The Pact_A gripping psychological thriller with heart-stopping suspense

by S. E. Lynes

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Ted said, smiling. ‘Might be out of it for a while, but if it’s less than four hours, hepatotoxicity is highly unlikely. They’ll give her a reversal agent, I should think. She’s breathing fine but she’s unconscious, so…’

  I nodded. I knew the procedure, knew your liver was at risk. If they found high serum levels, they’d give you acetylcysteine, maybe charcoal or something, I didn’t know exactly which one. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but I feared it might.

  ‘Tough shift?’ I said.

  He checked his watch. ‘Not yet. It will be.’

  I smiled, took your hand in mine and held it. We were in the ambulance now, heading for A&E, and I was confident that you were in safe hands. I knew I’d face tough questions once the dust had settled, and I think by then I also knew that the police were inevitable now.

  In A&E, the doctor gave you flumazenil. You were unconscious – it’s procedure. They took your bloods, wrote overdose on your notes. I was interviewed by a senior nurse, no one I knew, who asked me if you’d been depressed lately, all that sort of thing. She said that when you woke up she would need to speak to you, and that I would be formally interviewed at that point. I insisted you were fine. I didn’t tell her that I had given you the drugs. I did not say that, not categorically, because by then I was terrified they would take you away from me, that they’d investigate us, that they’d discover what your auntie Bridget had done, and take her away too.

  We are a family, Rosie. We are a funny, fucked-up triangle family, and in that moment I didn’t know who was at the base and who was at the top. All I know now is that we have tough questions ahead of us. It will be time, as they say, to face the music.

  Fifty-Six

  Bridget

  Bridget rummages through Rosie’s chest of drawers: black skinny stretchy jeans, they’ll do. And her Glass Animals T-shirt and her grey hoody. Shoes. She will need something to put on her feet… But try as Bridget might to block the old man from her mind, he surfaces there, blinking at her, his jaw hanging, his broken, filthy glasses. Oh God, she should never have shot him. If she’d just kicked him and legged it, if she’d been quicker, if…

  Still, at least if someone goes to prison, it will be her.

  Not Rosie, not Tones.

  Don’t think about that stuff. Thinking about it isn’t going to change what’s happened. Put it in a box, close the lid. Make sandwiches, a flask of coffee. Do something useful.

  She limps into the living room – her leg is killing her – switches on the television. Sits down, flicks through the channels, scrolls through the films on Netflix. Switches off the television. Stands up. Looks out onto the street. No one. Not a soul. Not even a cat. She should probably clean the fork wound on her leg, change out of the bloodstained trousers.

  In the bathroom, she removes her jeans, the denim bringing the sticky new scab with it as she peels it away, causing her leg to start bleeding once again. She grabs an old flannel from the airing cupboard and runs it under the tap. The wound is not deep, but there are three neat holes like a strange animal bite, which fill with red every time she lifts the cloth. She strips off and showers, holds the flannel to her leg once she is dry and finds the largest plaster she can. The wound is bleeding slower now but still comes through the plaster; she needs another two on top before it stops.

  She wanders into her room and puts on fresh jeans, a clean T-shirt. She rubs her hair dry with the towel, which she returns to the bathroom. After applying some hair wax and rinsing her hands, she ambles into Toni’s room, immaculately tidy, then into Rosie’s, a tip of clothes, clip files, books, pens, cuddly toys, make-up, nail varnishes. On the wall, her framed poster of Little Red and the Wolf, posters of the Glass Animals, The xx, others – Bridget has no idea who they are. She sits then lies on Rosie’s bed, pushes her face into her pillow. The smell of her is still there: her shampoo, the fuzzy smell of her when she’s just woken up. To live without this smell seems impossible.

  Too much. She’s going to make herself cry.

  Closing Rosie’s bedroom door behind her, she heads for the kitchen. Her laptop is still on the table. The niggling feeling is still with her, the ease with which she was able to rescue her niece, the house, its smell, its anachronistic decor, the lack of mod cons, how mismatched this all is with the fake Facebook profile, the iPhone, the Find My Friends app…

  Idly she presses the space bar and her screen saver blooms before her: Rosie on stage, in the red cape, the hood pulled over her head, the hint of those blue eyes peeping from the shadow. She looks so pretty, so young. So innocent. And despite everything that’s happened, that’s what she is, still. She wasn’t doing anything that isn’t natural, isn’t a completely normal part of becoming a grown-up. When all this is behind them, Bridget hopes she will see that and be able to come to the adult world in a safe and loving way, free from shame.

  She studies the photograph, drawn in by her niece’s cartoonish baby blues. It was taken at that first performance, she thinks. That was when they met Emily. Bridget remembers their conversation, Emily saying she’d gone to the Central School of Speech and Drama. Bridget hadn’t mentioned she’d gone to Central too – it was not her conversation to interrupt – and besides, what would she have said? Yes, I went there, but I dropped out because my little sister had fallen to pieces? No, too complicated. But she thinks about it now as she pulls the sliced bread from the bread bin, the butter, cheese and pickle from the fridge. She spreads butter on the bread, cuts cheese in thick slices, scoops glossy brown pickle from the jar.

  Emily must have gone there at a different time, since Bridget cannot remember her. She should have asked her when she stopped for dinner, but that evening they were there to talk about Rosie, and besides, it didn’t come up. Emily is a little older, probably. She looks it anyway. And Bridget would have remembered her. Judging by those photos she showed them, she had been beautiful, if old-fashioned, probably one of those people who are never properly young, who in middle age become what they’ve always been.

  Emily.

  That’s what Rosie said when Bridget ripped the tape from her mouth. Emily, she muttered as she slid into oblivion, before panic overtook them once again.

  Bridget leaves the sandwich stuff on the side and goes back to the kitchen table. Googles: Emily Wood.

  She is on IMDb. Bridget has checked all this before, the photos of Emily’s TV and theatre work. She really was so pretty then, a lot slimmer too. The blue eyes that blink huge now from behind strong lenses then were smaller, intense, penetrating. She was in The Bill, as she’d said, and Casualty. True to her claims of being a technophobe, she has no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter, no LinkedIn. But there is no mention of her mentoring agency, no link, nothing. Didn’t Rosie have a flyer or a business card or something?

  She returns to Rosie’s room on the strength of nothing more than a feeling. The last time Bridget ignored a feeling, it cost her niece dear, and she’s not about to do that again, no way. Rosie’s rucksack isn’t on the floor where it usually is. She will have taken it with her, of course, which means her purse won’t be here either. Which means both are still in that house of hell, along with her Doc Marten boots.

  Shit.

  The old man dead in the hall. Rosie’s boots and bag in his house. Bridget’s DNA in his house.

  The road to the police is inevitable.

  But she can’t – won’t – think about that.

  Rosie’s bedside-table drawer is open an inch. Emily’s card could be in there. But to search feels like a violation, even now.

  This is pure paranoia: nerves jangling like a wind chime in the breeze. Post-traumatic stress, that’s all it is. But that house. That house. The clean draining board, when all around was so fetid, so rank, so unsavoury. The front door to all appearances unused. That man, his nervousness, his grey pallor. The smell of him: lethargy, staleness. The lack of any technology in the house beyond an old-fashioned analogue radio. How did a guy
like that get as far as Hampton Hill High Street on his own? He couldn’t have taken her by force, not in broad daylight, not at that time of the morning. Persuasion then. But how? His appearance alone was off-putting enough, and as soon as he revealed himself to be Ollie Thomas, Rosie would have run a mile, wouldn’t she? She would have got herself out of there, out onto the crowded street, and come home.

  In Rosie’s bedside-table drawer are various pieces of cheap jewellery, hair bobbles, a hairbrush, nail varnishes, a half-used packet of make-up remover pads, birthday cards, one from Bridget herself. She picks it up and reads it:

  Squirt, it’s not true what they say. You’re not as daft as you look.

  Love, your favourite auntie currently living in Twickenham.

  She smiles, puts the card back. Under the other cards she finds not the business card but a flyer, folded in half.

  Into the Light. Mentoring and Representation with Madame Belle.

  The background is primrose, with an overlaid triangle in a paler yellow, like light cast by a spotlight. She remembers Rosie showing her the website the day after they’d met Emily. Bridget had been making the dinner, but she remembers the layout, the yellow colour.

  ‘Cool,’ she’d said, without taking too much notice, it seems to her now, thinking about it. ‘You’re going to be the next Emma Stone.’

  With the flyer in her hand, Bridget returns to the kitchen. She should be getting to the hospital now but there is nothing she, Bridget, can do and if she’s needed urgently, Toni will call her. Tones needed space. She made that very clear. Besides, for reasons Bridget cannot name, it feels important to look at this website.

  Up it comes, a simple font on that same primrose yellow, the same spotlight.

  Into the Light. Mentoring and Representation with Madame Belle.

  Of course. The website’s not listed under Emily Wood but Madame Belle. Beneath the header are small thumbnail photographs of ten or twelve actors, some in colour, some in black and white. She scans the faces, giving them her full attention this time instead of glancing at them from the stove. There is no one she recognises. Rosie is not on the site, which is odd. Emily must have had her headshot for weeks. Bridget looks again, clicks on the photos one by one to zoom in. There is a black-and-white shot of a boy of around twenty. He looks familiar. Enough to bug her. Something, somewhere… some chink of recognition at the edges of Bridget’s… Where does she know him from? What twenty-year-olds does she know? Saph’s son? He’s into drama and all that stuff, isn’t he? No, it’s not him, too square around the jaw and this guy’s hair is curly, not straight. A fan of The Promise? Nah. Too young. Who is it? Who is it who is it who is it?

  Lysander.

  It is Lysander. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, end-of-first-year production, the last thing she did at Central. But Lysander is not twenty. He’s Bridget’s age, give or take. What was his name? He’ll be in his fifties now. It can’t be him. But still… my God, it’s so like him, so very…

  Bridget runs to her room and pulls out the large packing box she keeps in the shoe well of her wardrobe. She heaves it onto her bed and pulls off the top. Inside are photo albums, a scrapbook full of signed photos of famous actors she’s worked with over the years: Colin Firth, Hugh Bonneville, Harriet Walter. Worked with in the sense that she was a stagehand. Those were the days. After she dropped out to look after Toni, she hung around the Old Vic long enough to be given something to carry. Even got the odd bit part, and it was enough, and slowly the work… didn’t take off exactly but increased. She got into writing. Not as if the RSC were going to beat a path, so she found a way of creating work where none existed. There are programmes from all the theatre performances she’s done: an all-female adaptation of The Crucible from the days when she worked with Fishnet Tight, a women-only theatre group in Wimbledon; Christmas pantos she did every year for at least a decade until the band took over… but she’s getting sidetracked. Where is the damn programme for A Midsummer Night’s Dream? If it’s from college days, it will be nearer the bottom, won’t it?

  She tips the box onto the bed, watches the papers slide and drop to the floor. And there it is, among the loose photos and posters and flyers of her life:

  CSSD presents A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  She flips through. It doesn’t take her long to find the headshots. Herself, Bottom, the donkey, playing opposite beautiful raven-haired, green-eyed Jacqueline Ball’s Tatiana. Whatever happened to her? She went to Africa, didn’t she? Ended up in charity work? And Dawn Worley, who played Hippolyta and dyed her hair pink for the role. And Lysander, there he is, Lysander… Stephen John.

  ‘Stephen John?’ she says out loud. ‘What the hell is going on?’

  Programme gripped tightly in her hand, she runs back into the kitchen, eyes locked on the photo. Her heart is banging. Already she knows what she’s looking at, but she needs to confirm it with her own eyes until it is undeniable. At this moment it is, quite simply, surreal. Holding the programme up in front of her, she sits in front of the laptop. Emily’s website reappears in a blast of primrose yellow. Bridget clicks on the young male actor’s photo.

  It is not only the same actor. It is the same photograph.

  ‘Jesus.’

  Fifty-Seven

  Daddy died first, younger than he should have. And then, when Mummy died, I sold the farm and we came here. Our farm was in Hampshire and we moved to Ham. I liked the continuity of that. Ham, do you see? I wasn’t living at the farm then, of course. I’d escaped to the bright lights, the big city, a dingy shared rental flat in Clapham North. But I moved in with him because I knew he couldn’t survive alone, not without Mummy and Daddy.

  I thought that now we were grown-ups, it would stop. We had left our childhood games, our plays, our theatre. Oh, the glorious plays we would enact, just for one another: the knight and his lady, the prince and his princess, the pigs and the cows and the sheep our unwitting extras! He was every bit as talented as me in the dramatic arts, but, alas, he was too particular. Strange, they called him. A bit of an oddball – something funny about that one. And of course his nerves would never have stood it. We had left such childish things behind along with our improvised costumes, our cereal-box crowns, our bed-sheet robes. I thought – hoped, rather – once we moved into the terrace that he would have left the other games behind too. The night games. The violence. But he hadn’t. They didn’t stop. None of it stopped until he pushed me down the stairs. Three months in a back brace is no joke. I put on weight; I was less agile, less firm of flesh. I was no use to him any more. I was no use to anyone.

  The thespian world is a fickle friend indeed.

  So when the house next door came up for sale, it was the perfect solution. He couldn’t have managed without me nearby, no way, Jose. He didn’t clean, he didn’t cook – his house was a disgrace. But that’s the way he liked it. Messy child.

  His rages grew worse. He would scream, wrap his hands around my neck, drag me by the hair, you name it. I bought him a tablet computer, set it up in his name, sorted out websites. Girls, very young. It was better than having to go and buy the magazines, or have them coming through the door.

  That kept him going for a little while. But it wasn’t enough.

  He wanted live flesh. He was very specific about that. He wanted it live and young, and he wanted it drowsy and smelling of lavender. As I had been.

  Fifty-Eight

  Bridget

  Bridget’s breath comes in ragged bursts; her chest burns. Emily has bolstered her page with fake headshots from years ago. The woman is a fraud. She checked out, for all the rest, but she is a fraud nonetheless.

  Emily, Rosie said when Bridget ripped the tape from her mouth, dazzled perhaps by the sun, not knowing who she was in that moment of panic and terror. Was it Emily that Rosie was expecting to see at the door of the van? The more Bridget thinks about it, the more this possibility becomes a probability.

  She calls Toni. Toni’s phone is dead.

  ‘Fu
ck!’

  Think. Think, Bridget. That night, the night Emily came over. She said she lived near Richmond, didn’t she? That guy’s house was in Ham, which is near Kingston, yes, that’s the way Bridget drove, but it’s near Richmond too. It lies between the two towns, doesn’t it? Emily mentioned she had a brother, what was his name? Could that revolting old man be her brother?

  Emily was meant to be coming over to the flat this afternoon. Didn’t Toni say she’d texted her to let her know Rosie was in hospital? Which means that Emily knows where she is…

  ‘Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no.’

  A search for West Middlesex Hospital: the switchboard number. In panic, Bridget’s eyes water, her fingers are clumsy on the keys. Whatever happens, she has to get a message to Toni. It could be paranoia, but for now paranoia is all she has, and it is paranoia that tells her that, somehow, Emily is connected to the man lying dead in the terraced house in Ham. Is it possible she’s his sister? Accomplice? If Emily shows up at the hospital, Toni has no reason not to trust her, no reason not to leave her alone with Rosie.

  Bridget calls the switchboard. It rings and rings, goes to the answering machine. She tries again. Same thing. She tries again. A woman answers. Bridget gasps, gives Rosie’s full name.

  ‘It’s really urgent I get a message to my sister, Rosie’s mother,’ she says. ‘Can you tell me which ward she’s in?’

  She gives the details, hears the woman tapping them in. Bridget drums her fingernails on the tabletop. Come on; come on.

  ‘She’s still in A&E,’ the woman says. ‘She’s not been moved yet, according to this. Well, she might have been moved but they’ve not updated the system.’

  ‘Can you put me through? I need to get a message to her. It’s urgent.’