I Found You

by Lisa Jewell

  She listens to the silence on the other end of the line. She imagines Beverley Traviss’s pen suspended above her notepad, her jaw hanging slightly ajar.

  ‘Where are you?’ WPC Traviss asks, and Lily can hear an unfamiliar tone of concern in her voice.

  Lily tells her.

  ‘Don’t move,’ says WPC Traviss. ‘Stay where you are. I’ll liaise with Yorkshire Constabulary. Get them to send a squad car right away.’

  Lily hangs up and looks at the others.

  ‘There,’ she says, ‘it is done.’

  She rests her phone on the table and feels her heart break in two.

  PART FOUR

  Ridinghouse Gazette

  Friday 24 April 2015

  Local Man Arrested Twenty Years After ‘Drowning’

  by

  Lesley Wade

  Former Coxwold and Ridinghouse Bay resident Mark Tate, 40, was arrested late on Wednesday night on historical abduction and assault charges after an intensive police search spanning three counties that ended in a hostage-taking situation in a bed-and-breakfast establishment in the Highlands of Scotland.

  Tate was believed to have ‘drowned’ twenty-two years ago in a tragic accident off the coast of Ridinghouse Bay in the early hours of Monday 2 August 1993. Reports at the time claimed that a party at his aunt’s house on Ridinghouse Lane had got out of hand and he and one of his guests, Kirsty Ross, 15, had drowned during a late-night swim whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

  Kirsty Ross’s father, Antony Ross, also died that night after suffering a fatal heart attack while trying to save the youngsters from the sea. Her brother, Graham Ross, suffered long-term memory loss as a result of the trauma and was never able to recall what exactly had led up to the drownings.

  However, in an extraordinary series of events earlier this month, Graham Ross, 39, recovered his memories of the night of the drownings after seeing a man he believed to be Mark Tate on the streets of Victoria in central London. He subsequently followed the man home from work and imprisoned him in an empty flat near the accused’s home, where, under duress, the accused confessed to faking his own death on the night in question.

  Mistakenly believing that he had killed Tate, Ross fled to Ridinghouse Bay where he suffered another episode of severe memory loss. Local artist, Alice Lake, 41, rescued him from the beach outside her house on the evening of Wednesday 15 April and has been helping him try to recover his memory ever since. A chance meeting between Ms Lake and Mr Ross, and Mark Tate’s current wife, Liljana Monrose, 21, in the Sugar Bowl Café on the High Street on Monday morning led them all to the home of Tate’s aunt, Mrs Katharine Tate, 62, of Coxwold.

  It was here that the full story of the events of 2 August 1993 was finally revealed, leading to Mrs Monrose calling the police and the subsequent nationwide police hunt for Mr Tate.

  Mr Tate was recognised by the landlady of his remote bed and breakfast in Loch Hourn, Invergarry, in the Highlands of Scotland from a photo she’d seen in a newspaper that morning. Unaware of the police hunt due to lack of internet or television access, Mr Tate was taken by surprise by the police and, according to local reports, took the landlady and her daughter hostage in a locked room. The siege lasted for three hours before police managed to knock the door down and disarm Tate. He is currently being held for questioning at Invergarry Police Station, on historical charges of assault, sexual assault, abduction, unlawful burial, identity fraud, blackmail and drug dealing.

  After receiving his DNA test results, it is also possible that police will be questioning Tate about a string of sexual assaults on women over the preceding twenty-two years, but this has not yet been confirmed.

  In Next Week’s Ridinghouse Gazette:

  Lesley Wade’s exclusive report from the day that Graham Ross met Katharine Tate and finally found out what really happened to his sister all those years ago.

  Sixty

  Lily lets herself into the flat. She has not been here since she left on Sunday but it is clear the moment she walks in that he has been here. He has rearranged the cushions on the sofa. He has taken things from the wardrobes in the bedroom. His overnight case is gone. He has showered and rehung his bath towel in the very particular way in which he always used to hang his bath towel. His toothbrush is gone; the tap is shining extra brightly. He has eaten lots of the unhealthy food she bought last week and carefully disposed of the wrappings in the recycling bin. He has emptied the waste bin and put a clean bag in the container. He has taken the cash she left behind, about five hundred pounds, and he has taken his phone charger, his Puffa jacket and his walking boots.

  And there, tucked into the frame of the mirror over the fake fireplace, is an envelope, with her name on it. She takes off her coat and hangs it in the hallway. Then she returns and plucks the envelope from the mirror. She sits and she opens it and she reads it, her heart pounding hard beneath her ribs.

  Darling Lily,

  I have had to go somewhere far away. I want you to know that I have not been away from you all this time out of choice. A man took me, tried to kill me, left me for dead. I wish I could explain to you what happened, but I can’t. It’s very complicated and it’s to do with things that happened a long time ago. I see my passport has gone. I assume the police needed it when you reported me missing? It is possible they may tell you something strange about my passport. Don’t pay any attention. I am Carl Monrose. I have always been Carl Monrose, the man you fell in love with, the man who fell in love with you. Whatever they try to tell you about other people, that’s not me. Carl Monrose is a good person, who has a good job and married a good woman. Anything else doesn’t matter.

  I’ll try to call you – I don’t know when. It might be a long time. Please don’t look for me. You won’t be able to find me. And if a man called Graham Ross tries to get in contact with you, please don’t talk to him. He is mad and he is dangerous and he is a liar.

  There is a small amount of money in our bank account, a few hundred. I’ve enclosed the card. The PIN is 6709. I’m sorry there’s not more. And I’m sorry I had to take the cash. Also, and this is hard to say, the flat is rented. I wasn’t entirely honest with you about that and I know I may have given you the impression that I owned it. So I’m afraid unless you can pay the next rent instalment, which is due on 13 May, you may need to find somewhere else to live. I’m sorry for this slip in my transparency with you. I just wanted you to feel secure.

  Every minute I have spent with you has been perfect, Lily. I wish I had met you twenty years ago. Maybe none of this would have happened. I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything in my whole stupid life.

  Stay amazing, my love, and forgive me,

  Carl

  Lily folds the note back into a rectangle and slides it into the envelope. She puts the cash card into her handbag and she sighs. A slip in my transparency. She could almost laugh out loud. Here he is, lying to her from beyond the mists of time. Or is he? Maybe her husband truly believed he was Carl Monrose, all-round good guy and enigmatic everyman. Maybe she had cured him of his badness, if only temporarily. She thinks of the poor woman in Scotland, with her teenage daughter, and how they must have felt locked in that room with Carl for all those hours. And then she realises that those people weren’t in a room with Carl Monrose, they were in a room with Mark Tate. And this comforts her.

  She slides the note into the outside pocket of her handbag. She will give it to Beverly Traviss. She doesn’t want it, not even as a souvenir. Then quickly she packs a suitcase, with as much as she can squeeze into it. She can come back for the rest another day. She peers from the window in the living room and waves at Russ, sitting at the wheel of his people carrier, reading the Saturday papers. He waves back at her and she gives him the thumbs up.

  She’s going to be Russ and Jo’s au pair. Russ had the idea on the way back from Ridinghouse, he said. Mooted it to Jo who, in a moment of sleep-deprived desperation, agreed to a trial few days, and Lily has been stay
ing with them since leaving Yorkshire, while the police searched the flat for evidence. It is a ridiculous turn of events. She doesn’t even like babies. But, actually, Darcy is quite a pleasant baby. She didn’t even cry when Jo first put her in her arms, just stared at her as if to say: You look all right. Jo said, ‘She likes you!’ and then, ‘Did you know that babies are genetically programmed to prefer people with pretty faces? It’s because they look more like babies.’ Which Lily took to be a compliment. But it might not have been. Jo is perfectly nice, if a bit brittle. But more than that she is so very grateful to Lily because now she can go to the gym sometimes and have a little lie-down during the day and meet a friend for lunch every now and then. They will give her fifty pounds a week. That’s fine. And Russ has given her his old laptop so she can continue her distance-learning accountancy course. Also, Putney is lovely. Much nicer than Oxted. Eventually, hopefully, when she has graduated, she would like to have her own flat here. And maybe, one day – not yet – marry a nice Englishman. She likes Englishmen very much. The women, she is not so sure about, but she is getting used to them. Or maybe it is the other way round.

  There is one more thing she needs to do before she leaves this flat. She opens her jewellery box in the bedroom and she searches through the tangle of tacky costume jewellery that she’d brought to England with her from the Ukraine in anticipation of the nights in ritzy nightclubs and celebrity-filled restaurants she’d foolishly imagined might be waiting for her over here. She pulls out a small suedette pouch and peers inside. There are the wedding rings she found in Carl’s filing cabinet. She knows whom they belong to now. They belong to a woman in Wales called Amanda Jones. She married Mark Tate in 2006 after a whirlwind four-week romance. He told her his name was Charles Moore. When she started asking him too many questions about who he was and where he came from, when she started going through his personal belongings trying to find clues to the man she married, he walked out, taking her rings from her finger and calling her a whore.

  Amanda Jones recognised his picture from the newspaper reports and turned up at her local police station. She’s remarried now and has a small child. Lily will send her the rings. The money will come in useful for her, Lily is sure.

  Then she takes one more look around the flat where she spent ten days of her life married to someone called Carl Monrose and she closes the door behind her.

  As Russ pulls away from the car park, they drive past Wolf’s Hill Boulevard and Lily looks up at the flat on the first floor. The light is still flickering. She wonders again what it was about that light that had so troubled her in those days when she was here alone. And then she remembers sitting on the sofa, calling her husband’s phone, frantically, insanely, again and again, and then the sound of an animal roaring, so loud that she’d thought of the wolves that disturbed her sleep sometimes in Kiev. And then … silence. Her calls stopped going through. It was the sound, she now knew, not of a displaced wolf but of Graham Ross throwing her husband’s phone against the cooker hood, just before he tried to strangle him to death. It was the sound of a tortured man finally acknowledging his pain.

  She’d heard it and she’d buried it, deep inside her subconscious.

  A sign by the road says: ‘Central London 12’.

  She turns to Russ, a kind man, and she smiles.

  Sixty-one

  Alice turns the lights down in her bedroom, leaving just the kind light of a black-shaded lamp to illuminate her face. She places a large glass of wine on her desk and then goes to the mirror where she prods at her disastrous hair with blunt fingernails. The time is 7.58 p.m. For two minutes she paces back and forth, stopping at the mirror every few seconds to check that her appearance hasn’t suddenly deteriorated further. Then it comes, the lullaby plip-plop-plip of a Skype call. She rushes to her desk and breathes in hard, clears her throat, presses reply.

  And there he is: ‘Hello, Alice.’

  ‘Hi!’

  He looks tired.

  ‘How are you?’ she continues.

  ‘I’m … aaah, well, what can I say? Not so good.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Turns out I’m not very good at being Gray Ross. Turns out I suck at it.’

  ‘Oh, Frank …’

  He smiles. ‘I do like being called Frank,’ he says dreamily. ‘I miss it.’

  ‘You’ll always be Frank to me,’ she says.

  ‘I know. I know. That makes me feel …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kind of sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t like being Gray. You know, the kids at school call me Fifty Shades.’ He sighs and Alice laughs loudly.

  ‘That’s hilarious!’

  ‘I suppose so. But it’s not that. It’s everything. I mean …’ The image on the screen moves as he picks up his laptop and moves it around. ‘Look at my flat, Alice. Seriously. Look at it.’

  He pans the webcam around a square room with yellow walls. There are piles of paperwork everywhere, a scruffy cream sofa, a cheap ceramic table lamp. Then he takes her into an unmodernised bathroom with a threadbare bathmat hanging at a slapdash angle on the side of the bath and a dead plant in a pot on the windowsill. His kitchen is piled with dirty dishes and his bedroom has an unmade bed at its centre and broken venetian blinds at the windows.

  ‘Everything was as I left it. Seriously. This is how I live.’

  ‘I’ve seen much worse,’ says Alice. ‘Where’s Brenda?’

  ‘Hold on …’ The image jerks as he searches his flat. Then: ‘Hello, gorgeous, there you are.’ The camera zooms in on a stripy red cat sitting curled up on a pile of dirty sheets.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘she’s lovely!’

  ‘She hates me,’ he says. ‘She’s been sulking ever since I got back.’

  Alice laughs; she can’t help it.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ he protests. ‘As far as I can tell she was the only friend I had in the world. Seriously, Alice. You wouldn’t want to know me.’

  She laughs again.

  ‘No. I’m being serious. I’m pretty much an alcoholic. Or I was – the fugue seems to have knocked that on the head, thank God. But, Christ, the recycling is ninety-nine per cent beer cans and vodka bottles. I don’t know how I hung on to my job for so long. I’d been given warnings about coming in late and unprepared. Had a reputation for smelling of stale alcohol. And, according to my mum, I’m distant and I don’t call her enough. So.’ He shrugs, makes an L out of his thumb and forefinger and holds it in front of his face. ‘Loser.’

  Alice smiles. ‘Well, then,’ she says, ‘that just about makes us quits.’

  He sighs and his face becomes serious. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I’ve made a decision. Pretty monumental. I’m in a really bad place. I’m guilt-ridden and I’m angry and I hate my life and I can’t move on. I just can’t. I’ve been seeing my therapist again but it doesn’t seem to be helping so he’s recommended some time away.’ He pauses and his eyes drop to his lap. ‘He’s suggested admitting myself into a psychiatric ward. Just for a little while. Get to the bottom of this memory issue I seem to have. Get to the bottom of me. And I think he’s right.’

  ‘How long?’ Alice feels panicky. She’d been going to invite him up for a weekend visit, had deliberately left the next four weekends clear to ensure that he’d be able to come.

  ‘No idea. Four weeks minimum. Maybe longer. I just …’ He sighs loudly. ‘I can’t be around anyone like this. I can’t be around you. And I’d like to be around you. I really would.’

  Alice smiles. ‘I’d like to be around you, too.’

  He brightens and straightens up. ‘Show me the dogs,’ he says. ‘I want to see the dogs.’

  ‘OK!’ She lifts the laptop and takes it to her bed where Griff is stretched out and yawning. The dog wags his tail lazily when he hears Frank’s voice coming from the laptop. ‘Ah,’ says Alice, ‘look! He remembers you!’ She moves the laptop on to the landing where Hero is sitting looking grumpy because Griff do
esn’t let her in Alice’s bedroom and then downstairs where Sadie lies shivering in front of the fire in a knitted jumper. Kai and Jasmine wave at him from the sofa. Romaine appears from the kitchen with a toothbrush between her teeth and kisses the screen, leaving toothpaste drool all over it.

  Franks sighs. ‘I love your house,’ he says. ‘I miss your house. I miss you. I …’ His voice cracks. ‘There’ll be a funeral,’ he says, ‘for Kirsty. Not for a few weeks yet. Will you come?’

  ‘Of course I’ll come.’

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good. Then that’s a date. I’ll be better by then, Alice. I’ll be … Well, I don’t know what I’ll be. But I’ll be better. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t make promises,’ she says, ‘just do what you can do. Just be what you can be. However flawed that is. I have very low standards,’ she jokes. ‘I swear, I’ll go with anyone.’

  Finally Frank laughs and it’s beautiful to hear.

  ‘Good luck, Frank,’ Alice says. ‘I’ll see you on the other side.’

  Frank kisses his knuckles and places them against the screen. Alice does the same. They stay like that for a moment, their hands touching across the ether, their eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I’ll see you on the other side,’ says Frank.

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ says Alice.

  And then the screen goes blank.

  Sixty-two

  Two Months Later

  They bury her in Croydon. Where else would they bury her? Not in Ridinghouse Bay where her short, unsullied life came to such a horrible end. And not in Bude where her grandparents lived, where her mother grew up, now it has been revealed that her killer lived there for a few years in the late nineties, date-raped two different women during his time in the town and stalked another into a state of near-suicidal depression.

  There was only Croydon. And at least it is a beautiful day.

  Alice feels a surge of homecoming as she negotiates the London transport system. She feels her salty seaside mamma persona fall away and she imagines herself in hipster pavement cafés and graffiti-daubed playgrounds and corner shops run by people with foreign accents. She loves Ridinghouse Bay, but she misses London.