Probably.
But at least he hadn’t seen that I’d come close to breaking out of the restraints, which meant there wasn’t a camera in here.
He lifted me to my feet and led me slowly out of the bathroom, then through the other room and into the hallway, my chains rattling and dragging on the hard floor. I could smell smoke again. And the damp, mildewy odour of neglect. I asked him where we were going.
‘We’re going to have a little talk,’ was all he said.
He led me into a different room and sat me down on a hard chair, pushing it forward until I was pressed against the edge of a table. ‘I’m going to release your hands at the back, then retie them at the front,’ he continued, almost gently. ‘You’re not going to misbehave, are you?’
‘Look, I just want to get out of here,’ I said. ‘And I’m not going to risk doing anything that puts my baby in jeopardy.’ He didn’t need to know I was no longer pregnant.
He didn’t say anything and I knew I’d touched a nerve. It takes a particular sociopath not to have sympathy for a pregnant woman, and his hesitation meant he was feeling something.
‘If you do what you’re told, you’ll get out of here,’ he said, coming round behind me and cutting the zip tie binding my wrists without, it seemed, looking at it too closely.
It felt incredibly liberating having my hands free, and I flexed my fingers, trying to get the circulation going.
He told me to put my hands out in front of me, palms facing outwards.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘can’t I just hold them out normally? It’s so much more comfortable like that, and it helps with, you know, the other stuff.’
He hesitated, and I thought he might agree, but instead he said a simple ‘no’.
I didn’t push it, especially as I now knew I was capable of getting out of the restraints myself. I rested my elbows on the desk with my hands out in front of me. He leaned down close, and it briefly crossed my mind to launch myself at him. He was clearly on his own here this morning, and if I could somehow stun him and get the keys to the shackles . . .
But you only have a moment to make those decisions, and mine passed.
Instead, as he applied the new zip tie to my wrists, I moved them ever so slightly apart so it wouldn’t be so tight. He didn’t seem to notice, applying it quickly and expertly before moving away from me.
I heard him rummage round in the room and pick something up from somewhere, then put whatever it was down on the table, and I wondered what he was up to. It occurred to me that he might be putting me at ease before finishing me off with a quick bullet to the head, and I tensed behind the blindfold as he came close to me again.
But there was no bullet. Instead he placed what felt a lot like a blood pressure cuff round my left arm, pumping it tight before making me lift my arms up as he attached two thick rubber tubes round my body, one above my chest, the other just below.
He asked me if it was comfortable.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in pain since I got here. What are you doing?’
Ignoring me, he lifted my forefinger and wrapped some tape around it. He then did the same to my middle finger. Now I knew exactly what he was doing. I’d seen a film once where a man was hooked up to a lie detector and questioned about a murder he was suspected of committing. The man had lied through his back teeth and it had all shown up on the machine.
I heard him sit back down again on the other side of the table. Then the tap-tap-tap of his fingers clicking on a keyboard.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions,’ he announced, ‘and you’re going to answer them truthfully. I’ll know if you’re lying. And lying isn’t going to help you.’
I swallowed. I felt I knew what was coming, and that my answers might well decide whether I lived or died. ‘Okay,’ I said uncertainly.
‘First question: what’s your full name?’
‘Katherine White.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
These were just the introductory questions, the ones that he would know the answers to, used simply to test that the machine was working.
‘Katherine White isn’t the name on your birth certificate, though, is it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘My birth name was Nicola Donohoe. Nikki for short.’
‘Were you a friend of Alana Roper?’
Here it was. What I’d been expecting.
And dreading.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Next question: did you kill her?’
31
Kate
Did I kill Alana Roper? The big question. One I’d been asked many times in the past. But not for a long time.
I took a deep breath. ‘No.’
There was a pause.
‘Tell me what happened on the night she died. You were there, weren’t you?’
There was no point denying it. ‘Yes, I was there. What do you want to dredge all this up for? It happened eighteen years ago.’
The twenty-third of June 2001. A date I’ll never forget.
‘Tell me exactly what happened, from the beginning of the evening until the moment of her death. Do you remember everything?’
Again, there was no use pretending. Not with the lie detector. And anyway, that night was etched in my memory forever. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I remember.’
‘Then begin.’
And so I told him. How I’d met Alana, her boyfriend David and a couple of their friends for drinks at Alana’s amazing penthouse flat on the fifth floor of a converted warehouse building not far from the old docks, then how we’d all headed out to dinner at Loch Fyne. I could even remember what I’d eaten. Salmon sashimi to start with, which they always seemed to do well there, followed by the haddock-and-chips special for main. Then sorbet for dessert. All washed down with a white Rioja that Alana and I ordered whenever we were in Loch Fyne. By that point we’d been friends for almost a year, and in all that time I’d resisted saying anything about how we were related. I’d come close a few times, always when it was just the two of us, and we were wrecked at her place and lying on the huge cushions she used to have in front of her big TV, chatting about this and that. But my courage had always deserted me. I didn’t want to risk spoiling what we had, because what we had was good, and it was exactly the same on that night. I wasn’t going to say a word.
From Loch Fyne, drunk by now, we’d headed to Steam Rocks, a bar we’d discovered near the old docks. A woman was singing with her acoustic guitar, but the atmosphere was too laid-back for us that night. Alana, David and I snorted some coke in the toilets, then left the other people we were there with and headed to a club, where we’d snorted some more coke, taken half a tab of Ecstasy each, danced a lot, and finally got a taxi back to Alana’s place when the club had shut at three.
That was the thing about that night. It had been so much fun.
Back at her place Alana had cracked open a bottle of champagne. We’d still been flying – or me and Alana had been anyway. David had drunk about half a glass of his then crashed out on the sofa.
I remember that it was an especially warm night, and Alana’s flat had a tiny roof terrace you reached from a stepladder in her bedroom, so the two of us took the bottle and went outside and stood there, looking out across the city.
I paused. I didn’t want to relive the next part.
‘Go on,’ he ordered.
I’d been feeling a tension growing in my belly as I recounted the events of that last evening, and now it seemed to be all-encompassing. I felt sick. ‘It’s hard to talk about it,’ I told him.
‘But you’re going to have to,’ he said.
‘I need water.’
He put a bottle to my lips, letting me drink a few gulps.
I took a deep breath and pictured the scene on Alana’s roof terrace, surprised by how well I remembered it all these years later.
‘We sat out there for a while, finishing off the champagne, and Alana rolled a joint. She said it
was to bring us back down after everything we’d taken that night. And so we sat on these two deckchairs she had out there smoking it, and afterwards we got up and stood looking over the city, just enjoying the moment. That was when she turned to me and said: “I love you, Kate. You’re my best friend.” And, you know, she’d never said anything like that to me before. She’d said nice things, but not something like that.’ I could feel the tears coming now, wetting the inside of the blindfold, as everything I’d tried so hard to repress came flooding back to me. ‘And I remember feeling incredibly emotional, and it just came out then and there. I told her we were sisters.’
‘How did she react?’ he asked gently.
‘She thought I was joking. But by that point it was too late to take it back, so instead I blurted out the whole story, about how Mum had been their cleaner, how her dad had got my mum pregnant but had never had anything to do with us. I knew she didn’t get on that well with her dad so I thought she’d be okay hearing that.’
‘And was she?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t. I could see her face darkening as I was telling her all this. I remember thinking: Kate, you’ve got to stop talking. This is not going to end well. But I just couldn’t. It was like I had to get it all out then and there.
‘And then she slapped me. Hard. Right round the face.’ I paused, back in the moment for the first time in years. I’d suppressed this memory for a long time, but I could recall everything with perfect clarity.
‘I was shocked. It was so unexpected. And it hurt. The slap really hurt. I was staring at her and her face was contorted in this angry, wild snarl. She called me a lying bitch, said she couldn’t believe I’d do this to her. That she thought I was her friend. That everyone did this to her eventually. And then she went to slap me again and I managed to block her this time, and I was apologising. I was saying, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you, because in my head all I wanted to do was bring back that moment we’d had just before, when we had that bond. And yet I knew we’d never have it again. Never. So now I just wanted to calm her down, but she was having none of it.
‘She started crying, these great heaving sobs. She was hugging herself tightly and shaking her head. And she was muttering to herself too, and I remember thinking then that I was really worried about her. So I went to her, and tried to put my arms round her, but she wouldn’t have any of it. “Get your fucking hands off me!” she hissed. “I thought I knew you. But you’re a sick little bitch, you fucking liar!”’
I paused again as those words – delivered slowly and with utter venom – came back through the years and hit me once again like hammer blows to the heart.
‘And then she pushed me away, and I stood there on that little roof terrace, shocked and shaking, and crying too. And I remember it like it was happening in slow motion. She looked at me, and the anger left her and it was replaced by something worse. Sadness. She looked so sad. And she said . . . she said something like “everyone fails me in the end” and then she turned away, walked to the edge and before I had time to say or do anything, she just . . .’ I took a deep breath, ‘she just jumped.’
I exhaled and lowered my head, utterly deflated. ‘That’s what happened.’
I heard my kidnapper move in his seat. ‘At the inquest, you said she slipped. Not jumped.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That was a lie. I thought people wouldn’t believe me if I told them she jumped.’
‘Did she jump? Or did you push her?’
‘I told you,’ I said quietly. ‘She jumped.’
There was a long pause. ‘And was David there with you when she jumped?’
‘No. He was asleep on the sofa. The first he knew about it was when I ran back inside to tell him what had happened.’
‘Death follows you around, doesn’t it?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked wearily, though I knew exactly what he was getting at.
‘We’re going to take a break now. But when I come back, we’re going to talk about David and the day he died. Because you were there then too, weren’t you?’
32
Sir Hugh Roper
‘Follow the herd. End up in the abattoir.’ That’s always been my motto. Right from a young age, I wanted to make it – and making it for me meant being a millionaire. When my primary school teacher had asked me what I wanted to do when I was older, that was exactly what I’d told her: ‘I want to be a millionaire, miss.’
I didn’t have the best of starts, but I’m honest enough to admit that I didn’t have the worst either. I came from a lower-middle-class family, with a father who worked away a lot as a travelling salesman, and a domineering mother who seemed to be permanently stressed with my dad. But I had one thing that so many of the herd haven’t. Ruthlessness. I bought my first house – a tumbledown wreck in Ilford close to where I was brought up – in 1971, aged twenty-one, after securing a mortgage with an application that I’ll readily admit was lies from start to finish. I begged, borrowed and stole to keep up the repayments, and then shafted all those who worked to do it up by delaying their payments, or in some cases not paying them at all. I sold the house on within a year at close to double what I paid for it, having already bought two more properties with similarly fraudulent mortgage applications.
It’s true. I’m no saint. I never have been. And I don’t feel guilt for my actions either. I always knew that I had to be hard if I wanted to get ahead in business. If people were naïve and stupid enough to fall for my patter, well, that was their problem. Weakness is a trait I despise more than any other.
And yet now, for the first time in my adult life, I felt weak and fearful, unsure of who to trust. I knew it had been a mistake not to replace Burns with a proper head of security when he’d gone into semi-retirement. Because Burns had taken his eye off the ball. I’d taken on Thomson as my chief bodyguard, because I knew he was as tough and as merciless as Burns, and at that point in life a hard man was all I felt I needed.
Unfortunately, I also needed someone who was resourceful enough to know where to start looking for Kate, because I had no doubt she was in terrible danger. And as I stood at the study window, watching my first wife get out of her Range Rover Evoque and walk towards the front door, I wondered again if she had anything to do with it. She’d always been a hard woman and, in all the time we’d spent together, I don’t remember ever seeing a softer side. There was no weakness about her, which had been one of the things that had caused my initial attraction to her. They sometimes say you marry your mother. I think I did. And I’d loved her too. More, I’m sure, than she’d ever loved me.
Even at seventy years old, she still had that striking, almost regal air about her. She walked purposefully, with shoulders back and chin up, looking down at the world around her, daring it to take her on.
Unbreakable. That was the word that best described her, and I had a sudden, unexpected frisson of excitement as I remembered those times in our very early days when she’d got out the riding crop and administered a beating.
Unfortunately, someone like Diana was never going to put up with my infidelities. I hadn’t done it as often as some like to make out, and I’d generally been very discreet. Except for Kate’s mother, that fucking cleaner! That had been insane – one of those things you do in life that you know can never end well, but which you still do anyway because you can’t see past the pussy. My excuse to myself was that Diana hadn’t been showing me any attention and consequently fucking the cleaner was both forbidden and exciting, especially as the dirty little minx had been the one who’d as good as instigated it.
Although if I’d had the remotest idea how it was going to turn out, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near her.
I remembered Diana’s rage when she’d found out, and I’d known that I’d never get away with anything like that again. Even so, that had been nothing in comparison to the rage she’d exhibited after the death of our daughter.
By the time of Alana’s death, we’d been divorced
eleven years. I wouldn’t pretend my daughter and I had had the best of relationships. I hadn’t seen enough of her when she’d been growing up, and in her teenage years she’d been difficult and hadn’t wanted to spend time at my new house. But losing a child so suddenly and so young is the kind of blow that hits you as hard as anything can.
But I had taken it, and though it had unbalanced me, it hadn’t knocked me down, even when the details of Alana’s drug-taking had emerged. According to the pathologist, her body had contained traces of cocaine, Ecstasy and marijuana, as well as a substantial amount of alcohol. She’d been with her boyfriend and another friend on the night she’d fallen from the roof of her apartment building, and the boyfriend, a twenty-two-year-old called David Griffiths, who I’d never met, had admitted supplying the drugs that had been in her system when she died, and had been sentenced to fourteen months in prison.
I’d been mortified by the pathetically lenient sentence he’d received, a feeling made worse by the fact that he was released after only seven. But my disappointment was nothing compared to Diana’s. She’d been furious. She’d wanted Griffiths to suffer properly for what he’d done. I’d felt like making the bastard pay as well, but I also knew that you should only ever use violence in business. The moment you let your emotions get involved, you make mistakes, and if anything had happened to Griffiths, it wouldn’t have taken the police long to come straight back to me.
But Diana hadn’t been prepared to let it go, and it was when she’d hired a private detective to look into the background of both Griffiths and the other girl with Alana that night, and had discovered that the girl was none other than my illegitimate daughter, that the cat had really been put amongst the pigeons.
With Thomson out looking for Kate, and the housekeeper finished for the day, the house was empty. I answered the front door myself. It was raining hard and Diana marched straight inside without waiting for an invitation.
Kill A Stranger: the twisting new thriller from the number one bestseller Page 13