Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  When she went down, I should have stepped up. I should have saved her, saved all of us. When I think where she must have been up to, you know, mentally, to get to a place where she could have done those things, and me not even noticing… I mean, what kind of husband does that make me? What kind of husband doesn’t notice his own wife, for God’s sake?

  33

  Rachel

  I think Amanda is tired. She looks a bit pale and there are dark circles under her eyes, which the concealer can’t quite hide. Maybe her kids kept her awake last night. Maybe she had a row with her husband. Maybe she went out on the lash. Who knows? As for me, I’m not tired. I’m like a boxer going in for round one, punching my big gloves together: come on, let’s do this. I just want it all off my chest and no one, no one has ever listened to me like she does. Funny – quirky, you might say – but both times when the other woman, the one in uniform, has accompanied me to the loo, when I’ve come back Blue Eyes has reapplied her lipstick. That tickles me, that she would bother. It’s a strong red-wine colour against her alabaster complexion. Harsh, almost, but it works. A face that hints that the smile, when it comes, will be worth the wait. She’s tall and striking in the way a Greek statue is striking: soft curves chiselled from hard marble. Grace and power combined. She makes me think she can tell me it’s going to be all right – that she has the authority to say this and make it so. And that makes me want to tell her everything, even though all is lost.

  So I do. Because when you’ve held it all in for so long, once you start letting it out, you can’t stop. And maybe that’s what I’ve been afraid of all along. And maybe it’s only now, talking to Amanda, that I realise that when there’s too much inside, it creates this big pressure. The pressure comes from the very act of holding it all in. It’s no wonder the walls of me were cracking.

  I didn’t see Lisa after that. Well, I saw her but she didn’t see me and now I’m in here.

  Even saying that feels surreal. That I wouldn’t see Lisa every week would have been unthinkable once. But she went off to Majorca with some of the girls we used to meet up with – she invited me but I said no, obviously. Our lives had forked, I suppose. She was a single woman now and I was still married, to all intents and purposes, and that had changed things. When Patrick left her, he’d also left our little gang of four: me and Mark, Lisa and Pat, two couples happy as anyone doing happy things together. His scandalous dumping of her for a younger model had left us all reeling at the time, and that was before I had bigger things to worry about.

  Meanwhile, somewhere in all of this, Katie went to Ibiza with her friend Thea and to Portugal with the boyf’s family, who are quite wealthy and had rented a villa with a pool. They say you lose your sons but keep your daughters, but I could see she was drifting away from me. She’d made no moves to apply for uni and I couldn’t broach the subject without her getting cross. She barely seemed to have time to chat or to want to spend time with me anymore, but that was understandable, I suppose.

  I didn’t want to spend time with me either.

  Mark and I didn’t go away. We hadn’t booked anything and we didn’t say it out loud but neither of us, I knew, saw the point. Instead, we drifted like shadows in the walls of our house. He went to the pub, or wherever he went, came back stinking of fags and beer; I went on my walkabouts. We ate our tea watching television: together but not together, looking anywhere but at each other.

  I walked. I printed off the news. I went to work. I walked. I printed off the news. I went to work. Repeat to fade.

  Dave continued to be a pain in the neck. Phil opened up a bit more, told me he’d got divorced the year before, which went some way to explaining the deterioration in his appearance.

  ‘I lost everything,’ he said, sitting on his regular stool after one of his gambling losses, ironically, though that’s not what he meant. ‘House, furniture, you name it.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She used to shout at me, call me names.’

  ‘Oh, Phil, I am sorry.’

  He shrugged, gave a bitter half laugh. ‘She cheated on me. I knew she was doing it. Used to leave little clues, and then when I asked her about them, she’d say I was controlling. Said she was innocent but everyone knew. Everyone. I thought I was losing my mind.’

  ‘Oh dear. That’s a bad do.’ Poor chap. It was no wonder he sought comfort in the betting shop – and here.

  ‘She made me feel about that big,’ He made an inch with his thumb and forefinger. I knew without him telling me that he’d repeated a pattern learned during his childhood, but he told me anyway. ‘My mum was what they used to call a scold.’

  ‘Now that’s an old word.’ By this time, I’d sat down on the stool I keep behind the bar for the rare moments when I’m not serving, cleaning, refilling, what have you. Phil seemed to want to chat and there was only one other punter in, so I didn’t see the harm.

  ‘My nan,’ he said. ‘The one who used to take me along with her while she bet on the horses? She’d been the same, I think, although I never saw that side of her. A shrew – I heard her called that more than once. I suppose those were different times and to me she was wicked and fun. But she finished her husband off, that was the family rumour. Drove him to a heart attack with the stress of living with her. He smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and ate like a pig, but that was how he coped, then boom!’ He made an explosion with his hands. ‘Then my dad the same. Spent as much time out of the house as he could. I remember my mum shouting at him, him standing there with his shoulders slumped and his head down. He was a gambler too, but what’s funny is I didn’t know that till later, and by then I’d already run up a two-grand overdraft on top of my student loan.’

  ‘Funny what we pick up without words, isn’t it?’ I said as he drained his glass. ‘You must have known it somehow, somewhere in you, like, that he was a gambler, without anyone saying anything.’ I stood, picked up his glass. ‘Another one?’

  He shook his head. ‘Better not.’

  I knew he’d run out of money. He’d paid his last quid in coppers. I’d have given him a free pint while no one was looking, but that wasn’t the way to help him; it would only make things worse.

  ‘I’d better get on,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. No problem. Thanks, Rachel.’

  Meanwhile I’d got to know some of the dog walkers by name. Pete only walked his chihuahua as far as the lamp post of an evening before he went to bed. His wife had dementia and was there one minute, gone the next. Marj, whose daughter had become withdrawn when I first met her, was happier now because said daughter had finished with her misery-guts of a boyfriend and was back to her old self. Claire’s dog had died, actually, but Claire, bless her, a lovely woman with a bright white-blonde crop and never without her fabulous red lipstick, couldn’t break the habit of her evening constitutional and was now thinking about getting a poodle because she’d always had poodles as a child. She was on her own, for the moment, having not found the right person. She worked a lot from home, copywriting, and came to the conclusion, talking it out, that she needed to find an office-based job at least part-time. She was a book nut too, like me. And like me, she was walking out for other reasons than the pooch.

  ‘But one thing was bugging me,’ I say.

  Amanda raises her perfectly shaped eyebrows. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Something that was impossible to get around.’ My chest swells, sinks.

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Well, just as I stopped going anywhere secluded with the people I met…’ I reach for the glass of water and cradle it in my hands, ‘so the attacks stopped. There were no attacks locally that summer. Not one.’

  I realise I can’t hear that fly anymore. It must have escaped. Or died.

  ‘Which brings us to September,’ Amanda says, very slowly. ‘To the next… to the next murder.’ She narrows her eyes; her mouth flattens. ‘Do you think you can talk about that?’

  I drink the rest of my water in one go, feel it run cold down my gullet. I p
lace the glass back on the table and make myself take a deep breath. Even now, I’m not sure what I can say; all I can do is tell her what I think I know.

  ‘September came, like you say,’ I begin. ‘I mean, September follows summer, doesn’t it? Like dessert follows a main course in one of those fixed menu things. Even if you don’t want any pudding, it will still arrive. And you’ll still eat it. Even if you know it’ll make you feel sick.’

  I look up. I look up at her a lot now that we’ve been here together so long. I feel like I need to see her, like she’s my point on the horizon.

  ‘I was desperate,’ I say. ‘I see that now. I was desperate to put everything behind me and somehow find my way out of the hole.’

  ‘So you were starting to come out of this difficult period of your life?’

  ‘Well, I did something I’d been meaning to do for a long time, so that’s a sign, isn’t it?’

  ‘Breaking the inertia, yes. Usually, that’s an indicator of positive energy returning. What did you do?’

  ‘I put my name down for a spinning class.’

  Not the great revolution, I know, if you’ll pardon the pun, but it felt big at the time. In TK Maxx I found some cheap sports leggings with super-strength elastic that held everything in and which looked OK with one of Mark’s old T-shirts over the top. As for not looking like Elle Macpherson, something Katie had read to me once from one of the body-positive accounts she follows popped into my mind: the girl in the photo doesn’t even look like the girl in the photo. God help the middle-aged woman – you barely see a photo of her at all, let alone an airbrushed one. So I kept that in mind and resolved to see what my body could do, not judge how it looked.

  Amanda’s blue eyes are still there, a constant in all my zigzagging about. I wipe more endless tears from the bottom of my chin.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s just that telling you this makes me feel so sad.’

  ‘Do you feel sad for yourself?’

  ‘Yes, but mainly for her. For Anne-Marie.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘If only I hadn’t gone to that class.’ A huge sob catches in my chest.

  ‘But you did. And we need to talk about that.’

  34

  Lisa

  Transcript of recorded interview with Lisa Baxter (excerpt)

  Also present: DI Heather Scott, PC Marilyn Button

  LB: Rach asked me if I wanted to go to this exercise class thing at Brookvale Leisure Centre. I said no, which I obviously regret now. It was by text, not a call; we hadn’t spoken even over the phone for weeks. She replied OK, words to that effect. But I should’ve gone. She was reaching out, I can see that now, but I didn’t think about it that way at the time.

  HS: For the benefit of the tape, I’m pausing while Ms Baxter composes herself.

  HS: Taped session restarting now. Ms Baxter, going back to last Thursday, Thursday the twenty-sixth of September, you’re saying Mrs Edwards appeared calm?

  LB: I don’t know what she was like that evening. As I say, I didn’t see her. I think she wanted us to do something together that maybe didn’t involve too much talking. I mean, that’s with hindsight, I don’t know that for sure, obviously. I’m not a psychiatrist.

  HS: Do you have any witnesses as to your whereabouts that evening?

  LB: Not as such, but our Jodi FaceTimed me from her friend’s house at about ten o’clock so she’d be able to tell you I was in my PJs and halfway through the new Line of Duty. Not to mention a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

  HS: We have two witnesses who say they saw a woman with fair hair spotted near the driveway leading to Brookvale Leisure Centre at around eight forty-five on the evening of Thursday the twenty-sixth. Do you have any thoughts as to who that might have been?

  LB: Not a clue. By which I mean it wasn’t me, obviously. I’ve blonded my hair since it went grey, yes, but as I said, I was at home.

  HS: You were at home at 10 p.m., but this woman was sighted at eight forty-five.

  LB: It wasn’t me. I don’t know what else to tell you.

  HS: Did you have any further contact with Rachel Edwards?

  LB: Yes. She called me on the Friday afternoon. This Friday just gone. The day after.

  HS: And how did she seem then?

  LB: She sounded… she sounded bad. I didn’t answer when she rang but I called her back from the car and asked if she wanted to meet for a drink. She’d been to see her dad that afternoon. But yeah, she sounded terrible.

  HS: What did you talk about?

  LB: I told her I’d been in the supermarket buying pizza for the girls.

  HS: And had you? For the benefit of the tape, Ms Baxter is shaking her head.

  LB: No. Well I had. But that’s not where I was when she rang.

  HS: Where had you been, Ms Baxter?

  LB: I’d been… I… I was with Mark.

  35

  Rachel

  I’d texted Lisa on the Monday to see if she wanted to come spinning, but as expected, she texted back: On yer bike. I’d rather eat my own ear wax!

  To which I replied: Very witty, bon appétit!

  So the banter was still there, if nothing else. She asked if I fancied a cuppa on Friday afternoon or a drink later on, but I texted back that I was going to see my dad and that I’d probably stay with him all evening. That last bit was a lie, but I couldn’t face seeing anyone, even her.

  Are you OK? she wrote.

  Yes, fine.

  I wasn’t fine, obviously; I was lonely. I was lonely because I couldn’t talk to a single human being about what I was feeling. Not one. Not even by text. I was so lonely that I even stooped to asking poor-me Ingrid to come to spinning. I wasn’t going to but she was out in next door’s garden on the Sunday afternoon, sitting in their swing seat with a fag on the go, and a gin and tonic by the looks of it. I wondered whose gin she’d used, whose tonic.

  As for me, I was bringing in the washing, nothing new there.

  ‘I don’t like exercise,’ she said when I asked her – typically tactless. I almost suggested she might need to stretch her legs given that she was getting a lift to work most days with my husband.

  ‘Me neither,’ I said instead, humouring her. ‘Endorphins, that’s what I’m after.’

  She took a long drag of her cigarette. ‘I would, but working full-time is tiring me out.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  The sarcasm was lost on her.

  I parked up and was on my way in, but just outside the leisure centre I had to stop due to an eruption of heat inside me. I leaned my hand against the wall and did some deep breathing, and slowly it passed.

  At reception, I had to cough theatrically to be seen. Obviously. Even when the girl – and she was a girl – did look at me, it was with the kind of unfocused stare you see in ruminating cows. After following the world’s most lacklustre directions, I reached the gym and performed an amoeba-like progression around the perimeter wall before clambering onto one of the bikes at the back, just about managing not to fall off the other side. Once aboard, so to speak, I spotted a woman two bikes down, about my age, hair the colour of a pomegranate. I smiled doubtfully, the way we women do, and was grateful when she threw her eyes heavenwards and blew at her fringe as if to say, well, here we are. Here we are indeed, I thought. Fighting off deterioration.

  Her hair was so cheery, I thought, bracing myself against the handlebars for what lay ahead. I wasn’t keen on the actual shade, but it was, as I say, bright, and I made the decision there and then to go to Shapers in town the following week and get a decent cut and colour, even if it meant going without the Saturday takeaway. Sod it, maybe I’d dye it pink! That’d put the cat among the pigeons!

  I’m only telling you this because I want you to know I was getting better. I was. I had no idea I was on any kind of edge, certainly not one so sharp with such a deep, deep drop.

  The teacher was a shouty lady of about thirty with one of those bodies you can bounce coins off. Seriously, not a
scrap on her. Neck veins like cables, deep folds round her mouth. To lose weight she’d have to dig out an eyeball… you get the picture.

  ‘Faster,’ she kept saying. ‘Let me see those legs pumping.’

  I’ll pump you in a minute, I thought, but I kept my head down, avoided eye contact at all costs. The rest of the women were younger by at least ten years, and I noticed that the woman who’d smiled was keeping her head down too.

  Sometimes we want to be invisible.

  When the first drop spotted the gym floor, I thought the roof was leaking, until I realised it was me – me, dripping sweat in great fat drops. I’d got my fitness up with my evening walks, but this was proper aerobic exercise. What had I been thinking, seeking out something that would make me even hotter? Honestly, I was sweating like a drug smuggler going through customs by the end. I didn’t dare look in the mirrors. I knew I’d be redder than a cranberry at Christmas.

  As everyone filed out, there was a mass move towards the showers – but one step at a time, sweet Jesus. Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’d face the women’s changing room when I was good and ready and not before.

  I clambered off my bike, and my God, the pain. My undercarriage felt like it had been kicked by a goat.

  ‘Ow,’ I whispered to my own knees and grabbed my towel.