by Louise Voss
‘It’s the worst thing,’ Derek said. ‘She probably still thinks I did it.’
Sheila shook her head, her gaze fixed on the photo of the whitewashed house on a Brazilian beach. ‘That’s not the worst thing. She probably has children of her own by now. We’re most likely grandparents.’
Derek reached over and patted his wife’s hand as she sobbed. He was staring into space now.
All of a sudden, Declan needed to get out of this room, this house – but he would take the letter and photo with him, along with the picture of Amber when she was in her early twenties, standing in front of the Christmas tree, smiling.
Run away to Brazil? This girl was on a mortuary slab, and somebody was going to have to persuade her parents of the truth of that. So they could bury her.
26
Amy
Thursday, 25 July
Amy trudged up the stairs to Becky’s flat, suddenly feeling limp with exhaustion. It was only lunchtime, but she felt as though the day had already lasted hundreds of hours. Inside her leathers, sweat trickled down her spine, and she had an unpleasantly damp feeling in her crotch, as though she’d wet herself. Leathers were fine in winter, but horrible in summer.
Unlocking the bottom lock made her think back to the other day, and how weird it was that Becky hadn’t double-locked before she went out – she always double-locked. Could someone else have been in there? Who? She shivered at the thought, and remembered, too, the other strange incident when someone had tried the door and she’d chased them into the street, but then tantalizingly seen nobody. It had been like chasing a ghost …
‘Hello?’ she called out hopefully, once she was inside, peeling off the sticky leathers and leaving them in a pile on the floor, like a huge insect husk. At that moment, she felt she’d have given a major organ to see Becky emerge bleary and hungover from her bedroom. ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ she would say. ‘Didn’t you get my email? I decided to come back early.’
But the flat was still eerily silent. Amy switched on the radio – it was tuned to Capital FM, which she hated, but anything was better than the stillness – and sat down at Becky’s iMac in her pants and T-shirt.
First, she checked Becky’s emails again – nothing new. She typed Googlemail into the Search box, and clicked on it, inputting [email protected] when requested, her fingers hesitating over the keyboard when she came to the password box. Her first few suggestions were rejected:
HARCOURT1986
Alicebarrow
Alicebarrow20041986
With a sinking heart, she realized that, even though there weren’t many likely words, there was still a huge potential number of combinations of them.
Harcourt20486
HarcourtAlice
HarcourtBarrow86
Still nothing.
A sudden knock at the door made her jump so hard that she bit her tongue. She ran into Becky’s bedroom and grabbed a denim skirt out of her chest of drawers, yanking it with difficulty over her hips – Becky was a size smaller. She managed to do it up, still fiddling with the zip as she pressed her ear against the door. She could taste blood.
She couldn’t hear anything, so she called out: ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, Gary.’
She flung open the door and let him in. ‘Hi. I thought it was the police – I don’t know why. And I forgot to put anything on under my leathers.’
‘Leathers,’ agreed Gary, although without smiling. He still looked wan and stressed.
‘Why aren’t you at work?’
His reply sounded slightly snappy: ‘I told you, I took the day off. Just came back here to change and shower, and heard the radio through the walls. I thought for a moment that it might be Becky …’
‘Sorry. It’s only me. I’m trying to get into Katherine’s Gmail account – Clive gave me a few suggestions about what the password might be, but nothing’s worked yet.’
Gary moved over to the computer and sat down. ‘Let’s have a go. What have you tried?’
Amy told him, and he scribbled the options down on a Post-it note, then tried ALICEHARCOURT. To Amy’s amazement it worked first time – they were in.
‘Beginner’s luck,’ she said, her heart pounding in her chest. She barged him off the office chair with her hip. ‘Let’s see what Ms Devine was up to, shall we? God rest her soul,’ she added hastily. In the euphoria of Gary guessing the password, she had actually momentarily forgotten that Katherine was dead. Gary didn’t seem at all excited, though. Perhaps all this is really starting to get to him, Amy thought. Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed him to get involved.
He got up and stood behind her as she scrolled through dozens and dozens of emails, many of them identical ones from Casexual.com: Dear Katherine, you have a new private message from … Click here to see it.
‘Popular, wasn’t she?’ commented Gary. ‘Put Casexual into the Search box. She might have kept her login confirmation email from Casexual, with her password on it.’
Amy shot him an admiring look. She might have thought of that herself, but it would have taken a lot longer.
‘You’re a star.’
But still he didn’t smile. ‘Um, Amy,’ he said. ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’
‘Hang on a second,’ Amy said. ‘Just let me do this first.’
He was right – after searching, she found an admin email from Casexual, headed, ‘Your login details’.
‘Bingo,’ she said, and clicked it open. When she saw what it said, she laughed ruefully: Katherine’s login details were exactly the same as her Gmail ones – her email address, with ALICEHARCOURT as password.
‘I bet she used the same password for everything,’ Gary said, almost angrily. ‘I hope you don’t do that, Amy. It’s crazy. Someone could easily have found out everything about her.’
‘Maybe they did,’ Amy replied soberly, logging on to Casexual.com as Katherine. All the messages loaded. ‘I don’t, no. I hope Becky didn’t … Can you turn on the printer, please? I’ll print all these out.’
Gary hesitated, but obliged.
‘What?’
‘Come and sit over here for a second. That thing I need to tell you – it’s really important.’
Amy set the printer going with the first email, then reluctantly allowed Gary to lead her over to the sofa.
‘It’s not about “us” then?’
He tutted, crouching down in front of her, his knees cracking like twigs. ‘No, it’s not. It’s something else. I’m sorry, Amy, but Pete rang me back this morning about those Facebook photos that Becky supposedly posted.’
‘And?’ Amy’s heart sank. It was pretty obvious where this was going. She felt like putting her hands over her ears and singing lalalala. In the background, an ad on Capital FM extolled the virtues of nought-per-cent finance on the new season’s sofas.
‘There’s nothing he can do. He can’t tell how old the photos are or identify the beach. He used Google Goggles to see if those pictures appear anywhere else on the web – you know, to check if someone had simply copied them from another site – but it came back with no matches.’
‘So the photos are originals?’
Gary shrugged helplessly. ‘It’s impossible to tell. It just means that those pictures haven’t been indexed by Google. But they could have been taken from another Facebook account, where the privacy settings are switched on, or scanned from a magazine …’
‘They could be from bloody anywhere.’
‘Or maybe Becky actually took them herself,’ he suggested in a soft voice.
‘No! It’s totally out of character. There’s no way she would post pictures like that with no captions, nor respond to any comments. Not unless she’s had a major personality transplant. I’m shocked you don’t believe me.’
He held his palms towards her. ‘I do believe you. I was just saying—’
‘What? That I’m making all of this up? Paranoid Amy, who won’t believe the evidence in front of her eye
s? Becky is not in fucking Asia – I would bet my life on it.’
‘OK, OK …’
She was in full flow now: ‘Why have you been going along with it, eh? Have you been pretending to help me just so you could get a shag?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Amy – you know it’s not like that.’
‘I bet you—’
‘Just shut up. Please!’
She stared at him, but he crossed to the window, rolling his shoulders to relieve some of the tension in them. Her heart was beating hard and her head felt like a bomb that was about to detonate. There was no way she was going to apologize to him. If he didn’t 100 per cent believe that something awful had happened to Becky, that she wasn’t swanning about on beaches in Asia, then she didn’t want him helping her any more. She would just have to do it on her own.
She went back to the computer and doggedly printed out the other thirty-four Casexual overtures one by one. All from strangers who wanted to have sex with Katherine – and Becky, too, probably, although she had been through Becky’s emails going back months and there had been nothing from any hook-up sites, only from the much tamer and more conventional dating site, CupidsWeb. She must have deleted the Welcome email, just in case. She knew from Fraser that Becky had been using Casexual too.
She glanced at a few of the messages as they churned out.
You’re one hot mama, can I come on your tits?
Wow, lady, you float my boat! Let’s be naughty together!
I’m so hard right now just looking at your profile pic. What size panties do you wear?
My wife won’t go down on me any more. You would, I can tell …
‘Ugh,’ she said to herself. ‘This is disgusting. What the hell was wrong with Katherine? There’s nothing exciting about this.’
Another email printed, one word jumping out at her that made her catch her breath. She snatched the paper out of the printer. ‘Oh, my God, no.’
‘What?’ Gary came and looked over her shoulder, his voice still cold. She stabbed at it with her finger and read out loud:
‘So excited about your friend Becky, I looked at her profile and she sounds as hot as you are. When will we three meet? Don’t worry, I have enough loving for both of you! I promise you a night you’ll NEVER forget. Can’t wait to hear from you!’
It was from someone with the username TooledUp, and he’d attached a photo in the body of the email. Taken in a mirror with a camera phone, he looked buff and oiled, with mean little eyes and far too many tattoos. His pecs bulged like rocks under his skin. He was horrible. Amy had seen enough.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said in a strangled voice, and dashed for the bathroom.
When she returned, Gary had opened the front door. He was holding her bag, which he handed her, the emails, and the keys to Becky’s flat.
They were a couple of steps down the hallway when Amy suddenly stopped. ‘Hang on – we didn’t Chubb the door.’
Gary tutted and turned back. ‘The door. Oh, I always bloody forget to do that …’ He tailed off, and looked so guilty that if Amy had been in any doubt as to what it meant, she wasn’t after she saw that look. Her eyes opened wide and they faced each other, held in the toxic spotlight of Gary’s revelation.
‘You always forget to do that?’ she whispered. ‘You forgot to do it the day she went missing, didn’t you? The door wasn’t double-locked then, either.’
She backed away from him, and he held out his free hand to her.
‘No, of course not, Amy. What do you think …?’
‘I don’t know what to think. Why didn’t you tell me you’d been in her flat? Why didn’t you tell the police?’ Her voice was increasingly shrill, and she realized she was flattening herself against the wall of the stairwell.
‘I wasn’t in her flat!’ he shouted, and made a move towards her, his hand in a fist, his face twisted into an expression she’d never seen on him before. The sheaf of emails spilled from his other hand and scattered across the floor, cascading down the stairs.
‘I don’t believe you!’ she screamed back and, for the second time in less than a week, ran down the stairs, swinging round the corners and ricocheting off the walls. The difference this time was that instead of running after someone, someone was running after her.
Gary was chasing her, full pelt, and when she glanced over her shoulder, he was almost upon her. She grappled with the door handle, but her hands were sweating, her body wasn’t working properly. As she finally pushed the door open, Gary bellowed, ‘Amy!’ in her ear.
He grabbed her, his hands like pincers on her shoulders.
27
Amy
Five years ago
A year had passed since that first row in Kingston. Nathan had begged and pleaded and apologized and said it would never happen again and finally Amy had forgiven him.
Of course it happened again.
Not for a long time – long enough that Amy was able to write off that first meltdown as an aberration – but other disturbing ripples began to fan out in its wake, rocking then steadying Amy’s conviction that Nathan was the one. Rocking and steadying, until she almost got used to feeling permanently seasick.
Part of her even loved him more for being so jealous – as he said, he’d never feel so possessive of her if he didn’t love her so much. She was pretty sure he checked all her texts and emails, and deliberately left her phone around so that he could do so, in the knowledge that there was nothing incriminating on it. She wanted him to feel secure.
That was all OK, she didn’t mind that. It was the criticism she found hard, the gradual erosion of her self-confidence and self-belief, crumbling away in a landslide of, ‘Are you really going out wearing that?’ and, ‘Oh, babe, I think you’d better only have half that bacon sandwich,’ and, ‘Leave your phone at home. Don’t want you getting texts from other blokes!’
Then they would have sex, powerful enough to bring them both to tears, and the slate would be wiped clean again – until the next time.
They took a holiday together, out to Spain to visit Amy’s parents, who immediately loved Nathan. Amy kept catching her mother looking sidelong at him with an expression of quiet awe. Nathan was happier than she had ever seen him, his smooth skin burnished bronze in the hot sunshine, laughing and drinking sangria and complimenting Amy’s mum on the paella, and he hardly criticized Amy at all.
And yet he refused to speak a word to her on the plane all the way home, because he claimed she had flirted with the checkin clerk at the airport.
Nobody had ever been so jealous, or worried about losing her. If she was honest with herself, Amy acknowledged that – when she could rise above the constant, low-level harassment – reassuring him made her feel powerful, sexy, desired.
Until the afternoon, five months later, when Nathan shoved her almost casually into the smallest of the built-in wardrobes in their bedroom and locked the door behind her. It all happened so fast that Amy didn’t have time to process what was going on, not until she heard the heavy clunk of a padlock hasp engaging. A padlock that she didn’t know existed. They hadn’t even had an argument, although he had seemed particularly intense all day.
‘This is for your own protection, you know, sweetheart. I won’t be long, I’m only going to the gym.’
‘What? Nathan! No, please, don’t, I can’t—’
All she heard were his footsteps retreating, and she was left in the pitch-darkness with all his suits still in their dry-cleaning wrappers. The soft clingy plastic attached itself to her head, suffocating her, and she batted it away in panic, her breath coming in harsh gulps of terror.
Amy remembered in a flash the first dinner she and Becky had had with him, when he’d asked about their worst fears.
She rattled at the wardrobe door, pounding on it with her fists and kicking with her heels, but it was more solid than it looked. Surely, he hadn’t actually gone? She hadn’t heard the front door close, but then she had been making a racket. The silence outside
felt as though it was pressing in, seeping into the wardrobe like a poisonous gas. She was choking, fighting the darkness, all her senses on red alert. What if he’d lost the plot entirely, and was waiting outside with a sharp curved knife? What did she really know about him? He had sprung, fully formed, into her life, and rarely talked about his past. She was an idiot to have trusted him. Now she would have to move out, and see the pitying ‘I told you so’ expression in Becky’s eyes.
No. Becky must not know. This could not be the end of her beautiful relationship. Nathan only criticized her because he loved her! She would make it right, somehow. Force him to come to therapy with her. Change him.
She would change him.
She cried and wailed and screamed so much that her throat was raw and she had to make herself stop, in case she used up all the oxygen in the wardrobe.
When he eventually returned, he was actually whistling: ‘Father and Son’ by Cat Stevens. Amy heard him pottering around in the hallway, hanging up his keys, going to the kitchen and pouring himself a glass of water out of the jug.
‘Nathan!’ she screamed. ‘Let me out!’
He took his time, sauntering into the bedroom. She heard the key engage in the padlock, and her fingers were curling around the edge of the sliding door the moment she saw a chink of daylight, dragging it open. She fell out, gasping, exhausted from sobbing and hyperventilation, lying like a comma on the bedroom floor. Her nails were broken and bleeding from scratching at the door.
‘Oh, sweetheart!’ he said when he saw her, concern furrowing his brow. ‘What’s the matter? I wasn’t long!’
He reached over to try to pick her up to embrace her, but she rolled away from him. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored wardrobe door – tears and snot smeared all over her deathly white face, her hair standing in crazed spikes.
‘Get away from me!’
She staggered to her feet, and he looked hurt.
‘What’s wrong?’ he repeated.
‘What’s fucking wrong? Are you insane? You lock me in the fucking wardrobe when you know I’m claustrophobic, and then you ask what’s wrong?’
