The Date: An unputdownable psychological thriller with a breathtaking twist (19 page)

A vice tightens around my ribcage until I feel my heart might burst as I scan the words again and again, almost hoping if I read fast enough they will blur together and turn into something else. Something I can cope with. But they remain the same.

Instead of finishing the sentence Chrissy had written ‘fuck-fuck-fuck’ followed by a series of doodles. Hearts. Flowers. Angels. Lower down the
page were small splodges that could have been tears and, in big angry letters,

I turn the paper over in my hands as I turn the words over in my mind.
I can’t do this anymore.
What couldn’t she do, and with who? My head is shaking ‘no’, as though I can stop his name popping into my mind.

Matt
.

Had he been having
an affair despite his promises there was no one else? ‘He’s often out in the evenings,’ Mr Henderson had said. Was that her grand plan, to seduce my husband, break up my marriage? Had her brother got involved and it all escalated into something else?

A murder charge.

I’m adding up two and two and I think I’m making four. Eight. Twelve.

Think
.

The day I got out of hospital
and went to collect Branwell. Matt wouldn’t let me upstairs. He was edgy. Desperate to get rid of me. Bedroom curtains drawn. Was she there? Is she still there? Hiding from me. Laughing at me. Matt offered to repair my car. Would he really have noticed the damage when it was facing forward on the driveway or had he known it was there?

I take another look inside the box in case I have missed
something, and I have. Face down is a photo. The white of the back of the print had blended in with the white of the cardboard. Taking a deep breath I scoop it up. It’s all piecing together now. The truth is hurtling towards me and I widen my stance and plant my feet, as though I can stop it slamming into me, bowling me over, breaking me entirely. I examine the photo, and frustration bolts through
my body like electricity as I study the two people in the image. I’m pretty certain the woman is Chrissy. Long blonde hair. A sprinkling of freckles covering her nose. The fine chain around her neck she often wore, with a gold wishbone dangling in the hollow between her collarbones. The man I’m not so sure. I draw it closer to my eyes, as though that might make a difference. He has short brown
hair that could belong to a trillion men. A white T-shirt. Nondescript. Unidentifiable to me. And briefly, I pretend to myself if I can’t recognise him, it can’t possibly be Matt, it can’t possibly be my husband, but the rational side of me knows if it isn’t, there would be no need for Chrissy to hide it away like the secret it so clearly is.

I stare at the two of them.

Two birds
with one stone.

If I’m in prison Chrissy gets her revenge and Matt gets the house. Knowing all that I am to these people I have loved is a problem to be solved, morphs the fear and the panic and the shame I have felt into something else. Something razor-sharp and ready to wound.

Still holding the photo I stalk out of the room and pound down the stairs.

Tick tock, Chrissy
.

Now I’m coming for you
.

It’s nearly time to end this before it breaks us both.

Are you remembering now? Remembering what you lost me, Ali?

Did you really think you could get away with it?

Do you really think I’ll let you get away with it? Of course not. You took something from me
and now I’ll take something from you. Your life or your freedom? Decisions, decisions.

Karma’s a bitch.

At the bottom of the stairs I grab my mobile from my bag and carry it into the kitchen. I message Matt and tell him he needn’t walk Branwell tonight, before I smooth the picture of him and Chrissy out onto the worktop and take a photo of it. I text it to Ben and within seconds
my phone is vibrating.

‘Where did you get that?’ Ben asks, and I’m glad he knows me well enough not to bother with opening pleasantries. To sense how upset I am.

‘In Chrissy’s room, hidden in the bottom of a box of chocolates.’

‘Don’t do anything rash. I’m coming back. We can talk about it properly.’

‘No. Don’t miss out on your meeting. Besides there’s nothing to talk
about. I’m going to fucking kill him.’

‘Kill him?’

‘He’s still my husband.’

Crackling fills the silence that stretches while my heart gallops, waiting, wanting my brother to be as outraged as I am.

Eventually he speaks, slowly, carefully. ‘But Matt’s not…’

Another beat. I hear him take a deep breath before he can continue.

‘But Matt’s not yours anymore,
is he? He hasn’t been for months.’

The truth is as heavy and as blunt as a cricket bat and strikes me with force.

‘Sorry.’ He almost whispers.

‘You’re right.’

‘I can come home, Ali-cat. If you need to talk.’

‘I need to find Chrissy. She must be with Matt. Where else could she be? She’s setting me up.’

‘Setting you up for what? Why would she do that?’ Every
word he speaks drips with fatigue, and part of me wishes I’d never rung him. His job is draining enough without the constant worry I am putting him through. I know I have to tell him about Chrissy’s connection with Dad, but I don’t want to do it over the phone. If he thinks for one second Chrissy and her brother have been targeting me he’ll be furious, and I don’t want him driving in that state
of mind.

‘Let’s wait until you’re home and we can talk it all through properly then.’

I know by this time tomorrow I will have found Chrissy and cleared my name. An idea is taking shape.

Dad’s arrest didn’t just make the local papers, it hit the nationals too. Somebody had uncovered an old, grainy photograph of Dad wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses, mouth a thin straight
line, aiming a gun at the lens, and it didn’t seem to matter this had been taken at a fancy dress party, and he’d been dressed up as Arnold Schwarzenegger in
Terminator
. If you looked closely you could see Mum’s bare arm before she’d been cut out of the image. She was his Linda Hamilton in a black vest top and jeans. It didn’t seem to matter that Dad wasn’t the one who actually pulled the trigger.
Headlines screamed his guilt, each one worse than the last from ‘Young mum gunned down in cold blood’ to ‘Stamped out in a post office’. On the Monday it was decided that Ben was so young he’d be better off staying at home, but at twelve, it was thought I should go to school, where I’d be safe and nurtured, among friends. Iris had stayed with Ben, while Mum had shouldered her way through the
reporters, dragging me by the hand, my eyes a mass of stars from the dozens of flashes. The snap-snap-snap of the cameras almost drowned out by the stupid questions that showered down, and we stamped on them, over them, as we hurried to her car. How did they
think
we felt? Did they
really
believe we knew Dad would break the law? In a desperate situation, are we all capable of monstrous acts? It’s
incomprehensible we can reach inside the darkest depths of someone else’s mind, when we ignore the blackness lurking in our own.

At school, the headmaster had been waiting at the gates, assuring Mum if any reporters tried to access the school grounds he would immediately ring the police. Instead of running over to my friends, as I normally would have, I’d been ushered straight inside, as
if I were sick or naughty. I’d sat by the window at the back of the class, my face burning, as the kids outside in the playground stared at me through the glass as though I was an elephant with two trunks. My white school blouse was damp, sticking to my back, my armpits, and that’s the first time I ever remember sweating. I had grown up overnight. The bell rang, and Melanie, Izzy and Lauren had
been the first through the door, and I’d forced my mouth to smile the first smile it had since I’d run towards the ding-dong of the front door at my party, expecting to find one of my friends on the step. Instead of smiling back, slipping into their usual seats Melanie had fired a look of pure hatred at me, as though I had wronged her, while Izzy and Lauren had avoided looking at me at all. The chairs
around me remained empty and when all the desks were filled and a small bunch of kids hovered uncertainly at the front, my teacher had barked at them to sit down.

‘But Miss,’ one of the children had whined, ‘we don’t want to sit next to a
murderer
.’

‘Yeah,’ chimed another. ‘My mum says all her family are fucking scum.’

They’d been reprimanded, of course, but it had made no
difference. I’d been shunned. No one had wanted to come near me, as though the trauma happening to my family was a contagious disease.

‘I can’t go back there tomorrow,’ I had sobbed, sitting on Mum’s lap that night as though I was Ben’s age and not a year off being a teenager.

‘You can’t let them prevent you getting an education,’ Mum had soothed. ‘Knowledge is power. Don’t let them
win.’

And that’s exactly what I tell myself now as I fetch my laptop.

Knowledge is power
.

I won’t let them win
.

I have desperately tried to leave the past behind me. Be a good daughter. A good wife. A good friend. Failing miserably at them all. Longing for the thing I did that took minutes out of the billions of minutes I have lived to fade into nothing. But it’s glaringly apparent, as
I type Sharon Marlow’s name into Google, adding the year and town of the robbery, that nothing in this digital age truly disappears. A sick feeling rises as over a million results load, and my fingers are shaking so hard I find it almost impossible to scroll through the pages. The condemnation. The endless, endless speculation about the case, the verdict. The call for the death penalty. Although
every fibre of my being screams at me to start a new search for Sharon’s children, I can’t help opening one of the more recent reports in an online edition of a red top. A ‘Where are the Tanmoor Three?’ as though they are faded pop stars or Blue Peter presenters. David Webb, the man who pulled the trigger, had died in prison after another prisoner set fire to him. That must have been the incident
Dad wrote about in his letter. Although David was in part responsible for everything my family have been through, are going through, I still shudder at the thought of burning to death and Dad helplessly watching. How on earth could that happen inside a prison with the guards and the cameras and the rigid rules?

It’s not like you see on TV
, I can imagine PC Hunter saying.
All cell searches
and confiscating contraband while guards and prisoners form bonds and everyone gets rehabilitated in the end
. But still, a slow and painful death is not what I’d wish on anyone and, as I think that, I picture Mum growing weaker each day, muscles wasting, speech slurring. Her dignity fading along with our childhood paintings stuck to the fridge and Ben’s toddler fingerprints on the walls. Time
seemed so cruel back then. Speed-of-light fast and yet impossibly slow. I read on. The second name is more familiar to me – Wayne Lindsell. He visited the house more and more once Dad had lost his job. I vividly remember, one scorching hot summer’s day, they drank cheap beer in the garden, while Mum frowned out of the window as she wiped her hands on her apron.

‘Tell your dad I want him,’
she had said.

I had relayed the message and stood awkwardly on our lawn that was yellowing with thirst, as Dad headed to the kitchen, and I began to follow, but Wayne called me back, asking how school was, in the way that adults do when they can’t think of anything to say.

‘Fine,’ I muttered as Mum’s urgent whisper floated out of the open window the way the butterflies were floating
around our lavender bush.

‘I can’t make dinner stretch to feed another mouth. He’ll have to go. And it’s far too early to be drinking.’

Wayne drained the last of his can before crushing it in one hand, his muscles bulging. I was mesmerised by the tattoo of a lion’s head glistening on his tanned arm.

‘It’s a reminder that I’m stronger and smarter and faster,’ Wayne had said.
‘King of the jungle. Invincible.’

He was also dead. Ravaged by cancer. There’s a photo of him in the prison hospital, all sunken cheeks and jutting collarbones. His hands lying crossed over his chest. His lion tattoo small and shrivelled.

Dad is the only one left. The only one free and, although I know I shouldn’t, I can’t help opening up the comments at the bottom of the article.
The malevolence that spews from my screen snatches my breath. The numerous variations of ‘I hope they didn’t waste more taxpayers’ money giving Wayne pain relief’ and the ‘someone should set fire to Justin Crawford. Why should he get to live his life free?’ And something deep inside of me, a primal, protective instinct, begins to unfurl as I’m back at that funfair, begging Dad to win me a teddy
bear on the shooting range. His awkwardness handling a gun, needing to be shown where to put the hard, tarnished pellets, told to close one eye before he squinted through the sight. He still missed the target. He’d hooked a duck instead, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth with concentration, and won me a grubby rabbit whose stuffing spilled out of its seams as he carried me high on his shoulders
when my legs became tired.

Branwell licks my hand, as though reminding me to focus, and I start a new search for ‘Sharon Marlow + children’.

Tragedy strikes again for the Marlow family
screams at me. I begin to read how Sharon’s eldest child, Lewis, was drowned while holidaying in Greece. Christine is the only surviving family member.

No wonder she hates me.

No wonder
she wants revenge.

But Lewis can’t be Ewan.

‘I know,’ Is all I say as I push past Jules and stride into her lounge. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about?’ she says but, despite her protestations, she can’t meet my eye.

‘That night. In the bar. On the CCTV. There wasn’t any Ewan at all, was there?’

Her eyes flicker to the ceiling,
as though she might find the answer painted there against the awful swirls of Artex the previous occupant had left behind.

‘I know Chrissy was fucking my husband.’ The word is crude and sour on my tongue, but my smouldering anger is burning brighter and brighter. ‘I know you recognised the face on the CCTV, so I’ll ask you once again, Jules. Who was there that night? Who had so much to
hide that they burned the bar down rather than risk the police viewing the footage?’

Jules sinks onto the sofa. ‘You really don’t remember anything, do you?’

I cross my arms. Waiting.

‘I didn’t want to hurt you.’ Jules drops her head into her hands, fingertips pressing into her scalp.

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Ali.’ Her voice is muffled but I can hear the regret.
‘It was Matt.’

It’s one of those moments you think you’re prepared for. Expecting. Wanting. Longing for it to be over, almost – a dentist extracting a throbbing tooth – but on hearing Jules speak Matt’s name aloud my stomach cramps, saliva flooding my mouth. I bolt out of the lounge, my feet pounding the stairs, towards the bathroom. As I round the corner, my left hand pulling on the bannister
for traction, I hit something solid and heavy.

‘Ali?’ James says, steadying me by the shoulders as he comes out of his bedroom. ‘Where’s the fire?’

Flinching at his choice of words I shrug him off, squeeze past, my fingers stretching towards the bathroom door handle.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks again and the worry in his voice slows me.

‘I know.’ I turn to face him. ‘I
know
exactly
who my date was that night.’

He doesn’t ask who it was. He doesn’t ask how I found out. He doesn’t ask any of the things I thought he might. Instead he says: ‘Oh God. I hoped you’d never find out it was me.’

He plants his feet wider, blocking off my exit down the stairs and, although I can’t read the expression on his face, I can read the clues that are now visible through
his open door: the
Star Wars
poster on his bedroom wall. Ewan McGregor brandishing a lightsaber. The new green jacket he’s only worn that once hanging on the front of the wardrobe door. The long black case propped up in the corner of the room that I’m guessing, if I were to check, would contain fishing rods.

Laughing. Dancing. Crying. Screaming.
I don’t want to
.

Mouth agape I stare
at James who is staring back at me. Waiting for my next move.

Just as I am waiting for his.