Can't Let Go

by Jane Hill

  'And have you any idea who's doing this?'

  'Danny, I've been going over and over it in my mind, all summer, ever since I got that first letter. At one point I thought it might be you, even. That maybe you were his son, or something. And then I thought maybe it was Zoey. She looks – looked – a little bit like him, from certain angles. But obviously it's not. It can't be, because now she's dead and there's another letter. It's someone I don't know, someone I've never seen.'

  'Are you sure you've never seen them? Are you sure you've never seen anyone following you?'

  'Oh God, all the time.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'All the bloody time. Virtually every day of my life since then. But it's him I see – Rivers Carillo, or people who look like him. Younger versions of him, sometimes. I see him in crowds, I see him sitting in cafes watching me, I see him when I'm out shopping. I saw him the other day. Here, in Edinburgh. I thought he was chasing after me. I'm a nervous wreck, Danny. This thing has dominated my entire life. And it's all my own fault.'

  'You have to go to the police,' Danny said decisively. 'You're going to speak to the police. You're going to give a statement about how you found the body, you're going to show them that note and you're going to tell them everything they need to know. Everything. Tell them in exactly the same way that you just told me. No one can blame you for what you did to that River guy.'

  'Rivers.'

  'Whatever. Now, go now. And if you need me, if you think there's going to be trouble, call me. I'll get on a train if you need me. But, Beth? This can't wait. You need to do this now.'

  He was right, of course. It was the only way to end the nightmare.

  Detective Inspector David Finlay was a tall, lean man in his forties, with thinning grey-blond hair cropped close to his skull, and clear, pale blue eyes. He was wearing chinos and a blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, no tie. He looked completely exhausted. He led me downstairs to a little room and called in another detective, a younger woman. And then he proceeded to take my statement.

  I was as prepared as I could be. I had my story straight in my head. All I had to do was to tell the truth. All I had to do was to sit there and tell that policeman, with his lean, wry face, everything I had done and how I had found the body. That was the first thing I had to do. And then the questions would get more difficult, and I would need to show him the note, and to tell him about Rivers Carillo, but at least I had my story straight. I would tell him exactly what I'd told Danny. I knew what to say. And at least in that little room I would be safe, for as long as it took.

  DI Finlay asked me how I knew Zoey and to describe our relationship, and he raised his eyebrows slightly when I said we'd been friends.

  'Just friends?'

  'Yes.' I was keeping my answers as short as possible. He wanted to know why I was in Edinburgh and how come I'd been staying with Zoey, and who else knew Zoey and where she lived. I mentioned Steve's name, and Laura and Suze, and he ticked them off on a list in front of him. 'In a moment, Ms Stephens, I'm going to ask you about finding the body. But first, I want you to tell me what you were doing yesterday.'

  'All day?'

  'All day, please. Hour by hour. With proof, if possible.'

  I pulled out my purse. I had tickets and receipts. I always kept them – I don't know why. Any time I got given such a piece of paper, I would shove it straight into one of the sections of my purse without thinking about it. I had a pile of little bits of paper that I spread out on the table. I had the whole of the previous day, that lovely day of fun and freedom, summed up in a bunch of tickets and receipts. I had a timed and dated ticket from the open-top tour bus, I had tickets for Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood House, and a credit-card receipt from the little Indian restaurant where I'd had dinner. I had my ticket for the Josie Long show, and another one for We Are Klang's show, which was called KlangBang. Finlay looked closely at that ticket, at the time of the show. Eight-forty p.m.: that interested him. 'Who are they, these Klang people?'

  'These three comedians. Three blokes. They do stupid sketches. They're very funny.' As I said that, I realised why he was asking. That must have been when Zoey had been killed: that was why he was so interested. I had been sitting there in that little room, nearly wetting myself with laughter, while Zoey's stomach was being hacked to bits by a madman with a knife.

  'Can you prove this is your ticket?'

  That was the young female detective, the first thing she'd said. I shrugged. 'I don't know. I can't remember how I paid. I think I used my credit card.'

  She wrote something down. 'Can you prove you were there? Were you with anyone? Did anyone see you? Would anyone have noticed you there?'

  I almost laughed at the irony. No one ever noticed me. I'd lived half my life trying to go unnoticed. 'No. I was on my own.'

  'Maybe there's something about the show you remember particularly?' Finlay picked up the questioning again.

  I thought hard. Of course I remembered it; but that wouldn't help. One thing I knew from Zoey was that comedians did more or less the same show every night. Even the apparent ad libs were often rehearsed. Even if I had recited the whole show, word for word, that wouldn't have proved that I'd been there on the night in question. I twisted my fingers together and then fiddled with the receipts and tickets lying there in front of me, rearranging them so that the edges were parallel with the edge of the table. I looked at DI Finlay, at his interesting face, and then I thought of something. 'They did this thing with insults. They picked on members of the audience.' I remembered sitting as still as I possibly could, plastering a nonchalant look on my face, sending out 'Don't pick me . . . don't pick me' vibes. 'People had to come up with the best insult they could for the guys on stage. It was really stupid, but very funny.' Finlay was frowning at me, wondering what I was about to say. 'Anyway, there was this old woman in the audience. I mean, really old, like eighty or something. And they picked on her, and she had to insult one of the comedians, this funny-looking bald guy. And she said he looked like a dead Gollum.'

  So that was my alibi. The detective's mouth twitched slightly at one corner. ' "A dead Gollum",' he said wryly, and wrote it down. He smiled to himself, and shook his head slightly. He looked at his colleague and she smiled too. Then Finlay scratched his chin and looked at me for a while, as if he was trying to work me out. I didn't know where to look. I was very conscious of the note in the back pocket of my jeans and I knew that soon I would have to show it to him.

  He cleared his throat. 'Now, Ms Stephens, I believe you arrived back at the flat last night and found Ms Spiegelman's body.'

  I nodded.

  'Could you speak up, please?'

  'Yes. Yes, I did.'

  'And what time was this?'

  'It was just gone ten. I looked at my watch as I got back to the flat.'

  'I need to know everything you did and everything you touched.'

  I took him through it, from the moment I'd pushed open the street door of the flats. Methodically, as calmly as possible, I told him about the key not being there, and about listening to all the phone messages as I climbed the stairs. A s I spoke I had my hand in the back pocket of my jeans, feeling the note, ready to pull it out and show him. I told him how I had seen blood in the hallway, and how I'd found Zoey's body, and how I had put my hands on her stomach to try to stop the bleeding. My voice had been quiet and steady until then, but it caught in my throat as I got to that bit, and the young female detective went over to a table in the corner and poured me a paper cup of water. 'Take your time,' she said. 'This must be difficult.'

  And that was when I lost my nerve. She was suddenly kind and gentle, and my throat was dry, and I'd been so strong until then. But I lost my nerve. I fingered the note in my pocket one more time, and then I shoved it deeper. I told them everything else that I'd done in that flat and where I'd left my bloody fingerprints. But I didn't tell them about the note. And I didn't tell them about Rivers Carillo. At the very last minute my resolve fled.<
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  'So why did you not report what you found? Why didn't you call 999 straight away?' DI Finlay was definitely playing bad cop. He glared at me, his forehead wrinkled into a frown.

  'Because I was scared,' I said. 'I heard footsteps. I thought the person who killed her was also going to kill me. I got scared, and so I ran.'

  Finlay raised his eyebrows. 'And now you're not scared?'

  'Of course I'm scared. But I couldn't stay running for ever.'

  He was going to ask me another question but there was a knock on the door. A uniformed policeman came into the room and apologised for the interruption. Finlay went outside to speak to him, while the female detective and I looked at each other across the table. She smiled at me. 'This won't take much longer,' she said.

  After a few minutes Finlay came back in, looking much happier. 'Okay,' he said, brushing his hands together as if he had finished with the whole business. 'That's it, Ms Stephens. Go with Detective Sergeant Ross here and we'll take your fingerprints for comparison purposes, and then you'll be free to go. I'm sure you'll be reassured to know that we have a suspect in custody. I anticipate that charges are imminent.'

  'What?' I was stunned. 'You found him? Already? Who? Who is it?'

  But Finlay wouldn't say. I was ushered out of that tiny room with my head spinning. This was crazy. Had they really managed to catch the killer so quickly? Who was it? Who the hell was it who had been haunting me all summer?

  Forty-one

  I walked out of the police station feeling like a zombie. I was tired and I was filthy and I wasn't sure whether I should be laughing or crying. Zoey was dead. But they had already arrested the man they thought had killed her. Who was it? Did they have the right person? Was it my stalker? Was it the note-writer? Was I safe at last? But even if they had arrested the right person, if they really had caught Zoey's killer, then maybe I was only safe for a little while. Because – what would he be saying about me? Would he tell the police why he'd done what he'd done? Would he tell them about me?

  'Beth!'

  The man's voice made me jump. I looked across to where the voice had come from. A tall, skinny, bearded man was standing in the doorway of an empty shop across the road, smoking. He was beckoning me over. I stood frozen to the spot for a moment. He'd been waiting for me. And then I blinked and I saw that it was Steve, Zoey's friend. He looked as dishevelled and distraught as I did. I walked across the road towards him, almost forgetting to check for traffic. I had never been so glad to see someone. Close up, I could tell that he had been crying. He held out his arms to me. He just stood there, saying nothing, and held out his arms. And I hugged him. It was a busy street, slightly run-down, away from the centre of the city, and people were walking past us – normal, mid-morning Edinburgh people, on their way to do normal things. But Steve and I stood there, the pair of us, his chin resting on my head, and we hugged each other, swaying slightly, saying nothing. His shirt smelled of cigarettes and sweat and it seemed like the most comforting smell I had ever known.

  After a while he said, 'This is so fucked-up. This is so fucking fucked-up.'

  He let go of me, and we stood side by side in that doorway.

  'Did they tell you they've got someone?'

  I nodded. I opened my mouth and to my surprise my voice was still working. 'Yes. They didn't say who.'

  'It's some fucking junkie. That's who they've got. I was talking to one of the cops. He came out for a smoke and we got talking. He shouldn't have told me, but he did. I guess they were proud of themselves. They found some fucking junkie with Zoey's purse, trying to use one of her credit cards. Apparently he's trying to tell them that the bag just appeared in his doorway. That he woke up and it was there. Christ.' He stubbed out his cigarette and trod it into the ground. I said nothing. I was scared all over again. This wasn't right. They hadn't got him. They hadn't found the killer.

  'You've got to give them marks for speed, I guess,' said Steve, his voice bitter. 'They were fast, I'll give them that. But this is fucked-up. This is fucking crazy. This is so fucking wrong. Like Zoey would let some junkie into the flat. Like some junkie would do that . . .' and his voice cracked slightly. 'Like he'd do that to her just to steal her fucking bag. Can't they see? The guy who did this must have taken her bag for some reason. I don't know. Maybe he wanted something from it. God knows. But then he dumps it. He sees some poor junkie kid sitting in a doorway somewhere, and dumps the bag on him. And the kid can't believe his luck, so he tries to use one of the cards and he gets banged up for fucking murder. This is so fucked-up. Why can't they see it?'

  Steve pulled out his pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I took it. I didn't smoke, not often, but I understood why people did. You can stop time when you're smoking, or at least slow it down. It's something very controlled that you can concentrate on. You can concentrate so hard on smoking a cigarette that nothing else matters for a little while. Steve lit my cigarette for me, and I noticed that his fingertips, like mine, were still black from the fingerprint ink. He noticed something else.

  'You have blood on your hands.'

  For just a moment I thought he meant it metaphorically, and I wondered how he knew, how he'd guessed. And then I looked at my fingers and realised that the dried blood was still caked around my nails.

  'I found her,' I said. 'I found her. But I ran away because I was scared.' That part of the story at least was becoming a little easier to say.

  'Christ,' said Steve. 'Christ. You saw her. You saw what he fucking did to her.' He pulled deeply on his cigarette and shuddered. 'How are you feeling?'

  I thought for a moment. I leaned back against the locked door of that empty shop. I watched a young mother with a pushchair walk past, and a brisk elderly lady with a shopping trolley. Neither of them looked at us. 'I feel dead,' I said, and I meant it. I even thought that maybe I was dead, actually dead. Maybe both of us were dead, Steve and I. Maybe no one else could see us. This was what death was like, this aimless scared wandering; this sense of not being able to get out of a nightmare.

  'Do you know what I feel?' Steve knocked the ash from his cigarette with his black fingertip.

  I shook my head.

  'I feel angry. Fucking angry. And I'm going to go right back to talk to those detectives and I'm going to make them see sense. I am going to make a fucking scene and I will not leave until they take me seriously. We both know Zoey wasn't killed for her credit cards. We both know there's got to be more to it than that.'

  I must have gasped or something. I must have made some kind of sound or gesture that gave something away, because suddenly Steve was staring at me very intently. The purple circles around his eyes had given them a curious greenish cast. 'What?' he said. 'What do you know? You do know something, don't you? Tell me.'

  He grabbed my wrist but I twisted away from him. 'I have to go,' I said. 'I have to . . . get back. Sorry, sorry.' And I walked away very quickly down that normal, shabby, busy street. I walked away as fast as I could, and as I turned a corner I started running and then I was hurtling through the streets, out of breath and still running from the nightmare that just wouldn't stop.

  Forty-two

  The Fringe was still in full swing. Nothing had changed. The ugly slab of concrete concourse above Waverley Station at the end of Princes Street was as bustling as it had been all week. I was sitting on a cold metal bench by a low stone wall that encompassed a flower bed, of sorts: a compacted bed of dry soil and cigarette stubs, a few tenacious shrubs still clinging to life despite the long dry summer. I was waiting to catch a train, hiding in plain sight in one of the busiest spots in the whole city. The giant marquee that served as a ticket office for the Fringe was packed with people waiting to use the array of computer screens to buy online tickets to whichever show the critics were raving about that week. The queue at the Half-Price Hut was less choosy; people were standing there weighing up the merits of comics and actors they had never heard of, deciding which ones were worthy of three or four pounds for a
cut-price ticket.

  Crowds of people were milling about, bringing splashes of colour to the grey city. I watched them with a new alertness, a new fear. I watched the faces, I looked at the eyes. I wondered if he had followed me here, if he was watching me even now. I wondered what he planned to do to me next.

  There were floppy-haired students from university drama societies, from Oxbridge, or Durham, or Exeter, promoting their modern-day productions of Macbeth or The Crucible or Hedda Gabler, as if any of it mattered. There were arty middle-aged people, Guardian-reader types, scarves and sandals, beards and berets, linen and corduroy. And everywhere there were groups of teenage girls in their uniform of leggings and ballet pumps, with their cheap chunky beads and their short denim skirts, their bra straps showing under their layers of brightly coloured vests and skimpy T-shirts, and their regulation ironed-straight hair. I had been one of them once, seventeen years ago, dressed in that summer's version of this bold, flirty finery, all cheap and brash and sexy and brave and innocent. And that was how everything got ruined.

  Every few moments someone would walk over to me and hand me a flyer for a show. 'Are you looking for some comedy tonight?' was what some of the pamphleteers asked me. They had no idea how blackly, grotesquely funny those words sounded. I wondered when – if – they would hear what had happened; how the news would spread. I wondered if the festival would come to a huge grinding halt. Or maybe everyone already knew what had happened and they were ignoring it. Maybe the festival momentum was impossible to stop.

  I let the pamphleteers give me their pieces of glossy paper, their postcards, their brochures. Just two days ago I had been doing the same thing: handing out flyers to anyone who might be remotely interested in seeing the show. I looked at the leaflets that I was handed, tried to read the words, tried to work out what the pictures meant, but nothing made sense. I put the flyers in a little pile by my side, straightening the edges so that the pile looked neat. They were just pieces of paper and cardboard. They couldn't hurt me. Everything around me was going on as it had done for the last two weeks. There were jugglers and fire-eaters and comedians and backpackers. People looked exhilarated or exhausted or confused. But no one else was as scared as I was. The world had tilted on its axis but no one else seemed to have noticed.