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It's hard to accept that a couple of weeks ago everything was normal. Now everything's wrong. I had gone out with friends for a Saturday brunch. We were a small group of settled, sorted, middle-aged men, some single, some in relationships, but none of us looking to do anything other than spend some quiet leisure time together. We had a couple of beers, shared a bottle of wine over the meal, then sat around in the pub chatting and reading the papers.
As the afternoon turned into evening, people began peeling off from the group. By 9.30pm, the last of my friends headed home. On a whim, I decided to stay. I'd never been in that pub before but I felt comfortable alone there.
After a while, I got chatting to a group around the bar. I got the impression that they knew each other and they were a friendly lot. We talked about football, music, the state of the country. It was good, happy banter. It was the chat that goes on every night, in hundreds of pubs across the country when new people start getting to know each other.
As the night wore on, the accumulation of a day's steady drinking began to back up. I was never particularly drunk, I don't think, but my memory becomes increasingly misty when I try to think back.
I can't remember when I first noticed the guy who ended up assaulting me, but he stood out from the rest of the group – he was more extrovert, a bit larger than life. But he didn't do or say anything that made me feel uncomfortable – or that gave the slightest suggestion of what he would be capable of doing a few hours later.
I was still in the pub at about midnight, then the next thing I remember is being in a house with the same group of about six people. I have no recollection of leaving the pub, travelling or arriving. I've racked my brain but I don't know if we walked there, or got a bus or a cab. I do have some memories from the rest of the evening, though. I remember standing in the kitchen, talking about Christina Rossetti's poem The Convent Threshold. It developed into a conversation about poetry and what we would want read at our funerals.
Then my memory tails off again. I don't think my drink was spiked. I'll never know if I was drugged or not but I didn't have any of the after-effects you would expect. I didn't feel disorientated or woozy.
My next memory is at about six or seven the following morning. I woke up in a bed and that guy was raping me. My first thought was: "What the **** do you think you're doing?" The second thought was fear, channelled into self-preservation: I jumped out of bed and grabbed my clothes from the floor. It didn't occur to me to arrest him. It did not even cross my mind that I was a detective. My only thought was my personal safety. He didn't try to stop me. We didn't say a word to each other.
UK, country where even policemen are raped
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