Chapter Thirty-Five

After what had happened at the club the previous night, Cassie hadn't got much sleep, despite prescribing herself a serious dose of vodka. Every time she closed her eyes, the peeling blue paint of that door filled her vision, she felt the pain in her cheek, heard the relentless boof-boof-boof of the music, his voice hissing in her ear, his clammy hands .?.?.

Stop!

In the early hours she had got up and smoked a spliff in the cockpit, eyeing the darkness of the canal with a new sense of anxiety, twitching at every innocuous sight and sound on the towpath.

As someone who'd had plenty of experience with people facing trauma in the shape of sudden bereavement, she understood in theory that the shock would take some getting over. But the thing Cassie struggled with, the thing that she just couldn't compute, was viewing herself as a victim. She had always seen herself as someone who could take care of herself, who if push came to shove could fight a guy off. But in that endless moment pinned to the door, his hands on her, she had felt completely powerless. The worst thing, the thing she never could have grasped before it happened to her, was the way it had blurred the boundaries of her selfhood , leaving her feeling raw and fuzzy at the edges.

A sinuous black shadow jumped silently up onto the boat, only Macavity's golden-green eyes reflecting the light in the night sky. After a moment staring at her, he came over and climbed into her lap, purring. A soft reassuring purr, not the higher pitched ‘feed me now' version. ‘I'm honoured,' she murmured. As she pulled him into an embrace, she felt a knife-like pain in her wrist – from where SkAR had twisted her arm up behind her back.

The only comfort was picturing how much pain he would be in. Thank God she'd worn the DMs and not some less sturdy footwear: that stomp on his foot had been hard enough to inflict a Jones fracture – a fracture of the fifth metatarsal, the commonest kind. As for his balls .?.?. well, maybe she had altered the boundaries of his selfhood in return.

Her phone lit up again. Ethan had already texted her half a dozen times asking how it went, was she OK etc., but she couldn't face speaking to him. She had the urge to call Archie, to hear his comforting laid-back tones – but really, what would that achieve? More confusion .

Well, she knew now what had happened to Bronte in Berlin, alone with that bastard into the small hours in a soundproof studio. She had pushed back on what they'd been recording, and when she wouldn't budge he'd decided to show her who was in charge. He wasn't just an opportunist who tried his luck – he was a sadistic predator who got off on women's fear. And if Cassie hadn't been able to fight him off, what hope for Bronte? Five foot three and less than eight stone. Easy to rape – and easy to tip over a balcony.

*

In the morning Cassie forced herself to listen back to the recording on her phone from last night. The phone had been in her pocket so it was muffled and the banging music obscured most of what he'd hissed in her ear. But worse still was the discovery that at no point had she shouted, No! stop now!! Why hadn't she? She'd never truly understood how the shock of sudden violence could rob you of the power of movement and speech. It was only seeing Bronte's face that had snapped her out of that, saving her from much worse.

Thank you , she murmured.

Bracing herself, she went online to find out more about SkAR. The bios revealed that his real name was Stefano Makris, born and raised in Enfield, who'd gone to a private boys' school where he was known as Steve. A rare early pic of him showed an overweight adolescent in a blazer, radiating a mixture of neediness and entitlement. After school he'd spent fourteen years working for his father's estate agency business. The whole super-cool SkAR persona, the street veneer, was a total facade.

She decided to think of him as just Steve from Enfield, the uncool pudgy kid turned estate agent. Maybe it would help dispel the feeling of utter powerlessness she'd experienced in his dressing room. One of the bio sites mentioned where in Cyprus his family hailed from – a village called Perdikia – which Google Maps showed as a tiny dot in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains without even a marked road. The accompanying image showed a few dilapidated houses strung along a dirt track, pretty much the ‘one-donkey shithole' of the type he had accused Bronte of coming from. Steve from Enfield had only turned his hand to DJ-ing a few years earlier, presumably while on a visit back to Cyprus, where he'd made his name at a club in Ayia Napa – the island's dance music mecca.

What else was it he'd said about Bronte's home village – where presumably Chrysanthi, or George had come from? ‘Where they don't marry outside the family'. It sounded like a standard if colourful insult against a remote and backward hamlet.

Closing the laptop, Cassie indulged in a revenge fantasy. Bronte came back from the dead and together they got Steve to a high building where, as he grovelled for mercy, they picked him up by shoulders and ankles like a sack of potatoes and threw him off. The image of his body getting smaller as he fell, his arms windmilling, gave her particular satisfaction.

Had Bronte threatened to expose him as a rapist? Had he killed her to shut her up? Like the film industry before it, the music scene was having its own moment of reckoning with serial abusers. But how would he know what she was allergic to? Maybe there was something in her rider from the record company to say what she could and couldn't eat?

She replayed the vid of Bronte singing the embryonic track ‘Skeleton' that Ethan had sent her. The central lyric was about secrets: secrets that she was accusing somebody of keeping, but listening to it a second time Cassie picked up something new. It was the line: ‘You feed me, always feed me, but what you feed me is lies.' Something in the way she sung it, staring straight into the lens, made Cassie wonder.

Was Bronte talking to her mother ?