Just as she was about to slam shut the lid of the computer, a notification popped up in red on the top right of the screen.
“Oh, shit,” she muttered.
Apparently, Ethan M Tayler had got back to her at the speed of light.
Hey supermarket girl, the message read. Foot is still severely damaged and therefore you need to meet me for coffee asap to make it up to me.
She realised that she was holding her breath and she exhaled shakily. Willing her fingers to stop trembling, she had a quick scoot around his facebook. Her efforts revealed very few pictures and a hidden friend list. There were only three photos of him, all of which appeared to have been taken on night out a few months back. He looked a little worse for wear, standing in the middle of a pub or nightclub, flanked by four other blokes who looked to be in their late twenties. Their faces, scrunched up in laughter, were shiny with too much beer and too much camera flash.
He was still gorgeous, though, drunk or not.
His timeline also revealed very little. It showed his join date –less than a month ago – and just a few shared ‘funny’ videos that she didn’t bother turning the sound up for, mainly consisting of cats and people tripping over things.
For some reason, the fact that his join date was so recent niggled her. But then, she reasoned, plenty of people had deleted their facebook accounts at least once in the past and the date they reactivated their account was the date that showed up as their facebook ‘start’ date. There was no godly reason for this small thing to bother her.
I can meet him for coffee tomorrow, she told herself. So long as it’s in a public place, where’s the harm in it?
It wasn’t a big deal and besides, it would be nice to have someone to talk to. Who said that men and women could never be friends? That was just horseshit. She began to type a reply:
Sure, let’s meet for coffee. How about tomorrow?
Before she had a chance to agonise over the sheer brazenness of her reply, he replied almost instantaneously:
I can do tomorrow, I have the week off. How does tomorrow afternoon sound, say, half one at Macey’s on the seafront?
Cassie stared at the screen, biting her lower lip, unmindful that her upper, front teeth were nipping just a shade too hard and that she was close to drawing blood.
Okay, great. See you tomorrow, she quickly replied.
Before he had a chance to reply, she slammed down the lid.
“This is not a date,” she said to the empty room, doing her best to ignore the guilt that coiled in her stomach like a sickness.
Realising that her glass was empty, she stood up. She needed red wine right now because her thoughts were driving her crazy. She needed to be calm, cool, calm and collected.
She needed tonight to not dream about Chloe.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
The first time that Cassie realised that something was seriously wrong with Chloe, they had been eleven years old. She had become acquainted with her twin’s sadistic streak before then, but this was the first time that she had ever seen it in action to this extreme.
As in, this was the first time that she had ever seen her kill something.
Their large back garden backed onto Lancaster’s canal. Their mum and dad always told them not to play too close to the water’s edge as there was no fence at the bottom of the garden, and they weren’t allowed to play there unsupervised. The very end of the garden was on a lower level to the rest of garden, and this lower platform was only a small area, being no bigger than three metres wide and two metres long – providing enough space for a wooden park bench overlooking the fast-flowing water that was near level to this small patch of land.
It was on this bench that Chloe was sitting with the dead cat in her lap.
“Chloe? What are you doing?”
At first, Cassie thought that the animal was asleep and that she was petting it, for it was with great tenderness that she stroked along the shiny, black length of its body. Only when her twin’s hand came away slick with blood did she realise that the animal was dead.
Chloe looked up at her and smiled serenely, her blue eyes sparkling and dead, like that of a beautiful china doll’s. Cassie staggered backwards, not taking her eyes off the macabre scene, her legs as soft and unresponsive as jelly beneath her.
“If you tell Mum and Dad, I will kill you,” she said simply. “And then I will kill them. Come and look at the pussy cat.”
Tears prickled Cassie’s eyes. This wasn’t her sister she was looking at, this was a monster. Chloe had always been mean to her when Mum and Dad weren’t looking, but this was beyond her childish capacity of comprehension.
This was evil in its purest form.
“Why?” she asked, the backs of her shins having backed onto the ledge that signalled the relative safety of the main part of the garden behind her.
Chloe laughed, but there was no humour in the sound. In fact, it kind of reminded Cassie of the way Mum laughed when she’d had a few glasses of wine and was holding court with hers and Dad’s couple friends. Worldly and knowing and so grown up.
“Because I wanted to know what it would feel like to take its life. I wanted to have complete control over it and I wanted to see the fear in its eyes when it died. Come and stroke it.”
“No,” she managed to gasp.
Her heart thumped at an alarming speed and all the moisture had sucked from her mouth. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs for her mum, but she was scared of what Chloe might do if she did and she knew that her mum wouldn’t hear anyway, because she and Dad had fallen into something on the telly and the living room was ‘round the front of the house.
“Come on, he won’t bite.”
Chloe threw back her head and laughed. It was a horrible sound because it was so bright and pretty. A little girl’s laugh that to Cassie was like fingernails scraping down a blackboard.
“I’m going to tell Mum,” Cassie said as she stood there trembling.
Chloe’s tinkling laughter abruptly died.
“I told you, if you do that, I will fucking end you.”
Cassie never used bad words and the sound of the f-bomb coming out of her twin’s mouth was almost as shocking as the sight of the dead cat in her lap. Because Chloe was always so well-behaved in front of their parents, so much so that they thought that Chloe was the perfect one and Cassie was the troublesome one.
Cassie finally gave in to the tears. This was simply too much – she had never felt so alone, out of her depth and terrified. She didn’t know it at the time, but with the passing of the years, she would come to understand that this was the precise moment that her childhood ended, when the ugly truth of life revealed itself to her in all its brutal glory.
“I hate you,” she sobbed.
Chloe regarded her levelly.
“Don’t be a slave to your emotions, Cassie. Hate and love are meaningless. Nothing means anything. We all live, and we all die. I just chose when the stupid cat should die, that’s all.”
Cassie didn’t have a clue what she was talking about and her legs trembled so badly that they crumpled beneath her. She collapsed onto her backside on the grassy ledge, unmindful of the jolt that smacked into her spine.
Chloe got to her feet and inside Cassie shrank in fear. She watched as her twin sister carried the dead cat to the water’s edge, bent over and almost reverently let the cat go into the water. Immediately, it sank below the surface.
Opposite, the footpath that ran parallel with the countryside on the very edge of Lancaster town was devoid of the usual array of dog walkers, joggers and folk out for a stroll on this still-light, Summer evening. At almost nine p.m. it was past their bedtime, but Mum and Dad had become engrossed in something on the telly. Their house was also detached, which meant that the neighbours were oblivious to her plight. As far as Cassie was concerned, she may as well have been stranded on the moon.
She had never felt more alone in her entire life.
/> Chloe straightened up and Cassie’s gaze snapped a little way upstream. In a state of sickened horror, she thought she glimpsed the cat’s black body, but it could’ve been anything, from a leaf to a shadow.
“I love the canal, things just drift away here. They must drift for miles and miles. I wonder where they all end up?”
And then it hit her.
They. She said they.
Only then did it occur to her that she might have done this to other animals besides the neighbours’ cat.
Chloe smiled at her, and her blood ran cold.
“I meant what I said, dear sister. If you tell our parents, I will kill you.”
CHAPTER NINE
NOW
Cassie made sure to arrive a good ten minutes early at Macey’s, the small café next to the tennis courts that overlooked Whitstable’s pebble beach. It wasn’t too busy, given that it was out of season and Spring had not yet quite broken. By a stroke of luck, the little round table in the window was empty and she sat there, gazing out at the churning, grey sea beyond the rain-lashed glass.
Nervously, she tugged at her duffel coat, conscious that she was looking a little frumpy. She hadn’t put too much thought into her appearance over the past five years, preferring to blend with the crowd rather than stand out. This, however, was easier said than done, for Cassie was aware that she possessed the kind of beauty that would look more at home on the cover of Vogue than on the checkout at Tesco. Her once lustrous mane of honey blonde hair had long been cut short into a choppy bob, and she didn’t use makeup to play up her strong features. She wore baggy clothes to hide her slim but statuesque figure and never wore heels as she already felt too tall at five feet eight.
All Cassie wanted was to be invisible, and it was surprisingly easy, no matter what Mother Nature had blessed her with genetically.
But now, for the first time in many years, she wanted to feel the heat of another man’s lust. Or Ethan’s lust, specifically. Not even when she had first met Hugh did she crave the full force of his lust. She was attracted more to the stability that he offered her, to the fact that he seemed happy for her not to work and play house while he pursued his career.
And up until now she had been content with this arrangement, always having believed that Hugh had been happy with it, too. She conceded that there was indeed trouble in paradise and that meeting Ethan today was rocking the already rolling boat.
She shivered, despite the central heating in Macey’s being cranked up to the max, gazing forlornly out at the choppy sea.
These weren’t fully-formed thoughts as such, more an in-articulated desire, a need for something more that was lacking in her life.
I am not going to be unfaithful to my husband, she told herself. This is just coffee, nothing more…
The little pep-talk to herself faded into oblivion when she spotted Ethan out of the window. Her stomach lurched at the sight of him. He wore a black beanie hat pulled down low over his forehead but he was instantly recognisable from his loping gate – that lovely, fluid elegance of his that had so entranced her the first time that she had clapped eyes on him. Yet again, she found herself comparing him to Hugh. Ethan was a good couple of inches taller than her husband, and a hell of a lot thinner. She didn’t think that she was attracted to thin men…
Apparently, she had been wrong about that, too.
Mixed in with his laidback attitude was something that was somehow a little street, a little edgy.
It was a potent combination.
He strolled along the windswept prom, hands shoved firmly in the pockets of a plain black overcoat that came down to his knees. He walked right past where she sat in the window and her heart kicked like a mule. He didn’t look up, instead swerving right and walking down the side of the café where the door was situated at the bottom.
The door to the café opened and in he came, bringing with him his youthful exuberance and a whole world of possibilities that had previously been unimaginable to her.
She watched him as he scanned the small café for her without a trace of self-consciousness. When his gaze settled upon her, he broke out into a broad grin – the kind which was face-splitting, making her think of the sun peeking out through clouds on a rainy day.
He raised his hand in greeting and ambled on over, pulling up a chair next to her.
“Hey,” he said, still smiling broadly. “So you didn’t stand me up.”
“No. I guess I didn’t.”
He turned his beaming smile onto the young waitress, and even though the girl was on the other side of the café by the till and the door that led to the kitchen, Cassie could clearly see the way her cheeks flamed. Jealousy twisted in her guts, and she quickly squashed the entirely inappropriate feeling.
“Can I have a black coffee, please?” he said to the pretty, blushing girl when she came over. “And the same again for my friend.”
The girl nodded, removing Cassie’s empty cappuccino cup without so much as a glance in her direction.
Ethan turned the full-force of his devastating, blue gaze and killer smile onto her, causing her stomach to twist into a tight knot.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she repeated softly.
“I’m glad you came. And I’m glad you found me on facebook.”
She felt her cheeks flaming when she replied:
“Yeah. It’s nice to get out.”
“Does your husband keep you locked away, then?”
“Not always. Sometimes he lets me out for good behaviour.”
“I take it he’s working today, then? I doubt he’d take kindly to his beautiful wife meeting a handsome stranger for coffee.”
“A handsome stranger?” she laughed. “You forgot to mention and deeply modest.”
“Yeah. That too. So is he working today?”
Secretly, she was thrilled that he had called her beautiful. She also knew that she was far more thrilled than she had any business being.
For a second, Dr Thornton’s warning danced in her mind: Don’t throw your life away on an affair.
And then she pushed such thoughts away as quickly as they had arrived.
“Yes. Actually, he’s away this week, as it happens.”
She squirmed slightly in her chair – she shouldn’t have told him that as it could only lead to trouble.
“All week? Where is he and what does he do?”
“He’s in Edinburgh right now, working on a case. He’s a lawyer.”
“Scotland, huh? That’s a long way away from home. No offence, but the man must be an idiot to leave you behind.”
“Yeah. There’s a lot of predators out there.”
Ethan grinned, waggling his dark eyebrows in an overtly lewd, joking manner, and she shivered in an unexpected rush of acute arousal. She noticed how straight and white his teeth were and a fleeting image of kissing his firm, full mouth flared in her mind in all its sexual glory.
She lowered her gaze to stare at the chequered, plastic tablecloth, embarrassed lest he should read her thoughts.
“And what about you, Mrs Cassie Yates? What do you do?”
And there it was. The dreaded, so what do you do for a living, question. The question that was ultimately make or break for the future of ‘whatever-it-was’ this was between them.
“I’m not working right now.”
“You’re not? How come? What do you normally do?”
Nothing. Absolutely sweet, fuck all.
“I don’t really have a normal thing I do. I mean, I graduated from Bristol University five years ago and haven’t really committed to anything since then.”
She chose her words carefully, not wanting to outright say that she had never worked at all, apart from taking a few bar jobs when she had been at Uni.
“Oh, you must be twenty-six, like me, then. Unless you took a year out which would make you an older woman?”
“You think I look old?” she asked in mock horror.
“No, I don’t, as it happens. A
ctually, I thought you were around twenty-one.”
She smirked at him.
“Bit of a charmer, aren’t you? I bet you say that to all the girls. So what do you do?” she asked, keen to deflect the whole subject of work off her and onto him.
“I work in computers.”
“What, here in Whitstable?”
“No, in London. I’m hoping to go completely self-employed soon and be able to work from home. Houses are that much cheaper here in Whitstable, comparatively, and I’ve always wanted to move back to the coast, and as it’s less than an hour to London on the train, I figured, why not, you know? In fact, the sale of the house I bought here went through just last week.”
She looked at him, impressed by his words.
“Wow. There must be a lot of money in computers, huh?”
“I guess I do okay. I couldn’t afford to buy a place in London though. Well, I probably could, but it would be a dump and away from the main tube line. But I just love the coast, I’ve always lived near the sea.”
“Me too.”
“Yeah? You’ve always lived in Whitstable?”
“No. I grew up in Lancaster, which is next door to not-so-sunny Morecambe. How about you? What coastal town are you from?”
“Southend. And I thought I detected a faint, Northern burr. Only subtle, mind.”
She felt herself inexplicably blushing.
“Does that bother you?” she found herself saying. “We all know how snotty you Southerners can be about the North and everyone in it.”
As soon as the words had exited her mouth, she regretted it. Her attraction towards him was making her inadvertently come across a little harsher than she had intended. But to her relief he laughed – a lovely, free and easy sound that warmed her to the core.
“Are you one of those uptight Northerners that thinks all Southerners are out to get them? Honestly, the only people that ever bring up the whole, North-South divide are Northerners.”
After She Died Page 4
