You Can Trust Me (11 page)

 

CHAPTER FIVE

I'm frozen to the spot, consumed with fear. The seconds I stand in the deserted cul-de-sac seem to stretch into hours, the dark shadows around me suck out my breath. The man—his eyes glinting with fury—walks toward me. Even as my heart thumps I am telling myself to run. But there's no way past him. No time.

He stands in front of me, his forehead creased with a frown. With a jolt, I realize that his expression is actually more confused than angry.

“You're Livy, aren't you?” he says. “At the funeral … you said you didn't think Julia killed herself?”

I stare at him, startled by the sudden intimacy of his words.

“That's right.” Several questions start to form in my head, but I'm still too scared to focus properly. And then the man's shoulders release and I see just how much tension he was holding in them before. He extends his arm. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I should have spoken to you at the funeral, but it was all so…” He hesitates. “I'm Damian Burton. I was … a friend of Julia's. A
good
friend…”

“Her boyfriend?” My hammering heart ratchets down a notch.

Damian nods. “I wasn't sure how much she'd said about me … if anything.”

“I only knew a nickname.”

He raises his eyebrows. “You mean Dirty Blond?” he says with a smile. Close up, in the lamplight, I can see he is even more handsome than I'd thought from my brief glance at the funeral, with a strong, square chin; smooth, even features; and hazel eyes. My fear eases further. This man was Julia's lover. I still don't understand why he is here, but he doesn't feel like a threat anymore. And then I remind myself that there's no way I can know that for sure. A nice smile and an attractive face can mask unutterable evil.

“It's a play on my initials,” Damian says. “D.B.—Dirty Blond.”

“Very Julia,” I say.

“Yes.”

A gust of wind blows along the alley, rustling the litter that's escaping from the scattered garbage bags and sending the stink of rotting vegetables into the air.

“Why are you here?” I ask. “How did you know
I
was here?”

“I've been coming here since Julia died, every couple of evenings,” Damian says. “I walked in and saw you with that blond girl. Someone spoke to me and when I looked round, you'd disappeared, so I came out the front. Saw the blond girl going up the road and thought maybe you'd come out with her, through the fire door, which you obviously had.” He pauses.

I wait for him to go on. This man clearly isn't intent on harming me—at least, not here and not now. But what's he doing at this singles bar—if it's not for the obvious reason? And what is it that he wants to say to me?

“Julia's funeral was awful, wasn't it?” he says softly.

I look up, surprised. There's real pain in his eyes.

“It was all wrong. Nothing of her,” Damian goes on. “That horrible brother … I'd never met him, but she used to call him ‘that dickweasel.'”

I nod. Julia did often refer to Robbie like that.

“… and she'd have hated the music and the flowers,” Damian goes on. “And everyone making out she was some kind of sad victim. It was like there was a script and everyone was forcing Julia to fit in with it.”

He's reflecting my own thoughts so accurately, I can't quite take it in.

“The only bit that made sense to me was when you were talking,” Damian says. “I mean, Julia had told me about you, of course, but when I saw you, it was obvious how much you loved her, how
real
your friendship was.…” He trails off.

“Julia talked to you about me?”

“Of course. She was so proud of you. And Hannah and Zack.” He stops talking for a second to acknowledge my surprise that he knows my children's names, then clears his throat. “She said you'd had the courage to make a commitment to—to Will, is it?—and stick with the relationship through all the ups and downs of married life. And she adored your kids. Said she'd always been too scared to even think about being a mum.”

“Too scared?” It's hard to imagine Julia being scared of anything. “She always said she didn't
want
children of her own.”

“She did say that,” Damian agrees. “But there was more to it than just not being an earth mother.…”

This is surreal. Damian sounds like he really knew Julia.
Understood
her. “How long were you…?”

“Together?” Damian sighs. “Six months or so.” He looks like he wants to say something else, then falls silent again.

Six months?
My suspicions rear up again. That
surely
isn't possible. Julia never went out with people that long.

Damian looks up. “Julia told me once that the ‘no kids' thing was because she was scared of … of loving anyone that much, of taking that risk.”

Another gust of wind sends litter swirling about our feet. My eyes fix on a burger wrapper, and I'm transported to the first time I met Julia, a few weeks or so after she and Kara became friends. They were both at the start of their first year at uni, and giddy with the excitement of living away from home for the first time. I was at the beginning of my junior year—jaded from a breakup with a boyfriend and long bored with the reality of having to sort out my own rent and shopping and washing. I remember the pair of them eating burgers as they got dressed up for Halloween. Kara was wearing tiny shorts and a basque, with dark, heavy makeup. She looked—to my eyes—ridiculous and disturbing, like a small child playing at being a whore. Julia was carrying off a similar look with much greater conviction—her hair teased into a wild frame around her head, the slight slant of her eyes accentuated with kohl and wearing a short leather skirt over ripped tights. I'd turned up, unexpected, at Kara's student house and was fussing over her, trying to make her at least put a proper shirt over the basque. Kara, as always, submitted to my bossing in silence—I knew she'd put the shirt on to shut me up, then take it off again once she was out of sight—but Julia soon lost patience.

“You really put the mother in
smother,
Livy,” she'd drawled. “Go and have your own children and leave Kara alone.”

I resented her then and over the next few months, especially when she spent the whole of the subsequent Christmas break in Bath with Kara and our parents. I tried to be generous about that—after all, it was sad that Julia felt so cut off from her own family—but despite Julia's charm, it was hard to have our normal traditions infiltrated. It was only after Kara's death that she and I became friends, when all our earlier differences seemed so petty and unimportant. Because the irony was that the night she was raped and murdered, Kara had been wearing jeans and tennis shoes—nothing provocative at all. I'm still not sure whether that meant Julia was right not to worry or whether I was wrong to knock Kara's confidence by trying to change the way she dressed.

“Livy?” Damian's been speaking, and I haven't heard a word. I look at him properly. “Would you like a drink?” He indicates Aces High. “I don't mean that place. There's a much nicer pub just up the road.”

“Sure.” We walk to the Lamb and Flag, an old-fashioned pub with ropy furnishings and a big pool table out the back. I'm surprised Damian considers it nicer than Aces High. There's nothing fancy or designed about it, and Damian looks too young and too stylish for such a place. His hair glints in the harsh overhead lights: an attractive mix of browns and yellows. I've known women who pay good money to acquire hair like that, but Damian's looks entirely natural. I wait while he buys a couple of mineral waters—he's driving too—and we take our drinks over to a quiet corner table.

“What do you do?” I ask as we sit down.

“I'm a graphic designer,” he says. “That's how I met Julia—on a shoot for a magazine I'd been working for. I was going out with the model. Then Julia turned up.…”

I smile to myself at the thought of Julia's sex appeal being powerful enough to prize a highly attractive younger man away from a woman paid for how she looks.

“So you're not married, then?” I say, remembering my previous suspicions.

“No.” Damian frowns. “Of course not. Julia wouldn't have come near me if I was.”

There's a pause. “You still haven't explained why you wanted to speak to me,” I say.

“Okay.” Damian takes a big breath. “The reason I'm … Well, it's that I don't believe Julia killed herself either.”

Something releases inside me, a sense that I'm not alone. To my surprise, emotion rolls up in a wave from my guts and I have to press my lips together to stop myself from crying.

“I know from what you said at the funeral that you don't think she did it,” Damian goes on. “But … the thing is … do you have a specific reason for thinking that? Or is it just that you knew her so well that you just can't believe it?”

I set down my glass. “Mostly the latter,” I admit. “Except, well, she texted me the evening she died. She said she really wanted to talk to me. Everyone else seems to see that as a cry for help, but—”

“But she
did
want to talk to you,” Damian interrupts. “I
know
she did. We had a fight about it—that's why I wasn't with her that night.…” He pauses, his eyes filling with pain at the memory. He swigs his drink. “Julia had something important to tell you. I … I asked her what it was, but she refused to say. She said she had to talk to you first, before she could tell anyone else. She was so bloody loyal.…” He shakes his head.

Relief and gratitude whirl inside me.. All this is validation of the terrible and lonely thoughts I've been living with for over two weeks. Until this moment, I hadn't realized how hard it has been to carry alone the burden of my belief that Julia
didn't
kill herself. That someone else took her life. And yet, my suspicions rear up again. How do I know Julia didn't want to talk to me about Damian himself? Can I really be sure that Damian is telling me the truth and not simply what I want to hear?

“What about the suicide note?” I ask.

Damian rolls his eyes. “I heard. ‘I can't go on … please make no fuss.…' Yeah, right. Julia wouldn't have written that in a million years.”

“I know.”

“And it was found, open, on her computer screen, so no handwriting, no signature. Which basically means whoever killed her could have written it as she was dying.”

I nod, hanging on every word. I want so much to believe what Damian is saying, tears prick at my eyes. “I'm sorry, but I wasn't expecting this. I wasn't expecting you.”

Damian raises his eyebrows. “Funny. Julia said exactly the same thing to me once.” His eyes bore into me. He is powerful and masculine in that open, confident way Julia always went for. Not me. I've always preferred my men quiet and brooding. I wriggle on my seat. “Do you know what Julia wanted to talk to me about?”

Damian holds my gaze. “It was to do with Kara,” he says.

“My
sister
?” I frown. “What do you mean?”

Damian hesitates.

“
Tell
me. What do you know?”

Damian sits forward. “I know that Kara was murdered eighteen years ago. I know that you and Julia became friends after her death. I know the murderer was never caught.”

I stare at him, surprised again that Julia has told him all this. Except for our conversations about Hannah and Kara looking alike, Julia and I hadn't talked properly about my sister for years. We mentioned her, of course, but it was Mum and Dad whom I turned to on all the anniversaries: the Christmases and the midsummer birthdays that left Kara eternally youthful while the rest of us aged. Julia used to try to talk about Kara more, but all her memories revolved around their shared life at uni, the boys and the parties. I didn't really recognize the Kara Julia knew, the young woman my little sister was trying to become.

“I'm sorry I didn't come and see you before.” Damian sits back. “I've just been in shock since … Julia. I didn't know whether it was right to—”

“
What
did Julia want to tell me about Kara?”

Damian rubs his forehead. “Okay, I don't know how to say this, because I know Julia never told you anything about it.…”

“Go on.”

“She told me that she felt guilty that she hadn't protected Kara … that night. In particular, that she didn't go home with her. She carried the guilt with her all the time.
Always.
”

I'm seriously surprised now. I remember Julia expressing remorse eighteen years ago that she had stayed at their friend's house, leaving Kara to find her way home alone. But everyone told her what had happened to Kara wasn't her fault, and I suppose I'd assumed that, in the end, she believed us. In fact, I thought
I
was the guilty one. I was Kara's big sister. I should have been there to keep her safe.

“
Always
felt guilty?” I say. Surely Damian's exaggerating.

“Yes,
always
.
Intensely
. She said it was her fault Kara was even at the party, that she'd not wanted to go, that Julia had made her. Then Kara wanted to go home and she asked Julia to leave with her, but Julia was having a good time. There was some guy she liked.…” He takes another gulp of water. His glass leaves a wet ring on the cracked wooden table and he smooths out the stain with his hand. “I know she didn't tell you, but she never forgave herself for not being there for your sister and she never stopped trying to find out who killed her. Every week, she spent hours tracking down leads. Sometimes she even went to different places, following clues.”

“No.” I can't believe it.