Don't Wake Up: A dark, terrifying new thriller with the most gripping first chapter you will ever read!

by Liz Lawler

  She lifted the paper bag to her mouth and breathed in and out. She had to stop thinking about it, or else she would become a prisoner inside her own home. But it was so hard. Anxiety plagued her all the time. At work she parked as close to her department as possible. She looked at every man she passed keenly. The porters, the nurses and the doctors she came in contact with were now suspects. The male patients she treated, if there for minor ailments, were also considered suspects. And while she stood in their presence studying their features, it was their voices she concentrated on most. But none had his voice. How could they? The pitch of his voice had been distorted. Flattened.

  What it reminded her of most was a tracheostomy patient who’d had a voice prosthesis inserted. When he spoke his voice sounded mechanical because air no longer passed through the vocal cords but through a tube instead. Could a man with a tracheostomy have taken her, she now crazily wondered. Someone who blamed her for the loss of his voice? She was going mad with all these wild speculations. He was sending her insane while destroying her life.

  Patrick had stopped ringing. The last message, from three days earlier, was still saved. She played it over and over, listening for any insincerity, but his apology for hurting her sounded genuine. He should never have gone behind her back and talked to Caroline. He was out of order. He regretted it entirely, but he felt out of control over the situation surrounding Alex and felt he had let her down. By not believing her. He kept his composure right up until the end where his voice broke: ‘I love you, Alex. I want to marry you. Please, please ring me.’

  The reason she didn’t call back was not because of him confiding in Caroline, though that hurt. It was because he’d admitted he didn’t believe her. Without trust and one hundred per cent belief in the person you were supposed to love, there was no foundation to build on. A long-term relationship like a marriage wouldn’t stand a chance. As far as she was concerned, their relationship, although not officially ended by either of them, was over.

  Standing alone in her kitchen she wished she didn’t miss him. She wished a thousand times that everything could go back to those minutes when she first set out to meet him, and that now they were planning what to buy each other for Christmas.

  But more than anything she wished she didn’t see him as someone different, someone weaker, someone she would never have fallen in love with. It was as if she had lost her Patrick and this new one replaced him, and with sadness she realised he probably felt exactly the same about her. They were lost to each other. Even if they searched really hard they would stay lost because they weren’t the same people any more. She had survived a horrific experience, which he believed she had imagined.

  Six weeks ago she had a boyfriend she loved, a job she loved, and a life to call her own. In the space of a few hours her sane world had been whipped away. It was now splashed with uncertainty, anxiety and great big splodges of the unknown. If it wasn’t for her job and the help of little blue pills, she knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on.

  *

  Later that afternoon, berating herself for trying to do all her Christmas shopping in one day, she struggled back to the car park under the weight of John Lewis, Marks & Spencer and Thorntons bags. She should have stuck to her original plan and given everyone vouchers instead. It would have saved her time and energy, and she wouldn’t now be exhausted and left with the thought that the gifts she’d bought were somehow not quite right. The shirt for her father now seemed too modern, and the dressing gown for her mother was a repeat of what she’d bought her last year. It had been a long day with no festive feeling. She hadn’t rung Fiona to remind her they were going shopping, because they hadn’t spoken since the party. She had not forgiven her yet.

  With carrier bags all over the back seat of her car she joined the lane of slow-moving vehicles making their way to the exit, and hoped the traffic from Bristol back to Bath had eased since the morning. She wanted to stop at a garage and get her car washed; she could still see flecks of yellow paint on the windscreen, even though it had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life. A clean car was one less reminder. When she got home, if she could muster enough energy, she would give her flat a tidy. On the other hand, she had tomorrow off as well and could catch up with any household chores then. It would keep her occupied until she returned to work.

  And then she could get back to the business of thinking about other people’s lives instead of her own.

  Winter darkness had arrived by four o’clock as she drove down the ramp to the basement car park beneath her apartment building, and her mind was free of all these unsettling things. Her thoughts were on what she would have for dinner, the long soak in a bubble bath she was looking forward to, and the TV drama on at nine o’clock.

  If she had been driving a fraction faster she would have driven straight over the woman. She slammed her foot on the brake and switched the headlights to full beam. The woman was lying on the ground, flat on her back in Alex’s car parking space, completely still. Instinctively Alex opened her glove box and pulled out various pieces of medical equipment that she kept on hand in the event of passing an accident. With a Guedel airway tube and stethoscope in one hand and a handful of bandages in the other she rushed to aid the woman.

  Briefly she took in the clothing and make-up: high-heeled black shiny boots, a minuscule red satin skirt barely covering plump bare thighs, and a low-cut black T-shirt under a cream satin jacket. Her initial thought was that the woman had taken a beating, but as Alex examined her closer she could see that she was wrong. Her right elbow was at an impossible angle and her shoulder looked massively swollen. Her finger bones had split through the skin and were bent backwards. Alex ignored the bloody hand; what filled her with most concern was the black mark across the cream jacket, right across the woman’s chest. It was the imprint of a tyre. She pulled out her mobile and called for an ambulance.

  Placing her ear near the woman’s mouth she felt warm breath and at the same time saw some rise in the chest. The vein in her neck was distended and pulsating hard. She was breathing, but how well was another matter. If a car had run over her there was the likelihood of multiple rib fractures and injury to the lungs. She undid the single button holding the cream jacket closed and ripped the thin black T-shirt up the middle. The rib cage was misshapen and there was only a feeble rise on the left side of the chest. Alex was dealing with major chest trauma, and knew that without the presence of a surgical team and the right instruments the woman could die soon.

  In the boot of her car there was a chest drain kit, chest tubes, scalpels and other equipment that would inflate a lung, but if there was severe vessel damage only blood or large volumes of fluid replacement would keep her heart pumping. But she must think positively. She needed to focus on keeping the woman alive for as long as possible.

  A small choking sound alerted her to the woman stirring and she switched her gaze back to the face. She was astonished to see the woman’s eyes open.

  ‘Hello, you’ve had an accident and I’m helping you,’ she calmly said.

  The woman tried to answer but no sound passed her moving lips.

  ‘I’m a doctor. An ambulance is on the way.’

  Alex felt faint hope. If the woman was conscious, maybe she wasn’t internally haemorrhaging. She definitely had a collapsed lung, but Alex could fix that. She needed to keep the woman breathing, that was all that mattered, because if her heart stopped beating Alex would be compressing broken ribs into a possibly damaged heart and lungs.

  A small spray of blood was coughed up and some of it showered the woman’s face. Using her fingertips Alex carefully wiped it from her eyelids, urgently praying for the ambulance to hurry up. This woman was about to bleed out!

  Then the woman spoke. And the low-pitched bubbling sound warned Alex she was drowning: ‘Wants to play doctors . . . save me . . .’

  She coughed again, and with blood-coated teeth she smiled gruesomely. ‘Some doctor . . .’

  When the
blood flooded the woman’s mouth Alex used the bandages, the woman’s clothing, and then as much as she could of her own clothing to mop it away. Only when her heart stopped pumping did the blood stop coming.

  The ambulance crew arrived to find both women bathed in blood from head to toe, and initially thought them both injured. Later, when interviewed by the police, they described finding Dr Taylor looking like a crazed woman kneeling over the dead body. ‘She looked like Carrie in the movie, her hair and face dripping with blood, and her eyes staring,’ one of them said. ‘Like bloody Carrie.’

  Chapter sixteen

  Four police cars and a transit van surrounded the area where the dead woman lay. The ambulance crew had come and gone, and a dozen police officers had taken their place. The occupants of the apartments, who were beginning to return from work, were told to park elsewhere. The area was a crime scene and no other vehicles would be allowed in for several days at least. Alex shivered in the back seat of one of the police vehicles. She had not been allowed to go up to her flat and change; the blood on her clothes and hands had dried and black crusts were buried beneath her nails.

  She had seen Laura Best and another officer walk around her newly washed bottle-green Mini several times. They had gone down on their bellies and inspected it underneath. A female officer had asked her to blow into a mouthpiece, and Alex was grateful for having resisted alcohol for the last few days. She was a suspect in a crime. Not necessarily the prime one, but a suspect all the same. She had given a brief statement to the first officer on the scene and was told that she would be questioned again later. It was more than four hours since she had arrived home from her Christmas shopping trip, and even though the hours were filled with so much going on around her, they were the longest hours she had ever lived.

  Maybe if she just got out of the police car and walked across the car park to the lift, she would escape to her apartment unseen. She could have a bath, cook some dinner . . .

  The sobs, when they came, robbed her of breath. She was unaware of the car door opening or of hands reaching in to help her out. She was unaware of being escorted up to her apartment, a throw being put around her shoulders and a warm mug being placed in her hands. It was only when the warmth of sweetened tea hit her stomach that she became aware of her surroundings.

  Greg Turner stood a few feet away, watching her with troubled eyes. The rain had flattened his wavy hair and the shoulders of his leather jacket were damp, and for the first time he didn’t seem so forbidding.

  ‘I’m sorry about this. I’ll have words with them later. I think they forgot they’d put you in the back of one of the cars.’

  Alex shivered as warmth penetrated her frozen limbs. It was always cold in the underground car park, and sitting there for several hours had made her numb. ‘I couldn’t save her,’ she whispered. ‘It was like a war zone. Her blood just kept coming and there was nothing I could do.’

  ‘The ambulance crew said she had massive injuries. I don’t think there was much anybody could have done in the circumstances.’

  ‘But I’m a doctor,’ she cried. ‘That’s what I do. I save lives. I should have done more. I should have acted quicker. Got a chest drain in. Got in an airway before she drowned in her own blood!’

  ‘I’m sure you did all you could,’ he said soothingly. Then: ‘We’ll need you to give a full statement. The sooner the better.’

  With her hands cradled round the warm mug, Alex saw the dried blood caking her fingernails and could smell its metallic odour as she thawed out.

  ‘Could I have a bath first?’

  He hesitated and then relented. ‘Sure. But we’ll need the clothes you’re wearing.’

  ‘I’m a suspect, aren’t I? They think I drove over her, don’t they?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s procedure. There might be transferred evidence on your clothes. She was a small-time prostitute. Known as “Lunchtime Lilly”.’

  Alex stared at him disdainfully.

  He raised his hands, suggesting this was not his name for her. ‘Lillian Armstrong. Known to her friends and by us as Lilly. She earned the nickname because she usually only worked daytime hours on account of her children being at school and having no husband to mind them at night.’

  Alex had guessed what she was, but didn’t want to say. She had met many women like Lilly over the years and knew they all had their reasons for doing what they did. She never judged them when they turned up at A & E instead of attending the sexual health clinic for their creams and antibiotics. And often she would be the one to give them tea after they had been patched up from the beatings they often got. It was a sick world, and her job was to treat the sick.

  ‘I’ll put my clothes in a bin liner if you want?’

  From his jacket pocket he pulled out two large clear plastic bags. ‘I’d prefer you to put them in these.’

  Alex rose wearily to her feet. ‘There’s a tyre mark. On her jacket, there’s the imprint of a tyre.’

  Turner frowned. ‘Whereabouts on the jacket?’

  ‘Across her chest. She was crushed.’

  ‘Did you move her when you got to her?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ she answered sharply. ‘She might have had spinal injuries!’ She heaved for breath and made a small cry. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.’

  ‘It’s understandable. You’ve had a rough day.’

  ‘Why did you ask me that?’ she asked. ‘Why did you think I might have moved her?’

  He shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’

  Greg Turner didn’t strike her as someone who just had a thought unless there was a reason behind it, but she didn’t think he’d tell her what it was. She would have to work it out herself when she was less tired.

  It was gone eleven when she finally shut the door on him. She was instructed to present at Bath police station tomorrow to give a full statement. She hoped it wouldn’t be Laura Best taking it. While she had been sitting in the back of the police car the woman had given her several appraising looks, her manner remote and cool. Police officers were still examining the car park and outside the perimeter. She heard knocks on several of her neighbours’ doors and knew they would all be giving statements, but it gave her no confidence that the police would find anything.

  They had a tyre mark, but that, she bet, was all they would have.

  Like a domestic animal finding its usual place to sleep, Alex found hers. Her back against her living-room wall, she huddled with a duvet pulled round her shoulders and heard again the woman’s final words: ‘Wants to play doctors . . .’

  Until this moment she had thought the woman was referring to her; her being the doctor and her doing the saving. But suppose that wasn’t the case, that in fact the dead woman had been referring to the person who had knocked her down?

  Some doctor . . .

  Supposing the person who knocked her down was a doctor; why hadn’t he or she tried to save her or called an ambulance? Could it be that it was deliberate? Could it be the same person who had targeted Alex? An awful thought consumed her. Had he been on his way to attack her again, only Lillian Armstrong had somehow got in the way? Did he know she lived here?

  Wants to play doctors . . .

  Lillian Armstrong’s words could have been nothing more than the last feeble attempt of a dying woman to make sense of what was happening to her. Alex prayed it was. Otherwise he was out there; he was still active and she wasn’t a one-off. He was still playing at being a doctor, but now he was killing his victims.

  Chapter seventeen

  They met at a restaurant that neither of them had been to before. A French bistro on Pulteney Bridge with stone floors, bare wooden tables and plenty of red, dripping candles. It was informal and a bit scruffy, yet expensive, and on weekends almost always full, which was why they hadn’t been before. On this Wednesday night, however, there was only one other table occupied and Patrick was seated at one with a panoramic view of the weir.

  He w
as staring at the menu when she arrived, wearing a burgundy shirt she had helped him choose and a smart black jacket. In the candlelight his handsome face looked flushed. A large glass of red wine sat in front of him on the table. His posture was relaxed and she wondered if it was his first drink.

  He was surprised when she slipped into the chair opposite him, and she was pleased at placing him so quickly at a disadvantage. He rose to his feet and had to reach awkwardly across the table to kiss her. The lit candle and single flower between them hampered his movements, and her averted face only allowed him to brush his lips against her cheek. If she had turned her head slightly he could have kissed her properly, but she wasn’t ready for that.

  An awkward silence filled the next few seconds, until he opened the second menu and handed it to her.

  ‘Food looks great. We should have come here before.’

  A waiter appeared and poured her a glass of water and enquired what she would like to drink. Alex chose dry white wine. The dryer the better. It would make her sip instead of guzzling it back. Alcohol was her enemy at the moment, and she mustn’t forget that. It would be so easy to knock back a couple of glasses of red or a sweeter white before the main course was even served if she allowed herself. Conversation would flow better, awkward moments would be dealt with more easily. But at the end of the evening Alex would want more. She would think of the unopened bottles back at her flat like friends and forget that they were the enemy. Far better to stick to a single glass of white wine.

  ‘I’ll have the moules followed by the monkfish,’ she said to the waiter before even being asked if she was ready to order.

  Patrick ordered the same, and asked for another glass of Merlot.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said predictably when they were alone again. Then he cleared his throat and moved his hand in an awkward gesture. ‘Sorry. That sounded crass. I sound like a host at a party.’ He waited for her to look at him. ‘I need to explain how sorry I am. Not just for my unforgivable behaviour over Caroline, but for the weeks before when I refused to allow you to talk about what happened. I behaved badly, rushing you off to Barbados like that as if I could simply make it better for you by offering you a bit of sunshine and a pretty beach.’