I Could Be You

by I Could Be You (epub)

  A wave of sadness washed over her, suffocating in its intensity. The thought of going inside, showering and getting dressed to face another day filled her with dread. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. In a moment, when she was able to dredge up some energy, she was going to go inside, crawl into bed, pull the duvet over her head and stay like that until this long day passed.

  Except going to bed would do nothing to ease the tightness across her chest, or the gnawing anxiety eating its way through the lining of her stomach. The only thing that would make her feel better was finding out that Jake was okay.

  With immense effort, she dragged herself out of the chair and poured herself a pint of water, which she drank slowly, afraid to glug it too fast in case she threw up again. The water made her feel slightly better, and she was contemplating a shower when the opening chords of ‘Ring of Fire’ blasted from her phone.

  She answered it, knowing there was only one person who’d call this early.

  ‘The dead woman’s not Katie,’ Louise said, rushing past the hellos and how-are-yous and getting straight to the point.

  ‘How did you find out?’ Dee asked.

  ‘How did I find out?’ Louise’s voice rose with that self-righteous tone Dee knew so well. ‘You mean you knew and you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘Ed asked me not to tell anyone,’ Dee said.

  ‘Ed? I didn’t realise you were on first-name terms.’

  ‘I would call him Eddie,’ Dee said. ‘Only he told me he doesn’t like it.’

  ‘You can be a real cow sometimes,’ Louise said. ‘You know that?’

  ‘Lou,’ Dee said, checking the time on the microwave. ‘It’s five past seven in the morning. I’m allowed to be anything I want this early. So tell me, how did you find out?’

  ‘It’s all over the bloody news,’ Louise said. ‘National, as well as local. Switch on your TV. They think Katie was driving the car that killed the woman. Did she own a red Peugeot?’

  Holding the phone to her ear, Dee turned on her TV. Katie and Jake smiling on the screen, the sea burning blue and bright behind them. A line of text beneath saying that police wanted to speak to Katie urgently in relation to a hit-and-run incident.

  Overnight, she’d gone from victim to suspect.

  ‘You told me it was Katie,’ Louise said. ‘Why would you lie to me, Dee? Don’t you trust me?’

  Dee closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at Katie and Jake while she answered.

  ‘I thought it was Katie,’ she said. ‘At first. Then yesterday afternoon, Ed asked me if I’d take another look at the body.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The post-mortem showed something unexpected,’ Dee said. ‘I was so sure he was wrong. But I went with him, thinking it was some silly mistake. And then I saw her and I realised it wasn’t Katie.’

  ‘What did they find in the post-mortem?’ Louise asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dee said. ‘Ed didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Louise said. ‘You’re a journalist. Of course you bloody asked.’

  ‘I’m a journalist who’s taking a career break,’ Dee said, although they both knew this wasn’t strictly true. The real reason she wasn’t working was because no one wanted to employ her. After the break-up of her marriage, she’d come back to Eastbourne to look after her dying mother. It had never occurred to her that she’d have problems finding another job. It was only later, after her mother was dead and Dee started looking for work, that she realised if you were a woman the wrong side of forty-five, no one was interested in employing you.

  ‘Yadda yadda yadda,’ Louise said. ‘Listen to me, Dee. This is important. You know how tough things are for local papers like the Recorder at the moment. If we could get an exclusive on this, before the nationals get involved, imagine what it could do for our readership. What about the red Peugeot? Is it hers?’

  ‘She doesn’t have a car,’ Dee said.

  On Dee’s TV, the news had moved on to another story. Brexit negotiations in Brussels had hit another rocky patch. When Dee opened her eyes, Katie and Jake had been replaced by a shot of the prime minister giving a press conference.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’d like to help, Louise. Really. But there’s nothing I can tell you.’

  ‘Swear?’

  ‘Swear.’

  Louise sighed. ‘I don’t believe you, but if you’re not going to be straight with me, there’s nothing I can do. Promise me you’ll think about it, at least?’

  ‘Think about what?’

  ‘Being straight with me.’

  ‘I promise,’ Dee said.

  She hung up, but kept the phone in her hand, wishing there was someone she could call to talk about what was happening. But the only person she could think of was Alex. And right now, he’d probably still be in bed, tucked up beside his wife.

  * * *

  Dee spent the rest of the morning holed up inside the house, nursing her hangover and obsessively watching the news. When she saw a journalist being filmed on the stretch of beach near her house, she went to the window. A crowd was gathered at the end of the road. TV vans with satellites on their roofs, journalists milling around on the beach, bright flashes of light from the many cameras taking photos. The journalists were a noisy lot; their voices and laughter carried across the beach to Dee’s house, a stark reminder that she was no longer part of all that.

  The police were back as well. Two uniformed officers guarding a line of blue-and-yellow police tape that had been put up to block the journalists from coming down the road. Not that it put them off. They came onto the beach instead, peering rudely through the windows of Dee’s house as they passed. Twice someone rang her doorbell. Both times she ignored it.

  By mid afternoon, the story hadn’t changed. The police were looking for Katie Hope, twenty-seven-year-old single mother, and her son Jake. They wanted to speak with Katie urgently about a hit-and-run incident in Eastbourne on Tuesday afternoon. They were urging anyone with information about Katie, her two-year-old son or the victim to get in touch.

  When she couldn’t stand being indoors a second longer, Dee slipped out the back of the house and walked along the beach to the extended mobile home where Katie and Jake had lived until two days ago. The journalists had obviously given up on finding anything and there was no one out this far now. When she looked back, she could see them – a greedy pack on the other side of the police tape, waiting to pounce.

  This place had been Dee’s first home. She’d lived here with her parents until she was six years old. Her father had bought the plot of land, installed the mobile home and built an extension so it was big enough for them to live in comfortably while his grand masterpiece was being constructed a few hundred yards further up the beach.

  Today, the entrance was cordoned off by another line of police tape. Dee wandered around to the side of the house that faced the beach. There was more tape here, drawn all the way across the land around the house. She was contemplating whether to dip under it when she heard footsteps on the road outside. She ran back to the beach side of the property, slipped under the tape and walked up to the road as if she was coming from the beach.

  The footsteps belonged to a woman – young and slender with glossy blonde hair and the sort of glowing skin Dee could only dream of.

  ‘Hello.’ The woman waved and smiled, greeting Dee as if they were old friends, although Dee had never set eyes on her before.

  ‘Melissa Hall. You’re Dee, right?’ She held her hand out for Dee to shake.

  ‘I don’t want to talk to anyone,’ Dee said, ignoring the outstretched hand. ‘And you can tell the rest of them the same thing.’ She nodded at the huddle of journalists at the end of the road. ‘I won’t be giving any statements or answering any questions. Nothing.’

  The woman withdrew her hand, blushing slightly. The colour, Dee noted sourly, enhanced the glow and made her seem even prettier.

  ‘I’m a friend of Billy’s.’ />
  The mention of her ex-husband’s name was so unexpected, Dee was momentarily lost for words.

  ‘He’s the one working on this story. Not me.’

  ‘So you’re not a journalist?’ Dee said.

  ‘Sort of. At least, I’m trying to become one. It’s a very competitive industry these days. Completely different to when you started out.’

  That did it.

  ‘You need to leave,’ Dee said. ‘The last time I checked, this was my property. You’re trespassing.’

  ‘Oh.’ The woman looked confused. ‘Sorry. I thought this was where Katie lived.’

  Alarm bells, loud and clanging, started up inside Dee’s head.

  ‘It’s my house,’ she said. ‘My land too. I’m Katie’s landlady. Listen, whatever-your-name-is…’ The girl wouldn’t last more than a few weeks. Remembering her name required more effort than Dee was willing to put into it. ‘I have no idea why Billy sent you here. But you can go running back to him now, tell him you’ve met me and I have nothing to say to you or him or anyone else.’

  ‘He doesn’t know I’m here. He’s in trouble, Dee. That’s why I came.’

  ‘Billy’s always in trouble. Luckily for me, that’s not my problem any more.’

  ‘No, wait!’ Melissa took a step forward. ‘This was my idea, I swear. I need to talk to you for a few minutes, Dee. That’s all.’

  Dee shook her head.

  ‘Please,’ Melissa said. ‘He needs a good story. He’s about to lose his job, and if that happens, he’ll lose the house too. And surely you don’t want that. Because I know it still belongs to both of you, right?’

  ‘Only because he won’t move out,’ Dee said.

  A knot of tension was forming in the pit of her stomach. Billy Morrison, her ex-husband, was a complete and utter waste of space. He was still living in the Greenwich town house they’d bought together soon after they got married, refusing to move out and refusing to pay more than his share of the mortgage. Leaving Dee stuck with paying for a house she no longer lived in.

  ‘The thing is,’ Melissa said, ‘if the house is repossessed, you could lose all of this too.’ She threw her arm out in a sweeping gesture that took in Dee’s house further along the beach, circling back to the mobile home. ‘That’s what Billy says, and that’s why he needs your help.’

  The knot in Dee’s stomach tightened, tension turning to a white-hot burning rage that coursed through her body until she was sure Melissa Hall must be able to see it rising out of her like the heat waves around that poor dead woman the other day.

  ‘We saw it on the news,’ Melissa said. ‘Billy recognised the place right away, and he was interested. Then this morning, when it turned out the police don’t know who the victim is… You know what he’s like – can’t pass up the promise of a story. He’s done a bit of research on Katie Hope and he thinks he’s found something interesting. It would be so good if you’d talk to him – maybe help him fill in the bits he hasn’t been able to find out for himself? Poor Billy – he didn’t want to ask because he didn’t want to upset you.’

  Bullshit, Dee thought.

  ‘So,’ Melissa said, cracking a smile so wide and bright it couldn’t possibly be genuine. ‘I thought, why don’t I do it – drive down here myself and see if you’ll speak to me? I know you were a journalist back in the day, and I thought maybe the two of you could work together on this. If he can get a scoop, think what it could do for him. And you, of course. Because the last thing he wants, Dee, is to see you get hurt. He’s still terribly fond of you.’

  The rage exploded out of her and all around her. She took a step towards Melissa Hall. And then another one. Saw fear flash across the woman’s perfect face and it felt good. Too good. Dee saw her own hand reaching out and grabbing the collar of Melissa’s figure-hugging pale-pink T-shirt.

  ‘This isn’t some story for Billy,’ she hissed, pushing her face too close to Melissa’s. ‘A young woman and her little boy are missing. Has he paused for more than a second to consider that? Or is he so obsessed with his failing career that all he can think about is how to turn this tragedy into a story?’

  A tear rolled down Melissa’s cheek. Dee let her go and stepped back, appalled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Melissa brushed the tear away, but more tears replaced it. Sorrow and shame replaced the rage, both intensified when Dee put her hand on Melissa’s arm and the woman flinched.

  ‘Don’t let him drag you down to his level,’ Dee said. ‘I know you think you’re helping him, but it won’t make any difference. Even if he finds a good story, he’ll drink away any money he makes from it. He’s an alcoholic who doesn’t want to stop drinking. There’s nothing you can do to change that.’

  ‘It’s your fault he drinks,’ Melissa said. ‘He’s told me all about you.’ Her fingers went up to her neck, straightening the material that had been crumpled by Dee’s hand. ‘You’re a psycho, you know that?’

  ‘Go,’ Dee said. ‘Please. Go back to London and tell my lowlife ex to keep his nose out of this. If he wants a big story, he’ll have to find it somewhere else.’

  She turned away, suffused with sadness. This beautiful young woman, who could probably have any man she set her heart on, had hooked up with someone who could never make her happy. A long time ago, so far back it was like remembering a different person, Dee had been like Melissa Hall. Young and full of hope. She’d known Billy Morrison was trouble from the moment she laid eyes on him. But she’d been young enough and foolish enough to believe she could save him. It had taken her sixteen years to realise that you could only save someone who wanted to be saved.

  Nine

  Katie

  Eleven years earlier

  I’m not allowed to work behind the bar. Dad justifies this by saying he wants better for me than that. Which is bullshit. We both know the real reason he won’t let me work in the pub: he’s worried I’ll end up like Mum.

  But I like the pub and I spend as much time there as I can. This is easier than it sounds, because my dad’s not there as much as he probably should be. He prefers to leave things to Roxanne, who basically runs the place as if it’s her own. A situation that seems to suit both of them.

  Sunday nights are my favourite time to be there. Dad goes out every Sunday and doesn’t come home until late, which means I never have to worry that he’ll catch me. I come downstairs as soon as I know he’s gone and sit in a corner with my book, pretending to read while all the time checking the door in case Shane turns up. I never drink alcohol. Even if Roxanne let me – which she never would because she knows my dad would freak – I’ve no intention of touching the stuff. Every time I see a drunk person it reminds me of Mum, and I know I’m never, ever going to end up the way she did.

  The pub’s called the Railway Tavern. It’s in Hither Green, on the corner of Ennersdale Road and Leahurst Road. The average age of most of our regulars is probably around fifty-five. Some younger people drink there too, but they’re couples mostly, looking for somewhere they can actually have a conversation without being deafened by the pounding music you get in most pubs.

  It’s not exactly rocking or cool, but it’s my home and I like it. I’ve lived over the pub my entire life. Until Mum left us, I spent nearly as much time downstairs as I did in the apartment. We ate dinner in the bar two or three times a week. On weekend mornings, I was allowed to help – setting out beer mats, polishing the glasses that hung down over the counter so that the lights reflected off them, creating a golden glow over the whole bar area.

  I loved it all and used to imagine growing up and getting married and taking over the pub from Mum and Dad. My whole life planned out, neat and tidy the way I like things to be. And then Mum left and nothing has been neat and tidy since.

  Tonight is Sunday, so I’m downstairs. Ella and Roxanne are working, but there’s not much for them to do because it’s quiet, like it always is on a Sunday night. The two of them are having a right giggle together. Every time o
ne of them laughs, it’s like something sharp stabbing me. Roxanne has been the closest thing I’ve had to a mum these last few years. She should be talking to me, not Ella Tate, who she barely even knows.

  Roxanne must have seen me looking over, because she comes out from behind the bar and asks if I’m okay. She tops up my Diet Coke and passes me a chocolate fudge pudding.

  ‘Don’t tell your dad,’ she says, winking at me.

  Ella ignores me and I ignore her right back, not that she notices.

  I’m worried Roxanne will send me upstairs soon. I need to be down here. Shane told me he might ‘pop in sometime to say hi’, and how can he do that if I’m being held prisoner upstairs, like some modern-day Rapunzel without the long hair and the looks? Every time the door opens, my heart jumps so hard it hurts my chest. I know it’s stupid to hope, but I can’t help it. After all, he was the one who said he might drop in.

  I see him nearly every day, but we haven’t spoken since that time at the end of class. He always smiles when he sees me, but it never goes beyond that, and there’s no way I’m making the first move.

  I torment myself imagining he’s already called in some other night when I’ve been locked away upstairs. The problem is, I’ve no way of finding out. I can’t ask Roxanne. She’d want to know who he is and why I’m asking about him, and she’d tease me about him and it would be awful. And there’s no way I’m asking Ella. The less she knows about my life, the better.

  I’m scooping the last chunk of fudge cake into my mouth when I hear the door opening. I look up, anticipating disappointment, and there he is. Standing in the doorway, looking around like he’s not sure what he’s doing here.

  It’s such a shock, seeing him just as I’ve imagined for so long, that I drop the spoon. It lands on my plate, clattering too loudly so that everyone – including Shane – turns to look at me. He sees me and smiles. I try to smile back, but my lips and jaw refuse to move. It feels as if someone has screwed my face into place.