Can't Let Go (15 page)

Zoey told me to drop Steve off with her at her flat in
Clapham. They were laughing as they fell out of the car. I
think they were about to sleep together. Maybe they were
already a couple. I didn't know. I didn't care. I drove
home through Kennington and Lambeth, over Waterloo
Bridge and on to the Strand, and through the strange leery
atmosphere of late Saturday night in central London; past
grey university buildings and Georgian terraces full of
cheap hotels, towards King's Cross and home. I found
somewhere to park. I pulled the letter out of my jeans
pocket, rolled it up and held it firmly in my hand. I got
back to my flat, locked and bolted the door behind me. I
unrolled the envelope from my now-sweaty hand. I pulled
out the piece of paper and straightened it. My hands were
trembling. It was the same type of paper as before, the
same weight, the same lack of grain or watermark; the
same small, neat handwriting, the same black ink. This
was what it said:

Remember, I'm watching you. Does your new lover know
how evil you are?

This is real. This is really happening.
That was all I
could think. That was what I kept repeating to
myself. I think I even said it out loud. This was
really happening. Someone was out there watching me,
stalking me, watching where I worked, where I went at
night and who I was sleeping with. They had followed me
to work; they were even following my car. Someone was
working hard to scare me, to threaten me, to squeeze all
the joy out of my life. Someone had followed me all the
way to Southampton just to leave that note on my windscreen.
This was dedication, this was vengeance; this was
serious hatred.

And it had been going on for weeks. That thought
suddenly struck me, stopped me dead in my tracks as I
paced around my tiny flat that Saturday night, that
Sunday morning. Dawn was already pinking the sky and
I was exhausted but I knew there was no point in going to
bed. There was no chance of sleeping. It had been going
on for weeks; of course it had. I had been so stupid, so
quick to believe that the first note was from one of my
pupils. Or had I believed it? Really, deep down in my
heart of hearts, had I known it was for real? Had I just
tried to fool myself? Had I just pretended that everything
was all right? And I'd blundered on, despite that earlier
warning. I'd carried on, enjoying myself, making friends,
dragging people I loved – and yes, I did love them, both
of them, Danny and Zoey – into my own personal nightmare,
getting more and more involved; doing everything
I'd always told myself I wouldn't do.

He'd been watching me for weeks, the avenger, the
letter-writer: all those times in the last few weeks when I'd
sensed myself being watched, when I'd sensed someone
out there watching me. Maybe he'd been there at that
comedy club, watching me as I stood behind the
microphone ready to perform. Maybe that had been him,
sitting there and grinning at my discomfiture, that figure
I'd mistaken for the ghost of Rivers Carillo.

Who? Who was it? Who on earth was doing this to
me? I got out my list, my list of things that I was scared of.
I pulled my manila file from its place on the bookshelf. I
sat down and read both the list and the file right through.
Who the hell was it?

It wasn't Rivers Carillo. I knew for certain that it
couldn't be him. He was dead, I knew he was. I'd seen his
head split open. I'd watched him as he died. I'd seen the
life leave his eyes. They found his body. They identified
it as him. So this couldn't be him. He was definitely dead.
All those times when I thought I saw him, I knew really
that it was just my guilty conscience playing games with
my mind. It wasn't him I should be scared of. It was
someone else, someone who knew I'd killed him. Rivers
Carillo was just a ghost. I could chase him away any time
I wanted to. This was something much scarier. This was a
real person doing this to me. Someone I didn't know;
someone who knew me intimately.

Rivers Carillo had had a wife, a wife who lived somewhere
in the Midwest, somewhere in Indiana. A
university town somewhere in Indiana; I didn't know
which one. His wife never met me. She never saw me, she
probably never knew about me. I was almost certain of
that. But maybe she suspected. Maybe she suspected that
her husband had lovers, that he'd been seeing someone in
San Francisco that summer. Maybe she'd found out who.

Who would have told her? Who knew for sure about
Rivers Carillo and me? Joanna, my sister's godmother:
she knew. She was one of Rivers's lovers, I was sure of it.
She knew about us, or she guessed about us. I was pretty
sure of that, too. That was why she'd sent me those newspaper
clippings about Rivers's body being found. But why
would she have told Rivers's wife about me? What would
she have had to gain? No, it couldn't have been Joanna.
And besides, she was long dead. She'd died of cancer
about ten years ago. There was no way she could have had
any connection with this.

I had a list of people who'd seen me that day, the day I
killed him. There was a bus driver who'd driven me back
to the city. There was the woman at the art gallery, the
museum, who'd let me use the toilet. There was the guy at
the coffee shop in the Marina District, who may or may
not have seen me tearing up that book of Rivers's poetry.
Maybe they'd suspected something when they'd heard
about the missing man, or when they'd heard about his
body being found. One of them might have remembered
the teenage girl they saw that day. But there was no way
they would have known my name, no way they could
have found it out. It couldn't be one of them.

Rivers Carillo had friends in San Francisco. One of
them owned a bookstore in North Beach. I met Rivers
there a couple of times. Maybe his friend had seen us
together, seen us exchange a few brief words. Maybe
Rivers had told him all about me. And then there was the
friend who lent us his houseboat in Sausalito – the
houseboat where we made love that first time. Rivers
must have told him about me. He must have told him
about this cute English girl he was trying to seduce.
Maybe that friend had seen me. Maybe Rivers had pointed
me out to him. Maybe he knew my name. Maybe the
friend knew that Rivers and I were together on that last
day, the day he disappeared. And maybe he'd been
looking for me all this time and he had just found me.
Found me somehow; I didn't know how.

I thought back and tried to remember Vicky Barron's
description of the man who'd handed her the note: about
my age, nondescript; tall, probably. Dark, maybe.

American? She didn't know, didn't think so, wasn't sure.
She never answered that question properly. About my
age. Rivers Carillo might have had children. I didn't
know for sure.

I made myself a cup of tea. I washed my face, combed
my hair and pulled it back. I stood and looked out of the
window for a while, watching Sunday dawn across the
London rooftops.

I tried the puzzle from a different direction. The night
before – who'd known I was going to be there, at that
pub? Could someone really have followed my car all the
way through London and down the M3 without me
noticing? Or did they somehow know I was going to be
there? Zoey knew, of course. Could she, would she have
had the time to dash out at some point during the evening
and put the letter under the windscreen-wiper blade? Had
there been a moment when I'd lost sight of her last night?
Had she gone to the loo at any point? Could it be her?
Could she be Rivers Carillo's daughter? I did some sums
in my head. It was a calculation I'd done before, but I
wanted to check. Yes, Zoey could be his daughter, just, if
he'd fathered her at nineteen or maybe lied about his age.
There was a slight resemblance – something pugnacious
about the face and jaw line. But Vicky Barron had said it
was a
man
who gave her the note, that first note. So maybe
Zoey had an accomplice? Who? Steve? He was tall and
dark, about my age. But Vicky had struggled to describe
the man. Surely even an unobservant fifteen-year-old
would have mentioned the beard and the long hair. And
besides, Zoey had passed my test – my casual mention of
Rivers Carillo, just dropped into the conversation. Her
response had seemed innocent and unknowing.

Tall, dark, about my age, not distinctive; no American
accent. A name kept coming to mind, a name I didn't want
to say. Danny Fairburn. Danny. No, no. It couldn't be.
Not Danny. I'd tested him. He'd passed the test. I'd
mentioned San Francisco, looked for a reaction and had
got none. It couldn't be Danny. But he was the right age.
Danny was, I knew, thirty-two. We'd joked about him
being my toyboy. He could be Rivers Carillo's son. His
colouring was right, although he didn't look much like
him otherwise. What about his non-reaction when I'd
tested him? But he'd have to be a good actor, wouldn't he,
to gain my trust, to feign a relationship with me? And if he
was that good an actor, he would have trained himself not
to react to questions like that. Maybe he was a sleeper,
deep cover; a sleeper pretending to be a mild-mannered
English music buff and local authority housing officer
when he was in fact an American avenging angel. No, no.
I shook my head with relief. It couldn't be Danny. Of
course it couldn't. He had already been living in his flat
when I'd moved here. He'd lived here for months, before
I'd even decided to move, before my last flat had even
started to feel unsafe. He hadn't known I was coming to
live here; he couldn't have planned it. It couldn't be
Danny, thank God.

And also, of course it wasn't him. The note, the second
note, had mentioned my new lover. There seemed to be
some threat to tell him what I'd done. Thank God. It
wasn't Danny. I was more relieved at this conclusion than
I could say.

Tall, dark, about my age; someone who wished me
harm. An ex-boyfriend? One of the grand total of three
semi-serious boyfriends, not counting Danny, that I'd had
in my adult life so far? But no, that was stupid, a complete
dead end. How would they have known about Rivers
Carillo? Why would they call me 'murdering bitch'? I
thought again, back to San Francisco. I remembered the
young guys that Joanna kept introducing me to; those
young guys around my age, those guys she made me go
out with, the ones who were supposed to take me off her
hands. Elliot, Jonas, Jason: I could vaguely remember
their names, some of them. One of them might have met
Rivers Carillo at some point. Most of them had been to at
least one of those late dinners in Joanna's basement
kitchen, those dinners where guests sat around talking
about poetry and music and art, and I was supposed to
chat to my escort for the night. And sometimes Rivers
Carillo was there. Had one of them, one of my young
escorts, seen something – a touch, a smile, a wink – something
that told them that Rivers and I were involved? Had
one of them seen us together elsewhere: in the basement
food court at Macy's, the cable-car turnaround on Market
Street, the bus out to Golden Gate Park on that fateful
day?

It was a stretch, a huge stretch, but nothing else seemed
to make sense to me. But why would they do this to me?
Why would they want to take vengeance? The new note,
the second note, had mentioned my 'new lover'. Did the
implied threat mean it was from someone who considered
themselves to be an old lover of mine? Again, I was
stretching, trying to make the pieces fit. And then I
remembered something. One of them – Elliot, was it? –
had liked me more than I'd liked him. He'd wanted to see
me again and I'd said no. I'd turned him down, and I'd
done it in my thoughtless eighteen-year-old way. I'd
turned him down in an offhand manner. I might even have
laughed at him. I remember thinking,
Why would I want to
go out with you when I have Rivers Carillo?
Was that it?
Was this some kind of long-delayed vengeance for a
thoughtless, callous laugh?

But if so – and I knew I was clutching at straws here; I
knew it only made a tiny bit more sense than any other
explanation I'd come up with – why now? And how had
he found me?

When the first note had arrived, I'd Googled Rivers
Carillo's name, trying to see what had changed,
what could possibly have sparked that letter. But it
suddenly struck me that I'd been doing precisely the
wrong thing. If someone was trying to hunt me down,
then
I
was the one
they'
d be Googling. Maybe there was
something new about me out there. Maybe I'd done
something to make myself more visible. Maybe they had
only just found Lizzie Stephens.

I had always tried to keep my internet presence to the
bare minimum. The kids at school were all using MySpace
and Facebook and something called Bebo, and they kept
nagging me to get involved, as if I might have a desire to
spread my name and picture all over the World Wide
Web. There was, as far as I knew, just one picture of me
on-line. It was on my school's website. I'd tried to avoid
having my picture taken for the site but I ran out of
excuses, so instead I put on the glasses that I was supposed
to use for reading, and I combed my hair forward over my
face so I was as unrecognisable as possible. It said 'Miss B.
Stephens' under the picture, and even my mother
wouldn't have recognised me.

I had got into the habit of Googling my name
regularly, just to check. Or rather, I Googled 'Lizzie
Stephens', once a month at least. The last time I'd tried it
was before that first note had arrived. All I'd got were a
couple of hits from some Victorian murder trial that
featured a servant girl with the same name as me and lots
of stuff from genealogy sites. I went over to my desk and
turned my computer on. I went to make another cup of
tea, and then went back to my desk. I clicked on the
Internet Explorer icon, and went to Google. Hands
shaking, I typed 'Lizzie Stephens' and waited, expecting
the same old links to come up. But this time it was
different. The third link on the first page took me
somewhere that made me feel cold all over. It was a
picture of me, right there on the internet for everyone to
see. It was me – it was Lizzie – with my hair all scrunched
and curly, in my full late-1980s teenage finery. And just
below, something that completely demolished my secret
identity, such as it was. It was a picture of me now, a
relaxed, informal family photograph, my hair off my face,
no glasses, with my usual little bit of make-up, almost
smiling at the camera. I looked utterly recognisable. All
those years, all that careful reinvention, and my kid sister
Jem had blown it with just one entry in her blog.