Behind Closed Doors: A Novel

That morning in Thailand, the morning after the night I discovered I’d married a monster, I was in no hurry for Jack to wake up because I knew that once he did I was going to have to start playing the role of my life. I had spent most of the long night preparing myself mentally, accepting that if I was to get back to England quickly and safely, I was going to have to pretend to be a broken and frightened woman. I wasn’t worried about pretending to be frightened, because I was. Pretending to be broken would be much harder, simply because it was in my nature to fight back. But, as Jack had predicted that I would try to escape again before we left Thailand, I was determined not to. It was important that he thought I had already given up.

Hearing him stir, I huddled further into my blanket and pretended to be asleep, hoping to gain a little more respite. I heard him get out of bed and walk over to where I was sitting slumped against the wall. I could feel him looking down at me. My skin started to crawl and my heart was beating so fast I was sure he could smell my fear. After a moment or two, he moved away, but it was only when I heard the bathroom door opening and the sound of the shower running that I opened my eyes.

‘I knew you were pretending to be asleep,’ he said, making me cry out in alarm, because he was standing right next to me. ‘Come on, get up, you’ve got a lot of apologising to do this morning, remember.’

As I showered and dressed with him looking on, I took comfort from what he had said the previous evening, that he wasn’t interested in me sexually.

‘Good,’ he said, nodding approvingly at the dress I’d chosen to wear. ‘Now, put a smile on your face.’

‘When we’re downstairs,’ I muttered, playing for time.

‘Now!’ His voice was firm. ‘I want you to look at me as if you love me.’

Swallowing hard, I turned slowly towards him, thinking I wouldn’t be able to do it, but when I saw the tenderness on his face as he looked back at me, I felt a bewildering sense of displacement, as if everything that had happened in the last forty-eight hours had been a dream. I couldn’t hide the longing I felt and, when he smiled lovingly at me, I couldn’t help but smile back.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Make sure you keep it there during breakfast.’

Appalled at myself for having forgotten even for a minute what he was, my skin burnt with embarrassment.

Noticing, he laughed. ‘Think of it this way, Grace—as you obviously still find me attractive, it’ll be easier for you to play the loving wife.’

Tears of shame pricked my eyes and I turned away, hating that his physical appearance was so at odds with the evil inside him. If he was able to fool me, if he was able, even for a few seconds, to make me forget what I knew about him, how would I ever be able to convince people that he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

We took the lift down to the lobby and, as we passed the reception desk, Jack steered me towards the manager and stood with his arm around me while I apologised for my behaviour the previous evening, explaining that because of the time change I had forgotten to take my medication at the prescribed time. I was aware of Kiko watching me silently from behind the counter and I couldn’t help hoping that something in her—some kind of female empathy perhaps—would recognise that my distress the night before had been genuine. Maybe she’d had misgivings when Jack had suddenly appeared in the room when I’d been changing in the bathroom and told her he would take it from there. As I finished my apology, I glanced at her, willing her to understand that I was playing a role and to call the Embassy after all. But, as before, she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

The manager brushed aside my apologies and escorted us out to the terrace himself, giving us a table in the sunshine. Although I wasn’t hungry, I made myself eat, aware that I needed to keep my strength up, and while we ate Jack kept up a steady stream of conversation, telling me—for the benefit of the people sitting at nearby tables—all the things we would be doing that day. In reality, we did none of them. Once breakfast was over, Jack took me along the road to the five-star hotel I had seen from the taxi the previous day and, after taking several photos of me standing in front of the entrance, where I used happy memories of Millie to put the smile that he demanded on my face, he walked me back to our hotel room.

‘I’d like to phone Millie,’ I said, as he closed the door behind us. ‘Could I have my phone, please?’

He shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I promised Mum I would phone,’ I insisted, ‘and I want to know how Millie is.’

‘And I want your parents to think that you’re having such a wonderful time with me on our honeymoon that all thoughts of Millie have gone right out of your head.’

‘Please, Jack.’ I hated the pleading tone in my voice, but I was desperate to know that Millie was all right and surprisingly desperate to hear Mum’s voice, to know that the world I once knew still existed.

‘No.’

‘I hate you,’ I said, through gritted teeth.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m going out for a while and you’re going to wait here on the balcony so that you have a lovely tan to go home with. So make sure you have everything you need because you won’t be able to get back into the room once I’ve gone.’

It took me a moment to understand. ‘You’re not seriously intending to lock me on the balcony!’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why can’t I stay in the room?’

‘Because I can’t lock you in.’

I looked at him in dismay. ‘What if I need to go to the toilet?’

‘You won’t be able to, so I suggest you go now.’

‘But how long will you be gone?’

‘Two or three hours. Four, maybe. And just in case you’re thinking of calling for help from the balcony, I advise you not to. I’ll be around, watching and listening. So don’t do anything stupid, Grace, I’m warning you.’

The way he said it made a chill run down my spine, yet once he’d left, it was hard not to give in to the temptation to stand on the balcony and scream for help at the top of my voice. I tried to imagine what would happen if I did and came to the conclusion that even if people did come running, Jack would too, armed with a convincing story about my mental state. And although someone might decide to look further into my claims that I was being held a prisoner and that Jack was a murderer, it could be weeks before anything could be proved.

I could repeat the story he’d told me and eventually the authorities might find a case of a father beating his wife to death which matched the version I had told them and track down Jack’s father. But, even if he said that it was his son who had committed the crime, it was doubtful he would be believed some thirty years after the event and the chances were that he was already dead anyway. Also, I had no way of knowing if the story was true. It had sounded horribly plausible but Jack could have made the whole thing up just to frighten me.

The balcony I was to spend the next few hours on gave onto a terrace at the back of the hotel and, looking down, I could see people milling around the swimming pool, preparing for a swim or a spot of sunbathing. Realising that Jack could be anywhere down there watching me, and would be able to see me more easily than I could see him, I moved away from the edge of the balcony. The balcony itself was furnished with two wooden slatted chairs, the uncomfortable kind that left marks on the back of your legs if you sat on them for too long. There was also a small table but no cushioned sunbed, which would have made my time there more comfortable. Luckily, I had thought to bring my towel with me so I made a cushion of it and put it on one of the chairs. Jack had given me just enough time to gather together a bikini, suntan lotion and sunglasses, but I hadn’t thought to take one of the many books I had brought with me. Not that it mattered—I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate, no matter how exciting the story was. After only a few minutes on the balcony, I already felt like a caged lion, which made my desire to escape even stronger and I was glad the room next door was empty because the temptation to call over the balcony for help would have been too strong to resist.

The next week was torture.

Sometimes Jack took me down to breakfast in the morning, sometimes he didn’t and it became obvious, from the way that he was treated by the manager, that he was a regular visitor to the hotel. If we did go down for breakfast, Jack would take me straight back to the room once we had finished and I would be locked on the balcony until he came back from wherever he’d been and let me into the room so that I could use the toilet and eat whatever he had brought for me for lunch. An hour or so later, he would force me back onto the balcony and disappear until the evening.

Terrible though it was, there were a few things I was grateful for: there was always a part of the balcony where I could find shade and, because I insisted, Jack gave me bottles of water, although I had to be careful how much I drank. He never left me for more than four hours at a time, but the time passed excruciatingly slowly. When everything—the loneliness, the boredom, the fear, the despair—got too much to bear, I closed my eyes and thought of Millie.

Although I longed to get off the balcony, when Jack did decide to take me out, not because he felt sorry for me but because he wanted to take photographs, they were such stressful occasions that I was often glad to get back to the hotel room. One evening he took me to dinner in a wonderful restaurant where he took photo after photo of me at various stages of the meal. One afternoon, he booked a taxi and we crammed four days’ sightseeing into four hours, during which he took more photos of me as proof of the lovely time I was having.

Another afternoon he took me to what must have been one of the best hotels in Bangkok, where he miraculously had access to its private beach and, as I changed into bikini after bikini so it would look as if the photos he took had been taken on different days, I wondered if it was there that Jack spent his days while I was stuck on the balcony. I hoped that the staff back at the hotel where I stayed might wonder why they rarely saw me around, but when Jack took me down to breakfast one morning and they asked me solicitously if I was feeling better, I understood that he had told them I was confined to our room with a stomach bug.

The worst thing about these small forays into normality was the hope they gave me, because in public Jack reverted to the man I had fallen in love with. Sometimes—over the course of a meal, for example—as he played the attentive and loving husband, I forgot what he was. Maybe if he hadn’t been such good company it would have been easier to remember, but even when I did remember, it was so hard to equate the man who looked adoringly at me from the other side of the table with the man who held me prisoner that I almost believed I had imagined everything.

The crashing back down to reality was doubly hard, for along with the disappointment, there was the shame of having succumbed to his charm, and I would look around wildly, searching for a way out, somewhere to run to, someone to tell. Seeing this, he would look at me in amusement and tell me to go ahead. ‘Run,’ he would say. ‘Go on, go and tell that person over there, or perhaps that one over there, that I am holding you prisoner, that I am a monster, a murderer. But first, look around you. Look around this beautiful restaurant I have brought you to, and think, think about the delicious food you are eating and the wonderful wine in your glass. Do you look as if you are a prisoner? Do I look as if I am a monster, a murderer? I think not. But if you want to go ahead, I won’t stop you. I’m in the mood for some fun.’ And I would swallow my tears and remind myself that once we were back in England, everything would be easier.

At the beginning of the second week in Thailand, I hit such a low that it became hard to resist the temptation to try to escape. Not only was the thought of spending most of the remaining six days stuck on the balcony depressing, I had also begun to recognise the hopelessness of my situation. I was no longer sure that once we were back in England it would be as easy as I thought to escape from Jack, not least because his reputation as a successful lawyer was bound to protect him. When I thought about alerting someone to who he really was, I began to feel that the British Embassy in Thailand might be a safer bet than the local police back home.

There was something else too. For the previous three days, once Jack had unlocked the balcony and let me back into the room for the evening, he had left the room again, telling me he’d be back shortly and warning me that if I tried to escape, he would know about it immediately. Knowing that I could open the door and leave was excruciating and it required all my willpower to ignore the instinct to flee. It was just as well. The first evening, he came back after twenty minutes, the second evening after an hour. But the third evening, he hadn’t come back until almost eleven, and I realised he was gradually building up the amount of time he was leaving me by myself. The thought that he might actually stay out long enough for me to get to the British Embassy made me wonder if I should attempt it.

I knew I couldn’t count on the hotel management to help me, and that without help I wouldn’t get very far, but the fact that the room next door had been occupied since the weekend made me wonder if I could ask my neighbours for help. I couldn’t tell what nationality they were, because the voices that came through the wall were muffled, but I guessed they were a young couple, simply because of the type of music they listened to. Although they weren’t around a lot during the day—nobody would come to Thailand and spend their time in a hotel room unless they were a prisoner like me—when they were in their room sometimes one or other of them would come out onto their balcony to smoke a cigarette. I guessed it was the man because the silhouette I could vaguely make out through the partition seemed to be male, and sometimes I would hear him call something to the woman in what I thought was either Spanish or Portuguese. They also seemed to spend most evenings in their room, so I guessed them to be honeymooners, content to stay in and make love. On those evenings, with the sound of soft music coming through the walls, my eyes would fill with tears, as, once again, I was reminded of what could have been.

When, on the fourth evening, Jack didn’t come back until midnight, I knew I’d been right in my theory that he was gradually building up the amount of time he left me by myself, counting on the fact that I wouldn’t try to run. I had no idea where he went on these evenings, but, as he was always in a good mood when he came back, I guessed he visited some kind of brothel. I had decided, during my long hours on the balcony where I had nothing but my thoughts to keep me company, that because of what he had said about making love to me, he must be homosexual, and I concluded that he came to Thailand to indulge in what he didn’t dare indulge in at home for fear of being blackmailed. I knew there was something missing in my theory, because being found to be gay was hardly the end of the world but I didn’t yet know what.

On the fifth night, when he didn’t come back until two in the morning, I seriously began to weigh up my options. There were another five days until we were due to fly back to England and, as well as it seeming an interminably long time to wait, there was also the added fear that we wouldn’t leave when we were meant to. That morning, increasingly upset that I still hadn’t phoned Millie, I’d asked Jack if we could go and see her as soon as we got back. His reply—that he was enjoying our honeymoon so much he was thinking of extending it—had made silent tears of anguish fall from my eyes. I told myself that it was another of his games, that he was trying to destabilise me, but I’d felt so helpless I spent most of the day crying.

By the time evening came, I was determined to get away from him. Maybe if I hadn’t been sure that the couple next door were Spanish rather than Portuguese I would have stayed where I was, but, because I had picked up enough of the language during my travels to Argentina, I was confident I could make them understand that I was seriously in need of help. The fact that they were a couple—that there would be a woman I could talk to—also decided me. Anyway, I was certain they already knew I was in trouble because that afternoon, when the man had come onto the balcony to smoke, he had called worriedly to the woman, telling her that he could hear someone crying. Scared that Jack might see them trying to look over the balcony from wherever he was watching from, I’d stifled my sobs and remained as still as possible so that they would think I had gone back into the room. But I hoped the fact that they had heard me crying would stand me in good stead.

I waited until Jack had been gone for three hours before making my move. It was gone eleven, but I knew the couple were still up because I could hear them moving around in their room. Mindful of what had happened the time before, I checked my bag, my case and the room to make sure my passport and purse weren’t there. When I couldn’t find them, I went over to the door and opened it slowly, praying I wouldn’t find Jack coming down the corridor, on his way back. I didn’t, but the thought that he might suddenly appear had me pounding on the Spanish couple’s door more loudly than I intended. I could hear the man muttering something, annoyed perhaps at being disturbed so late at night.

‘¿Quién es?’ he called through the closed door.

‘I’m your neighbour, could you help me, please!’

‘¿Qué pasa?’

‘Can you open the door, please?’ The unmistakable sound of the lift coming to a stop further down the corridor had me pounding on the door again. ‘Hurry!’ I cried, my heart in my mouth. ‘Please hurry!’ As the bolt was shot back, the noise of the lift doors opening propelled me into the room. ‘Thank you, thank you!’ I gabbled. ‘I …’ The words died on my lips and I found myself staring in horror at Jack.

‘I actually expected you before tonight,’ he said, laughing at the shock on my face. ‘I was beginning to think I’d got you wrong, I had almost begun to believe that you had heeded my warning after all and wouldn’t attempt to escape. Of course, it would have been better for you if you had, but much less fun for me. I must admit I would have been disappointed if all my hard work had gone to waste.’

My body went limp and, as I sank to the floor, shivering with shock, he crouched down next to me. ‘Let me guess,’ he said softly. ‘You thought a Spanish couple had moved into this room, didn’t you? Yet there was only me. If you think about it, you never heard the woman reply because the voice came from a radio. You never saw her on the balcony either, yet you still believed that she existed. Of course, you didn’t know that I smoked—I don’t usually make a habit of it—nor did you know that I spoke Spanish.’

He paused a moment. ‘I also told you it would be very foolish to try and escape again before we left Thailand,’ he went on, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘So now that you have, what do you think I’m going to do?’

‘Do whatever you like,’ I sobbed. ‘I don’t care any more.’

‘Brave words, but I’m sure you don’t mean them. For example, I’m sure you would be distraught if I decided to kill you, because it would mean you’d never see Millie again.’

‘You’re not going to kill me,’ I said, with more assurance than I felt.

‘You’re right, I’m not, not yet, anyway. First and foremost, I need you to do for Millie what she can’t do for herself.’ He stood up and looked down at me dispassionately. ‘Unfortunately, I can’t punish you here, because there is nothing I can really deprive you of. But because you have now tried to escape twice, we won’t be going to see Millie either the first weekend or the second weekend after we get back to England.’

‘You can’t do that!’ I cried.

‘Of course I can—what’s more, I warned you that I would.’ He reached down and hauled me to my feet. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ He opened the door and pushed me out into the corridor. ‘It was well worth paying for the extra room,’ he said, closing the door behind him. ‘Mr Ho—the manager—quite understood why I might need a separate room for myself, given your mental state. How does it feel to know that I was watching you the whole time?’

‘Not as good as it’ll feel the day I see you go to prison,’ I snarled.

‘That, Grace, is never going to happen,’ he said, bundling me back into our room. ‘And do you know why? Because I’m squeaky clean.’

It was the lowest point of my two weeks in Thailand. It wasn’t so much that I’d failed to escape, it was more that, once again, I’d fallen into the trap Jack had so carefully laid for me. I tried to work out why he had gone to such lengths to set me up when I wouldn’t otherwise have tried to escape. Maybe it was simply that my acquiescence bored him or maybe it was something more sinister, in that by denying himself the pleasure of breaking me physically, he wanted the pleasure of breaking me mentally. The thought that he was going to turn my imprisonment into some sort of psychological game made my blood run cold. Even if another opportunity to escape presented itself, there would always be the fear that he was orchestrating the whole thing, and I realised that if I didn’t get away from him as soon as we arrived in England, before we had even left the airport, it would be much, much harder once we were installed in a house.

Battling despair, I forced myself to think about what I could do, both on the plane and when we arrived at Heathrow. If I told one of the air hostesses, once we had taken off, that Jack was keeping me prisoner, would I be able to remain calm when he maintained that I was delusional? What if he brought out the report from the hotel manager to back up his claim? What would I do then? And, if I managed to remain calm and told them that he meant great harm to me and my sister, would I be able to persuade them to run checks on him while we were still in the air? And, if they did, would they find that he was an imposter or would they find that Jack Angel was a successful lawyer who championed battered women? I didn’t know, but I was determined to make myself heard and equally determined that if nobody listened, I would kick up such a fuss once we arrived at Heathrow that I would be taken to a hospital or a police station.

I didn’t think too much about it when I began to feel sleepy shortly after our evening flight had taken off. But, by the time we landed the next morning, I was so groggy that a wheelchair had to be brought so that I could get off the plane, and my words were so slurred I could barely speak. Although I couldn’t hear what Jack was saying to the doctor who came to check on me, because of the fog that had permeated my brain, I could see that he was holding a bottle of pills in his hand. Aware that my chances of getting away from him were slipping through my fingers, I made a valiant effort to call for help as we were escorted through passport control, but all that came out of my mouth were unintelligible sounds.

In the car, Jack strapped me into my seat and I slumped against the door, unable to fight the drowsiness that rendered me helpless. The next time I came to, it was to find Jack force-feeding me strong black coffee he had bought from a machine at a service station. It cleared my head a little, but I still felt confused and disorientated.

‘Where are we?’ I slurred, making an effort to sit upright.

‘Nearly home,’ he replied, and there was such excitement in his voice that I felt afraid.

He got back in the car and as we drove along, I tried to work out where we were, but I didn’t recognise the names of any of the villages we passed. After about half an hour, he turned into a lane.

‘Well, here it is, my darling wife,’ he said, slowing the car down. ‘I hope you’re going to like it.’

We stopped beside a pair of huge black gates. A little further along there was a smaller single black gate with a bell set into the wall beside it. He took a remote control from his pocket, pressed a button and the double gates swung open. ‘The house that I promised you as your wedding present. Now, what do you think of it?’

At first I thought that whatever he had drugged me with was making me hallucinate. But then I realised that I really was looking at the house we had drawn together on a piece of paper in the bar of the Connaught Hotel, the house he promised he would find for me, right down to the little round window in the roof.

‘I see that you’re lost for words,’ he laughed, as he drove in through the gates.

After drawing to a stop near the front door, he got out of the car and came round to open my door for me. When I just sat there, he put his hands under my arms, hauled me unceremoniously from the car and dragged me onto the porch. He unlocked the front door and pushed me into the hall, slamming the door behind him.

‘Welcome home,’ he said mockingly. ‘I hope you’ll be very happy here.’

The hall was beautiful, with its high ceiling and magnificent staircase. The doors to the right were closed, as were the huge double doors to the left.

‘I’m sure you’d like me to show you around,’ he went on. ‘But first, wouldn’t you like to see Molly?’

I stared at him. ‘Molly?’

‘Yes, Molly. Don’t tell me you’d forgotten all about her?’

‘Where is she?’ I asked urgently, shocked that I hadn’t thought about her once while we’d been in Thailand. ‘Where’s Molly?’

‘In the utility room.’ He opened a door to the right of the staircase and switched on a light. ‘Down here.’

As I followed him down to the basement, I recognised the tiles from the photo he had shown me of Molly in her basket. He came to a stop in front of a door. ‘She’s in there. But before you go and see her, you’d better take one of these.’ He took a roll of bin bags from where they were lying on a shelf, tore one off and handed it to me. ‘I think you might be needing it.’