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

by Jake Cross

  Her hand lay on top of his. He waited for her to lift his, but she didn’t. She left it right there on her flesh. And hers atop it. He didn’t realise how tense he was until he relaxed and his head sank two inches deeper into the pillow.

  In the morning. Then he would tell her the entire truth, and together they would deal with a transformed and painful future.

  * * *

  At ten to midnight, Julia made her exit. She chose the back door, because the key for that was left in the lock. She left the door unlocked, figuring that burglars wouldn’t be skulking in the back of beyond. It was a ten-minute walk to Mr Jernigan’s house, so she took the old bike in the back garden. It creaked, so she carried it to the main track before climbing on.

  The going was rough because of stones and gouges from car tyres, and the rain was softening the miniature hills and valleys into muddy plains, but her adrenaline was flowing and the sweat on her skin felt good, and the rain kept her from overheating. It was a tough, long ride. She hoped Donna didn’t mind a little female stink.

  Mr Jernigan’s house had a light on in the living room, so she decided to forego her promise to wait at the foam boulder. Instead, she continued up the track fifty metres, where she found a tree stump that made a nice seat. She laid the bike in the undergrowth and sat, holding her warm phone between both hands.

  No message yet from Donna. But if she was driving, then—

  A noise in the woods, behind her. The crack of still-dry wood snapping, so familiar from a thousand horror films. Someone stepping on a fallen twig. She stood and turned, and stared. The light from her phone had killed her night vision, so it took a few seconds for her eyes to make out a squat black shape against the tall, thin trees. Someone there, twenty metres away. Rain was bouncing off its shoulders.

  It raised a hand, and waved. She waved back.

  ‘Donna? Where’s your car?’

  Donna tripped and fell forward. Stifling a laugh, Julia moved into the woods. She had to sidestep around a tree because of a tangled foliage patch ahead, and in the instant her vision was blocked by thick black wood, Donna had got to her feet. On the ground one moment, upright the next, like a pair of images in a flick book.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Julia said, and turned her phone to illuminate her friend.

  And then she tripped. She landed hard, but on twigs and sodden leaves, and it didn’t hurt at all. In fact, she laughed, even though her phone skipped out of her hands.

  Donna stepped closer as Julia got to her knees and reached for her bright phone.

  ‘Well, it’s not happening under the starlight,’ Julia said. And she held out her hand to meet the two reaching for her.

  But they didn’t take her hand.

  They slipped past, and grabbed her head.

  ‘You came here for a party, little bitch-ass. So let’s have one.’

  The horror pulsed like something electric, something painful. Not Donna at all – that powerful grip, that rugged voice: a man.

  She tried to get to her feet, and that happened easily because the figure yanked her up, but she also tried to turn and run, and that didn’t work because it still had hold of her head in both hands.

  One hand let go, and then she did turn, because the figure spun her. She tried to move forward, towards the track, towards freedom, but was jerked backwards instead, and then a hand clamped over her mouth.

  Forty-Seven

  One thing nobody out in the boondocks wants is a late-night noise in the house. Chris jerked into a sitting position to find Rose already awake and staring at him.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Julia,’ he said aloud. He dearly hoped he was right. She’d been the only one awake when he went to bed. The good news was that he stuck his head out and saw her bedroom door wide open. The bad news was that—

  ‘Her phone’s going straight to voicemail!’ He turned to see Rose with her phone at her illuminated ear.

  ‘Maybe it’s out of charge,’ he said, but he knew, absolutely knew he was wrong. Rose’s look said the same. Julia never put her mobile out of reach. To do so, she had once said, was like disconnecting yourself from the world. The phone hung in her pocket in the shops, lay on her pillow at night, and sat on the side of the bath while she soaked. She even had a portable charger in case it got low on juice. He had never known her to let her phone go flat. Ever. There was more chance of getting no answer from the emergency services than from Julia.

  ‘Maybe you accidentally blocked all numbers on her phone,’ Rose whispered. That calmed him a little, despite Rose’s accusing tone. ‘Check downstairs.’

  He dressed while she slipped into a bathrobe, and they both went to the top of the stairs, in the dark. Light would have helped, but it would expose that people were awake if a stranger was in the house. Instead, he padded quietly but quickly down the stairs. Rose was right behind him.

  A small window in the front door splashed a ray of moonlight onto the bottom of the stairs, and he quickly rushed through the beam as if it were burning hot. Rose, again, was right on his backside.

  Down the short hall, but slower this time, dead quiet, listening for more sounds. Somehow, it was worse that there was nothing to hear. No TV, no voice, no noise of something cooking. He knew, dead centre of his thudding heart, that Julia wasn’t in the house.

  But someone was.

  He pushed open the door to the living room and slapped the light switch, all in one movement, no pause, still moving forward.

  But then he froze.

  Rose crashed into him.

  There was someone in black clothing sitting on the sofa, facing them, and aiming a gun.

  * * *

  ‘In the stolen car, abandoned when a fugitive attacked police with a machete on Wednesday night, there was a £20 note with a bloody fingerprint,’ Chris said. ‘The police traced it because it might belong to another victim. And got a match. To me. They came to see me at the hospital. But the bloody print wasn’t blood. It was a dye called neutral red which is used for staining samples in the microbiology lab. On Monday I was using that dye and it put my thumbprint on that £20 note. The same note that was in my wallet when it was stolen on a dark road on Monday night. By Dominic Everton.’

  The figure behind the gun said nothing. Rose, shaking her head, muttered, ‘I don’t understand, Chris. Please, what’s going on? Where’s Julia?’

  ‘Katie’s bogus father’s killer, her real father, and Katie herself, by sheer coincidence all together on that sliver of the planet at that exact moment? She set it all up, Rose.’

  Still Katie said nothing.

  Rose looked between her and Chris, numbed by shock, by an inability to digest what she was hearing. She dropped to her knees on the wooden floor, still staring at that gun in Katie’s hand. It was the detail that twisted everything into an incomprehensible mess.

  ‘What’s he saying, Katie? Is it true? Where’s my Julia?’

  But Katie continued her silence. She just watched, intrigued.

  ‘Rose, all along she’s been in league with the two men who killed Ron Hugill. She had Ron killed. She set up that robbery so she could play hero and get into our lives. And she sent Everton to our house tonight. We were supposed to think Everton had hurt her and that he’d come for us. But I suspect she would have arrived in the nick of time yet again. She would save us from a murderous fugitive and we’d all be together for ever, and in awe of the magnificent Katie.’

  Still there was no emotion from Katie. Rose had to plant a hand on the floor to avoid crashing down dead-weight. Chris stepped forward to aid her, but in the next moment she leaped to her feet, pain ignored, and launched herself towards Katie, planning Lord knew what. In the nick of time he grabbed a trailing arm and enveloped her, holding her tightly as she struggled to be free.

  ‘Police found our house burned down, Rose, and a body insi—’

  With a wail, she went limp in his arms, instant shutdown, like a computer crashing because of overload. His mind darted back
to his conversation with the police superintendent…

  I was hoping you could answer that. Who burned the house, Mr Redfern? Do you know who’s lying burned to a crisp in your home?

  Katherine Hugill. My daughter.

  Scrambled, he had been answering the superintendent’s first question, not the second. Now realising he was creating the same shudder in Rose that the superintendent had felt before Chris had explained, he turned her face to his.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s not family, it’s Dominic Everton. When Katie found us gone, she got Everton to burn our house down. He died inside. And then she came here to hurt us. I don’t know how she found us, but she did, and she’s taken Julia. I’m so sorry, Rose. I brought a monster into our home, Rose. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s too late for apologies—’ Katie started.

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ he roared over Rose’s head. Putting this woman into his heart had been a sluggish affair, like wading through quicksand, but ejecting her from it took an atomic second. ‘The police know everything, Katie. You’re being hunted. Thin blood binds us, Katie. You are not my daughter.’

  ‘Your own sister, you bitch,’ Rose screamed at her. ‘What have you done to her?’

  Katie stood.

  Chris stepped in front of Rose, partly to shield her, and partly in case she tried something stupid again.

  ‘Julia went to meet a girlfriend,’ Katie said. She arched her spine, as if sitting had hurt. ‘A lady called Donna. Donna doesn’t exist, though. A fake profile. I’m Donna. You didn’t know Julia was a lesbian, did you?’

  He didn’t care about that. But he thought back to when Julia had knocked the key rack off the hook in the hallway. He’d seen her looking at the House Rules poster on the wall. But not actually the rules. The address and postcode for the house. To give to this Donna, so they could arrange a secret woodland meet late at night. He tried not to imagine Julia’s terror when, out of the eerie blackness, Katie had appeared instead of the girl she was meeting. Her own sister, who had then attacked her and done… God knew what.

  ‘If she’s hurt, I’ll kill you,’ Chris said. Quietly.

  ‘She’s not hurt, but that changes if anyone tries anything. Lift the blue rug.’

  The blue rug. Katie knew where the cellar was. He realised she was planning to put Rose down there. But not him. She would have something different planned for him. So he went to the rug and yanked it aside, almost eagerly. It would be dark and cold down there, but his wife would be beyond the reach of that gun.

  ‘Open it,’ Katie said. ‘And help your wife down there. Don’t try anything wacky.’

  Rose shook her head. ‘No, what’s she going to do to you, Chris? No, I’m not going in there. I want Julia.’

  But he threw open the trapdoor then grabbed her under the arms, hauling her to her feet. She kicked liked an abductee, but he was far too strong.

  Katie seemed fascinated by the show.

  ‘No, Chris, no, please, I can’t, she’ll kill you.’

  ‘No, I’ll get Julia back. She’s going to take me to her.’

  She still struggled, but he lifted her right off the floor and carried her. Her thrashing head caught his lip and he felt blood run over his chin. But he didn’t pause. Across the room. Down the cellar stairs. Into a black hole as cold as deep space. All the while, he whispered into her ear promises of a reunited family, oh so soon.

  Rose’s nails raked his back and shoulders as he tore free of her grip. He felt like a monster as he grabbed her painful wrists and forced them towards the pitted concrete floor, which made her fall to her knees.

  ‘Rose, we have to. Please trust me.’

  The fight in her evaporated. She collapsed onto her side, sobbing. The chilly cavern suddenly felt like her grave, as if he was entombing his wife.

  But he had to.

  What little light seeped in from above was blocked as Katie appeared at the top of the stairs, just a silhouette aiming a gun.

  ‘Get out of there, and lock the trapdoor.’

  He kissed the side of Rose’s head, swept her hair off her face and pulled her dressing gown tight around her for warmth. She continued to sob, staring dead ahead, at nothing.

  ‘Everything will be okay, I promise. The next time that trapdoor opens, you’re going to see Julia standing there. Both of us. I swear.’

  Now she looked at him. He wasn’t confident of his promise, but his resolve took a boost by the belief in her wet eyes.

  ‘I love you with everything I have,’ he told her.

  And then he buried her alive.

  Forty-Eight

  The cellar… something about the cellar… but he couldn’t place it.

  He knelt on the trapdoor, creating an additional barrier between Katie and Rose. But Katie ordered him into the kitchen. And he went. The further he was from Rose, the less chance she would hear the gunshot that killed him.

  She followed him into the dark and flicked on the light.

  ‘If you won’t tell me where Julia is, please tell me if she’s hurt?’

  ‘Sit at the far end of the table.’

  Chris took the seat she indicated. Katie took the chair opposite. As she sat, she blocked his view of the cellar trapdoor in the living room. He could finally focus on the woman. She looked pasty, and tired. The eyes were blank. No, cold. On TV, cold was a popular description of the eyes of psychopaths by their victims.

  She laid the gun down on the oak, but kept her finger on the trigger. The barrel pointed across eight feet, right at Chris’s gut. She ordered him to put his hands on the table. Something wildly optimistic inside him clenched them into touching fists, creating a barrier across the bullet’s path.

  ‘Is my Julia hurt?’

  ‘She’s not dead, if that’s what you mean. I told you that.’

  ‘I should believe a single word that comes out of your face, that’s what you think?’

  ‘Antagonising someone with a gun is good, that’s what you think?’

  ‘I think you’re dead inside. I think you have a plan and it doesn’t matter what names I call you.’

  She gave him a thumbs up. ‘There’s a chance you could do something heroic and save Rose, because she’s right here. Just over there, well within reach. But not Julia. You don’t know where she is and it’s going to stay that way until I’ve shown you what I want you to see.’

  Unable to rend flesh from bones, Chris wanted to spit and curse, but he knew that would only waste time. ‘What do you want to show me?’

  ‘It’s not here. We need a short journey. But once you’ve seen, I’ll let you all go. Go free. Just like that. How’s that sound?’

  ‘Is this about Ron Hugill? He was the man who abused you, wasn’t he? You slipped up when you said the abuse happened after Ron got with your mother, and you had to give that lie about her having other boyfriends. Ron abused you, and when you found out he wasn’t your father, you decided it would be fine to kill him in revenge. Using Everton.’

  Katie took time over her answer. ‘The storm in here,’ she tapped her head, ‘is there to stay. I didn’t have a home. I wasn’t a daughter. It was a prison. I was a prisoner.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how you must have suffered.’

  ‘Obviously, with your perfect family. But it wasn’t physical abuse. Mental abuse leaves eternal scars.’

  The act of sympathy became ever-harder as Chris said, ‘I know. Katie, you need help for—’

  ‘One time, though, when I was eleven, I did get hurt, and I was glad. Finally, it was out of my hands. Teachers would see bruises. I was ready to tell everything. I told the story over and over in my head, and I practised it in the mirror. It became like a scene from a novel. I rewrote it and rewrote it, for maximum tension, for intrigue, all those things writers do when they tell a scene. I was eager to tell the story. I couldn’t wait. It would be the end of all my problems.’

  Katie closed her eyes. Chris had to placate a sudden urge to pounce across the table, to snatch that gun.
If he failed…

  ‘I moved four feet through the black, knowing where to step to avoid pits in the brick floor. I felt out for a switch and flicked it. Nothing happened. The cellar light had blown. From high above, muted by brick, came that voice again. “I know you’re down there! I heard you down there!”

  ‘A sick feeling in my stomach at that voice again. My hand slipped off the wall into a hole that sucked me in. For all my memories of this dark place, I forgot the corner where I’d played so many times. Minus toys, I had had to improvise. The cellar was my alien world, always dark because there was no sun, the corner my spaceship. As I fell, my head hit the old fireplace and I dropped to my knees onto the broken pieces of an old radio.

  ‘My head swam for a moment. Black dots darker than the cellar exploded in my vision like bloated raindrops striking a window. Then another shout from an alien monster cut through the gloom, through the endless ticking of expanding and contracting pipes, which was a symphony I came to love, even need.

  ‘Before, I had twisted and linked the wires of that radio in an attempt to repower the engine of my spacecraft and blast off from this cold, dark, desolate planet; now, I huddled and hoped the beast in the atmosphere above didn’t find me. I grabbed the wires, hoping to restart the engine and fire off from this world, and to burn up the beast in my fiery jets. I had patience, though, because I had spent hours and hours here, over days and days, cramped, aching, pain everywhere, but never giving up, never condemning myself to a life alone, lost, abandoned here on this planet.

  ‘Then the throbbing in my injured head faded, to be replaced by growing fear. The spaceship dissolved, too, and I was back in the cellar, in a recess that had once been home for a fireplace. The dream had been replaced by a living nightmare.

  ‘“I know you’re down there!” came the voice again, slurred by alcohol. Light flooded my dark world as the cellar door was yanked open. The monster stepped into the light washing the steps, crouching to be seen…’