The Promise You Made

by A J McDine

  Anger.

  Fear would not hold me prisoner. Because avoiding danger was no safer in the long run. The fearful were caught as often as the bold. If Roy Matthews was coming for me, I would be ready for him.

  My mind made up, I grabbed a fleece and headed downstairs, careful to avoid the creaky floorboard outside Eloise’s room. As I passed through the kitchen, I stopped by the sink and stared out of the window into the night, wondering if Matthews, cloaked by the trees, was staring back at me in a sinister game of cat and mouse. With a pang I thought of Dinah, my beautiful, spirited cat, lying dead on the cold slab of the vet’s examination table, the life sucked out of her by Roy fucking Matthews, and my resolve strengthened.

  Pulling on my wellies, I picked up my keys and let myself out of the back door. Mindful that Eloise was now alone, I locked the door behind me. Once outside, I paused and listened while my eyes adjusted to the dark. But the only sounds were the rustle of leaves, the soft soughing of branches, and the occasional hoot of a barn owl. Noises I had grown up with, as familiar to me as the pounding of my heart.

  Satisfied Matthews wasn’t about to leap out of the trees and grab me around the neck, I made my way towards the shed. My bare feet slid in my wellies, and my wellies slid in the mud, giving the disconcerting sensation that I was skating on ice. Ice so thin it could shatter under my weight at any moment.

  I made it to the shed unnoticed and in one piece. Before I pushed the key into the lock, I looked around again, straining to hear a twig snap or the low hawk of a throat being cleared. Nothing. I turned the key and pushed open the door, my focus on the trunk.

  I’d been lying when I’d told Eloise my father’s old rifle was harmless. OK, so it wasn’t a twelve-bore shotgun, but in the wrong hands, air rifles could be lethal. A pellet could perforate a lung, killing someone in minutes. A chest wound might lead to heart failure. Hitting a major artery or blood vessel would almost certainly cause catastrophic blood loss. And bleeding out was never a pretty way to die.

  Not that I wanted to kill Roy Matthews. Of course I didn’t. The gun was merely a deterrent to show him he couldn’t intimidate me. I would sleep better at night knowing it was under my bed, loaded and ready.

  Just in case.

  The metal trunk was cold to the touch, and my fingers fumbled with the catch. There was a knack to it. You had to press the lid of the trunk down, and only then could you prise the latch from its keeper. Eventually the catch sprang open, and I lifted the lid and stared into the blackness.

  Suddenly, I was transported to the side of the sinkhole, a spade in my hand and the dank scent of mud in my nostrils. And then time and place shifted again, and I was gazing into another gaping chasm. Juliet’s grave. A warm hand in mine. A promise. A second death on my conscience.

  My head reeling, I stepped back, colliding with a set of shelves and knocking a stack of plastic plant pots flying. The sound of them clattering to the floor was unnaturally loud, and I stood like a statue and held my breath and listened for Matthews, aware that I might as well have erected a neon sign over the shed screaming, SHE’S IN HERE!

  I counted to twenty, then reached into the trunk, the tips of my fingers walking over the contents, feeling for the rifle’s smooth wooden stock or its cylindrical metal barrel, keen to feel the weight of the gun in my hand, even though I knew I would never use it.

  Would I ever use it?

  But the question was irrelevant, because someone had beaten me to it.

  The rifle wasn’t there.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  JUNE 1999

  * * *

  It took eight whole years for Danny to creep back out of the woodwork.

  Juliet was working in a small art gallery in Marylebone High Street by then, living in a pretty mews house a five-minute walk away. Her parents had bought her the house for her twenty-fifth birthday.

  ‘They’ve given you a house?’ I said incredulously when she told me. ‘I got a twenty-pound gift voucher for BHS.’

  ‘They’re worried about me. They think I’ve been left on the shelf.’

  ‘Left on the shelf?’ I spluttered.

  ‘They were married at nineteen. They think I should have settled down and started a family years ago.’

  ‘I don’t know why you haven’t. It’s not like you don’t get enough offers.’

  It was true. The rich City types who frequented the gallery were always asking her out, but she rarely accepted, and the few men she did date never lasted long.

  ‘It didn’t feel right,’ was her constant refrain, and I was happy, because when Juliet was single, she had time for me, and that was all I ever wanted.

  I was still living at home and working as a volunteer in a local charity shop. It was dull, uninspiring work, and I was the youngest there by almost forty years, but it saved me having to look for an actual job. Because the unpalatable truth was that I didn’t have the confidence to find proper paid work, let alone fly the nest. It may have been eight years since I’d dropped out of med school, but my self-esteem was still at an all-time low.

  I couldn’t blame my mother any more, either. Although she’d clung onto life for six miserable years after her stroke, she’d finally succumbed to a nasty bout of pneumonia two years previously. Her death could have set me free, but instead I chose to stay at home with my father. The only thing that kept me sane were the weekends I spent in London with Juliet, when we drank Chardonnay by the gallon and pretended we were Bridget Jones.

  More often than not, our drunken musings turned to Danny and what a prick he was. According to John, now a Porsche-driving City trader, Danny had spent a year travelling around Australia after Juliet kicked him out, settling in Melbourne where he worked as a personal trainer.

  ‘Such a twat,’ Juliet would say, tipping wine down her throat. ‘What a lucky escape.’

  ‘Amen to that,’ I’d agree, clinking glasses, and although we’d laugh and move on, I’d sense a certain wistfulness in her expression for the rest of the night.

  I didn’t think much of it when Juliet casually mentioned one day that John had told her Danny was back in the country. I was confident that even if he dared show his face, there was no way she’d forgive him for cheating on her twice.

  Two weeks later Juliet cancelled our weekend because she had a last-minute exhibition to prep for.

  Two weeks after that, she said she was coming down with a migraine and needed to spend the weekend in bed.

  The week after that, the gallery’s ceiling fell down after a water leak in the flat upstairs.

  ‘You’ll be washing your hair next. Anyone would think you didn’t want to see me,’ I joked. But inside I was seething. If Juliet had a boyfriend, why didn’t she just tell me? I wouldn’t have minded. Much.

  I decided to surprise her the following Friday. I left the charity shop just after lunch and bought flowers and a bottle of wine on my way to the station. The Victoria Line was already busy, and it was standing room only. I jumped off at Oxford Circus and followed signs for the Bakerloo Line, this time finding a seat between a teenage boy listening to his Sony Walkman on one side and a man reading the Financial Times on the other. I clutched the wine and flowers close to my chest as the tube click-clacked towards Marylebone, wondering if I should have phoned Juliet to warn her I was coming.

  Too late now, I thought, as the train lurched to a stop and I jumped onto the platform.

  I called in at the gallery first. It was an exclusive place that specialised in the work of the new breed of conceptual artists taking the country by storm. The kind who thought a series of black and white photographs of a man eating a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie was of more artistic merit than the Mona Lisa. The gallery itself was a white cube-like space where a wire bin filled with screwed up bits of paper could just be a wire bin filled with screwed up bits of paper or it could be a piece of art with a price tag that would make your eyes water.

  ‘She took today off,’ an effete young man dressed in
a candy-pink pinstripe suit informed me. ‘Won’t be back in till Monday.’

  I thanked him and turned right out of the gallery towards the cobbled mews where Juliet lived. It was a warm summer’s afternoon and Marylebone High Street was teeming with tourists and office workers.

  Juliet took so long answering her door that at first I thought she might not be in at all, and I was about to retrace my steps to the cafe around the corner and grab a coffee when I saw a figure come down the stairs and the door swung open. Juliet was wearing a satin dressing gown I hadn’t seen before and her hair was scraped into a bun at the top of her head.

  ‘Surprise!’ I said, handing her the flowers.

  ‘Rose!’ Juliet cried. ‘You didn’t tell me you were coming.’

  ‘It was a last-minute thing,’ I said, holding up the wine. ‘Shall I put this in the fridge?’

  ‘Um, yes, of course.’ She followed me through to the kitchen and opened the fridge door. I slotted the bottle between a two-pint carton of milk and a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Special occasion?’ I asked, looking in the cupboards for a vase.

  ‘What?’ Juliet’s head snapped around.

  ‘The Moët.’

  ‘Oh that. No. We were all given one as a thank you for the exhibition the other week. It sold out. Tell you what,’ she said. ‘We should drink it now. We are celebrating, after all.’

  ‘Are we?’ I raised an eyebrow. Her welcome had been lukewarm, bordering on perfunctory.

  ‘Of course we are. It’s such a lovely surprise to see you. Why don’t you sit in the garden while I take a quick shower?’

  I elbowed her playfully. ‘Yes, why are you still in your dressing gown in the middle of the afternoon?’

  A dark flush crept up her neck. ‘Thought I’d make the most of my day off. Have a duvet day, you know?’ She thrust the Moët and two glasses into my hands, opened the back door, and ushered me out. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be long.’

  The door closed swiftly, and I was alone. I crossed the small courtyard garden, plonked the glasses on the bistro table in the sunny far corner, and set about opening the champagne. As I twisted the wire, a movement upstairs caught my eye. My grip on the neck of the bottle tightened as the curtain in the top window - Juliet’s bedroom - twitched and a silhouette appeared. Juliet? I shook my head. No one could have sprinted up two flights of stairs that quickly. I stiffened as I realised I wasn’t the only one making myself comfortable at Juliet’s place this afternoon.

  Why couldn’t she just tell me she had someone round? I wouldn’t have minded. Unless… The thought made my stomach flip. Unless it was a woman. But no, Juliet was straight. She had to be. She wouldn’t have rejected me otherwise.

  Self-doubt gnawed at my insides as I gripped the cork and twisted the bottle towards me. Just as the cork popped out, the front door slammed. Whoever Juliet had been having a duvet day with had gone.

  I poured two glasses and downed mine in three painful gulps.

  Juliet appeared, fresh from the shower, fifteen minutes later. She was glowing. Tanned and luminous, her tawny eyes sparkling and her newly washed hair a curtain of spun gold across her bare shoulders. Beside her, I was pale and drab and one-dimensional. I let out a long sigh.

  ‘Penny for them,’ she said, refilling my glass.

  How could I tell her that the thought of someone kissing her neck, her breasts, the deepest parts of her, sent me crazy with jealousy? That I couldn’t bear the thought of sharing her? That if she only opened her eyes and looked at me… properly looked at me… she’d see what I’d seen the moment she burst into my room at university, that we were meant to be together. But it was useless because I’d never tell her, because I was a coward. And platonic love was better than no love at all.

  ‘They’re not even worth a penny,’ I said, pushing my chair back. ‘I need a pee.’

  In the bathroom, I splashed water on my face and stared at my reflection as the drops trickled down my cheeks like tears. I needed to get a grip. I needed to be acerbic, caustic Rose, queen of the quip, master of the pithy aside. That was the Rose Juliet loved, not woebegone Rose, wallowing in self-pity. I dried my face on the hand towel, slapped my cheeks to get some colour into them, and left the bathroom.

  At the top of the stairs I paused, one hand on the white-gloss newel post. Something was drawing me towards Juliet’s bedroom at the top of the house. Maybe it was morbid curiosity. Maybe I was tormenting myself with what could never be mine, but the pull was irresistible and could not be ignored. I sidled along the landing to the narrow staircase at the back of the house that led to Juliet’s bedroom and en suite.

  The stairs were steep, and I was puffing when I reached the top. Stopping to catch my breath, I glanced out of the window. Juliet was still sitting at the table sipping her champagne. Reassured, I pushed open her bedroom door.

  The bed was rumpled, the smell of sex heavy in the dimly lit room. On Juliet’s side of the bed, a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin had been left open and face down on the bedside table next to an empty coffee cup. I picked up Juliet’s pillow and held it against my cheek, breathing in her scent. Next, I shuffled around the bed, looking for anything that might identify her lover.

  This pillow smelt of cologne. I inhaled deeply. Citrus and cedar wood. The unmistakable aroma of CK One. But that told me nothing. Everyone knew it was a unisex fragrance. Leave it, Rose, said the voice in my head. I dropped the pillow and was about to leave the room when I spied a glint of metal peeking out from under the bed. The strap of a chunky steel watch. A man’s watch. I stooped down and picked it up, looping it around my wrist and fixing the catch. It was a Tag Heuer, so big the metal links flapped loosely around my wrist.

  As I slid the watch off, the tightness eased in my chest. I closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. Juliet might have taken a lover, but it wasn’t a woman, and that made it bearable.

  I was about to head downstairs when I remembered I still hadn’t peed, so I slipped into the en suite. I was washing my hands when I saw it. A blue inhaler, next to a tube of toothpaste for sensitive teeth. The type of inhaler used to treat the symptoms of asthma. And I only knew one person with asthma.

  Danny.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I felt discombobulated as I staggered back to the house. I was certain I’d put the rifle back in the trunk in the shed. For one bewildering moment, I wondered if the lack of sleep was messing with my head and the intruder had been a figment of my imagination, too. But no, Eloise had heard him and had called me. And the house had been turned upside down. I hadn’t imagined that. Nor the couple of hours we’d spent setting everything straight.

  Even so, I reached for my phone and checked my call log to confirm Eloise had phoned me. And she had, at ten to five, just as I remembered. Of course I hadn’t imagined it. Any of it. The fact that I’d doubted myself was almost as terrifying as the possibility I’d made it up.

  No, I reasoned, as I let myself in the back door and kicked off my boots. There would be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the gun not being in the trunk. Like I had meant to put it back but had been distracted by something and had clean forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. I was always walking into rooms only to wonder what the hell I’d gone in them for.

  I locked and bolted the back door and then walked from room to room, pulling curtains and checking every window was closed. As I passed the mirror in the hallway, I glimpsed my reflection. My hair was awry, and my face was gaunt, apart from the puckered pouches beneath my eyes. I looked like the crabby and eccentric inhabitant of Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and slapped some colour into my pale cheeks. The pain felt good, sharp and stinging, and I slapped them again, harder. As I stared at my reflection, I became aware that my right eye had begun to twitch. A spasm caused, no doubt, by exhaustion. Wearily, I trudged up the stairs to bed.

  It was
only as I pulled back the covers and was about to climb into bed that I stubbed my big toe on something cold and hard behind the ruffled valance. Mystified, I bent down and peered under the bed, my eyes widening when I realised I was staring down the barrel of a gun. My father’s rifle. I would recognise it anywhere. Carefully, I spun the rifle round so it was facing away from me, then pulled it out. I rocked back on my heels, uncocked it and checked to see if it was loaded. Sure enough, the skirt of a little lead pellet was visible in the chamber, just waiting for someone to pull the trigger.

  I pushed the rifle back under the bed and contemplated the very real possibility that I was losing my mind. But no, my memory was playing tricks on me, that was all. Even though I could have sworn I’d put the rifle back in its trunk in the shed, I must have stowed it here after all. No matter. At least I knew it hadn’t fallen into the wrong hands. My eye twitched again, and I rubbed my face before hauling myself up from the floor. All I needed was a good night’s sleep. A deep, dreamless sleep from which I’d wake up calm and refreshed, not jittery and paranoid.

  Not for the first time, I wished I hadn’t chucked my stash of vitamins. Had I been arrogant to think I could manage without them?

  I didn’t mention the rifle to Eloise when I took her a cup of tea the next morning. I didn’t want her to think I was going doolally. So, I painted a smile on my face and wittered on about the garden and how I needed to get on with cutting back the Virginia creeper before it covered every window in the house.

  ‘Are you going into work today?’ Eloise asked, interrupting.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t go in on a Saturday. But I do need to pop out this morning. Will you be all right here on your own?’