Chapter 58 Ruby #2
She wanted to take a shower. She knew that taking a shower would mean the erasure of evidence, but she opted not to go to the guards.
Jack said, ‘You know this means there’s a rapist out there who can target other people?
Don’t you want to stop him? Where does he live?
I’m going to go and beat the living shit out of him. ’
I turned on Jack. ‘Why should it be Lucy’s responsibility to stop him?’
Jack was annoyed. ‘I can’t say anything right. You can at least let me go and sort him out?’
‘No, Dad, please don’t. He’s younger than you. Stronger. He could hurt you.’
‘Just give me the address.’ Jack was shouting now.
‘We all need to calm down,’ I said.
‘But, Ruby –’ Jack started.
‘Shut up, Jack,’ I cut across him.
Lucy burst into tears again. Jack backed down then. ‘I’m sorry, pet. The only thing we are doing today is looking after our girl. Lucy, love, do you mind if your mum takes photos of the bruises and the bite marks?’
I didn’t like where this was going. ‘Why?’
He ignored me and directed himself to Lucy. ‘Do you want to keep working there? For ComStat Holdings?’
‘Not if he’s there.’
‘Fine. I will go and meet him. It’s Simon … Preston, isn’t it? I won’t lay a finger on him, but he has to be warned.’
‘Simon Perry. Dad, what are you going to do?’
As he asked her these questions I went up to her bedroom, and I fetched towels from the airing cupboard. I needed to get away from both of them, but I could still hear them.
‘I’m going to gather evidence. What restaurant were you in?’
‘L’étoile Bleue.’
An upmarket place where the tables were in booths separated by silk hand-painted screens. Jack and I had been there. We had joked that it would be the ideal place to go if you were having an affair.
‘I’m going to see if they have CCTV inside or outside. He must have carried you out. Someone will have noticed.’
‘Why would they hand over CCTV to you?’ Lucy asked.
‘Because I will tell them that they will be part of a rape story in the newspapers if they don’t hand it over. Don’t worry, I’ll only say it to make them cooperate. Where is the apartment?’
‘In the Docklands, the Zevon Building, number 902. It’s a penthouse apartment. He stays there sometimes during the week. His family home is in Wicklow somewhere.’
Of course it was. Lucy wouldn’t have fallen for the mailroom guy.
‘I will pay him a visit in the office on Monday and show him the photos, screenshots, whatever I can get.’
‘Dad, he’s going to lie to you.’
‘I will know if he’s lying.’ He smiled at her.
I played along. Taking photos of my daughter’s bruised body was truly traumatic.
There were teeth marks on her breasts, almost as if he had tried to bite her nipple off, bruising across her stomach, teeth marks on her buttocks where he had drawn blood.
Her knees were scraped as well, though that might have happened when she fell.
She did not remember how she got these marks.
God knows what kind of porn was out there, all available at a click.
Twelve-year-olds were watching it on their phones.
Sexual activity had certainly changed since my youth.
Had their encounter been consensual? Maybe violent sex was a turn-on for some girls, but my Lucy? Then I hated myself for thinking that.
Part of me was thinking ‘that bastard’ about Simon Perry. And part of me was thinking of how ambitious Lucy was, how driven, how badly she had taken loss or rejection in the past.
When she was five or six at a Sports Day in elementary school, she smacked the girl who beat her in a race, her face red with fury.
When her first boyfriend broke up with her at fifteen, she stole his bicycle.
We didn’t know a thing about it until spring arrived and Jack went to the shed for the lawnmower and found the bike, immediately recognizable as Tommy’s.
I thought it was funny at the time. I guess I was relieved that she hadn’t done anything worse.
In fact, I thought she had handled that rejection well, though we made her return the bike.
And then, when she was older, her team had come second to two girls from another school in the Young Scientist of the Year competition.
I was called into the school a week later.
Lucy had found the kids on the winning team on Snapchat and Instagram and had left nasty comments about them cheating, suggesting they had won by blowing one of the male judges.
God knows how it hadn’t become a bigger story, but she had done it using an anonymous account.
Both schools got involved and it took very little to uncover her identity.
I was ashamed of her. We took her phone and turned off the Wi-Fi router in her room for a month.
Our beautiful Lucy, such a brilliant, smart and funny child from the beginning, and yet she could be devious. And she could be as dishonest as I was.
Had Simon rejected her after consensual violent sex? Had he told her he was never leaving his wife? Was that why she was upset? Had she been obsessed by him? She had certainly mentioned him often enough.
Yes, Lucy was book-smart, but she was younger than her peers, and she wasn’t as emotionally mature as them. Maybe she had gone along with what Simon wanted and then regretted it.
I remembered being back in Boston in the cop station making my statement.
I lost count of how many times I had to tell my story to different people and then again behind a screen in court.
I loved the attention but they tripped me up a few times.
I gave two different versions of how I got the cut on my head.
The mechanics of how Milo got my jeans off were questioned.
He had said I was wearing shorts. I said jeans in my witness statement.
I was asked why I thought he called me Daisy Duke if I was wearing ordinary jeans.
She famously wore denim shorts. I was asked why I’d invited him into the house when I knew that Erin wouldn’t be back until very late.
Lots of little lies that I had to make up on the spot and then remember for the next time.
Lucy’s story was full of contradictions, and we were her parents. I wanted her to be lying. I needed a drink badly.
Lucy stayed in her bedroom. I left Jack to take care of her and said I was slipping out to get some groceries. Instead, I went drinking. That was the night I ended up in the Merrion Hotel, out-of-control drunk for the first time in fourteen years, in bed with Karl from Austin, Texas.