I Found You

by Lisa Jewell

  Mark shook his head, a tiny jerk of a movement. ‘I told you, I was half-dead. Literally. I didn’t wake up until three days later. By that time the whole world thought I was dead. I couldn’t have gone back. I couldn’t go anywhere.’

  Gray clamped his hands to the sides of his head. ‘Fucking hell. She might be there. She might be there, on the rocks, right now. All these years and we might have been able to bury her. I mean, Jesus Christ, do you have even the slightest clue? My life has been … it’s been shit. It’s been shit. Because of you. Because of what you did to my family. What you did to my mother. To me. We were … we were a perfect family. Literally. The best family. Just boring and suburban and predictable and dull. All our furniture was brown. All our food was brown. Our car was brown. My sister was so innocent. And my parents were … Well, we didn’t exactly have lively conversations about current affairs over the dinner table. We didn’t talk about anything important, ever. And it didn’t matter. Because we didn’t matter. Nothing we did mattered or was ever going to change anything. In fact, you could have killed the whole fucking lot of us and it would have made no difference to anything. But we were perfect. And you destroyed us. You destroyed me.’ He stopped, aware of tears building in the base of his throat. ‘And what about your family? Your mum? How could you and Kitty let your mum think you were dead?’

  ‘Because …’ Mark sighed heavily. ‘My mum hated me. My father too. And me and Kitty, we had this bond. From when I was a child. And she just knew. Without me saying anything. She knew that whatever had happened had something to do with me. And she wanted to protect me because that’s what she always did. And then she heard via the Ridinghouse grapevine that you’d lost your memory, that the police were calling it misadventure, that they’d given up hope of ever finding the bodies. So she hid me away for two years. And all that time we were just waiting for the knock on the door, waiting to hear that you’d remembered. And it never came and you never did and bit by bit I started a new life. I moved down to Cornwall for a year, did cash-in-hand jobs, then up to Scotland, back down to Cornwall, kept as far from Harrogate as I could without a passport. Rented bedsits. Saved up enough to buy a fake identity. Got a job. Got promoted. Promoted again. And then I …’

  He stopped, cast his eyes right, towards his own apartment block. ‘I met a woman. Got married. It’s been hard, without a family. Doing everything by myself. Not having any real friends. But now, finally, I’ve got something. I’ve got someone. Someone all of my own.’ His phone began buzzing again, right on cue. He dropped his head into his chest, waited for it to stop, then looked up again. ‘And I love her more than I’ve loved anything in my life and …’

  Gray stared at him. And then he laughed.

  Mark flinched at the sound.

  ‘Seriously? You seriously expect me to feel sorry for you? Are you fucking nuts? Oh, yes, I forgot – you are.’

  A muscle in Mark’s cheek twitched and he tried once more to flick his hair from his eyes. ‘So, tell me, when exactly did your memory miraculously return?’

  ‘The minute I saw you, last week.’

  ‘You saw me, last week?’

  ‘Yeah. In town. Victoria. Going into your office. And it all came back. All of it.’

  ‘And what exactly do you remember?’

  Gray blanches as the scenario passes again through his mind’s eye. His voice shakes as he restates the details. ‘I remember it all. I remember you following us out into the garden. We were looking at the peacock. It was dancing. I remember that room you took us to. I remember you touching my sister. Trying to rape her. Then you following us down to the rocks, taking my sister into the water. My dad … dead … on the beach. All of it. All the stuff that’s been locked away in there for over twenty years. All the stuff that’s stopped me living my life. And now it’s out. I’ve remembered. And you’re finally going to pay for what you did. I’m going to call the police. They’re going to arrest you and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.’

  Mark laughed hoarsely. ‘Really? You think so? Based on the frankly unreliable memories of a man who was taking recreational drugs on the night in question? Who claimed at the time to remember nothing of what happened that night? Who miraculously regained his memory more than twenty years later? Do you really think they’d believe a man who is capable of taking someone off the street at knifepoint and breaking into private property and holding him prisoner? A man who, frankly, if you don’t mind me saying, looks quite, quite insane?’

  ‘But you pretended to be dead!’ said Gray. ‘You have a fake passport!’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘What do you mean, so I say?’

  ‘I mean, if you bring the police here I will simply tell them that I must bear some similarity to some man who died a long way from here, a long time ago, and that you attacked me and that you are very dangerous and possibly mad. I will deny all knowledge of being this so-called Mark Tate.’

  ‘But they’ll check your identity. They’ll know Carl Monrose doesn’t really exist.’

  Mark shook his head slowly. ‘I paid a lot of money for my ID. One hell of a lot of money. It’s police-proof. It’s everything-proof.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Mark shrugged. ‘I pay my taxes. I vote in elections. I travel abroad freely. I am Carl Monrose. Go on.’ He gestured towards Gray’s phone with a nod of his head. ‘Call them. See what happens to you then. Do it.’

  Gray stared hard at Mark and then down at his phone. A wave of nausea passed over him as the reality of his position became clear.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mark. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  The phone was damp inside Gray’s clammy fingers. He turned away from Mark. His body began to shake. He couldn’t think straight.

  ‘You may as well untie me,’ Mark said. ‘Untie me – let me go. You get on with your life. I get on with my life. Yes?’

  Gray spun round. ‘No!’ he said. ‘No! I haven’t got a life to get on with. Don’t you see? I haven’t got a fucking life because you took it away from me!’

  Mark sighed. His phone vibrated again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘She’s getting desperate now. She’ll be calling the police soon herself. They’ll track my phone to here. They’ll find an innocent man tied to a radiator and a wild-eyed lunatic with his prints all over a knife. Let me go now and I’ll tell her some lie about a delay on the train.’

  Gray closed his eyes and thought of his mother. Broken, alone, entirely dependent upon Gray for any semblance of meaningful life. He thought of the small things that made him human: his job, his students, his cat, his five-a-side football team. And then he thought of the humiliation of being taken away in a squad car to a strip-lit room, trying to explain himself to a pair of steely-faced detectives, who would look sadly at him over steepled fingers as though he was mad. And then he thought maybe he was mad. Surely? What had he been thinking? Stalking this man around London and Surrey? Kidnapping him off the streets? Tying him up? What had he been hoping to achieve?

  The phone vibrated again. The sound of it passed through his consciousness like broken glass. He waited until it went silent and then he turned to face Mark.

  He was smiling at him, smugly, like a car salesman about to close a deal on an unsellable car. ‘Come on, Graham. Let me go.’

  Red heat descended upon Gray.

  His vision blurred. His body shook. He lunged towards Mark with his arms outstretched.

  Fifty-four

  Lily grabs Frank’s arm and she almost shouts, ‘So? What? Did you kill him? Is he dead? Or is he still there? Tell me! Tell me now!’

  He stares at her blankly, shakes his head, and she cries out, ‘Enough!’ and pulls out her phone, but she pauses before pressing WPC Traviss’s number. What if this strange man is right? What if her husband did do those terrible things? What if they take him away and send him to prison? No, she decides, not the police. Not yet. Instead she takes her phone outside the café and brings up Russ’s number. He answers wit
hin one ring.

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘Russ, where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the office.’

  ‘Russ, you need to leave, now. You need to go to a place. It is called Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. It is a building development on London Road. Next to the flat where I live with Carl. There is no one there because it is bankrupt. You have to—’

  ‘Lily, stop. I’m at work, I’m about to walk into a meeting.’

  ‘You must not walk into the meeting, Russ. You must go to Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. It is Carl. He is there. I am with the man who put him there. He tied him to a radiator there. On Tuesday night. You must go now and find him. He is in apartment one. Please.’

  She hears him sighing. ‘Lily,’ he says softly, ‘start from the beginning. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in a café. In Ridinghouse Bay. I came in here to find out about the woman who owns that house. And there were these people here. And they heard me asking. And they have a friend who had lost his memory, who came here on Tuesday. And he saw the photo of Carl and he knew him. He says that Carl used to be called Mark, that something bad happened in this town twenty years ago, that Carl hurt someone. He says he followed him home last week, and took him into the building site and tied him up and left him there. So please, Russ, please go and find him! Now!’

  ‘Lily,’ he sighs, ‘I think maybe you should probably call the police?’

  ‘No! I can’t do that, Russ. This man, in the café, he says Carl was a criminal. That he did bad things. I don’t think I believe him …’ She pauses momentarily, thinking of that night when she’d woken up with his hands around her throat, of the blackness that descended on him for no discernible reason from time to time, the fake passport, the fake mother. ‘But still,’ she rallies, ‘I don’t want to take the risk. Not until I’ve seen him myself.’

  She hears the tone of his voice change, the acceptance softening him. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘OK.’ She hears the background noises stop, a door closing, a rustle of paper. She can tell that he has sat down. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘tell me exactly where this place is and what to do when I get there.’

  Fifty-five

  Alice glances at Lily through the window of the café. Then she passes Derry her door keys and says, ‘Can you pop back to mine – just quickly? Open the back door, let the dogs out. Ignore anything you find on the floor.’

  Derry shrugs and leaves. Lesley goes to the counter to buy another round of coffees. Outside the coffee shop, Lily paces and gesticulates while talking to whoever she is on the phone to.

  Alice turns to look at Frank. ‘How are you?’ she says, her hand resting on his shoulder.

  He shrugs.

  ‘Any more memories?’

  He stares through the window for a moment, then sighs and shakes his head.

  On the pavement outside, Lily has finished her phone call.

  ‘What did they say?’ says Alice when she walks back into the cafe.

  ‘I did not call the police,’ she says tersely. ‘I called my friend. He will go to the building site. Soon we will know.’ She looks at them, one by one. ‘What do we do now?’

  Lesley answers: ‘It’s obvious really, isn’t it? There’s only thing we can do. We need to find Kitty Tate.’

  ‘We should go back to the house,’ says Alice. ‘See if we can find an address for her there.’

  ‘I have looked in the house already,’ says Lily. ‘I found nothing.’

  ‘It’s a big house,’ says Alice gently. ‘Might be worth another search?’ This girl is just five years older than Jasmine. She imagines her daughter in a strange country frantically searching for the man who brought her there. She imagines how she and Frank and Lesley must appear to her: old and other, discomfitingly unfamiliar. She smiles at her for the first time.

  Lily wavers for a split second but then pulls back her shoulders and her resolve. ‘You can do that,’ she says. ‘I will keep asking the people in this town. I will come later.’

  Alice watches her turn and leave the café, hesitating momentarily in the doorway before turning left. What twist of fate brought this girl to this quiet, gently bohemian town hidden away in a dip of the Yorkshire coast? And what would she be doing now, right now, if Mark Tate had never walked into her life?

  She pictures him now, tied to a radiator in an empty flat. And she thinks of what the man she knows as Frank says he had to do to put him there: the knife to the throat, the bag over the head, the tying of hands and the issuing of threats, the kidnapping and the taking hostage. She cannot conflate these actions with the soft man who has been living in her house for the past five days, the man she has slept with, who has sat with her daughter in the early hours of the morning, who has been befriended by her least trusting dog and given the seal of approval by her teenage son. She is reminded once again that the man she found on the beach last week was not a man at all, just an empty box in which to put whatever she wanted. She’d imbued him with qualities and character traits that suited her. She’d ignored the possibility that underneath the gentle, golden façade, Frank might well be a sociopath or even a killer. She’d put her children in danger. She’d put herself in danger.

  And yet still, as she walks with him, side by side, towards Kitty Tate’s house, her heart aches for him, her arms yearn to embrace him. Whatever he is. Whoever he is. Whatever he has done.

  *

  Frank turns to Alice and smiles uncertainly. What is she thinking? he wonders. Is she regretting every minute she has spent in his company? Is she recoiling at the memories of their night together? Is she already repainting him in her mind’s eye as the twisted monster that he might well turn out to be?

  From the very beginning of his slow emergence from the fugue he has felt echoes of violence, of hands around a throat, the slow burn of murderousness. What will Lily’s friend find when he opens the door to apartment number one? An empty room? A dead body?

  He finds that he has begun walking away from the others as they head up the hill towards the main road out of town.

  ‘Frank? Where are you going?’ calls Alice.

  He looks up at them and then down towards the coastal road. ‘Can we …? Just quickly?’

  Something’s tugging him down the hill, down that alleyway, towards the sea. He’s walked this way before. Many, many times. The others nod and follow him and as he emerges from the other end of the narrow alleyway he instinctively turns right and there it is, Rabbit Cottage. Except it’s not called Rabbit Cottage any more. The engraved slate plaque outside says ‘Ivy Cottage’. It’s been painted a soft sky blue and the windows have been replaced with double glazing.

  He stares at the tiny house and feels his soul opening up like a sinkhole. This was the last place they’d all been together. If he’d come home from the pub that night with his family, if he’d stayed with his family instead of chasing girls, if he hadn’t drunk three shots of tequila and brought those people here, they’d all have gone to bed that night, woken up together, spent another day together, and another, and another; they’d have driven back south together, spent the rest of their lives together. Kirsty would have met a man who wasn’t mentally ill; Gray would have had a niece or a nephew, a brother-in-law. He may even have had a wife of his own, a child or two. His mother would have dealt with her empty nest like a normal human being instead of an anxiety-ridden lunatic. His father would have grown older and greyer and they would have been normal and boring and perfect forever and ever.

  It was all his fault. All of it. All of it.

  Derry appears then from the mouth of a cobbled alleyway, holding Alice’s door keys. She looks at them in surprise. ‘Nice of you all to say where you were going,’ she says. ‘Just went back to the Sugar Bowl; woman outside said she saw you all heading this way.’

  Alice apologises and Derry shrugs and puts her hands in her pockets. They all start walking towards town. Frank finds himself side by side with Derry. For a while they walk in silence, then Derry says, ‘So, Frank, did you k
ill him?’

  He starts. ‘What?’

  ‘Mark Tate. Did you kill him? You keep looking at your fingers’ – she glances down at his hands – ‘like you don’t recognise them. Like they don’t belong to you.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘I mean … it would be the logical explanation. It would explain your memory loss, your midnight flit to the middle of nowhere. Wouldn’t it?’

  He looks at her, trying to gauge her stance. Is she challenging him? Attacking him? Or merely trying to introduce him to some interesting concepts?

  ‘I genuinely don’t know,’ he says. ‘I might have killed him, yes. I might well have. And with my hands.’

  ‘And if you have?’

  ‘Then he deserved to die. And I deserve to go to prison for what I did.’ He shrugs, feeling a sense of balance and release at this idea.

  They walk the rest of the way in silence.

  Fifty-six

  Mark’s phone rang again.

  Gray stopped dead, stepped back from Mark, dragged his fingers through his hair. The concerned wife. He pictured her perched nervously on the edge of a sofa, a wrinkled tissue in her curled-up hands, pressing the call button, obsessively, over and over. She would keep pressing it until Mark’s phone ran out of charge. He leaned down and yanked the phone from Mark’s pocket and then, uttering a deathly, reverberating war cry, he hurled it across the room. It hit the extractor hood with a terrible crack, skidded across the kitchen floor and came to rest in the far corner. The bulb in the extractor hood fizzed and blinked. Then silence fell upon them and Gray felt a wave of relief.

  ‘Nice one, you twat,’ said Mark. ‘Now she’ll be even more worried. You really are a loser.’

  The rage, momentarily quelled, resurfaced, twice as red, twice as strong.

  And then Gray finally succumbed to the primal urge that had been haunting him since the first time he’d set eyes on Mark Tate twenty-two years ago and he let his hands lead him to Mark Tate and he watched as they circled together around his neck and he mentally applauded his hands as they worked together to squeeze the breath out of Mark Tate, to squeeze and obstruct and block until finally Mark Tate stopped fighting Gray’s hands, until finally he softened, flopped into himself, stopped breathing, shut the fuck up, for ever.