The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

walk back to the house. I’m not sure what it was about that – maybe just because it was a moment of kindness after experiencing so much horror – but it made me burst into tears. It probably terrified him.

‘Although he was only about four years younger than me, it must have been a bizarre sight to witness – the man of the castle, found naked in the fountain of his own garden surrounded by vodka bottles and cocaine, crying like a child. But he didn’t run; he just awkwardly told me things “weren’t that bad” and we all had a wild night now and then. So he walked me back to the castle. He had to help me – I was trembling so much – and by the time we’d got up the stairs up to my room I think he realised something serious had happened, as he started to suggest phoning someone for me, perhaps even an ambulance. I begged him not to; I said I was fine and I didn’t need any help. I just needed to go to bed, to sleep. Forget everything. But it wasn’t over. There was a surprise waiting for me in my room. The boy opened the door for me and helped me in. I was shivering terribly by that point and he picked up a towel I’d left on the floor so I could put it round me. That was when he noticed the photographs. All over the bed. Must have been a hundred or more. Polaroids. They were scattered all around the duvet and pillows. I think he said something like “fucking hell” when he picked one of them up and offered it out to me.

‘The first one I saw confused me. It was of a woman’s naked breasts, a hand touching them. I asked the boy what it was doing there, but of course it was a pointless question. I looked down at the rest of them and a few seconds later realised what they were. They were photos of Collette. In a lot of them, she was completely naked; some had her legs open. In many of them, she was accompanied by a young man. His face wasn’t visible in most, but it was pretty obvious who it was. Johnny Holden. Some of them showed her sucking his cock, others were of him fucking her. She looked off her face, wasted, high, stoned. I was already in pure shock when I saw them, but this was the final straw. I crashed across the room into the en suite and was violently sick. I don’t know whether the gardener’s boy recognised Collette from the photos. He may never have seen her, since she visited so infrequently and the estate was so large. Or maybe he presumed I had some sick, incestuous porn thing going on with her. I don’t know. But the vomiting made him even more keen to call someone, and again I begged him not to. In the end, he helped me into the bed, the photos brushed onto the floor, and filled a glass of water from the bathroom. I hope I said thank you at the time, but I think I fell asleep almost immediately. I slept through the whole day and into the evening, waking when it was getting dark around 7pm.

‘My phone had been on my nightstand the whole time. When I woke, the battery was dead and I put it on charge. Tons of missed calls and messages came flooding in. They were from Colette. She said Johnny was furious, that he blamed me for getting her to leave him and give up the drugs. She was terrified of what he’d do to me. It was only moments after I’d showered and dressed that I heard the front door go. Part of me was terrified it was the gang of men back again for round two, but then I heard Collette’s voice calling me. She was beside herself. She had got the train up, terrified of what she might find. I got quite upset when I saw her. She could tell immediately something had happened, even though I didn’t really have any visible marks aside from a small cut under my nose from where they’d held the knife to me. We went down to the servants’ area and sat in the kitchen like we’d done as children when we still had live-in staff. We were always getting in their way, but loved the warmth of the Aga and our cook, Mrs McDonald, often gave us gingerbread. Of course, on that horrible evening there was no freshly baked gingerbread. Just basic decaffeinated teabags, stale biscuits and Collette trying to get me to tell her what had happened.

‘When she’d got it out of me, she cried and hugged me. Then I told her I wanted to call the police. That was when things turned tricky. She told me he’d got her fingerprints on bags of cocaine – a large shipment he was helping to distribute. He was starting to earn quite big money from it all, and she’d helped him pack some of it up and into bags. I asked her how could she have done such a thing, but she just shook her head, tears spilling from her eyes and said, “Oh dearest, if only you knew what love was like.” I felt sick hearing her talk like that. Talk as if their love was some Romeo and Juliet star-crossed lovers’ romance. I told her he was a psychopath; what he did to me was horrific. I thought I was going to die. She was upset by it, I could tell, but she said if I went to the police he had evidence that would land her in prison. Evidence that she’d assisted – even funded, with her own money – some of his criminal activities. She told me that if I could bear not reporting the incident, she really would go clean;