Two Shades of the Lilac Sunset

by Rosen Trevithick

  Eventually, she found what she hoped was the right house. It looked much the same as all the others but with an unwieldy wisteria plant blocking half of the cracked paving slabs.

  She stood outside for a good ten seconds before pressing the bell. Her heart pounded and she became dizzy. Had she made the wrong decision? She felt as though she were walking into the devil’s jaws.

  An orange light came on behind the frosted glass. She heard footsteps. She felt faint and grabbed the doorframe to steady herself. Was there really any chance this woman could be an ally?

  The door opened. There stood the slim, brunette lady, who looked like a slightly older, more dignified model of herself – Katrina Bell-Tompkins.

  Katrina looked gobsmacked. “Miss Cassidy?”

  Willow was shaking so much that her words chattered. “I know you must hate me, but …”

  Katrina looked over Willow’s shoulder and out onto the pavement. “Are you alone?” she asked, anxiously.

  Willow felt like she was going to throw up.

  “Are you okay?”

  Willow lurched into the house. Katrina steadied her, helping her indoors and onto the bottom step of a flight of stairs. She went to the doorway and surveyed the street. Then she closed the door, sealing Willow inside with her.

  “How on earth did you find me? He’s not with you, is he?”

  Willow shook her head.

  “He’s really not with you?”

  “No.”

  “So how did you find me?”

  Willow didn’t have enough energy to explain.

  “Have you just come all the way from Cornwall?”

  “Yes.” Willow’s lower jaw shuddered as she tried not to cry. “I’m sorry. I know you hate me. I just …”

  Katrina just stared, gobsmacked. Eventually, “Let me get you a drink.”

  Katrina returned from the kitchen with a pint glass full of water. She looked calmer now – more welcoming. “Come and sit in the lounge.”

  The lounge was more modest than Willow had expected. She had imagined that Katrina lived somewhere grand and modern. The room had a homely feel to it; it was warm, smelt slightly of lilies and an episode of Friends was playing silently on an old television set.

  “Would you like a blanket?”

  “No, thank you. If anything, I’m too hot.” Willow took off her jacket, preferring to sit in just her jogging clothes.

  “I’ll turn the heater down.” Katrina crossed the room and began fiddling with a dial.

  Willow studied her. “Why are you being nice to me?”

  “I can guess why you’ve come here.”

  “Nobody else gets it. Nobody will ever understand why I stayed. It was just like you said – by the time I wanted to leave him, I had nowhere to go.”

  “He distanced you from your friends and family?”

  “I was never left with any time to see my friends and I haven’t got much family. My mum died and my dad’s never really been around.” Willow swallowed “I’m not getting on very well with my sister.”

  “Does she live in Cornwall, too?”

  “She tried to warn me about Nat and I ignored her.”

  “I’m sure, if you talk to her …”

  “And he knows where she lives.” Willow suddenly panicked. “He doesn’t know where you live, does he?”

  “I moved. How did you find me?”

  “On the BT website.”

  “I’m on the BT website?”

  “Yes. You’re in the phonebook. Didn’t you know?”

  “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

  “As far as I know, Nat hasn’t looked at it.”

  Katrina looked troubled. But then she took Willow’s hand. “I do get it, you know.”

  Willow felt ashamed when she remembered what she’d done when Katrina turned up at Falmouth in a hysterical mess – nothing.

  “I understand that you feel alone,” said Katrina. “That’s how I felt. He made me scared to talk to my friends, especially about him. He actually bought the publishing company where I worked. I ended up quitting my job because it felt as if he owned me.”

  Willow remembered how Nat had bought her way into the exhibition at the Princess Pavilion.

  “I lived and breathed for him. It was like a drug. It went on for months and months. Then when he’d had his fun, he cast me aside, leaving me feeling completely helpless.”

  At first Willow felt bad for being the cause of that, but then she muttered, “I wish he would cast me aside.”

  “I was furious when he left me. I hated you. I used to wish terrible things would happen to you. But now I can see you did me a favour. You saved me.”

  Willow looked into her water glass and said nothing.

  Katrina took Willow’s other hand and held them both tightly. “What is the state of play right now? Does he know you’re in London? Did you use his computer to get my address?

  “I went to an internet café near Paddington. I had to ditch my phone.”

  “You came all the way here without knowing where I lived?”

  “I knew you were in the phone book because I’d fantasised about running away before – never using his computer though, just my phone.”

  “Could he have looked at your phone?”

  “You think he checked my browser history?”

  “Quite possibly!” Katrina sounded alarmed.

  “You’re the only Katrina Bell-Tompkins in the phonebook. If he wants to find you, he will.”

  Katrina looked terrified.

  “You can opt out, you know.”

  Katrina checked her watch. “I’ll phone BT first thing tomorrow.” Then she added, “It’s Sunday, so he will have noticed you’re gone. I assume he used the same old contract. The one he borrowed for me from his ex.”

  “Yes, but we tore it up.”

  Katrina looked hurt for a moment, but brushed it away. “But he was expecting to see you today?”

  “I practically live at his now. I tried to go home once, but he came after me. This morning, I told him I was going for a jog. At first I was planning on hurting myself. You know …” Willow gulped, “… ending it.”

  Katrina stared back, her big, brown eyes disturbed.

  “But when I got there I couldn’t do it. The cliffs aren’t all that high on the south coast and I thought of the injuries I might end up with if I survived the fall. Also, well, I’m a coward …”

  “Don’t think that way. You got away from him. You got all the way to London. That doesn’t sound cowardly to me.”

  “I was sitting on the headland, trying to clear my head, when I realised he had tracked my phone!”

  “Yeah, he likes to do that.”

  “I put my phone down and ran. I knew I had to get out of Falmouth and as far away as I could.”

  “So nobody knows you’re here?” Katrina checked, again.

  “No. I want to tell my sister that I’m safe. But she’s going out with Nat’s friend – or rather, a chap who used to be Nat’s friend. I’m worried he could force or trick information out of them. You don’t know what he’s like.”

  “Sadly, I do.”

  “I want him to think I’m gone without a trace, so that he doesn’t try to find me. What if he’s tapped their phones too? What if texting Demi leads him here? She’ll come looking for me, I know she will! And what if he follows?”

  “He’s really got you scared, hasn’t he?”

  Willow felt ashamed, and nodded. “I left him once, then went back to him. I’m so stupid.”

  “What did he do, tell you his friend had a brain tumour?”

  Willow was surprised. This was a whole new form of low. “Is that not true?”

  “Put it this way: he told me he’d just found out, but another girl heard the same line three years ago.”

  Willow felt appalled, then suddenly jealous. “How many girls have there been?”

  Katrina frowned. “You’re still in the zone.”

  “What zone?”<
br />
  Katrina sat face to face with Willow and took a deep breath. “Listen, this is important: when I was with him, even when I knew I had to get away, a part of me still desperately wanted him. A part of him wanted him to beg me to stay. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  Willow remembered Nat kneeling beside her bath begging her to come back. She remembered hating him and wanting him at the same time. She understood too well.

  “I need you to promise me, that if you have a wobble, and want to call him, that you won’t tell him you’re with me.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m serious. I’ve worked really hard to rid my head of that man. I don’t want him back.”

  “I’m so sorry I’ve brought him back into your life.”

  “Don’t apologise. Being here for you means that those two years of my life weren’t all for nothing. But I cannot have him near me, not ever again. Do you understand?”

  Evening of Sunday 23 rd August – at Swanpool

  Demi watched as the dusk sent the cliffs to sleep. The quarter moon did little to illuminate the scene. She turned to Jack. “We still haven’t checked Kingfisher Cove.”

  “This place has been swarming with officers for the last hour. If she was there, somebody would have seen her.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You can’t see Kingfisher Cove from here. Unless she wants to be found, which I think we can agree she doesn’t, nobody will have seen her.”

  “All right,” agreed Jack, reluctantly. “I’ll check.”

  Demi followed Jack to the far end of the beach.

  “Wait there.”

  She watched Jack scramble the rocks, while P.C. Jones illuminated the way with a heavy duty torch.

  “Thank God it wasn’t her body,” whispered Ross.

  Demi squeezed him. “I really thought it was her. I gave up on her, Ross!”

  “No, you didn’t. Anybody would have feared the worst.”

  “But where is she?” begged Demi, standing on tippy toes as if that was going to make any difference.

  Ross could say nothing, so instead he just held her tightly, rescuing a few strands of her golden hair from the breeze.

  “He’s got her, hasn’t he?”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “But they’re both missing.”

  Jack returned from the rocks, shaking his head. Willow wasn’t hiding in the darkness of Kingfisher Cove.

  “What about the next cove along?”

  “Demi, our helicopter already checked seven miles of coastline. I had another look at Kingfisher Cove to reassure you that she isn’t there. I can’t check every cove; it’s not possible and there’s no point.”

  “Perhaps they missed her. It was already starting to get dark when you sent out the helicopter.”

  “That’s why we used infrared. I know how hard this is for you, I do, but you really would be better off at home right now.”

  Morning of Tuesday 25 th August – inside a house on Mayfield Road

  Demi stared at the pressed daisy – Willow’s favourite flower – and wished she could dare to believe. She remembered reading a book in which a terrified character had sent dried flowers to a relative to hint that she was still alive. Had Willow read the same book? Was the daisy a sign that she was alive and well? Or was it another of Nat’s games? Why did the envelope have a London postmark?

  She looked at Ross, wondering if she should tell him. She trusted Ross, but did Willow? She didn’t want to betray her sister in any way.

  The doorbell rang and yet again they braced themselves for news. Demi went into the hallway and saw the familiar shapes of police uniforms. However, when she opened the door, she found that she didn’t recognise either of the officers.

  “I’m D.C.I. Ryan,” said a middle-aged chap with bushy, stern eyebrows, “and this is my colleague, D.I. Davidson.” The partner was a younger man with black hair and a moustache.

  “Have you found Willow? Where are Jack and P.C. Jones?”

  “Can we come in, please?”

  For the fifth time in two days, Demi showed two policemen into her living room. She perched on the edge of an arm chair whilst the two officers sat on the sofa, looking grave.

  “We’re investigating the death of Nathaniel Gordon.”

  “Nat’s dead?”

  The police officer’s eyes drove into her.

  Demi gawped back at him. “Fuck!” Her head begin to spin. “Seriously?”

  “He died on Sunday.”

  “On Sunday? When on Sunday? I was with him in the morning. Was it his body we saw?”

  “We don’t have a precise time of death yet, but we’re operating under the assumption that the time of death was mid to late morning.”

  “Jesus. What happened?” asked Ross, suddenly tense.

  “We pulled Nat’s body from the sea on Sunday evening. I understand you were there?”

  Demi blinked a few times. So Nat wasn’t ignoring her calls. He hadn’t been hiding from the police. A part of her had considered that the body might have been Nat’s, but with so much going on she had discounted that. How could he be dead? He had always seemed so infuriatingly invincible.

  “We were there,” she stammered. “We were there looking for my sister, Willow. I was worried that the body … we were worried that it …” Demi tried to take it all in. “God, if I’d known it was Nat …”

  “You’d have what?”

  “God knows. Celebrated, probably.”

  “Is it fair to say that you were not on good terms with Mr Gordon?”

  “Not at all. Is he really dead? Was it an accident? Could Willow have been hurt too?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to establish. When did you last see your sister?”

  Demi wondered whether she should mention the daisy. A blank card containing just one of Willow’s favourite flowers seemed intentionally vague and cryptic. It was a secret message – a secret message that had been addressed to her personally. If it was from Willow, there had to be a good reason why she hadn’t sent something clearer.

  “I last heard from her on Sunday morning.”

  “By email?”

  “Yes.”

  “But when did you last actually see her?”

  “A few weeks ago when I went over to Nat’s to find out what the hell was going on. She wasn’t right, then. The room was full of smoke and she was just sitting there, not moving. The toast was on fire and she just let it burn.”

  “And when was that, exactly?”

  “I don’t know – I worked out the date with Jack. I mean P.C. Tamar. God, I wish I’d called the police there and then.”

  “And when did you last speak to her?”

  “At the same time. But, like I told the other officers, I got an email from her on Sunday morning. You’ve already got copies of that.”

  “And you have no idea where your sister is?”

  “No! I’ve told you this! You’re supposed to be looking for her. Not asking me questions I’ve already answered.”

  D.C.I. Ryan sat calmly with his notebook, unperturbed by Demi’s frustration.

  “I’m scared stiff because I don’t know where she is. It’s not like her to disappear and not tell me anything.”

  “Yet you went for almost a month without speaking to each other at all.”

  “I tried to contact her. She just didn’t know because Nat blocked me on her phone.”

  D.C.I. Ryan jotted something down. “Do you mind if we take a look around?”

  “Why?” Demi was confused. Then she realised, “You think I’m hiding her?” Despite her troubled state, she found herself laughing. “I have called you two dozen times over the last few days, trying to find my sister, and now you think I’ve been hiding her?”

  “We’re just following all lines of enquiry.”

  Fantastic. Willow’s disappearance had been reduced to a cliché.

  Demi tried to absorb the news that Nat was dead, washed up on the beach, dead. Co
uld there have been some sort of boating accident? She began to feel a new type of dread rising into the picture. Had he drunk that drink?

  “Do you need me to show you around?”

  “It would be best if you stayed here.”

  Demi wasn’t happy about the officers stomping all over their house, but she decided not to argue. She listened to their footsteps ascending the stairs, plodding on the landing …

  She turned to Ross and whispered, “Can you detect antihistamines in a post mortem?”

  “I don’t know, why?”

  Demi took a deep breath and muttered, “Because I think I might have caused it.”

  “What?”

  Demi didn’t dare go into details with the police in the house. What if the antihistamines had contributed to Nat’s death? Would she be arrested and charged with murder? Her heart thumped as police footsteps rumbled above her.

  When the police officers came back into the room, she was too terrified to speak, afraid that the faintest twitch in her intonation would give her away. She let Ross show them out, whilst she remained sitting in the living room, paralysed with fear.

  She heard Ross mumbling something about letting the police know if they heard anything and the officers responding with the usual platitudes, told in slightly gruffer tones than those Jack and P.C. Jones used.

  Eventually, Ross came back in. “What’s the matter?” He looked alarmed. “What’s this about antihistamines?”

  Demi opened her mouth and her conscience fell out. “I emptied some of my hay fever capsules into his drink. I just meant to send him to sleep, maybe make him a bit dopey – so that he’d stop looking for Willow.”

  “Demi!” exclaimed Ross, shocked.

  “I didn’t want him to hurt her.”

  “He went out looking in his car! You could have caused an accident. You could have hurt innocent people!”

  “Like Willow,” replied Demi, devastated by Ross’s reaction.

  He loosened up a little. “Look, we know there wasn’t a car accident, because his body was found in the sea.”

  “What about a boating accident?”

  “Why would he have been in a boat?”

  “I don’t know. So that he could get Willow alone? You can rent little sailing boats from Swanpool.”