In Her Shadow

by Mark Edwards

  She had no choice but to tell him. He unlocked it, navigated to her voicemails and laid the phone on the floor between them.

  Will’s voice came out of the speaker. It took a moment for her to recognise it, because this was not the confident, laid-back voice she knew. This was a tremulous, terrified version, something cracking in his throat, the words emerging hesitantly, like an actor being forced to recite lines at gunpoint.

  ‘Jessica,’ Will said on the recording, ‘I have something important to tell you. It was me. I murdered Isabel. I was . . .’ He broke off and muttered something, and she heard another harsh voice in the background. ‘I was sleeping with her and . . . I pushed her off that balcony.’

  Ryan pointed at the phone as Will’s confession continued. There was triumph in his eyes. Spittle flew from his lips as he spoke. ‘Are you listening to this?’

  Jessica had slowly backed up until her heels touched the bottom stair. Again she tried to ensure her voice was calm, though there was a tremor there, echoing the distress in Will’s voice as he continued to talk on the voicemail. ‘Will didn’t kill Isabel. That’s not a real confession. I can hear you in the background, forcing him to say it.’

  Ryan pressed stop on the voicemail and laughed. ‘You stupid, trusting bitch. You don’t know. You don’t know what I saw. What I heard.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Jessica asked. ‘Where is Will?’

  Ryan pointed the blade of Jessica’s knife towards the ceiling. He grinned, his unnaturally white teeth glowing in the gloom. ‘He’s here,’ he said. ‘Do you want to hear him confess to your face?’

  Chapter 41

  Ryan forced Jessica upstairs, the knife at her back.

  ‘Along here,’ he said when they reached the landing.

  It was dark and Jessica had to feel her way along the wall. She could hear Ryan breathing heavily behind her as she made her way towards a door which was edged with light.

  ‘Open it,’ Ryan said.

  She did as he told her, grasping the handle and pushing the door open. Bright light from within momentarily dazzled her. Ryan put a hand on her back and pushed her inside, following her in and shutting the door behind him.

  ‘Oh . . . Oh, Will!’

  He was lying on his side on the floor, in a foetal position, with his eyes closed. Asleep – or unconscious. Jessica stepped closer. His T-shirt was rucked up to expose his belly and one shoe was missing. There was blood on the one hand she could see. It appeared one of his fingernails was missing. His face was even worse, covered with fresh bruises, and there was a gash across his upturned cheek. His lip was split too and, with horror, Jessica saw a small white object lying in a puddle of blood not far from his face. A tooth.

  A baseball bat was propped against the wall on the far side of the room. Next to it, a pair of pliers. Apart from these objects, and Will, the room was completely empty.

  Jessica threw herself on to the floor beside her husband, whispering his name and gently stroking the side of his head. He made a low moaning sound but didn’t open his eyes.

  She looked up at Ryan, who was standing in the doorway, holding the knife by his side.

  ‘You animal,’ she spat. ‘This was how you got him to leave me that message? You beat him? Tortured him? You really think his confession means anything?’

  Ryan gazed down at her. He was no longer bouncing around. He was still, but there was a flicker of doubt on his face.

  ‘Will didn’t push Izzy,’ she said. ‘Olivia spelled out Daddy because she doesn’t know how to spell anything else. You’re her teaching assistant. You should know that.’

  He shook his head. ‘It was him. I know it was him. Olivia passed the message on, but you didn’t do anything about it. You were supposed to get him to admit it, Jess. But you backed away . . . Too cowardly, too blinkered and stupid to accept the truth.’

  There was something missing here. A piece of the puzzle.

  ‘How did you know what I was thinking?’ she asked, but the realisation hit her as soon as the words left her mouth. ‘It was Pete, wasn’t it? You talked to him at the RAFA Club?’ Mum must have recounted their conversation, when Jessica had accused her of everything, to Pete.

  ‘Oh yes. We’ve become good friends, Pete and me. He loves a good gossip.’

  Jessica cursed silently. She guessed Pete had been feeding information back to Ryan all along, unaware of the damage he was doing.

  She stroked Will’s head softly and tried to keep her voice even. ‘You’re wrong about Will. You’re the one who was following Izzy around. You were stalking her. Do you know what I think? I think you killed her.’

  ‘Me? I loved her! I would never have harmed her!’

  He took a step towards her, waving the knife in front of him, and she flinched away.

  ‘Okay.’ She held up both palms, trying to pacify him. From the corner of her eye she could see the baseball bat. Could she reach it and strike Ryan with it before he stabbed her? He was pacing the floor now, lips moving like he was arguing with himself.

  He stopped and pointed a finger at her.

  ‘I wasn’t stalking her.’

  ‘Okay . . .’

  ‘I just wanted to be close to her.’

  She breathed deeply, refusing to allow herself to say what she longed to say. Instead she said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘And if I hadn’t been watching out for her, no one would know what happened to her.’

  Jessica’s heart skipped. The way he was talking, the whining tone, reminded her of a little boy, agitated and confused. A boy who had never grown up. She used the same voice when Felix was upset. ‘What was that, Ryan?’

  He had started pacing again. ‘I loved her from the moment I met her at school. She was so sad and lonely and the other girls, those bitches, they were bullying her. I was there for her! I told her I believed her when she claimed to have a ghost. I made her smile, Jess. I made her smile.’

  Jessica took a deep breath. ‘That’s . . . I’m sure she appreciated it.’

  ‘No!’ he yelled. Beside her, Will stirred, but still didn’t open his eyes. ‘We had a wonderful time together, the best day of my life, but something . . . something made her go off me. I think it was those slags, Parminder and Sharon and Julie. They told her I wasn’t good enough for her. Told her I was a loser. She dumped me!’ He clenched his teeth together, jaw muscles flexing.

  ‘So you hated her?’ Jessica asked.

  Were there tears in his eyes? He rubbed at them with the back of his hand. When he spoke, his voice was croaky. ‘No. I still loved her.’ He pushed his palm against his chest. ‘Always. And I went through years of agony, seeing her at school. My heart never had a chance to heal because she tore the wound open every day.’

  ‘I loved her too,’ Jessica said.

  He didn’t seem to hear. ‘When we left school I didn’t see her for a long time. I didn’t go to university, but I went away. Mum gave me some money and I went travelling. I lived in Thailand for a while. I had a girlfriend out there, a local girl. She was sweet. Compliant. She helped me forget all about your sister. But then, well, we broke up and I came back to this shithole. That was in 2012.’

  Jessica nodded for him to go on.

  ‘Almost the first thing I saw when I returned to Beckenham was a story about Izzy in the local paper. A sex therapist! I always knew she’d do something remarkable. And seeing her in the paper, it was like – like a sign that we were meant to be together. I found out she was going to a business networking event, and I went up to talk to her afterwards. She didn’t recognise me.’

  ‘That must have been hard.’

  He sneered. ‘Hard? Hard? It felt like she’d stabbed me, right here.’ He pointed the tip of the knife at his heart.

  ‘So you wanted to get back at her?’ Jessica suggested, trying to sound matter-of-fact. ‘I can understand that.’

  Ryan turned the knife around, pointing it back at Jessica. She glanced over at the baseball bat again. Beside her, Will moaned
softly.

  ‘No. You don’t understand,’ Ryan said.

  ‘So tell me, Ryan.’

  He opened his mouth. Shut it. Let out a humourless laugh. Then he met Jessica’s eye. ‘All I wanted was to be near her, to be in her orbit. And yes, I wanted her to notice me. To acknowledge my fucking existence. That’s why I followed her and took photos of her. I was trying to learn everything about her, the woman she had become. I was trying to work out a strategy . . .’

  He fell quiet and Jessica said, ‘A strategy to make her notice you?’

  ‘To make her love me.’ His voice had become high-pitched and desperate. ‘And I was getting there, Jess. I was figuring it out. Getting into her head.’ He stared at the carpet. ‘But then it was too late. She was dead.’

  Jess snuck another look at the baseball bat. If only she were a metre closer, she was confident she could leap over there and grab it before Ryan stopped her. Maybe if she shuffled towards it, inch by inch . . .

  Ryan sniffed loudly, drawing her attention back to him. His shoulders shook. He was crying.

  He took a shuddering breath and raised his tear-streaked face. ‘We lost her, Jess. Not just you. I lost her as well.’

  For a moment her pity almost returned, came close to becoming empathy. The shared grief of losing someone they both loved. But she caught herself. How dare he equate his feelings with hers? She was Izzy’s sister. Ryan . . . He was her fucking stalker.

  She was about to tell him this when Will spoke.

  ‘You’re pathetic,’ he said.

  Startled, Jessica scooted closer to him. He had one eye open; the other was sealed shut by his injuries. His voice was thick with pain. He tried to roll on to his back, gasping as he did so, revealing the gap where his lost tooth had been. Jessica held his shoulders gently, urged him to lie still.

  ‘I didn’t kill her,’ he whispered.

  ‘I know.’

  A shadow stretched across the floor. Ryan was there, looming over them. He had wiped away his tears but he still looked wretched. ‘Liar! I saw you!’ he yelled at Will. ‘The day she died . . . You were there.’

  Chapter 42

  March 2013

  The sky was crowded with fat, grey clouds but Ryan was sweating. He had parked his mum’s car in its usual spot in the cul-de-sac behind The Heights. From here, when the trees were bare, he had a perfect view of Isabel’s house. The balcony on which she often stood, his very own Juliet. Sometimes he imagined himself below, calling up to her, and then he would imagine them both dying, poison rushing through their veins, a beautiful suicide pact, the only way they could be together. Star-crossed lovers, together forever in the afterlife.

  It was funny. After leaving school, Ryan had done everything he could to forget about Isabel. He had moved away, first into central London and then, after a few years doing dead-end jobs, he’d trained as an EFL teacher and gone abroad. He went to Japan first, and then to Thailand, where he’d lived for the best part of a decade. He’d had a girlfriend over there, Phaelin, and they were happy for a while, but she never made him feel like Izzy had. When he got into one of his black moods he would take it out on her.

  When he eventually pushed her too far, she left him and told her older brothers what Ryan had done to her. Suddenly Thailand wasn’t a safe place to be. Plus his mum was getting old and less healthy, and he thought he’d better remind her of his existence before she signed his inheritance over to someone else, so he came home. Back to Beckenham.

  And who had he spotted just a few days after he got back? Isabel. And, just like that, all the old feelings – the obsessive love, the pain, the longing to be close to her – came rushing back.

  She was the one who got away. And the more he thought about it, the more he came to believe that his life so far had been shit because of her absence from it.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t too late to change that.

  He gazed up at the house for a little while, watching for signs of life. He’d got here a little later than usual, so had missed seeing Isabel drinking her morning coffee. The house seemed quiet, empty. Just as he had hoped.

  He got out of the car and, checking there were no nosy neighbours spying on him, he walked around the fence that ringed Isabel and Darpak’s house. On one of his previous recces he had discovered a loose fence panel, hidden by trees. Over the weeks, he had worked at it, wriggling and tugging at it like a child working at a loose tooth, until it could now be easily pulled aside.

  Sucking in his belly, he was just about able to squeeze through.

  More trees stood around the edge of the garden, and he used these to conceal himself – though he was confident no one was home – as he approached the house and slipped down the side passage to the front courtyard.

  Darpak’s car was here but that wasn’t a surprise. He often took a cab or walked to the station if he had a meeting in town. It was extremely rare for the man Ryan thought of as his love rival to be at home after 9.30 on a weekday morning. Isabel often hung around a little longer, but her car wasn’t here. She must have gone out.

  He went back round to the garden and, trying to ignore the spasms of excitement and fear in his chest, reached into the stone planter that stood to the left of the patio. A couple of months ago he had watched Darpak and Isabel arrive home and, after a short while, fish something out of this planter. Shortly afterwards, Darpak had come back and dropped a small object back into it.

  The object Ryan now held in his hand. Their spare front door key.

  He went back round and stood on the doorstep. This was the most nerve-wracking part. The emblem of a security company was attached to the wall above where he stood, but he wasn’t sure if his beloved regularly armed the burglar alarm before going out. His mum had a burglar alarm and she almost always forgot to arm it, believing that the security logo outside was enough of a deterrent. Ryan had recently watched a documentary in which a cop had explained that a high percentage of people were just like his mother.

  He had decided to risk it. If an alarm went off, he would run. No harm would be done. He would just have to figure out another way of getting into Isabel’s home.

  He slid the key into the lock, counted to three and turned it.

  No alarm sounded.

  He pushed the door open. Still no alarm.

  He was in. For the second time in his life he was inside Isabel’s home. Okay, the first time he had been invited, but this occasion was almost as thrilling. He had to take a moment to compose himself, to stop his heart exploding out of his chest.

  He headed towards the stairs. He didn’t want to be in here long, even though he would love to spend hours exploring Isabel’s domain. Sitting on her sofa. Putting his lips to the cup from which she drank her morning coffee. Pressing her clothes against his skin.

  A delicious notion came to him. She would have a laundry basket somewhere. In her bedroom, probably. And in that basket he would be sure to find some items of her underwear . . .

  His heart was pounding again now as he pictured himself pressing a pair of her panties to his face, inhaling her sweet scent. They would surely be lacy, expensive. But it wouldn’t matter if they were tatty and cheap. If they were hers, he would treasure them forever.

  That was all he wanted: some new mementoes. A few items that she wouldn’t miss, that she would think she had misplaced. While he was here he also planned to take some photos of her bedroom, so he could update the shrine at his mum’s place. Isabel wasn’t a girl any more. She was a grown woman, and he wanted his shrine to reflect that. He was sure he could source whatever art hung on her bedroom walls, could find the bedding, replicate the technology . . .

  Oh God . . . Would she have a vibrator in her bedside drawer? He wouldn’t dare to take that – she would miss it – but the idea of touching it was exquisite, making him so turned on that he was finding it difficult to walk up the stairs. He had to stop for a moment, forcing himself to think of something repulsive – he imagined pulling Darpak’s dirty boxer shor
ts from the laundry basket – so he was able to carry on.

  He reached the top of the stairs, and the doorbell rang.

  He froze.

  He was able, once his pulse had slowed, to convince himself it was nothing to worry about. Probably just the postman. He began to creep slowly along the hallway, wondering which of the doors led to the master bedroom, when the bell sounded again.

  And he heard movement from within one of the rooms along the hallway. A splashing sound, then a soft thump.

  Someone was home!

  The doorbell sounded again and he heard Isabel call out, ‘Hold your horses!’

  Oh shit. Oh fuck. Isabel was here! Just beyond that door. And he could hear her coming towards him.

  Panicking, he looked around wildly. There was a door behind him. He pulled it open and found himself staring into a closet. Quickly, he ducked inside and closed the door. There was no handle on the inside and he wasn’t able to pull it fully shut, so it remained ajar an inch. He heard Isabel’s quiet footsteps coming towards him and he sucked down a breath, convinced she was going to find him and that he was going to have a terrible time explaining himself. But she ran down the stairs and said something to someone. Please, he prayed, let it be the postman. But then, a few seconds later, he heard the front door shut and the bass rumble of a man’s voice.

  They were coming up the stairs.

  He strained, trying to work out who it was. He had watched videos on YouTube of Darpak giving dull business presentations, and he didn’t think it was him. Then he heard Isabel laugh and say, ‘Oh, Will.’

  Huddled in the dark closet, dust tickling his nose, Ryan gritted his teeth. Will! What the fuck was he doing here? Over the last few weeks, he’d watched Jessica’s husband come and go several times. Were they having an affair? He hadn’t dared believe it – the thought that Isabel could be sleeping with two other men was unbearable – and Will hadn’t been here for a week or two, so he had stopped worrying about it.