Five Strangers

by E. V. Adamson

  But just before I leave the bedroom I notice a pair of shoes that she must have kicked off before she got into bed. I pick up one of them – a little black number with a nice heel – and as I start to descend the stairs I place it in the middle of the second step down.

  If she were to trip and fall to her death, whose fault would that be?

  73

  JEN

  I’m on the sofa pretending to sleep when Bex comes in. She doesn’t put the light on, but I sense her moving around the room. Then she walks over to me. I can feel her looking down, studying me. I have to make an effort to keep my breathing steady and calm. I want to bolt upright and ask what the hell is going on. But I know I have to keep still. I feel like I’m choking, like something is blocking my throat, but I daren’t even cough. I begin to count to ten, slowly, hoping that Bex will soon leave me alone.

  One … The words from the 1990 report still play around my mind. Valentine’s Day. Murder–suicide. Neighbours say that the dead couple are survived by a young daughter, Rebecca, 13, who was at the house at the time of the incident, but was uninjured. She has since been placed with a foster family.

  Two … Penelope’s interview with Karen Oliver, in which she said that her son Daniel had had a relationship with an older woman called Becky.

  Three … If Becky knew Daniel Oliver from way back did the murder–suicide on Parliament Hill Fields have anything to do with her?

  The thought of that is like a tight hand around my neck and I can’t swallow.

  Four … And what about everything that’s happened to me since then?

  Five …The messages from @WatchingYouJenHunter.

  I can feel my breathing begin to quicken.

  Six … The feeling of being constantly observed, stalked.

  Seven … The attack on the Heath, the man … the person in the mask.

  I can feel saliva pooling at the back of my throat.

  Eight … Finding the mask in Laurence’s house. My increasing hatred, my utter loathing, for him.

  I can’t control my breathing any longer. The fear makes me take a great gulp of breath like a dying fish, a gasp that I try to cover up by coughing. I open my eyes and see her dark shadow standing over me.

  ‘Don’t worry – it’s just me,’ she says.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, clearing my throat again.

  ‘Sorry, I was just looking for my charger.’

  Using the light from my phone I make a half-hearted effort to look under and around the sofa.

  ‘Never mind. Perhaps it’s in my room.’ She continues to stand there, looking at me.

  The air is heavy with many things unsaid. I want to ask her question after question, but I remain silent.

  ‘Is there something wrong, Jen?’ she whispers.

  ‘Just a bad dream. It’s nothing. I’d better get back to sleep. I’ve got a big day tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just that the editor wants me to file the piece early. He also wants me to go into the office to look at the layout to make sure I’m happy with it all.’

  It’s dark. Bex can’t see me. But will she still be able to tell I’m lying?

  ‘Is that normal?’

  ‘It’s a bit odd, yeah.’ I try to keep my voice steady. ‘But Nick, my editor, said something about how because I was involved in the story – as a witness – I should be there to oversee its production. They want it to be handled as sensitively as possible.’

  Bex goes quiet again, before she switches a light on and comes to sit by me.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  I can feel my heart racing now. ‘No, that’s fine,’ I say, as I sit up properly and swing my legs off the sofa.

  We’ve sat as close as this – closer – so many times, but tonight there’s something wrong. It’s like every cell in my body is screaming out to tell me to get as far away from her as possible. I sense her studying me, examining me for what – signs of guilt? Some kind of secret knowledge? A marker of betrayal?

  ‘Have you got anything to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you?’

  ‘Yes – something’s on your mind. You know I can sense when there’s something wrong. Is it about Laurence? Have you changed your mind about …’

  ‘No – I want to …’

  ‘You want to give him a fright that he’ll never forget?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do. After hearing what he did to you, I want to see that fucker really suffer.’

  ‘So do I. So there’s nothing else?’

  ‘It’s probably just the interviews. Listening to the other witnesses. It brought a lot of things up. Remembering the incident. All that blood. Those deaths.’

  ‘That must have been hard. So there’s nothing else? Nothing about Penelope?’

  ‘Penelope?’

  She nods her head slowly. ‘Have you heard from her?’

  ‘No – no I haven’t.’

  I can feel the power of her gaze, stripping off the layers of deceit I’ve accumulated around myself like some kind of powerful acid.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Nothing but the usual rubbish. Some shit about you.’

  ‘What did she say – I mean, the exact words?’

  ‘That she had this file, the one I told you about. There was the transcript of the interview she did with Daniel Oliver’s mother. But I only saw the two pages that dropped out.’ I don’t tell her about the question Penelope asked me about the map of the Heath and its CCTV coverage. I don’t tell her about the emails and voice messages from Penelope. I don’t tell her about the newspaper cutting I’ve seen, the report into that murder–suicide on Valentine’s Day 1990. ‘She asked me … asked me how much I really knew about you.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘You’ve always been there for me.’ The words sound empty, hollow. ‘That … that I’d trust you with my life.’

  74

  BEX

  I’m up early and so, of course, is Jen. Despite the fact that she managed to lie to her readers for so long, she’s always been bad at lying to me. I know at once when she’s not telling the truth: she blinks too quickly and there’s a shifty quality to her eyes. I was right not to trust her.

  As I follow her out of the flat I wonder if she’s on the way to the Royal Free. Did Penelope trip over that shoe I placed on the stairs and is she now in hospital? But it seems as though Jen’s heading somewhere else. From the flat she walks to the Tube and she takes the Northern Line to King’s Cross. If she was going to the office she would change onto the Circle Line to transport her west to High Street Kensington, but she travels east to emerge at Liverpool Street station.

  I watch her from a safe distance as she buys her ticket from a machine. What’s going on inside that pretty blonde head of hers? What has Penelope told her? Obviously, she knows much more than what she told me last night, otherwise she wouldn’t be here, looking up at the display board that lists destinations that lie to the east of the capital: Cambridge, Norwich, Ipswich, Clacton-on-Sea, Harlow and Colchester, my home town. I know that’s where she’s headed – if she felt she had to lie to me, where else would she be going? – and, as she’s queuing for a coffee, I buy myself a ticket.

  I follow her onto the platform, keeping well back from her, and enter a carriage three down from hers. As the train begins to snake its way out of London, past supercool lofts and swish offices, I feel uneasy. It’s a journey I haven’t taken in years, a journey I hoped never to take again. The sensation is not as simple as feeling nauseous. It’s more like there’s something crawling under my skin, desperate to escape. I can’t allow the feeling to overwhelm me. I need to think about Jen, not myself. I still don’t know what I’m going to do if she does dig up stuff about my past.

  Of course, I could kill her, but that would defeat the object. No, I’ve never wanted that. Rather it’s the opposite: my goal is that she’ll stay with me, for ever. Perhaps I could injure her so that she would have no choice but to depen
d on me. A spinal injury. A terrible amputation. An awful disfigurement. Blindness? There are a few options that could be explored. But then, when I think about it, I can’t imagine doing any of these things to her. I want to keep her just as she is.

  Sitting on the train, with Jen just a few carriages away, reminds me of that time I followed her up north. She lied to me then, too. I remember that it was in June 1998 that she phoned me to say that her aunt Kathleen had died and that she intended to go to her funeral in Preston. I asked her whether she wanted me to come with her, but she told me that she’d be fine going on her own. Unknown to her, I was with her every step of the way from the moment she took the Tube to Euston, to when she stepped on the train north, to the crematorium.

  I’d taken a taxi from the station through streets of red brick terraced houses, passed soulless industrial estates, circled around endless roundabouts, until we came to the crematorium. As I sat in the car I spotted Jen, dressed in black. A woman, perhaps an elderly relative, embraced her. I waited for the small group of people to enter the building before getting out, asking the driver to stay behind for me.

  I spotted a stern-faced undertaker and asked him if he could tell me the name of the deceased. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. Hesmondalgh, he said. Kenneth Hesmondalgh, who had died on 3 June. It was the funeral not of Jen’s aunt, but her father. I thanked him, got back into the car and drove away. I was back in London ready for Jen’s return.

  Armed with this information it was easy for me to send off for Kenneth Hesmondalgh’s death certificate. Cause of death was not injuries suffered by a car crash, but myocardial infarction – a heart attack. Eventually, after a few further searches online, I managed to find a record of the death of Gillian Hesmondalgh, Jen’s mother, who had passed away in September 1997, from cancer.

  Initially I felt a sting of betrayal: one of the reasons I had felt so drawn to her was because I thought we had so much in common. We’d both lost our parents as teenagers. We were alone in the world. Later, I learned that we’d both changed our surnames. And weren’t we supposed to be best friends who told each other everything? Then I realised that there were certain things I had kept from her, aspects of my life I thought it was best not to share. That’s one of the reasons why I’d been so paranoid about Jen naming me in that first piece she ever wrote in the student newspaper, and why I made her promise never to mention me in print again.

  I also recognised that I felt a level of admiration for Jen’s actions. She was more like me than I had thought. And now I had this knowledge about her I felt I had a hold over her. The power of that thrilled me, more, much more than the pleasure I got from sex. A quick orgasm was nothing compared to the twisted knot of tight energy that grew inside me, the realisation that I had power over Jen.

  There were times, often when we were drunk, that I thought about telling her that I knew her secret. But no matter how close I got – it was on the very tip of my tongue, nearly slipping out of my mouth – I always reeled back at the last minute. Everyone else in my life had left me.

  I wasn’t going to let her go.

  75

  JEN

  I press the button to open the doors to the train and step down onto the platform. As I walk towards the sign that says ‘Way Out’ I notice a figure standing there. It can’t be. I squint my eyes closer together. It must be someone who looks like her. With each step closer the fear I’d felt the night before takes repossession of my body. My skin feels cold. My chest begins to tighten. My breathing is shallow, like a hunted animal. She’s followed me. She’s here.

  I’m about to turn to get back onto the train when the doors close and lock. I look around to see if there’s anyone to help, but the commuters have long left for London. I bite the inside of my lip. I have no choice but to face her. Perhaps this is for the best, perhaps an honest conversation could end it all here. I just need to be brave.

  As I approach I realise there’s something wrong with her. She’s standing too near the edge of the platform. She’s got her arms crossed and she’s rocking back and forth. Her face is fixed on the tracks in front of her.

  ‘Bex?’

  She doesn’t answer. It’s almost as if she doesn’t know I’m here. I say her name again and she turns her head slightly towards me.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Her only response is to step a little closer to the platform edge. I look up at the display. There’s nothing due for another ten minutes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Big fat tears form in her eyes and begin to spill down her cheeks. The tracks on the line begin to crack and in the distance I can hear the rumble of a train approaching.

  ‘Bex – talk to me. It’s me, Jen.’

  The sound of my name seems to rouse her.

  ‘Jen?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m here.’

  She looks at me like a little girl. ‘Are you angry with me? Please don’t be angry with me.’

  I am furious with her, of course, on many levels. More than furious. I can’t tell where anger starts and fear begins. But now’s not the time to tell her that.

  ‘Why would I be angry with you?’

  ‘I c-can’t carry on.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  Again she falls quiet. She’s fixated on the tracks, seemingly hypnotised by their hum.

  I’m scared now. I look up at the display. An announcement flashes up to say that there’s a fast, non-stopping train that’s due to speed through the station in a minute. ‘Bex. You need to snap out of this.’

  Her body is shaking now and she rasps out the words. ‘It’s— too— late. I know I’ve h-hurt you. I didn’t tell you the truth.’

  ‘What didn’t you tell me?’

  Panicking, I look around me to see if I can see anyone in a hi-vis jacket. But apart from a mother with three young kids, one in a pram, standing at the far end of the platform, there’s no one around. I think about shouting down to her.

  ‘Bex. You need to tell me what’s going on.’

  The hum of the tracks rises to a rattle and is fast approaching a scream. The train is due any second. I don’t want to frighten Bex into making any sudden movements and so I take a small, almost unnoticeable step towards her. If I had to, I’m confident I could launch myself towards her and grab her. I’m primed, watching her every movement, ready to save her. Even though I’ve got my suspicions about her – questions swarm around my head like a mass of trapped wasps – I can’t let her do this.

  ‘I promise I’m not angry with you.’

  Finally, she turns her head so her eyes – red, raw, sad eyes – meet mine.

  ‘I thought you’d—’

  Just then the train whooshes by at what seems like two hundred miles an hour, a violent, thundering machine that would have crushed Bex in its path. I can feel its shuddering impact vibrate through my body. The noise is terrible, all-consuming. My hair erupts into a mad frenzy, dancing above and around my head. The tunnel of wind forces Bex back and she collapses onto the platform. And then, once the train has passed, the station is left silent again apart from the sound of sobbing.

  I bend down so I’m at her level and take her in my arms. I hold her for what seems like an eternity, until the sobs lessen. I tell her to take some deep breaths and finally she’s able to look at me again. I help her up onto a nearby bench.

  I find it hard to contain my anger now. ‘What were you thinking? Bex – talk to me!’

  She wipes her nose on her sleeve and through yet more tears she begins to explain. Her confession comes in fragments, as if she’s incapable of speaking fully-formed sentences.

  ‘He was a boyfriend – I knew him, Daniel, I mean – I know I should have told you. He was sweet back then – I was older, more experienced. He was the younger brother of a friend – she’s in Australia now, a waitress, haven’t heard from her in years. Dan was jealous back then too, had a temper. We went out for a few months. But I couldn’t bear him watchi
ng over me, always asking whether I’d seen another bloke, constantly on my back. I finished it. He was devastated. Had some kind of nervous breakdown, I think. I had to do it for the sake of my own sanity. I wasn’t sure about my safety. I had to move away. You see I had to be careful. I was … vulnerable, you see. After what happened to me. I couldn’t tell you because – because it would risk bringing everything else up too.’

  I wonder if I can risk asking her a question. ‘About your parents?’

  She nods and is silenced by another wave of crying.

  ‘I’ve read about what happened, Bex. It’s okay – you know you can tell me.’

  ‘You won’t hate me?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘My family – my birth family – was a mess, I mean a real mess. Mum drank. Dad was … violent. They say children don’t know any different when they’re young, they accept whatever goes on because they think it’s normal, they’ve got nothing to compare it to. But not with me. I knew what went on wasn’t … right. It all got so bad for Mum – the beatings and everything else – that one day in 1990, during a horrible row it all got so much worse. Dad pushed Mum’s hand … He pushed her hand into a frying pan. I still remember the smell of that burning flesh.’

  She breaks off to cry some more. I squeeze her shoulder to show that I’m here for her. ‘If it’s too much for you—’

  But she cuts me off. She tries to smile, more for my benefit than her own, and she continues. ‘That was seared in my mind for ever. Anyway, Mum reached out for something to stop him and she … she took hold of the closest thing to hand. A kitchen knife. She … stabbed him to death. And then … Mum used the same knife to kill herself. I tried to stop it all, but I couldn’t. I was scared. I wasn’t strong enough. I still feel it’s all my fault.’