Damian springs to his feet. “Then we need to see what we can find here.”
“Okay.” I hesitate. “But suppose someone did follow us?”
He runs his hand through his hair with a frown. “Let’s give ourselves ten, fifteen minutes max to search the place, see if we can find anything that might help us work out where Shannon got your sister’s locket. We can take it away and look through it properly later.”
We work systematically rifling through the drawers and cupboards in the kitchen. There’s nothing remotely relevant here. I deposit the groceries from Shannon’s shopping onto the countertop and we each take a plastic bag. Damian hurtles upstairs while I grab anything I can find that might be worth a second look from the living room. There isn’t much, just a bunch of receipts on the dresser and a shoe box of photos under the coffee table.
After a couple of minutes I head up the stairs. Damian is busy rifling through the chest of drawers in Shannon’s bedroom, his own plastic bag bulging. Again, I have a sense of déjà vu.
“Anything useful?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Not really.” As he speaks, his phone rings.
It’s Gaz, Damian’s friend who’s been looking at the hard drive from Julia’s computer. He tells Damian that he’s retrieved some fragments, and is going to e-mail them over.
I head next door. It’s a spare room. Just a bed and two side tables, with a shelf of books next to the wardrobe.
“I don’t think there’s much in here,” I call out. “Two more minutes, then let’s take what we’ve got and go.”
Damian agrees. I open the wardrobe. It’s full of more designer clothes. I move to the bookshelf. These are Julia’s, I’d bet money on it. She was studying psychology at uni, like Kara, and I remember years ago her being in awe of my own degree in history—and of all the books she thought I had read.
My taste in books makes your average airport novel look highbrow, she once told me. I just want to escape when I read, not have to think.
I run my fingers over the paperback spines. They feel old and dusty. I don’t recognize any of the author names, but the covers are all in lurid golds and pinks.
The firm smack of a door closing downstairs makes me turn.
“Damian?” I walk to the door.
He’s still visible in Shannon’s bedroom, now on his hands and knees looking under her bed.
I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, then the sharp scent of mineral spirits.
As I turn to face the stairs, I hear the crackle of flames. My guts clench as thick black smoke curls up onto the landing. I take a step toward it. Time slows down. My mouth opens.
“Fire!” I hear myself say. “Damian! Fire!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Damian! Fire!”
In an instant he’s beside me. “Fuck!” He looks wildly around.
I am transfixed by the smoke. Flames crackle and writhe on the stairs below us. The smell is acrid, stifling. There’s absolutely no way past the fire to the ground floor.
I glance back through to the spare room. There’s a window opposite.
“Come on.” I rush over, all my focus on opening the window and getting out.
I yank at the sash. It’s locked. My fingers fumble with the catch. Damian pushes my hand away and flips it in a single movement. He hauls the sash up. Peers out.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I’m moaning with fear.
“We’re going to have to climb onto the roof,” Damian says. “We can’t jump down.”
I push past him to look out of the window myself. There’s a deep ledge and a sheer drop to the paving stone below. My stomach lurches as I peer down. Damian’s right. It’s too far to jump. He’s already easing himself out onto the ledge. I look out, up and down the beach. Where is everyone? The mums with strollers are distant specks. There’s a man walking his dog in the opposite direction. I yell out, but he doesn’t hear.
“Come on.” Damian gets to his feet on the ledge. It’s just deep enough for him to stand on. He’s holding on to the tiles above the top of the window with his fingers.
“Oh, God.” I look over my shoulder. Smoke is filling the room behind me.
Outside, Damian is clawing his way up, onto the roof. I watch his legs go past, then creep out onto the ledge myself. I’m trembling all over, my heart beating furiously against my ribs.
“Please, help us, please,” I mutter under my breath. I don’t know whom I’m praying to. When Kara died, my parents lost their faith. I never had any in the first place.
I edge a little farther out so I’m sideways onto the ledge, one leg still left inside the bedroom. I peer up. The sky is clear blue against the red tiles. Damian’s feet disappear over the gutter just above. He is prostrate on the roof. Turning, his face is red with effort. He reaches his hand down to me.
“Livy, here.”
I look inside the bedroom again. I can’t see the door. Smoke fills the air, thick and acrid against my throat. Another minute and the fumes will get me. I have to move.
I grip the frame above my head and ease myself up. Now I am standing on the window ledge. I will myself not to look down. One sweating palm grips the gutter above. I have the strange sense of being out of my own body, watching myself cling to the roof.
Careful, Livy, don’t break a nail. Julia’s ironic voice is so clear inside my head, I almost turn to see where she is.
“Livy.” Damian’s voice cuts across my imagined conversation. “Hold my hand. Reach for the tiles. The gutter won’t take your weight.
It takes a second to register what he’s said.
“Cheers,” I mutter, snapping back to full reality.
Damian gives up a bitter laugh. “Now you’re reminding me of her.”
I take a deep breath and shift my hand onto the edge of the tiles. Damian grabs my other wrist.
“Got you,” he says. “Now push yourself up.”
I flex my legs and push up. One hand clutches the tiles. The pain in my fingers is agonizing. Damian holds my wrist so tightly, it’s sore. There’s a ripping sound as my pants tear. I can feel the material flap against my ankle as I rise up, my body against the tiles. I’m clawing for a better purchase. Damian hauls me higher. Another rip, this time my shirt. My cheek grazes against the hot tile. The sun burning, blood pulsing at my temples.
With a groan, Damian heaves me up again. I find the gutter with my feet and push against the metal. My knee stings. Another claw at the tiles. A final heave. And I’m up, lying flat on the roof just below Damian.
I gasp for breath. Damian releases my hand.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I rasp. I’m still trembling and my whole body feels sore and bruised, but I’m on the roof. Smoke is filtering out of the window, curling in wisps around us. We are on the beach side of the roof. There are people in the distance. I can’t tell if any of them have noticed the smoke yet. But surely they will. Surely someone will call for the fire brigade. I reach for my own phone, but the movement sets me off balance. I slip, dangerously, down the tiles, just as a series of small explosions erupt from the cottage. I look up, terrified. Damian hasn’t seen me slip. He is inching forward, commando style. He’s right. It’s dangerous to stay put. Pushing thoughts of my 999 call away for now, I follow him. Every muscle in my body is tensed. The roof slopes and it’s hard to keep balance. The sun beats down on my head as the rough edges of the tiles scrape against my elbows and knees.
I creep along. Damian is gaining on me. I try to speed up. Smoke pours out of the cottage windows, rising into the air above me. I think of the dresser—then of my handbag, somewhere still inside the house and of the two plastic bags we had filled with Shannon’s things, our clues—all going up in smoke. Damian is crawling, inching forward. He reaches the edge of the roof. Shaking, I arrive beside him. There’s a series of iron steps down the side wall between one set of cottages and the next, into a narrow alley way that leads between the beach and the main road. This must be where Shannon ran.
<
br /> It’s another treacherous balancing act to swing my legs off the side of the roof. I clamber after Damian, down the iron steps as a fire engine alarm sounds in the distance. Less than five minutes can have passed since I saw the smoke on the stairs. It feels like a lifetime. I look down as I reach the ground. My shirt is filthy and the pocket is ripped. There’s a long tear on the right side of my pants. I can feel my cheek and arms are bruised and grazed. Damian has survived the climb better. His clothes are intact and, being black, his shirt just looks a little dusty.
“Let’s get back to my car,” he says.
“Do you think it’s safe?” My hands are still shaking. “The man from earlier, he must have followed us after all.”
“I know, but we need to get out of here.” Damian puts his arm across my shoulders and leads me along the alleyway, toward the road.
His car is parked just a few meters away. A crowd has gathered outside Magalan Cottage. Everyone is watching the flames, unaware of our presence behind them. The fire truck is getting closer, it’s siren blaring into the air. Damian ushers me into his car. As a getaway vehicle, it leaves a lot to be desired, being both attention-grabbing and relatively slow, compared to more modern engines. I don’t point out either of these drawbacks to Damian, who looks tense with fear. He drives away. I pull down the passenger seat mirror. The damage—to my face at least—is not so bad as I feared, just a graze on my left cheek. I feel lost without my bag.
“In there.” Damian points to the glove compartment. Inside, I find a pack of tissues. I peel one, spit and dab at the dirt on my face.
My hands are still shaking.
I glance over my shoulder as we turn the corner. Julia’s cottage is going to be burned to the ground, a ruin. Everything inside it, from Shannon’s designer clothes to that photo of Julia and Kara, is gone. Forever.
A tear bubbles up behind my eye and trickles down my cheek. I turn my face away, so Damian can’t see.
“Don’t hold back on my account,” he says, and I can hear he’s grimacing as he speaks. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“What are we going to do?” It comes out as a whisper. “If he followed your car here, he’s going to notice it’s gone.
“We’ll have to leave the car somewhere. I just … Jesus, I don’t know.…”
“We have to go to the police. Tell them everything.”
Damian shrugs. “Tell them what? That we just escaped from a fire?”
“That someone deliberately tried to kill us,” I say, my voice rising. How can Damian not see that this is the obvious course of action. “I smelled cigarette smoke just before the fire started. The man must have followed us, from Shannon’s place in Torquay. He must have been downstairs, using a cigarette and the mineral spirits, maybe.”
“But cigarettes and mineral spirits don’t prove anything happened deliberately. If it comes to that they were probably my cigarettes down there. I even spilled mineral spirits on the floor. Plus we broke the door down when we went back inside.”
“You mean if we tell the police someone set the fire deliberately, it will just look like we’re trying to shift the blame from ourselves?”
“Exactly.” Damian shakes his head, a despairing gesture. “If we go to the police, we have to explain why we were in the cottage at all and once we tell them that, it’ll be hard not to explain about breaking into Shannon’s flat in Torquay too.”
“But we can explain all of that, if we just tell them about—”
“No.” Damian’s voice is angrier than I’ve ever heard it. “No fucking way.”
I sit back as we drive on, a riot of emotions racing through my head. Damian’s hands grip the wheel, a furious expression on his face.
Damian is hiding something, has been hiding something from the beginning. It’s to do with the police and with the lock-picking—something criminal, I’m certain. I pull my phone out of my pocket, open the browser, and put his real name, Damian Chambers, in the search box. Then I add in the words “arrested,” “charged,” and “convicted” in turn.
Seconds later, I’m staring openmouthed at what I’ve found. I turn to Damian. “You have a suspended sentence for domestic burglary.”
He says nothing.
“Damian?” I persist.
“Okay.” He hesitates. “I didn’t lie to you, Livy.”
“And that makes it okay?” I glare at him. “Anyway, what about lock-picking being something you ‘picked up’ in college?”
“It was,” he says quietly. “Another addict showed me. We were off our heads most of the time, thought we were something out of Natural Born Killers.”
He catches the horrified look in my eye.
“We never hurt anyone,” he says quickly. “We stole stuff to sell, for money.”
“For drugs?”
He nods. There’s a long pause. “It all feels like it happened to another person now.”
“Tell me,” I say. “Please.”
“Okay,” Damian says. “It was years ago, when I was at art school. I’d only done some E and a bit of spliff before that.” He hesitates. “Then I started using coke to get me going in the morning and I was still partying at night and … and my drinking was … well, I was getting through a bottle of whisky a day at one point. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t afford the half of it, so me and this girl, we ended up housebreaking. We took whatever we could carry: jewelry, laptops, cameras.” He glances at me and his eyes are filled with shame. “Looking back, I can’t believe I wasn’t caught sooner. In the end, I almost went to prison for it. But my sentence was suspended, I did some rehab. It didn’t really work so … after a couple of relapses Mum and Dad found a private clinic. They put their home on the market to pay for me to dry out. And that time, it was different. I stopped doing drugs. Went back to college. Turned things around. Like I told you before, it’s been five years plus since I used anything. I still go to meetings, do the whole AA thing.”
“Right.” I try to take in what he’s said. “So you have a record as a burglar. That’s why you don’t want to talk to the police, why you said ages back that they wouldn’t believe anything you said?”
“Yes,” Damian says. His eyes are fixed on the road ahead, a deserted stretch of dual carriageway lined with trees on either side.
“Did Julia know?”
“Of course.” Damian flashes a look at me. “I told her straightaway. She was brilliant about it, said everyone deserved a second chance. She used to turn to me sometimes, in the middle of a row and say, ‘How’s that searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself coming, Crime Boy?’” He smiles sadly at the memory. “She insisted that that I could still make up to my parents for what I’d put them through, whereas she could never give Kara her life back. She said I should work hard ‘to make direct amends.’”
I look down at my lap.
“Look, Livy, it’s not just my past that’s stopping me going to the police,” Damian adds with a sigh. “Think about where we broke into.”
“The cottage?” I say. “Why would anyone think we wanted to damage that?”
“Don’t Julia’s family already think you stole her ring? Maybe they’ll suspect you of wanting the cottage too, and getting angry about not having it.”
He’s right. I feel disoriented, as if the world has shifted on its axis and everything now looks slightly different than it did a few days ago.
“Let’s go, then,” I say. “There’s bound to be a car park at the train station. We can leave your car. It’ll be safe. And we can catch a train. I … I don’t have any money now, but—”
“Shit, your handbag.” Damian glances at me, horrified. “I was only thinking about us losing those plastic bags with all Shannon’s stuff in them.” He pulls off the two-lane road and slows the car as we reach the lights.
I turn my head away so that Damian can’t see the tear that trickles down my face.
“Hey.” His voice is soft.
I feel his fingers on my chee
k, turning my face toward his. We gaze into each other’s eyes, and for a single, terrifying moment I think he is about to kiss me. Then he clears his throat and his hand drops from my face.
“I’ll pay for the tickets, for whatever you need until you can get back home,” he offers gruffly.
“Thank you.” I wipe my eyes as the lights ahead change. Damian shifts gears and we drive on in silence. My thoughts jump about. I can’t settle. When I close my eyes I see the fire burning and then the messenger from earlier, then Damian looking at me, his finger trailing down my cheek. My hands are still shaking.
More than anything, I want Will. A lump lodges in my throat. I so want to call him, to turn to him for help and reassurance. And yet, how can I trust him? Shannon might have said Julia only used his name as a “cover” for whatever she was really doing, but he has still lied to me. He has still been unfaithful. And I still found Julia’s ring in his toolbox, which I simply can’t explain at all.
The car stops and I open my eyes. We’re at Honiton station. Damian and I get out. After a short discussion we decide to buy tickets for London but get off the train well beforehand, at Salisbury. I had been planning to go back to Bath, back to Mum and the kids. But now that idea seems like too big a risk, possibly even putting them in danger. We might have dumped the car, but we could still be being followed. Anyway, Salisbury is only an hour’s drive from Bath. I can get a taxi there if I need to.
Damian lugs his laptop and Shannon’s suitcase out of the trunk and over to the ticket office, then steps up to the counter to buy us two singles to London. The guy in the ticket office frowns as he catches sight of me, my shirt all ripped.
I rummage in Shannon’s case and find a blue T-shirt than looks a little larger than the others. I disappear into the ladies’ room to change and wash. There’s not much I can do about my pants. I can just about squeeze into one of Shannon’s tops, but her designer jeans are at least two sizes too small. In the end, I rip both my own trouser legs off just below the knee and roll them up. The effect is better than I was expecting. The cut-offs look good with my sandals and against my legs, tanned from the past few sunny weekends. In fact, as I look at myself in the mirror, it occurs to me that the trousers are looser than they were a few weeks ago, that I’ve lost weight since Julia’s death.
You Can Trust Me: A Novel Page 21