by C. K. Martin
The frustration did nothing to quell the fire and temptation. She had switched on the light with the intent of turning Hayley into something more tangible, but somehow had been left with more questions than answers. There was nothing even to associate her with the bar. She knew it was possible to be discrete on the internet, but she just wasn’t used to someone being so concerned about their privacy. She’d heard it was possible, sure. But living out of sight? That was just an alien concept to her.
Kate got out of bed and walked over to the cupboard where she kept her camera. She took it out and turned it on. The three inch LCD screen gave her a great view of the shots she had taken, without having to download them onto her laptop. She returned to bed and began clicking through the photographs from earlier that day.
True to her word, she hadn’t consciously taken any pictures of Hayley after being so explicitly requested not to do so. But, as she’d hoped, there were a handful where she had inadvertently caught her at the edge of the frame. She zoomed into these on the small screen, looking at pictures of Hayley when she had been unguarded.
That was it, she realised. If there was a word she was looking for to describe the other woman whenever they were together, then it was guarded.
Kate guessed she must not be the only one with a broken heart. Perhaps there had been someone else once. A dead wife perhaps? That sounded suitably dramatic enough to turn someone into a public recluse. Hayley definitely existed on the surface of life. Her emotional depths were out of bounds to everyone.
Of course, Kate had hardly been forthcoming with her own hopes and dreams so far. She could hardly blame Hayley for not opening up on what was technically their first date.
That was how she would always see today. Their first date.
That also implied there would be a second. As she selected another image and zoomed, Kate knew that she would do just about anything in her power to ensure that it happened. The intensity of her feelings enthralled and terrified her. The wound that had been Kazue had finally begun to heal and if anyone was going to be the glue to mend her broken heart, then Hayley was that person.
Thoughts of the future crowded her head and she pushed them away. She had planned for it once and look how that had turned out. No, it was better not to think about it. There were bridges you could only cross once you came to them.
The sound of someone getting up from one of the dorm rooms and heading to the bathroom made her check her watch again. If she didn’t sleep soon, then tomorrow was going to turn into a long and painful day. She switched off the camera and returned it to its spot in the cupboard. The pictures of Hayley would still be there in the morning.
As she settled down and tried once again to fall asleep, she wondered if down at the bottom of the hill, Hayley was having a frustrated, sleepless night of her own.
Chapter Nine
The camera flashes blinded her view. They came thick and fast as she pushed her way through the crowd. The police officers either side of her were supposed to keep the people away, but they let her be jostled enough to let her know they all suspected her as well.
Why did no one believe her?
She was a witness, nothing more. Every flash made her feel like she was the one on trial. She would be sitting in the witness box, not the dock. The man in front stopped asking her questions.
He began to accuse her.
The verdict came in. She was still sitting there, still saying she didn’t know anything.
One by one, they yelled.
Guilty.
Guilty.
The final juror stood up and looked at her. It was Kate. Dead Kate. As she opened her mouth, Kate shifted to the girl, the final girl who had died.
Guilty.
Hayley sat up in bed, sweat running down her back. Thin pyjamas stuck to her skin. Her heart was beating so fast it felt like a tight band of steel had encircled her chest and it squeezed. Contracted. Getting air into her lungs was impossible and the panic began to claw at her throat.
Her hands gripped the sheets, cramping in fear.
It was just a bad dream, she told herself. The urge to scream for help remained overwhelming.
She needed to calm down.
She turned on the light with trembling hands and looked around the room, trying to find something to focus on. She saw a coffee cup on the nightstand and stared at it intently, slowing her breathing as her therapist had taught her to do long ago. Eventually, after what felt like forever, the walls stopped closing in. She felt calm enough to just feel sick, rather than terrified.
She had gone to sleep with the air con running, but her skin was covered with the cold sweat of fear.
Hayley ran her hands over her eyes. It had been over a year since she’d had a nightmare as intense as that. Her past continually invaded her dreams, but never enough to feel devastating.
In the beginning, those debilitating nightmares had come once a week, sometimes more. Then they faded to once a month as she began to heal, piece by piece.
Only when she came here did they go away completely for months on end. That was when she knew she’d found the place she needed to stay. She would never go back to England again.
She hadn’t had a cigarette in fifteen years, but she wanted one so desperately. She always did when a nightmare like that happened. Something to make the shaking go away. In the jittery aftershocks of adrenalin, it felt good to have something to do with her hands.
She got out of bed, grabbed her robe and opened the doors to the small balcony that sat above the bar. She hardly ever went out there. She kept her life too busy with the bar to sit and relax. A small plastic chair was her only concession to its status as a usable area.
Tonight she needed to feel the fresh air. She needed to breathe the clean sea breeze and remind herself she was here and not there anymore.
The night was chilly on her damp skin and she tugged the robe tighter around her as she sat down. Lights were still on further along the coast, up on the hill where the main hotels of the resort were built. In her little part of town, it was darker. The locals slept more soundly in their beds. As she looked out over the ocean into the inky blackness, she could see the light of the moon dissecting the darkness where water and sky met. Above her a thousand stars twinkled, making her feel small in the universe.
Small and insignificant. That was exactly how she wanted to feel right now.
Her hands fiddled with the edge of her robe. It was no surprise, now she was fully awake and free of its clutches, that a nightmare had paid her a visit. She had known from the moment she’d laid eyes on Kate it would open up old wounds. She’d known and she had done it anyway. She only had herself to blame.
Of course, the courtroom of her nightmares was not identical to the one she had experienced in real life.
Back then, fifteen-year-old Hayley Jones had been Rachael Taylor Chapman and everyone knew her name. More importantly, they knew her father’s name. His picture was on the front page of every newspaper, broadsheet or tabloid.
Britain’s most notorious serial killer since the Yorkshire Ripper had finally been caught.
He’d denied it all, of course, in the beginning. A long-distance lorry driver, he had argued that the routes he took up and down Britain, down to mainland Europe and back, were routes taken by thousands of others. That they had the wrong man.
Hayley had wanted so desperately to believe him. He was a good father. He worked hard. He was her dad. He had been away from home a lot while she was growing up, but that was the price you had to pay to do the job. He had taken her with him sometimes, during the school holidays. They had slept in the cab, parked in truck stops overnight. It had felt like one big adventure the first time she had sat up front with him. The last time she’d travelled with him had been only a few weeks before the police had turned up at their door with a warrant for his arrest.
That was, she knew, why so many people believed she had been a part of it on some level.
Her mother, consume
d by a guilt that wasn’t hers to carry, had killed herself the night before the guilty verdict was delivered.
With one parent dead and the other looking down the barrel of consecutive life sentences, four months before her sixteenth birthday, Hayley had found herself entirely alone.
She finished out the school year and somehow still managed to get good grades, but foster homes didn’t really matter when you were so close to being an adult. Instead, she ended up in a grimy one-bed council flat in the very worst part of town. There was no support. No counselling. Not much to do when there was no one around to help you and your friends no longer wanted to know you.
Those years haunted her the most. There was worse to come, but it wasn’t like the terror of those times. When the shit really hit the fan, she was older. Tougher. But back then, she was still a raw half-girl, half-woman living in a strange place, the fear of being singled out for retribution always not far behind.
They had been the days of looking over her shoulder.
The days of only going out after dark so she wouldn’t be recognised. Of chip shop food and cheap booze from the local shop that never asked for any ID.
In the end, she cut her hair and dyed it pink. She changed her style to something that the young Rachael would never have worn. She was still a long way from becoming Hayley Jones, but the first sense that she could be someone else, someone who wasn’t just the daughter of a murderer had been born.
Eventually she’d got a job behind a bar. With no friends, she was willing to do all the shifts that no one else wanted. She worked hard and saved up her money. The first thing she really bought for herself was the Celtic knot tattoo Kate had traced almost reverently on their one night together. It had hurt getting it done, but it was a good kind of pain. It was the pain of a new beginning. The guy who did it wasn’t the best in town. He was no artist, but that didn’t matter to her. It was the design that mattered. A symbol of inner strength. The talisman that signalled she was rising from the ashes.
She started seeing a therapist to help her with the nightmares. Back then, they still happened frequently enough that she would spend some weeks going from work to sleep in a constant state of exhaustion. Finally, she began to face up to what her father had done.
He’d confessed, in the end. Her thin security blanket of denial over the matter was long gone.
And beneath it, she found a new reason to fear. Coming to terms with the fact she was gay terrified her. Not because of the usual reasons. She didn’t have to deal with peer pressure or religious relatives. It was the knowledge that if she’d liked boys instead, then it would make her less like him.
But no, she liked girls. Worse, despite forcing herself to try to feel otherwise, the girls she found herself attracted to, the pretty ones with the long hair and the open smiles, were all too similar to the ones he had lured into his cab in the darkness and killed.
On the balcony, Hayley shuddered from the memory. She genuinely liked Kate, but she was too much like the ones that had gone before. The ones he had taken. Kate made the nightmares come back to life.
Of course, Hayley had never had a single impulse to do any of the things he did. Her temper, during those late teenage years, came from the hurt and isolation of being alone and vulnerable, not some darker desire. Once her life began to make sense again, that anger went away. Occasional medication kept the anxiety in check. Now, she didn’t even like to argue. She didn’t like the heightened rush of emotions. It was why she went along with Pablo’s harebrained schemes so easily and why she had tried to placate Kate each time it seemed they were veering towards a disagreement.
She didn’t want to be a murderer. She didn’t want to be like him.
Even if she knew it to be true, that didn’t mean everyone else did. The rumours never really went away. Perhaps, if he’d never taken her with him on his jobs, then the idea would never have crossed anyone’s mind. But he had, and they’d been pleasant, uneventful journeys at the time. In the years since, she had tried to remember what it was like. If there were any warning signs. He’d not so much as picked up a hitchhiker when she was with him. Instead, it was listening to the radio and watching the trees on motorway embankments go by. In hindsight, they were dull trips. Mundane, really.
There was never any sense that behind her, in the back of the cab, when she went on that last trip with him, at least five girls had died in the very spot where she went to sleep.
Hayley retched. The feeling never got any better. It never stopped her feeling dirty.
It was that macabre fact that had kept the press hounding her for years. Whenever the anniversary of the guilty verdict came round, one newspaper or another would print an article on him and she would be implicated in some subtle way. It was all very cleverly done - at one point she had even seen a lawyer in the hopes she could sue and stop them for good - to keep the misery alive in the public’s mind.
Then, she had the break she so sorely needed. One tabloid hack of a paper went too far. Her phone was tapped, the calls monitored in the hope that she would communicate with her father. It was through sheer chance that it was found out, in relation to another big news story involving a politician and his inflatable friend, but it was enough for her to get a payout.
Suddenly she had the kind of cash that working behind a bar was never going to provide, even if she worked until she was sixty and saved every penny. Enough money, she knew, to buy a new life somewhere else.
It had been surprisingly easy to stop being Rachael Taylor Chapman and become plain old Hayley Jones. All the official documentation was still in her old name, but she soon found out that when you met people for the first time, they never asked for proof. They took the name you gave them as truth, without question.
Her whole life here was built on a lie, but it was a lie that gave her a chance at living again.
Damn, she could really do with a cigarette.
This was the closest she had been in years to being discovered and it was all a mess of her own making. Pablo loved her like a brother, but he was so caught up in his own world that he didn’t ever question her about hers. When he did, it was only at a superficial level. She had become adept at having conversations where she spoke and yet somehow still said nothing at all.
Kate, she knew, was different.
Kate wanted to date her, be with her, know her. It was more than just sex.
This was both a good and a bad thing, depending on which one of Hayley’s emotions were in charge. It was great that someone like Kate, who she found curiously interesting and attractive, felt the same way about her. That she didn’t just want a quick fling. She was sure that would be how other people would feel about this unexpected turn of events. The sex had been great, but would it have been better to live with a lifetime of wistful regrets than face the reality of this thing she could never have?
She looked at the incandescent fire of the Milky Way swirling its band overhead. This was a sight she had never seen growing up. If the truth got out about who she really was, then she would have to say goodbye to the world she was only just discovering. Why had she never taken the time to appreciate it more?
That was what she couldn’t understand about Kate. She lived a life of adventure, if one chose to look at it that way. Hayley saw it as a life where you had to keep starting over. Her only experience of that was steeped in pain and fear.
Hayley knew she was wilfully ignoring the good points and emphasising the bad. She had made a promise to herself, once she had opened the bar and fully transitioned from Rachael to Hayley, that she would always choose herself and her freedom over anything else. That it was better to spend a lifetime of lonely nights than a lifetime of fearful ones.
Yes, Hayley had chosen not to be afraid and for years, it had worked. Now Kate had come along and she was terrified once again.
She’d avoided the news after the first few weeks of being in town. Sometimes a customer would bring a copy of the worst kind of tabloid into the bar to read wi
th their beer and she would force herself not to look at the headline. She needed no reminders of a life back home.
Only one person knew where she was: her lawyer. The two of them had actually formed a close friendship throughout the newspaper trial and it made her happier to know that he was bound by client confidentiality. It made it easier for her to trust him. He got in touch maybe once a year, just to check that things were okay and catch up on any minor legal matters. When he did, she guessed it had been prompted by her father making the news again and a subsequent reference to her had appeared.
It annoyed her that her father was now throwing himself into the spotlight. She had hoped, erroneously, that he would quietly live out the rest of his life in repentance and regret. Instead, prison had brought out the worst in him. Or, perhaps, he no longer had to hide the man he had been all along. There had been fights, which he usually won thanks to the years overcompensating for trucking by bodybuilding, and hunger strikes that always seemed less successful. The one thing that hadn’t been a lie all along was his love of food.
Years of not being able to find her, of being unable to provide a new and harrowing picture of her trying to live a normal life, meant that the heat had died down. The more time went by, the more the media turned to him and away from her.
Hayley wasn’t stupid. She’d seen the circus that happened around the tenth anniversary of his conviction. The parents of the girls he had killed had given interviews about how their lives had been destroyed forever.
Now, she knew, the twentieth anniversary was coming up. Could it really have been that long? It made her feel old, being thirty-six, when she was using the stolen lives of others as her marker for the passage of time. The frenzy would start again. Soon, they would be reviewing his sentences and deeming him still to be a danger to the public. There was no other viable option. She wanted him kept behind bars as much as anyone else.
It was a heavy burden for her to carry alone.
It was too much of a burden to share with anyone else.