– Finding a sopping-wet towel in the bathroom with no apparent explanation for why it was wet. A hand towel, in the upstairs bathroom. Linda thought she remembered using it the night before, just before she’d gone to bed. She’d dried her hands with it. Even for it to be damp all these hours later would be a bit of a stretch, but when Linda shuffled into the bathroom just after waking up around 7:00 a.m., the towel was so wet it was dripping on to the tiled floor below. There was no leak she could see and, even if she’d found one, what kind of leak dripped directly on to a hand towel hung on a rail directly below a medicine cabinet that itself wasn’t wet at all? It didn’t make any sense. But again, Linda told herself that her own memory was the problem, and that one of the builders had used the towel the day before to surreptitiously mop something up, and that’s how it had got wet. She didn’t ask any of them about it.
– A number of items going missing or being moved. Little things, like a lipstick Linda thought she’d dropped into a bowl on her dressing table that later reappeared in the living room. A knife that she always put back in the block on the kitchen counter but which, for some reason, was now in a junk drawer. One evening she’d settled down to watch the movie Gladiator on DVD only to discover that the disc inside the case was actually an instalment of Jurassic Park, and in that case was another mismatched disc and so on and on for several more of them. Conor was proud of his DVD collection and kept them alphabetised, while Linda liked to have everything in its place. This was no accident. Were the movers messing with their heads? The foreman, Johnnie Murphy, was an old school friend of Conor’s; that was inside the realm of possibility. On a transatlantic phone call, this was the explanation the couple settled on. They’d laughed about it.
The presence of the builders made all of this relatively easy to explain away. The house wasn’t secure. Vehicles pulled up outside and men in heavy boots and hard hats stomped in and out all day, every day. The quantity surveyor, Roisin, had a habit of arriving without warning and leaving without saying goodbye. The front door was rarely closed for very long and the electronic gates at the end of the drive never were. Linda may have been home alone, but she was barely alone in the house. She couldn’t demand that things remain where she’d put them, or that other things stay untouched. She was living in a building site. She had to allow for that.
Then the diary disappeared.
Linda kept track of her life in a blue Moleskine diary, about the same size as a DVD case. Stateside, its pages had managed her workdays, each one packed tight with her unusually tiny scrawl, the flap at the back stuffed with business cards, receipts and ticket stubs. By the closing months of each year it would be bloated, refusing to close, and Linda would be eyeing up a new, fresh, unblemished one, which she would christen ceremonially on 1 January with a list of her life goals. When it disappeared that April, the 2001 edition was still practically pristine. This was unusual but, since coming to Fermoy, it had been demoted – there were no workdays now, after all – and its new purpose was to be the holder of pertinent information about the house renovation. Its pages were consulted for things like the plumber’s telephone number, the measurements of the kitchen tile and the date the new sectional sofa was due to arrive, but most days it never made it out of the shallow drawer in the hall table where it lived. Then, one day, it disappeared from there and was never seen again.
At first, Linda assumed that one of the men working on the house had taken it to find a phone number and then never put it back. But each of the four men on site at the time denied this. Linda called Johnnie, their foreman, who promised he’d get to the bottom of it but arrived at the house the following morning empty-handed, both figuratively and literally. No one on his crew had taken the diary, he said, and he trusted his men. But Linda was sure she’d put it in the drawer. Where had it gone?
Unlike the other incidents, Linda knows for sure when this one happened. She discovered the diary was missing on 9 April 2001. Johnnie reported that none of his guys had taken it the following morning, 10 April. She knows this because it was late that night, just as the clock ticked into 11 April, that Linda awoke to find a masked man standing at the side of her bed.
She didn’t know what woke her up but he was the first thing she saw when she did. A tall, well-built man looming over her. Wearing a black mask with just one slit for his eyes. Holding what she would describe as a ‘small’ gun that he held over her stomach, pointed straight down. He warned her that he would pull the trigger if she screamed, and that death by bullet wound to the stomach was slow and excruciatingly painful.
She asked him what he wanted. He didn’t respond. She pleaded with him to take whatever he liked from the house and to leave her alone. He handed her a blindfold and told her to put it on. When she hesitated, he pressed the muzzle of the gun against her flesh. The blindfold felt like it might be a silk neck tie. Once she’d tied it behind her head, the masked man warned her that if she made a single sound, he would pull the trigger and she would die. Then he raped her.
There was a part of Linda that just refused to believe what was happening. She had lived for ten years in a major American city famously plagued by petty crime. San Francisco could lay claim to the highest rate of vehicle break-ins and burglaries in the whole of the United States. Now here she was in a little Irish country town where the word crime only had to stretch to cover incidents of public drunkenness and drink-driving, and she was being raped by a masked man in her own bed. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t be real. Was she still asleep? Was she just dreaming this? All her life, Linda had been able to wake herself up from her nightmares. She desperately tried to do it now.
Afterwards, her attacker tied her wrists and ankles with lengths of rope – bright blue and braided – and ordered her off the bed and into the bathroom. He told her to climb into the bath and, once she had done this, he looped another length of rope through the ties on her wrists and then around the safety grip on the side of the bathtub. She was now trapped in there, blind and hurting and naked and terrified. Then the masked man left the bathroom and went downstairs, but remained in the house.
Judging by the distant noise that accompanied his movements, he spent time in the kitchen and the living room. He opened and closed doors, ran a tap, turned on the TV. Then the squeak of a hinge signalled that the back door had been opened and a dull thump suggested it had swung closed again. Had he left? Linda’s body temperature had been dropping ever since he’d left her in the bath, bare flesh against cold ceramic, and now her teeth were chattering. The cold was almost all she could think about. It made it increasingly difficult to follow her own thoughts, let alone the sounds from downstairs. She couldn’t hear anything now. Was that because there was nothing to hear? Had he left? Was he gone?
Linda thought if she rubbed her head against the tiles on the bathroom wall beside her, she’d push the blindfold up and off. Her movement was limited to a foot or so of rope, but she thought there might be a disposable razor on the side of the bath behind her. If she could reach it, she might be able to fray the rope enough to break it in two.
But she wasn’t sure he was gone, so she waited. She clenched her jaw. She tried to ignore the stabbing pain of the cold. She listened as hard as she could. All around her, the house seemed silent and still. She seemed to be the only living, breathing, moving creature inside it. Still, she waited. She thought of the gun and what he could do with it if he caught her trying to escape. Eventually Linda had the sense that a weak grey light was forcing its way around the edges of the blindfold. It seemed like a long time had passed since she’d last heard him make a noise, many maybe hours. It must be if it was getting light outside. He was gone, surely. She waited five more minutes, counting the seconds out in her head. Finally, Linda moved to rub her head against the tile.