"Oh, Cassie," I said. I was aching to go over to her, put my arms around her, hold her close until that terrible rigidity melted out of her body and she came back from whatever remote place she had gone to. But the immobility of her, her braced shoulders: I couldn't tell whether she would welcome it or whether it would be the worst thing I could do. Blame boarding school; blame, if you prefer, some deep-seated character flaw. The fact is that I didn't know how. I doubt that, in the long run, it would have made any difference; but this only makes me wish even more intensely that, at least for that one moment, I had known what to do.
"I stuck it out for another couple of weeks," Cassie said. She lit another cigarette off the end of the old one, something I had never seen her do before. "He was always surrounded by this knot of people giving him protective pats and glaring at me. People were coming up to me to tell me that I was the reason why genuine rapists got away with it. One girl said I deserved to be raped so I'd realize what a horrible thing I'd done."
She laughed, a small harsh sound. "It's ironic, isn't it? A hundred psychology students, and not one of us recognized a classic psychopath. You know the strange thing? I wished I had done everything he claimed I had. If I had, then it would all have made sense: I would have been getting what I deserved. But I hadn't done any of it, and yet that made absolutely no difference to what happened. There was no such thing as cause and effect. I thought I was losing my mind."
I leaned over-slowly, the way you would reach out towards a terrified animal-and took her hand; that much, at least, I managed to do. She gave a quick breath of a laugh, squeezed my fingers, then let them go. "Anyway. Finally he came up to me one day, in the Buttery-all these girls were trying to stop him, but he sort of shook them off bravely and came over to me and said, loud, so they could hear him, 'Please, stop ringing me in the middle of the night. What have I ever done to you?' I was completely stunned, I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. All I could think of to say was, 'But I haven't rung you.' He smiled and shook his head, like,
"Hon," I said finally, carefully, "maybe you should put in an alarm on this place. I don't want to scare you, but-"
Cassie shook her head. "And what, never leave the flat again? I can't afford to start getting paranoid. I've got good locks, and I keep my gun beside my bed." I had noticed that, of course, but there are plenty of detectives who don't feel right unless they have their guns within reach. "Anyway, I'm pretty sure he'd never actually do it. I know the way he works-unfortunately. It's a lot more fun for him to think that I'm always wondering than to just do it and get it over with."
She took a last pull on her cigarette, leaned forward to stub it out. Her spine was so rigid that the movement looked painful. "At the time, though, the whole thing freaked me out enough that I dropped out of college. I went over to France-I've got cousins in Lyons, I stayed with them for a year and worked as a waitress in this café. It was nice. That's where I got the Vespa. Then I came back and applied to Templemore."
"Because of him?"
She shrugged. "I guess. Probably. So maybe one good thing came out of it. Two: I've got good psychopath sensors now. It's like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you're supersensitized." She finished her drink in a long swallow. "I ran into Sarah-Jane last year, in a pub in town. I said hi. She told me he was doing fine, 'in spite of your best efforts,' and then walked off."
"Is that what your nightmares are about?" I said gently, after a moment. I had woken her from these dreams-flailing at me, gasping incomprehensible spates of words-twice before, when we had worked rape-murders, but she would never tell me the details.
"Yeah. I dream he's the guy we're after, but we can't prove it, and when he finds out I'm on the case, he…Well. He does his thing."
I took it for granted, at the time, that she dreamed this guy followed through on his threat. Now I think I was wrong. I failed to understand the one crucial thing: where the real danger lay. I think this may have been, in the face of stiff competition, my single biggest mistake of all.
"What was his name?" I asked. I was desperate to do something, fix this somehow, and running a background check on this guy, trying to find something to arrest him for, was the only thing I could think of to do. And I suppose a small part of me, whether through cruelty or detached curiosity or whatever, had noticed that Cassie refused to say it, and wanted to see what would happen if she did.
