The Girl at the Spa Ch. 04

"I might do just that," I said smiling at Dad.

We all went to the Accident and Emergency department in Truro. I had superficial cuts and some significant bruising to my right side when I hit the rock shelf during my fall but surprisingly had very little damage to show for my part.

Meghan was fine but for a few fine cuts to her throat that even I could see where already starting to coagulate prior to scabbing. Dad was in shock but doing fine, while Ali was admitted, X-rayed and checked over.

Sean had given her a proper pasting, and he had managed to fracture her cheek bone, give her a frontal sinus fracture around her eye socket, and break her nose and her crack her jaw. The consultant said that her attacker had been frenzied. Dad broke down at this, Sean's insistence that 'it was your fault' must have stuck, and Meghan saw this.

"None of this is your fault!" she said to him, "this was Sean, not you, NOT YOU!"

"OK," said Dad, hardly convinced.

Detective Dave spoke up.

"Ralph, by the look of everything that Sean Patterson did, this was several months in the planning. The signal jammer he wrecked the phones and our radios with was ordered six weeks ago. The protocols he uploaded to your system would have taken weeks to write. This was a planned revenge and he needed Ali's help to get through your firewall. Ali was fucking brave, and thanks to the messages she left we caught on."

We sat in Ali's room sipping coffee and relaxing as the Metropolitan Police and Devon and Cornwall decided who was nicking Sean and for what. They were getting very little from him other than the occasional scared jibber about witchcraft.

"Meghan," I said unable to hold back any longer, "That kicking, you fucking demolished him, what martial art was that?"

Meghan stretched back in her seat, her arms above her head and smiled,

"It's part Indian martial art, a little thing called Yuddha Kala, plus at least 50 percent ballet school. Knew that shit would come in handy one day, and to think I hated Grandma for sending me there."

We were all pronounced fit enough to go home except for Sean, who spent five hours having emergency surgery to repair his stomach and as much of his damaged upper and lower intestine as possible.

The next day Detective Dave sat in the warm living room in the apartment with his notebook and told us of the picture he had built up.

Sean had started to plan his revenge the night Ali and I got engaged, annoyed that he couldn't stay at what he now considered to be his home for Christmas, yet I could. He went to London and tried to talk Paula round to spending Christmas with him but she was staying with her parents and while they shared a bed occasionally an invite for him wasn't forthcoming.

So he stayed in the staff bedroom at the London Clinic, spending a lonely couple of days by himself walking downstairs to the staff kitchen and shower rooms. It was at this point that his rage against Dad and me grew, in that tiny room with just a bed and a TV, denied access to the rest of the flat that I, the interloper, had.

His rage grew and he found himself considering all kinds of options, mostly that all was well before I arrived and all could be again if I could be gotten out of the way. He thought about how he couldn't sneak into the Spa to exact his revenge, then the cage came back to him and he started to think about a plan. The police found his private files on his laptop at his place; there was a credit card that he used to buy what he needed.

He must have spent every free waking moment pouring over plans of The Spa and using rare moments when Dad and Meghan were absent to play around with cage and find the remote, learn how to power it up and work out the power it needed. He rented a large fishing boat from a small fishing village much like Port George some miles away and learned how to operate it and work out how to get it to base of the cliff without drowning himself and more important get away again.

Next there was a thorough grounding in the security system and he worked out how to reprogram the locks, the CCTV, how to re-route the video to play back looped footage so he could do what he wanted without being seen.

Finally, the day that Meghan and Dad had left for the states he put his plan in to action taking down the fence and dropping the cage down the side of the cliff late at night to be there when he arrived later that week. Ali was always at the Spa, except for this weekend it seemed, because I was coming to London or she was going to Cambridge to meet me or some shit. For this to work I had to be at the Spa, no two ways about it.

But Ali wouldn't play the game. She was in London, no way to change her mind. No way to get me there either.

He couldn't get to Dad's Spa office and his controlling PC so he went to London and tried to reset the security system remotely as the computers where linked. He asked Ali what the secret passwords were.

"Secret," she'd replied.

"I don't know them," he said.

"No, that's right, you don't."

He was using the kitchen in the flat when he overheard Ali having a skype chat with me, and when she appeared an hour later in incredibly hot looking nightwear he knew she'd worn it for me! Just... just for a fucking... chat!!

He lost his temper and pulled her into the main bedroom smacking her face. She hit him back, so he punched her so hard she lost consciousness. He tied her hands together and had dressed her in her standard jeans and a sweater, nothing slutty, before she came round. Her laptop was still open so he used it to contact me and close down her Facebook page, set up an 'out of office' on her email and cancelled her appointments for the that day, a Friday, and the following week. He heard people moving around downstairs and quickly tied a gag around her mouth and stuffed her into a wardrobe while he checked all was clear.

She came round and started shouting so he gagged her again, telling her that she'd get another black eye if she didn't learn to shut the fuck up. She snarled at him through the gag and he punched her again. Being Meghan's daughter, her eyes watered but she didn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry. He hit her again.

"The passwords Alice..."

They were still unforthcoming and her looks and gagged shouts were most disrespectful so she received a few more slaps and hits for her trouble..

Janice the receptionist shouted upstairs and asked about Alice and her cancelled appointments. Sean said that she was feeling unwell and was getting the train back to the Spa to recover. Janice seemed happy with that and said she would forward her calls accordingly.

He was unhappy with the amount of blood on her pristine white sweater so removed it. Her firm boobs were looking hot in the great bra she was wearing so he played with them for a while. He then decided that her jeans had too much blood on them so they came off. Needless to say everything came off and he tied her hands and feet to the bed and had sex with her. She started to play the game a bit, after all she had been shagging him on and off for two years so it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

She asked him if she could have a shower seeing as they'd had such a busy night and he agreed, happy that there was no way she could get out of the bathroom as the window was tiny. It was at this point that she found the spare pack of contraceptive pills she had left in the bathroom drawer in an innocent in a white envelope (there are some things you don't want your Step Dad to consider even) and took one to make up for the one she'd missed the night before from her handbag. As she sipped water from the tap she thought about the envelope and how she could raise the alarm with it. Sean was out of control and this being a Friday night she knew that there was little chance of sneaking a message out and using the tiniest nub of an eyebrow pencil wrote the address for my digs, slipped her ring into it, sealed it, kissed it and dropped it out of the back window down into the staff entrance and what she hoped would be a message I would react to straight away. And I did.

She put the contraceptive pills back in the drawer and took a shower.

This same thing went on throughout the weekend; he would demand access to the security system and she would refuse, he would hit, slap until early on the Monday morning after preparing food for them both he looked at the huge 'Kitchen Devil' in the drawer.

She was initially unphased but eventually gave in at the third cut of the lightning flash style letter 'S' he began to cut into her shoulder. Looking for something to treat her back wound he found her contraceptive pills with three missing corresponding with the three days they had been in the flat. She was going to get a beating for that but he was so pleased when he logged into her laptop and found he had access to everything he needed.

Success! Dad and Meghan were out of the country so as far as Sean was concerned the clock was ticking. He needed me at the Spa, where he could take his time and kill me, dump my body where it would wash out into the Atlantic. Aaaaaaaaall gone.

During the day Ali was locked in the now empty wardrobe cushioned with spare duvets, pillows etc. but tied and gagged while Sean went downstairs to the Clinic and carried out his day job.

So he figured he needed to get Ali to the Spa then to get me there. She could see that something was going on in his fucked up brain and started to reason with him. This was when the police believe that the majority of the damage was done to her face. When she came around it was to find that she was dressed and her arms were bound behind her from wrist to elbow in some weird version of bondage ropework he'd found on the internet. She screamed.

He slapped her face and from his tool kit got a long strip of duct tape and wound it around her head twice. All was set for the escape - Janice the receptionist was due out of the building and he would take Ali's car out to Virginia Water, dump it somewhere out of the way and pick up his 'home resprayed' but still technically legal E-type and drive to the tiny fishing village and his rented cabin fishing boat. He had one more client to see and then he would be on his way.

Then I arrived and fucked it up.

As I lay at the bottom of the stairs before the police officers he blocked the upstairs door, and dragged Ali to the fire door, hitting the crash bar and setting off the alarms. He pulled a bound and silenced Ali down the stairs into her Jag and a quick dash across London, then into his disguised Jag and a run through a route he had been practicing for weeks now.

He parked his Jag in a 'pay and display' car park happy that he had no police tail on him, paying enough on the ticket to keep him on site for twenty four hours, by which time he hoped to be back in London innocently working on his next client. Sadly for us, while the police were driving around looking for a car, he was using both of his large Suzuki outboards to power him the fifteen miles to the rocky piece of coast line and the yellow cage at the base of the cliff waiting for him. He raised him and the still bound Alice up the cliff with the remote control he'd had with him since the week before.

Leaving Ali in the cage he ran the power cable he'd brought with him to the steel of the main gates, plugging it into an already prepared fixing in the plant room, but hidden behind the elegant planting my Dad had spent so much money on.

Back at the top of the cliff he wired the cage to tell him if the gate opened, next he used the metal of the cage and the gantry to act as an aerial and repeater station for the small jammer he'd bought, leaving it to one side. Using the Spa Wi-fi he connected and began to mess around with the security system, getting control of the CCTV and the security system, uploading his programs to do what he wanted when he wanted.

As he removed the metal shackles that normally held the cage he replaced them with electronically controlled version that would open and drop the cage, and send a message to the laptop should the gates be opened, he heard the whop-whop-whop of the Bell Jet Ranger helicopter coming close, and he threw a green blanket over him and Ali and all his workings.

He saw that Me, Dad, Meghan and probably a police officer had gotten off of the aircraft, he thought about his options. He could still kill me of course but after that it was going to be very much playing it by ear. Dad and Meghan were supposed to be in America, Alice should really have been in London, this was going to be damage limitation.

He thought about routes around the Spa and strung trip lines across the area before running back to the cage and his laptop, blanking out the previous security settings and video library and sending the loop that the police would be concentrating on so much while he got down to work. That done, he turned on the jammer, and froze the landline phone system.

He was now watching the various cameras and saw me running around trying to get back in to reception. The rest, as they say, is history.

Epilogue.

"...and I Alice Louisa Trenowden take you Richard Joseph McNair to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward..."

She looked up at me staring straight into my eyes and I just felt the love.

Alice went back to Truro General once a week for scans and x-rays and had to have her nose reset, which was done under a general anaesthetic and day surgery. Her bruising went down extremely quickly thanks to cold packs, and some herbal treatments carried out by Grandma who grabbed the first flight she could, being the second helicopter to land on the new pad straight from Heathrow. She also sat with Meghan and Alice for hours at a time and talked themselves through events and, so it appears, they both seemed to have very little stress from that time. The 'S' shape scar disappeared under some minor plastic surgery.

Dad recovered once he saw that Ali had come through it so well.

I prescribed myself a long weekend of bed rest and paracetamol for the pain of my cracked rib, plus a week for good behaviour and upon receipt of Ali's ring back from the Devon and Cornwall Police I put it back on her and we went out to dinner. To my amazement that night in bed, she pulled me over her with a very rude grin,

"For fuck's sake Richie, I'm not broken anywhere else, are you ever going to make love to me?"

I did, and it was fucking wonderful. For Ali she had processed Sean's sexual activities as just more Spa sex, and was fine. I'm not sure if Meghan or Grandma hypnotised her but she never seemed upset by it. Happy that she was being taken care of by the best I went back to Cambridge

We didn't rush to get married after all I still had another thirteen months of study to be a Doctor in Cambridge and while Alice moved part of her work to the London Clinic so I could spend many evenings and many weekends there with her, I became extremely effective in reading, making notes and typing on the train on my journeys to and from, but we still couldn't live together as a normal married couple.

One evening we were sat around the Flat in London a year into our engagement after 'setting the date' and preparing things for the service. We had chosen the lovely, tiny St George's Church near to The Spa, where Alice had been Christened all those years ago (Despite Grandma's spiritual disagreement!), with Meghan insisting that the reception could be fully taken care of at The Spa, and I had already decided that we were going to the Maldives for our Honeymoon.

As we talked about the service, vows, her bridesmaids, my best man and that sort of thing, Dad could see Alice was thinking about something so came straight out with it,

"Darling Alice," he said taking her hand and kissing the back of it, "I would be proud and exceedingly honoured if I could give you away?"

"Ooh Daddy!" she almost levitated from her chair such was her happiness at his statement, and she hugged him, "It was always going to be you!" To my knowledge she never even referred to him as 'Ralph' ever again.

She would wear the same pearl encrusted, off-the-shoulder white dress that Meghan had worn when she had married Dad, and it took very little tailoring to fit it to her perfect figure. It even had the same sash of 'Hunting green' McNair Tartan across one shoulder and Grandma's Christmas present diamond and silver tiara set in her styled dark brown hair holding Grandma's original wedding veil that Meghan had worn some fourteen years before. When Dad raised that veil and kissed her it was one of those perfect moments, and I didn't think it was possible to love her more than I did already.

I wore a grey morning suit with tails, Dad the same, even Dave the Leech had gotten one to match, and was trying in his own rather sad way to be part of everything.

I was actually a bit pleased that Ali chose Fiona to be one of her four bridesmaids, and she took a real interest in the dresses and making sure that the new shapely Fi would look suitably sweet. She did ask Leah, but she demurred, saying with a dismissive laugh that no disrespect but the last thing she needed at her age was to dress up like some fairy off of the Christmas tree.

"Your age?" said Ali.

"Err..." we had the Kardashian raised hand, "I'm a grown up now actually?"

"Really?" said Mum, "you could have fooled me."

We delivered Fiona's dress to the house in London a month before the ceremony that would be in July. Ali had her try it on and I was sure that I detected just the hint of green eyed monster from Leah across the room while pretending not to be interested, Ali saw it too.

"Leah, say the word honey, I'll have one here for you in four days, I promise you'll look fantastic," said Ali. Mum, helping Fi get everything straight with her dress beamed a smile at her almost daughter in law.

Leah laughed, closed her eyes and shook her head,

"Thanks HONEY, but I'm more than happy for my sister to look like a fucking tramp, but NO fuck..."

In seconds Mum was two steps across the room and slapping Leah across her chubby opinionated face with a resonating crack.

"Don't you fucking dare!" snapped Mum her face a picture of pursed lipped rage, "Ali has spent the last eighteen months trying so hard to be nice to you but no; I thought it was just Richard that you were fucking unpleasant to but do you know? You're just bloody nasty to everyone, aren't you?"

"You... you hit me!" snapped Leah, her hand to her cheek.

"You were fucking asking for it," growled Mum. "Leah, I've tried SO hard to learn to live with you and your moods and temper, but I'm done trying. Now listen," with hands on hips and right into the chubby face her eyes flared and she spoke again, "that's it; one more time Leah and you are out the door, you can live in your halls of residence that your father is paying for and you aren't using. I've had enough." She turned and walked away.

"But..."

"But nothing!" snapped Mum spinning on her heels, "you swan around like the Queen of fucking Sheba, you do nothing in the house other than complain about EVERYTHING, eat food and leave my kitchen and bathrooms looking like a war zone. You are horrid and nasty to Richard who, whether you like it or not, is actually your bloody landlord!" Leah's bottom lip started to wobble.

Mum, the courtroom terror, was having none of it and pinched Leah's top and bottom lip. "Shape up or ship out, or so help me ONE MORE OUTBURST and you will wake up and find your clothes in bin bags on the street outside."

Dave the Leech was looking lost, partway between wanting to stand up for his eldest daughter and not wanting to upset Mum. He stepped closer to Mum just in case she might have been thinking about leaving him to marry someone else.