Jenny Hammond's persistent fear after the attack

Jenny Hammond’s persistent fear after the attack shapes both her move to Manham and the way she experiences her later abduction. The first assault left her physically only lightly injured, but its lasting consequence was a sense that danger could recur without warning; when a later attacker trapped her, the memory returned under circumstances that offered far less hope of escape.

The taxi attack and its aftermath

About eighteen months before telling David Hunter what had happened, Jenny was attacked by a taxi driver while travelling home after an evening out. The assault was interrupted when people nearby crossed the car park: she attracted their attention, and the driver fled. The police could not identify him. Jenny had little description to give, and because she had flagged down the taxi in the street, she did not know the company it belonged to. The attacker remained unidentified.

The interruption prevented the assault from going further, and Jenny emerged with cuts and bruises rather than more serious physical injuries. That outcome did not make her feel fortunate. She told David that she felt scared, and explained that the fear widened beyond the prospect of meeting the same man again. If such an assault could happen for no reason once, she felt it might happen again at any time. The uncertainty, rather than a known continuing threat from the driver, became central to her sense of danger.

Seeking safety in Manham

As the fear began to restrict her life, Jenny became afraid to go out. She did not describe this simply as fear of the original attacker: the experience had made the outside world itself seem unpredictable. She decided to leave the city and look for somewhere that felt safer, eventually taking a job in Manham.

The move was an attempt to regain ordinary freedom by changing her surroundings. When she recounted it to David beside the water, she treated the decision with a crooked, self-deprecating smile, but the account made clear that the search for safety had been serious. David responded that he was glad she had come; his words escaped before he had considered them, revealing his growing attachment to her. The exchange places her vulnerability within the developing relationship without suggesting that she had told him the story as a request for rescue.

The past returns during her abduction

Jenny’s new assault makes the earlier attack recur in a more threatening form. When her captor orders her to undress, she experiences the moment as resembling the taxi attack, but worse: she is captive and believes no one will come to interrupt it this time. The remembered event is therefore not merely background to her fear. It becomes the measure by which she understands her immediate danger.

During captivity, Jenny also recognizes signs that other women had been brought to the same place and that the acts imposed on them followed a pattern she could not understand. She wonders why she has not been sexually assaulted, but does not take that uncertainty as evidence of mercy or safety. By then, she believes she will not survive what is happening to her. Her fear is compounded by her physical condition: without insulin, her blood sugar is dangerously high, and she is struggling to remain awake. The earlier attack had taught her that apparent safety could be overturned suddenly; captivity leaves her facing that uncertainty with diminishing strength and no expected interruption.

Significance

Jenny’s history complicates the promise of the move that brought her to Manham. She left the city in search of a place where she could feel safe, yet the danger she feared found her there. The contrast does not make her earlier decision foolish; it shows how the attack had already altered her daily life, while the abduction turns her fear of recurrence into a devastating reality.

Her account also distinguishes physical survival from emotional recovery. The first attacker’s escape and the police’s inability to identify him left the danger unresolved, even though Jenny survived with comparatively minor injuries. When the past returns during her captivity, its force comes from the resemblance between the two attacks and from the changed circumstances: the interruption that once saved her no longer seems possible. Through Jenny, the novel presents fear as both a lasting consequence of violence and a response sharpened by immediate, worsening peril.