Who Are You?: Part 2 of 3: With one click she found her perfect man. And he found his perfect victim. A true story of the ultimate deception.. Megan Henley
Читать онлайн книгу.
hackers to store information about you. As regarding your hacker I have seen no activity within the last 3 weeks that he is doing anything to your computer at all so I am a little mystified on that one. I will have a closer look on Monday and let you know if I find anything. You need to be aware that hackers do pass information on and because there were such big holes in your last system unfortunately it has been open to abuse for any of these stupidly inclined people. As I mentioned earlier your new system is top drawer stuff. There is not even an encryption code for people to copy so I would feel a lot easier about using your computer. Cheers, Martin
The thought that Christopher was passing on all of my personal details to other nutters was horrible. I cursed myself again for not being a better judge of character. At least, this time, with Vic, I had someone who would fight my corner. Even when we were arguing between ourselves, I told myself it was just natural as we had a new baby on the way – the fact was, even when we niggled, he had my back. To begin with, he’d known nothing about computers, that was why he had got Martin involved in the first place, and now he had taught himself so much just in order to help me. Even Martin was impressed!
I didn’t have a chance to relax for long, though, as another message popped through a couple of days later:
Hi Megan – just to let you know there was some strange activity on your Facebook last night. Someone it would seem was trying to change your password. Don’t worry though they didn’t get past the first mirror and I have checked it this morning and it is all running fine. If you have any problems please let me know. Thanks – Martin.
‘Does this guy not know who I fucking am?’ Vic asked. ‘Why is he not getting the message? It’s time for this to stop.’ With this, he headed out to the public phone box again – in fact, for the next few days it felt like he was there more than he was at home.
Nothing was ever specifically said to me, as Vic didn’t believe I could keep my mouth shut, but all of the clues led me to believe that a big, covert gypsy operation was being planned and that Christopher was going to be bumped off. I couldn’t believe it had got that far, but it also seemed so far that there was no turning back, if that made sense. I was pregnant and vulnerable – and I kept my head down.
‘He won’t be bothering you any more,’ Vic told me one day, holding me tightly in his arms, and being more affectionate that I could remember in a long while. I didn’t dare ask how he could be so certain about that, I just felt a massive sense of relief that the months of being stalked by Christopher were over. Sure enough, Vic was right. An almost pleasant few months followed, from the spring onwards, where it seemed we were getting minimal bother from Vic’s family. I suffered really bad pelvic pain during my pregnancy, and Vic was a real help. I was pretty much unable to walk, but he would happily take Ruby to school and back so that I could get some rest. We were very definitely not in a conventional relationship, he had his room and I had mine, but the impending baby seemed to have given Vic a focus and a reason to not be mad, and his mental health problems were pretty much all better. I had a horrible feeling, though, that all this was the calm before the storm where his family were concerned.
The improvements in Vic’s mental health meant that he started up a business doing computer repairs. He’d learned so much from Martin when the online harassment had started from Christopher that he said it would be a waste not to do something with it. He put adverts and cards around the town and soon the work started coming in. Vic seemed able to fix computers that had been declared dead by other repair places, and had many happy customers. He told me that he would enter the BIOS settings of the computer and talk to it using code, which would entice it back to life – he explained that he had been able to learn it really quickly because of his autism. It was all another language to me, but it also seemed like a fantastic step on the way to a normal life.
There was one thing I found confusing about it all, though – Vic had told me that he had a condition called synaesthesia. This is a neurological condition which has a lot of different forms. In one type of synaesthesia, signs, letters and numbers take on the form of colours to the sufferer, and this is what Vic had. With this, for example, the numbers zero and one could be white and black, and the letter ‘A’ could be red. Vic had told me that it meant he could only read text if it was in certain colours, and the colour he found easiest was green writing on a red background. He told me that his own laptop had been installed with a programme which meant that he could read text on it and that he had been helped by a special support group for people who had synaesthesia. However, he seemed to have absolutely no problem in using other people’s computers for hours on end while he was fixing them; I couldn’t work it out, but assumed it was just part of the mental health issues he battled daily, and that I was privileged to not have to deal with such things in my own life.
I patted my belly as I thought about all of Vic’s troubles, and tried to ignore the awful things he had done just to keep us safe.
‘Soon,’ I told the little one growing inside me, ‘soon you’ll be here, and I’ll have the strength to concentrate on just making a wonderful life for you. Wonderful, but normal. Very, very normal.’
It was all I wished for. A healthy baby, a safe family life, and blissful normality. I might as well have been asking for the moon on a stick.
Chapter 7
July 2010–January 2011
We were also planning to move house. The place we’d found in Horsham was much nicer than the cottage, which held so many bad memories for me, and I hoped it would be a fresh start. There were four bedrooms, which meant we could keep our current arrangement of separate rooms, which seemed important to Vic. The only problem was that the move ended up being very close to my due date. Luckily, in some ways, my little girl decided to arrive early.
As I was packing up the old house, the contractions started. I’d been here before, so I decided to just keep going with boxing things up and go to hospital as late as possible. I had a doula ready on speed dial to meet me there, and was hoping for as little intervention as possible. I was so worried that Vic might have an episode when I went into labour, which was why I had engaged a doula in the first place; I needed someone I could rely on. Life had been so crazy, but I desperately wanted this little one to come out into peace and calm.
Ruby was with her dad. I held on for as long as I could, and then, with the contractions mounting, Vic drove me to hospital. He was chatty on the way there, playing me music that he’d been working on and trying to help with my breathing. However, as soon as we were shown into the labour room, he changed. We were met by Magda, the doula, and he disappeared almost immediately.
‘Where are you going?’ I shouted as he headed out of the door.
‘Need to move the car!’ he replied. ‘Don’t want a ticket.’
This went on all through the labour. He seemed obsessed with moving the car to avoid a traffic warden seeing it, and ignored my perfectly sensible advice to ‘JUST PAY FOR A BLOODY SPACE!!’ A pregnant woman in the last throes of labour is perhaps not the most reasonable person in the world, but I did feel that he was being absolutely ridiculous. Thankfully, I had Magda with me and she was more help than Vic could ever have been. The contractions were coming quickly, and agonisingly, and the last thing I could be bothered with was Vic’s odd ways. I clung on to Magda and promised myself that I would NEVER be doing this again. Finally, it was over – one last push, one last scream and there she was.
My little girl.
My Lily.
She was stunning. All dark hair and big lungs. Vic was there for it, for the most important part, and he was in tears when she arrived. I knew that he must be thinking of Zack – and probably Dina and Logan too. He had previously said to me that he wouldn’t have a minute’s peace until the baby got past the age of Zack, but I kept reassuring him that I was very different to Zack’s mother and no one would put my children in danger, least of all me.
We spent that night in hospital, just the three of us,