Your Closest Friend

by Karen Perry

  Karen Perry

  * * *

  YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND

  Contents

  Part One

  1. Cara

  2. Amy

  3. Cara

  4. Amy

  5. Cara

  6. Amy

  7. Cara

  8. Amy

  9. Cara

  10. Amy

  Part Two

  11. Cara

  12. Amy

  13. Cara

  14. Amy

  15. Cara

  16. Amy

  17. Cara

  18. Amy

  19. Cara

  20. Amy

  Part Three

  21. Cara

  22. Cara

  23. Cara

  24. Cara

  25. Amy

  26. Cara

  27. Amy

  28. Cara

  29. Amy

  30. Cara

  31. Cara

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Karen Perry is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Can You Keep a Secret?, Girl Unknown, Only We Know and The Boy That Never Was, which was selected for the Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club. She lives in Dublin with her family.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  YOUR CLOSEST FRIEND

  Praise for Karen Perry

  ‘Builds to an incredibly tense finale – before delivering an amazing final twist. Riveting stuff’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘Like Gone Girl … it’s the most gripping thing I’ve read for ages’ Evening Standard

  ‘Stunning’ Simon Mayo Radio 2 Book Club

  ‘Truly remarkable … Grips your heart from the first pages and simply never lets go’ Jeffery Deaver

  ‘This tense, unpredictable novel blends a thriller with an intimate family story to produce a most compelling read’ John Boyne

  ‘A twist-filled page-turner’ Closer

  ‘Both as a crime novel and an emotional journey, it’s gripping stuff’ Tana French

  ‘Full of intrigue and incident and keeps us guessing until the very last tragic page’ Liz Nugent

  ‘An unputdownable novel … leading to a stunning conclusion you won’t see coming’ Michelle Richmond

  Part One

  * * *

  1.

  Cara

  It’s his eyes that grab my attention. Not the gun. Eyes like a doll’s: dark and malevolently blank.

  Other details follow – the meagre scruff of beard skirting his young face, grey jeans and hoodie, a knife in his belt. These things register in a fleeting, abstract way as I walk towards the Tube station, my head still zinging with cocktails and revelations, the thrill of the illicit. The night is hot and clammy, a faintly faecal odour emanating from the drains masked somewhat by petrol fumes and cigarette smoke.

  When I see the gun in his hands, my first thought is: That thing’s not real. Clunky and oversized, it seems an exaggeration of a weapon, like a toy, or one of those guns they give you when playing Quasar or Splatoon. The word terror doesn’t enter my head, even though the whole city has been on high alert all summer. Perhaps I am drunker than I realize, but when I see him prowling the street, his eyes sweeping for targets, I have the thought that this is a game – a stag party involving teams, some kind of jokey hunt that has spilled out on to the streets of Shoreditch. It’s the start of the bank holiday weekend and I don’t feel threatened yet. I’m too focused on my own misdemeanour – the person I’ve spent the past couple of hours with and how I’m going to explain it; how I’m going to cover it up. Sorrow is a long way off. I am giddy with alcohol and with the headiness of my encounter and all that trickles from it.

  The air is split by the sound of screaming. My eyes dart across the street to a couple: professionals casually dressed for a Friday night date, kids probably at home with the babysitter. The woman is clutching at her partner, almost pushing him into a shop doorway as she recoils, face contorting with terror. The sound the gun makes seems too small for such an outlandish weapon – a firecracker, a sharply snapped branch.

  It is not in any way like a game now. The woman crumples to the ground and the realization comes over me swiftly: I am witnessing a killing. Her companion reaches for her while looking up, his mouth open with the shock of an ending, the sweetness of the evening, his love, his whole life, already over. A bullet to the head and he is gone.

  The street fills with panic. Screaming, feet pound the pavement, all of us running now. In the distance, an approaching siren whines. Everywhere swarms with movement, the crack of gunfire unleashed with abandon, limbs flailing, the wounded attempting to stagger away, flashes of blood on summer clothing, garish and visceral in its horror. I trip over a kerbstone and drop my bag, hands and knees on the asphalt, my breath high and light in my chest as I try to regain my footing. And it’s as I right myself that I see him: a second assailant coming in the other direction. He wears khaki fatigues, and heavy boots, and he walks with a military strut, plunging his knife with an air of detachment like he is stabbing pillows, not flesh and blood. His eyes lock on me now – those same doll’s eyes, glassy and unmoved, enmity in his blank stare.

  My thoughts slow, and what returns to me now is a sensory memory of Mabel in my arms when she was a baby and I’d lift her from the cot – that instant when her soft, fragrant little body would meet with my chest – the familiarity of it coming over me in a way that is painful, knowing it’s going to be snatched away. And with it comes a rush of feeling: angry indignation because I’m nowhere near ready for this, rage because so much of my life is yet unlived. You fucker, I think with spitting venom as my executioner closes in, the blade of his knife dull with blood. And that is when I feel it: the sharp grip around my upper arm like a claw. A hard tug and I am falling backwards towards a voice in the darkness.

  ‘Get in!’ someone hisses, and I stumble back over a threshold, the hand still pulling at me, so hard it hurts.

  We are scrambling up a stairway now, feet clattering over metal steps. How many of us are there? Three? Four? Is he coming after us? Up ahead, tiny red lights blink and dance through the darkness, and it takes me a moment to realize they are lights in the soles of trainers, like the shoes I bought for Mabel in Clarks. I have no idea where we are going as I charge up the flight of stairs after the others, my heart clamouring with fear, not knowing if this is a path to safety or if we are barrelling headlong towards our own slaughter.

  ‘In here!’ the voice says.

  A doorway appears, fluorescent light beyond, and I hurry after the others, the door closing shut behind me, my breathing wild in my chest, three of us listening, an uneasy triumvirate, each face caught in a rictus of fear.

  Strip lighting on the ceiling gives off a sibilant hum. Somewhere beyond this building there are whining sirens, screams, chaos, the crackling of firearms, but in here there is hushed silence and frightened eyes. A man and a woman and me, trapped in a room with a buzzing fridge, towers of bottled water and canned soft drinks, a table and some stacked chairs, empty hooks on the walls. There is a lingering odour of cigarette smoke, undercut by the hospital smell of detergent.

  ‘We should go,’ the man whispers urgently, and the girl shoots him a fierce look, puts her finger to her own lips to silence him.

  Her face is small and triangular, like a cat’s. Short, cropped hair that has been bleached yellow-white, the colour of sour milk. She is smaller than the man, smaller than me, and she looks young – not much more than twenty.

  The man mops his hand over his face and shuffles from one side of the room to the other. I wish he would stand still so that I can listen, so that I can think. His trainers squeak on the linoleum floor and I look down and see large orange sports shoes, their
logo emblazoned in red, lights winking in the soles – the same lights I’d noticed on the stairs. I have a sudden flash of him trying these shoes on for the first time, admiring them in the shop mirror, and the thought makes me feel sad somehow. I bet he never thought he would be walking them into a situation like this.

  ‘Stay still, Neil, for fuck’s sake,’ the girl hisses. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

  Her accent has an American inflection. I also realize that these two know each other, yet I can tell they are not a couple. Like the girl, Neil looks to be in his early twenties. Tall and heavy-set with hair that is probably reddish but looks blond under the fluorescent bulbs. His clothing, like hers, is nondescript – jeans and a white shirt. The words ‘Team PRET’ embroidered on the back of his shirt point to their connection. These two work together, and we are standing in the storeroom of whatever Pret store they work in. It’s only now that I notice, with a fresh plunge of panic, that the room has no windows. The only way out is the door we came in.

  ‘This doesn’t feel right,’ Neil says, and beyond the skittish nerves in his voice there is something else: movement in the corridor outside.

  ‘Quiet!’ I hiss, and we all freeze.

  Blood pounds in my ears, and I see a small pulmonary throb in Neil’s neck, sweat beading on his upper lip. The girl says nothing, her angular features and tight mouth pulled taut in concentration. She is standing close to me and as we strain for a sound beyond the door, my eyes take in the white iPhone earbuds emerging from the neck of her shirt, dark circles under her eyes and a rash of tiny spots at the corner of her mouth. The three of us strain to hear a sound beyond the door, and when it comes again – a faint dropping sound, like a pebble falling on to wood – she moves quickly to the doorway, and reaches for the light switch, plunging us into a new darkness.

  I have never experienced fear like this – not in my adult life. Fear that is pure and whole and occupies the body completely like some kind of parasitic invasion. Outside on the street, facing the killer, what I had felt was rage. But in here, trapped in this room, terror comes for me. I am rigid with it. Overhead, a blue glow fills the space where the fluorescent bulb had hummed. This ghostly memory of light redoubles the shivery fear I feel. In the darkness, we strain to hear a sound, poised on a terrifying threshold.

  Neil moves and the lights of his shoes flicker briefly. From outside comes the sound of engines gunning, wheels screeching, but the night-filled streets seem suddenly distant. This room, our collective breathing, the furious throb of regret that has started inside me, seem to occupy a different plane, far from everything familiar, everything safe.

  Run. Hide. Tell.

  All summer long it’s been drilled into us. At work, we’ve conducted rehearsed emergency evacuations. Our building is a potential target for terrorism, and I have attended seminars and training courses to learn how I should react in various situations of danger.

  But now that I am here, in this room, hiding, while murder takes place on the street outside, I do not feel safe. I feel trapped. I can’t escape the suspicion that we are sitting ducks.

  ‘We should go.’ There is heat in Neil’s urgent whisper.

  ‘No,’ the girl says firmly.

  I look in the direction of her voice, and all at once her face is there, lit by the glow of her iPhone.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We need to tell someone where we are,’ she says. Her voice, although lowered, is firm and calm.

  ‘They might hear you!’ I whisper.

  She ignores me and I watch her thumbs flying over the screen. There’s at least ten years between us, yet she seems the authoritative one.

  As she taps out her message, I remember my bag – how I dropped it on the street. My phone, wallet, keys, Oyster card – everything gone.

  ‘Shit,’ the girl says in her deadpan tone. ‘No fucking reception.’

  The glow from the screen fades, and the darkness feels cloying, claustrophobic.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Neil says, his voice punched with the jittery panic I feel.

  ‘No way,’ she replies.

  ‘I’m not standing around here, waiting for them to come and butcher me! We should run!’

  ‘Maybe he’s right,’ I say, my instincts thrown off kilter. ‘Is there another way out?’

  ‘The only other way is through the shop, and that’s shuttered. If you go back down on to the street, you could get killed.’

  ‘They were moving,’ I say. ‘If they haven’t already been shot by the police, they’ll have moved on to another street.’

  ‘You don’t know how many of them could be out there.’

  ‘What if one of them has a bomb?’ Neil counters. ‘For all we know they might have explosives strapped to themselves and we should be evacuating this building right now, not waiting to be blown up.’ His voice rises with frustration.

  ‘The police advice is to hide until it’s safe.’

  ‘But at some point, some fuckhead is going to realize the next big way to terrorize people is to hunt them down in their hiding places.’

  I feel a movement of air past me, and Neil is at the door.

  ‘Don’t,’ she warns him.

  But he mutters, ‘I’ll take my chances. You two can do what you want.’

  He flings the door wide, and I feel a new surge of panic at the prospect of him leaving. All my feminist principles take flight, and I find myself scared at the thought of being deserted by this man. Two women alone in a room. What chance will we have should one of those crazed attackers come up here? As Neil heads for the stairwell, I am suddenly sure that if I stay here, I will die. I have to take my chance now while there is still a chance to take. The door is closing and I can hear Neil’s feet in his big orange trainers clattering down the stairs, and something propels me to push open the door and follow, nerves pinging all over my body. But before I even reach the first step, I feel the pincer grip around my shoulder again, tugging me back.

  ‘No,’ she says firmly. ‘Let him go if he wants. We have to stay. We have to wait until it’s safe.’

  Her voice is low, throaty, surprisingly deep for one so young. I feel myself straining after Neil – the exit is so close. I can’t hear his footsteps any more, and the darkness of the stairway seems vaguely threatening. From somewhere outside, I can hear breaking glass and I shrink from it now.

  ‘Trust me,’ she says, her voice softer. ‘We’ll wait together.’

  At the top of the stairs, there’s an Emergency Exit sign. The light from it casts her face in a green glow, and her eyes seem melancholy, pleading.

  All of a sudden, I start to cry. Fat, hot tears burn my eyes, and I turn from her and head into the room, finding the wall and sliding down so that I’m sitting with my knees pulled up, the heels of my hands pressing into my eye sockets. Mabel, I think, picturing my little girl asleep in bed, and fervently wishing I hadn’t been so stupid, so selfish and reckless, that I hadn’t made the decision I did.

  The light snaps on and I look up.

  The girl shrugs. ‘Less scary this way.’

  ‘But if someone sees the light –’

  ‘They won’t. No one’s going to come up here.’

  ‘But Neil –’

  ‘If Neil gets to safety, he’ll tell some cop where we are and they’ll come get us when it’s safe. If he doesn’t get to safety, well … then, I guess we made the right decision.’

  Her voice seems to hold the shrug, and she seems more relaxed now, even though her shoulders are high with tension as she lopes across the small room to free a can of Coca-Cola from its tower.

  ‘You want one?’ she asks.

  I say no, wincing at the loud snap as she pulls the ring. I swipe at my eyes, embarrassed by the lapse in my composure.

  Perching on the edge of the table, she takes out her phone once more. Despite the confidence of her decisions, there is a nervous, caged-bird flutter about the way her hands move.

  ‘I dropped
my bag outside,’ I tell her. ‘It had all my stuff in it.’

  Turning her phone towards me, she asks, ‘You wanna contact someone?’

  ‘I thought you said there was no reception.’

  ‘There isn’t. But you could line up a WhatsApp or a text. It would go through whenever this shithole picks up coverage.’

  I think about Jeff, but what would I tell him? How could I explain myself?

  ‘Thanks, but I’m okay.’

  She goes back to her message, but my thoughts have strayed now to Jeff at home, watching rolling news reports of the attack, trying to call me again and again, only to get no answer. Will he call Kamila to check? Does he even know her number? I feel a drag of nausea in my stomach.

  ‘I shouldn’t even be here,’ I say, and she looks up, mildly curious. ‘I don’t mean here, in this room – I mean in this part of London. I wasn’t supposed to be here tonight.’

  Her eyes take on a different sort of intensity. Do I imagine it, or do they flare a little with interest? Her hands grow still, and her fidgeting stops. How strange this is, I think. An hour or so ago I was sitting in a bar trading jokes at the expense of millennials, making disparaging remarks about snowflakes. And now here I am with one of them.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks, interest softening her voice.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘You can tell me. I won’t tell a soul.’

  It feels strange. The way she’s looking at me – the concern in her eyes, so unexpected. I’m a little drunk. All those Aperols are making my head feel heavy. And here is this stranger, offering me a space to confide in the most bizarre circumstances. But somehow it feels right. It feels necessary. Like refuge in a storm. Whatever happens, I need to unburden myself before I leave the room.

  Everything in my life has been brought into sharp relief with this terror attack. The swarming confusion of my feelings – the doubts, the regrets over decisions made – all brought into focus in the light of imminent danger, the threat prowling the street outside. Private thoughts that I haven’t shared with anyone, stirred to life earlier this evening, now demand to be heard. And there is no one here except me and this girl with her dark eyes and plain face. There is something tranquil about her, as if she is unperturbed by the atrocities committed outside, but far from being wary of her unflappability, I find myself cleaving to it. Right now, she seems like the perfect person to share my secrets with, no thought given to the consequences.