by Jake Cross
Perfect Stranger
A gripping psychological thriller with nail-biting suspense
Jake Cross
Books by Jake Cross
The Choice
The Family Lie
Contents
MONDAY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
TUESDAY
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
WEDNESDAY
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
THURSDAY
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
FRIDAY
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
SATURDAY
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
SUNDAY
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
ONE WEEK LATER
Chapter 55
The Choice
Books by Jake Cross
A Letter from Jake
The Family Lie
Acknowledgements
MONDAY
One
‘What on earth is this?’
Chris’s wife walked into the kitchen, mail in hand and favouring her right ankle today. She held up a note.
It was a piece of thick white paper the size of a postcard. It was blank. Blank except for those eight words which he could read even from six feet away.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO EVE LEVINE
‘Who’s that addressed to?’ Chris asked.
‘No envelope.’ Rose turned the note over. ‘And it’s not stamped.’
He took the note, turning it over carefully, hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t. No stamp. The sender hadn’t dropped the envelope into a post box half a country away. He or she had approached the house, had stood right at the front door and slotted it into their home, to guarantee the recipient would find it, read it, be shocked by it.
‘This can’t be for us,’ he said. ‘It must be a mistake.’
Julia sauntered into the kitchen, eye make-up smudged and long oak hair from her mother a wild mess. Her blue dressing gown was similar to Rose’s, but Julia’s had a frayed collar where she liked to chew it. Rose grabbed the note and slotted it into the mass of mail to hide it, and then put the mass into Chris’s hands. She needn’t have bothered because their eighteen-year-old was hypnotised by her phone yet again, which made the rest of the world white noise.
Rose put the kettle on then started to fix hair that had escaped from her messy bun.
‘Remember I’ve got the physiotherapist and then I’m off to Meadowhall. And you’re buying, remember?’
He did remember. He’d bought her the wrong phone charger. The last thing on his mind at the moment.
With both girls distracted, he went to the front door and peered out, left and right. No strange cars or faces. The same schoolkids drifting past, the same neighbours leaving for work, and not a one amongst them with a guilty look. He walked halfway down his path just to make sure there was no damage to his car or Rose’s or to the house. If someone was bold enough to post unsettling notes through their letterbox, who knows what else they might do? But the cars were fine. It was just another Monday morning no one would remember on their deathbed in a Sheffield suburb on nobody’s ‘places-to-die’ list.
Back in the kitchen, Julia was still hooked to her mobile, and Rose was writing on a sheet of paper stuck to the fridge door, using her special big pen and big letters because of her arthritic wrist. Always chirpy in the morning, she was mouthing the words to some song as she scribbled the day’s important tasks. A routine morning in the Redfern household. Same scene as yesterday, and the day before, and countless previous. Save for the note that Chris couldn’t get out of his head.
‘Grab my slippers, please. From the en suite,’ Rose said.
He did as asked, trudging up the stairs.
But when he came out of the bathroom, she was standing in front of their closed bedroom door. Clearly, she didn’t want this conversation to happen in front of Julia.
Chris noticed that he still had the mail clutched tightly in one hand, Rose’s slippers in the other. Rose took the lot and dropped everything but the note.
‘I just asked Julia if she knew the name Eve Levine. No. And it’s a no from me, too.’
She was awaiting something, leaning against the door with her arms folded. With her long bob now free of its bun, she looked healthy and radiant.
Chris said, ‘Same here.’
‘What about your work?’
Chris paused to think. As a microbiologist, he was often instrumental in saving lives, but not always. Sometimes patients were just too ill to save. But that didn’t mean…
‘Do you think this could be about my job? Someone blaming me because my lab failed to save Eve from her cancer?’
She stepped forward and touched his arm reassuringly. ‘Don’t panic yet. It could just be some kids playing silly buggers.’ Rose glanced down at the note in her hand. ‘But we have to be sure. So, when you go in today, would you ask about it?’
He nodded. She left and he took a shower and dressed.
But when he came out of the en suite, his wife was back. And was sitting on the bed with his phone.
‘What are you doing?’
She showed him. She’d loaded his Facebook app and sent a message:
You know what I did, do you? HA HA. PM me
‘I sent this to all your friends, even those old college pals you’ve not seen in nearly twenty years after you just walked out. It’ll sound vague to most of them. But if someone’s playing a game, they’ll think they’ve been found out and so they’ll private message you. I’ve done the same on mine and I’ll do Julia’s if she ever lets it go. So now all you have to do is swoon over your wife’s computer brain and then wait. Help me dress.’
While childbirth had put a little stubborn weight on her, and arthritis had stolen her ability to exercise, teenage years of gymnastics had kept her slender and young-looking. He kissed her insteps as he helped her into socks, and the smooth skin of her shoulders as he clumsily worked the clasp of her bra. She cast her hair aside so he could nibble her neck, but giggled and playfully slapped his hands when they tried to wander.
The rest of her clothing she could manage alone, so he went downstairs. She had left his packed lunch in the fridge. Another cold meal, yippee.
There was a note on the fridge.
Buy whiteboard so don’t have to stick paper on fridge and read what’s on damn paper stuck on fridge.<
br />
He was always forgetting to check the notes. He wrote ‘WHITEBOARD’ on his hand. He grabbed his coat. Julia didn’t even glance up from her phone, but en route to the car he got a text from her reminding him that it was their wedding anniversary on Saturday. He smiled. Sometimes it was easy to forget how sweet she could be.
Then he set off for another day of work, trying to ignore the ball of dread in the pit of his stomach. This was the only family he had, and he couldn’t let anything happen to it.
Two
Saturday, 16 November
* * *
Double tragedy as mother of one takes own life following boyfriend’s murder
* * *
Eve Levine, 40, was found dead at her home in Bradford by her sister, Elaine, 44, early on Friday morning. Eve had been living with a terminal cancer diagnosis when Ron Hugill, 48, her long-term boyfriend and father to her daughter, was murdered in an altercation with a mugger at the gym where he was employed on 9 November. His funeral is on Monday.
* * *
Eve’s sister says, ‘I want to remember Eve in life, not death. She was suffering at the end, and Ron’s murder hit her hard. I hope there is a heaven and she’s finally at peace.’
* * *
Eve, whose funeral is on 22 November, is survived by her estranged sister and a young daughter.
* * *
‘Did you click the link in my text?’ Rose said as soon as she answered the phone. Chris had been walking across the car park to the lab when her message had pinged through, stopping him dead in his tracks. The concern in her voice upped his own store of anxiety tenfold.
‘Yes. What the hell is it?’
‘A newspaper article. Look at the date. I searched for the name Eve Levine online. It took some time because it’s a popular name, but I found her. This was the only mention of her that I could find. She was from Bradford, so it’s got to be her. Look, cancer. So she would have had tests. This really could be about your work after all.’
He stopped and leaned against someone else’s car in the car park to get his head around this.
‘Not possible, Rose. Cancer, it says. And even if I’d done something to cause this woman harm, and her family is pissed off, they would blame the GP first. They couldn’t get my name except through official channels, probably not even then. It would involve a complaint and I’d know about it. Rose, it’s just a big mistake. Forget about it.’
‘I can’t. Just make sure you ask your boss about it. I also searched for Eve’s sister, Elaine. But there’s nothing online or on Facebook or anything. I couldn’t find anything about her daughter, either. The one mentioned in the article. Poor girl, losing her mother to suicide. And her father, if that’s what the man who got killed was to her. The article doesn’t really say, does it? I hope she’s not a small child. How old do you think she is?’
‘How should I know?’ he snapped before he could stop himself. ‘Sorry, Rose. I just— I just don’t know why someone would want to mess with us like this.’
Rose’s voice came back softly. ‘It’s okay, Chris. You’re worried, I’m worried, and I guess it’s making us a bit snappy. But we’ll figure this out, together.’
‘You’re right, you always are. But right now I’m still sorry. And I’ll always love you.’
‘I love you too. Also always.’ Rose paused. ‘But, even if it’s just for peace of mind, would you ask at work? You never know.’
Chris sighed. ‘I will. I’ll ask.’
She thanked him and hung up. But he knew she was still upset at his outburst.
A headache was forming, and he didn’t expect it to go away anytime soon.
Three
Sheffield Royal Infirmary’s microbiology lab. Here were the guys and gals who poked and prodded at blood or tissue or whatever else the nurse or doctor took from you. Their job was to work out what was messing you up. You’d never meet them, but they’d know you had HIV or Ebola long before you did.
Chris worked on Sterile Fluids, while the staff called ‘body bench’: a name that to the uninitiated painted a picture of corpses laid out for dissection. Body parts were not uncommon, but mostly Chris dealt with blood samples. One of the keen-to-please Medical Lab assistants had already taken all positive blood cultures from the machine and dumped them on his bench. Chris would go through the robotic routine of applying coloured dyes to highlight the invisible little alien intruders, so he could work out what kind they were. Then he’d call the medical staff in charge of the respective patients with news of how to wipe out whatever he’d found.
An intruder. Like the one who’d posted the threatening note.
Chris waited until Alan, his gangly boss, went into his office, then he sat at one of the computers and loaded I-Lab, the laboratory’s filing system. On his way upstairs, he’d copied Rose’s idea and checked Facebook for Eve Levine, but the result had mirrored what I-Lab now showed him. Nothing. Rose’s Facebook message had already fielded a blitz of replies that ended in question marks or puzzled-face emojis.
‘So, sixteenth anniversary on Saturday. That’s silver hollowware, by the way. Like a teapot. If you’d killed her on your wedding day, you’d be out of prison and a free man by now.’
He turned his chair. Hovering far too close was Louise, twenty-six going on fifteen with two oblivious-to-each-other boyfriends, and a habit of shoplifting cosmetics. Chris stood in order to hide the screen.
‘Dobbo, you done that shift swap form yet? You’re my last hope, remember?’ Louise asked, tapping at her lower lip with a forefinger. It was her bizarre version of fluttering the eyelids.
‘I’ll sort it.’
‘And while you’re not busy, order me an urgent BDMAX Enterics kit.’
He gave her a thumbs up and she meandered away.
Still hopeful the computer could shed light, Chris delved into Medway, the national system, and found an abundance of historical information about Eve Levine. Every test performed, treatment given, appointment made, the works. Even her GP’s name. All to do with her cancer, because anything much older wouldn’t have been transferred from dusty cardboard to digital yet. But what he wanted was her address.
The Blue Swan, Shipley, Bradford.
It stirred something deep down, almost lost within his memory banks, like a mild bout of déjà vu.
A quick scan down the list of websites containing ‘The Blue Swan’ paid a jackpot. A newspaper article, dated fifteen months ago, about a charity fun day held in the beer garden of The Blue Swan pub. And Eve Levine was pictured surrounded by playing kids, although none clung to her or otherwise appeared to be her daughter. She was standing with a thick-set middle-aged man with a completely bald head and a boxer’s twisted nose. The photo’s caption was ‘Eve and Ron, proprietors of The Blue Swan public house in Bradford’.
He zoomed in with shaking fingers, cutting Ron Hugill and the children out of the image. Amongst fun day revellers, Eve posed in a dress that hung on her bone-thin frame. So she already had cancer chewing her up from the inside out. Short hair, no style, messy: a cut designed only for comfort, and screaming that there was no one in her life to impress. Forty years old, so only a couple of years his senior, but while he still had youthful brown hair and very few lines on his face, she was grey and wrinkled. Good health and humorous times had kept him fresh, but Eve looked like she had been through the wringer. A clearly fake smile added to the impression that her life had been one of far fewer fun days than miserable ones.
The note flashed through his mind again.
I know what you did to Eve Levine.
But he wasn’t responsible for what had happened to this woman. He couldn’t be. Could he? Even if one look at Eve’s wasted face showed him features he knew he’d seen before.
* * *
On the way home, Chris stopped to buy a whiteboard. Hopefully, remembering would win him brownie points with Rose. On the corner of his street, the Swift sons, strapping twenty-year-old university rugby players, were finally get
ting around to fixing their garden fence, which some idiot had cut down with his car late at night two Saturdays ago. Chris waved as he passed.
As soon as he stepped through his front door, a heavy tension burst from his chest in a thick, loud sigh. He hadn’t realised how worked up he’d been. Someone who might have bad intentions knew where he lived, and by extension, where his wife and daughter slept, too. But Chris was blind and deaf to his enemy. They could be anyone. They were a stranger, and according to Chris’s Facebook profile all but 217 of the 6 billion people in the world were strangers to him. They existed in the aisles of the local supermarket, in the corridors of his hospital, on the pavements criss-crossing the city. They were everywhere, the world across, infesting it, and he couldn’t get from A to B without crossing their paths. His enemy could just as easily get to him in the town centre in broad daylight as in his bedroom during the dead hours. And Chris wouldn’t know the face of that enemy until it was too late.