Life Class (35 page)

‘Is everything all right with Fran and her family?’ he asked when they sat down, the wine and a bowl of olives on the low table between them.

Dory sighed. ‘Short answer, yes, I think so. Long answer … do you really want to know?’

‘Only if you want to tell me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to intrude.’

‘It will be a relief to tell someone.’ Relaxing back into her chair, Dory crossed her legs. He heard the faint shimmy of the fabric against bare skin. She seemed to be looking into her wine for inspiration. ‘My niece got herself into a bit of bother out in Thailand, but part of the problem stemmed from my sister’s neglect.’

‘Neglect?’ The word raised all sorts of extreme connotations in his mind. Dory raised her eyes to his then shrugged.

‘Afraid so. Perhaps it’s too strong a word. I don’t mean the misery-memoir kind of neglect. Mel is a well-loved child, but lately …’ She drew a breath. ‘Fran has allowed herself to be distracted from her responsibilities as a mother.’ Dory sipped her wine. ‘It’s to do with her age. I don’t really understand it, but I’m younger. Perhaps staring down the barrel of my fortieth will have the same affect on me? This is very nice.’ She reached for the wine bottle and looked more attentively at the label. Her eyebrows went up. ‘No wonder!’

‘Your niece?’ he prompted.

‘How can I explain? It’s almost like Fran was still waiting for her life to begin when four things happened. Our mother died, her husband, Peter, took early retirement, her daughter left school, and she suddenly realised she’d soon be forty. The tabloid explanation would be a mid-life crisis. Instead of seeing it as an opening up of new opportunities, Fran saw her options shutting down. You already know a symptom of it, her ridiculous schoolgirl crush on Dominic.’ Dory raised her glass. ‘I think she just wanted to prove to herself she was still young enough, attractive enough to …’ as she took another sip, her eyes engaged his across the rim of her glass, ‘… pull.’

‘She is an attractive woman but she chose the wrong target.’ His reply was disconnected from his thoughts. There were beads of wine on Dory’s full lower lip. He watched the tip of her tongue lick them off.

‘You were a witness to me telling her so.’ Her eyes shifted away from his. ‘But by that time her interest in Dominic was already being superseded by another obsession. I wouldn’t have found out if she hadn’t been upset by the … tumescent Dermot.’ She smiled wryly.

Aware now what a challenge a model like Dermot could present to the women drawing him, Stefan felt the need to explain. ‘There was no other model available. I should have thought about his … tendencies and supervised the pose. If he’s not looking at anyone, anyone female, he’s a great model,’ he shrugged. ‘I shan’t be using him again.’

‘Don’t apologise. It was the catalyst Fran needed. The experience triggered a sort of mini breakdown, which led to her begging me to check her PC.’

‘Her computer?’ he queried, confused; he’d thought she was going to tell him something about her niece.

‘Bizarre, I know, but Fran got herself into a bit of a fix. The Dermot thing was the proverbial last straw. After the lesson it all came out. She admitted she was being cyber-stalked. Fran’s a bit dozy about computers and the internet. She was worried she’d given away her actual address to the stalker, but she’d been deleting everything so couldn’t reread her sent emails. She asked me for my help.’

‘But what could you do?’

‘There were no guarantees I could find what she needed, but I knew where to look. As it turned out, it was unnecessary.’ Dory recalled her sister’s transfixed horror when confronted by Peter. ‘I’ve never seen her husband so angry. So, what I was useful for was to give moral support.’ Dory rolled her eyes. ‘That’s something I hope I never go through again. Arguments with a loved one can be bad enough, but it’s almost worse … agonising … being a witness to that sort of row between people you care about.’ Her mouth turned down at the corners. Though still in the dark and losing his grip on the story, Stefan felt an answering clutch of emotion.

‘Why was he so angry? It wasn’t her fault she was being cyber-stalked, was it?’

‘It
was
her fault. But at that point, Peter knew nothing about it. I’m sorry. I’m explaining this badly. At my sister’s house the desktop in the study is, to all intents and purposes, hers. That’s where all their personal emails go. Peter has the laptop with his business email account set up on it. Fran had become so totally enthralled with this other correspondence that she’d stopped reading her regular emails, even those from her own daughter.’

‘But why did she engage with the stalker?’

‘At first she was thrilled by it. The lure of the forbidden but without the guilt.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve always suspected women were weird.’

Her expression changed and she gave a small rueful smile. ‘Communicating virtually felt abstract, uncommitted. Safe, I suppose, safer even than handwriting a letter and posting it. It answered a need that she was still desirable, still a sexual being. Most women need that to some extent.’ Dory’s eyes connected with his. He felt a pulse of response and wished she’d stop mentioning sex. ‘But then the emails from this saddo degenerated into a form of sexual harassment. Having finally admitted the problem to me, after that last lesson before half-term, I offered to block his incoming mails and to try to recover the deleted emails from her hard drive.’

Dory sighed and sat back further into the chair, raising and dropping her shoulders, arching her head back. For a brief moment, he stared at the curve of her throat. ‘But when we got to her house there’d been one of those off-the-wall coincidences. An hour earlier, Peter had been visited by Jacky, a friend of Mel’s who lives in the village. She’s not one of Mel’s closest friends, she’s in the year below her at school, but she’d received, out of the blue, a curious, miss- spelt email from Mel, saying she was in trouble and claiming that her parents were ignoring her. To find out what was going on, Jacky had tried to text Mel, then email and ring. There was no answer, so, rather heroically I feel, she went round to speak to Peter.

‘Of course, Peter reassured her. He couldn’t believe that Fran was ignoring their daughter. He assumed the email Jacky received was a scam or a phishing exercise. You know, someone hacking an address book and sending out fake messages to everyone on it to try to blag money or gather sensitive information. So he tried to phone Mel himself, but kept getting the “unavailable” message. Eventually, just before my sister and I arrived, he’d gone into the study to open the Live Mail account, to check if there was anything untoward there. We walked in just after he’d discovered a whole batch of unopened emails, cries for help, from Melanie. And he was on the phone, booking himself a flight to Bangkok.’

‘How long had she been out in Thailand?’

‘Since last summer. She accompanied a couple of girlfriends who’d organised the trip for their gap year. Fran and Peter had tried to persuade her not to go. She’d failed to get the grades she needed for her first-choice university and hadn’t organised a place anywhere else. For her, it wasn’t a gap year, it was just a long holiday financed by some money left her by her grandmother.
They
wanted her to concentrate on retaking her A-levels.’

‘A characteristic of the young, their refusal to take advice.’

Dory nodded. ‘Originally, she and her friends were island hopping. They were enjoying themselves. Mel had an uncomplicated relationship with an Australian lad. It came to an end when he went home to Oz at Christmas. Then she found herself a far dodgier boyfriend. A resident this time, an Irishman called Tyler. He told them he owned a club in Bangkok and could give Mel a job as manager. Her friends didn’t like him, apparently. Thought he was too full of himself and Melanie had been taken in. Mel thought Tyler was being straight with her and her friends were just jealous. There was a parting of the ways. They moved on to Bali. Mel went back to Bangkok with him and moved into his apartment. It was then Tyler changed.’ Dory pushed her fingers through her hair, making it stand on end, in that way he liked. Stop it, he told himself. Concentrate.

‘Mel
was
emailing home, but Fran was so consumed by her obsession that even when she was still reading Mel’s emails she failed to pick up on any subtext. Then she stopped reading them altogether. I’ve now read every one and to be fair, though it was obvious Melanie felt let down by Tyler, she didn’t really spell it out in what way he was bullying her. It was only the emails Fran hadn’t even opened which rang loud alarm bells.’

‘What
was
going on?’

‘We didn’t know the details till she got home. There
was
a club, only it was more like a bar, on the fringes of the Patpong area – the red-light district of Bangkok. Tyler was the manager, not the owner. When Mel got there, the only job on offer was hostessing. You know the kind of thing … socialising with the clientele and getting them to buy expensive drinks. She went along with it to begin with, but most of the men wanted more than a few hours’ flirting. Tyler started to pressure Mel. The customers expected extras, and when the girls weren’t willing to oblige it reflected on him. And if the customers didn’t get what they expected, Tyler didn’t get his bung.’

‘He was pimping.’ Stefan was all too aware what Melanie’s close relatives would feel about this.

‘In his eyes, apparently, it was commission. He was doing his customers a favour and they paid him for the privilege. The other members of staff were mostly Thai nationals, girls and boys, some very young. And most of them
were
offering sex.’

‘It’s an age-old trade,’ Stefan said, his thoughts ranging wider. ‘There will always be a demand. There will always be people willing to meet the demand.’

‘Most of them were sending money home. It was the only way their families could get by. Mel, of course, didn’t have that pressure. She dug her heels in. The whole situation was horribly distressing for her. She’d made friends with many of them. But she still didn’t blame Tyler. Even though he continued to try to coerce her, she still somehow saw him as her boyfriend. As if she believed they were just going through a bad patch and he was bound to come round. But then things changed. He got drunk and took her Blackberry, her passport, and her wallet. From then on, even if she could get out, she’d no money, no plastic. But he kept her close, locking her in the apartment when she wasn’t working. Told her the chief of police was his friend and she’d find no allies there even if she managed to get away.’

Stefan uttered a low whistle. ‘How was she emailing home?’

‘He wasn’t so daft as to leave her locked in with a phone or a laptop. But I suppose it’s typical of bullies. They underestimate their victims. He assumed she was too stupid to do anything to help herself. But her friends were helping her. She was writing out her messages and when they could, one or other of the girls would slip out to the internet café and log into Mel’s account. Some of the messages are a bit garbled where the Thai girls have mistranscribed Mel’s original message. And it is only those last emails, the one’s sent by her friends, that really push the panic buttons.’

‘Shit!’ Stefan said. ‘But she’s all right now?’

‘I think so. We hope so. Her father flew out there and alerted the authorities. Whether or not he really had friends in high places, Tyler was arrested and Peter brought Melanie home on Friday. Pete’s a gentle, laid-back kind of guy, but I’ve never seen him so angry. In fact, I have never seen him angry, full stop … but he was utterly furious with Fran.’

‘But …? Presumably
he
wasn’t reading his daughter’s emails either?’

‘Maybe part of his anger was at himself for leaving all the parenting to Fran. But that’s not all.’

‘He wanted to know why his wife had been distracted?’

‘Exactly, what she had been doing online that was more important than Melanie’s welfare.’ Dory’s taut half-smile betrayed the stress she’d been under. Again, he felt that empathetic tug. ‘That’s when she fessed up to the whole thing.’

‘That was brave.’

‘I think she was so tired of it all she needed to unburden herself. Needed to lean on someone, preferably her husband. Perhaps she secretly hoped he would take it in his stride and forgive her. Poor Fran.’ Dory shook her head. ‘She
had
been double deleting everything. But that evening, when she gave Peter her password to log on to her account, there was another email from her stalker. They’d simply been hitting the reply icon to one another. When Peter scrolled down, the whole sorry correspondence was there to read. Fran and I had the additional agony of standing there, like a couple of lemons, while he read every one, including the links to some very dodgy websites right back to the first.’

‘With each step forward in technology, the world gets scarier.’

Dory nodded. ‘Thankfully, the thing she was most worried about, that she might have given away her home address to the creep, was unfounded. It was the one saving grace of a pretty shitty day.’ Dory was gazing into her glass. She gave a short sigh and looked up at him with a wan smile.

‘And how is Melanie?’ he asked.

‘Health-wise she’ll be fine. In the last weeks, the so-called boyfriend was forcing himself on her without condoms. But she’s had a thorough health check. Fortunately, she’s not pregnant and hasn’t picked up any significant sexually transmitted infections.’

‘But I thought … She’s only been back a few days. How can you be sure so quickly? Dom was told there had to be a window of time, as much as six months after contact, before HIV tests could be considered reliable?’

‘Speed and peace of mind can be bought at a price. I work in the NHS, remember? Our Health Trust has yet to provide the sexual health department with the funds to offer the most up-to-date screening tests. But Mel’s had a PCR test, which can detect the presence of the virus as soon as the body’s been exposed to it. Physically, she’ll be absolutely fine. Emotionally, who knows? Only time will tell. As you can imagine, poor Fran is devastated that she was ignoring her while her daughter was in such a plight.’