesitated. ‘Yes, I know her.’

‘Bollocks,’ she decided. ‘You don’t know my mother. And anyway, she wouldn’t want to talk to anyone who’d do such a pathetic, cowardly thing.’

It was true, Katie realized with a surge of emotion. Her mother might be an interfering old cow, but she had principles. Why hadn’t she called her in months? There was no real reason. And suddenly Katie was impatient to speak to her. To hear the gossip. To tell her she loved her.

But she wasn’t doing it in front of this bastard.

She glared at her attacker. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘either hurry up and rape me or bloody well let me go.’

He made a sound that was halfway between a gasp and a cry.

‘Filthy!’ he said. ‘Filthy little whore.’

‘You’re filthy,’ she spat back. ‘Making a total stranger take her clothes off. Taking pictures of it. That’s filthy. That’s sick.’

He angrily pressed the phone against her face, squashing her nose, pushing her off balance. ‘Call your fucking mother.’

Katie slapped the phone away, sending it spinning off a tree.

‘Call yours, arsehole!’

He swung at her so hard that when he missed, he almost fell.

Katie got up and ran, and he went after her.

This time he didn’t stop after a few strides. Instead, her running ignited some deep chase instinct in him. Like a hound after a hare, he wanted to catch her. Wanted to bring her down.

But the girl was quick – even in socks – and nimble through the slender trees that were close-knit and had thin, stiff branches that jabbed at head and hands.

With every stride his anger grew. Once, he got close enough to touch her shoulder with his outstretched fingers, and she shrieked and ducked backwards under his arm and ran off at a new angle. He turned too fast and fell on to needles so thick they were like a prickly mattress. It didn’t hurt, but it did harm: by the time he got up she had broken the dark cover of the trees and was on the main road, crying and shouting and waving down cars – naked but for her tattered red socks.

Shameless.

He watched from behind a tree as she got into a little silver car and disappeared, then yanked off the balaclava, his blood pounding with the fury of losing her – of losing control.

He’d blown it. Both times, he now realized. It was all over too fast and brought him no satisfaction. This time hadn’t even been funny – only frustrating. And the girl had given him a load of cheek too, which made him feel like a stupid little boy instead of like a man in charge of the situation.

He scratched his head all over; it was hot and itchy from the wool.

He went back through the trees and found her clothes and her rucksack and the broken phone. There was a thick wad of money in a beaded purse, and shop-bought cheese and pickle sandwiches, which he ate as he drove out to Abbotsham cliffs. Pretty much everything else he threw into the hungry sea.

He watched her T-shirts and knickers and cotton trousers spread-eagle over the waves and felt cheated.

This time he hadn’t wanted it to end.