[Anh Ngữ] Because She Loves Me - Mark Edwards (English)

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 31

Charlie’s building was not at all what I expected. I thought, like me, she would live in a converted Victorian house, although I wasn’t sure where that impression had come from. Instead, the address I’d found on the envelope was of a large 1960s building, a former local authority block housing thirty or forty small flats. It sat just off a busy main road near the Arts College and, in the dying light, looked foreboding and depressing, the England flags that were draped from several windows making the place appear even more unwelcoming.

I went up three flights of steps and found Charlie’s door. There was no one around. Apart from the smell of lunch being prepared and the muffled bark of a dog inside one of the flats, the whole block could have been deserted, ready for demolition. I looked around nervously before I knocked.

I waited by the door. From inside I could hear the faint sound of a TV. I still couldn’t picture Charlie living here. I had an image of her coming to the door, a couple of kids round her ankles, a shocked expression on her face. But that was impossible, of course. She had spent far too many nights at mine to be leading a double life.

I knocked again and heard a toilet flush. A male voice called out, ‘Hang on.’

The door opened.

I don’t know who was more shocked: me or him.

It was the guy who had been watching me in the cafe in Hoxton the day before. He was tall, maybe six-foot-four, the absence of his hat revealing a mop of curly blond hair.

I must have been more shocked than him because he recovered first, saying, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m . . . looking for Charlie.’

‘Go away.’ He tried to close the door but I stepped forward, blocking it with my foot.

‘If you don’t let me in I’ll call the police, tell them you’ve been following me.’

‘What?’

‘I saw you yesterday.’

He sneered. ‘That was a coincidence.’ ‘But you were looking at me like you knew me. I’ve never seen you before, so. . .’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake. You’d better come in.’

I followed him into the living room. He picked up the remote and turned off the TV. A half-full ashtray and can of beer sat on the coffee table. Apart from the TV and an iPod dock, a few magazines and books stuffed untidily onto a bookcase, the room was bare. No pictures on the wall, nothing to make it look like a proper home.

‘Charlie’s stuff is all in her room. Boxed up. Ready for when she moves in with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m Fraser. I’m having a beer. Want one?’

It was only noon. I shook my head. ‘Suit yourself. I’m having one.’

He came back and handed me a dirty glass containing tepid tap water, then gestured for me to sit down.

‘So, are you Charlie’s flatmate?’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’

I decided to come back to that one. ‘Why have you been following me?’

He seemed wired, his left leg twitching up and down like it wanted to detach itself and make a run for it. He stared at me, his eyes wide and unblinking, and I wondered if he was on drugs. Was he a smackhead? He was wearing a thick jumper so I couldn’t see his arms, couldn’t tell if they were covered with track marks. He was chewing gum, even while drinking his beer, and his jaw jerked in time with his leg.

‘I told you, I wasn’t.’

‘Then why were you staring at me?’ ‘Because I recognised you, didn’t I?’ ‘You mean . . . Charlie showed you a photo of me?’

He barked out a laugh. ‘Yeah. Something like that.’

‘What are you smirking at?’

‘I’ve seen you in the flesh before, too.’ I didn’t like the way he said it. It was hot in the room but I felt cold inside. ‘The first time I saw you was back in December. That night you and Charlie hooked up.’

So that was where I had originally recognised him from. That night, coming out of the nightclub. He had seen us and crossed the road. I’d hardly thought anything of it at the time.

He picked up his beer can but fumbled it, knocking it over. Beer gushed onto the carpet between his feet.

‘Oh, bollocks!’ he shouted, springing up and running to the kitchen, coming back with a cloth. ‘Charlie will be well pissed—’ He stopped himself. ‘Ha. Force of habit. I don’t need to worry about all that shit anymore, do I? She’s your problem now.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

He impersonated me, using a whiny voice. ‘What do you mean, what do you mean? You ask a lot of questions. I mean, you’ve got her now, haven’t you? You’re the one who has to deal with her issues.’

I stared at him. ‘Were you and Charlie. . . together?’

Fraser snorted. ‘Yeah, we were. For nine months. We moved in here together after we’d been with each other for about a month.’ He looked around the empty room. ‘Good times.’

‘I had no idea she still lived with her ex.’ At least I knew now why she hadn’t wanted me to visit her place.
He picked up the almost-empty can, raised it and sucked out the dregs. ‘Likes her secrets, does Charlotte.’
I almost said What do you mean? but stopped myself.

‘When did the two of you split up?’ I asked.

He frowned. ‘Do you really expect me to just sit here and answer all your stupid fucking questions?’

He stood up and I shrank back, suddenly fearful of him. He was bigger than me, though he didn’t look particularly strong. His face twisted into a snarl of hatred, then suddenly relaxed, and he flopped back onto the sofa. He put his face in his hands.

‘I thought we were going to be together forever,’ he whimpered. I realised, with horror, that he was crying. I shrank back in my seat, wishing it would swallow me up. Eventually, he wiped his face on his sleeve and groped on the table for a cigarette.

‘We split up just after Christmas. That was—’ He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘That was the worst week.’ I could see him picturing it, like he was reliving a nightmare. Just after Christmas. That meant they were still together when Charlie and I had gone out that night.

He gathered himself. ‘I don’t want to talk about that week. It’s too . . .’ He trailed off.

That first night, Charlie had told me she was going to stay with a friend. ‘Did she stay here? That first night I saw you?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled with one corner of his mouth. ‘She was really turned on that night. Horny as hell. I suppose I should thank you for that.’

My insides went cold.

‘And now you get to fuck her. Amazing, isn’t she? Unbelievable. Tha girl . . . I’d give anything, everything, to spend another night with her.’ He stared at me as he sucked his cigarette.

‘You haven’t . . . slept with her since I was with her?’

He laughed coldly. ‘No. I’ve hardly seen her. She’s never here. And now she’s moving in with you and I’ll probably never see her again. But that’s good, it’s for the best. I mean, I’ll be able to move on. Get my life back on track.’

I waited for him to say more but he changed the subject. ‘Why are you here?’

I trotted out the lie I’d prepared. ‘I want to surprise Charlie by arranging to move her stuff. I wanted to see how much there is.’

He swept an arm towards the hallway.

‘Feel free. Second door along.’

I left the room, leaving him curled into a ball on the sofa. I wanted to go, to get the hell out of here, but I had come here looking for information. This could be my only chance. I had already found out why Charlie had taken so long to contact me after that first night. She had been with this loser. I had taken an instant dislike to him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him about yesterday. Had he already been in the cafe when I went in? I couldn’t remember. On balance, he was probably telling the truth about it being a coincidence.
Charlie’s bedroom was almost as empty as the living room. Half a dozen boxes were piled up in the corner, along with a few carrier bags stuffed full of clothes. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the walls bare. The room smelled stale, musty.

Then I spotted half a dozen canvases leaning against the wall, one against the other. I crouched and studied them. A couple were abstract: jagged lines and swirls, blood reds and blacks. They looked angry. Another was a charcoal sketch of a man, but he had no face. Was it supposed to be me? The canvas at the back startled me. It was a collage of photographs arranged in the shape of a female body. The photos had been cut out of a book: my Rankin book, to be precise.

Various models, either naked or nearly nude. Charlie had painted sharp, jagged lines in red across their flesh. It was a powerful picture. But why hadn’t she asked if she could take the book if she wanted to cut pictures out of it?

‘Not much, is there?’ Fraser said, startling me. He was leaning in the doorway. ‘You could probably take it home on the bus.’

‘She never had much stuff,’ he continued, swaying in the doorway, his eyes pink and unfocused. ‘I used to joke that she always acted like she was preparing to go on the run.’

‘How did the two of you meet?’ I asked.

‘I was working at King’s.’ Kings College Hospital was just up the road from this flat. ‘I’m in IT and she was on a temp contract there, just before she started at Moorfields.’

‘And do you know where she lived before that?’

He stared at me and a sly smile crept on to his face. ‘She’s as secretive with you as she was with me, isn’t she? It used to drive me crazy. Trying to get any info out of her about her past was like trying to get a cat to go walkies. Her line was that it didn’t matter, that it was all about the here and now.’

He walked into the room, came up close. His breath stank of warm lager and I shrank away as he grabbed my arm and leaned in close, his nose inches from mine. ‘Do yourself a favour, mate. Don’t let her move in. Get away while you can.’ I pulled my arm free. ‘Why are you saying that? A minute ago you were saying you’d do anything to spend another night with her.’

‘Yeah. A night. Not a day.’ He pulled up the sleeve of his jumper and I gasped. The skin was criss-crossed with slashes, most of them scars but some fresh, scabbed over, the skin between the knife- marks looking like it was going to peel off.

‘See this. This is what Charlie did to me. She fucked me up.’ A noise came out of his mouth that was half laugh, half sob. ‘She really fucked me up.’

I waited for him to calm down.

‘What did she do?’ I asked quietly, dreading the answer.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, picked at one of the long scabs on his arm. ‘It’s hard . . . it’s hard for me to talk about. But you know her. You must have seen it. Signs, at least.’

I didn’t want to give anything away. I had no idea if I could trust him. And with the conflict raging inside me, the internal war between virus and antibodies, I didn’t want to say anything negative about Charlie. I was still hoping that, any minute, the lights would come on and the truth would be illuminated – the truth being that Charlie was innocent of everything but being jealous, that this guy was a liar or a nutter or both, and that my girlfriend and I could get on with our lives. Walk into our bright future together. ‘I’m talking about how possessive she is,’ he said. ‘How jealous. Even though I never did anything to make her jealous. Christ, why would I want to look at other women when I had her? It didn’t make sense. I used to tell her, it’s irrational, illogical. Stupid.’

‘What was her reply?’ My throat was so dry I could barely get the words out.

‘That love isn’t rational or logical. That it’s meant to be like this: like a tropical storm, a hurricane. Exciting and destructive and unpredictable. She said that when two people love each other they have to give themselves completely. It has to be all or nothing. No one else is allowed in.’

I wondered if this conversation was awaiting me in the future.

‘She hated me seeing other women. Being in IT, I mainly work with a load of greasy blokes, but I have female friends, acquaintances. Charlie went mental if I so much as went for a coffee with them.’

‘How long had you been together when she started being like that?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. Three months? Everything kind of snowballed after that. I mean, it just went crazy. Intense. Her temp contract ended and she persuaded me to quit my job so we could be together all the time. She wouldn’t let me go out. We got all our shopping delivered. I mean, we became hermits. We stayed in all the time. I lost contact with everyone: my mates, my family. My mum would ring me every day, worried sick, and Charlie wouldn’t let me answer it, said that I shouldn’t need anyone else, even my mum. And I was so scared of her leaving me that I gave in. She had a violent temper too. She smashed up loads of my stuff, all my old vinyl, because she said I’d listened to the music with other women so it was tainted.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I had one album, an old Pixies album, with a picture of a topless woman on the cover. When Charlie saw it she went mental. Accused me of fancying this picture more than I fancied her. She burned it, right there in the middle of the living room. I thought she was going to burn the fucking flat down. She was screaming at me. I’m amazed the neighbours didn’t call the police. But afterwards, the *** . . . That’s why I stayed.’ He hung his head.

I could understand. Not because he was thinking with his penis – though that was probably part of it. I could understand how you could get trapped in a bubble, the intensity and excitement addictive, this twisted version of love providing rush after rush. It was the opposite of boredom. It was being alive.

I had tasted that with Charlie too. But wasn’t like Fraser, the poor sap. I was in control now. I had told Charlie she needed to seek help for her jealousy. I wouldn’t let her control me. I understood the draw of the dark side of love, knew how seductive the stormy waves could be, but I was strong enough to resist.
Wasn’t I?

‘I asked her to get help,’ Fraser said. ‘To see a counsellor about her jealousy, and she told me she was going to see one, but she lied.’

I swallowed. There were barbs in my throat.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘it all changed. Suddenly. She went out one day and came back announcing that she had a new job, a contract at Moorfields. She told me I should get one too, get out of my pit, as she said. It was so sudden, like she’d simply got bored and decided she wasn’t interested any more. She stopped wanting to have *** with me. I tried to talk to her and she said that I was being pathetic, that I shouldn’t expect it to last forever. But I couldn’t suddenly change the way I felt about her.’

I looked at him, at this shell of a man. Chewed up and spat out. Was this my future?

‘That’s when she met you,’ he said. ‘I followed her that night, I admit. I watched you both. I saw her kiss you goodbye. I texted her straight away, telling her that I was going to talk to you, tell you what she was really like, put you off, if she didn’t come home with me. We spent the rest of that week here, talking. Fucking. I called you at one point, but chickened out and hung up. I hid Charlie’s phone, which made her go mad. And at the end of that week, I was worn out. I knew I couldn’ cling on anymore, that I had to let her go. We agreed that she would stay here for a little while, and she moved her stuff into the spare room. This room. And that was it – she went. Leaving me like this.’

It was raining outside now. In the silence that followed his words, I heard it beating against the window.

‘What about other people?’ I said. ‘Did anything . . . happen to any of your friends while you were with her?’
He stared at me like he didn’t understand the words. ‘What?’

‘Your friends. Especially female friends. Ex-girlfriends. Did anything weird happen to any of them?’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘But as soon as I let Charlie in, I broke contac with everyone, like I told you. I didn’t have any female friends left. And Charlie was my first proper girlfriend.’

I let this sink in. So there had been no one to threaten the relationship from the outside.

‘Do you promise you haven’t been following me or Charlie around?’ I said.

He nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him. I still didn’t trust him.

‘I’d better go,’ I said.

I walked past him into the hallway, my legs unsteady. My injured knee throbbed and there were spots dancing before my eyes. I had an almost irresistible urge to go home and put the duvet over my head, blot the world out. Stay there forever.

‘There are probably others,’ Fraser said, as I opened the door.

I turned back. ‘Others?’

‘Like me. Other men, from her past. I she’s left a trail of fucked-up blokes and squashed hearts. And you’ll be next.’ He pointed a shaky finger at me. ‘Think of me, when she decides to leave you.’

‘I you’re hoping she will,’ I said. ‘Because you’d have her back, wouldn’t you? You’d want her back, anyway.’

He shook his head. But I knew he would. He’d have her back in a heartbeat.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 32

I leaned my head against the window of the bus, welcoming the vibrations into my skull. The man in the seat in front was talking earnestly to his companion about how Jesus had come to him in a dream and told him that the world would end on April 1st. ‘And it won’t be no April Fool’s joke!’

I had found out nothing to prove that Charlie was either innocent or guilty of murdering Karen. But I had been given a terrifying glimpse into what life with Charlie might be like. Did I still want to prove her innocence? Maybe I should go to the police now, tell them my suspicions. Explode everything. Go back to being alone.

But even as I thought this, a text arrived on my phone.

Hi handsome. What are up to? Feeling REALLY rough thismorning. Can’t concentrate. Why the hell do they have to do training at the weekend? Call me later – maybe we can Skype? Finish what we started yesterday. Love and miss you. xxx PS Can’t wait to live with you Exciting! xxx

I sighed. How could any of it be true? How did I know Fraser wasn’t lying or exaggerating? He didn’t seem like the most stable person on earth, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I was that he was lying about following me. Even if a lot of what he’d said was true, that had been his relationship with Charlie, not mine. He was weak. He had caved in to all her demands, pathetically grateful that she was his girlfriend. The dynamics in their relationship were all wrong; they created bad weather. I would never allow anything like that to happen. Knowing that Charlie was prone to jealousy, possessiveness, even obsessive behaviour, didn’t put me off her. I didn’t want a boring girlfriend and as long as it didn’t get out of control, it would be worth it. I suppose there was also part of me that relished the challenge, that wanted to be the one who rescued her, an atavistic urge that lay deep within my psyche, the need that we men feel to be the gallant prince, the hero, the only man able to tame the wild woman. I wasn’t proud of this. It was just the way it was.

I wanted to rewind time, just a few days, back before I had started to wonder about Charlie. Back when everything was straightforward.

Instead, I still needed to prove her innocence to myself.

I texted her back, still pretending everything was normal.

Hi gorgeous. Not up to much. Miss you too. Def Skype later. I’ll wait up. xxx

I sat back and tuned out the doom- mongering warnings of the guy in front. Being on the bus prompted thoughts of the bag Charlie claimed to have left on one just like this. I was now certain that she had been lying. I could picture her rifling through it, spying on my past, feeling sick as she discovered the old photos and letters from ex-girlfriends. Then, in a jealous rage, she had decided to destroy the bag. Dump it in a bin somewhere. She wouldn’t have been able to come up with a story to explain removing just the items relating to my exes; she’d needed to get rid of the whole thing. Then she made up the tale about losing it on a bus, pretended that she had been calling London Transport every day in a desperate bid to find it.

There was, of course, a big difference between the things I knew or strongly believed she’d done – cutting up my photography book, destroying my bag of mementoes – and killing someone. I now knew that she could be jealous, secretive, a liar. But those were things I could deal with, could talk to Charlie about. I didn’t expect her to be perfect. Nobody is.

The crux, I reminded myself, was whether she was jealous, secretive and duplicitous enough to be the one thing that I would never be able to forgive her for. A murderer.

I stared at the filthy streets as they rolled by. I knew where I needed to go next, who I had to talk to.

Harold’s expression changed from puzzlement to delight when he opened his door, his little dog, Dickens, bounding about at his feet.

‘You changed your mind?’ he said. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes, please, do. I was just making tea.’

I followed him into what I guessed he would call the sitting room. A fire burned in the hearth and Harold’s dog, Dickens, lay on the rug, chin on paws. The scene reminded me of going to see my grandparents, my mum’s parents, when I was little. They had outlived my parents – I remember them at the funeral, him stoic, her sobbing – but died a few years later within weeks of one another. Couples in my family die in pairs.

Harold came and sat in the armchair opposite mine, putting the tea tray on the table between us and tossing half a biscuit to Dickens, who snatched it up and swallowed it in one gulp.

‘How have you been?’ Harold asked, leaning forward and looking not only directly at me but at the air around me, his eyes roaming about my periphery. It was disconcerting.

‘Not bad.’ I didn’t want to give too much away. ‘I wanted to ask you a couple of questions – about Karen.’

He nodded very slowly. ‘That would be fine. But only if you agree to do something for me.’

I knew what he was going to ask. ‘Let me read your aura.’

What harm could it do? It wasn’t like I believed in any of his hokum. As long as I didn’t let what he said worm into my head, it would be fine.

‘All right.’

He rubbed his hands together. ‘Marvellous.’

‘Do I need to do anything to prepare?’ I asked.

‘Yes, please take off all your clothes, dear boy, and leave them on the chair.’ He smiled wickedly at my expression. ‘I jest. You don’t need to do anything except stand here, in front of the white wall, and relax.’

He stood before me and reached up, his hands hovering over my head, one on either side, then slowly moved them down so they were a couple of inches from my cheeks. I closed my eyes. Harold had terrible breath, like he had rotting meat trapped in his teeth, and I tried not to breathe through my nose. He made a low humming noise as he studied me. Despite the halitosis smell and my scepticism, I could feel my muscles unknotting like I was having a deep tissue massage. At the same time, I felt a prickle on my scalp; my stomach gurgled. My legs felt weak. I lost track of time, went deep inside my head, though when I emerged I couldn’t recall what I’d been thinking about.

I opened my eyes. Harold stood before me, a grave expression on his face. He sat down and picked up his teacup, took a sip, screwed up his face like it was bitter. ‘What did you see?’ I asked, returning
to the seat opposite.

His face was covered with his hand, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. I had expected a full run-down of what he had seen, expected to see a theatrical report, but he looked exhausted, grumpy. Wiped out. His voice was reduced to a cracked mumble. ‘Your aura. . . It’s like a bruise surrounding you. Purples and browns and greys . . . Ropes of black and blood red.’

He looked up at me, his eyes watery, unfocused. ‘I don’t want to alarm you.’

‘Tell me.’ I wasn’t worried. I didn’t believe in it. I wasn’t sure why I was whispering. I knew I shouldn’t allow him to suck me in. This way madness lay.

‘Very well.’ He recovered his voice a little. ‘The mix of brown and grey and pink . . . That usually indicates terminal illness. Cancer or something equally dreadful.’

Now I was alarmed.

He waved his hand before I could speak. ‘But I don’t think that’s it . . . It’s more like . . . a cancer of the spirit. An emotional, spiritual sickness. There’s black there too, which shows that you’re experiencing great trauma, and grey, which indicates depression. It’s hooked into your chakras, here and here—’ He pointed to my chest and throat. ‘And here.’ This time he pointed at my groin.

‘This is a very generalised interpretation, you understand. I could go into far more detail.’

I shook my head. ‘Is it all negative?’ His mouth twitched. ‘No. Not all. There’s pink there too. The pale pink of love and the more vivid pink of sexual desire.’

I nodded.

‘But there’s something else . . . The spirit that has attached itself to you . . . It communicated with me. Showed me a vision. A woman, a woman who is obsessed with you, who believes what she feels to be love. The spirit is acting out her desires, causing havoc, what it sees as mischief.’

I studied him. I wasn’t sure if he believed all this stuff or if it was a deliberate con. If the latter, what was he trying to get out of me? I guessed he would offer me more sessions, help to deal with the negative energy and the dark spirit, at which point he would charge me. Such help wouldn’t come cheap. If it was a con, he was an excellent actor, because he appeared genuinely disturbed and shaken. So perhaps he was genuine, but anyone could have guessed my state of mind. We had met when I’d come here asking about a dead woman. This wasn’t rocket science. The very fact, though, that he had lasered in on my biggest concern, my current obsession, made me feel cold and uneasy.

‘There’s a cord hooked to your crown,’ Harold said, pointing towards the top of my head. ‘It’s draining your life force.’

‘What do you suggest I do?’ I asked, my voice still a whisper.

‘I should do a cord cutting. It’s not as alarming as it sounds.’

‘No.’ I really didn’t want to get involved in any of this. I felt like I was having to turn down a persistent salesman. ‘I don’t really believe in this stuff.’

He looked at my harshly. ‘Then all I can suggest is that you stay away from this woman.’

On the rug, the dog stretched and yawned, breaking the spell.

‘I need to go,’ I said.

He seemed terribly disappointed. As I headed for the door he said, ‘You came here to ask me something?’
In my eagerness to get out – away from the images he had, despite my efforts, implanted in my head – I had almost forgotten why I’d come here.

‘Oh, yes. Of course.’

I showed him my phone, a recent photo of Charlie on the screen, smiling at the camera.

‘Is this your girlfriend?’ Harold asked. ‘Yes. Have you ever seen her near here?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ He squinted at the picture. Then, unexpectedly, he grabbed my arm. His fingers were sharp and dug into the bone of my arm. ‘But this woman . . . there’s a darkness about her aura too. It’s screaming at me, even through a photograph. Black and red. Blood red. She’s dangerous, Andrew.’ He hissed in my face, a noseful of halitosis. ‘Dangerous.’

I snatched my arm away, rubbed at it. I felt terribly claustrophobic, scared, desperate to get away.
‘Be careful,’ he said, as I yanked open the door. ‘Please. Be careful.’

There was one more place I needed to go before I went home. King’s College Hospital, which dominated Denmark Hill not far from my flat. Charlie’s old workplace, where she’d met Fraser. I remembered reading in the newspaper reports about Kristi’s attack that she was being cared for there. It had been weeks ago but I guessed she would still be there, given the severity of her injuries.

As I entered the hospital, I had a growing sense of a clock ticking. I needed to resolve the swirling questions in my head before Charlie got back. Otherwise, how would I be able to act normal around her? So far, all I had were questions and doubts. Everything was ambiguous.

I wasn’t sure which ward she would be in but, after consulting the board in the lobby, I figured she would most likely be in the Brunel Ward, where patients undergoing facial surgery stayed. I would try there first.
I felt queasy with nerves as I negotiated the maze-like corridors. Would she agree to see me? Would they let me? I had no idea, but I had to try.

I eventually found the Brunel Ward and, acting as confidently as I could, told reception I was here to see Kristi Tolka. The woman behind the counter said, ‘Bed thirteen’ and I inwardly thanked God for providing me with this stroke of luck. Dark spirit, be damned.

Bed thirteen had a plastic curtain drawn around it, and I could hear voices from within. I paused. The voices were speaking a language I didn’t recognise. Albanian, I assumed. I cleared my throa and said, ‘Excuse me.’
The curtain was jerked back and a young woman with black hair and suspicious eyes peered up at me. Now I wished I’d brought flowers.

‘Yes?’ she said in a thickly accented voice.

‘I . . . er . . . I came to see Kristi.’ I couldn’t see beyond the curtain to the bed.

‘Who are you?’ the woman asked.

‘My name’s Andrew Sumner. Kristi was my cleaner and I, er, heard about the terrible . . . thing that happened. I just wanted to check how she is.’

Then Kristi said something in her native language, addressing the other woman as Dita. Reluctantly, Dita gestured with her chin for me to step beyond the curtain.

I took a deep breath as Kristi came into view. She was sitting up in bed, a pillow propped behind her, a thin hospital quilt pulled up to her collarbone. The right side of her face was covered with a bandage, which wrapped around her skull and across her chin. Her lips were visible through a slit in the bandage. Only the upper left-hand side of her face, including her undamaged eye, was visible.

She fixed that eye upon me now and said, in a weak, restricted voice, ‘Hello?’ ‘Hi Kristi,’ I said, in what I hoped was a friendly, light tone. ‘How are you?’

She looked at me, her eye blinking slowly. I cringed.

‘How do you think she is?’ Dita asked. ‘I’m sorry.’ I turned back to Kristi, who picked up a beaker and sucked up some juice through a straw. I noticed that there were no cards or flowers beside the bed and wondered how many people she knew in the UK. Would she go back to Albania after this? I found her future impossible to envisage. But I knew it would involve pain and suffering. ‘Have they caught the person who did it?’

Dita replied for her. ‘Fucking police are not even looking. Why do they care about some immigrant?’ She spat out the last word.

Kristi said something to her in Albanian and Dita said, ‘She is asking what you want.’

It had dawned on me that by coming here, I was making myself a suspect, particularly in the eyes of these two women. And what I needed to ask Kristi would seem strange to say the least.

I spoke to Dita, while continuing to look at my former cleaner. She had been so beautiful. It’s easy to say that beauty is only skin deep, but I imagined myself trotting out that cliché now. It would be like a barb in her heart. ‘I need to ask Kristi something. I want to show her a photo and ask if she recognises this person.’

I thought that, if Charlie had been behind the attack, she would have had to follow Kristi at some point so she knew her route home, which would tell her where to lie in wait. The report had said that the attacker was a man in a balaclava and black leather jacket. But wouldn’t it be easy for a woman dressed like that to be mistaken for a man? Especially if it happened quickly, in the dark, and the victim was half-blinded? I wanted to know if Kristi had seen Charlie.

‘I need to know if you ever saw this woman,’ I said. Dita translated.

I brought up my girlfriend’s photo on my phone and held it close to Kristi’s face. She reached up with an arm that was also wrapped in bandages and took the phone.

She scrunched her one visible eyebrow. ‘Your girlfriend,’ she said in English.

‘Yes. You saw her at my flat. But did you ever see her anywhere else? In the street.’ Again, Dita translated.
The wait for her response was agonising. She stared at the picture. I could hear her breathing, a wet, rasping sound that emerged from the slit in the bandages.

She spoke to Dita in Albanian, and I waited impatiently for the translation.

‘What did she say?’

Dita stared at me, her face pale and hostile. ‘She says that your girlfriend is crazy. That she offered her money to stop cleaning your flat.’

My blood ran cold. ‘When was this?’

The two women spoke and Dita shrugged with one shoulder. ‘She doesn’t know exactly. A day or two after she first met her? This girl, your girlfriend, was waiting outside the cleaning agency office when Kristi went to get wages. She asked Kristi to refuse to clean your flat, that she would give her £100 to stop.’

They spoke together for a moment. ‘Your girlfriend had translated her words into Albanian on the internet – she had words printed out.’

‘What did Kristi say?’

Another exchange.

‘She said nothing. She just laughed at her. Laughed in her face.’

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 33

I walked home from the bus stop, picturing myself surrounded by a bruise- coloured halo, invisible hooks and cords turning me into a living marionette, and when I went inside I was shivering and sniffing from the damp, clinging cold. Harold’s and Kristi’s words echoed in my head.

I could picture Charlie’s reaction when Kristi laughed at her. The anger that would have bubbled up. Anger that could lead to her attacking the woman who had rejected her offer. Would Charlie really go that far? All I knew was that Charlie had felt threatened enough by Kristi to try to stop her cleaning my flat. My cleaner, who was attractive, yes, but whom I had never shown any sexual interest in. If Charlie had done what Kristi said – and I couldn’t see any reason why Kristi would have lied about it – then some of the other things I suspected Charlie of seemed more in character, like setting up Victor to stop me working in his office and becoming ‘exposed’ to all those attractive women.

As if that wasn’t enough, when I got home I found an email from Sasha in my inbox.

Hey A

How’s it going? Just wanted to let you know all is quiet here at the moment. No more threatening texts or weird things going bump in the night (I have to joke about it because otherwise I’d spend every day hiding in bed, unable to go out!).
I’m sure I saw Charlie yesterday afternoon in Farringdon. She was going into the chemist’s. I tried to catch her eye, not wanting to be unfriendly, but she blanked me. Hope all is good with you two. I’d like to meet up with her again, try to make amends for last time. I don’t want there to be any crap between us, anything that makes it

harder for me to see you.
Anyway, hope all good with you. Call me.

S xx

I called her immediately.

‘I just got your email,’ I said.

She mimicked my voice. ‘Hi Sasha, how are you? I’m fine, thanks. How about you?’

‘Sorry. It’s just . . . are you sure you saw Charlie yesterday afternoon?’ I was light-headed, the walls of the flat closing in on me.

She hesitated. ‘I’m pretty sure it was her, yeah. Like I said, she blanked me. Though I don’t—’ ‘What time was it?’

‘Um. I finished work early, got back into Herne Hill about four, so it would have been just after that.’

‘It can’t have been her. She’s in Newcastle on a training course.’

‘Oh.’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, I didn’t see her face. Not properly. She was ducking into the doorway.’

‘But you said you tried to catch her eye.’

Again, she took ages to respond. ‘Yeah. I meant I was waiting for her to turn her head. Maybe it was someone who looks like her, wears similar clothes.’

‘That must be it. Sorry.’

I hung up before Sasha could say any more. Had Charlie lied about going to Newcastle? She had given me the name of the hotel she was supposedly staying at so I looked up the number and called it. A young woman with a light Geordie accent answered.

‘Hello. I need to speak to one of your guests. Charlotte Summers.’

‘Do you have her room number, sir?’ I told her I didn’t.

‘Hold on.’

The line beeped for a while, then started ringing. If they were trying to put me through, at least that meant she was indeed at the hotel. I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty. Surely her training would have finished for the day. But then I was talking to the receptionist again. ‘Sorry, sir, there’s no answer. Can I take a message?’

‘No, it’s fine. Can you tell me when she checked in?’

An intake of breath. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not able to do that. But I can take a message.’

‘It’s all right. I’ll try her mobile.’

I stared at my phone. Sasha must have got it wrong. Of course she had. Normally, I would have known that straight away, but with everything that was going on . . . I sent Charlie a text, asking her to call me when she got a minute. After that, I looked in the fridge and took out a bottle of wine. I needed to get drunk.

When Charlie called me, a couple of hours later, I had almost finished the wine. I didn’t ask her whether she’d been in Herne Hill yesterday afternoon, unable to think of a way of asking it without revealing all my suspicions. She told me about an amusing incident on the course, said that she missed me, told me they were going out in Newcastle but she didn’t really want to go.

‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. Staying in, watching TV.’ ‘You should go out. Why don’t you go and see Sasha?’ ‘Really?’

A soft sigh. ‘Yes, really. I know there’s nothing going on between you, and she’s your best friend. Apart from me, I mean.’ She laughed. ‘I need to make an effort to be friends with her.’

I felt like my brain was being ripped in two. ‘She said something very similar earlier.’

‘You saw her today?’ ‘No, she emailed me.’

‘Oh, right. Well, that’s good. You don’t want the women in your life to be at war, do you?’

I couldn’t tell Charlie that I didn’ want to go out because I had no energy, that I was worried sick, that all I wanted to do was hide in my flat. So I said, ‘No, I think I’m going to stay in. There’s a film on that I want to watch.’

I woke up late the next day with another hangover, having polished off nearly two bottles of red wine. This needs to stop, I thought, running myself a hot bath, planning to sweat out the alcohol.

Charlie would be back the next day and, sitting in the bath, I made my mind up. I was going to ask Charlie about everything. I would tell her I knew about her offering Kristi money and visiting Karen. I would also tell her I knew she lived with her ex-boyfriend. It was the only way forward. I would be able to gauge her reaction to the news that Karen had died of a drug overdose, see what she had to say about Kristi and Fraser. I would look into her eyes as we spoke and, I felt confident, I would know.

I didn’t know, however, what I would do with this knowledge.

I got out of the bath and walked, dripping and naked, into the bedroom. The heating was cranked up and the flat was tropical, the windows steamed up. I was sick of winter, was reaching the point I got to every year where I started to crave sunshine, my body starved of vitamin D. It had been a long winter and now even the brightness Charlie had brought into my life was diminished, black clouds over the sun. I wanted to get that brightness back.

The phone rang. It was Tilly.

She went straight into the conversation without niceties, in the same way I had with Sasha the day before.
‘Did Rachel stay at yours on Friday night?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘And what did she say she was going to do afterwards?’

‘Why? What’s happened? You sound like you’re about to have a panic attack.’

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll explain in a second Just tell me, please.’

‘She said she was going to ride up to Cardiff to stay with her sister. She left here Saturday morning. What’s going on?’ I sat on my bed wrapped in just a towel, the last droplets of water on my body evaporating. I could hear the couple downstairs arguing. I wondered vaguely what colour my aura was at the moment.
Red, probably. Cabernet sauvignon.

Tilly’s voice tightened, like she was on the verge of tears. ‘She never got there. Her sister waited for her all afternoon. Rachel’s not answering her phone, either. I’ve tried to ring it a hundred times but it goes straight to voicemail, like it’s turned off.’

‘Oh Jesus.’

‘I’m so worried, Andrew. We’ve been on to the police but there haven’t been any reports of motorbike accidents.’

‘Maybe – I mean, I don’t like to say it but what if she went off the road somewhere remote and the bike’s ... concealed somewhere.’

‘In a ditch, you mean.’ Neither of us spoke.

‘How did she seem Friday night?’

I realised straight away what Tilly was asking. ‘You mean did she seem suicidal? No, she didn’t at all. She was scared, shaken by what had happened with Henry. But she struck me as someone who very much wanted to survive.’

‘That’s what I told the police. Listen, they’ve got your name and address. They might come round to talk to you.’

‘OK.’ The couple downstairs had stopped arguing and were now having ***. ‘What about Henry?’

‘I don’t know. The police asked me a lot of questions about him. I told them what he’d done.’

‘You think he caught up with her, intercepted her?’

‘Oh God, I hope not. But that’s the most probable explanation, isn’t it?’ Her voice caught. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her. I couldn’t cope.’

All I could do was reassure her, say words I didn’t believe. Tell her everything would be all right. But inside I was thinking, She’s dead. Another one. And I heard Harold’s voice again, talking about the dark spirit.
Rachel had stayed with me – and now she was dead.

It was my fault.

Monday morning. Charlie was due back later. There was no news about Rachel, except that the police had arrested Henry, were questioning him. I kept the news channel on, waiting for a story about how the body of a female motorcyclist had been found. But there was nothing.

I needed to change the bed. The sheets smelled and a ridiculous part of me was worried that Charlie would be able to smell Rachel on them. I stripped the sheets and opened the wardrobe to get out a clean set.
A few of Charlie’s clothes had slipped off their hangers onto the wardrobe floor, including a coat and the suit I’d had dry cleaned. I picked them up and took down some coat hangers. As I held the coat, something struck me. If I was looking for evidence, surely here was somewhere else to look.

I felt terrible delving in her pockets, but reassured myself that the ends justified it. Besides, I had already looked through one of her bags, and I didn’t really expect to find anything, anyway.

The coat contained nothing but a few balled-up tissues, an old Oyster card and a pair of gloves. Next I checked the trousers of the suit. Empty.

Finally, I tried the pockets of the suit jacket. There was just one pocket, on the inside, and I could feel, immediately, that there was something inside. A small brown envelope, sealed. I took it out and held it in my hands. Had the envelope been there when I’d had it dry cleaned? I hadn’t checked, had just taken it out of the wardrobe and put it in a bag.

If I opened the envelope, Charlie would know. Unless I went out and bought an identical envelope, which wouldn’t be hard. This one had no marks on it, no writing.

I had to do it. I ripped it open and something dropped to the carpet.

I stooped to pick it up. It was a little plastic bag, as big as a credit card. It was quarter-filled with pale brown powder.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 34

I waited in the interview room at the police station, sipping from a plastic cup of coffee. It was, I imagined, exactly like the coffee dispensed by the machines at the eye hospital, the coffee that had given me an excuse to talk to Charlie that first day. I set it down on the table. I couldn’t stomach it.

The policeman at the front desk had listened to the beginning of my story with an inscrutable expression before holding up a hand to stop me. Twenty minutes later, during which I almost changed my mind and went home, a guy in a smart- but-inexpensive suit came out and gestured for me to follow him. This was Detective Constable David Moseley. had seen enough cop shows to know this was the lowest detective rank, and Moseley had the air of somebody who was ambitious and impatient to progress. He took me into an interview room and I showed him the little bag of heroin, began to tell him my story. As I spoke, DC Moseley stared at me, occasionally glancing at the little packet of powder on the desk between us. Then he disappeared and left me waiting for another twenty minutes.
Now, DC Moseley came back into the room. This time he had a notepad with him. He licked his index finger and thumb and flicked the pad open.

‘OK, Mr Sumner. Let’s go over all this again. Start by telling me how and where you found what you believe to be heroin and how you believe it relates to Karen Jameson’s death.’

He had taken the packet with him last time he’d left the room.

‘Are you saying it might not be heroin?’ I asked.

‘We need to check that.’ ‘Have it analysed, you mean?’

He rocked his head back and forth and made a non-committal sound in the back of his throat. ‘Please tell me again how you found it.’

So I recounted the tale, and then went back and told the whole story from the beginning. Trying to stay calm, though my heart was trying to burst out of my chest, I told him all the things I suspected Charlie of doing, from murdering Karen using the heroin I’d found in my flat, right back to Harriet’s burglary, taking in the attack on Kristi, the framing of Victor and all the other odd and worrying things that had happened over the last couple of months. My voice cracked as I told him about going to see Fraser, what Kristi had told me in the hospital, about Charlie’s jealous rage. As I spoke, DC Moseley wrote everything down in his notepad in a series of bullet points. He kept writing for a few minutes after I stopped talking, catching up while I tried to catch my breath.

He sat back and tapped the pen on the table.

‘That’s quite a litany of accusations,’ he said.

‘I know.’ I sank my face into my hands. I hated this. Hated it. ‘But the only one can prove is Karen’s murder.’

The detective lifted a dark eyebrow. ‘Prove?’

‘Well. I mean, that’s the only one with any evidence. That’s probably the one we, you, should concentrate on.’ My voice trailed off when I saw the look he was giving me.

‘Leave the detective work to us, please, Mr Sumner.’

‘Sorry.’

He tapped his pen on his teeth, studied his notes. ‘How well do you know this woman, Charlie Summers?’
‘I told you. She’s my girlfriend. Or she was my girlfriend.’

‘Hmmm. Would you describe it as a close relationship?’

‘Yes, very.’

He remained quiet, waiting for me to fill the silence. Although I suspected this was a technique he’d been taught, I still surrendered.

‘Very . . . intense.’

‘Intense, eh?’ That eyebrow lifted again. ‘And Karen Jameson, the deceased, is an ex-girlfriend.’

I met his eye. ‘She wasn’t really a girlfriend. But we had a relationship, yes.’

‘Were still having a relationship?’ ‘No! It ended a long time ago.’

‘So why would Ms Summers be jealous enough to want to kill her?’

‘I told you this too. Because Charlie is obsessive. I was working for Karen and Charlie must have hated it.’

‘Must have? She didn’t tell you she hated it?’

‘No. Not in those words.’

I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d expected, but it wasn’t this. I had imagined the police being keenly interested, treating me as some kind of tragic hero, understanding the pain I was putting myself through. How naive can you get? My story sounded like the invention of a lunatic or a fantasist. But the bag of heroin was real. Surely the police could see that this proved that Charlie was the killer?

‘All right,’ DC Moseley said. ‘Let’s go through it again.’ As I started to protest he said, ‘Just the last bit, involving Karen Jameson.’

‘You need to talk to Harold,’ I said. ‘He lives in the ground floor flat in Karen’s building. He might have seen Charlie . . .’ I paused. I didn’t want to start talking about Harold reading auras. I could imagine how that would go down with the detective. ‘Victor Codsall too. Karen told him that Charlie had been to see her.’
DC Moseley doodled a number o swirls and stars around his notes. He said, ‘OK, thank you. Leave it with us.’

He stood and I looked up at him. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘We’ll talk to Ms Summers.’ I had already given him details of Charlie’s movements.

‘And you’ll be in touch?’ ‘We will indeed.’

I stood outside the police station with no idea of what to do next. Charlie was due back in London in a few hours. I knew she would come straight round to mine. But I couldn’t be there, not now I’d found the heroin. I needed to head her off. I had no other choice: I would have to lie.

I sent her a text.

Hi Charlie. Have had to leave flat Suspected gas leak. Why don’t you go back to yours and I’ll text you with the all-clear later?

I agonised over whether to put a kiss at the end. If I didn’t, she would definitely know something was up. I decided to add a couple. What harm could it do? As soon as the police went to talk to her she would know I had been lying anyway.

She texted back a minute later. Oh, OK. What a nightmare. See you later. xx

I went to a coffee shop and sat at a table on the pavement, embracing the cold. I felt utterly miserable, more unhappy than at any time since my parents had died. It felt like all my emotions had been put into a spin dryer which was churning and tossing them around inside me. I didn’t know it was actually physically possible for a heart to ache, but right now, mine did.

I had just lost the woman I loved, the woman who had made me so happy over the last couple of months. Regardless of what she’d done, I loved her. You can’t turn your feelings off like a tap. Love doesn’t die like that. Look at all those husbands and wives who stand by their spouses even after they’ve been found guilty of the most terrible crimes. Picture the mother who stands by her murderer son. Even if they know their spouse or offspring is guilty, even if it goes against everything they believe to be right and decent, they still love them. Love is hard to break. Adultery, violence, betrayal, cruelty. Love can survive them all. Although I didn’t expect Charlie’s love for me would survive what I’d done. She had, I believed, committed murder. But, in a way, my crime against her was even worse. I’d betrayed her behind her back.

I missed my girlfriend. I wanted to erase the last couple of weeks, to go back. I had a kind of waking dream in which Charlie and I were lying in bed, her head on my chest, talking to me, laughing, and the only other sound I could hear was the rain beating against the window.

‘You all right, mate?’

I looked up. One of the baristas from the coffee shop was looking at me with a mix of concern and amusement. And who could blame him? I was sitting in the middle of a downpour, the rain lashing down on me, drenching my skin and hair, plopping into my coffee. I hadn’t even noticed.

I went to Sasha’s, sat outside on the steps till she got home. Luckily, the rain had stopped.

She took one look at me and said, ‘Andrew? What the fuck’s happened?’

‘Can I come in? I’ll tell you all about it.’

We sat on her sofa and she listened while I poured out the whole story, for the second time that day, though it came out as more of a jumble this time, jumping back and forth, Sasha constantly stopping me to ask questions, gasping, swearing, her mouth hanging open. It all came gushing out, like telling it to Sasha was a kind of exorcism. When celebrities write their autobiographies they always, without fail, say it’s been a cathartic experience. That’s what this was like. Sasha was particularly interested in the part where I described Charlie’s jealous frenzy the night I stayed over with her. There was part of me that thought Sasha was enjoying this tale a little too much. Though I couldn’t blame her. It was a great story, involving people she knew, and the baddie was someone she hated, who she’d warned me about.

‘You haven’t said I told you so yet,’ I pointed out after I’d finished. I was spent.

‘I’m not going to. How the hell were you supposed to know she was . . . like that?’ She laid a hand on my arm. ‘How are you coping?’

I hung my head and fought back tears. ‘Not well, to be honest. I miss her, Sash. Despite everything. I love her.’

Sasha stroked my hair. ‘I know. I feel the same about Lance, despite all the shit he’s done.’

‘How is everything with that?’ I asked. ‘Oh, he’s gone quiet. I saw him at work today and he ignored me but he didn’t look at me like he wants me to die. I think he realises I’m not going to leave Wowcom but that I’m not going to cause any trouble for him. I mean, it makes me sad to see him but a little less sad every day. So tell me—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’ ‘All right. I understand.’ She squeezed my knee. ‘Let’s get drunk.’ ‘I don’t—’

‘Come on. You could definitely use a drink. You look like you haven’t eaten for days as well.’

She was right. I had barely eaten anything since meeting up with Victor on Friday.

‘I’ll pop out,’ Sasha said, ‘get us a takeaway and some booze. What do you fancy? Fish and chips?’

I nodded. I wasn’t hungry. But the booze, and the prospect of temporary oblivion, sounded perfect.

Sasha came back with two bags, the greasy smell of cod and chips emanating from one, the other containing two bottles of gin that clonked together. She put the food onto plates and poured us both a large G&T.

‘Put the TV on,’ she said. ‘Unless you’d prefer music.’

‘Telly’s fine.’

It was strange being with Sasha sometimes, like we were an old married couple, completely at ease with each other. It came from when we’d lived together for two years at uni, our bedrooms adjoining. We did our food shopping and cooked together to save money, went out together all the time. Spent many nights sitting up putting the world to rights, dreaming of our futures. Most people thought we were a couple, which Sasha blamed for her lack of success with men, but we were firmly in the friend zone.

The news came on and Sasha told me to switch it over to something more light- hearted, but just as I was about to change channels, a familiar face appeared on screen and my finger froze.

‘Sasha – that’s Rachel!’

She came over to join me by the TV as the newsreader intoned over the photo of my sister's missing personal assitant.

Police are appealing to anyone who might have seen Rachel Marson, 27, who went missing on Saturday while riding her motorcycle from London to Cardiff. Miss Marson, who lives in Eastbourne, East Sussex, called her sister to tell her she was setting off at just after 10:30 a.m. Since then, no one has seen or heard from her. She was riding a black and purple Harley Davidson, wearing a black leather jacket and trousers and a purple crash hermet.

They went on to recount her licence plate number and to give out a phone number for anyone who might have seen her.

‘Do you think she might have simply done a runner?’ Sasha asked, passing me my plate.

‘I hope so.’

‘You should turn your phone off,’ Sasha said.

‘Eh?’

‘You keep looking at it. All the time. It’s quite distracting.’

‘I can’t help it. I keep thinking I’m either going to get a call from the police telling me they’ve arrested Charlie or a call from Charlie herself.’

Sasha took the phone from its spot beside my plate and switched it off. ‘Now you can concentrate. Come on, drink up.’

I finished my first G&T and pushed the glass forward for her to refill it.

By ten, we were both wasted. Sasha had turned off the TV and put music on, and was lying across the sofa, gesticulating with her arms and legs as we talked. We were reminiscing about the old days. My anxiety was a constant buzzing at the back of my head, but it had got to the point where the front of my brain was able to ignore it, treat it as ambient noise. ‘. . . And do you remember that Halloween party, the time that girl doing sociology turned up dressed as The Demonisation of Human Sexuality?’

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t she completely naked?’

Sasha laughed. ‘She was wearing a flesh-coloured bodysuit.’

‘Oh no, I’m disappointed. I knew should have worn my glasses that night.’

I stood up to go to the loo, and had to hold on to the back of a nearby chair to steady myself.

‘Whoa,’ I said.

Sasha squinted up at me. ‘Where are you going?’

‘To find my flesh-coloured body suit.’

She laughed again as I staggered to the bathroom. As I peed, I felt my pockets for my phone, then remembered Sasha still had it. I closed my eyes and swayed. I really was drunk. I wanted to lie down. Lie down and never get up.

When I re-entered the living room, a half-formed joke about the sociology student in my head, Sasha was sitting up, a serious, but still inebriated, expression on her face.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ I sat down on the sofa beside her.

‘It’s about Lance.’ She took a big gulp of vodka. She was drinking it neat now. I hadn’t seen her this drunk for a long time.

‘What about him?’

She looked at me. ‘Something I haven’ told you. When our affair ended, he – he tried to kill me.’

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 35

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ I said as softly as I could.

She nodded, not meeting my eye. ‘Can you turn the music down?’

‘Of course.’ I got up and turned it down so it was barely audible. I thought Sasha might want some physical space so sat in the chair opposite, leaning forward so she could speak quietly.

‘It happened the day he told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. He said he wanted to meet me at the hotel we went to sometimes. That’s when he told me he wanted to end our relationship – just after we’d had ***.’ ‘He waited till after?’

She stared into her glass, where the last couple of ice cubes were clinging to life. ‘I know. Bastard, right? We were naked, in bed, and he told me he needed to talk about something. That’s when he told me it was over. That his wife had found out about us and he’d promised her he’d end it.’

‘What did you do?’

She poured more vodka into the glass. As she talked, her words slurred and she wobbled from side to side. Her face had that sloppy, unfocused look really pissed people get just before they pass out.

‘I told him I was going to talk to her, to tell her exactly what we’d done together. All the really pervy stuff. I haven’t told you all of it. I told him I’d tell Mae that he told me she was an ugly old bitch and that I was so much better than her in bed.’

‘You wouldn’t really have done that, though, would you?’

‘Of course not. I was upset, angry. I wanted to scare him. Because I knew, from that moment, that he’d get away with it. He’d had his fun, got to fuck a young girl from work, and would now walk away unscathed.’

‘And that’s when he attacked you?’

She shook her head. ‘Not at that moment. He told me to get dressed. I went into the bathroom, suddenly didn’t want him to see my body, certainly didn’t want to look at his shrivelled old cock. I stood in the hotel bathroom and cried. I was in there for ages, hoping he’d go before I came out.’ She looked at me. ‘I loved him, Andrew. I know it was stupid, that I should have known the rules. And I did feel terrible for his wife. I still do. But I couldn’t help the way I felt about him.’

‘I understand.’

‘When I came out of the bathroom, he was still there. That was when it happened. He grabbed me by the throat, like this.’ She mimed him squeezing her neck, fingers pressed hard against the underside of her jaw.
‘He pushed me against the wall. He said if I went near his wife, he would kill me. He told me he knew people who could dispose of bodies. He said he could buy anything, any service.’

‘Did you tell the police about this?’ I asked. I felt more sober now, her story a slap round the face.

‘No.’

‘Oh, Sasha. Why not?’

‘What’s the point? There’s no evidence. It’s just my word against his.’

‘I know. But you still have to tell them.’

She pouted. ‘In case he does it to someone else?’

‘Exactly. Please, Sash.’

Very reluctantly, she nodded.

‘Let’s do it now.’

‘But it’s nearly eleven.’

‘I know. But the police are there all night. Come on. Where’s your phone?’

I called the police station for her, before she could protest any more, and once I’d been put through I handed the phone to her. I listened to her explain everything to the police officer on the other end.

‘They said they’ll send someone round to talk to me first thing tomorrow. Now, I need to go to bed.’

‘OK.’ I stood up too, waited for her to leave the room, but she didn’t move. ‘What is it?’

‘Will you sleep in my bed?’

‘Sasha, I—’

‘I don’t mean ***, stupid. I just – don’t want to be alone. Is that OK?’

She took hold of my hands in hers. ‘Come on then,’ I said.

I was woken by the insistent sound of the door buzzer. I lifted my head and it was like being punched in the face. The room was bright with sunlight and I didn’t know where I was. Then I looked beside me and saw Sasha, the covers thrown off, arms and legs akimbo. She was naked. I was naked too.

Oh shit. We hadn’t . . . had we? I tried desperately to remember. But the last thing I could recall was crawling into bed, Sasha asking me to hold her. No ***. I didn’t think we had, was sure I would remember it.

The buzzer sounded again, like a giant angry wasp. Sasha moaned and rolled over, exposing her pale buttocks. I covered her with the quilt, pulled on my jeans and T-shirt, which were dumped at the end of the bed, and walked into the living room to look out of the front window to see who was ringing so insistently.
It was Charlie. I stepped back quickly from the window, just as her head turned. Her face was flushed with anger. I was sure she had spotted me.

I noticed my phone on the sofa, and switched it on. It immediately started vibrating with notifications: seven missed calls from Charlie this morning, a couple from my sister, a text from Charlie that was so long that it filled the screen. Before I could read it, the phone, which had been on one per cent battery when I turned it on, died.

The door buzzed again, and Sasha came into the room, a dressing gown wrapped round her. She looked like one of the walking dead, her hair Medusa- like, eyes like a dying panda’s.

‘It’s Charlie,’ I said.

She peeked out the window. ‘Don’t let her in.’

‘I don’t want to hide from her,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Because—’ I couldn’t find the words. Because I was a man, not a mouse? Because I felt I owed Charlie the commo decency to talk to her? Or was it that I wanted to see her? This was the real reason. I missed her, was worried about her. Had she spent the night in a cell? Was it cold? Were they horrible to her?
My thoughts must have been evident on my face because Sasha said, ‘Go on then. Go and talk to her. Just, please, don’t tell her about last night. I don’t want her coming in here trying to kill me.’

Before I could respond, ask Sasha i she remembered what had happened when we’d gone to bed, she had locked herself in the bathroom.

I put on my socks, shoes and coat, went down the stairs and, after taking a deep breath, opened the front door.

Charlie looked over my shoulder into the hallway before turning her attention to me, her face stony, eyes cold. But despite her expression she looked lovely: her hair looked just-washed, her long black coat hugging the contours of her body, her face clear and fresh. I closed the door and stepped onto the pavement.

‘I knew it,’ she said.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked softly.

She ignored the question. ‘I knew you’d be here. With her.’ Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘Don’t worry, Andrew. I’m not going to cause a scene. I just think it would have been decent of you to tell me where you were or answer my fucking calls.’

Her voice was very quiet and even, right up until the final two words.

‘I’m sorry. I thought—’

She interrupted me again, her voice returning to its previous quiet tone. I found this more unnerving than if she’d screamed and shouted. Plus something here didn’t make sense. She wasn’t following the script I had sketched out in my head.

‘I’ve been at your flat all night, trying to stay calm, wondering if you’d had an accident. I even phoned the hospital. Then I figured it out. That you’d be with her.’

I blinked. ‘Hang on. Haven’t you been with the police?’

She frowned at me. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

I was speechless. She hadn’t been arrested. She hadn’t even been questioned. My mind raced.

Charlie had already moved on. ‘So are you going to deny it this time? That you fucked her?’

I think I must have looked very stupid at that moment, my mouth gaping open, unable to defend myself because I didn’t know if I’d had *** with Sasha, was still reeling from the news that Charlie hadn’t been arrested. What were the police playing at?

I managed to get a grip of myself. ‘Come on, let’s go somewhere else to talk.’ I reached out for her arm and she snatched it away like I was made of shit.

‘What? Don’t want to upset her? Is she up there, listening out of the window? Doesn’t want all the neighbours to know what she is? A serial home wrecker.’

‘Please, Charlie, come on. It’s nothing to do with Sasha.’

Reluctantly, she followed me down the road and around the corner, where there was a small park with a couple of benches and a few bare trees. The sky was almost white, like it was going to snow again. I sat on a bench that glistened with frost and gestured for Charlie to sit beside me.

‘No,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to do. If the police hadn’t talked to her, she wouldn’t know anything about all the things I suspected her of. Karen, the heroin, Kristi. All of it.

‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘What do you want to say to me?’

I couldn’t tell her. I simply couldn’t get the words out. All I could say was, ‘I’m sorry.’

She sneered. ‘Sorry? Sorry? You think that means anything to me? Jesus Christ, last week you made me sign up to see a fucking therapist – who I didn’t go to see, by the way, so stick that in your pipe – because of my “issues”. But I was justified, wasn’t I?’ Her eyes blazed. ‘Everything . . . I was fucking justified.’
Quietly, I said, ‘Do you really think so?’

‘What?’

‘I know everything, Charlie. I know what you’ve done.’

She stared at me. ‘What I’ve done?

What the hell are you talking about?’ ‘Everything. Karen, for one. I’ve go evidence.’

She looked around, as if trying to see if anyone could overhear, but there was no one around, just a couple of thrushes pecking fruitlessly at the hard ground.

‘I have no idea what you’re going on about.’

A wave of nausea washed over me, almost dragging me under. I had the urge to put my head between my knees. An elderly man came into the park and walked past us. We watched him go.

‘Have you been fucking Sasha the whole time we’ve been together?’ Charlie asked. Her eyes had taken on a manic sheen. ‘How did you have the energy? The time?’

I shook my head. ‘You should have gone to see that therapist, Charlie. It might have helped your defence. Shown that you were trying to seek help for your problems.’

She gawped at me, her face full of shock and disgust.

‘I went to your flat,’ I said. ‘What?’

‘I met Fraser. He told me all about your relationship, about what you put him through. I guess that was the start of it. A kind of practice run. At least, with him, no one got hurt. No one died.’

‘I can’t believe you went to my flat.’ She pointed at me. ‘How dare you?’

‘I’ve been to Karen’s flat too, spoken to her neighbour. He saw you, can identify you.’

This was a lie, but I wanted her to believe she had no way to escape.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she said.

I stood up. ‘You should hand yourself in, Charlie. They’ll help you. You’ll get psychiatric care.’

But she wasn’t listening. She stared into the air beside my head, her mouth open, face flushed. Her eyes were darting about; I could feel waves of nervous energy coming off her.

‘Fraser is a lying shit,’ she said. She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘I love you, Andrew. You told me you loved me. You promised me.’

‘I do. I did.’

‘You swore on your life. You swore on your sister’s life. And then you betrayed me.’ Without warning, she let out a terrible noise, a high-pitched wail that rose with distress and then dipped with fury.

‘Charlie . . .’ I began.

She pointed at me again, her eyes ablaze with hatred. ‘You’ll never be happy,’ she said. ‘You think you can just walk away from this. But I’m going to haunt you, Andrew. I’m going to fucking haunt you.’

Before I could respond, ask her what she meant, she was gone, running across the little park and out through the gate.

I could barely breathe. I needed to talk to the police but my phone was dead. I didn’t want to go back to Sasha’s, didn’t want to face her right now (had we had ***?), so I made my mind up. I would go home, plug my phone in, call DC Moseley.

My flat was only ten minutes’ walk from the park. I felt so sick, my head thumping with every step, that I could only walk slowly. After what felt like the longest walk of my life, I reached my building. As I felt in my pockets for my keys, I heard a car door shut and looked up.

It was DC Moseley. Great. That woul save me from making the call.

‘Mr Sumner,’ he said, sauntering over to me. ‘Will you come with me, please?’

‘What for?’

‘I need to ask you some questions.’

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 36

This time, there was more than one detective in the room. Beside DC Moseley sat a female officer with chestnut hair, wearing a suit that, unlike Moseley’s, looked cheap and worn, though she was a higher rank than him. This was Detective Inspector Hannah Jones. She sat back in her chair, head crooked to one side, regarding me like I was an interesting yet slightly repulsive painting in a museum. They had kept me waiting in the room for over an hour and a half before coming in to talk to me.

‘Why didn’t you talk to Charlie?’ I asked. ‘She came to find me. I’m worried that she’s going to—’

Jones cut me off. ‘We will talk to her, don’t worry. But we want to talk to you first.’

‘Ask me more questions, you mean?’ They exchanged a glance.

‘Tell us again about finding the bag of heroin in your flat,’ Moseley said.

I went over it for what felt like the hundredth time. This was how the police wore people down, tripped them up if they were lying. They asked you to repeat the same story again and again until you got so tired that you let your guard down, made mistakes. This thought was chased by another: Do they suspect me?

‘You don’t think I had anything to do with Karen’s death, do you?’

Jones motioned for Moseley to do the talking.

‘Our lab analysed the substance you brought in,’ he said. ‘It is indeed heroin. As you told us. We also had the plastic container fingerprinted. Can you guess what I’m going to say?’

‘That Charlie’s prints weren’t on it?’ ‘Correct. Actually, we don’t have Charlotte Summers’ prints on record. But we do have yours.’

I swallowed. A dim memory surfaced, of a cop in a different station pressing my fingers into a pad of ink.

‘And there was only one set of prints on the bag, Andrew,’ Moseley said. ‘Yours.’

‘I’m not denying that I touched it. You know I did. I handed it to you! Bu Charlie must have worn gloves.’

Moseley stared at me. ‘Here’s what I think happened. You and Karen Jameson had a disagreement over the money she owed you. Or perhaps it was a lovers’ quarrel. Karen was jealous of your new, younger girlfriend. You murdered her, injected her with a dose of nearly pure heroin while she slept beside you, then panicked and came up with this crazy story about your girlfriend doing it.’

‘Pretty nasty,’ Jones said. ‘Killing one girlfriend and trying to frame the other for it.’

‘This is mad,’ I said. ‘It was Charlie. can’t believe you haven’t talked to her. She’s still out there. Listen, if you don’t get her in custody, I have no idea what she’ll do. I’m worried she’s going to do something to Sasha.’

Moseley raised an eyebrow. ‘Sasha? Who’s that?’

I didn’t like his expression. ‘A friend.’ The two detectives exchanged a glance. ‘Quite the Casanova, aren’t you? It’s always the quiet ones.’

I could sense Jones sizing me up, a slight curl to her lip. It was dawning on me that maybe I should ask for a solicitor. It would have to be the duty solicitor as I didn’t have enough money to hire my own. But would that seem like an admission of guilt. This whole thing seemed so ludicrous that I couldn’t believe the detectives weren’t going to break into laughter at any moment, point at me and say, ‘Gotcha!’

‘If I was guilty, why the hell would I come here and bring you the heroin? As far as I know you weren’t even treating Karen’s death as suspicious until yesterday.’

Moseley leaned back and the look he gave me chilled my blood. ‘This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, is it, Andrew?’

My words could barely squeeze past the lump in my throat. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Come on. Don’t act the innocent.’ He actually said those words. ‘We had a look at your record.’

The door opened and another plain- clothed policeman stuck his head in, gesturing to Moseley.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, pausing the interview, and both he and Jones left the room, leaving me alone in a horrified daze.

I knew exactly what Moseley was talking about.

It was a memory that was so painful, that so conflicted with my current image of myself, that I kept it locked away in a consciousness-proof box. Sometimes, the memories seeped into my dreams and I would wake up feeling ashamed and jittery. But if they tried to escape during waking hours, I would push them straight back into the box.

‘That was a long time ago,’ I said to the empty room, my voice weak.

But sitting there in the interview room, punch drunk, weakened and exhausted, I no longer had the strength to hold the box shut. The lid flew open and, like wasps escaping from a bottle, all the memories came flooding out.

After our parents died, when I was sixteen and Tilly fourteen, I went to live with Uncle Pete (my dad’s brother), Aunt Sandra, and their kids in Hastings, a few miles along the coast from our family home. Their daughter, Michelle, was my age, and my other cousin, Dominic, was thirteen. It was just me because Tilly was in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, which had a specialist department for dealing with people like her: accident victims who had broken their spines. We visited her every weekend, driving up to Aylesbury, the whole journey like a trip on a rollercoaster. Every lurch of the car sent bubbles of panic through my blood. I held my breath every time we passed a truck. It was terrifying and I had to be dragged into the car every time like a dog being dragged into the vet’s. Uncle Pete, a no- nonsense, balding bank manager with the emotional intelligence of a goldfish, was a firm believer in getting back in the saddle, in embracing your fears. After a while though – and, I’m sure, some stern words from Sandra – Pete relented and let us go by train. I could cope with his passive aggressive comments about the extortionate costs and the stale buffet sandwiches far better than I could handle being driven on motorways.

Because Hastings and Eastbourne are only thirty minutes apart, I was originally going to return to my old school to study for my A-levels. But on my first day back I realised I couldn’t handle the pitying looks, the soft voices, the sympathy. At lunch time, I sat on my own, chewing food I couldn’t taste, an invisible force field around my table. A couple of upper sixth form girls came over to talk to me, and if I’d been a different kind of person I could have milked it, let them look after me. They could have passed me around, the sad orphan virgin, and made me merely a sad orphan.

Instead, I went home that night and announced to Pete and Sandra that there was no way I could ever go back. A week later I was enrolled at Hastings College where no one knew my history. I was just another gangly teenager. I didn’t tell any of my new friends about my parents or my sister. When they asked if I wanted to meet up at the weekend, I made up an excuse about a part-time job. I invented a back story for myself, one in which I’d been to private school in Los Angeles, where my dad worked in the movie industry and my mum was a soap opera actress, but they’d sent me over to England to learn about the ‘old country’. No one ever asked me why I had a Sussex accent; it’s easy to live a lie when everyone around you is a self-absorbed teenager. And I discovered that making up stories made me feel better about my real life. I became addicted to lying. I even began to believe the fiction myself – it was easier to inhabit this invented world than live in the real one and deal with the terrible, all-encompassing grief that made my bones ache, the urge to cry as constant as the need to breathe. It was comforting to think that my parents were living the good life in Hollywood.

The only people who knew my real past were my new family, though I hated thinking of them like that. Everything about them, compared to my former life, irritated me. Uncle Pete and his boring stories; Aunt Sandra and her cooking which was nothing like my mum’s (she used the wrong kind of meat in shepherd’s pie, for a start); Michelle, who was much cooler than me, with an older boyfriend who took her out every night, driving up and down the seafront with the other boy racers. Then there was Dominic. Thinking about Dominic makes me prickle with shame. I haven’t seen him in over ten years. I’m sure if he saw me in the street he would hide. One day, when Pete or Sandra die, we will have to attend their funeral together. The prospect of that day stays firmly locked in my box.

Dominic was a typical thirteen-year- old boy in most ways. Spotty, awkward, addicted to his PlayStation. He was also somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Brilliant at maths and chess, but fragile and cripplingly shy, barely able to cope with the social side of school. I am not exactly sure whether he was ever given a special educational needs statement, even if such things existed in those days. I was too wrapped up in my own problems, not privy to my aunt and uncle’s conversations. All I knew was that Dominic made me feel awkward and uncomfortable. He would ask me questions that I didn’t want to answer, questions about the accident, about what it sounded like when we hit the lorry, whether I knew the velocity of the car when it collided with the truck, whether I remembered our Nissan rolling over and how loudly Tilly had screamed. Thinking back, I guess he was trying to make mathematical sense of it, find a neat way in which he could understand it. Being asked these questions though, mere months after it happened, repeatedly, made me want to punch him. I avoided him as much as I could. I didn’t want to hit anyone. I didn’t like or understand these feelings of rage and the urge to commit violence. I had never been like this.

I had been assigned a bereavement counsellor after the accident, a man with nostrils like the entrance of a great forest, who wanted me to talk to him about my feelings. I tried, at first. I didn’t tell him about the sadness and fear and anger that would swoop down out of nowhere, when I was waiting to cross the road, or that were provoked by a misplaced word, like Dominic’s questions. I pretended I was fine, tried to convince him. I lied to him, told him things I thought he’d like to hear, based on a TV documentary I’d watched.

The only person I could be honest with during this whole period was Tilly, on the rare occasions I was left alone with her, flat on her back in the hospital, the rest of the family gone to the cafeteria, nurses coming by every so often to turn Tilly to prevent bed sores. Tilly and I would talk about Mum and Dad, but also the future: Tilly was going to get better and I would look after her. She was going to be a paralympian athlete. She would hold my hand and cry and I would whisper that I was sorry, that it should have been me.

Between my made-up life at college, the lies I told my counsellor and pretending to be fine in my new home, my visits with Tilly were what I clung to, little moments of reality that allowed me to hold on to my true self.
Christmas was coming and we had arranged to visit Tilly on Christmas Eve then stay overnight in Aylesbury so we could be with her on the day itself. I was desperately looking forward to it, had starting to hype up this event in my head as a turning point, a day on which I would begin to claw back some happiness.
Then Uncle Pete announced that because the trains on Christmas Eve were going to be ‘a nightmare’, we would have to drive.

I begged him to let us take the train. Since we’d stopped travelling to the hospital by car, the auto journeys had taken on a near-mythical horror in my imagination. I couldn’t picture myself in a car on a motorway without bloody, fiery disaster striking – and Dominic would be there recording the velocity and decibel levels as the car burst into flames around us. I saw his charred skeleton in my daydreams, reciting numbers and poking at a calculator with a blackened, smoking finger.

‘The trains will be a nightmare,’ Pete repeated, and Sandra agreed. They understood my fear, but I was worrying about nothing.

‘Your uncle will drive carefully, sixty in the slow lane all the way. Won’t you, Pete?’ Sandra tried to reassure me, but I didn’t trust my uncle. He didn’t say yes at all convincingly.

I managed to enlist Dominic, who didn’t want to go by car either, mainly because he hated being squashed in the back between Michelle and me. He complained and moaned about it, and asked if he could stay at home on his own, but that just made Uncle Pete laugh and start talking about Macaulay Culkin. Dominic went into a major sulk, locking himself in his room, while I stoked his resentment by reminding him constantly how awful the journey was going to be.

As December 24th approached – and my excitement about Christmas curdled into dread – I began to panic. How could I stop us going? I wanted to see Tilly, but I couldn’t get into the car. I had become like one of those people who is terrified of flying, who would need to be given a general anaesthetic before getting on a plane. I needed to do something.

We had the internet at Pete and Sandra’s, unlike most people in England back then. When everyone was out one afternoon I dialled up and searched for ways to disable a car engine. My plan was to sneak out the night before Christmas Eve, do something to the car that would mean we’d have to get the train.

I found the answer pretty quickly – or as quickly as anything could be found online in those days. Sugar in the petrol tank. Simple. I crept downstairs after everyone had gone to bed, grabbed a bag of granulated sugar from the cupboard, along with a plastic funnel, and went into the garage. I poured a pound of sugar into the tank then went to bed, confident that we would be travelling by train the following day.

But that’s not what happened.

The next day, when I got up, I asked Sandra where Pete was.

‘He’s gone to the petrol station to fill up before the journey,’ she replied.

I walked out to look in the garage. The car was indeed gone. My plan hadn’t worked. I started to tremble. But then the phone rang inside the house. It was the police. Uncle Pete had been in an accident.

What I hadn’t realised, hadn’t discovered through my internet research, is that a car with sugar in the tank will start up and travel a little way before it breaks down. Pete had been halfway across the busiest crossroads in town, the roads full of last-minute Christmas shoppers, when his car had suddenly broken down. The car behind went into his rear, another car ploughed into that; it caused a four-vehicle pile-up. Uncle Pete was all right apart from minor whiplash and the fact that his precious motor was written off. The woman in the car behind was less lucky; she banged her face on the steering wheel, suffered concussion, broke her cheekbone.

When the police and insurance companies got involved, they quickly discovered the sugar in the tank. When the police turned up on our doorstep and told us what had happened, questioned everybody, I had known there was only one thing I could do.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 37

‘You told them you saw your autistic cousin do it,’ Moseley said, tutting. He and Jones had been gone for ten minutes before returning, their expressions even graver than before. ‘Pinned it on Dominic. Seems like that’s your way of operating, isn’t it? Point the finger of blame.’

‘But I owned up in the end,’ I protested.

‘And why was that?’

I stared at the surface of the desk. ‘Pete looked at the history on my computer.’ I didn’t know you could delete it, not back then.

‘So you didn’t actually own up. You were found out. How long was this after the incident?’

I had a feeling he knew the answer. ‘About a week.’

‘During which time your poor cousin had been through hell, I .’

‘He denied it, said it was me. But they didn’t know which one of us to believe. Until they found the evidence.’
They both shook their heads slowly, looked at me like I was a kitten killer, the lowest piece of scum who’d ever sat in front of them. It was exactly how everyone had looked at me back then, when I’d been found out.

‘I was a different person back then,’ I said, thumping the table. ‘I was a kid, one who’d just lost his parents. I was fucked up, confused. Terrified of going in that car.’

‘I understand that, Andrew,’ Moseley said. He was a few years younger than me but he talked to me like I was the guilty sixteen-year-old liar I’d been that Christmas. ‘But in our job, you know what we see more than anything? Patterns of behaviour. People who do the same things, make the same mistakes, over and over again. This is your nature. You fuck up, and you blame someone else. You make accusations. You know what else I think, why you came to us in the first place? You want to get rid of this girlfriend of yours, Charlotte, but you’re too much of a coward to go about it the manly way. So instead of telling her you don’t want to be with her anymore, you go extreme and decide to get her arrested.’

‘No . . .’

‘You saw a way of killing two birds with one stone.’ He smiled at his own joke.

‘I want a solicitor,’ I said.

‘Oh really? Very well. Duty solicitor OK, or have you got your own?’

‘Duty,’ I said quietly.

‘All right. We’ll arrange something.’

He knocked on the door of the interview room and a uniformed constable came in.
‘Put Mr Sumner here in a holding cell,’ Moseley said. ‘We’re postponing our little chat.’

‘Am I allowed a phone call?’ I said.

He rolled his eyes. ‘We’ll arrange that too.’

‘Listen,’ I said, before they escorted me from the room. ‘Have you talked to Harold, the old man in the ground floor flat? He can verify what I’m saying. He’ll tell you how shocked I was when I heard that Karen was dead. You need to go round there.’

‘We have,’ Moseley said, his voice flat.

‘And? What did he say?’

‘He didn’t say anything,’ said Jones from behind me. I turned around and thought the look she was giving me might turn me to stone. ‘He’s dead.’

I stared at her. ‘Harold?’

‘Trying to pretend you didn’t know?’

I swung round to face Moseley. ‘It must have been Charlie. She did it to stop him talking. Must have thought he’d seen her. When did you find him? How long has he been dead? Oh my God.’

That poor old man. The dark spirit that he had warned me about, that had been following me around – well, now it had visited him. Yet again, it was my fault.

‘We thought you might be able to tell us that,’ Moseley said.

I sank back into my seat. I was too shocked to respond. When had Charlie done it? Thinking that Harold had spotted her and could ID her, she must have gone straight round there this morning after I’d spoken to her, while I was being kept waiting here. Now I knew why the two detectives had left the room halfway through my interview. If I’d had any last lingering doubts about Charlie before, I didn’t now. And, I realised with a lurch, it was my fault. I had lied to her about Harold definitely seeing her. His death was down to me.
‘If he died this morning, while I was here,’ I said, raising my face, wondering how pale I looked, ‘then how can I know what happened to him?’

I could tell that Harold’s death had complicated things for Moseley. Probably, they were waiting for the coroner to tell them the time of death. I could see in the DC’s head that he was trying to work it out, figure out how I fitted in to everything. And they weren’t going to let me go till either the time they were allowed to hold me for ran out or they solved the puzzle. The most maddening thing was that I knew the solution, had told them – and they wouldn’t believe me.

‘Please, tell me,’ I said. ‘What happened to him?’

The two detectives exchanged a look and, this time, Jones answered.

‘We don’t know the exact cause of death yet, Mr Sumner. But it looks like he had a fall, hit his head on the fireplace. Whether he fell or was pushed, we don’t know yet.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Unfortunately the scene, the body, had been disturbed somewhat by his dog.’

Moseley studied my face, trying to work out what was going on beneath the surface of my reaction to this horrific piece of news. Then he lifted his chin in the direction of the uniformed PC, and I was escorted from the room, my legs so shaky I could hardly walk.

The cell was small and stank of nervous sweat. I sat on a bench that appeared to have been designed to hurt your buttocks as quickly as possible, and stared at the wall, trying to wrestle my thoughts into some kind of order.

I had mostly managed to get the memories of what had happened with Pete, Sandra and Dominic back into the box, but now I forced myself to remember the rest of it, so I could play it through, exorcise it once again. Move on to the current nightmare I was trapped in.

After the truth had come out, Dominic didn’t speak to me anymore and Uncle Pete communicated with me only when he had to. He had wanted me to be charged – vandalism, reckless endangerment, I forget the rest – but Sandra had pleaded with him and he’d backed down. Because of the injuries to the woman in the second car, and the involvement of the insurance companies, it hadn’t been simple. There had been compensation claims, an out-of- court settlement that, eventually, came out of the death benefit I received. There were no criminal charges brought in the end. But the story of what had happened – in its black and white version, stripped to the facts – obviously remained on my record.

The worst thing had been how I had destroyed my relationship with my surviving family. I felt a terrible guilt. In a way, what I’d done, the blast of fear and regret that followed, helped me. It was the short sharp shock that people say should be meted out to young offenders, and it worked for me. It brought me out of the cocoon of fantasy and lies I’d been living in, made me face up to what had happened. I was finally able to grieve properly for my parents. I opened up to my counsellor at last, and I did everything I could to act like a model nephew for the next two years.

By the time I left Hastings and headed to university almost two years later, I was different. I had grown up. This doesn’t mean I didn’t have my demons. I had more than my fair share. I still felt, in my heart, out of step with the world. I found it easier to seek solitude than fall into crowds. And I guess, without trying to psychoanalyse myself, it led to the loneliness that made me so vulnerable and open – desperate, even – when Charlie came along and promised to make me whole.

None of my history with the law had crossed my mind when I’d reported Charlie. Perhaps if it had, I would have thought twice about going to the police, even though the circumstances were so different.

My thoughts returned to the present. Where was Charlie now? What was she doing? I guessed she would run, go far away. If she had killed Harold while I was at the police station, did she really think she could get away with it, that the police would blame me? Although she wouldn’t have known I was here, that I had the best alibi it’s possible to get. Was she going to go to my flat and leave something of Harold’s there, some fake souvenir? And how had she killed him? Frightened to death. Yet again, I thought of the dark spirit and thanked God I wasn’t superstitious, then laughed humourlessly at the irony of this.

I banged on the cell door. After a while, a policeman in a uniform with a white stain like baby sick on one shoulder, came to the door.

‘After room service?’ he said.

‘I need to talk to DC Moseley or D Jones.’

‘You’ll have to wait,’ he said. ‘Try to enjoy the facilities.’

‘But Charlie will be getting away. She’s probably planting something in my flat right now, trying to frame me.’

He chuckled. ‘I’ll pass that on.’

‘What about my phone call? I want to call my sister. And my solicitor? You can’t keep me here indefinitely.’

‘Patience is a virtue,’ he said, shutting the door in my face.

Fifteen minutes later, it opened again. I rose from the bench, expecting to hear that I could make my call or talk to my solicitor. But it was the policeman with the baby sick stain again, and he was escorting someone else into the cell.

It was a tall middle-aged man, balding but fit-looking. I must have gawped at him because he gave me a dirty look before going to sit on the bench and putting his face in his hands. A moment later, he sprang up and stared pacing around, muttering to himself.

‘What are you staring at?’ he snapped.

His voice was middle-class, private educated. He was wearing an expensive watch and the kind of suit I could never afford.

I had recognised him the moment he’d entered the room. Had seen his picture on his own website. It was Lance.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 38

I was sharing my tiny cell with the man who had terrified and attacked my best friend. I had never met him before, despite the work I’d done for Wowcom, so he had no idea who I was. The police must have gone to talk to him after Sasha’s call this morning, had brought him in for questioning.

I could have kept my mouth shut. But I was so agitated that I couldn’t help myself.

‘I know who you are,’ I said, as Lance continued to pace the cell.

He stopped dead.

‘You’re Lance Hendrix. From Wowcom.’

He eyed me warily. I expect he thought I had seen his profile in Wired or a Sunday newspaper, that I was going to hit him with a business idea, pitch for an investment. Or, more likely, he was worried that when I got out of this cell I would leak news of his arrest. I am sure he had a lawyer to match his expensive watch and suit, someone who would be doing everything they could to not only get their client off but keep his face out of the papers.

‘You deserve everything you get,’ I said.

I wished in that moment that I could have taken a picture of his face, of his jaw literally dropping, and send it to Sasha.

‘What the bloody hell are you talking about?’ he said when he’d recovered.

I stepped closer to him. ‘I’m talking about what you did to Sasha.’

He stepped back. ‘You know that little bitch?’

‘She’s my best friend. And she’s told me everything – your sordid affair, what you did to her in that hotel room, the threatening texts, the way you set your wife on her. All of it.’

He sneered at me, though his face had turned white. He looked me up and down. ‘What are you doing in here? Did she tell a pack of lies about you too?’ ‘What? No. But I know—’

He jabbed a finger at me. ‘I have no reason to explain myself to you, whoever you are. But this girl is a liar. I never had an affair with her. In fact, for your information, I have never, ever been unfaithful to my wife. I certainly never attacked the silly girl.’ He twisted and turned as he spoke, a ball of kinetic energy. ‘I was barely aware of her existence until the police turned up at my office this morning.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘How can you say that? She works for you.’

‘Hundreds of people work for me. Do you think I know them all?’

I ignored him. ‘And I know you had an affair. She told me all about it. She told me all about your . . . proclivities.’

‘My what?’

‘She told me what you like to do in bed.’

He stared at me, then burst out laughing. ‘Did she indeed?’ He seemed genuinely amused. ‘Tell me, does your friend have mental health issues? We normally screen for that sort of thing, but a few slip through the net. Psychometric tests aren’t foolproof, unfortunately.’

Now it was my turn to be affronted. ‘No, she hasn’t. Is that going to be your defence in court?’

He sat down on the bench, suddenly calm and collected. ‘It will never get to court. Sarah or Sasha or whatever her name is – she’s a liar. A fantasist. She’s invented the whole thing.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘You know what? I don’t care.’

Before I could say any more, or make sense of this, the door opened and the officer with the baby sick stain beckoned me out.

‘You can make your phone call now.’

He pointed to a pay phone on the wall opposite. I hadn’t used a pay phone in years, was barely aware they still existed. I picked the receiver up and realised I was going to have to pay for the call myself. I fished in my pockets and found two 20p pieces. I pushed one into the slot and dialled Tilly’s mobile number, one of the few phone numbers I knew by heart.

She picked up after four rings, but all I could hear was a great rushing howl. It was like she was standing at the centre of a hurricane, or there was extreme interference on the line.

‘Hello?’ I said. Then, raising my voice when there was no response, said it again. The howling continued, a blast of static that looped and roared. I pulled the handset away from my ear. It was like I was trying to call someone in Hell.

‘Tilly, are you there?’

‘Hello? Andrew?’ Her voice was faint but it was unmistakeably my sister. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Yes. Sorry, it’s really windy here.’ She laughed. ‘It’s like the start of the Wizard of Oz.’ Her voice was a little clearer now, though I had to press the receiver hard against my ear. Beyond her voice and the roar of the wind, I could hear the faint background sound of seagulls, their cries cutting through the static.

‘Where are you?’ I asked, gripping the phone with frustration.

‘Beachy Head.’

‘What the hell are you doing up there?’

Beachy Head is a famous chalk cliff on the outskirts of Eastbourne and is a notorious suicide spot. It’s well known as the most popular place in England to kill yourself. I remembered reading that around twenty people a year throw themselves off the cliff, its fame no doubt adding to its popularity among the suicidal. The Samaritans had a huge billboard on the clifftop, encouraging people to call the charity helpline to be talked around. Despite its bloody reputation, it was a beautiful place, offering breathtaking views of the churning English Channel below, the red and white stripes of the lighthouse, the continent just beyond the horizon.

Her reply was swept away on the wind and as I said, ‘What?’ the phone beeped and the display flashed Insert another coin. Jesus. I stuck my second and final twenty pence piece into the slot.

‘Sorry, Andrew,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should call you back when I’m inside. I think we’re going in the pub in a minute.’

She sounded happy and I wondered if she was on a date. Or maybe Rachel had turned up. But I needed to tell her about my own predicament – it was important that someone knew where I was – so I said, ‘Listen I need to tell you something. . .’

She wasn’t really listening. I heard her say, ‘It’s Andrew,’ to whoever she was with.

‘Tilly . . .’ I said, impatient.

‘What’s the matter? You sound really worried. Don’t tell me you think I’m going to wheel myself off the cliff?’

‘No, Tilly . . .’

‘That thing at the start of the year, it wasn’t that serious. I’m absolutely fine now, OK? How many times do I have to tell you. I. Am. Fine.’

I heard her say something to whoever she was with. Then she addressed me: ‘I think I should call you back. Do you want to talk to her first?’

Little shivering tendrils of dread reached out for me. ‘Tilly,’ I said. ‘Who are you with?’

‘Charlie.’

It was as if the gales blowing across the clifftop came down the wires and through the phone, knocking me backwards, a blast of ice that penetrated my entire body. The police officer who’d escorted me to the phone furrowed his brow as I staggered, grabbing hold of the payphone on the wall and almost collapsed.

I could hear Charlie’s voice from just a few hours ago. You swore on your life. You swore on your sister’s life.
I frantically tried to work it out. Could Charlie have got round to Harold’s in north London then down to Eastbourne in the time I’d been here? Yes, just about, with the hours I’d been kept waiting in the interview room and then in the holding cell.

‘Yeah, she came to see me,’ Tilly said in her chirpiest voice. ‘She wanted to take me out as a treat. Hold on, she wants to talk to you.’

Before I could shout out a warning to Tilly, Charlie came on the line.

‘Hello Andrew.’

Her voice was calm and measured. As she spoke, the wind seemed to drop, the roaring noise dropping to a low, undulating hiss.

‘Charlie. Whatever you’re planning to do, please, don’t do it. Tilly has never done anything to you.’
She laughed. It was the coldest sound I’d ever heard.

‘We’re having a lovely time,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to believe that so many people die every year in such a beautiful place.’

‘Charlie!’

There was a pause of a few seconds and I figured that Charlie was taking a few steps away from Tilly so she wouldn’t be overheard.

‘Tilly doesn’t know what you did to me,’ she said.

‘I know,’ I blurted. ‘She’s innocent. Charlie, I’ll do anything, say anything. Just please, please don’t—’

The police officer was watching me even more closely now.

‘I can’t hear you,’ Charlie said. ‘Too much interference on the line. You know, this is probably the last time we’ll ever talk.’ She sighed, sadness entering her voice. ‘I loved you, Andrew.’

‘Charlie, I loved you too.’ My voice was shaking. ‘Maybe we can—’

‘Shut up,’ she hissed. ‘You betrayed me. Do you really think I could forgive you?’

‘Charlie—’

The phone beeped. Insert another coin. I didn’t have any more coins.

‘I’m going to go now, Andrew. I’ll hand you back to Tilly.’

‘Please—’

The phone beeped urgently.

‘Say goodbye to your sister,’ Charlie said, and the line went dead.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 39

I stared at the dead receiver in my hand. I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I scrambled in my pockets for another coin but had nothing. I wanted to scream.

‘Everything all right?’ said the police officer, coming over.

‘No. Please, I need you to call Eastbourne police, get someone to Beachy Head.’ I was almost sobbing. ‘She – Charlie – is going to kill my sister. She’s going to push her over the cliff, make it look like an accident. Oh God, it’s probably too late already.’

He put his hand on my arm.

‘Calm down,’ he said. I guess he was used to dealing with crazy people, drunks, nutters. He was looking at me like I was one of them.

‘I can’t fucking calm down,’ I said. ‘You have to let me go. And call Eastbourne police. You have to!’

‘Let’s get you back to your cell . . .’ ‘No!’

I shoved him in the chest, and in a flash I was surrounded by uniformed police. They came out of nowhere, and one of them had my face against the wall, yanking my arms back, sending spasms of pain into my shoulders. He cuffed me, and I was dragged back to the cell and shoved inside. The door slammed shut behind me.

‘She’s going to kill her!’ I shouted at the door. I kicked it and screamed curses at the unrelenting metal, shouting till my throat was shredded and hoarse. Tilly, oh Tilly. I could picture the stunned look on her face as Charlie shoved her chair, the sea and the rocks rushing up to meet her. I closed my eyes, sank to my knees, sobbing. It was too late. She would already be dead.

I had invited the dark spirit into my life. Its name was Charlie. It had stolen from Harriet, disfigured Kristi, ruined Victor, murdered Karen and Harold. It had wreaked havoc in my life, tried to cut me off from everyone. What had happened to Sasha and Rachel – was that Charlie too? Were Lance and Henry merely convenient patsies? Everyone I cared about, all the people I liked and loved. The dark spirit had poisoned their lives too, destroying everything. And now, the final straw, the coup de grace. It – she – had taken my sister.

Eventually, I stopped crying and looked up to see Lance gazing at me with a mixture of contempt and amusement.

‘You’re as mental as your friend,’ he said.

A little while after that, Lance was taken from the cell, for questioning I assumed. I sat on the hard bench, numb and drained. I had given up trying to get the police to open the door or talk to me. All I could do now was wait.

If Tilly was dead, the only person I had left in the world now was Sasha. I was terrified that Charlie would target her next. She hated Sasha anyway. A terrible thought struck me: what if she had already done something to Sasha before heading to Eastbourne? That would be logical. She knew Sasha was at home. What would she do? Make it look like another death by misadventure? An apparent suicide?

The door opened and DC Mosele entered the room.

I jumped to my feet.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘Urgently. I tried to tell the—’

Moseley put up a hand to silence me then gestured to the uniformed officer who had cuffed me. Moseley took the key and unlocked the cuffs.

‘You’re free to go,’ he said.

I stared at him. ‘What? Why?’

He rubbed his neck. He looked tired but alert, like he was running on adrenaline. ‘Some new evidence has come to light.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not able to tell you right now.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake . . .’

The officer holding the cuffs gave me a meaningful look and I shut up.

‘Go home,’ Moseley said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

‘What about my sister?’ I said. ‘Did you speak to the police in Eastbourne? Has anyone?’

He sighed wearily. ‘Just go home, Mr Sumner. Have a shower.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘You reek.’

‘You have to call them. I’m reporting a crime. You can’t ignore that.’

‘All right. Jesus.’ He had reached the end of his tether with me. ‘I’ll call them now. OK?’

‘Thank you.’

A few seconds passed. ‘What are you still hanging around for?’

‘I’m waiting for you to call Eastbourne.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he muttered. ‘Go home. I’ll ring you shortly. OK?’

I walked home in the rain. It was that fine, drizzling rain that soaks you from head to foot within seconds. My wallet must have been at Sasha’s, probably on her bedroom floor, so I couldn’t get any money out to pay for a cab or get a bus. I needed to get home as quickly as I could so I could plug my phone in and try to call Tilly and Sasha. Plus I would phone Eastbourne station myself, make sure someone was checking out Beachy Head. I alternated running and walking, jogging as far as I could each time until my lungs burned and my legs were on the verge of collapse.

It took me just over an hour to get back, by which point I was drenched, water trickling down my face and stinging my eyes. I let myself in and went up the stairs, opening the door and going into the warmth. I dropped my coat on the floor, kicked off my shoes and stripped off my wet top and socks, headed into the bathroom to grab a towel.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair stuck up from my scalp, my skin looked like the surface of the moon, my eyes were sore and pink. But I didn’t have time to stand around studying the wreck I’d become. I needed to call Tilly, the police and Sasha, in that order.

My phone charger was plugged in next to the bed, so I went into the bedroom, sat down in my damp jeans and plugged the phone in, holding it and urging it to switch on, jiggling my knees up and down and muttering ‘Come on, come on.’

After what felt like an eternity in purgatory, the Apple logo appeared on the screen and a few dots appeared to let me know I had a signal. I immediately called Tilly. It went straight to voicemail. While I was leaving her a message, telling her that I prayed she was OK and to please call me the second she could, the phone vibrated a few times. When I looked at the screen, I saw I had two voicemails.

The first was from Tilly. It had come in just after I’d spoken to her in the police station.

I listened to it. The wind was howling behind her but her voice was clear.

‘Hey, bruv. I tried to talk to you but you were gone. Are you all right? You sounded really stressed out. Call me back. Charlie’s just going to take me up to the cliff edge so I can take some photos of the lighthouse.’

My heart jumped and skipped and I chewed my knuckles, the phone still held to my ear. While I was frozen in that pose the second voicemail message began to play. It was a gruff male voice, thick London accent.

‘This is a message for a Mr Andrew Sumner. This is the Lost Property office at London Bridge. Your bag has turned up. Yeah, someone at the bus depot left it in a cupboard in their office and it’s just made its way to us. The young lady who reported it left us this number to call if it turned up.’ He laughed. ‘I recognised it as soon as it came in because she used to ring us every day. We’re open—’

I had stopped listening.

My bag of mementoes. Charlie really had left it on a bus. She really had reported it to London Transport and chased it daily. I stared at the phone screen, the guy from the lost property office still chattering away, as if the truth might leap out from it. I had been certain Charlie was lying about the bag.

If she hadn’t been lying about that, did that mean . . . ?

Something went bang in the living room.

Somebody was in the flat.

It couldn’t be Charlie. There was no way she could have got back from Beachy Head in time. But she was the only other person with a key. Then I realised what it must be: another bird, flying into the front window. My stomach settled and I stood up and walked into the living room to check.

Sasha was sitting on the sofa. Her bag lay by her feet, half its contents spilled out like guts on the carpet. She had a cushion on her lap. She didn’t get up, or move, but rolled her eyes towards me. She must have been in the flat when I got home, but I hadn’t looked in the living room.

‘Sasha. What are you doing here?’

She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. I went over and stood in front of her, my mind racing all over the place, hearing voices. Lance saying that Sasha was a fantasist, that she had invented everything. The man from the lost property office telling me that Charlie hadn’t been lying.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sasha said. Her voice was very quiet, a forced whisper.

‘What for?’ I didn’t want to get too close. All of a sudden, I was afraid of her.

She opened her mouth to speak but again, nothing came out. What was wrong with her?

I crouched on the carpet before her, keeping my distance. ‘Sasha, I saw Lance at the police station.’

She stared at me.

‘He said that you made the whole thing up, that you were a fantasist.’

She shook her head and said a single word. ‘Liar.’ Her face creased with pain and it hit me: why had I believed him, a stranger, over the woman I had known and trusted longer than any other? Sasha hadn’t been lying. Lance was the fantasist. ‘I believe you,’ I said, and her lips twitched; the faintest flicker of a smile.

Then she coughed and drops of spittle flew from her mouth, flashing red in the light that streamed in from the window.

I scooted closer, put my hands on her upper arms. She was freezing, her body like marble.

‘Sasha, what’s wrong? What’s going on?’

She looked into my eyes and coughed again, blood droplets splattering my face.

My voice went up an octave as I spoke, panic mounting. ‘Sasha, what’s happened? What’s wrong with you?’

She made a guttural sound, trying to speak, but could only manage a single syllable. ‘She . . .’

‘What? She what? Do you mean Charlie?’

Sasha stared into my eyes and pulled the cushion away from her lap with great effort, as if it was heavier than a rock.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘Oh Jesus. Oh fuck. Sasha . . .’

There was a hole in her stomach. A gaping wound, dark blood trickling from it, down between her legs onto the upholstery. A wild, ridiculous thought entered my head, that not even Maria would be able to get those stains out, and at that moment Sasha toppled sideways, rasping, a line of blood running from her mouth, and I caught hold of her. She flopped. A dead weight.

‘Don’t touch her.’

The voice came from behind me. After gently laying Sasha on her side and closing her eyes, I turned and stared at the woman who had just murdered my best friend.

 

[kenny0112]

BECAUSE SHE LOVES ME
by MARK EDWARDS

Genre: Mystery Thriller
​

Spoiler: Chapter 40

‘Stand up. Get away from her. But keep your hands up, like this. I want to be able to see them.’ She smiled as she said this. The butcher’s knife in her hand glinted.

I did as she asked, catching sight of myself in the mirror above the fireplace. Sasha’s blood ran in streaks across my naked torso.

Rachel looked at me affectionately, the way you might look like at a child who’d spilled his dinner over himself. ‘We’re going to have to get you cleaned up. Come on, strip the rest of it off. Let’s get you in the shower.’

‘Rachel . . .’

She was wearing her biker gear – the leather boots and trousers – and there was a holdall by her feet. There was a dark patch on the front of her black T-shirt. The muscles in her arms appeared to ripple, reminding me that I had once envied her athletic build, developed from all those months of lifting my sister.

But though she looked the same, she held herself differently. She seemed more open, confident. Her hand didn’t move to her mouth as she spoke. She seemed fully relaxed. Here she was, for the first time since I’d met her, showing her true self. Her real, terrifying self.

‘Quiet,’ she said. ‘Take your clothes off. Stop fucking around.’

Trying hard not to look at Sasha’s body, I unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them down, kicking them off. I felt curiously calm. Where was my phone? Still charging in the bedroom. I glanced around for a weapon but there was nothing within reach. Certainly nothing that could take on the huge knife Sasha held. Plus the leather outfit acted like a suit of armour. Anything I threw would bounce off her.

‘Underpants too,’ she said. ‘Come on, Rachel.’

‘Off.’

I obeyed, and stood before her, naked and completely vulnerable. I guessed that was her intention. She looked me up and down, slowly, like I was a statue in a Roman museum.

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘But dirty. You’ve got that bitch’s blood on you.’ She looked at Sasha, tutted and shook her head. ‘You shared a bed with her last night, didn’t you? What was she like?’

I had my hands cupped over my shrunken genitals. The flat was warm but I was shaking. ‘Please Rachel . . .’ I still couldn’t remember if I’d had *** with Sasha. I didn’t think so, was sure I would know if I had.

‘Save it. It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s only the future that matters now.’ She took a step towards me. She was smiling.

‘Come on, let’s get you into the shower.’

She escorted me into the bathroom at knifepoint. Again, I looked around for a weapon. There were some razors in the cabinet. A small cup that held the toothbrushes. That was it. Holding the knife pointed towards me, she turned on the shower, which hung on the wall above the bathtub, with the other hand. When the water was hot and steam began to rise into the air, she ordered me to step into the bath. I stood beneath the scalding water and she handed me a bar of soap, told me to scrub. Sasha’s blood ran down my body in thin, pink rivulets.

‘Wash it all,’ Rachel said. ‘I want you clean. That’s it, wash off all the whore’s blood. I want all traces of her scrubbed from your skin.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, as I did what she commanded.

She looked at me like I was stupid.

She shrugged.

‘Because I love you, Andrew.’

I looked around the bathroom. Rachel barred the door and there was no other way out, just a tiny window that had been painted shut years before. There weren’t any heavy objects in the room that I could smash it with. Even if I did smash the window, all I would be able to do was shout for help. By the time anyone heard me, Rachel would have stabbed me to death. There was already one body in the flat. If she was caught, she would do life for murder. It wouldn’t matter if there were two of us or one.

‘You killed them, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘Karen and Harold? And it was you who threw the acid at Kristi?’

‘The cleaner? No, that was nothing to do with me. A happy coincidence.’

‘But the others?’

Her face twisted into a glassy-eyed smile again. ‘Oh yes. You can thank me later.’

My only hope was that Rachel believed she loved me. The people she’d hurt so far had been the people around me. There was one little bright spot in this fucked-up, terrifying situation. Tilly must be OK. When Charlie said ‘Sa goodbye to your sister,’ that was exactly what she meant. It wasn’t supposed to be a permanent goodbye.

I had been so wrong about Charlie. Bu I didn’t have time to think about that, because Rachel reached up and turned the shower off, pointing the knife at my face.

‘Into the bedroom,’ she said.

I got out of the shower, shivering and dripping, and Rachel jabbed the tip of the knife into my back, beside my spine. I gasped with pain and she said, ‘Oh for goodness sake.’

‘Rachel . . .’

‘Shut up, Andrew.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Please don’t make me lose my temper.’

We entered the bedroom and she instructed me to lie on my back on the bed. There were handcuffs attached to the bed frame. She snapped one over each wrist. Then she cuffed my ankles together. If I had been scared before, now I was terrified. I turned my head and saw that my phone was gone. She walked out of the room and came back carrying the holdall.

‘How did you get in?’ I asked. I needed to keep her talking, try to connect with her, talk her round. Find out what she wanted.

‘You keep a spare key in your bedside drawer,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I thought you meant for me to take it.’

I took a deep breath. ‘And the little bag of heroin. You put it in Charlie’s suit pocket.’

She smiled at me. ‘Clever, aren’t I? You’ll soon realise, Andrew, that all those other women – Sasha, Karen, Charlie – they’re nothing compared to me. I thought maybe Harriet was a threat too, but I could tell from your emails that you stopped caring about her a long time ago. I don’t think you ever loved her.’

As she talked, she put the holdall on the bed and removed some items from it. From my prostrate position I couldn’t see what they were, could only see a flash of silver, something catching the light.

‘You’ve read my emails?’ I said. ‘Hmm. All I needed was your iCloud password. Once I had that all I had to do was set it up on my iPad and I had access to everything, including all the texts you send and receive on your iPhone. Easy.’

‘But how did you get it? My password?’

She smirked. ‘I installed a piece of keystroke-recording software on Tilly’s computer. I wanted to keep an eye on her emails, see what she was saying about me. And when you stayed at Christmas you logged in to your iCloud emails and your Facebook. The software stored your passwords. That was the best Christmas present I ever had.’

I was stunned and horrified. With one password she could access everything because I used my Apple computer and phone, using my iCloud account, to send all my messages. And my Facebook password gave her even more access to my life.

‘And you deleted loads of my Facebook friends.’

‘Only the sluts.’ She smiled at me. ‘You didn’t notice me for a long time, did you? I know you merely thought of me as the poor sap who looked after your sister, who did the job you didn’t want to do.’

I opened my mouth but she put a finger to my lips. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t blame you. Some people are meant to be carers – like me – and others are supposed to be cared for. Like you. The first time I met you I knew that it was actually you I was supposed to look after.’

She put a hand behind my head and tilted it upwards, put something on my tongue. Before I could spit it out, she poured water into my mouth from a plastic bottle and the pill slipped down my throat.

‘What was that?’ I said, gasping, water running onto my neck. The rest of my body was still damp, cold.

‘Just something to relax you.’

‘Rachel, come on. Why don’t you uncuff me? We can talk about everything.’ She shook her head.
‘Later. When I’ve finished.’

‘Finished what?’

She leaned over me and I saw that she was wearing something familiar. It was a helmet – the same helmet Mr Makkawi had worn when he’d performed my eye operation. It looked a little like an old- fashioned miner’s helmet, a brilliant light attached to the front.

‘Rachel, why are you wearing that?’ I could barely speak. On top of everything else, the sight of the helmet had brought back memories of the pain of the eye examinations I’d undergone. The awful torture as they shone brilliant lights into my eyes, the veins filling my vision like bloody corals, the horror of being trapped, my eyes forced open, the laser they used for the follow-up surgery causing the nerves in my eyes to scream, like when a dentist pokes a nerve in a tooth.

She didn’t reply. Instead she took a couple of small objects from her holdall.

‘You know, Rachel isn’t really my name,’ she said. ‘But I like it. Makes me feel pretty.’ She spoke in a strange sing- song voice.

A deep shudder went through my core as I realised what she was holding.

Eye clamps.

‘No, please, Rachel, please don’t . . .’

She ignored me. ‘Did you know I worked at Moorfields for a while?

Fascinating place. I took this helmet when I left. That’s where I first saw you, when I realised that we should be together. You were coming out of your operation. You were unconscious. You looked so beautiful, like an angel lying there. I looked up your details. One of the other nurses told me that you’d told her about your sister, that she was in a wheelchair. You told her that she was looking for a personal assistant. It seemed like fate. What better way for me to get close to you, to watch you.’ She wagged her finger at me. ‘Though I was disappointed you didn’t visit more often.’

She snapped the clamps onto my eyes, forcing them open. I stared at her face, tried to turn my head, but she grabbed my chin and forced me to look at her. Tears pooled in my eyes and ran down my cheeks. She dabbed them away with a tissue. The hard metal of the clamps dug into my eye sockets, the pressure intense, like someone pushing the end of a spoon into my eye. I tried to kick with my legs, but Rachel straddled me, leather on my bare skin, pinning me down.

‘When I got Fraser to push you down those steps, I was hoping you would break your back. I was very disappointed. I thought, if I could get you to have an accident, I could be your personal assistant. I could look after you. We’d be together all the time.’ She licked her lips.

‘But that didn’t work. Fraser . . . what a fuck-up he is.’

‘Rachel . . .’

She ignored me. ‘This will be better than a broken back, though. I don’t really want you paralysed, Andrew, because then you wouldn’t be able to make love to me.’ She leant forward and kissed me on the lips. She ran her knuckles over my shrunken penis. ‘So beautiful. I could look at you all day. Soon, I will be able to look at you all day.’

She pulled a gag out of her holdall and strapped it around my mouth.

‘Don’t want you screaming and bringing the neighbours running, do we?’

She held up a scalpel.

‘When you’re blind, you’ll need someone to care for you. It’s going to be wonderful, living together. And it’s perfect because you won’t be able to look at any other women ever again.’

She raised the scalpel and held it above my left eye. ‘I’m the last thing you’ll ever see, Andrew. My face will be imprinted in your memory forever.’

She brought the blade towards my eye and I started screaming into my gag.