Can't Let Go (8 page)

Remember, I'm watching you. I know everywhere you
go.

One
sheet of paper and nine words. That's all it
was. Nine words – but it felt like the whole world had
changed. I'd been living on a fault line for seventeen years
and finally the earthquake had struck. All those years of
fear, wondering what might happen, if anyone would find
out, if I'd really got away with it. All those years of fear,
and there it was: a white envelope, a sheet of white paper,
nine words, neatly handwritten in black ballpoint pen. A
standard sheet of white laser-print paper, no watermark,
no smudges. A single sheet of paper, thin and deadly, like
an arrow breaching my defences.

I got back to my flat on that Friday afternoon and I
locked and bolted the door, as usual. I leaned against the
front door, standing in the hallway of my flat, and out of
nowhere I started laughing. Suddenly the note seemed
hideously funny. I remembered the man at Leicester
Forest East, running after me to give me my carrier bag
and calling me 'duck', and how scared I'd been then. That
was nothing compared to this. I was laughing because —
well, I'd been afraid for so long, and now it was finally
here. It, the judgement, the avenger — whatever it was.
Whoever it was. It had finally caught up with me. It was
almost a relief. And then, in the way that hysterical
laughter tends to, it turned into sobs, and I found myself
sinking down, still leaning against the front door, until I
was sitting on the prickly doormat. And on that sweltering
day in London, another day when the temperatures were
soaring close to thirty degrees Celsius, I sat there feeling
colder than I had ever done in my life.

Eventually I got out my list. What else could I do? I got
out my list, and I dug out the manila file from the
place where it was hidden on the bookshelf and I reread
everything I'd written, every piece of information I'd
gathered together. I was trying to control my fear through
information, or simply by doing something, anything. I
checked the internet. I searched Rivers Carillo's name on
it for what felt like the millionth time. There was nothing
new, nothing added, from all the other times I'd searched.
I didn't know what I was looking for, anyway. Maybe a
police report. The kind of thing you'd get in a T V police
procedural. Something to say the case had been reopened
because new evidence had been found – a 'cold case',
they'd call it. Or more far-fetched: a close relative of his
who'd had amnesia for seventeen years had suddenly
remembered the identity of the girl that Rivers had been
seeing the summer that he'd died. Or a report that the
body they found wasn't Rivers Carillo at all. But there
was nothing. Nothing had changed.

Everything had changed.

Why now? I kept asking myself. Why now, after all
these years? As I paced around my flat I caught sight of
my green jacket hanging on the back of my door and I
realised that something
had
changed –
I
had changed. I'd
decided to stop being afraid; I'd decided to start being
happy. Had this person – the letter-writer, the stalker, the
avenger – had they seen me with Zoey, laughing and
joking and acting like a normal, happy person having
lunch with a friend? Had they followed me to the Black
Keys gig, waited outside and watched me leave arm in
arm with Danny? Had they seen me go into Danny's flat?
Had they waited outside until I'd emerged the following
morning looking happy? Was that the trigger?

And that made everything even worse, because that
meant someone had been watching me for years, watching
my fear, feeding off it; waiting for their moment to strike
– the moment when I'd dropped my guard, the moment
when I'd stopped being afraid. And that someone was
probably close at hand right now.

Assess the threat level. That sentence came into my
head from nowhere. Maybe it was something I'd heard on
TV, from a survival programme, or from some American
miniseries about disaster threatening the Earth. What was
the threat level? More to the point, what was the threat?
What was I being threatened
with?
I was being watched.
Somebody knew exactly what I was doing and who I spent
my time with. Someone was out there. I'd probably seen
them at some point – in the street, on the Tube, hanging
around outside school. They knew where I worked; no
doubt they also knew where I lived. They probably knew
everything about me. But what did the note mean, and
what were they threatening to do to me? To carry on
watching, that much was certain. But what else? Were
they going to expose what I had done? If so, to whom?
Was I in physical danger? What should I do? Should I
leave? Should I run away and hide?

Someone was watching me and I didn't know who.
And I didn't know what they planned to do to me. The
questions went round and round, round and round,
swirling around inside my head. There were no answers.
I had no idea what to do. I'd come to a decision, an
explanation, a plan of action, and then it would float away
again. There was no one I could tell. How could I,
without revealing what I had done all those years ago?

Impatient, frustrated and afraid, I turned off my computer.
I looked at the note once more, flattened it out, then
folded it up again, put it back into the envelope and
slipped the envelope into the file. I put the file back where
it belonged, hidden between the atlas and the D I Y book,
weighed down and hidden where no one would find it. I
looked at my white walls, at the sparsely furnished rooms,
at the small pile of books, the few CDs on the shelves. I
looked at what my life had come to, what my life
amounted to. I couldn't think of anything else to do. I
turned off my phone. I turned the television on, loud. I
cooked some pasta and tried to eat it. I watched something
on television – I don't know what, maybe it was a sitcom,
maybe the news. I ran a bath and lay in it until my skin
wrinkled, drinking red wine, as if a hot bath and enough
alcohol could somehow persuade me that everything was
normal. And, in the end, I made myself go to bed. I curled
up in a foetal position, my duvet tightly wrapped around
me, and I tried to go to sleep. What else could I possibly
do?

There he was again, out of the corner of my eye:
Rivers Carillo. I knew it was stupid. He was dead;
I killed him. Whoever was stalking me was not
Rivers Carillo. How could it be? But still, there he was,
the next day, haunting me at another motorway service
station; haunting me yet again when I was trying to run
away. There he was, serving behind the hot-food counter
at Pease Pottage Services, just south of Crawley. He was
wearing a white hat and overall, and he was serving all day
breakfasts to frazzled-looking families. From time to
time he looked across at me and seemed to grin. I looked
away. I moved my seat so that I was sitting at a different
angle, so it was difficult to make even the slightest eye
contact. I was hiding under the baseball cap I usually wore
only on bad hair days, and I pulled the rim further down
over my face. I was trying hard to keep myself together,
to act as normally as possible. I took a long gulp of Diet
Coke and filled in another clue in the
Times
crossword
with a shaking hand. The crossword was calming me
slightly, letting me focus on working out anagrams and
other word puzzles, putting letters into blank squares,
feeling a sense of control. It was what I needed.

After a while I made myself look back towards the hot-food
counter and – of course – it wasn't Rivers Carillo at all.
It was just a kid, a young guy, not much more than twenty,
with a cheery face and a frizz of curly dark hair poking out
of his hygienic hat. And it occurred to me that all the time
I'd been bothering about him, that spectre of Rivers Carillo,
someone else had probably been watching me, someone I
wouldn't recognise. I looked around me cautiously, as
discreetly as possible, feeling as if every hair on my body
was standing on end. Just the normal Saturday crowds.
Nobody looked suspicious. Everyone looked suspicious.

I was running away. I didn't want to be in London. I
couldn't stay in my flat. I'd woken just after seven, the sun
already streaming through the gaps in the blinds, the flat
already stuffy and airless. I had a headache and my throat
was dry. I'd stumbled into the bathroom and splashed
water onto my face. I could see in the mirror that the skin
around my eyes looked puffy and bruised. I went back to
bed, tossed and turned, and eventually fell asleep again,
waking frequently in the midst of horrific dreams.

I'd tried to stay in bed. I thought maybe I could stay
asleep all day, all weekend; hiding under my duvet,
escaping the fear that way, killing time, killing the empty
days. But by mid-morning I was wide awake. I felt hot and
sweaty, and I couldn't find a cool place on the pillow. I got
up again and walked around the flat, counting to myself.
Then I stood in front of my bookshelf for a while, my arms
tightly folded so that I wouldn't be tempted to fish out the
letter from the file and read it again. I opened the big
window as wide as it would go, and I stuck my head out and
breathed in the sticky London air. There were roofs and
windows as far as I could see, each hiding people that I
didn't know: hundreds and thousands of them, people and
people and people, and one of them wished me harm. In the
street below my window someone was kicking a beer can
along the street. The sky was white with the threat of
humidity and extreme heat. I knew that I had to get away.

So there I was, on the run. I was looking for some air,
and a chance to escape for a while. I wanted to lock the
door on that sheet of white paper with those nine words on
it: to put some miles under my belt; to get away, to hide.
And so I was on my way to a place that I guessed would
always be a refuge, however old I got. I was going to
spend the weekend with my parents. I even had a half formed
idea – a glimmer of a plan – that I might tell them
what had happened: tell them everything, and let them
sort it out. That's what parents are supposed to do, isn't it?
But I knew I would never do it. I knew I would lose my
nerve at the last minute.

My parents lived in one of those small Sussex seaside
resorts that aren't Brighton, a town full of bed-and-breakfasts
and down-at-heel cafes. We'd moved there
when I was thirteen, and my parents must have liked it
because they stayed. There was a grim concrete shopping
centre built in the 1960s that the local council was
planning to knock down when they could decide what to
build instead. The latest idea was a new leisure centre-cum-civic
theatre. The main shopping precinct seemed
mainly to specialise in shops selling sports shoes,
greetings cards and Chinese medicines. There were at
least four charity shops, filling spaces where big-name
high-street stores used to be. The beach was mostly
shingle, the pier was falling down, and the town's only
glories were a few streets of faded Victorian villas, one
terrace of attractively restored Georgian houses and the
brightly coloured municipal flower beds, always filled
with pelargoniums and impatiens in various eye-searing
colours. My mother had taught me the Latin names for
plants; she was a keen gardener. But I knew that another
name for impatiens was Busy Lizzie, because that's what
my father used to call me: Busy Lizzie, or sometimes
Dizzy Lizzie or Whizzy Lizzie or Fizzy Lizzie. Variants
on a theme: I was the child who soaked up attention, who
was never still, who was always dancing and acting, and
acting up. I threw tantrums if I was ignored for more than
five minutes. I was difficult, a pain, a little madam, a
show-off. It was no wonder that my parents were so
pleasantly surprised when I returned home from my
summer in San Francisco as a newly quiet, restrained
woman called Beth.

Did I blame my parents for never noticing that something
was wrong – badly wrong – with me? I don't think
so. Not really. They had so many other things to think
about. My dad was a vicar – I suppose he still was; you
never stop being a vicar, do you? He still filled in sometimes,
covering for other vicars who went on holiday or
had nervous breakdowns or affairs with parishioners,
taking services at a variety of local churches. Back when I
was a teenager, we'd lived in one of those Victorian
houses in the old part of town, a huge rambling vicarage
with seven bedrooms that had now been sold off and
converted into flats. Both my parents took their pastoral
roles seriously and kept an open house. You never knew
who might be staying under our roof: homeless drug
addicts, pregnant teenagers thrown out by their parents,
African theology students with archaic Biblical names like
Zachariah and Simeon.

There was a lot of love in our home, but the love was
swirling and unfocused. It was up to each individual child
to grab as much love from my parents as we could, as they
passed by on their way from one good work to the next. It
was very easy to hide from, if you didn't want to deal with
parental love. And then, when I was older, there was a
whole thing with my younger sister Jem: hospital
appointments and big medical decisions and operations,
and suddenly she was the focus of family life as the rest of
us left home. All this might explain why I was such a
show-off as a child and yet I'd been able to fly under the
radar ever since.

I was, ironically, the child who gave my parents the
least worry. My older sister Sarah was divorced and
bringing up teenage kids on her own, up there in what my
parents considered to be the grim North. Jem – the
youngest child, the baby, the one who had been ill as a
child – was permanently infantilised by the family and my
mother didn't seem to realise that she was now a grown
woman. Jem was seven years younger than me. She was
involved with websites or videos or graphic design, and
from time to time I would bump into her in Soho or in
Camden, and we'd make half-hearted promises to each
other to have lunch. She had a lot of piercings and tattoos
and variably coloured hair, she wore strange footwear and
T-shirts with Japanese logos on them, and none of us
really knew her at all.

And then there was me: the killer who lived in a state of
permanent fear. Or to describe me the way the world saw
me: there was Beth, the sensible one, the schoolteacher
with a nice little flat in London who visited her parents
dutifully every couple of months. My mother did
occasionally worry that I was lonely; I think she thought
that I might be a lesbian and she wished that I would come
out and tell her, because she would have been really supportive.
In fact, she probably would have been thrilled.
But, mostly, my parents didn't worry much about me.
They thought I had my life all sorted out. What would
they have said if I had told them?

My parents wished they could still live in a house like
the vicarage. They would have liked a sprawling house to
fit their image, their dream, of the sprawling extended
family. But instead they had a little bungalow on the
outskirts of town, with a neat garden that I had to
remember to admire every time I visited. It was probably
not their fault that our family split apart like curdled milk.
Except maybe, because we shared that vicarage with
every needy person in the parish, because there was no
privacy and no separate family time, Sarah and Jem and I
had all built walls around us and between us in our
different ways. Mine was the least definable but definitely
the most impenetrable.

It was very hot, even there on the coast, the kind of heat
that hits you like an insult as you get out of an air conditioned
car. But at least there was a whisper of a
breeze off the sea. I parked my car on the street that sloped
gently down from the Downs and towards the sea, and I
breathed in the fresh air. My mother was in the front
garden, planting or uprooting something in one of her
tubs. She was kneeling, her hands – ungloved – deep in
the soil. She saw me, smiled, and stood with difficulty. I
noticed that she was starting to get old. She hugged me,
careful not to touch me with her dirty hands, and asked me
if I liked what she'd done to the garden. I gave her a
cautiously general response about how pretty it was
looking despite the lack of rain. Then she said, 'You look
tired,' and before I could answer she added, 'But never
mind, you've got that lovely long holiday ahead of you.'

Inside, the porch was full of supermarket carrier bags
stuffed with jumble, presumably on its way to a church
fete. My mother put the kettle on and I went through the
airless, shabby bungalow and out to the conservatory,
where my father was doing the same crossword that I'd
been attempting to complete earlier. His new reading
glasses made his eyes look enormous as he looked up at
me. 'Busy Lizzie,' he said tenderly, ruefully, his dry lips
brushing my cheek. He'd taken to calling me that again; I
didn't know why. I slumped down into one of the cane
chairs and looked around me, at all the familiar ornaments
and at the tatty carpet, and the furniture that had seen
better days.

For half a moment I considered confessing. I should tell
my father what I did, all those years ago. 'Dad, I have
something to tell you.' That's how I would have begun.
My father would have looked up, vaguely. 'Dad, I killed
someone.'

What would he have said? Would he have dealt with
the shock? Would he have asked me to tell him everything,
all the details? Would he have taken it in his stride,
as a vicar should, and offer me forgiveness and absolution
in exchange for repentance and penitence? Not that I
believed in all that. I had killed any vestigial faith that
I might have had on the day that I killed Rivers Carillo. I
grew up in a house surrounded by people of deep
Christian faith. It was always there for the taking, and
somehow I'd taken it for granted. But I had never
bothered to develop my own faith. Any belief that I had
was probably always destined to die very quickly, like the
seeds in the parable that were sown on rocky soil.
Forgiveness seemed like a cop-out. I didn't believe that
anything could be that easy. And yet I still yearned to
confess.

But as my father put the crossword down on the table
to talk to me, I could tell at a glance that he had got one of
the answers wrong. Suddenly I wanted to cry. I wanted to
cry because my parents were getting old. I wanted to cry
at the stifling familiarity of it all. I wanted to cry, because
I was tired and scared and because there was love there if
I wanted it, but I couldn't take it, not properly. I wanted
to cry because I was wondering what my father would
have said if I
had
told him; whether he could have coped,
or whether the truth would have killed him. I wanted to
cry because I'd been there for five minutes and already
I knew that I wouldn't be able to stay for long. Already I
wanted to walk away.

Dinner was early, and it was some kind of bean stew.
My mother was convinced I was a vegetarian. I'd told her,
countless times, that I ate meat. I'd been eating meat all
my life except for about eighteen months in my mid twenties.
But I didn't have the heart to tell her again.
Later, we left my father dozing in front of
Who Wants to
be a Millionaire?
and my mother drove me the short
distance to the seafront.

We walked along the prom in what was, I suppose,
friendly silence. It was still very warm, and
suddenly I got the urge to paddle. I walked down to the
sea, took off my sandals, rolled up my jeans and hobbled
over the last few inches of shingle and into the sea.

I don't think I had ever known the sea in Sussex to be
that warm. It lapped around my ankles, gently licking and
fondling my feet. I found a rare patch of sand to stand on,
and the grains dribbled around my toes. There was a yacht
with a white sail moving slowly along the horizon. I
closed my eyes. I could feel the evening sun on my right
shoulder. I could hear the seagulls shrieking to each other.
I could feel tears start to form in my eyes. I thought:
maybe I can just stand here – in this precise spot – for the
rest of my life. I counted to four, to eight, to sixteen, and
then I turned around and walked back up the beach.