The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  A voice that is not Sam’s.

  ‘Patrick.’ She runs through to the hall to see him standing there.

  Minutes later she is in his car, pulling out of the driveway. She doesn’t look back but focuses instead on the road ahead, the line of fierce blue sky. She was right. It is a beautiful day.

  Chapter Twenty

  Eve

  THE DAY WAS still alive. The midday heat had lingered through the afternoon and towards evening. Swirls of smoke from barbecues drifted over us, a steady hum of lawnmowers; occasionally we caught the sound of bass, emitted from a passing car, rising and falling.

  Going on to the pub was not part of the plan, but like all the best days this one had a mind of its own. Besides, we had exhausted the food and alcohol supply at David’s. Strolling down Goldhawk Road, woozy from afternoon beers, we wore smiles that no amount of beeping horns or swearing drunks or littered pavements could lift from our faces. We were buzzing off each other, with the help of three bottles of Kronenbourg and a gin and tonic apiece.

  We chose a pub off Goldhawk Road in Brackenbury Village, an affluent pocket of delis and gastropubs wedged in between Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, and ordered a bottle of champagne. David’s ordeal wasn’t over. But it was surely the beginning of the end.

  It fell to David to bring me back to earth. ‘Let’s not forget Melody in this. I lost a good friend and no one knows who tried to kill her.’ He shook his head and took a gulp of his champagne.

  Over dinner we made a few aborted attempts to discuss a plan of action – we would need to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission for the conviction to be looked at – but no one wanted to be bogged down in detail. Today was about enjoying a small achievement.

  ‘I’m done,’ David announced as the waitress cleared our plates. ‘I’m not made for drinking the posh stuff, I haven’t been this drunk in ages. My bed is calling me.’ He leant over and kissed me again, on the cheek. ‘Thank God for spilt strawberry daiquiris’ were his parting words.

  Annie stayed on for an hour or so before surrendering. ‘I’d invite you back,’ she said slowly, her focus sliding from my face, ‘but I’m not quite sure I can talk. You are very special, do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to tell people that for a long time.’

  She laughed. ‘You’ll call a cab, right?’

  ‘Of course,’ and I waved her off.

  I got up to go; my legs swayed beneath me. I knew when I was beaten. I needed a taxi, fast. I called the number on my phone and a guy with barely passable English told me it would be half an hour. The barman came round, clearing drinks from the tables. ‘Come on, time to finish up,’ he said loudly as he approached. I looked across the pub. There were a few people still standing at the bar. I was trying to keep my vision straight, but it was listing. A man turned around and gave me a wave, hesitant, as if he was uncertain I would recognise him.

  I waved back, but it was only as I walked past him out the door that I realised who it was.

  On the street I clung to the hope that I’d be able to flag a cab. My flat was only a mile or so away, but it was too far at that time of night with six hours’ worth of wine and beer sloshing around inside me. I watched a few taxis streak past; never any when you want one. Reluctantly I had started to walk when I heard a voice call my name.

  I turned around to see him.

  To be honest, I wasn’t up for conversation. Keep it short, I told myself.

  ‘I thought that was you.’ He was taller than I remembered, tanned too, cropped dark hair and piercing eyes.

  Get a grip.

  ‘Sod’s law.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Never any taxis when you want one.’ I was aware of the slur in my words and tried to overcompensate by speaking very slowly. ‘Anyway …’ I raised a hand to wave goodbye and turned to walk up the street, only to realise he was going in the same direction. For a moment I was caught in a dilemma. Do I run, pretend I’ve remembered something urgent? Do I hang about waiting for a free taxi that is patently not going to come? Or do I just act like an adult, walk at the same pace as him and resign myself to conversation.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asked, and we started walking.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  DI Rutter

  HER STOMACH LURCHES as the mobile skitters across her desk. What now? It’ll be Doug, she’s sure of it, filling her in on the latest calamity to befall the kids. Her immediate thought is for herself. Selfish cow. Another evening lost, bleached out under the halogen lights of Kingston Hospital’s accident and emergency department. She’s embarrassed going there now, worried the doctors might suspect her of some form of Munchausen by proxy given the frequency of her visits: pen top lodged up the nose (Bella), a broken nose (Oliver playing rugby), a chipped wrist (Bella in the playground), suspected meningitis (Oliver), a fractured arm (Bella at ballet!). She’s no good at the enforced idleness the waiting demands, the endless hours spent leafing through sticky, dog-eared copies of Hello!. Free time to sit and think and audit her to-do list is something she avoids if possible. Doing nothing when a million things need her attention produces a strange curdling stress inside her.

  And it’s her who the kids want. Without fail. Doug runs the house, arranges the online shop, packs the lunches in the morning, cooks at suppertime, manages their growing timetable of extra-curricular activities, but none of it counts when the chips are down. Bella and Oliver want their mum, and galling as that may be for her husband, a part of her loves it. For all her maternal shortcomings, it’s good to be reminded she is still wanted and needed.

  So Victoria is thinking of her children, hospitals and plastic chairs and stained lino and the smell of bleach mixed with vomit, as she looks at the phone dancing across the desk. She is not, for once, thinking of the investigation that has been monopolising her time.

  A quick glance at the screen, however, and she knows it’s not Doug, or the school. It’s a mobile number. She answers and hears a woman’s voice on the end of the line.

  Words race out. Not sentences, just words, a dump of them through which she hears gulps of air as if the caller, who has yet to identify herself, is out of breath. It’s the urgency in her tone, the sense that whatever she is recounting is happening right now, that makes Victoria’s pulse quicken. She reaches for a notepad and pen on her desk, ready to scribble down whatever details she can extract.

  ‘Can you tell me your name?’ she says.

  The words come to a halt. ‘It’s Melody. Melody Pieterson,’ she says, as if it should have been obvious all along.

  Less than an hour later, Melody Pieterson sits in front of her in the interview room. Having declined coffee and tea, she has accepted a plastic cup of water from the filter. Victoria hasn’t seen her drink any. Instead she cradles it in her hand, running her finger back and forth around the rim.

  ‘Are you sure you are OK to do this now?’ she asks.

  Melody nods. ‘I’m fine, fine.’ Clearly this is not true. Her sun top is smeared with reddish-brown stains. Gashes pattern the palms of her hands. Melody administers to them with balled tissues soaked with blood. Her blond hair is scraped back into a loose ponytail, a halo of frizz surrounding her head. She is a different woman to the one who sat here only a few weeks ago, manicured, polished. And the manner in which she speaks, freely, withholding nothing, is in direct contrast to that careful, clipped performance. It’s like she’s been uncorked.

  ‘Did he do that?’

  Melody opens her palms and studies them as if she has only realised now the state they are in.

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘I smashed some glass. I couldn’t get out, you see. He locked me in. I’d still be there if it wasn’t for Patrick.’

  ‘Patrick?’

  ‘Patrick Carling, my friend who brought me here. He came round to check on me. He was expecting me and when I didn’t call or answer my phone, he was worried.’

  ‘I see,’ DI Rutter says
, her mind beginning to whir with the information. ‘Shall we start at the beginning?’

  ‘I have Eve Elliot’s file … she’d spoken to all of them, all my friends, Honor, Sam …’

  Victoria smiles. How the hell did Melody get hold of that? Then she remembers how it came into her own possession. She’ll be having words with Nathaniel Jenkins later. ‘This would be the file detailing Eve’s investigation of David Alden’s conviction?’

  Either Melody doesn’t hear the question or she chooses to ignore it, refusing to allow anything to derail her story. ‘Honor had found out we were having an affair, it was totally obvious to me when I read it. You know, Sam and me were … well, we were … behind her back.’

  Victoria raises an eyebrow more to remind Melody of her previous lie than anything else. Hadn’t she asked her only a few weeks ago if she had been seeing anyone at the time of her attack? ‘No,’ she’d said. The answer couldn’t have been more emphatic.

  Melody picks up on her irritation. ‘I know. I know.’ She raises her hands in the air. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t mention that before … some friend. No wonder she couldn’t stand being around me. But the thing was, I had never said sorry. I went to see her because I wanted to tell her … just once at least, how much I regretted it, how I hated myself for doing that to her and killing our friendship. But when we started talking about Eve I realised she didn’t know she was dead. She had no idea. She looked broken, it was awful, really. I guess that’s why she told me everything … you know, because a woman had died and she didn’t want to lie anymore.’

  ‘Lie?’

  ‘They weren’t together on the night I was attacked. Sam doesn’t have an alibi. It was him I thought I was meeting. He says by the time he came out to find me, I was gone.’

  ‘So you confronted him?’ Victoria is increasingly confused.

  ‘Not intentionally. I went home to get my stuff – I don’t want to be anywhere near him – but he came home. He said he wouldn’t let me go until I believed him.’

  When Melody starts talking about fish, how Sam served her uncooked mackerel and demanded she eat, Victoria ends the interview. She’s not a fan of fish at the best of times and she can spot a superfluous fact when it hits her. Besides, Melody clearly needs some rest.

  ‘What are you going to do with him?’ Melody demands.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Victoria says. ‘Someone is already on their way to Mr Chapman’s house. You will be the first to know of any developments.’

  Sometimes she catches herself and hates the way she sounds. Officious, uncaring, procedural. But she can’t tell Melody that Sam Chapman is already on her radar. She’s read the file too. And the fact that it’s now alleged that at least two of Melody’s friends have had something to hide makes them all the more interesting to her. She feels her face colour, a shot of excitement snaps through her. You wait long enough and it comes. It always does. This is the bit she likes, when what has been stagnant starts springing to life.

  She thinks of the man who accompanied Melody when she came here a few weeks ago. The imposing stature, the supreme confidence, the crushing handshake. Never trust a man whose grip is that hard. It makes her suspicious of what they are trying to prove.

  ‘Do you have someone you can stay with?’

  ‘Patrick … He’s waiting in reception.’

  ‘We’ll need a number for you, and an address.’ She pushes a blank piece of paper across the table to Melody and hands her a pen. ‘If you can write his full name and address down. And we’ll need a contact number for you, since you don’t have your phone.’

  ‘You can reach me on Patrick’s … the one I called you on before. He won’t mind.’ Her hands shake as she scrawls the address. ‘Here,’ she says, scraping the chair along the floor as she pushes it out.

  They walk to reception together. ‘We have people you can talk to if you need to, trained and sensitive,’ Victoria says gently before handing her a card. Melody puts it straight into her pocket without looking at it.

  Ahead a man dressed in jeans, a white shirt and a blazer rises to his feet as he sees them approach. Patrick Carling. His face is etched with concern. Melody walks straight to him, lets his chest support her head. He puts a protective arm around her back.

  ‘I’ll be in touch tomorrow,’ Victoria says and watches them fade through the doors into the evening.

  It’s a shame, she thinks, what this job does to her. Anyone else would look at that scene and see the kindness in it, whereas all she does is search for ulterior motives.

  Victoria turns and heads back to the matter that was occupying her before Melody called; the results from the samples of soil she ordered from Climping. She’s had them compared with the grains of soil found on Melody and Eve.

  The properties are so similar it would lead us to the conclusion that they are taken from the same geographical location.

  Tomorrow she is sending DS Cook and DC Rollings down to Climping with one of her more unusual instructions. To locate the cottage that once belonged to Rosemary Crighton and look for any sign of Hibiscus syriacus. She’s told it is in bloom at this time of year.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Melody

  THEY’RE STILL IN Richmond, edging around the one-way system. Stop. Start. If it was her mum driving she’d turn the engine off every time they came to a halt to save petrol. To her left is a bar, its exterior painted an elegant dusty grey, baskets of purple and white flowers spilling from the windows. Not a pink one in sight, she notes gratefully. She watches a group of women disappear through the door under a red awning. They’re dressed up, the working week behind them. What will they drink? Cocktails? A bottle of wine to share? Tears bubble up. They are only a few metres away from her, tucked inside the bar now, but she is a thousand times removed from them.

  She stares at the palms of her hands. They’re grubby and bloodied. She needs a shower to wash away all the filth of yesterday and today, and the stench of fish that still clings to her hair. She needs to brush the fur from her teeth and tongue.

  The car moves ten metres or so and the bar slips away behind her. Ahead the road glows red with brake lights, a throbbing vein that twists its way through town.

  ‘You don’t honestly believe Sam did it, do you?’ Patrick asks.

  It was only a few weeks ago that she was in Sam’s car picking their way out of the town back to Surrey. How could she have sat there and not suspected him? All she was focused on was the newness of the car, the cloying smell of new upholstery and sealers. Is that why he changed his car, because he had carried Eve’s body in the old one? Were her senses more alert than her brain, ahead of the game, trying to show her something she wasn’t willing to see?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anything really. I don’t know what to think … the police will have arrested him by now.’

  They approach the roundabout, join the snarl of traffic waiting for the lights to change. Patrick turns to her as if to say something, but shakes his head.

  ‘What?’ she asks. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Will they tell you if they don’t arrest him, tonight I mean? If he’s not at home or work?’

  The thought hadn’t occurred to her. She accepted without question that he would be taken into custody tonight. The stupidity of the assumption slaps her in the face. Why would he be at home waiting? The moment he realised she was missing, surely he would come looking for her.

  ‘You don’t think he would come …?’

  ‘I don’t know … It’s the obvious place to look for you, but …’

  ‘Where else can we go? She needs the security of knowing Sam can’t find her. Now that they have acknowledged the possibility that he might turn up at Patrick’s, she can’t go there. Not until she receives a call from DI Rutter to tell her they have him.

  Patrick pauses, screws up his face as if deep in thought. ‘I have an idea,’ he says, and takes a sharp right instead of going straight ahead.

  Chapter Twenty-th
ree

  DI Rutter

  SAM CHAPMAN HAS not shaken her hand this time. Even if he had, she suspects it would have had none of the crunching strength of before. Funny, she thinks, how different situations can completely change a person’s demeanour and how you perceive them. Last week it was Sam’s physique that grabbed her attention. He must be six foot four at least, towering and muscular. He had that sheen of success and wealth, all white teeth and bright eyes that spoke of a lifetime of eating organic vegetables. When he talked, his tone was measured, in command, if a little pompous. Now when she looks at him she doesn’t notice his height, not when he’s hunched into the seat at any rate. Without the careful styling of before, his hair is wild, rising up in vertical shoots like one of those cress heads her kids grow out of yoghurt pots.

  She has to award him a few points for effort. His opening gambit went like this: ‘I was with Honor on the night Melody was attacked so that in itself wasn’t a lie; it was just that I wasn’t there all night. It was a simple oversight.’

  On hearing this she laughed, deep and throaty, threw her head back and stared up to the cork ceiling tiles for a moment to make her point. Everything in the station was a shade of brown; it was like working in a tea bag.

  When she came back to face him, she smiled one her best dazzlers and winked.

  ‘Shall we start again?’

  ‘Melody went crazy, I mean you should have seen her.’ He points to the gouge on his cheek. ‘She did this …’ He pauses, as if waiting for her to agree that the scratch is indeed evidence of Melody’s insanity. When she doesn’t, he continues. ‘I wanted her to calm down before she left. Of course I wasn’t going to keep her there against her will.’

  ‘But you took her phone, her laptop, locked her in.’

  ‘All right, I know how that looks … I wasn’t thinking. I just wanted her to calm down so I could talk to her properly.’