Follow You Home

by Mark Edwards

  She had begged Daniel not to pursue it with the police afterwards. Daniel had wanted to follow it up later, despite being convinced that Constantin was corrupt. Laura had persuaded him not to. He told her that it didn’t matter, that no one would judge her, but he didn’t get it. He didn’t understand. She judged herself. And she didn’t want anyone to know what she’d done.

  When she found out that Daniel had been speaking to his therapist about their experience, she was mortified. What if he told her everything?

  But then the therapist’s house had burned down. It was like the gods were protecting Laura.

  For a short while, Laura thought the problem had gone away—until Daniel texted her to say he’d spoken to Jake. Laura was horrified, panic-stricken. Mad, frankly. There was no denying it. She imagined Daniel telling Jake everything, what she’d done. Now, not only did Jake know about her failings, know that she was a coward, a murderer by proxy, but he was the worst possible person for Daniel to tell. Jake was a gossip, never able to keep anything juicy to himself. Oh Jesus, what if he wrote a song about it? Or spoke about it in an interview?

  The whole world would know who Laura really was.

  That night, after Jake’s funeral, Laura lay in Daniel’s arms and told him she was shivering because of the cold and the emotion. He was so happy that night, ecstatic to have her back. And he was convinced she would be pleased with him, grateful that he’d changed the story when he spoke to Edward.

  ‘What about Jake?’ she asked, not daring to look at Daniel as she spoke.

  ‘Oh. I only got a little way into telling him, up to the point where we heard the baby crying, and he rushed off. He . . . he was dead before I could tell him anything else. But I would have told him the same version I told Edward. I hope you weren’t worried about it.’

  She wanted to scream at him. Why hadn’t he told her that at the time? Why leave her to think he’d told Jake everything? But she couldn’t scream, couldn’t say anything at all.

  Because Daniel could never know what she’d done.

  Shortly after receiving the message from Daniel telling her he was going to talk to Jake, Laura went out into Erin and Rob’s garden. Alina glimmered between the two apple trees, camouflaged by shadows. Not a ghost, Laura knew that now. Just a woman. A woman who had come here to avenge what she and Daniel had done.

  ‘Something has happened,’ Laura said.

  She told Alina about the message she’d just received from Daniel.

  ‘You need to go and see him,’ Alina said. ‘Talk to Jake. Beg him to keep it secret.’

  So she had set off straight away. She was hurrying towards his flat when she saw him ahead of her, on Thornberry Bridge, heading home. She caught up with him, called his name. He stopped. It was late and there was no one around.

  ‘Laura? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Hi Jake.’

  He swayed a little and she realised he was drunk. He laughed. ‘Oops, a bit tipsy. We had champagne. Lots of champagne! I think they’re going to sign me, Laura. After all these years, I’m finally going to make it.’ He moved to hug her but she backed away.

  ‘How can you bear to hug me?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Daniel told you what happened in Romania.’

  He was so drunk he could barely stand up. ‘Yeah. Romania. Fuck, Laura.’ He stared at her. ‘You know what I think? That whatever happened, you shouldn’t have run off. He’s a broken man, Laura.’

  This came like a slap in the face, but he was right. There was no end to the damage she had done, the damage she would go on doing. Before Jake could react, she climbed up onto the railing, staring down at the traffic below, wondering how long it would take to hit the asphalt below.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Jake asked, climbing unsteadily onto the railing beside her. ‘Whoa!’ he said, looking down at the road below. He sat down on the thick ledge that ran along the top of the railing, his back to the road. Laura sat beside him.

  ‘You can’t ever tell anyone,’ she said. ‘I need you to promise me that you’ll never tell.’

  He stared at her. He looked ill. Oh God, it was because she made him sick. A blast of cold air hit them and they both swayed. Cars rushed beneath them, almost drowning out his words. ‘We need to get down, Laura.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Please, Laura.’

  ‘Promise me!’

  ‘Yeah, of course, my lips are sealed. Scout’s honour.’

  But his eyes shifted, the way someone’s eyes shift when they say ‘I love you’ and don’t mean it. And she knew in that instant that the secret, her shame, was not safe with him.

  He took out his phone saying he was going to call Daniel, and she snatched it from him. That was the last thing that could happen. More pain, more hurt and confusion for Daniel. No.

  There was a temporary lull in the traffic; the lights must be red further along the road.

  ‘Swear on your niece’s life. You will never tell.’

  ‘Laura, that’s ghoulish. That’s terrible. No, I’m not going to swear on Cleo’s life—’

  She pushed him.

  She looked at her own hands. Looked over the edge of the bridge, saw his body lying on the road. Not hers. Too cowardly to join him, and unable to bear the sight of what she’d done, she turned and jumped down from the ledge onto the pavement.

  She was a killer. A coward, a liar, and now a murderer.

  The skin that had grown back was not the old skin. This was her new body and there was no wall of silk to hide behind.

  And he’ll never tell, she thought. Nobody will ever know the real you.

  Hands shaking, looking left and right to check there was nobody coming, she quickly typed out a message to Jake’s sister:

  I’ve decided I can’t go on anymore. Everything is hollow and not worth fighting for. I’m sorry. I hope you don’t think I’m a coward. Please give Cleo a big cuddle from me. I love you. Jake xxx

  She sent it and hurried home, tucking the phone into her pocket. She needed to get rid of it because, if she was found with it, everyone would know she’d been there when Jake died. She couldn’t throw it away now though. It would have her fingerprints all over it. She would dispose of it later. For the time being, she needed to hide it.

  Now, of course, she knew that when Jake said ‘You shouldn’t have run off’ he meant that she shouldn’t have split up with Daniel. But how was she supposed to have known that at the time? Why couldn’t he have been clearer? When he had looked ill, it was because he was drunk, not because she made him sick.

  She stared at the pregnancy test, still waiting for it to develop, and tried to remember what she’d done with the phone. The days following Jake’s death were so blurry. She had lost her mind for a while, until the night Gabor abducted her and Oscar.

  Somebody banged on the door of the toilet just as the result appeared on the test. She stared at it, hardly able to breathe.

  I don’t deserve to have a baby, she thought. I don’t deserve happiness. A coward, a liar, a murderer. What kind of mother would I be?

  ‘Are you coming out of there?’ The woman’s voice was shrill, desperate.

  ‘Yes, hang on.’

  She flushed the toilet and opened the door, trying to ignore the way the woman tutted at her as they passed. In her pocket was the pregnancy test, complete with two lines, a positive result, and as she walked back to her seat she made a decision.

  She was going to be a mother now. She had to put this behind her. She could never let Daniel find out what she had done. When Alina had lied to Daniel about killing Jake, she had gifted Laura the freedom to go on. Laura could learn from that, and from the way Daniel had lied for her too.

  It was time to shed her skin again. To shed the killer’s skin and start afresh.

  There would be no mo
re cowardice, no more lies, no more fear. As soon as she got home she was going to tell Daniel the good news about the baby. Their baby! What they had wanted right back at the start of all this. He would be so happy. They were going to be a family. And she made a vow to herself. She would never confess. Daniel could never know what she’d done.

  She found her way back to her seat, saw the inspector coming towards her and took the ticket out of her purse, smiling sweetly as he stamped it, trying to ignore the way the air shimmered behind him, the crack she’d tried so hard to seal splitting open again, evil pushing through into the world. She closed her eyes, counted to three and forced herself to open one eye. The crack was gone.

  For now.

  She had one other secret, hidden here in her bag. It had arrived in the post a couple of days ago, with a French postmark. It was issue two of a comic book called Mirela, drawn by hand, just thirty-two pages long. But those thirty-two pages told a familiar story: two couples meeting on a train, a black-clad girl being taken captive and subjected to unspeakable things, then her escape and, finally, vengeance. Laura had raced through the pages until she found the scene in which a young man falls from a bridge. The reader doesn’t see the hands that push him, just the terrible look on his face: the shock, the realisation.

  In another frame, Alina had drawn the heroine cradling a baby, both of them staring defiantly at the reader. Laura took the comic out now and turned to this illustration, looked at the baby, ran her finger over it.

  She laid her hands on her belly and a tear trickled down her cheek, attracting the attention of the woman opposite, who offered Laura a tissue. Struck by this gesture, by the kindness of strangers, Laura began to cry, then sob, then howl, until everyone in the carriage was either staring at her or huddled around her, trying to comfort her. The train moved on through the oblivious countryside, gliding into a dark tunnel. Laura braced herself, eyes shut tight, waiting to re-emerge into light, and at that moment she remembered, with a sickening lurch that had nothing to do with the motion of the train, what she’d done with Jake’s phone.

  THE END

  Letter from the Author

  Dear Reader

  Thank you for reading Follow You Home. I love hearing from readers and can be contacted in a variety of ways:

  Email me at markcity@me.com;

  Find me on Facebook.com/vossandedwards;

  Follow me on Twitter with the username @mredwards.

  Please note, the rest of this letter may contain spoilers, so please don’t read it until you’ve finished the book.

  Like my previous novels, The Magpies and Because She Loves Me, this novel was inspired by something that happened to me when I was younger, an experience that I took and turned into something much scarier in order to entertain my readers.

  When I was nineteen, my then-girlfriend and I scraped together our pennies so we could go Interrailing around Europe. We spent months planning our itinerary, intending to enjoy a whistle-stop tour of the Continent that would last the entire summer. The budget was tight but we were going to have the time of our lives.

  Three days into the trip we took a night train south to Avignon. We went into a private compartment and shut the door. Exhausted after a day trudging around Paris and a sleepless night on a noisy campsite, we fell asleep. When we woke up, the pouches we wore around our necks, which contained our Interrail tickets, passports and money, had been stolen. We ran up and down the train but, of course, the thieves were long gone. The reality of the situation sank in as we arrived in Avignon at dawn. Interrail tickets are not replaceable. Our Grand Tour was over before it had begun.

  We hitch-hiked to Marseille to obtain documents that would allow us to travel back to the UK, arriving late in the evening. We spent the night lying on the floor of the train station, drinking water from the taps in the public toilets, with no food . . . (I hope you have your violins out.) At one point, a shifty man approached and asked us if we would like him to buy us a hot meal . . . We refused and hid.

  Deciding to make the best of the situation, we hitch-hiked home, Marseilles to Calais, 663 miles. It took two weeks. And apart from the nights spent lying beside the autoroute, the rides with men who fortunately didn’t turn out to be serial killers, and an unfortunate incident with a packet of laxatives on a campsite near Dijon, we had a great time.

  When we got home, the English papers were full of stories about French bandits gassing tourists on night trains, sending them to sleep so they could steal the passengers’ possessions at their leisure. Though this may have been typical British paranoia about the French.

  I do hope that this book does not put anyone off visiting the beautiful, historic country where it is partly set. The bad guys in this novel are as fictional as the vampires of legend. Or to put it another way, monsters don’t only live in faraway forests. They are just as likely to live next door.

  But please, if you find yourself in a train carriage far from home, whatever you do, don’t fall asleep. And if you ever happen upon a creepy house in a dark forest, take my advice.

  Run.

  Thanks again for reading.

  Best wishes,

  Mark Edwards

  Acknowledgements

  I am extremely lucky to be surrounded by a small but perfectly formed support team who help me write and edit my books and get them into the world.

  Chief among these is my beautiful wife, Sara, who yet again did all the really hard work (taking care of our three kids) so I could hide away and write this book, allowing me to get away with saying ‘I can’t help—my brain is in a forest in Romania’ when she called me with news of the mayhem at home. Sara also read this novel before anyone else and made numerous astute suggestions as always.

  This is my fourth solo book with Amazon Publishing in the UK and I am grateful as always to the tireless and enthusiastic team there, including Emilie, Sana and Neil. Thanks too to David Downing, my editor, for his insight, honesty and wit.

  Thanks to my agent, Sam Copeland. Somebody should buy him the PlayStation 4 he craves. He’s worth it.

  To Louise Voss for patiently waiting for me to finish working on this book while we were meant to be writing our new one together.

  To the author Helen Fitzgerald for her extremely helpful advice that rang in my ears as I was writing this book.

  Two characters in this book were named after readers who won this dubious privilege in competitions on Facebook: Sophie Carpenter and Alina Ghinescu. Alina also helped me by reading the manuscript and checking the Romanian sections for accuracy.

  Thank you to Jonathan Hill who answered my pharmaceutical questions.

  Thanks to everyone at Latuske’s café in Wolverhampton for providing me with fuel for my writing: the best scrambled eggs and coffee in the West Midlands (and possibly the world).

  Last, but most importantly, thank you to the many readers who have contacted me over the last couple of years, via email, Twitter and Facebook. Your kind words kept me going when I thought I would never get myself or my characters out of that dark forest . . .

  About the Author

  Photo © 2014 Mark Earthy

  Mark writes psychological thrillers. He loves stories in which scary things happen to ordinary people and is inspired by writers such as Stephen King, Ira Levin, Ruth Rendell, Ian McEwan, Val McDermid and Donna Tartt.

  Mark is now a full-time writer. Before that, he once picked broad beans, answered complaint calls for a rail company, taught English in Japan and worked as a marketing director.

  Mark co-published a series of crime novels with Louise Voss. The Magpies was his first solo venture and topped the UK Kindle charts for three months when it was first released. Since its success, the novel has been re-edited and published by Thomas & Mercer on 26 November 2013. Because She Loves Me is his second spine-tingling thriller.

  He lives in England with his wife, their th
ree children and a ginger cat.

  He can be contacted at: markandlouise@me.com

  Twitter: @mredwards

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/vossandedwards

  Download a Free Story by Mark Edwards

  Consenting Adults

  A new short story featuring private detective Edward Rooney from Follow You Home.

  Set shortly before the events of Follow You Home, Edward Rooney is hired to find a missing Belarusian woman who was working illegally at a hotel in London.

  Has she run away with her boyfriend—or has something far more sinister happened to her?

  Download now at www.markedwardsauthor.com/free