Perfect Stranger: A gripping psychological thriller with nail-biting suspense

by Jake Cross

  Eve Levine’s arm went back and forth between her lap and her mouth, fingers clutching a pill on the way up but empty on the return journey. The room was dim, curtains drawn against sunlight, perhaps because a bright day would kill the black mood needed for the act of ending your own life. Dozens of dolls were scattered around the bedroom, and scattered was an appropriate word because they weren’t sitting or leaning or propped, as ornaments should be. They were jammed in corners and draped across books and littering the floor, as if tossed like confetti, or a major earthquake had struck. And there wasn’t a whole one he could see, either. They were in various stages of construction or deconstruction, or dismemberment – that was a better word. Legs here, arms there, heads all over the place. No earthquake had painted this scene.

  The woman was in a nightgown, sitting up with her back against a wad of pillows, with pale and emaciated legs poking out. Dead centre of the bed, because the man who’d shared that bed had stopped doing so. Chris didn’t recognise her against the memories in his head. She didn’t even resemble the shambolic woman pictured at a charity fun day.

  Her only movement was that arm. Up and down, robotically, like a captivated cinemagoer automatically crunching popcorn. It was like watching a looping piece of short film, except for one minor change: the pile of pills next to a bottle on her lap slowly shrank, one at a time. Her eyes were looking beyond him, so maybe, instead of lost in a trance, she was transfixed by something he couldn’t see, something beyond the camera.

  Twelve pills in, something changed. A glitch in the looped film reel. Her piston-like arm popped a pill and then those gnarly fingers spread over her face. She lowered her head as she rubbed her nose and eyes. Then she raised her head, seemed to yawn and laughed at something. And that was it. The loop resumed.

  The loop glitched again at nineteen pills, and twenty-one, and twenty-four, and for a final time at thirty pills. Two pills later, the pile was gone, and the empty bottle was slapped off the bed, as if she blamed it for her lethal act. She shuffled forward, a supreme effort that made her grimace, then toppled backwards onto the pillows. Bony arms dragged the thick quilt up to her neck, which was also a great effort, and then she relaxed. He saw the quilt deflate as she released a heavy sigh from the exertion of moving. Or maybe it had been a breath of relief, of happiness, because the only task she had left in life was to greet the darkness.

  Twenty-Six

  In the Manor, he didn’t even sit before his first drink. He upended the whiskey bottle and took a giant swig. Throwing his head back cracked it on a wooden rafter, but it didn’t interrupt his guzzling. He stopped for a breath only when the fire in his throat became too much. Then he sat, hard enough to hear a crack from the plastic chair.

  He wasn’t drinking to blot the shock but simply to sleep. And it worked because one second he was swallowing whiskey, and the next he was groggy and hearing what he thought was sniffling. He realised he’d fallen asleep.

  He went to the trapdoor. Now the sniffling was definitely that. Rose, he knew. Upset. He slapped his pocket, realised he’d left his phone in the bedroom and got hit by a wave of dread. Now he understood.

  Sure enough, he entered the dark bedroom to find Rose sitting up, crying softly, and with his phone in her hands. Its bright light displayed her grim expression. He had left the phone unlocked, screen lit up, and it must not have gone to sleep. She must have woken to see it alive and bright and displaying what he saw now.

  The media player on his device showed a symbol of a square inside a circle, backdropped by the final frame of the suicide video. Eve lying, unmoving, with a big STOP symbol planted across her. He wished he’d deleted it.

  She sensed him at the doorway and turned her head, which cast half of her face in shadow. ‘Where did you get this?’

  Even now he was unsure why he had set his phone to record the video as it played on the laptop. ‘Katie had it on a disc.’

  She didn’t ask why. Only one person could answer that question. She wiped her eyes one at a time with the same palm. The other still held the phone before her face.

  He got into bed and lay back, stared at the darkness above, and willed himself to talk in order to ease his wife. But she got there first.

  ‘She was with Eve, wasn’t she? At the end.’

  He remembered what Katie had said about that night: how she’d pottered about, doing housework, and while I did this my mother was killing herself ten feet above me…

  But when he started to relay this story, she stopped him.

  ‘No, Chris. I mean she was with Eve. She was in the room. Eve is talking to someone.’

  He sat up. She moved closer to him, arm touching his, and restarted the video. He couldn’t not watch as Eve returned to life for yet another go at death.

  The first time she spoke was when nineteen pills were gone. The second of what he’d called glitches in the loop.

  Nineteen pills.

  Eve flicks a glance to her left, beyond the camera, something there having caught her attention. A pause. Something happening behind that camera. A pause, and then Eve’s mouth moves.

  ‘She said no,’ Rose said. He agreed. Eve had said no to someone. To Katie?

  Twenty-one pills.

  Eve puts her face in her hands, and he can see her jaw moving. More words spoken into her palms. Not a yawn, as he first suspected. Words, the last of which is uttered as she lifts her face to the camera.

  ‘Ron,’ Rose said. ‘She’s saying “Ron”.’

  He agreed.

  Twenty-four pills.

  ‘It looks like “And his whole family”,’ Rose interpreted.

  And that final utterance, at thirty pills, while staring past the camera.

  ‘“Let’s hope you find your real father, then”,’ according to Rose.

  He could hardly believe it, but there it was: undeniable proof that Katie hadn’t been in another room, dismayed but accepting of her mother’s suicide. She’d been right there with her. Had helped her commit suicide.

  As if reading his thoughts, Rose said, ‘There’s no indication that she helped. She might have felt forced.’

  He didn’t know enough to have an opinion on that.

  ‘She stayed out of range of the camera,’ Rose said. ‘I think someone edited the video to remove the audio.’

  ‘Remove the audio? But why?’

  ‘I think Eve probably didn’t want to be alone at the end. If she was in pain, suffering, nothing to look forward to, and Katie agreed it was for the best, maybe she felt compelled to be there for the final moments. But there’s laws against assisting suicide, and it probably counts as assisting if you intentionally don’t stop someone. I think that’s why Katie took out the audio. So no one would know Eve wasn’t alone when she died.’

  He couldn’t get his head around any of this. Too many questions circled his brain.

  ‘But why film it at all?’

  Sitting up to look downwards at the video had hurt Rose’s neck, so she rubbed it. Two hands. The phone got placed face down on the bed. They were in utter darkness.

  ‘Maybe for proof that Eve chose to take her own life.’

  Katie was worried the police might suspect foul play? ‘But nobody has seen this video, Rose. The police don’t have it. They’d question the lack of audio. They’d see what you saw – that someone was there. It would look bad.’

  ‘Then I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe, right at the end of her life, when it was about to happen, Katie realised she didn’t have any videos of her mother. Maybe Katie insisted on filming… something. Having something to keep.’

  ‘But, like you said, this must be illegal.’

  She put a hand on his shoulder. In the dark, blind, she caught his ear first. ‘Is this your worry? That Katie will be revealed to be your daughter and then she’ll go to prison?’

  He shrugged and sighed, because he just didn’t know. He told her he was trying to avoid thinking that far ahead. That he didn’t like anything he was feelin
g right now.

  ‘How do you feel about the euthanasia? It means “good death” in Greek.’

  ‘And how on earth do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He grabbed the hand on his shoulder and began massaging her misshapen knuckles. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t euthanasia. Assisted suicide, if anything,’

  ‘Does the law see a difference, though?’ she said. ‘It’s not the same as killing a sick pet at the vet’s. It’ll be a blow if you get a new daughter and you have to visit her in prison. That video goes against her. She’s obviously there. The police—’

  He dropped her hand. ‘Look, we don’t know what happened in that bedroom, okay? Maybe Katie stood by helplessly, forced to watch. Maybe Eve needed her to control the camera. Maybe Katie agreed suicide was for the best, or maybe she tried to talk her mother out of it. I don’t know and neither do you. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, okay?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She turned away. He did the same, so they were back-to-back but two feet apart. He doubted either of them would sleep.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘What’s up?’ Rose said.

  She sat up sharply as he rolled over in bed, clutching at his leg. His muscle was cramping which often happened if he stretched his legs after sleep. He beat at his calf with karate chops. Rose quickly realised what was happening and rolled her eyes at him. She took his calf and massaged it in both hands, which probably hurt her.

  ‘Damn stupid dream about dolls,’ he said once the spasm had subsided and he could think about something other than pain. ‘They rained out of the sky and filled the streets.’

  Rose grabbed her e-cigarette. ‘Not sure that caused the cramp. But I had a funny one about buying a car with Boris Karloff. Anyway, we should get ready.’ She patted his bad leg and got up and slipped into the en suite. He watched her naked figure walk away until it was gone.

  In the night, he had felt Rose’s touch, and her lips. And responded. Afterwards, without a word said, both had quickly found sleep. The sex must have had a medicinal quality, or it was the new, bright day, because he felt little of the dark disposition of last night. Clearly, Rose felt the same. It was as if the whole shebang with the suicide video had been a shared dream quickly written off. It wasn’t, of course, so he’d have to see how his emotions held up when he encountered Katie, and as the day progressed.

  ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ Rose called out above the noise of the shower. ‘Katie. She’s not your daughter yet. Or if she wasn’t. Do you think she looks pretty?’

  He got up and walked to the window. ‘No. I don’t think anything like that about her. Why?’

  No answer to that. A few seconds passed and then she said, ‘Talking of dreams. You dream, like, based on things that happened a day or two before. I watched that Boris Karloff film a couple back, didn’t I? Freud called it day residue.’

  Of the two horror films she’d recently watched, a Boris Karloff movie had stuck? Then again, he’d dreamed about a downpour of plastic dolls smashing cars and holing roofs and crushing skulls. He looked out at his car, at the street. No dolls, of course. Day residue. Because of the doll he’d seen above the door of The Blue Swan, probably.

  ‘Don’t wear that River Island shirt because it’s missing a button, okay?’ Rose called out.

  Realisation hit him like a slap. Eve Levine’s funeral! This morning. He’d forgotten all about it, somehow.

  ‘Christ.’

  Rose poked her head out the doorway, hair soaked. ‘You forgot, didn’t you?’

  He ignored the question. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  She shook her head and vanished back into the bathroom. ‘You’re a little wimp at times.’

  ‘And I don’t want to write a speech.’

  She was still naked, and wet and glistening when she came out the bathroom. ‘I’ll help you with it. Wimp.’ She donned her dressing gown and opened the wardrobe. He was glad she seemed buoyant and the arthritis didn’t seem to have a chokehold this morning.

  ‘It’s today, Rose, and we haven’t got the paternity results. What am I supposed to say? Katie might not be my kid.’

  ‘It’s not about her, it’s about Eve. And Eve you were definitely connected to, shared daughter or not. Talk about her. Here, think it’s okay to wear this one?’ She held up a red and black dress that he didn’t ever recall her wearing or even buying.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Eve was a woman I knew briefly. She was sweet and lovely and a moment of passion has eternally bound us.’

  ‘I dare you.’ She shook the dress at him with a frown.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, that dress is fine. Look, help me out here. I don’t know what to say. I barely knew her and it was years ago.’

  She hung the dress off the door. ‘Lord. I’ll write it. Tell me some of the things you found captivating about her. I don’t want you embarrassing yourself in front of Katie.’

  ‘Too late.’

  Twenty-Seven

  To Whom It May Concern,

  * * *

  I am hoping to get a replacement trophy. You made one for an Under-7s go-karting establishment. It was Rider of the Year for someone called Katie Levine. This would have been in about 2007 or slightly before. Can you help?

  * * *

  Thanking you in advance,

  * * *

  Christopher Redfern

  * * *

  Email sent to Cooper & Sons Ltd, Chris headed downstairs. The rolled-up sleeping bag on the sofa told him that Katie was out. The notebook was gone. In the kitchen, he found Rose at the table with a big smile on her face and pointing at the fridge door. Years ago, they’d bought Julia a bag of magnetic letters and he’d thought them long gone. But no. Except all the Os, it seemed.

  Gine fetch car fixed washer surry late nite uwt mther huse cllect stuff! Fixed washer t wash em

  That explained why Katie had gone out in the dead hours. Had she gone to The Blue Swan to collect her belongings?

  ‘That’s cool, right?’

  She meant the fridge message.

  ‘Easier to use the whiteboard,’ he said, which he knew was a bit childish.

  Now she pointed at the washing machine. Fixed indeed, because it was on a cycle.

  ‘Isn’t she just brilliant?’ Rose said.

  ‘She didn’t put the whiteboard up, though, did she?’

  The sarcasm was misplaced because it was a good thing that Rose had taken to Katie; all sorts of tension could exist if she hated her. But for some reason her morning glee grated on him. Maybe it was because he’d been promising to get the washer fixed for two weeks now and someone else had beaten him there. A man-pride thing. Whatever. He was annoyed.

  ‘And she did the tree root. Maybe she can get a new ladder installed for the attic.’

  Never. ‘It’s a shame she’s not a bloke, because otherwise you two could have had a glorious white bloody wedding.’

  One second she was virtually dancing on air, and the next she gave him a clock-stopping look and stormed out of the room. A wrecking ball of guilt instantly demolished his anger. He found her at the bedroom wall mirror, plucking her eyebrows, which was something she did when angry. He’d often referred to it as self-harm for the vain.

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘You should be sorry,’ she said. ‘That could be your daughter and you’re acting like she’s in the way.’

  He apologised again, and she tossed down the tweezers. She’d only plucked one eyebrow, so either she’d cooled or her fingers were hurting. He kissed her cheek and turned to go.

  ‘You need to mention that video to her. The police will need to see it. She needs to show the police. It could hurt her if they find out another way.’

  He nodded. He knew she was right.

  ‘Today, Chris. Has to be today. Perhaps when you go to the pub tonight?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Let’s not mention it until then, and let’s try to be normal around he
r until then. Maybe there was no way she could have stopped her mother taking those tablets. It might have been a long decision, carefully thought out, and we don’t know what kind of pain Eve was in.’

  A final nod.

  Rose ran a finger down her nose. Like Julia’s, it was slightly hooked. ‘Think I should do some plastic surgery? I could have a nose like Katie’s. It’s so petite. Was Eve’s the same? Was it what drew you to her?’

  Before he could utter the sheer bewilderment he felt at this strange utterance, Rose turned from the mirror and waved a hand. ‘Ignore me, I’m being silly. Come on, let’s go.’

  Downstairs, they got breakfast and awaited Julia. Chris had finished his cereal before she arrived, locked up with her phone. He was about to complain about her rudeness when his own phone beeped.

  ‘Katie’s got a car for the funeral. She’ll be back in half an hour.’

  ‘Why does she want a car?’ Julia said. ‘Does she not want to travel with us?’

  ‘I don’t know. Thinking time, maybe.’

  ‘No problem,’ Rose said. ‘Half an hour, so let’s hurry and eat and get ready, boys and girls.’

  They were chowing down only for seconds when Julia, through a mouthful, noticed the washer on a cycle. ‘Hey, you fixed the “useless bastard”, Dad. About time.’

  Rose almost spat her breakfast across the table. ‘Language, miss. Katie fixed the washer, not your father.’

  ‘How come she’s staying with us, anyway? I mean, I like it. She’s nice and she’s not at my college, so we’ve got more than just studies to chat about, but I’m curious.’

  ‘It’s just for a short time,’ Rose said. ‘Katie is waiting for a letter that she’s got coming here.’

  She gave him a solicitous look. Is that okay? A pretty inert statement, he felt.