I Could Be You

by I Could Be You (epub)

  Drenched through, pushing her soaking hair back from her face, she ran back towards the house. She’d left the sitting room light on, and she could see the sofa and the TV and the table where she’d been working on her laptop earlier. It was all blurred because of the rain battering the window. Even so, she could make out enough to know that the laptop was gone.

  As she ran, she heard something behind her. It sounded like footsteps, but when she swung around, scanning the beach, there was no one there. She strained her ears, but it was impossible to hear anything over the clatter of rain battering the sea and shingle.

  She turned back to the house, using the light from the sitting room to guide her. She was almost at the deck when a shape rose up in front of her, blocking out the light. The sudden darkness disoriented her, made her slow to react.

  She saw his arm, swiping towards her face. She jerked sideways, but not quickly enough. His fist caught the side of her head, and an explosion of pain burst through her ear. She stumbled and fell, landing on her elbow, then scrabbled forward, shingle shifting and sliding beneath her as she tried to get up. But again she wasn’t fast enough. His weight landed on her, knocking the air from her body, pressing her into the cold, hard stones. She screamed and thrashed and bucked against him, trying to knock him off her. She tried to hit him and kick him, but she was on her stomach, and her fists and feet couldn’t get near him.

  He grabbed a handful of her hair, yanked her head back and smashed her face into the ground. Flashes of white light exploded inside her brain. Blood in her mouth. Something broken. Teeth or nose or everything. Too much pain to understand what was going on.

  His hands wrapped around her neck, and there was a brief moment of relief. Because if he killed her, the pain would be over. He was strong. Hands squeezing the life from her, blocking her airway. She couldn’t breathe, pressure building up inside her head, and any moment now it would explode and she would be gone.

  Suddenly, she didn’t want it to end. Dredging up one final surge of energy, she jerked her head back. Felt it connect with something and heard a howl of pain. The pressure on her neck disappeared and air rushed down her throat, filling her lungs, choking her all over again.

  She crawled forward, hands fumbling on the stones. Grabbing the biggest one she could find, she swung around in time to see him lunging for her through the rain. With a scream of pure rage, her arm went up and out and she smashed the stone as hard as she possibly could into the side of his head. He fell forward, his entire weight landing on top of her. Still screaming, she hit him again, and again.

  Rain poured down on them, water mixing with the blood on Dee’s face. The man lay on top of her, not moving. She tried to push him off, but he was too heavy. She shifted her body, trying to slide out from under him. The stones beneath her moved too. She tried again, and kept trying. It took all she had, but at last she managed to wriggle free.

  When she was able to, she struggled upright. It was only when she was standing that the full impact of what had just happened hit her. She started to shake. Her stomach contracted. She twisted away from the body, vomiting onto the stones, the acid stink of her own puke rising through the wet air.

  She staggered into the house, closed the bifold doors, locking them so no one could get inside. There was a switch on the wall for the outside light. She pressed it, and the beach and deck were illuminated so she could see him. A dark shape lying on the shingle, about ten feet from the house.

  She knew there was something she was meant to do, but her brain couldn’t work out what that was. She looked around the room, unsure what she was looking for, until she saw her mobile phone lying on the sofa.

  She picked it up, hands shaking so badly it took three attempts to dial the digits she needed.

  A woman’s voice. ‘Emergency services, how can I direct your call?’

  ‘Police,’ Dee said.

  The woman said something Dee didn’t catch, distracted by the drip, drip of blood falling from her face and splashing onto the parquet floor that her mother had loved so much.

  There was someone else on the phone now, a man, asking Dee if she was in any immediate danger.

  ‘It’s not me,’ she said. ‘I’m okay. But he’s not. I think I’ve killed him.’

  ‘Who’s dead?’ The man had a kind voice, but she knew this wasn’t who she needed right now.

  ‘I have to speak to Ed Mitchell,’ she said. ‘Tell him it’s Dee Doran. Tell him I’ve killed someone and the body’s lying outside my house and I don’t know what to do.’

  The man started to say something else, but Dee didn’t hear it because she’d already hung up. The blood from her broken nose was still dripping onto the floor. She knew she needed to wipe her face, but she didn’t have the energy even to lift her hands.

  After a while, the steady rhythm of her blood splashing onto the polished floor became soothing. Her body swayed in time with each drop that hit the ground. She closed her eyes, but he was still there, branded onto the inside of her brain. The dark shape of his body lying ten feet from where she stood.

  Forty-Five

  Dee

  The doorbell was ringing; someone was banging on the front door and a man was shouting her name. The world was moving in slow motion. Every noise took an age to reach her, every movement she made dragged on forever.

  She reached the front door, but it was still boarded up, so she had to open the hall window instead.

  ‘Dee! Thank God.’

  Ed.

  She tried to say his name, but the hard lump in her throat made it impossible to speak. He lifted himself up and through the window and put his arms around her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

  He was lying.

  Flashes of blue light blinked through the open window. Shadows moved about outside. Dee recognised Rachel Lewis’s short, stocky figure amongst them. It wasn’t okay. Ed was here to arrest her, because she’d killed someone.

  Sometime later, they were in the living room. Dee was sitting on the sofa, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and a wad of tissues in her hand to soak up the blood still coming out of her broken nose. Ed sat beside her, holding the hand that didn’t have the tissues while he spoke to someone on his mobile phone.

  ‘Stay back for now. Let me speak to her first. Have the paramedics on standby. She’s going to need medical treatment.’

  When he’d finished, he put the phone into his jacket pocket and asked Dee if she was able to tell him what had happened.

  The outside light was still on, but she couldn’t see the body from where she was sitting. She never wanted to see it again, but she knew that at some point she’d have to take Ed outside and show him where it was.

  Her eyes drifted around the room, landing on the empty table. ‘My laptop.’ When she spoke, her throat felt as if she was rubbing sandpaper across it.

  ‘Here.’ Ed held a glass of water to her lips and she took a sip.

  ‘Thanks,’ she whispered, pushing the glass away.

  ‘Think you’re ready to talk?’

  She told him everything, starting from the moment she saw something flash past the window, finishing with the sickening sound of bone crunching when she hit him with the stone. Killing him.

  ‘It must have been terrifying,’ Ed said when she stopped talking.

  Tears pricked her eyes and she looked away so he wouldn’t notice. ‘It’s my fault.’

  ‘No,’ Ed said. ‘He attacked you, Dee. You were defending yourself, that’s all. From what you’ve told me, it wasn’t like you had a choice. Jesus.’ He rubbed a hand down his face. ‘Thank God you were able to fight back.’

  ‘I contacted Shane Gilbert.’ There. She’d said it.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I found out where he’s living and I went to visit him. He wouldn’t speak to me. But I left him my name and contact details. The day my house was broken into? I was in London waiting to meet him. Only he never turned up.’<
br />
  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Ed leapt up, walked to the other side of the room, as if he wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Dee? You promised, remember? I asked you to keep your nose out of this police investigation and you promised me you’d do that.’

  ‘I never promised anything. You issued an order that you expected me to obey whether I liked it or not.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. You sound like some spoilt kid who hasn’t got their own way. You could have been killed. Do you understand that? It could be you lying out there right now. From what you’ve told me you, it almost was you. And look at you. You’re a mess. Christ only knows what else is broken besides your nose. There could be permanent damage to your vocal cords, broken ribs, concussion, anything.’

  ‘You’re saying I should sit back and do nothing?’ Dee said, anger making her forget how much pain she was in. ‘She was my neighbour, Ed. And that little boy… I love him. I loved that they lived next door. I loved knowing I’d see him grow up, watch him having parties with his friends down on the beach like I used to. It made me feel…’

  She stopped, but it was too late. She’d caught the look of pity on his face and hated him even more than she had a moment earlier.

  ‘I can’t let them simply disappear,’ she said. ‘I’m a journalist and I’m going to use everything I’ve learned as a journalist to find them. This is what I do, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Ed said. ‘You told me yourself you haven’t worked in over two years. If I stopped working, do you think it would be okay for me to go on calling myself a detective two years later? I’d be a retired detective, like you’re a retired journalist who’s made the decision to waste your days away with a lowlife like Alex Mackey, who has a wife and should know better.’

  ‘How fucking dare you.’

  ‘Someone needs to tell you the truth,’ Ed said. ‘And Mackey sure as hell isn’t going to do that. Not when he’s got you waiting around for him every evening like some sad schoolgirl who doesn’t know any better. You do realise you’re not the only one? Oh, I forgot. You’re a journalist. You’ll already have it all worked out, I’m sure.’

  Dee was considering the various ways she could tell Ed Mitchell to get out of her house and never come back when his phone started to ring. He turned away from her to answer it, and it took all she had not to leap off the sofa and attack him, screaming and punching every bit of judgemental crap from his body.

  ‘Rachel,’ he said. ‘You sure about that? Okay, let me speak to her.’

  He finished the call and turned back to Dee.

  ‘Dee, can you come outside and show me where the body is?’

  Every instinct Dee possessed recoiled at the thought of going back out there, but she wasn’t about to let Ed see how she felt. She stood up, waited for the room to stop spinning, and went out to the deck.

  ‘Down there somewhere?’ Ed asked.

  The outside light gave her a clear view of the scene. The shingle, still wet from the earlier rain, was slick and black under the glaring light. She scanned the beach, trying to locate the exact spot. She knew where it was, because the memory of looking at him from inside the house was seared onto her brain. Except the place where he’d been lying was empty.

  The body was gone.

  Forty-Six

  Ella

  Three weeks earlier

  Victoria station. A blur of bodies and movement and noise. Ella pushed her way through the crowds, disorientated. She held tight to Jake’s hand, terrified that if she let him go for a second, she’d lose him. She saw a row of metal chairs and collapsed into one of them, pulling Jake onto her lap. A pair of police officers walked past, a man and a woman, eyes scanning the crowd as if they were looking for someone.

  She buried her face in the top of Jake’s head. When she looked up again, the officers were gone. She couldn’t stay here. Her every move would be tracked by CCTV. There were probably cameras all over the station, sending her image to a bank of screens. If the cameras didn’t catch her, there were so many other ways she could be found. As soon as she took cash out, there’d be a record of that somewhere; they could track her from the GPS signal on her phone as well. She’d switched her phone off on the train, but she wasn’t sure if that was enough, or if there was something else she should do to stop it alerting the police to her location.

  ‘Come on, Jakey. Let’s go.’

  She stood up, but he started to cry when she tried to get him to walk. She tugged his arm, trying to pull him forward, but that only made him cry louder. Aware of faces turning to look at them both, she sat back down again.

  She needed help. Balancing Jake on her lap, she took her phone out of her bag and switched it on. She’d already called Roxanne from the train, but had got her voicemail and hadn’t bothered leaving a message. She called her again. This time, she left a message.

  ‘It’s me. Can you call me as soon as you get this? Something’s happened.’

  She didn’t know how she was going to find the words to tell Roxanne that Katie was dead. Katie, who for so many years had been the closest thing Roxanne had to a daughter of her own. Even if the two of them had drifted apart after the trial and hadn’t spoken to each other in years, Ella knew Roxanne would be devastated.

  She scrolled through the list of contacts on her phone, wondering who else she would call. Dee was the person she most wanted to speak to. But she didn’t think Dee would want anything to do with her when she found out the sort of person Ella really was. A liar. And worse.

  Most of the other contacts in her phone were parents of the students she taught. Apart from one name. Someone she hadn’t spoken to in years. Phoning him now, asking for help, was a risk. But what choice did she have?

  She couldn’t focus. Her mind kept racing back to places she didn’t want it to go. To the night it happened. Shane and Gus and the bottle breaking and the blood. So much blood. Gus holding his hands to his neck, the look of surprise on his face right before he fell. To all those years later, in Bristol, when Shane got out of prison and came looking for her. To yesterday morning, on the beach with Katie and Jake. Building a sandcastle on the sandy strip that appeared when the tide was out. Waiting for the sea to come back in and wondering how she was going to tell Katie to leave. Watching the castle being slowly erased until there was no sign of it.

  Like the sandcastle, the image faded, replaced by Katie again. Being so greedily needy that Ella wanted to scream. When she offered to go to the shops, Ella said okay, because at least that would give her time to think. She gave Katie a list, telling her to take the buggy because it was handy for carrying the shopping…

  She wanted to shut her mind down, stop all the images, but her mind was something she could no longer control. The fear was a wave she was drowning under. Her throat closed over, her chest so tight and sore she couldn’t bear it. She shut her eyes, tried to breathe slowly and focus. But how could anyone focus when there were so many people, and Jake was wriggling and squirming in her lap, his feet kicking against her shins?

  She opened her eyes. And there was Shane. He was on the other side of the concourse, walking towards her. Pushing his way through the crowds in his rush to reach her. She stood up, Jake in her arms, and started running in the opposite direction. People shouted at her as she jostled against them, but she ran on, ignoring them. She ran until her heart was pounding and her breath was burning the back of her throat.

  She looked over her shoulder, scanning the faces in the crowd as she stumbled forward. She couldn’t see him, but it was impossible to make out any one individual. The sea of faces blurred together, eyes and noses and mouths. The weight of Jake in her arms was too much. She put him down and took his hand in hers, ready to move forward once more.

  Someone grabbed her shoulder, the sudden contact making her scream. She jumped sideways. Saw the man she’d thought was Shane stepping back, hands in the air.

  ‘I didn’t
mean to startle you,’ he said. ‘You dropped this as you were getting off the train. I tried to shout after you, but you didn’t hear me.’

  He lowered his right hand and she saw he was holding Jake’s toy train. His little blue Thomas the Tank Engine that he would be devastated to lose. She hadn’t even noticed it was missing.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she managed, taking the train and handing it to Jake.

  ‘No problem,’ the man said. ‘I’ve got a boy about the same age as yours.’ He looked as if he was going to say something else, so Ella thanked him once more, said they were late for their next train and hurried away. When she looked behind her again, he was gone.

  Holding Jake’s hand, she made her way outside the station. There was a hotel across the road. She went inside, located the bar and sat at a table by the window, watching people hurry along on the street outside. In contrast to the hustle and bustle of the station, there were barely any people in the bar. For the first time since arriving in London, she was able to clear her mind enough to think. Roxanne still hadn’t called her back, and she couldn’t afford to wait until she did. Which left her with only one other option.

  He answered after four rings.

  ‘Hello?’

  She paused, unsure whether to speak or hang up.

  ‘Ella? Is that you?’

  ‘I’m in trouble,’ she said. ‘Roxanne’s not answering her phone. I didn’t know who else to call. Will you help me, Leonard?’

  Forty-Seven

  Dee

  ‘Got everything?’ Louise asked.

  ‘I think so,’ Dee said. Except it sounded like I dink do. Speaking with a broken nose wasn’t easy. ‘And I don’t care if I’ve forgotten something. I want to get out of here.’

  She’d spent the night in hospital. When she finally got to be examined by the consultant, in the early hours of the morning, she was told she needed to stay in for twelve hours before they’d allow her to go home. An hour ago, she’d been declared fit to leave, on condition she was able to arrange for someone to come and pick her up.