by Carys Jones
‘We need to just focus on letting you heal.’ Shane cloaked her in the towel.
‘He pushed me.’
‘You said that before, what did you mean?’
Amanda drifted back into the hotel room. She shuddered beneath the towel, away from the trapped heat of the shower.
‘Here,’ Shane went over to a large paper shopping bag that was tucked up in the far corner of the room. He pulled out a trio of soft flannel pyjamas and also a long-length nightgown adorned with Wonder Woman. ‘I thought you might want something comfortable to wear, but I wasn’t sure what you’d go for.’
Amanda looked at the items which Shane displayed on the bed. She reached out and stroked the pyjamas. They were deliciously soft to the touch.
‘And these,’ he hastily added two pairs of slippers to the arrangement and some striped slipper socks. ‘Just pick what you want.’
Amanda pulled on the soft pyjamas and the slipper socks. She noticed that Shane turned away as she did so. Her wounds marginally eased within the gentle fabric. She sat down on the bed and rested a hand against her stomach, realising how hungry she was. ‘I feel like I could literally eat a horse,’ she joked.
Shane handed her the room service menu and remained standing, watching her like she was painting in a gallery he was struggling to discern the meaning of. ‘You said he pushed you?’ Shane crossed his arms against his chest and waited.
‘Yes.’ Amanda kept her head bent, focused on the menu. ‘Ooh, a cheeseburger sounds good. Or macaroni and cheese. What are you going to get?’
‘He pushed you – where? Down the stairs?’
‘Actually, I might go for pizza.’
‘Amanda, answer me.’
Slowly she closed the menu and raised her head to meet his penetrating gaze. In the bathroom mirror she’d noticed that the sea had stolen some of the brightness from her blue eyes.
‘He didn’t push me down the stairs.’ A tear journeyed down her cheek.
‘Then what did he do?’ Shane whispered.
‘He pushed me off a cliff.’
Shane clamped a hand to his mouth and turned away from her.
‘I think my head’s still bleeding I might need some new plasters or something—’
‘That fucking bastard!’ Shane roared. ‘He pushed you off a fucking cliff! He could have killed you!’
‘I’m pretty sure that was his intention.’
‘Amanda, how can you be so calm about this? What the hell happened at that mansion? Why did he do this? That man, he…’ Shane was at a loss for words. He paced back and forth, puffing out his cheeks.
‘He made my greatest nightmare a reality,’ she concluded flatly for him. ‘And I let him do it. I went there, knowing how dangerous he was, but I thought I knew better. I thought I was smarter. I was wrong.’
‘Amanda, you cannot blame yourself for this.’
‘Oh, I don’t.’
‘What he did to you—’ Shane spun around and punched the wall. His knuckles connected with plaster with a muffled smack, leaving a slight indentation.
‘Right now I don’t have the mental energy to think about what he did. I need to focus on healing.’
‘I’ll kill him. I’ll kill the prick. I’ll rip his fucking eyes out.’
Not when I could have the satisfaction of killing you myself. Those had been the last words McAllister had said to Amanda before he pushed her. And now she understood the sentiment implicitly.
‘If anyone’s killing him, it’s me.’ Anger swam in her veins, travelling to every inch of her body and pushing back any feelings of pain.
‘Ridiculous,’ Shane scoffed. ‘All you need to do is rest and focus on getting your strength back. All right?’
‘First I need to eat,’ Amanda tapped the menu in her lap.
*
When Amanda woke up the television was on. The dull drone of distant voices had slowly pulled her away from sleep. With a struggle she sat up and rubbed at her eyes. She felt well rested. It was surprising how effective a long shower and a decent meal could be. She’d barely finished her macaroni and cheese when she felt her eyelids drooping south, her body relaxing into the softness of the mattress.
‘What time is it?’ she yawned. The television provided the only light in the room. It glowed on the far wall like an animated night light.
‘Three.’ Shane was sat up on the other side of the bed, the remote resting in his hand.
‘Three?’ Amanda shot a look at the window. Sure enough, the world outside seemed shrouded in darkness.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you, I’ll turn this down,’ Shane began lowering the volume with the remote control.
‘No, it’s okay.’ Amanda rubbed at her eyes some more. They were so sore. ‘Three? Why aren’t you asleep?’
‘I can’t sleep.’ Shane’s attention never drifted away from the glowing screen. He watched it with a scary intensity, like a hawk studying a field mouse.
‘Have you slept at all?’
‘No.’
‘What are you even watching?’ Amanda looked over at the woman on the screen who wore a formal blue blazer and spoke with authority. The news. Shane was watching the twenty-four-hour news channel. ‘You really need to try and sleep.’
‘There has to be something.’
‘Something?’
‘On the news, about McAllister. There has to be something. How can he throw someone off a cliff and no one says anything about it.’
‘Because only his men saw.’
‘Someone must have seen something.’
‘It was remote and it was the middle of the night.’
‘Are you making excuses for him?’
‘No,’ Amanda sighed, ‘I’m making excuses for the situation. For the lack of valid witnesses.’
‘I’ll keep watching, there must be something.’
‘Actually,’ Amanda awkwardly scrambled out of bed and grabbed her laptop. It felt heavier than she remembered. She opened it up, the blue glow of the screen illuminating her face. She was about to log in and then she hesitated. The online world had always felt like a safe place, somewhere she was able to hide in plain sight if she so wanted. But now, when she saw her log-in screen, her spine tingled with a sense of apprehension. How safe was her digital world? Did McAllister have eyes and ears there too, tracking her every move?
‘Go back to sleep, you need to rest.’
‘First I need to ensure that McAllister thinks me dead.’ Amanda traced her fingers along her freshly bandaged temple before taking the plunge and logging in.
‘What are you doing?’ Shane looked away from the television.
‘I’m just going to plant a false story about a body washing up on a beach or a fishing boat catching me in their nets.’ She knew exactly where to go, how to leak such a lie to the world to make it look convincing.
‘No.’ Shane snapped her laptop closed. Amanda barely had chance to withdraw her fingers in time.
‘Christ, Shane, what did you do that for?’
‘I’m not having you fake your own death.’
‘But if I don’t—’
‘He’ll what? He pushed you off a cliff, Amanda. He doesn’t expect you to get washed up somewhere. In his mind you’re just gone.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I do know that.’ Shane’s gaze became distant. ‘I’ve worked a lot of homicide cases where bodies surface alongside a river, or on a beach. Once we finally trace the killer they are always stunned that the body was found, that they were able to be tied to the crime. When someone throws a body into the ocean or a river, they assume it’s gone for good.’
Gone for good.
Is that what McAllister was striving for? To erase any trace of Amanda from the earth, to forever condemn her to exist only in memory?
‘I don’t want you to play dead for him. I want you to get better and then we’ll go back home and turn our backs on this whole fucking mess.’
‘It’s just one little artic
le. One little lie.’
‘And if it snowballs?’ Shane raised his eyebrows at her. ‘If it gains momentum, if someone links your name to the body, if your mother ends up getting a call that you’re dead, how do you go home then, Amanda? You couldn’t say you miraculously rose up out of the grave, you’d have to disappear to maintain the lie. You’d have to abandon your life and everyone you know.’
‘Like Will did.’
The words hung between them.
‘He was trying to protect someone,’ Shane said stoically after a moment. ‘You’d be creating a lie just to protect your original plan.’
‘What if he goes after Ewan? I need to check on him, make sure he’s okay,’ Amanda scrambled for the hotel room’s phone but Shane rested his hand on her shoulders and eased her back against the pillows on the bed.
‘I imagine that’d be more trouble than it’s worth. To McAllister, pretty much everyone connected to Will is dead. He got what he wanted – his payback.’
Amanda looked at her laptop. ‘Could you give it all up, your life, your identity if I commit to my lie?’
Shane massaged the back of his neck and watched the television. ‘If you asked it of me, then yeah, I could.’ He dropped his hand and turned to face her, his green eyes glistening with tears. ‘But, Amanda, please don’t ask that of me.’
19
Amanda watched the sun rise. She opened the curtains in her hotel room and sat on the bed, waiting for the shadows of night to recede. As a new day dawned a blue sky appeared above the city, cloudless and bright. The early morning light glistened against the windows of distant buildings, making the skyline look as though it were infused with diamonds.
She heard the door creak open as Shane returned from the gym. He’d been there since four in the morning, sweating away his frustrations. ‘You should be resting.’
‘I can’t sleep.’ Amanda felt caught between exhaustion and exhilaration. Her body longed for rest; each time she lay down her bones pressed themselves against the bed, wanting to become absorbed by its delicate softness. But while her body was tired, her mind was unbearably alert. Thoughts bounced off one another like bubbles in a glass of Coke. There was so much activity going on behind Amanda’s temple that she felt a constant ache behind her bruised eyes. ‘I keep thinking about it all.’
‘Amanda.’ She felt the bed sag beside her as Shane sat down. He began to gently massage her shoulders. ‘I can only imagine how terrifying it was to go through what you did. But it’s done now. You just need to rest and let your body heal.’
‘There were names,’ Amanda muttered bleakly. ‘So many names, I see them when I close my eyes. They dance through my mind like I’m trapped in the Matrix or something.’
‘So what happened to the USB?’
Amanda shot her laptop a dirty look where it sat upon the nearby desk. Technology had let her down. ‘He threw the USB off the cliff,’ she swallowed against a lump that was forming in her throat, ‘before he threw me off too.’
‘You need to try and forget,’ Shane kept massaging her shoulders. ‘You need to try and rest.’
‘There must have been fifty, sixty names. Women, girls, who he had plucked from their lives and brought here to be sold as slaves. How can he just get away with that?’ She spun around and stared into Shane’s green eyes, searching their gentle depths for answers.
‘You could report him. Tip off the local cops,’ he offered weakly with a shrug.
‘The case would be dead in minutes without any evidence, you know that.’ Amanda struggled to her feet, refusing Shane’s assistance. ‘And he’ll have wiped that entire laptop the second he got back to his house.’
‘So what then? The only choice you have is to let this go.’
Amanda knew that the last thing she could do was to let it go. She was going to finish McAllister. She’d seen the true extent of his monstrous nature and she wasn’t about to not at least try and end him, to stop his plague of torment upon countless others.
‘The beach.’
‘What?’
‘The tide… it brought me to the beach.’ Amanda hobbled back and forth, pressing her fingertips against her temple. If only the bubbles would settle, just a bit, to grant her direct access to her jumble of memories. ‘Otherwell… Otterby…’
‘Otterwell Bay?’
‘That’s it,’ she snapped her fingers at him and stood still. ‘Otterwell Bay. The tide dragged me there and then I found a phone box.’
‘Okay…’
‘Maybe the USB washed up there too?’
Amanda felt rejuvenated by the injection of hope she’d just given herself.
‘Look—’
‘We go there, we check the beach and who knows, maybe we find it. If it’s not too waterlogged I should hopefully be able to recover its data, and then bam, we’ve still got him.’ She closed her hand into a tight fist.
‘I’m not taking you back to Otterwell Bay.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you need to rest, that’s why.’ Shane got up and began stalking towards the bathroom. Amanda went after him, forcing her aching legs to move quickly.
‘Shane, I’ve been resting for days. A bit of fresh air, it will do me good. Besides, I’m going crazy being cooped up here all the time.’
‘It’s too risky.’
‘This might be my only shot at bringing McAllister down.’ Amanda grabbed Shane’s gaze and drew him towards her, pleading with her eyes as she looked up at him. ‘All those names. There were just so many. They will all be someone’s daughter, sister… wife. They deserve to be found, don’t you think?’
Shane looked doubtful but Amanda recognised the way he leaned his head to the left, it meant he was reluctantly giving in to her demands. ‘You have to sleep on the way and when we get there you can spend twenty minutes on the beach. That’s it, do you understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘And wrap up warm.’
‘Sure.’
‘And be prepared for the fact that in all likelihood we won’t find the USB, Amanda.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You’re basically looking for a needle in a haystack.’
*
Amanda didn’t sleep during the drive out of the city. Instead she gazed absently at the rows of buildings which thinned away to the rolling heather-clad landscape of the highlands. The early morning blue sky remained, bathing everywhere in glorious golden light. Leaning back in her seat, Amanda let the vibrations of the car soothe the deep ache in her bones.
‘Okay, it’s just up here,’ Shane repeated the information that the satnav had just given him.
Amanda straightened and peered out the windscreen. They were almost two hours out of the city. They hadn’t passed another car in miles. The road they were on was bleak and desolate, even in the sunshine. It wound its way along the shoreline, twisting and turning, meandering as though it had no destination in mind.
The phone box was on the side of the road. Amanda looked at it and shrivelled within her hooded jumper and loose-fitting joggers. She couldn’t bear to wear anything tight against all her bruises.
‘Are you really sure about this?’ Shane slowed the car and then stopped. He looked at her, his fingertips grazing the key in the ignition. ‘We could still go back.’
‘I need to at least look for it.’
Amanda climbed out of the car and an icy breeze immediately tangled itself up in her hair. She furiously knocked the blonde strands out of her eyes. The low ponytail she’d hastily tugged her hair into earlier was proving to be not as proficient as she’d hoped. Some of her looser layers had broken free and now danced about her head as they were manipulated by the wind.
The small shingle beach looked miles away. Amanda paused at the top of the cliff, looking beyond the wooden staircase which twisted its way down between the rocks. Her palms became clammy, her heart beat quickening. If she closed her eyes she could still recall how it felt to fall and just keep falling.
‘
That’s a long walk down,’ Shane’s hand was quickly on her shoulder. She felt stronger with him by her side.
‘Yep, it is,’ she agreed with a tight nod. She could barely recall climbing the stairs when she’d clamoured up from the beach. Adrenalin had made her feral that day, moving purely on instinct and she considered it was the only way she could have survived. If she’d stopped, even for a moment, and considered what she was up against she’d have fallen down and never got up again.
‘Look, if you’re not up to it—’
‘I have to start pushing myself at some point, else I’ll never get better.’
Amanda boldly approached the stairway which led down to the beach. Though her bones ached, nothing was broken. She’d thankfully sustained only surface injuries and she wasn’t about to let some bruises weaken her, not anymore, not when she could be standing so tantalisingly close to the one piece of evidence which could destroy the monster that was McAllister.
The stairs creaked as they walked down them, the wood weary and fragile from decades being pounded by relentless winds.
Just as it had been the day Amanda washed up upon it, the beach was deserted. A few seagulls danced against the blue sky before diving into the water like kamikaze pilots.
‘Where do we start looking?’ Shane was pacing along the beach, head bent as he focused on the shingle beneath his feet.
Amanda tasted something metal. Closing her eyes, she drank in the sea air, focused on the shrill cry of the sea gulls. She needed to centre herself, needed to push back the memory of what had happened upon the beach. Like a piece of driftwood she’d been tossed ashore. Using what little strength remained in her arms she’d crawled along the sand and shingle.
‘We need to focus on the shoreline,’ Shane called over to her.
Amanda blinked. A brisk breeze slapped across her cheeks as if also committed to bringing her back into the moment.
‘The shoreline, yes.’ Amanda trudged over to the waves. They lapped idly against the mosaic of shingle, lacking any of the destructive strength they’d had further along the coast, where Amanda had fallen.