by Tammy Cohen
I looked at my phone to check the time. Later that evening I was introducing Nick to Kath and Mari and I needed time to get ready. Our relationship was still at that magical early stage where I wanted him only to see me at my best.
At least the shadows under my eyes had faded a little since I’d started sleeping again. Only a few hours a night, to be sure, but it was a start.
Detective Byrne got to his feet from the chair where he was sitting in our kitchen – the same kitchen in which he’d stood all those months ago on the night Em was attacked.
‘You look after yourself, Mrs Hopwood,’ he said.
It was one of those things people say, but with him I felt he meant it.
Em arrived home as we were saying goodbye on the doorstep. I saw the anxiety in her expression as she recognized the policeman and knew she would be panicking about what fresh trouble his presence signified. I stepped forward to put my arms around her.
‘Everything’s fine, Em. Detective Byrne was just updating me on things.’
Two months on from the fire, Em’s hands had lost the bandages she’d worn during those first awful weeks, but the skin was tight and shiny, though we’d been told that would eventually heal. Similarly, the effects of the smoke inhalation had all but cleared. She’d needed an inhaler in the immediate aftermath and we’d joked about her secret hope of being stuck for ever with her new deep, raspy, sexy voice. And both of us were still comparing notes daily on the colour of our phlegm, which had gradually lightened from black to toffee-coloured and now almost clear again. But apart from that, you’d hardly notice anything different.
The emotional scars, though. It’d be a while before we knew the extent of those.
As Detective Byrne drove away, we turned back into the house, my daughter and I. Rosie would be arriving shortly to keep Em company while I was out with Nick. Em insisted she didn’t need babysitting, of course. But I wasn’t taking any chances.
‘Honestly, Mum,’ she’d said earlier, ‘what do you think is going to happen?’
I’d thought then of the fire, how I’d been convinced we were both going to die, and of the shadow passing my parents’ open doorway. I thought, with the usual poker-hot flare of rage, of my dad, who’d only ever done his best, and my mum in her single bed at the nursing home, snatching at words and memories, trying to anchor herself to a world that no longer made sense. I thought of Em’s face after the attack and the bumps that came up like eggs on her scalp under her hair, and Rosie crying herself to sleep, heartbroken. I thought of the blood on Dotty’s collar, and the gash in her stomach that had faded now to a thin pink scar. I’d been back to Frances’s house to ask her neighbour if she’d ever seen her with a small black-and-white dog, but she’d looked at me as if I were crazy. ‘She risked her life to rescue your daughter,’ the woman told me. ‘You should be thanking her, not blaming her.’
The truth was, none of us knew what was going to happen from one day to the next. Life was random. People were unpredictable. We were all of us so fragile.
‘You’re right,’ I said to Em. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’
I didn’t tell her I’d installed the webcam from my parents’ house in the light-fitting in our hallway.
Just in case.
I am watching you.
I follow you on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. I chose my online persona carefully – an older woman. A friend of a friend of a friend. A teacher with a close family and an interest in galleries and exhibitions. I trawled the internet for the right photograph. Middle-aged, smiley, but not too smiley, if you know what I mean. Someone you’d have to work at getting to know. Someone who doesn’t offer friendship on a plate. Someone you’d want to impress.
I didn’t approach you until I’d already been befriended by several of your online friends, so there were enough mutuals.
I knew you’d be on your guard.
And now I’m in, I watch what you do. Where you go. Who you go with.
I know you might find that hard to believe, after the lengths to which we went to get you out of our lives. Claudia and I joining forces together. Bringing your cousin Michael to confront you with all the lies you told.
It was the mention of your mother that drove you away in the end. Nothing else shamed you, not what you did to Matt, or to Emma, or my poor dad. When I think of it, that shadow in the hallway, I still feel I could tear you apart with my bare hands, limb from limb, force the blade of a knife through that gap in your teeth and twist.
But you denied it all. Not you in the nude photos, the fire an accident, my dad’s death suicide, just as the coroner said.
But your mother was more than you could bear. Having to admit she was dead and that you would never have the chance to force her to love you? You were prepared to give us up, rather than do that.
But still I want to keep tabs on where you are in relation to me, and to Em and Rosie and the other people I love, to know that they’re safe.
I saw when you got that new job at the health trust. They clearly didn’t speak to Dean Baverstock. Or maybe he’s just decided to keep quiet about it all now. It’s not really his business, after all.
I saw when you moved to Clapham. I guess your insurers must have paid out for your Muswell Hill flat in the end. I went past it the other day, you know. It has been rebuilt. The scorch marks all covered over in fresh white paint. It looks like nothing untoward ever happened there. They did a good job.
I click on your Instagram now, as I do several times a day. And this is when I see it. A photograph of you in a pub, sitting next to a woman. She is about my age, attractive, relaxed and smiling, holding up a glass of rosé wine as if making a toast, and looking straight at the camera.
But you, you are looking at her.
My new boss, you have written. Better look busy! #LOL #NotReally #BestBossintheWorld
You look so normal in your blue-and-white striped Breton top and your conker-shiny hair and your butter-wouldn’t-melt smile.
They must have thought they’d lucked out when you turned up for the interview. So keen to help. To be useful.
But I know.
I know what you did.
Acknowledgements
There are certain events, both good and bad, that shape the landscape of family life. In January 2014, my daughter, Billie, was followed off a bus on her way home from a party by a man who then tried to drag her off the main road, hitting her repeatedly around the head when she resisted. Thankfully, a passer-by shouted from the other side of the road and the man ran off.
That story is hers to tell. What is mine is the feeling of utter powerlessness that followed. The intense but useless rage as I sat in the police station while they played the ID parade video, knowing that somewhere on that tape was the man who had done this to my daughter. The visceral reaction to one of the participants, followed by incredulity when Billie was unable to make an identification. Then the worry when she came home from school weeks later and said she thought she’d seen the man who did it emerging from a doorway locally. Or was it the man from the video? She couldn’t be sure.
Luckily, that’s where my and Tessa’s experiences diverge. There were no more sightings. There was no more contact from the police. Our lives went back to normal and the attack became just another chapter – a dark one, to be sure – in our family’s ever-expanding history. My daughter is in her last year of university and has travelled widely since then, sometimes on her own, always looking forwards, never behind, just as it should be.
There’s a refrain in my house and among my long-suffering friends: I expect you’re going to put that in a book. So the first and biggest of thanks goes to Billie for giving me permission to use this horrible moment in her life as the spark for this story. And for relinquishing ownership of it, allowing me to fashion someone else’s narrative out of the seed that had been hers. She is strong and brave and resilient and, if karma has any decency, only good things will happen to her from now on.
I’
d also like to thank the detectives from the Met police who dealt with my then-teenaged daughter with kindness and empathy. In the intervening years, the station where the ID parade took place has been closed, along with many others, and I feel a little pang of sadness every time I go past its whited-out windows. And a shout-out also to Victim Support. My daughter decided she was fine (and she was), but it was reassuring to know there was help if she needed it.
Huge thanks to Lucy Morris and Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown, who read and re-read draft after draft of this story, making bacon-saving suggestions and gently steering me away from the deadest of ends. Some of the key scenes and turning points stem from an intense but productive brainstorming session with the two of them, which gave me the inspiration I needed to push on and finish the book. Agents are the best, and these two are the best of the best. Thanks also to Melissa Pimentel at Curtis Brown, whose job it is to convince foreign publishers to buy my books. Whenever I see her name in my inbox, my heart does a little dance.
Transworld has been publishing me since my debut in 2011, and I am so lucky to work with the brilliant team there. Stop at Nothing represents my first experience working with editor Frankie Gray, and I’m grateful for her thoroughness, perceptiveness and deftness of touch and for understanding how paranoid authors can get waiting for feedback and our pitiful need for reassurance. Natasha Barsby also read multiple drafts of the book and suggested ways to make it stronger, and for that I’m truly thankful.
There’s little point in writing a book if no one ever gets to hear about it, and that’s one of the reasons I love my publicist, Alison Barrow, so very much. No one spreads the book love quite like Alison. She’s also innovative and kind and one of the best-read people I know. Swapping book recommendations with her is one of my very favourite ways of distracting myself from work.
Thanks also to copy-editor Sarah Day, who unwittingly sparked a Twitter storm after correcting the phrase ‘you’ve got another thing coming’ to ‘you’ve got another think coming’. It blew my mind – and the minds of thousands of Twitter users too, apparently – when I googled it and found she was absolutely right, so thanks for sparing me the shame of that and my myriad other mistakes. Thanks as always to Kate Samano for overseeing the copy-edit, and to Richard Ogle and his team, who come up with the covers that bring my books magically to life.
I know nothing about fire safety, so a big thank-you goes to Steve Westley of Shrewsbury Fire Station, who advised me on the fire scenes at the end of the book (and to Jenny Blackhurst, who introduced us). And also to Dr Roma Cartwright, who suggested the diabetes storyline. Rebecca Bradley is a former police officer turned crime writer who now offers a service advising on police procedure and I’m grateful to her for patiently answering all my many queries on policing. It goes without saying that any mistakes in any of these areas are absolutely my own.
The writing community is incredible. So many writers have helped with this book, in terms of providing either practical writing advice or emotional support or gin or all of the above. So I’d like to thank Amanda Jennings, Colette McBeth, Marnie Riches, Lisa Jewell, Anna Mazzola, Fiona Cummins and Clare Mackintosh, as well as all the Killer Women and the Prime Writers and the Cockblankets and the NLW. I went on three wonderful writing retreats during the writing of this book, having never been on one before in my life, and now I am a retreat convert. So gratitude goes to Julie and Steve at Ponden Hall and to Janie and Mike at Chez Castillon, as well as to the staff at the brilliantly eccentric and magical Gladstone’s Library. Also to Angela Clarke, Rowan Coleman, Julie Cohen, Polly Chase, Kate Harrison, Cally Taylor, Callie Longbridge, Tamsyn Murray, Cari Rosen, Karin Salvalaggio, Rachael Lucas and everyone else who kept me company on those retreats and bombarded me with drunken title suggestions in the early hours.
Thanks, too, to the bloggers and the reviewers who do such brilliant work in championing the books they love and getting the word out. With retail space for books decreasing all the time, word of mouth has never been more crucial.
My family and friends put up with a lot. Not only with me plundering their lives for inspiration for books and working at weekends and on holidays, but also dealing with the inevitable mood slumps that come at thirty thousand words into a book when the plot has ground to a halt and self-doubt is raging. So thanks to Rikki, Mike, Roma, Juliet, Mark, Mel, Helen, Jo, Maria, Steve, Sally, Ed and Dill. And to Sara, Colin, Ed, Alfie, Simon, Emma, Margaret, Paul and Ben. And, as always, to my children, Otis, Jake and Billie, of whom I’m ridiculously proud. And special thanks to Michael for reminding me, whenever I insist this is the very worst book anyone’s ever written, that ‘you always say that’.
Finally, thank you to the readers. I’m so grateful to everyone who buys my books or borrows them from the library (authors get a small amount for each loan). There is so much instant entertainment on tap in all our lives – Netflix, TV, YouTube, social media. I find it hugely cheering that people are still choosing to read.
Book people make the world a better place. Fact.
If you enjoyed STOP AT NOTHING and want a sunnier setting, try this for a gripping, escapist read.
Read on for an extract …
1
20 May 1948
IF VERA ARRIVES before Harry her whole life will change. Eve watches and waits. Really she ought to be outside, whipping sheets off the line before they are completely sodden, but her limbs remain pinioned to the sofa. Her eyes follow the progress of the two raindrops down the pane of glass until they pool together at the bottom, Vera merging into Harry, having not, after all, triumphed. A fleeting tug of disappointment.
But hadn’t she intended it to be the best of three? Most assuredly she had.
Eve scans the top of the window until she locates two more likely looking drops whom she names Bert and Louisa. But before they reach the bottom, she is disturbed by the shrill ringing of the bell.
Mr Ward, the postman, has a florid round face which is forever glazed with some form of precipitation, whether perspiration from the summer heat or, as now, a steady drizzle of rain. He is friendly and nosy and always seems to be expecting something more from his interactions with Eve than she is able to give.
‘One for you in there,’ he says, handing over a stack of envelopes.
Eve’s heart sinks. The only person who writes to her is her mother and she does not think she has the fortitude today to withstand the force of her mother’s disappointment.
Mr Ward is lingering on the step as if he expects her to open her letter right there and share the contents with him. But Eve is in no hurry.
‘Thank you, Mr Ward,’ she says, closing the door so he is caught out mid-mop with his white handkerchief aloft.
Eve flings herself back down on to the lumpy sofa, but she cannot recapture the pleasant indolence of a few minutes before. Even though the letters are safely hidden from view on the table in the hall, the knowledge of them is like a persistent insect buzzing in her ear.
She glances up at the ugly grandfather clock on the opposite wall. All the furniture is Clifford’s. Dark, heavy pieces that originated from his grandparents’ house and that his grim-faced father reluctantly passed on after she and Clifford married, observing that as Eve most likely didn’t know the first thing about caring for furniture of such quality, they would no doubt fall into wrack and ruin.
Chance would be a fine thing.
It is 12.15. Apart from the fifteen minutes from four o’clock when she can lose herself in Mrs Dale’s Diary on the wireless, the remaining hours of the day stretch ahead long and empty, the silence punctuated only by the tick-ticking of the hideous clock.
At 5.40 Clifford will come home. There will be the usual flurry of anticipation – company, conversation – followed by the inevitable downward readjustment when Clifford settles into his armchair, right leg crossed over left, newspaper hiding his face, the only hint of animation provided by the occasional twitch of his right shoe, shined every Sunday evening.
When they were first married she used to fling herself on to the floor by his chair and question him about his day, about what was in the news. But he had soon curtailed that. ‘My dear, I am a company director. My entire day is taken up by people asking things of me. When I come home, I should so appreciate a little bit of quiet. I’m sure you can understand.’
So now she waits until dinner time.
The rain seems to have drained away, leaving behind a grey soupy day. Through the bay window she can see the opposite bay window of Number Thirty-Nine. A mirror image of this house. Semi-detached with a garage to the side and a neat front path leading up to the leaded glass-panelled front door. Two elderly sisters live there whom, even nearly two years on, Eve still knows only as the Misses Judd. Sometimes she will see one or other of the Misses Judd standing at one of the upstairs windows, gazing out on to the street. I will go over there, she tells herself on these occasions. Who knows what stories they will have to tell. We might become friends. But she never does.
Awareness of her mother’s letter waiting on the hall table weighs heavily on her. Eventually she can stand it no longer. She gets to her feet and makes her way across the sitting room with its thick wine-coloured carpet and once more out into the hall, where she snatches up the pile of envelopes and searches impatiently through all the letters addressed to Mr C. Forrester until she comes to one with her own name.
But – oh.
In place of her mother’s cramped, precise handwriting in blue ink on the usual thin, pale blue envelope, there is a typed address on thick yellowy paper. Mrs Eve Forrester.
Eve feels a faint tingling in her nerve endings. She replaces the rest of the envelopes and wanders back into the sitting room. The drawing room, as Clifford insists on calling it. As always when she crosses the threshold, there is a sense of the air being displaced, as if she is walking into a solid mass and pushing it out of shape.
