I Could Be You

by I Could Be You (epub)

  I hold the bottle to my lips and drink as much as I can without throwing up. When I finish, my face is wet and there’s cider running down my chin and along my neck, soaking the collar of my Gap sweatshirt.

  There’s a brightness in his eyes that I recognise from that night in the pub. His pupils are huge and dark. I know that if I look at him for too long, I’ll lose myself in that darkness.

  ‘Better?’ he says.

  ‘Better.’ I try to smile, but the cider is swishing around inside my stomach and I wish I was at home, on my own.

  And then the weirdest and loveliest moment of my life happens: Shane Gilbert leans in and kisses me.

  Fourteen

  Dee

  Dee walked through Shoreditch as far as Brick Lane, with its rows of curry shops, hipster fashion stores and grunge-inspired coffee shops. She’d bought her first property in this area. A tiny one-bed ex-council flat in a 1950s low-rise block on a narrow side street. Back in the early nineties, there had been no hipster stores or posh coffee shops; the area was unrecognisable today.

  Things had already been changing when she had moved south of the river to Greenwich. Artists and musicians and other ‘creatives’ had started to flood in, attracted by the low rents and the authenticity already gentrified out of so many other parts of the city. At the same time, the sudden growth and prosperity of the newly developed Docklands area was starting to spread. Eventually, this little area of east London, caught between the City on one hand and the Docklands on the other, found its character and identity washed away by the relentless flow of prosperity and vulgar money inundating it from all sides.

  Digital companies like Hexagon Consultancy moved in. The artists, musicians and creatives were pushed out by the sudden hike in rents, moving further east to places like Stepney, Stratford and Clacton. Property prices rocketed, and suddenly no one apart from the super-rich could afford to live here. Walking around the area today, Dee felt like a stranger.

  Passing her old local, the Pride of Spitalfields, she had a sudden urge to step inside for a pint. Peering through the door, she could see that this place, at least, had avoided any outward signs of gentrification.

  Inside, she opted for a coffee instead of London Pride. She drank it at a table in the corner while she planned out the rest of her day. She was meeting Trevor Dubber, an ex-colleague, at his Soho club later that afternoon. Trevor had started his career on the South London Press, the paper that had covered the murder of Gus Hope. Dee was hoping he might know someone there she could speak to.

  Revived by coffee and thirty minutes’ respite from the gentrification, she walked to Aldgate Underground station with a spring in her step. The meeting with Hexagon hadn’t been a success, but the rest of the day stretched ahead of her, and for the first time in ages, it seemed full of possibility.

  She felt alive again. Being back in the buzz of the city, meeting old contacts and trying to uncover the facts before anyone else. For so long, being a journalist had been her lifeblood, the way religion, nature or exotic yoga were for other people. She was under no illusions about that part of her life. It was over. But right now, using what she’d learned to help her find Katie and Jake felt good. More than good; it felt right.

  * * *

  Trevor’s club was on Dean Street, in a tall Georgian town house. After Dee had given her name, a willowy girl with sun-kissed skin and feathery blonde hair led her up several staircases. She caught teasing glimpses of groups of people and bursts of conversations on each floor before she was whisked on to the next one.

  Trevor was waiting for her in a booth on the top floor.

  ‘Dee Doran.’ He stood up, smiling as he grabbed her in a bear hug and held her tight. ‘How the hell are you?’ he asked, letting her go but keeping his hands on her shoulders. ‘Come on. Let’s sit down. I’ve got a bottle of New Zealand Pinot on ice in your honour. Do you want something to eat?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he beamed his thousand-watt smile at the willowy blonde and asked her to bring them a selection of sharing plates.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ he said, pouring a glass of green-tinted wine and handing it to Dee. ‘Life by the seaside obviously suits you.’

  ‘There’s nothing in my life that suits me right now,’ Dee said, taking the glass and sitting opposite him on a matching chesterfield-style sofa. ‘Both my parents are dead, I can’t get any work, and one of the few friends I have has gone missing. I spend my days comfort-eating and watching Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and my evenings drinking too much wine and feeling sorry for myself.’

  Trevor grinned. ‘Glad to hear everything’s going so well. I did notice the extra few pounds, but they suit you. You were always too skinny.’

  ‘You look better than you do on TV,’ Dee said. ‘What do they do with your hair? It always looks as if someone’s glued it to your head.’

  ‘Some sort of gel.’ Trevor pulled a face. ‘I’ve never cared enough to ask.’

  He was as handsome as ever. A few more streaks of silver in his black hair, but they only added to the silver-fox vibe that turned so many women into gibbering fools around him.

  Every heterosexual woman and gay man at the Post had fancied Trevor Dubber at one time or another. Dee guessed many of them still did. With his olive skin, melting brown eyes, lean, muscled body and voice as rich and smooth as the finest cappuccino, he had a sex appeal that was on a different level to most of the other men Dee worked with. He was also a hard-nosed hack with a reputation for not taking shit from anyone. Like all of his admirers, Dee respected him, fancied him and was scared of him in equal measure. These days, he was chief presenter on Channel 4’s nightly current affairs programme, Sixty Minutes.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about you and Billy,’ he said.

  ‘Not your fault,’ Dee mumbled, embarrassed.

  ‘Still, thought I’d better get it out of the way at the beginning. I felt like a real shit for not getting in touch after it happened.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Dee said. ‘You were friends with both of us. I guessed you didn’t want to get involved, and that’s fine.’

  She took a sip of wine and felt some of the tension drain from her body. She’d been nervous about meeting Trevor. He’d been one of her closest friends when she was living in London. They’d worked together and drunk together, and there’d been a heady period during the early nineties when Billy Morrison and Trevor Dubber were two of the most successful journalists in the country.

  Dee had lied when she said it was okay that he hadn’t called. At the time, his silence had hurt. She’d assumed, as you did when you were going through a separation, that Trevor had taken Billy’s side. That somehow he blamed Dee for not sticking with the marriage.

  ‘It’s not fine,’ he said. ‘The truth is, Dee, I’ve been so busy, so focused on the next thing, I lost sight for a bit of what was important to me.’

  ‘You’ve worked that out now, then?’ Dee asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Trevor said. ‘Anyway, what about you? What are you up to these days?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Dee said, finding it easier than she’d imagined to be straight with him. She’d missed this. Being back in London, hanging out with a friend, catching up on gossip. It felt good.

  ‘After Billy and I split up,’ she said, ‘everything fell apart really quickly. My dad died, my mum got sick. I felt as if I’d had enough of everything. London, work, that whole little world that was our lives for so long, I needed a clean break. So I got pissed one night and emailed Rob Harvey telling him exactly what I thought of him. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The next morning I already regretted it, but it was too late by then.’

  ‘No one,’ Trevor said, leaning forward and boring into Dee with those brown eyes, ‘should regret sending an email like that. It’s a classic.’

  ‘You’ve seen it?’ Dee asked.

  ‘Everyone’s seen it,’ Trevor said. ‘I thought you knew. He forwarded it to someone who forwarded it to someone else an
d so on, and so on. You’re a bloody legend, Dee!’

  Rob Harvey had been Dee’s boss at the Daily Post. He’d only been in the job two months and was already universally hated by all the journalists who worked for him. An ex-politician with a relentless drive for self-promotion and no idea how journalism really worked, he’d been hired to ‘make a difference’, which basically meant cutting costs in whatever way he could. Dee’s email gave him the perfect excuse to get rid of one more ‘overpaid hack’.

  ‘After that,’ she said. ‘I moved home and watched my mum get sicker and sicker. When she finally died, suddenly I was alone, with no idea what to do with the rest of my life.’ She tried to smile to lighten the impact of what she was saying, but her mouth wobbled so she took a swig of wine instead.

  ‘You need to start working again,’ Trevor said.

  ‘No one wants to hire me. Rob made sure of that.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. Is that why you wanted to see me today? Because if it is, then I’d be only too happy to throw some ideas about and see what we can come up with.’

  Dee’s eyes pricked with unexpected tears, touched by Trevor’s faith in her abilities.

  ‘I did look into freelance work,’ she said. ‘Features, lifestyle pieces, that sort of thing. But that market’s already pretty saturated. And it’s not me, Trevor. I’m an investigative journalist. It’s who I am. But I couldn’t work out what I wanted to write about.’

  ‘And now you have?’ Trevor asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. In the meantime, a friend of mine is in trouble and I’m trying to help her. That’s sort of why I wanted to see you – not the only reason, of course. You started out on the South London Press, didn’t you?’

  ‘I sure did,’ Trevor said.

  ‘In 2008, there was a murder in Hither Green,’ Dee said. ‘I’ve been reading up about it and it seems the story was mostly covered by the South London Press.’

  ‘I was long gone by then,’ Trevor said. He refilled their glasses, sat back on the sofa and crossed his legs. ‘But I’m still mates with some of the guys I used to work with at the paper. Tell me what you want. I’m all ears.’

  Dee told him about Katie and the dead woman who looked like Katie but wasn’t. She told him she thought there could be a connection between the murder of Katie’s father and this new death, although she hadn’t worked out what it was. And she told him the thing she’d been thinking about for the last two days but hadn’t told anyone else. Until now.

  As she spoke, she pictured the dead woman. Dressed in Katie’s clothes, wearing her hair the same way as Katie’s. Pushing the buggy that Katie used for her son. Looking so like Katie, it was the easiest thing in the world to think she was Katie.

  ‘Whenever I go back over it,’ she said, ‘I keep coming back to the same thing. What if the person driving the car made a mistake? What if he hit the wrong girl?’

  Fifteen

  Dee

  Dee sat on the deck scrolling through the latest news updates on Katie and Jake. Louise and her colleagues had been busy. A Facebook page and a Twitter account had been set up, both appealing for anyone with information to come forward. On Twitter, the hashtag #findKatieandJake was gathering momentum. Dee was midway through reading the comments on the Facebook page when her phone rang.

  ‘Dee Doran?’ A man’s voice. South London accent, gravelly timbre, as if he’d spent too many years smoking too many cigarettes.

  ‘That’s right,’ Dee said. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Leonard Mann.’ He stopped speaking to cough.

  ‘Thanks for calling me back,’ Dee said when the coughing ended.

  She’d got Leonard’s name from Trevor, who’d thought he might be a good person to speak to about the death of Katie’s father. She’d called him on the way back from London and left a message telling him she had some questions about Gus Hope’s murder.

  ‘My pleasure,’ Leonard said. ‘You’re a friend of Trev’s, right?’

  ‘He said you’d be happy to speak to me,’ Dee said.

  ‘Happy might be pushing it,’ Leonard said. ‘How’s he doing, anyway? Last time I saw him, he was fronting some poncey discussion show on Channel 4. A bunch of self-satisfied wankers talking a load of shite. He still doing that?’

  ‘I doubt he’d describe it as that,’ Dee said, smiling. ‘But he’s still doing it, yeah.’

  ‘He’s got the face for it,’ Leonard said. ‘I’ll give him that. My face, on the other hand, well… let’s just say I’m destined to remain a print journalist. You’re in the business too, I see. I remember reading that piece you did on Casey Hall – the kid killed by his stepfather? You did a bloody good job with that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dee said, enjoying the warm flush of pleasure his praise gave her.

  ‘So.’ Leonard’s sentence was cut off by another bout of coughing. ‘Gus Hope,’ he said, when he was able to speak again. ‘Why do you want to dig around in that old story?’

  ‘It’s actually his daughter I’m interested in,’ Dee said.

  She went on to explain her connection with Katie. Leonard told her he’d already seen the news pieces about the police hunt for Katie and Jake.

  ‘Brought it all back,’ he told Dee. ‘Poor kid. I felt bloody sorry for her. No mum, you know. She’d disappeared years earlier. Had a reputation as a bit of a lush. General consensus was she’d got pissed and fallen into the Thames, although her body was never found, so I guess we’ll never know what happened to her.’

  ‘I read that he was killed breaking up a fight,’ Dee said, realising Leonard would need a bit of steering to keep the conversation on track.

  ‘Something like that,’ Leonard said.

  In the background, a woman shouted something.

  ‘Pint and a chaser,’ Leonard said. Then, to Dee: ‘Listen, love. I have to go. Give me your email address and I’ll dig out anything I still have on the story. I’ll get it across to you right away. Can’t say fairer than that, can you?’

  Dee agreed you could not say fairer. She gave Leonard her email address, thanked him several times and promised to buy him a pint the next time she was in London.

  True to his word, Leonard’s email arrived ten minutes later. There were several attachments. Definitely worth a couple of pints, Dee thought as she scanned the information.

  Most of it simply confirmed what she already knew. Katie’s father, Gus Hope, had been the landlord of a popular pub in Hither Green called the Railway Tavern. His death seemed to be a straightforward case of manslaughter. He had got into a row with a young man named Shane Gilbert, who had attacked him with a broken bottle, cutting through his carotid artery and causing him to bleed to death. Two women working in the pub had witnessed the attack and both gave testimony in court. The witnesses’ names were Roxanne Reed and Ella Tate. In his email, Leonard said that Roxanne had died soon after the trial. The only information he had on Ella Tate was that she’d gone to study at Bristol University a few months after the trial ended. Bristol was where Katie had lived too. Dee wondered if the two women had been there at the same time.

  No idea where she is now, Leonard had written. Not that either of them would be much use to you. The case was clear-cut. Whatever Katie’s done, I doubt it’s got anything to do with her poor old dad.

  A few of the stories carried a blurred black-and-white photo of Katie, nineteen years old at the time of the murder trial. Dee tried to enlarge the photo, curious to see what Katie looked like back then. But enlarging it made the pixels bigger, so it was even harder to see the details of her face.

  A photo of the killer accompanied all the articles. Shane Gilbert had dark floppy hair and strong features. At the time of the murder, he’d been seventeen – the same age as Katie. It wasn’t clear whether the two of them had been in a relationship or not. The view on this varied from news story to news story. One piece suggested that Katie had encouraged the young man to kill her father on purpose, although most were more balanced than that.

  Dee
thought it seemed likely that Katie and Gilbert had been dating. Katie’s father, overprotective and overbearing according to several witnesses, hadn’t liked it. There’d been a fight, and it had ended tragically.

  The whole thing sounded like a terrible accident.

  When she’d finished reading everything, she felt deflated. She hadn’t found a single thing connecting the dead woman with the pub murder ten years ago. Which meant Leonard was right: the two events were unconnected. Or was the connection right there in front of her and she simply couldn’t see it? She scanned the documents again, eyes flitting over the names of all the people involved. The witnesses, the victim, the killer…

  The killer.

  One of the stories Leonard had sent was an op-ed piece speculating on why a middle-class boy had turned to violence. It was the sort of faux-intellectual right-wing crap that Dee hated. Full of sweeping statements about the lazy, wayward youth of today and calling for the return of compulsory military service to ‘show these young men and women what it’s like to do a real job’. According to the article, Shane Gilbert had been a ‘computer whizz’, obsessed with programming and video games. The journalist seemed to be making a direct link between the increase in young people using computers and the rise in violent crime across the UK.

  Even though she hated the story, there was something in it that kept drawing Dee back. Finally, as she was scanning it for the third time, it hit her. The length of the sentence.

  Nine years ago, the man who had killed Katie’s father was given an eight-year prison sentence. He probably wouldn’t have served the full amount. With good behaviour, and taking into consideration the time he’d spent incarcerated before the trial, he could have got out in five or six years. Which meant there was every chance he left prison at more or less the same time that Katie moved to Eastbourne.

  Dee wasn’t deflated any longer. The different strands of Katie’s life, which hadn’t made any sense until now, were finally coming together to form a pattern that had been there all along, waiting for her to see it.