The Prison Book Club Read Free

Almost as ironic as the security camera mounted on our house: it pointed directly at the crime scene, but was not operational.
    I soon discovered that I couldn’t walk at night or park in underground parking garages, which made it hard to attend my evening writing classes. Walking home from book club at friends’ houses in the neighbourhood was terrifying. I couldn’t set foot on Hampstead Heath without a walking companion.
    In the weeks that followed I saw an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harley Street, a psychologist in Welbeck Street in Marylebone and an art therapist in Hampstead.The ENT said that no permanent damage had been done to my throat. My voice was still hoarse, though, and I had lost the upper octave of my singing range. He assured me that at least my speaking voice would return to normal, unlike another recent strangulation robbery victim I’d read about who had been rendered permanently mute. The psychologist heard me out and said that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms and would have a peripheral startle response for months to come. Anything approaching me from the left or right would trigger it. It was true. I once opened the garden door to step into the lane and the postman was approaching on my right, a few feet away. I screamed involuntarily and slammed the door. I can’t imagine what he must have thought. As for the art therapist, she brought oil pastels and paper to the house and encouraged me to deal with my feelings through drawing.
    My husband’s employer, concerned about an attack on one of its new expats, sent its global head of security, a sympathetic fellow formerly with the London Metropolitan Police, to provide me with a security briefing. It felt like a scene from an early 007 movie. He arrived with a briefcase full of gadgets. First, he pulled out a heavy thirteen-inch aluminum flashlight that could be used as both a defence weapon and an alarm. There was a button for the barking-Doberman sound and another for a police siren. For weeks I was inseparable from that flashlight. For my purse and pockets, he handed me square pocket alarms triggered by grenade-like pull strings. They were eardrum-piercing. The strings tended to catch on things, so I was forever setting them off and frightening people. A spray canister was next. Not mace, but invisible marking spray that only became visible under ultraviolet light. If the police later picked up the marked assailant, he might not even know he’d been tagged.
    The security expert also taught me to read and memorize the licence plates of any cars following mine and to take evasive routes home if the same vehicle remained in my rear-view mirror for too long. He coached me to avoid being boxed in by cars at stoplights and warned me never to occupy the middle lane of a three-lane thoroughfare—both standard anti-kidnapping operating procedures. A friend taught me self-defence techniques, including how to scrape the heel of my shoe down the shin of a chokehold robber.And I visited a rescue kennel in search of a Belgian shepherd dog because I had heard that Belgian shepherds would leap walls to come to their owner’s defence. I was well equipped for danger and remained on high alert through the remaining three years of our stay in London.
    â€œAnd did they get the men who did it?”
    â€œI can’t talk about that right now,” I said. I hated talking about it still: the fact that they found one man but not the other, that he was charged with numerous similar assaults and pleaded guilty to several, including mine, and that the judge at London’s Middlesex Guildhall court, in sentencing him to eight and a half years in prison, had characterized the assaults as having been carried out with “utterly callous and ruthless efficiency,” saying it was lucky that none of the women he attacked had died. I couldn’t tell her about the police lineup or the visit to victim