The Day She Can’t Forget: Psychological suspense you’ll just have to keep reading

by Meg Carter

  Alma catches sight of herself in a shop window. Her waxen face framed by a helmet of lank hair. And then a second face – not hers, a man’s. Pinch-eyed and scant-haired in a garish tank top, he is tutting at her through the window display of hats, gloves and umbrellas. As Alma steps away she spots the empty wooden bench facing the road at the point the pavement widens. This is where Pete will pick her up in the second-hand Audi he has bought to celebrate his first professional commission, from the Sunday Times.

  It began as an exploration of childhood memories. But after Pete revisited the terraced streets where he and Brian played as boys, the picture editor had been so impressed with the resulting images that he’d offered a good price for them to be used in a forthcoming special report.

  One image particularly struck her. It was of a girl of about twelve, scruffy and coatless, standing on the street beside a tiny boy with a vacant stare. Between them stood an ancient pram in which they’d propped up a man’s suit stuffed with crumpled paper and topped with an outsized trilby. Pennies for the guy, their handmade sign read.

  Pete had taken this only two weeks earlier, but there was something so unremitting about it – the blankness of the boy’s face, the defiance in his sister’s eyes – that it could be a scene from any time over the past two hundred years. The picture will be the central image accompanying story about the great British economic decline. Cruel Britannia is the headline.

  Alma’s heart sinks as a clock strikes for the half hour. Though she is in the right place, in her eagerness not to be late she has arrived half an hour too early. She sinks down onto the bench then quickly springs to her feet. The seat is sodden by repeated splashes from the passing traffic. Seeking shelter, she sizes up a cafe a short distance ahead. The place has a warm, inviting glow.

  Inside, the hectic cafe proves anything but the anonymous sanctuary she craves, but the smell of yeasty dough is soothing. A flickering light on the ceiling emits a nicotine glow which she barely notices. Nor does she see that the brown Formica table tops are still waiting to be wiped down. Or the tramp-like man muttering incoherently, seated by the window.

  As Alma picks a table away from the door by the retro jukebox any lingering doubts quickly fade. She peels off her mac and hangs it over the chair opposite then stows her bag, upended, on the floor against the wall by her side.

  ‘What’ll it be, luv?’ A bottle-blonde waitress in her late fifties has appeared at Alma’s side.

  She would prefer to eat but knows from bitter experience accumulated over the preceding few weeks how bad consuming anything before midday will make her feel. Recurring nausea has become a clockwork reminder of the tiny life now unfurling inside her.

  That, after all, is the reason she’s here, waiting for Pete to drive her north to the clinic he has found just outside Scarborough. In just a few days, they will return to London to pick up where they left off and everything will be fine. She prays Viola is right when she says the pain and discomfort will be only short-lived.

  What Alma dreads most of all is the awful possibility that once it is done she might regret it; that somehow the course on which she’s decided will prove too awful to live with. A mistake, or something worse: a sin. Alma tries to swallow but the lump in her throat is stubborn and when at last she speaks her voice is hoarse.

  ‘Tea for one, please. And don’t worry about the milk.’

  The waitress nods, her face impassive as she heads back towards the counter where a young man with a shaven head stands by the till watching. He is wearing a stained apron tied tight enough to emphasise the bony contours of his narrow hips. The youth is not much younger than she is, Alma decides, but a broken nose and tattoos roughly scored across his knuckles suggest they have led rather different lives.

  The young man steps out from behind the counter and walks towards the jukebox.

  Oblivious to Alma’s presence, he now stands by her side reviewing the playlist. Having made his selection, he pulls a coin from his back pocket, thrusts it into the slot and turns back towards the counter. The waitress, watching, shows a mixture of curiosity and disdain.

  As the mechanism lifts the record into position, the youth places one hand across his heart and with the other blows his colleague a kiss. His words are overwhelmed by a sudden shiny wave of trumpets. Dream-boat, trills the familiar voice. You loveable dream-boat. Say that you’ll b-e mine. For-ever-more.

  Alma closes her eyes, and tries to moderate her breathing as she listens. For as long as she can remember, the song has been her mother’s favourite. Alma bloody Cogan, she thinks, battling in vain to wipe from her mind a lifetime’s references, associations and allusions to this plastic promise of perfect love. It is a golden world that did not, could not and would never exist.

  Yet she is unable to leave the cafe, because the music is familiar and comforting, even as those swinging trumpets hammer intrusively.

  I would sail the seven seas-with-you. That voice, again. A powerhouse, that’s what the papers called her. With talent that came from nowhere like a natural spring. I-love-you-so dear-ly. Alma screws her eyes shut but now she can see old black and white footage of the woman. I’d-follow-you dar-ling. To any sho-re. A satin cocktail dress with matching shoes encasing tiny feet.

  A sob suddenly bubbles. She curses the singer who, two decades earlier, her mother had chosen to name her daughter after. The woman whose singing would always mean home.

  A beautiful name for a beautiful girl, her father had told her. The A in Alma, he’d once said, stood for A Wonderful Promise To Be Fulfilled.

  Alma’s eyes snap open.

  Well, she’d certainly shown them, hadn’t she? By immersing herself in music. Studying piano. Singing solo in the cathedral choir. Winning a music scholarship to the Conservatoire. Fulfilling her parents’ dreams, then throwing them all away. Though she can fix it, she tells herself defiantly; she can make things right again.

  The track ends and Alma senses something odd has happened. While she’s been lost, alone in her own nightmare, people at different tables have exchanged glances. Strangers have started talking to one another. Smiling. Even the waitress has relaxed, she notices, as she sets down Alma’s tea.

  ‘Can’t beat the girl with the laugh in her voice, can you?’ the woman smiles.

  ‘No,’ Alma replies. ‘I don’t suppose you can.’

  It has stopped raining by the time she makes it back out onto the street. But as she takes up position a few paces from the still-wet bench, the dull sky shows no sign of clearing. Where is he? she wonders, though she is confident he’d not let her down. Because once the initial shock subsided, he’d asked her to marry him. And he didn’t have to do that, did he? It’s a way of proving how serious he is about sticking by her, he has told her, repeatedly, because they are both in this together.

  Again, Alma checks her watch. What can be holding him up?

  At ten past, as a number 13 bus pulls up at the stop to her left, the driver stares at her, blankly. His only two passengers disembark and he switches off the engine, leans back in his seat and pulls out a Sunday paper. At quarter past, an elderly man in an old jacket shuffles past dragging a tiny terrier on a lead. At half past, the bus driver refolds his paper, restarts the engine then pulls away.

  Finally, at twenty-five to, a brown BMW draws to a standstill by her side.

  ‘Alma!’

  Looking up she sees not Pete but Brian, rolling down the driver’s window. The car is otherwise empty.

  ‘Hi,’ she acknowledges, cautiously.

  ‘Pete sent me,’ he calls. ‘He asked me to give you this.’ Confused, she stares for a moment at the brown padded envelope he’s holding out towards her. ‘It’s for you,’ Brian nods, encouragingly. ‘It’s the keys. To his flat?’ Alma accepts the envelope without a word. ‘He asked me to tell you to wait for him there and he’ll pick you up a little later.’

  ‘Later,’ she echoes. All she wants is to get going and get it over with.

  Brian’s
face softens. ‘Yes, not long. It’s Patsy,’ he adds. ‘She’s in University College hospital – they think it was an overdose.’ He scrutinises Alma’s reaction to what he says next. ‘That’s where I was just now, with Pete and Derek. I just popped out because he begged me to come and find you to let you know.’

  ‘Why?’ Alma mumbles. ‘I mean, Patsy – why would she do a thing like that?’

  ‘I would have thought that was pretty obvious.’ Then, clocking Alma’s bemusement, Brian’s eyes widen. ‘So you don’t know about Phil?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Lung cancer. A few days ago the doctors told him it’s terminal. My guess is Patsy’s only just heard.’ He shakes his head. ‘Poor cow,’ he murmurs. ‘Christ alone knows why she’s never managed to get over him.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘She swallowed a bottle of sleeping tablets. Derek found her just in time. They’re probably pumping her stomach as I speak. She’s fragile, see – always has been – only it’s got worse recently what with Cynthia and now the baby.’

  Alma stares at the brown envelope which Pete has folded in half, in half again and sealed with Sellotape. Through the padding she can make out the familiar shape of his leather key ring fob. She shakes her head at the thought that these are the only keys they have between them: he never got round to giving her the spare set.

  Of course Pete will want to be with his mother, she decides, bravely. Just as long as it takes to make sure she’s going to be all right.

  ’Tell him thanks,’ Alma mumbles. ‘I’ll see him there. And I hope Patsy is OK.’

  ‘Will do.’ Brian’s looks at Alma’s bag. He smiles. ‘And I hope wherever it is you two are sneaking off to together will be worth the wait.’

  As Brian disappears from view it starts to rain again, but this time Alma doesn’t move. Instead, she watches the surface of the envelope darken with every droplet. Until, when the ink on the A of her name starts to run, she breaks the seal. Inside is a slip of paper wrapped around a key.

  I need to stay with Mum a little longer, Pete has written in a rushed hand. The car’s parked close by on Mornington Crescent. Wait for me in the flat. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Px

  How can he do this? Alma wonders, bleakly. Leave me standing in the street like this. Not ask Brian to take me back to the hospital with him. Though perhaps that is for the best, considering what is happening on Monday morning. His flat will be warm and dry, at least. And according to Brian, Pete won’t be long.

  This is a family crisis; an emergency, she tells herself, firmly. And at time likes this, well, you’ve just got to muck in.

  Refolding the note around the key, Alma slips both into her coat pocket and reaches for her bag. Then, with head bowed, she starts to trace her steps back towards the Underground. He’ll be coming, soon, she reassures herself. Even so, she can’t help remembering what Chrissie said that afternoon she let herself into Pete’s flat, unannounced: about Hamilton blood being thicker than water.

  25

  Beauloch, February 2016

  Zeb charges downwards, numb to the cuts on her hands from flailing limbs of gorse as thick as hawsers; oblivious to the clatter of dislodged scree. With her eyes fixed on the flat, she twists her back into the slope to stop herself from falling. With each step, the pressure of absorbing every jolt and jar makes her knees scream.

  At last, when the slope starts to even, she dares to draw breath.

  The hill above her is empty. There is no sign of the man who chased her to Euston, the same man who broke into her flat – for it is him, she is sure. She turns back down the hill towards the car park and the road that connects it to the world beyond. The path gradually flattens out towards the clump of trees she remembers walking through earlier. Not much further, she thinks, though she can’t be sure how far as the car park is out of view.

  I should never have come, the voice inside her cries. What was I thinking?

  Where the hell is Fraser?

  A distant sound makes her stiffen. She strains to hear, and then she is sure: she can hear someone behind her. With legs pounding and shoulders hunched, Alma gallops forward. Any second now, she fears, the man will grab her from behind.

  Ahead, through a gap between the tall banks of maturing conifers that flank the path, she spots the wooden gate that will lead her back into the car park – and full view of anyone further up the hill. For now she has the advantage, but only a small one. So she must act quickly to make the most of it. Get off the path. Cut through the wood and find a way out onto the road back towards the village and then, a bit further along, hitch a lift.

  Three strides on, Zeb dives into the densely-packed trees.

  It takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, a delay which disorientates her. Scared she might allow her pursuer a chance to reach her, she keeps running. But it’s difficult to stay in a straight line despite the apparent regularity of the rows of trunks. The ground is uneven, littered with hollows and broken branches hidden beneath a carpet of pine needles and dead bracken. As she twists and turns within seconds all sense of direction is lost.

  After a few paces more, Zeb stops.

  Leaning an arm against a nearby tree for support, she bends double. Her lungs ache. She pinches at the stitch in her side. But when Zeb straightens up she is dizzy, and it takes another minute for the snowstorm in her head to subside. Glancing back, Zeb half expects to see the man lunging towards her from the shadows. But there is no sign of him, not yet.

  What she does see, though, is almost worse.

  Darkness.

  Without any trace of sky or the outer fringes of the copse in any direction, she notes with a plummeting heart that the clump of trees is far larger than she expected. That she has run too far into the heart of it, too fast. And that the trunks among which she sought shelter now enclose her like the bars of a cage.

  Rubbing her eyes, she tries to think. If she can’t see, then maybe she can hear. Yet now there is no sound whatsoever from the hill above, the road, the car park. There is nothing. Just silence. And the harder she tries to listen, the more she concentrates, the more it clangs inside her head like the heartbeat of a dreadful living thing.

  Zeb forces herself to keep scanning the trees encircling her. There’s no evidence of any life. Even rain, it seems, struggles to reach this part of the forest, she thinks as she sees the ground at her feet is tinder dry. As she gazes up at the impenetrable canopy above her head, she tries to feel grateful that she is safe, for now at least.

  Zeb tries to visualise how the wood looked from the top of the hill. It is lozenge-shaped, she recalls. If she walks long enough in any direction it shouldn’t take her too long to find her way out, and then she can make her way around the outside until she finds the road.

  Choosing a point in the middle distance where a tree trunk displays a jagged vertical gash, she starts to walk, making sure not to lose sight of this fixed point as she zig-zags around obstacles. Then, when she reaches the trunk, she squints into the darkness beyond, finds another suitable landmark and does the same again. Until, some minutes later, she senses a perceptible lightening of the gloom ahead.

  It’s only a small gap in the trees, not worthy of being called a clearing. But as Zeb gets nearer she can make out the shadowy outline of a low construction no bigger than a two-man tent, made from a collection of branches neatly aligned then meticulously interwoven. A lean-to shelter of some kind, just big enough for an adult. Built as a den, probably, by local kids. On the ground a few feet from the shelter’s side are the charred remnants of a fire.

  Careful not to get too close, Zeb draws level with the den’s opening and bends down. Inside, the ground is covered by an old tarpaulin weighted down with an old toolbox. Eager to arm herself, she stumbles towards the shelter’s entrance then drops to her knees. She crawls inside the shelter and reaches out to grab the box and drag it towards her.

  There is no padlock, just two metal flaps that when lift
ed reveal the upper tray. On the top is a magazine which is dog-eared and stained. Zeb stares for a moment at the uppermost page from which a doe-eyed girl with straw-blonde hair stares up open-mouthed as she pushes a large black dildo between her legs.

  Tossing the magazine towards the back of the shelter, Zeb scans the tray beneath, which contains an assortment of rusty DIY tools and kitchen equipment. There’s a collection of barbecue skewers. Plastic straws. Some string. A fruit knife with a serrated edge, which she quickly pockets.

  Sitting back on her haunches, Zeb hears the sound of branches moving.

  Folds of tarpaulin twist around Zeb’s legs in her haste to scramble back outside. Kicking her shoes free at last, she pulls herself to her feet and stumbles out of the gloom into the tiny clearing. Something is caught around her ankle, and when she looks down she sees it is the handle of a leather shoulder bag.

  Her shoulder bag. The one Dad bought her for Christmas.

  Hurriedly, she yanks it open, but it is empty.

  She kicks it away impatiently.

  With no time to lose, Zeb thrashes over to the far side of the shelter then plunges through the trees in the direction she’s been heading. Running, careless of the snapping of twigs, her panting breath, her mind fixed only on escape.

  What does he want? How can any of this have anything to do with me?

  Quickly picking a direction, she presses on until she is close enough to the outer line of trees to listen for any sound of life from the world beyond. Is she on the car park side – the way she came in – or the edge closest to the road leading back to the village? With no desire to go back into the woods, there’s only one way to tell.

  Creeping from tree to tree towards the light, Zeb pauses behind each trunk to check for signs of Brian before moving a few metres further forward until, at last, she sees the grey expanse of empty car park. With a surge of relief, she realises that the BMW has gone. And with a stab of disappointment, that Fraser has still not returned. But there’s no time for that now. Instead, she must press on.