Dragging herself across to the passenger side, Emily wrenched open the door and climbed in.
“The name’s Frank,” the man said, setting off again. “Put your seatbelt on. I’m always telling my daughter the same thing.”
“Jennifer. Thank you for the ride.”
The van turned onto the motorway and joined the convoy of vehicles heading towards the city. Emily sank back into the seat, pain and exhaustion pulling her towards unconsciousness.
Frank eyed his passenger, grumbled something under his breath, then turned his attention to the road.
Resting her head against the window, Emily listened to the hum of the engine. Soon, she was asleep. Above her, the spring sky remained a vivid blue.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tailbacks into the city added an hour onto their journey, and the small detour Frank made to drop off his passenger meant his delivery was now well overdue. Pulling up to the kerb, he watched Emily struggle with the door as she stepped outside.
“You going to be all right?”
She nodded, avoiding his gaze. “Thanks for the ride.”
Frank drove away, turning the corner to be greeted by a gridlock of traffic.
Emily faced the window of the letting agency. Paulina Blanchard was inside, hunched over her desk.
“I’m sorry, I’m closing up early today,” Paulina said, her eyes glued to the computer screen, when the bell over the front door chimed. When it was clear the customer wasn’t leaving, she looked up with waspish annoyance. Muscle by muscle, her annoyance turned to surprise.
“Miss Swanson! I—you’re back. I didn’t know you were ... coming home.”
Emily shifted her weight from left foot to right, trying to balance out the discomfort. She was quiet, noticing Paulina’s unease, watching her eyes flit to the phone on her desk and then towards the front window, where pedestrians hurried by.
“I need to get into my apartment. I don’t have the keys.” Emily picked up a pen from Paulina’s desk and wrapped her fingers around it. “I trust I still have my apartment?”
“Oh yes,” Paulina said too quickly. “Everything’s in order. Your rental payments have been coming through just fine while you’ve been away. You don’t have your keys?”
“No.”
“Well, fortunately we keep spare sets. Of course, there will be a charge. Do you think we’ll need to change the locks again?”
Twenty minutes later, Emily stood outside of The Holmeswood, oblivious to the crowds. She took the set of keys from her pocket and entered the building. It was as if time had stood still. The foyer remained unchanged. A notice on the lift door advised of its temporary unavailability. Silence drifted down and settled on the same patterns of red and white tiles.
Taking the staircase one step at a time, Emily made her way towards her apartment. As she moved higher, her legs protested with painful stabs. Her apartment was up ahead. She was overwhelmed by a sudden urge to knock on the Goldings’ door. She needed to see that Harriet was alive and well, to protest her innocence. And she would do that. But first, she needed to return to her apartment. To get inside and lock the door. She would not be able to stay long. Doctor Chelmsford would come looking for her.
Emily locked the door behind her as she stepped inside, then slid the keys back inside her pocket. Being home, even if it had never felt like home before, overwhelmed her with emotion, which she struggled to keep inside. But inside was where all those feelings needed to remain.
Emily moved towards the living room, then changed her mind, instead heading for the bathroom. Keeping the door open, she looked around. The shower curtain was pulled across the bathtub. There were towels on the rack and one lying on the floor. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember that night. Nothing came. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she stooped and picked up the towel. It was damp, as if it had been recently used.
She opened the medicine cabinet. Her row of pill bottles was gone, replaced by vitamin tablets, shaving foam, and a cup containing two electric toothbrushes. A memory stirred in her mind—pills tumbling out of bottles into the sink. She stared, confused by the contents of the cabinet.
The curtains of her bedroom were half-open, the windows closed. A stuffy, airless odour swamped the room. Her bed sat pushed up against the wall, bedsheets crumpled and unmade. A pile of clothes lay at the bottom. They were not hers.
Stumbling towards the wardrobes, she pulled back each door. Her clothes were all there, hanging from rails. But there were other clothes here too. Men’s clothes. Hadn’t she lived here alone? Hadn’t she moved to the city alone?
Frightened now, Emily made her way to the living room. Her furniture was still there. The painting of Alina was gone, the wall left blank.
She felt dizzy, breathless. For an apartment that hadn’t been lived in for three months the place looked remarkably dust-free.
“This isn’t right,” she said.
In the kitchen, a stack of clean dishes sat on the rack. Someone had fixed the jammed window. What was going on here?
An unmistakable sound pulled her from her confused thoughts—keys hitting the side of a lock. Someone was letting themselves into her apartment. Now they were closing the door behind them and locking it.
Emily dove for a drawer. Her fingers wrapped around the handle of a kitchen knife. Footsteps, heavy and plodding, moved along the hallway, coming towards the living room.
Pressed up against the kitchen sink, Emily held the knife up in front of her. The living room door opened. The footsteps moved inside. The knife trembled in Emily’s outstretched hand. Had they found her already?
A shadow fell across the floor. Emily opened her mouth and in a trembling voice yelled, “Don’t come any closer!”
The shadow froze.
“I mean it! I have a knife!”
The knife in question wavered in her hand.
The shadow moved. A figure stepped into view, hands up, eyes wide, mouth hanging open.
“Emily?”
She stared at him as if he were a stranger. Then, as the name and face attached, she lowered the knife.
“What the actual fuck, Emily? I literally just had a heart attack!”
Emily stared at Jerome.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He rushed towards her, arms outstretched, and they embraced.
***
“What happened that night?”
Jerome sat on the edge of the bed watching Emily throw clothes into a suitcase. She shook her head, pausing to rub her arms.
“You don’t remember?”
“They did something to me. Tried to make me forget everything.”
“What did they do?”
“They tried to tell me I took an overdose, fell into a coma. I didn’t take any overdose, Jerome. They induced that coma. And when I was asleep they—they tried to make me forget. But they failed. I remember looking for Alina. I remember going to Karl Henry’s house, finding that box hidden at the back of his wardrobe. I gave that box to Harriet.” She paused, suddenly crushed by guilt. “Is she ... I should go over there.”
“Harriet’s not doing so well these days.”
“You know I didn’t hurt her, don’t you? I would never have done that.”
Jerome’s gaze dropped to the carpet. “Do you remember what we fought about that night? Do you remember I told you I knew about Phillip?”
A memory stirred, flickering like a half-forgotten dream.
“You ran. I didn’t follow you. Those people threatened me, and when I saw the stories about what happened with Phillip, I—I didn’t know what to think. I was scared, Emily. I panicked. I lashed out.”
“You shouldn’t always believe what you read in the papers,” Emily said.
“I’m sorry.” Jerome hung his head. “After you took off that night, I looked into what happened some more. There were stories saying you’d been accused of hitting him, and then later ones saying it was only speculation, that no charges had
been brought against you.”
A single tear sailed the length of Emily’s face. “You know, for the longest time I believed it myself. The newspapers had twisted the truth to the point that everyone around me believed I was guilty. My doctor had me on so many pills I didn’t know what day it was. I began to think that I’d hit him. Everyone was saying it—even the people I loved—so why not believe it too? Do you know what that’s like? To suddenly not know who you are? To lose yourself so completely you believe you could be capable of doing something so terrible?”
She stopped packing and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Phillip was saying awful things. I was out of my mind with grief. I shouted at him to stop. I lost my temper and I threw some papers, but I never laid a finger on him, I swear.”
“I believe you,” Jerome said, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Philip’s father was an alcoholic. He’d get drunk and knock them around, Phillip and his brother. His wife would always say, he’s stopped now. Everything is fine. Which of course gave everyone the excuse to do nothing about it. Good old small town mentality—look the other way and it’s like it never happened.”
“It’s not just small town mentality,” Jerome said. “Look at what happened with Alina.”
“I guess we all have blood on our hands, one way or another.”
Jerome was silent, staring into space. Then he said, “The night you took off, I tried calling you. When you didn’t pick up, I went looking for you. Later on, I was lying awake in bed when I heard you come home.”
“What time was that?”
“Around two maybe. I was just glad you were okay. The morning after, I came upstairs to apologise but you didn’t answer your door. I assumed you didn’t want to talk to me anymore. So, I packed a bag, got on a train and went to my parents.”
“You didn’t hear anything else that night?”
“After you came back I still couldn’t sleep, so I took a sleeping pill. It wasn’t until I came to pick up the rest of my furniture the following week that I learned what happened.”
“From who?”
“Andrew Golding. He told me he woke in the middle of the night to find his apartment door open and Harriet gone. He found her unconscious on the stairwell and called for an ambulance. They thought she’d woken up confused, wandered out of the apartment half asleep, and fallen on the stairs.”
Emily shook her head, over and over. “This doesn’t make any sense. If Andrew called an ambulance for Harriet, then who found me? Doctor Ad—Doctor Chelmsford told me that someone in the building called the police after hearing screams coming from my apartment.”
Jerome shifted on the bed. When he looked up, his face was pale and drawn. “Emily, nobody knew you were gone until a few days later.”
“What?”
“Paulina Blanchard received an email saying you’d gone away for a few months—that your rent payments would continue in your absence.”
Emily felt sick. “Who was the email from?”
“That’s just it,” Jerome said. “It was from you.”
The instant realisation of what had happened to her, of what they’d done to her crushed the air from her lungs. Doctor Chelmsford had lied. There had been no screams from her apartment. There had been no police involvement. They had taken her, abducted her while she’d slept. At St. Dymphna’s, they’d kept her drugged and unconscious, experimenting on her memory to make her forget. And when they’d finally woken her, they’d fed her lie after lie. Emily shuddered. How easy it had been to take her, to convince her that their lies were real. But they had been so premature, so arrogant in their self-congratulations, that they had overlooked one small possibility—that their attempts to make her forget might fail.
“Let’s go and see Harriet,” Emily said, standing on weak legs. “I need to know if she still has that box.”
Jerome remained on the bed, head hanging low.
“I’m sorry, Emily” he said. “When I heard that you’d gone, I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to believe you had gone off somewhere, to lie low for a while until things went quiet. You’d run away from your old life, maybe you’d run away from this one too. I tried to convince myself that’s what you did.”
Emily said nothing.
“I tried calling you. Your phone rang the first few times, then it started going straight to voicemail. I remembered what you’d told me—that you’d given all the evidence you’d found to Harriet. I went to visit her in the hospital, and ...”
“And what?”
Jerome struggled to get the words out. He paced over to the window. Outside, the sun began to set over the city. “Emily, it’s all gone.”
He looked up, meeting Emily’s shell-shocked gaze.
***
Harriet Golding sat in her chair. She had aged terribly, her papery skin cracked and lined, and when she spoke, her voice trembled with emotion.
“That night, I waited for you to come back. You said you were only going to be an hour. I waited for three and then I went to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I heard your door slam. You looked so worried when you gave me that box to hold, I thought I best give it straight back.”
Emily sat on the sofa next to Jerome, guilt weighing her down. Andrew Golding stood by the window, hands dug into his pockets.
“I got out of bed and went to bring it over. All the lights in the hallway had gone out. I knocked on your door, but you hadn’t closed it properly and it swung open. All the lights in your apartment were out too. I called your name, told you I had the box, and then ...” She paused, her face pale and clammy. “And then I felt someone was there with me, in the dark. Next thing I knew, I wake up in hospital two days later with a broken arm and a black eye for my trouble.”
“Harriet, I’m so sorry,” Emily said, placing a hand on the elderly woman’s knee. “I should never have given you the box.”
“Well, it’s gone now,” Harriet replied. “And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
“What about the police? What did they say?”
“She didn’t tell them,” Andrew said, shaking his head.
“The doctors reckoned I took a tumble in the dark. If that’s what they say, then let everyone believe it.” Harriet picked up her cup and saucer and they quivered in her hands. “What good have the police ever done me and my family, eh? Besides, I didn’t know what was inside that box and I wasn’t about to get you in trouble if it was something untoward.”
Emily was quiet. Harriet had been badly hurt because of her. The evidence was gone, back in the hands of the people it incriminated. The hopelessness she felt was paralysing.
Beside her, Jerome said, “When Harriet told me about that night, you’d already been gone two weeks. I let myself into your apartment with the spare key you’d given me. There was no sign of the box or any of the evidence that was inside it. Your clothes were all still there though. That didn’t sit right with me.”
“So that was when you moved into my apartment?”
Jerome blushed. “Harriet felt safer with me next door. And we thought I could take care of the place until either we found you or you came back on your own.”
“You looked for me?” Emily couldn’t hide her surprise.
“I tried,” Jerome said. “But I didn’t know where to start. I thought about contacting that receptionist, the one that helped you from the hospice. But I got scared. I didn’t want to attract anymore unwanted attention. Clearly I should leave the detective work to you.”
“Jerome, we uncovered something,” Emily said. “Something so terrible that those doctors thought it safer to lock me away. Whatever it is, it’s big. It reaches further than Alina, further than the Ever After Care Foundation. And it means they’re looking for me right now. They’ll be here soon. I can’t be here when they arrive.”
“Can you stay with a friend?” Harriet asked.
“My friends are all in this room.” Emily turned to Jerome. “Can you help me get to a ho
tel?”
“Of course. That reminds me.” He stood and hurried out of the apartment. When he returned moments later, he handed Emily her wallet.
“I found it under the bed.”
Emily pocketed the wallet. We better get going.”
“You will be careful, my dear, won’t you?” Harriet reached out her hand and Emily took it.
“If anyone comes knocking on your door, you haven’t seen me in months.”
In the window, Andrew let out a nervous laugh.
“Don’t you worry about us,” Harriet said. “Anyone tries anything, I’ll take my stick to ‘em!”
***
Twenty minutes later, Emily and Jerome sat in the back of a cab, heading through busy streets. It was getting dark, the sky somewhere between bottle-green and smudged charcoal. The driver had given up his attempts at conversation and now hummed along to a tune on the radio. His passengers were quiet, their heads turned from each other as they looked through the windows.
When they reached their destination, Emily paid the driver and watched the cab disappear. She limped badly now, the exertions of the day’s events taking their toll.
“Here,” Jerome said, hooking her arm over his shoulder.
They walked the short distance to the hotel, Jerome taking Emily’s weight. When they arrived, he held the door open, then moved to follow her inside.
Emily stopped him. “You should go home to your parents.”
“I’m not leaving you on your own like this,” Jerome protested. “You can barely walk.”
“The further you are away from me, the safer you’ll be.”
Jerome hung his head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find you.”
“That’s not what this is about. This is about keeping you safe. They hurt Harriet because of me. I can’t let that happen again. Besides, when the time comes I’m going to need your help, and that means nothing can happen to you in the meantime.”
Jerome looked up. “What do you mean when the time comes? What are you planning to do?”
“This isn’t going to end well unless we stop them,” Emily said. “So I’m going to stop them.”
“How?”
“We’re going to show the world exactly who these doctors are and what they’ve been up to.”
Lost Lives (Emily Swanson Mystery Thriller Series Book 1) Page 19