‘Could you see his face?’
‘No. It was very dark. The light bulbs were gone, and in the middle of the night there wasn’t much light coming in from outside…’
There was a heavy silence, and they heard a rustle of something, maybe tissues.
‘Take your time,’ said Vicky.
‘He pushed himself on top of me. I just remember the smell of him, he had a really horrible strong aftershave on. Like it was too much, and mixed in with this he had horrible breath… He said, “Keep your mouth shut, bitch, and I won’t hurt you…” He grabbed my arms and pinned me down… put his knee between my legs… He kept saying “shush, shush, shush” like I was a little kid who’d woken from a bad dream. As he loomed over me with his breath, he started to drool. It was disgusting. He was drooling like a dog and I felt it on my neck and my cheek… And he was… he was hard. I could feel it… Then, thank God, I heard someone in the corridor outside, one of the other girls had gone to use the bathroom at the end of the corridor. The toilet flushing distracted him for a moment. I suddenly thought that this is not how my life was going to end. I managed to get my hand free. I’d been to this self-defence class where they showed us this move, where you hit someone with the flat of your hand up and under their nose… I don’t know how I got the courage, but I hit him hard… And I must have got the bullseye, cos he screamed, and I screamed, and then he ran for it. He got the door open, and he was gone. The corridor was dark outside… I lay there for a second in shock with the door wide open. And then I freaked out and closed and locked it and put a chair up against it…’
‘What did you do next?’ asked Vicky.
‘I closed the window. It was around 3am, and I was terrified he was going to come back… And I stayed there until it got light.’
‘Did you report it?’
‘I wasn’t going to. I waited until six, when it started to get light and I just wanted to leave there and run for it and get the train… I saw one of the girls as I was leaving. And she saw me and asked if everything was okay, and I told her… She was the one who persuaded me to go to the police. And I reported it.’
‘What happened after you reported it?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I never heard from the police, or from anyone at GDA again. I didn’t get a place at the drama school. I didn’t want to go back. It was as if it never happened.’
37
‘Vicky was due to upload episode eighteen of her podcast last week, but she didn’t,’ said Erika when the recording had finished.
‘If it was an episode about a sex attacker, would we know about it? There could be something in the system, if this Becky Wayland reported it,’ said Peterson.
‘But we don’t have an exact date of when it happened,’ said Moss.
‘But we have a place. We need to find out how many houses GDA operates as student accommodation. She says on the tape that it was just near New Cross Gate station,’ said Erika. ‘Again, we need to find out where Vicky kept her notes.’
‘There are three more files,’ said Moss. She clicked on the third one. They heard Vicky clear her throat, and she spoke with a heightened dramatic intensity.
‘This is take one, introduction to act two of episode eighteen… With bulb lamp sound effect…’ She cleared her throat, and then affected a more serious tone of voice. ‘The three students I’ve spoken to all tell a similar tale. Whilst staying in ground floor rooms at student halls in and around New Cross Gate, they reported the radiator being broken and a sweltering room…’ There was a squeaking sound, of metal on metal, rhythmic. ‘The old-fashioned screwin bulbs were missing from the lights…’ The squeaking sound continued. ‘Had someone deliberately staged these rooms? Unscrewing the bulbs and setting the heating on high? I spoke to another woman…’ There was a pause and then they heard the flicking of pages in a notebook, and her voice went back to her normal tone. ‘Oh shit, what’s her name?’
Here the recording ended abruptly. Moss clicked on sound file number four. This was a second ‘take’ of the same and when they reached the same point where Vicky had cut off, she had the woman’s name as Kathleen Barber.
‘Kathleen managed to scare the man off before he could do anything… Another woman, Grace Leith, reported a man in her room, but he was scared off by Grace’s boyfriend coming back from the bathroom.’ At the end of the track there was a pop and a smash as the bulb broke. The sound file ended.