Stalk Me

by Richard Parker

  Beth stepped into the pristine and sterile corridor. The air smelt of resin, the floor was covered with large institutional blue carpet tiles and, ahead of her, two doors were locked open.

  She inched towards them, slowing at the edge of the daylight spilling through the frame. The sound of the workmen was muffled here, but she could hear traffic through the open window. Beth gulped her fear and walked through them.

  She was standing in an expansive, open-plan office space. Bunches of coiled grey wires hung from the ceiling, and ceiling panels were stacked in one corner. She was alone. But Beth had already seen the doors leading to two smaller private offices on the other side of the floor and knew that that was where the gunman had been, or was still, positioned.

  She listened again, not breathing, for what felt like minutes. If he had made it down to the car park, there was no way she would catch up with him now. But her instinct told her somebody was in the office. Beth moved forward, brandishing the knife beside her cheek. Would he have the rifle trained on the door when she opened it? She put her fingers on the handle and strained her ear for sounds from the other side. Beth stood to the right of it and quickly yanked down, allowing it to swing inward.

  No gunshot. No movement.

  She peered slowly around the jamb and choked. The Gunman was seated at the table, his rifle positioned on a stand in front of him and his finger still on the trigger.

  From behind him, she could see that his head was bowed. There was a small smudgy hole in his bald scalp. She couldn’t see his face. Most of it lay in fragments over the tabletop.

  As she clenched her fingers over her mouth, she thought of the man she’d run into at the bottom of the stairs. The gunman had been wrong. It appeared the French government knew much more about covert resolution than he’d given them credit for.

  Chapter 89

  “I’m just waiting for her so I can finish for the day.” Karina, the harried domestic help, opened the door to Beth with a coat and furry hat on.

  “What time do you expect her home?”

  “Oh, she’s here, but she’s in the garden. If you like I can–”

  But Beth was already striding away from the doorway and across the front of the house. She knew the way. It was dark and only a few lights illuminated the carport and the vapour of hot breath about her. She vaguely heard Karina call after her, but everything around Beth was a tunnel that led to the conversation ahead.

  She opened the gate and walked into the landscaped area at the side. Lin was talking to her gardener in the top tier. A bonfire was burning there, sparks soaring from the peaks of the tall flames. She considered the inferno she’d jumped into through the attic hatch and the scars she’d emerged with. As she strode up the steps, Lin spotted her, conversation cut short as she waited for Beth to enter the orange glow.

  Lin’s puzzled smile quickly vanished. “OK, thanks, Paul. I’ll see you next week.”

  The gardener passed Beth on the steps, but she didn’t acknowledge him. As she reached Lin, she was still hoping she was wrong. But when she saw her expression illuminated by the intensity of the fire, she could see the fear Lin had barely kept hidden when they’d last met immediately betray itself.

  For a moment, there was only their breath clouds and popping wood between them.

  Beth examined the shadows dancing on her face, distorting her into someone different. “Don’t make this worse by pretending you don’t know why I’m here.”

  “Mrs McIntyre?”

  They both looked back to the house where Karina was standing.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Pete’s outside in the car. Can I slope off?”

  Beth turned back to Lin when she didn’t answer.

  Lin seemed to be in two minds about being left alone but met Beth’s eye and replied without shifting her gaze. “Yes. Go,” she said with resignation.

  “Sure everything’s OK?”

  “Go!”

  “OK.” Karina didn’t sound certain.

  They both waited for the noise of the door slam.

  Beth sniffed. “Does Jerome know?”

  “No. He knows I was seeing somebody but not that it was...”

  “Luc.”

  Lin nodded and went to turn.

  “Don’t fucking walk away from me.”

  Beth’s tone halted her. “So what are we supposed to do now?” Lin sighed.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Exactly what I said, Beth. What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Not that. The sigh. Was that a ‘we’re grown ups and beyond making a scene’ sigh?”

  The beginnings of panic started to register in Lin’s expression.

  “Or was that a ‘Luc is dead, so what does it matter anymore’ sigh?”

  “Hit me, Beth. Do what you want. Luc’s been taken from both of us.”

  But it was clear when Beth stepped forward and Lin flinched that she didn’t expect Beth to strike her. “Maybe as I had to suffer an assault, we should even things out.”

  Now Lin’s features shifted to horror. “That was Luc’s idea.”

  Beth began to tremble. How premeditated had it been and how long had Luc been waiting for an opportunity? When he staggered out of the wreckage, had Lin really been the catalyst for him to finish her; to stamp her out and make her look like a casualty of the collision? “So when was it decided you’d attack me? And why? You’d have plenty of money if you divorced Jerome.”

  “Jerome’s ruined.” Lin held Beth’s eye again, as if it were an admission that was relevant.

  Beth realised that Lin truly believed the revelation would elicit sympathy. Her universe was herself. She’d never wanted children with Jerome. Was that why Luc had been so drawn to her?

  “He’s made a lot of bad choices that have caught up with us.”

  “Luc never...” But Beth stopped herself. Of course he hadn’t told her. Because Luc had been lying to her. She gritted her teeth against the heat of tears building. Not here. Not in front of this woman. “So you thought you’d hop over into my life. And you didn’t want a divorce to deprive you two of half Luc’s share of Avellana.”

  Lin said nothing.

  “You conniving cunt.”

  Lin blinked as if she’d been slapped, like it had never occurred to her she’d have to answer to what she’d done. “I told Luc it was a bad idea.”

  “Because you were both scared of doing it or scared of getting caught?”

  Aggression flared in Lin’s features. “Because I knew Luc wouldn’t have the balls. I did exactly what I had to and waited for you in the car park. I had to hit you once with the baseball bat in front of the security camera and push you into the blind spot. Luc was meant to take care of the rest. Then he’d hand it back to me and I’d run. I knew he wasn’t capable. He still could have done it though, even when you hit me. We were out of view behind the pillar.”

  The impact of Lin’s words seemed harder than the moment the car had spun off the road. “You were the hoodie?”

  “Of course.” Lin nodded vehemently, but when Beth’s reaction halted her, a new abhorrence supplanted her anger. Not for what she’d done but for the mistake she’d just made.

  Beth thought about the night they’d been mugged and how she’d fought back. She was meant to have died that night. She shouldn’t even have been in the car in France.

  She recalled how easily Luc had thrown away all of their postcards and photographs from the memory chest when they were moving. He’d been preparing to dispose of her.

  “You must have had such great plans together, but now Luc’s dead, his wealth is out of your reach and you’ll never get Jerome back. You should be thankful he couldn’t bash my brains in, Lin; otherwise, these scars would be yours.” Beth falteringly drew breath and considered the gunman and his commitment to closure for the people whose lives he was about to end. “I suppose I owe it to you to let you know Luc did finally find his courage. After w
e crashed the car, he took his chance to try and finish me there. Which is what I was actually talking about.”

  Beth turned and walked down the steps, shaking and sick and hating herself more than Lin. Hating herself for how she’d nursed Luc through his depression after the mugging. She wondered who he was and how he could possibly have allowed her to do that when his abjection was purely because he hadn’t had the guts to go through with his plan to kill her.

  She remembered her last meeting with Lin in the coffee shop and her hugging Beth and saying how sorry she was. Sorry that Luc was dead? Sorry for trying to kill her? Sorry their plan had misfired? It struck her how much Lin’s ultra-modern home was similar to the one she was meant to move into with Luc. The house Luc had found online that was so unlike anything she imagined he’d want. Luc’s genetic sentence meant he’d lived his life by cutting corners. She’d never, ever conceived she could be one of them.

  “It was me he texted before he died,” Lin said through tears behind her. “Minutes before he died. He was sitting next to you in the car, but he was talking to me.”

  Chapter 90

  “Are you coming?” Jody shouted up from downstairs.

  Beth Lucas knew she’d kept him waiting too long, but that he wouldn’t let it show when she joined him there. He was finding it difficult helping her move out. There was no way she and Theo could continue living with him, even though he’d told her they were welcome to stay and she would have been happy to. He’d helped her through the aftermath of her ordeal and had been as supportive as she’d reached full term.

  She’d finished changing Theo and made sure he was tucked and warm in the carrier before she hefted the handles. Beth looked into his four week-old expression of exasperation and waited for the tears to start. They didn’t, so she headed for the door.

  They were moving into the new house tomorrow but had got the keys a day early. Now the house in Wandsworth and Luc’s stake in Avellana had been sold, she had at last been able to get a place of her own. It was less than ten minutes from Jody’s. Just as she reached the top of the stairs, her iPhone rang. Beth considered ignoring it, but put Theo down on the landing and scrabbled it out of her handbag.

  “Hello?”

  “Beth?”

  She immediately recognised the voice. “Rae?”

  It sounded like she was in a busy thoroughfare and didn’t answer.

  “Are you staying safe?”

  “I’m still moving around.”

  “Is he still looking for you?”

  “I don’t know for sure. And it’s probably better that I don’t.”

  Beth knew what it was like to live in the indeterminate shadow of a man, but at least, as the months had passed, Luc’s had gradually begun to fade. “Why are you calling me?”

  “I heard about what happened to you on TV.”

  As soon as Beth had the baby, there’d been a resurgence of interest in her story. The previous morning, she’d seen Lin’s face next to hers on the front of the newspapers. After confessing to being an accomplice in Beth’s attempted murder, she was awaiting sentencing. “I’m trying to put everything behind me now.”

  “I wish you good luck. How is your newborn?”

  Beth looked down at him. His eyes were half closed.

  “He’s perfect.”

  Tyler, the boy she’d attacked at the crash site, had made her consider the limited life he had. She’d thought a lot about her conversation with Mrs O’Doole as they’d sat in the ambulance.

  Trying not to treat them differently is the hardest thing.

  But something else Marcia said had more resonance.

  Give them the life they should have, however long it is.

  She thought about the immediate future, was already making provision for it. Whatever lay further than tomorrow, however, they would face together when it arrived. Beth didn’t want to look too far around the corner or consider what might be lurking there.

  “I’m sorry for what you came to learn about your husband. But I am relieved. I couldn’t be personally responsible for destroying your memory of him.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “At the roadside, he already knew he wouldn’t make it to the hospital. He told me he’d done something terrible to you. That he didn’t deserve forgiveness.”

  The phone felt hot against Beth’s ear.

  Rae’s voice was suddenly louder. “I couldn’t have told you that. It wasn’t my place.”

  “What about Allegro?”

  “Allegro... is my daughter. I was leaving the voicemail for you. I was going to tell you everything but decided I couldn’t do that in a recorded message. At that moment, my daughter came into the room. I was asking her to leave.”

  Beth remembered her whispering the name. Rae had been scolding her child

  “I hung up, but I had to call back and speak to you personally. I was going to tell you exactly what he’d said, but you already believed Allegro was the word. I realised you would have been consumed if you’d never known what his last words had been, but when I heard the desperation in your voice, I changed my mind. Better that it was Allegro than what he’d whispered to me. A mystery and not an admission of guilt. I let it be Allegro.”

  A child’s name. It was what had driven Beth to find the truth. And in the flames, she knew it had been protecting her own that had made her jump through the attic hatch and escape to safety.

  “Then I saw the news and knew the secret of his guilt was no longer mine.”

  Beth shook her head.

  “Are you still there?”

  “How old is your daughter, Rae?”

  “She’s seven in three weeks.”

  Beth understood how Rae could go on, even with the spectre of what she’d left behind threatening to impact her present. “Thank you, Rae; stay safe and look after her.”

  “I will.” Rae hung up.

  “Beth, I’m double-parked!” There was a distinct trace of irritation in Jody’s voice.

  It was time to go. “Coming.” Beth gently picked up Theo in the carrier, briefly regarded the bullet holes in the wall of the landing, then headed outside.

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