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

by Jake Cross

  ‘Imagine if it was Julia who got—’

  ‘Piss off. It’s not Julia. She’s been with…’

  She tapered off, obviously realising she was about to say the wrong thing. Too late, though.

  ‘I know, I know. If Katie is my daughter, it means I wasn’t there to prevent this. I wasn’t around to stop her getting abused. I ran away, and a sick bastard got hold of him. Trust me, I feel like a shit because of that.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said, but her tone said she was unconvinced by her own claim.

  He threw his phone down. ‘If Katie is my daughter, I’m not going to let this lie. No way.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just… finding this man… that’s no answer. It’s in history. Leave it there. Katie has moved on.’

  He turned off his bedside lamp, turned away from her.

  But a few seconds later, she said, ‘I need to tell you something about Katie. Something Julia said Katie told her. I don’t know how you will feel about this. I didn’t really want to bring it up. But I think she might need help. Mentally.’

  He didn’t turn towards her, but after a few seconds he said, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It’s about why Katie thinks her hands and feet tingle.’

  ‘Paraesthesia,’ he said. ‘Julia already told me she told Katie that. B-12 deficiency. I saw Katie drink salt water to get rid of a metallic taste in her mouth, which can happen with low B-12.’

  ‘No, it’s not that, Chris.’

  ‘You got a metallic taste a couple of days after getting pregnant with Julia, remember, and you had salt water to—’

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Face me, Chris.’

  And he did. But when she started to explain, she found she couldn’t meet his eyes. When Katie was a young girl, she smashed a vase with a small bouncy ball. She was forced to eat that rubber ball. It went into her body. It never came back out. Instead, it lived inside her, still bouncing, still causing damage. Across days and weeks and months, it flattened veins, it broke tendons and it smashed bones. Over the years, bits of flesh and bone and coagulated blood pummelled loose by the rubber ball floated about inside her, and gravity took them into her extremities. Her fingers and toes. Her hands and feet tingled because they were clogged up.

  When it was told, Chris said nothing, and he remained turned away. But his chest rose and fell faster with quickened breathing.

  Rose put her hand on his shoulder. ‘We can get her help for that, if she’s your daughter.’

  ‘And sod her if she’s not, you mean?’

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that, Chris. That’s not fair.’

  He didn’t respond and heard her turn away from him, and felt her tug the covers to get comfortable. He shuffled so their warm backs were touching. His way of apologising. She pressed back. Her way of accepting it.

  Sleep didn’t come easily that night. Chris had worried about many things concerning Katie, but not this. Apart from one moment when he wondered if Katie had been that radiographer’s Chiclet patient, this had never occurred to him. That he might inherit a daughter with serious mental illness. What if he couldn’t handle the emotional baggage?

  Chris buried his head under the pillow. There was no sand.

  Eventually, Chris did manage sleep, but only briefly. He awoke and immediately wondered why. He didn’t need the toilet, Rose wasn’t snoring, and he wondered if an unknown noise had kicked him out. Possibly just Katie moving about downstairs, if so. But he had to know. He shuffled to the door and poked his head out. Immediately he noticed the attic trapdoor hanging down. And then he heard a voice from above.

  ‘… Stepped into the light washing the steps, crouching to be seen…’

  It was Katie, of course, not a burglar. He wanted to call out, but something told him to listen some more. So he stepped out, avoiding the part of the floor that creaked. He stood below the trap, looking up, seeing the light. The voice said something else, but he only caught a part of it:

  ‘… Always dark because there was no sun…’

  Chris quickly opened Julia’s door and grabbed her wash basket, a sturdy plastic thing. Back under the trap, he placed it upside down.

  ‘… I had patience though, because I had spent hours and hours here, over days and days…’

  What? Katie had been in the Manor many times? Chris got on the basket. As he struggled to be quiet, to balance, he missed most of Katie’s whispering. But as he squatted on the wash basket, and finally took a slow breath so needed by his thumping chest, he heard more.

  ‘… I know you’re down there…’

  At first, he thought he’d been rumbled and considered fleeing back to his bedroom. But this was his house. So he stood up, head above the trap, and prepared to say What the hell are you doing? But what he witnessed locked up his throat.

  The chair was for relaxing, but Katie was a world away from such a thing. Feet up on the seat, head between her knees. One arm was hooked under a knee. Her blonde hair was loose, wild, and her fingers were fisted in it pulling, forcing her head down, as if she was trying to fold herself into a ball. He knew he hadn’t been heard. She was still talking in that loud mumble.

  ‘… The monster stepped into the light—’

  Mid-sentence, she stopped. Her feet hit the floor with a thump. Thinking she’d sensed his presence, Chris ducked. He clambered off the wash basket as he heard the creak of footsteps above.

  He scuttled quickly into his room and closed the door, quietly. He was in bed seconds later, and debating whether or not to wake Rose to explain what he’d just experienced. But he left her to sleep.

  What had he just observed? A symptom of mental illness? Self-harm? He was no expert on either. For all he knew, it had been an ancient and exotic exercise routine. Despite the strange things she’d said, maybe there was a logical and rational explanation, so he knew his best response was to wait and see. The daylight hours might deliver answers. The pair of them might be laughing about this come breakfast time.

  Still, he balanced Rose’s phone on the door handle, so it would fall and make a noise if someone tried to enter.

  Thirty-Five

  When Chris woke, his first thought was if the strange behaviour he’d witnessed last night had been a dream, or he’d misread it with a sleepy brain. Rose was still out like a light. His phone said it was 6.32. It was still dark out in the second-to-last month of the year. He decided that he would wake Katie and have a chat, because a little bit of normalcy would help him to forget the scene in the Manor last night.

  Unable to remember if he turned Rose in the night, he did it now and then headed out. He nearly walked into Julia’s wash basket. Shit, it was still upended under the trap, which was now shut. Katie couldn’t have missed it when she climbed down. She would know why it was there. Chris had been rumbled after all. Now that chat was inevitable.

  Katie was already up, eating cereal at the kitchen table. Her hair was again in a bun at the back of her head and she wore a tracksuit. Not one of Chris’s or Rose’s. He strolled in nice and relaxed and patted Katie on the shoulder as he went for a glass of water, and he asked about her clothes. All to show he wasn’t unnerved by last night’s event.

  ‘An old one of mine from Mum’s house,’ Katie said. ‘I went there Thursday night, grabbed a few things. I’ve just been for a jog.’

  ‘How was it, going back there?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was home for a long time. It was okay. I’m getting through it. Listen, I hope you don’t think I was intruding, but I went into your attic last night.’

  That wash basket would be the reason Katie was admitting this. And the reason Chris couldn’t lie.

  ‘I know. I heard the ceiling creaking in the bedroom. I put a makeshift step out for you, because it makes a racket dropping down.’

  ‘I was looking to see if I could sleep up there. You know, to get out of everyone’s way because I’m taking up the living room. And I got relaxed. When I’m relaxed, I like to quote from an old storyboo
k my mum used to read to me as a kid.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any of that, so you didn’t wake anyone. I was awake anyway.’

  They dropped into silence. Katie chewed, Chris drank and considered small talk subjects. Further awkwardness was interrupted by movement and voices upstairs as Rose and Julia met the new day. Chris grabbed a frying pan to make eggs as they filed into the kitchen with sleepy voices and wild hair. They danced around him to get their own breakfasts as he cracked eggs, and nobody gave him strife for having a greasy meal.

  The first egg exploded against the side of the pan and he swore, which raised laughter and applause. Chris took the pan to the bin, but Rose yelled at him.

  ‘What are you doing? That’s a waste.’

  ‘It cracked. The yolk’ll go hard.’

  ‘It’s still an egg. All the yolk is still there.’

  Through a mouthful of cheese spread scooped straight from the carton by a finger, Julia said, ‘That’s sixty boxes of eggs a year wasted if you toss one egg a day.’ She waved her phone to show she’d accessed the calculator in the blink of an eye.

  That started something. Rose put her hand on Julia’s shoulder, forming a tag-team. ‘Just think of the farmer who picked it, and the people who packaged it, and the driver who delivered it, and the Tesco staff who put it on the shelf. All that hard work wasted.’

  ‘And we haven’t even got round to Third World starvation yet.’

  ‘Get lost,’ Chris said. He was still standing over the bin, frying pan in hand. He motioned to tip the dead egg out, but it got a chorus of moans.

  Rose said, ‘Remember those alternate universe branches. If you cook another egg, you’ll be a minute behind for the rest of the day. If you’re driving to work and you see a crash behind you, just think about how you would have been back there and caught up in it. And then we’d all be sad.’

  ‘So an egg is somehow going to save this family sorrow and heartache?’

  Julia furrowed her brow at this. Rose laughed. Katie just watched. Chris relented and put the pan back on the hob. A minute later, he was at the table with everybody else, and eggs had been replaced as a subject of conversation. But he bristled and couldn’t help himself.

  ‘It’s not a waste of their hard work, by the way. Their work was rewarded when we bought the box. They don’t get paid when I eat.’

  All three rolled their eyes. Katie had been watching the show with intrigue and now offered her first remark on the subject. ‘True, Chris, true, nobody loses out if you don’t eat the egg you bought. Except the chicken. Not her ideal dream for her little boy to be eaten. But at least he’s serving a purpose now. Little Sammy thanks you for not binning him because he wasn’t what you wanted.’

  Rose and Julia nodded like her damn backing singers.

  Chris said, ‘It’s not little Sammy. It’s just a bloody egg.’

  Julia said, ‘How about human eggs, Dad? Sometimes they don’t cook right, so are you saying the government should get rid of disabled? It’s not 1940s Germany.’

  The humorous atmosphere stammered as everyone failed to work out whether Julia was trying to be funny. Annoyed, Chris got up with the last of his toast smeared in crappy solid egg yolk and stomped out of the room. He knew it was childish, but he didn’t care.

  The timing of his puerile exit was perfect, though, because he was two seconds into the living room when he got a Messenger call from Lionel Parrott.

  ‘Cops found Louise,’ he said. ‘Beaten within an inch of her life.’

  Chris’s mouth moved only to chew crap egg. He let Lionel ramble. Lionel was happy to do so, because he’d been calling everyone from work about this story.

  An online newspaper in Louise’s area had run the story on their website, which Lionel subscribed to. A reporter for that publication had been headed to his other place of work and had spotted the cop cars and crime scene vans on the street. The whole scene was packaged up like a Christmas present. But the cops were saying nothing, so the guy loaded up his laptop and wrote a story with the blanks filled neatly in. In that version, unknown intruders, perhaps as many as five, broke in and raped and killed the Bible-worshipping family inside. The reporter was boastful about using this trick to scare a young and naïve cop guarding the gate into giving up the truth: lone young female occupant, beaten badly in her kitchen. Comatose, no obvious sexual assault, no stolen items. Boyfriend claimed he found her when he popped by. Maybe he did, but he was down the station giving up his skin cells because there was no forced entry and that suggested she knew her attacker. She’d opened the door to him. The police were lurking around Doncaster Royal Infirmary in the hope that she’d emerge from that coma and provide a description. Or a name.

  Chris said, ‘So they think he did it?’

  ‘We all thought she’d been off because of that patient who died,’ Lionel said. ‘I guess you can stop worrying about that. She was probably off work because of this boyfriend. Some long-term argument that came to a head. So that Enterics kit mess-up had nothing to do with this. Everyone’s gone on to her Facebook to leave messages. You going to?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You okay, man? I know this is a shock.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll chat later, okay? I’ve got to call some others about this.’

  ‘So the cops definitely think it’s the boyfriend? They’re not looking for anyone else?’

  ‘Looks that way, I’m afraid. But, hey, that’s not why I called. Can you bring some milk for the fridge? Later, dude.’

  Chris put down his phone and crunched more toast. He put Louise out of his mind when he heard the mail thump through the letterbox. He didn’t dare move. He heard someone scrape the letters off the hallway tiles, and then Rose appeared in the doorway.

  She held a letter up.

  ‘Results.’

  Thirty-Six

  Not an ideal place, but they needed to be away from Julia. In the bathroom, Rose looked from Katie to Chris, knowing each wanted to see the reaction of the other before showing their feelings to what she’d just read out. Nobody moved.

  ‘It’s that bum chin you both have. Now hug, silly people.’ She pushed them both together.

  Official, then. Father and daughter.

  She knew the hug might be an uncomfortable affair, but she’d thrown them at one another so she could slip out of the bathroom unnoticed. They needed time alone, but to be honest, she needed the same in order to let her own emotions adjust. That letter, that result, had officially announced that Katie Levine was going to be a big part of her life now, for a long, long time. She’d spent days picturing this moment, analysing it, breathing and believing it, and had concluded that she was prepared for the scales to tip either way. But now it was here, real, in her face, and she didn’t know how to feel. Although she felt regret that she’d told Chris she hoped Katie wasn’t his because she wasn’t hers. Hopefully he wouldn’t remember.

  She sat in the living room and stared at the letter, and at Katie’s stern face on the driving licence attached to it. A 99.998 per cent probability that Chris was the biological father. Undeniable, but that made acceptance no easier to swallow. She knew time would help. Or hoped so.

  She dropped the letter and went back upstairs, but not to see Katie and Chris. She wanted to be alone. She stopped halfway up the stairs, in a dead zone where she couldn’t hear Julia below or Chris and Katie above. There, she sat and stared at a family picture on the wall. A photo from three years ago, taken at their garden table. Three of them in a circle, fixated on the camera, drinks before them, green grass below, blue sky and hot sun way above. The memory of that day stirred a warmth in her belly – did that mean something?

  It was a four-seater table.

  It had meant nothing at the time, of course – it was simply a spare chair that Chris had assembled in case another broke, and nobody made three-seater tables. Now, though, that empty chair looked like a void, as if someone had been airbrushed into nothingness. Or, conversely
, like a hint, as if something heavenly had sent her a forecast. She imagined Katie in that empty seat to see how it affected the picture. It didn’t look right, and it didn’t look wrong. She was still undecided.

  She wiped away a tear as Julia appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  In her hands was the letter.

  Chris and Katie came out of the bathroom, laughing about something, but they stopped when they saw Rose on the bed, with Julia lying with her head in her mother’s lap. Rose made a motion that meant close the door. Katie looked puzzled, but Chris, in tune, granted her wish. Rose heard her husband tell Katie they should go downstairs and wait. She could hear a deadness in his voice, as if he’d been concussed. Well, he had, hadn’t he?

  ‘When I said all those years ago that I wished I had company in the house, I meant a dog,’ Julia said, giggling. Rose stroked her daughter’s brow.

  Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. A few seconds later, she spoke again.

  ‘If there’s something in your will about a bonus for the eldest child, that’s got to change.’ Another joke, a typical Redfern reaction to shock. Rose remained silent, still willing to wait.

  Another half minute passed in silence, then Julia said, ‘She’s not taking the top if we have to get bunk beds in my bedroom.’ Another laugh.

  Again, Rose silently waited for her daughter’s emotions to acclimatise to the new atmosphere. Julia got up and walked to the window. ‘They’re in the garden. My dad and my sister, who I barely know but is taller, and older than me by a few weeks.’ She paused. ‘Since it’s a day for big news, I have some. Think you’re ready?’

  ‘Is this about how you like girls?’

  Julia’s jaw dropped.

  ‘I’ve suspected for a while, Julia. Mums can sense things. Now you can relax and stop hiding it.’