Can You See Her?: An absolutely compelling psychological thriller

by S. E. Lynes

  IT: Before you charge me, I just want to say something. You’re doing a lot of talking and you’re making it sound like I had it all worked out, but I didn’t. I’m a nice person. I’ve been suffering from… from undiagnosed depression after a traumatic divorce. I’m a really nice person. It was all just a horrible series of coincidences. If my ex had spent enough time in bed and less time pouring our savings down the toilet, I would never have ended up in this mess. That was him all over: selfish. I thought he was having an affair – that’s the only reason I followed him. Any woman would have done the same. I mean, I thought he was on drugs, don’t you see? I even checked his arms for tracks.

  That I actually followed him makes me laugh now. It makes me sick, to be honest. It’s been terrible for me, really hard. No one understands, absolutely no one. The humiliation has been unbearable at times. The shame. To see him go into a bookmaker’s, a bloody gambling shop, and suddenly everything becoming clear. The money draining from the bank account, the weight loss, the dark circles under his eyes. Money, our money, haemorrhaged on bloody horses of all things, drip-fed over hours into slot machines, funnelled into football results. And when the chips were down, as they invariably were, there was the inevitable self-pitying drowning of sorrows at the pub, weeping into the bosom of Rachel bloody Edwards. Every day, when he said he had to work late, off he went, until there was no money left to piss away.

  So I watched. So what? I’ve become a great watcher. Any woman would have done the same. And when he filed for divorce and all that business in Helsby… I was bullied. I’ve been bullied. What you’re using against me is gossip. I was hounded out of that town, as if none of them had ever put a foot wrong. I didn’t touch that woman’s husband and what happened at the party is my word against theirs. The knife was on the worktop; I just held it for two seconds, literally two. I only went out for a couple of lunches with the stupid cow’s husband and that was only because I was bored to death at home. But sleep with him? No way, I would never do that.

  All I ever did was focus on my health. (Laughs) Sorry, if I’m laughing it’s only at the irony of giving up work, taking folic acid, devoting time to my flute when all the time the main task at hand, for which I needed his input, was the one task left undone. That man took me through my entire thirties and now look at me. Darling, you had one job, as they say.

  And so, yes, I watched. You can’t charge me for that. And yes, I watched Rachel Edwards. With her fallen features and fried hair, her palpable apathy and rounded shoulders. No one called her a Jezebel, did they? Well, I’ll just say for the record that the other woman doesn’t always wear a tight red dress. There she was with a friendly hand on his shoulder, a pint pulled ready to greet him after a day flushing my money down the drain, always welcoming, always with the How are you, Phil? All right, Phil? Chat, chat, chat. Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, while he ruined my life, my life not hers, with his filthy habit.

  Enabler.

  Home wrecker.

  And his name is Philip, by the way, not Phil.

  When the flat came up for sale on Rachel’s road – sorry, close – it was the perfect opportunity to start again. I was being hounded out of Helsby like a witch – have you any idea how that feels? No one understands. You can’t prove I knew where Rachel Edwards lived. I’d had a change in circumstances and needed to downsize, that’s all. I couldn’t have stalked her even if I’d wanted to; she didn’t even exist online.

  And this idea that I was somehow after her husband? That’s because of what happened in Helsby, isn’t it? That underwear shot you seem intent on using against me was only because Mark had texted me one morning to ask if I was ready and I’d answered with that picture with the caption Not quite, lol, for a joke! A joke! You’ve taken it completely out of context. Mark and I used to make each other laugh all the time, this is what I mean by you twisting everything against me. He only deleted it because he said his weirdo wife might not understand my sense of humour. She might get the wrong idea. I mean, not being funny, but if she couldn’t trust him to be friends with someone, it’s obvious they were at the end of the road. I’m certainly not to blame for the shitty state of their marriage.

  And as for the people who have come forward with stories of how she helped them talk through their problems, how they’d come to think of her as a friend, I can see what you’re doing, pitting her profile against mine, but, well, they’re weirdos too. Dog walkers are strange, end of. They buy an animal so that they can stick it on the end of a rope and walk around the neighbourhood in endless circles picking up poo and making small talk with people they don’t know, never will know and will never invite into their homes. Weird. I wasn’t doing that, was I? All I did was go for a couple of walks and that’s enough to put me in the frame for brutal murders? Rachel Edwards could easily have broken into my flat, smeared the victims’ blood over my clothes, nicked my silk jacket, my shoes and secretly put them at the back of the wardrobe when I wasn’t in the house, stolen some cigarette ends and placed them at the scene, somehow got my fingerprints on that car. And how anyone could tell it was me from those CCTV captures I don’t know. What a joke. My own mother wouldn’t have known me.

  (Pause)

  HS: For the tape, Ms Taylor is composing herself.

  IT: OK, so you’ve got evidence for that Golightly woman, that David guy and the tramp kid. OK. Happy? I have no chance, I get that. I mean, who can compete with the mother of a murdered child? No one. In the Top Trumps of Victimhood, she holds the winning card, even if she did keep a file of death in her kitchen and go around chatting up strangers in the dark. People always prefer the underdog, the down-at-heel middle-aged woman, over the younger model when it comes down to who to believe. That’s just sexism, pure and simple. All the blame cast on me for no other reason than that I’m more attractive. Well, I’ll tell you something. As far as I’m concerned:

  Rachel Edwards steals husbands, not me.

  Rachel Edwards ruins lives, not me.

  Rachel Edwards is a murderer, and I’ll tell you how I know.

  I should have said it straight away. I should have told you, but I could tell you were trying to pin all this on me. But I saw Rachel Edwards go into the park with that girl. I saw her but I said I didn’t because only a fool would put themselves at the scene of the crime. I said I wasn’t there but I was. I was, OK? I saw her. I know you don’t have the CCTV, but I was there, I did see her, I swear. And the next day, when I read about that girl in the paper, I knew it was her, Rachel, Rachel Edwards. I couldn’t believe it when you didn’t trace it to her. Middle-aged woman, little black dog, walks the streets, talks to strangers, keeps a file of death? Just how much evidence do you need? It was exhausting. I would never have killed so many if you’d done your fucking job. Two more deaths and one near miss… and even then she had to do your job for you, turn herself in. I know you’re under-resourced, but honestly, you’re as stupid as her blind, trusting husband, to whom I dropped enough hints to sink a battleship. I’m telling you, Rachel Edwards killed Jo Weatherall. Rachel Edwards, do you hear me? I might be a murderer but she’s a murderer too.

  57

  Rachel

  One year later

  Amanda Frost recrosses her legs and fixes me with that blue gaze. It’s almost a year since I turned myself in. I’m off the antipsychotics now and this third type of HRT suits me a lot better than the other two, thank heavens. Sometimes the drugs do work.

  ‘Like we’ve said,’ Amanda says, with the air of a lawyer summing up, ‘sometimes it’s not one thing that can result in such extreme outcomes, but a number of things. And often it’s something relatively small that tips us over an edge we’ve been teetering on for some time.’

  ‘Like Crackerjack.’

  ‘Like Crackerjack.’ She smiles. ‘You have a wonderful support network. You have people who love you. How do you feel about Katie leaving? Liverpool, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m OK. I’m all right. I mean, she’s a lot less angry sinc
e the counselling and I know I might have thought I couldn’t bear for her to leave, but I saw what her not leaving meant, not following her path, and it was terrible. And I know she’s academic, but it’s stage make-up she loves and that’s what she should do. You’ve got to follow your heart, haven’t you? Do something you’re passionate about. And I’ll be glad to get shut of all her props, to be honest – they’re taking over! I just want her to be happy. I’m following her now, by the way. On Instagram, I mean. Me and 4,000 others. She’s an influencer, did I tell you? Whatever that is.’

  ‘And Liverpool isn’t too far away.’

  ‘Not too far away, no. Half an hour on the train, not even that. She can still be independent but she’s near enough if she needs us after… after everything. And she can still be here for Kieron’s anniversary.’

  ‘Which is next week. Are you doing anything specific?’

  ‘We’re going to scatter his ashes and play his favourite song.’

  Her eyebrows go up. ‘Where?’

  ‘Town hall.’ I smile. ‘The pond.’

  Her eyebrows, which had barely landed, are up again. ‘What’s your thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking that hate is going to eat this world up if we’re not careful. And what we need is love. The town hall is where Mark and I got married. It’s where we registered our children’s births. It’s where I took them to feed the ducks when they were little, watched them play. That place was always love for me and I’ll not have it ruined. I’ll not have it ruined by hate.’

  ‘You’re reclaiming it.’

  ‘I suppose I am, yes.’

  When she says goodbye, there are tears in her eyes, as there have been at other moments when we’ve spoken. She is in her late thirties, as I thought, and she has two kids, two little girls. This last year, as I’ve got better, I have managed to make her laugh more and more. I know she’s here if I feel things getting on top of me again, and I know I’ll see her for my follow-ups, but now it’s time for me to go.

  ‘Thanks for everything,’ I say. There are tears in my eyes too, but I’m sure you’d guessed that.

  ‘Good luck, Rachel. I wish you every possible happiness. You deserve it.’

  ‘I’ll miss you.’

  ‘And I you.’

  We hug each other like old friends. When we part, I give her a little wave, then I go out of her office and close the door. As I step out onto the street, I burst into tears so violent that I have to sit on the kerb for a few minutes to compose myself.

  ‘You all right, love?’ someone says.

  I look up. There’s a middle-aged woman with two carrier bags full of groceries. She looks tired, a bit frazzled. She digs in her handbag and pulls out a packet of tissues. She’s trying to wrestle one out of the packet, but after a moment she gives up and hands me the whole lot.

  ‘Here,’ she says. ‘You going to be OK?’ I wonder whether they see her at home, whether they hear her when she says something, laugh when she tells a joke. I want to tell her that I see her. But I don’t, obviously; that would be nuts.

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ is all I say. ‘I’m going to be OK.’

  ‘All right, love, mind how you go.’

  I watch her go on her way until someone else appears, coming towards me. At the sight of me, he lifts his hand in a wave. He said he might be able to meet me out of today’s session on his way home from college, and here he is, how lovely. Ian didn’t die, did I say that? He pulled through. He was only sixteen, as it turns out – cheeky monkey, telling me he was nineteen – so the attack alerted the local authority to his situation. They found him some temporary sheltered accommodation and he’s seeing his mother once a week. He’s started a plumbing course at Widnes FE College. I vouched for him. He and Katie get on very well, so if he gets his diploma, I’ve told him he can have Kieron’s room for a year while he gets himself sorted.

  ‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘What’re you doing sitting on the kerb?’ He holds out his hand and pulls me up.

  58

  Rachel

  A week later, on the second anniversary of Kieron’s death, Mark, Katie, Lisa and I walk to the town-hall gardens at dawn. At the pond we stand together and say goodbye and scatter my son’s ashes on the water, listening to ‘Into My Arms’ on Katie’s iPhone. When I ask her if it’s Rick Cave, she rolls her eyes, but before she can say, Mum, it’s Nick, not Rick, I tell her I’m only joking and she laughs and throws an arm around my waist.

  Later, before we go out for dinner to celebrate our son’s too-short life, Mark and I are sorting through his remaining things. This last year I have come into his room often to sit and be quiet and remember. I have listened to his favourite vinyl records, and if I close my eyes, I can tell you every poster and scrap of paper and photo he has Blu-Tacked to the wall.

  ‘Shall I take this stuff to the car then?’ Mark is standing at the door, nodding at the totem pole of cardboard boxes by his feet.

  ‘I’ll come with you. Just let me sit here another minute.’

  On my lap is a box. In it are Kieron’s dancing and football medals and shields, his bolt and hoop earrings in a smaller, velvet-lined box, his soft ripped jeans and his Antony and the Johnsons T-shirt, which still smells of him, and which has the words I Am a Bird Now on the front. Yes, I think. You are a bird now, my love.

  I’m keeping his art folders and English books from every year of his school life – some of his ink drawings and paintings I have put into frames and hung in the hall and the kitchen, where I can see them every day. His childish compositions I will read and reread, and no matter how much it hurts. I will try not to look away from the memory of him at eight years old reaching for the right way to say something. There is no right way. That much I know. Sometimes there is no way at all, because saying it will make it true. If you’re lucky, someone will help you find maybe not the right words but the words you need in that moment. Amanda was that person for me. She was able to help me swim down to a truth I had no heart, no stomach, no lungs for. The last compassionate act of my grief-addled mind was to trick me into saying the words I needed to say to my beloved boy in his dying moments to another boy in a memory entirely of my own making. What would any of us say? I love you. You’ll be all right. Sleep now, my angel.

  Anger gets trapped inside us, becomes hate. If we’re not careful, hate becomes a force often too hard to control and which solves nothing. A father punishes a son for damage done by his own father. A child beats up a weaker child to avenge violence done to him at home. A grown man stabs another for fear of what lurks in his own chaotic nature, perhaps – who knows? We punish the wrong people, too hard, for the sins of others, for our own frustrations, our own failures. Ingrid found me in her sights and, humiliated and rejected, decided I would be the one she punished for all that had gone wrong in her life. In the end, the only person she hurt was herself. That’s the thing about revenge. It’s an act of hate and not the satisfying finale everyone believes it is, the action-movie climax where the villain dies a horrible death in a plume of flames and everyone cheers. Revenge is not a dish best served cold. It is a dish best served not at all.

  When I turned myself in, they saw a woman made mad by grief and believed me until the evidence and testimonies didn’t add up. All I wanted was connection. I wanted Mark and Katie to be able to look at me and me at them and for us all to see the memory of Kieron and be able to keep looking. I wanted to live in a world where love wins out over hate.

  Mark is still standing at the door.

  ‘Are you hovering?’ I ask, folding up Kieron’s T-shirt to put in the ‘keep’ box.

  ‘I thought…’ He seems to lose his train of thought a moment before starting again. ‘I thought after this we could walk down to the canal and maybe call at the Wilsons for a half, just the two of us, before we meet Katie at the restaurant.’

  ‘OK.’

  He pushes his bottom lip up against the top one and shakes his head. He’s looking at me. His eyes are greeny-brown and they change
according to the weather. I’d forgotten.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’

  ‘I’m not looking at you like anything. I’m just looking at you.’

  My eyes prick but I don’t take them from his. ‘And what do you see?’

  ‘I see the girl at Tanya Hodgkins’ eighteenth at the Mersey View wearing the tightest black minidress I’d ever seen and big black DMs, dancing like she was on something. I see the girl I asked out for a walk that first time when I had no money to take her out for a drink.’

  ‘You nicked flowers from that garden.’

  He smirks. ‘You were worth stealing for. And you bought us a packet of Hula Hoops and a can of Bass shandy and we shared them on the bench by the pavilion. I thought, I’d better get a job if I’m going to have any chance of getting her to be my girlfriend.’

  ‘An apprenticeship, no less. There’s flash, I thought. I thought, he’s going places. And—’

  He holds up his hand, biting his lip now against the stuff on his mind, and I realise he’s been waiting to say his piece, that he’s probably rehearsed it, knowing that words are not his strong suit, that he’s been waiting for the right moment, which has never come, and so now, surrounded by our beloved son’s things packed into all these cardboard boxes, he’s saying it anyway.

  ‘Go on,’ I almost whisper.

  He comes nearer, slowly, like a child. ‘And then, well, I see the woman I kept out till midnight so it would be her birthday before I asked her to marry me. And I didn’t really think she would but she said, All right then, you’re on.’ His eyes have started to shine; mine too, I can feel them – how hopeless we both are.

  He sits next to me on our son’s bed. I feel the weight of him, the warmth of him. He’s not looking at me anymore, he’s looking at the knot of our hands on my lap.