Dee was torn between wanting to slap him and kiss him back. As always, she ended up doing neither and stepped away from him to hug Ben, who was tugging the bottom of her sweater.
‘Hey, Ben boy.’ She lifted him in the air and held him tight, breathing in the warm, comforting smell of his little-boy body.
‘We got cake!’
Ben jumped out of her arms, took her hand and started dragging her towards the kitchen. She let him pull her, while she looked around the room for the two people she hadn’t seen yet.
As she was admiring the cake, a chocolate caterpillar with far too many candles on its back, she spotted Alex Mackey outside on the beach. He was down by the water, walking along the stretch of sand that appeared when the tide was out. He was speaking to someone on the phone, his shoulders hunched up, making him look tense and tired and old.
Even now, three months after the event, Dee felt the familiar mix of anger and shame when she saw him. He had lied to her. He was nothing more than a shallow womaniser who preyed on lonely, vulnerable women. He had been seeing her and Ella at the same time. Pretending to both of them that he was their friend when all along he was only interested in having sex with them.
He’d known that if anyone found out he’d been seeing Ella, he would become a suspect. So he’d pushed to keep Dee close. Using her to find out how the police investigation was going, making sure no one suspected him of doing anything wrong.
At least Dee knew now that it wasn’t Alex who had broken into her house and stolen Katie’s file. That had been Shane Gilbert.
By the time the emergency services had turned up at Roxanne’s house, Shane had disappeared. The police eventually tracked him down to a caravan park in Kent. He was arrested and had been in custody since then, awaiting trial for multiple murders.
Thanks to Ed, Dee had been able to piece together most of Shane’s story from his police interviews. He’d admitted breaking into Dee’s house and taking Katie’s file. But he’d denied coming back the next day and stealing her laptop. Instead, he was claiming it was Billy who’d taken the laptop and attacked Dee.
Dee didn’t believe this, and neither did Kent police, who had decided to include Billy Morrison’s manslaughter in the list of charges facing Shane Gilbert. Their version of events was that Shane had asked Billy to help him hack into Dee’s laptop. When Billy refused, Shane lost his temper and pushed Billy down the stairs, planting the laptop beside his body to make it look as if Billy had stolen it.
Ed had told Dee that when Shane’s case came to trial, his defence team might well put forward a plea of not guilty by insanity. While still in prison, he had started using bodybuilding steroids, an addiction that had got worse over the years. At some point, he’d also become a heavy cocaine user. The combination of steroids and cocaine was known to cause psychotic and violent outbursts.
Dee knew Shane’s story was tragic. He’d been sentenced for a crime he’d never committed. There was every chance that his subsequent drug habit was a direct consequence of this miscarriage of justice. But he’d killed too many people for her to feel sorry for him.
‘Hey.’ Ed put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure.’ Dee forced herself to smile.
‘They’re here,’ he said. ‘They got stuck in traffic apparently. Look.’ He pointed out of the window at the two people walking along the beach from the mobile home. Dee opened the back door and went out to greet them, smiling so hard her face hurt.
‘Dee!’
Jake started to run when he saw her, tripping and slipping over the shingle, a smile lighting up his face.
‘We got you a present.’ He was carrying a gift-wrapped box, far too big for him, which he thrust into Dee’s hands. ‘Candles. They smell.’
‘I’m sure they’ll be lovely,’ Dee said. ‘That’s really thoughtful. Thank you.’ She looked over Jake’s head at the man standing behind him.
‘I wasn’t sure what to get you,’ Tom said. ‘But Jake saw these and said you liked candles.’
‘He’s right,’ Dee said. ‘I love them.’ She looked back down at Jake. ‘We’ve got cake inside. Chocolate cake.’
‘I love cake,’ Jake said, already running towards the house.
‘How’s he doing?’ Dee asked.
‘Not great today,’ Tom said. ‘He misses her so much, you know?’
‘Of course he does. How about you?’
‘This week’s been a bit crap,’ Tom said. ‘But that means next week will be better, right?’
‘And you’ll see her next week,’ Dee said.
‘We’ll see her next week.’ Tom smiled. ‘Yeah. That’ll be good. She called last night. She sounded okay, actually. Although I never know how much of it she puts on for Jake, you know?’
‘I thought she seemed all right the last time I went to visit,’ Dee said. ‘I know it can’t be easy, but I get the feeling she’s relieved it’s all over. And she knows how lucky she is. How lucky they both are.’
Unlike Trevor and Roxanne, Jake and Ella had survived that terrible afternoon. Inside the burning shed, Trevor had managed to knock down the back wall and push Jake outside to safety. He was following the little boy out when a piece of burning wood fell on him, trapping him.
Ella was barely alive when the firemen found her. In the days following the fire, it had been touch and go whether she would survive. But she was tougher than she looked, and she fought back.
One of the first things she did when she was able to speak was confess to killing Gus Hope in 2008. Roxanne, who had witnessed the tragedy, had come up with the idea of framing Shane for the attack. At the time, Ella had gone along with it, thinking it was the only way she could escape Shane’s obsessive attention. But the guilt at what she’d done had never left her. If anything, it had grown worse over the years. It was guilt that had made her maintain her friendship with Katie. Not knowing that Katie had her own agenda for wanting to keep her close.
‘She knew,’ Ella told Dee. ‘All that time when she was pretending to be my friend, she knew what I’d done. She set out to destroy my life. Not that I can blame her. I never should have lied about what happened that night.’
When Shane was released from prison, it was all too easy for Ella to believe he was out to get her. Pregnant, alone and half crazed with guilt, she had never imagined it could be Katie behind the silent phone calls and the break-ins. By the time Katie suggested they swap identities, it seemed like the answer to all her problems.
‘Katie orchestrated the whole thing,’ she said. ‘In my head, I’d turned Shane into this monster. He was never half as powerful as I made him out to be.’
Ella had recounted all of this during Dee’s regular visits to her in HMP Bronzefield, where she was being held on remand. After she’d confessed, the Crown Prosecution Service had decided to charge her with manslaughter and perverting the course of justice. Given her history, she was deemed a flight risk and bail was denied.
Once the trial was over – whatever the outcome – Dee would be able to write about it. If that was what she wanted. At its heart, she sensed this was Katie’s story. A messed-up, lonely kid so full of self-hatred she’d spent most of her life trying to become someone she wasn’t. She wasn’t sure this was a story she was ready to tell.
Unlike Katie, Dee had been given a second chance. She was rebuilding her life. A different life to the one she’d had in London, but a life nonetheless. Tom and Jake were living in the mobile home. Dee helped a lot with Jake because the boy needed all the support he could get. He was having counselling following the fire, and he missed his mother every single day. She had been the sole source of everything for the first two years of his life. Learning to live without her wasn’t easy. Even with a dad like Tom to help him through.
Dee had started hiking again; long, solitary walks across the South Downs that gave her the space she needed to breathe and the time she needed to think about what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She had a few ideas,
but nothing concrete. Not yet.
Then there was Ed. She wasn’t sure how she’d define their relationship. If she’d even call it a relationship. Nothing had happened between them. But it felt as if something was about to. And that sense of anticipation was reason enough to get her out of bed most mornings.
On the days she found it harder – the days she was tempted to do nothing except laze about inside waiting until the evening came so she could start drinking – those days, she would think of Trevor Dubber and Billy Morrison. She would think of the life and promise they’d both had, that sense they gave of anything being possible. And she would think how lucky she was, how very lucky, because she was still here.
She was alive, and the sun was shining outside her bedroom window, and she had friends, people she cared about. And maybe, when she had worked out what she was going to do with the rest of her life, she would write a story that would make Billy and Trevor proud.
Acknowledgements
Massive thanks to all my friends who’ve stuck with me through this writing journey and so much else. Thanks also to: my parents (the Irish sales team); my lovely agent, Laura Longrigg; my writing buddies Chris Curran, Sarah Reed, Alison O’Leary, Louise Phillips, Claire Flynn and Adele O’Neill, for being so generous with your time and support; everyone at Team Canelo, especially Louise Cullen, Francesca Riccardi and Siân Heap. Finally, and most importantly, my family – Luke, Sean, Ruby: we’ve been through so much and we’re still here, stronger and tougher and better than ever. I love you guys more than words can ever say.
About the Author
Sheila grew up in a small town in the west of Ireland. After studying Psychology at University College Galway (now called NUI Galway) she left Ireland and worked as an EFL teacher, travelling to Italy, Spain, Germany, Holland and Argentina.
She is the author of a series of crime novels featuring DI Ellen Kelly. The novels are set in South East London, an area she knows and loves. She now lives in Eastbourne, on the beautiful East Sussex coast. Eastbourne is the location for her series of crime novels featuring investigative journalist Dee Doran.
When she’s not writing, Sheila does corporate writing and storytelling, she runs creative writing courses, is a tutor for the Writers Bureau and is a mentor on the WoMentoring programme. She reviews crime fiction for crimesquad.com and she is a regular guest on BBC Radio Sussex.
She is married with two children.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2020 by Canelo
Canelo Digital Publishing Limited
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Copyright © Sheila Bugler, 2020
The moral right of Sheila Bugler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788637701
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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