Fall From Grace (45 page)

To his sons
.

As Garrick’s answerphone kicked in, she jammed a hand on the cradle and killed the call, looking back at the village she’d become a prisoner in
.

Better to be a prisoner than a corpse
.

That’s what Len had told her
.

But she wasn’t sure if she believed that any more
.

Two days later, she got back to the house after making her call to the voicemail, let herself in and locked the door. In the hallway mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself: a 37-year-old woman who wore every single year of that time on her face. She’d long since stopped thinking of herself as attractive, but sometimes in the months before she had to go into hiding, she’d still caught men looking at her, holding her gaze as she passed them in the street. In those moments, she realized something of her past remained
.

A glimpse of a younger life
.

A better life
.

She moved through to the kitchen. It had two entrances: one from the living room, one from the hallway. The flat was small, but despite its size, despite the way she had started to feel imprisoned inside it, it had a nice flow to it. She liked the way the rooms all connected. She might have liked the location if she got to leave it more often. She’d even grown to like the sound of the family padding around upstairs: their laughter, the girl’s tears when she was upset, the way the mother could so quickly and quietly comfort her
.

Casey had done that once, a long time ago, and as she thought of those moments, she allowed herself to drift. She sat down in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, and recalled those times that were gone and never coming back. That first train ride into London, reading over her interview prep, nerves coiling in her stomach. The day they called her at home in Devon to offer her the job. Cradling Lucas in her arms, three years later, in the hours after he was born. Turning her back for what seemed like a second and then hearing his screams for help. Burying him in the rain, his tiny coffin disappearing into the grave. And then the collapse of her marriage, the descent into depression – and coming out the other side. Sometimes she wondered if it might have been easier not to
.

Then she heard a noise
.

A click
.

She listened again
.

Nothing
.

She inched around the kitchen table and looked through the archway, into the living room. She could see the edge of a sofa, and a side table with an empty cup on it. As she passed under the arch, her hand moved to the wall and she switched on the lights
.

The living room was empty
.

‘I thought I’d let myself in.’

Her heart hit her throat
.

She spun around, facing back into the kitchen
.

Reynolds was standing in the doorway connecting the kitchen to the hall. He took another step. She automatically took a step back, the base of her spine hitting the wall
.

He’s found me, she thought
.

Oh fuck. Oh shit. He’s found me
.

In the subdued light, his skin was chalk white, like a phantom. He smiled, holding up a big hand, as if that would be some kind of reassurance
.

But it was the opposite
.

There was no reassurance in him at all
.

‘Relax,’ he said
.

‘What do you want?’

‘I think we need to talk.’

‘How did you find me?’

He smirked. ‘Oh, it wasn’t so hard. I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist calling that doctor friend of yours. After all, who else have you got?’ He paused, eyes widening. ‘I’ve had a tracker on his mobile for over a year. He’s so caught up in his own world, in his buzzwords, his amateur-hour psychology, he never realized. Thirteen months later, your weakness finally exposed you. You just don’t like being alone, do you, Casey?’

‘What do you want?’

‘What do I want?’ He took another step into the kitchen, hand reaching out for the counter. He pressed his palm flat to it, fingers spreading like an oil spill. ‘We never got to finish our conversation. Don’t you remember that? Our conversation on the beach at Keel Point? We were watching all those patients being loaded on to the fun bus.’

She just looked at him
.

‘Do you remember that?’

She nodded
.

‘Do you remember what I said to you? I said I wanted to talk to you, somewhere private, somewhere people couldn’t see me with my hands around your neck. So we made an arrangement: I would follow you on to the moors. And we would talk.’

‘You were taking me up there to kill me, to dump my car, to get rid of any trace I existed.’

Another smirk
.

He took a couple of quick steps towards her, and before she could come out from against the wall he was two feet from her, leaning over her. He didn’t touch her, but he didn’t need to: he’d blocked off her route into the living room, and out into the hallway
.

‘You managed to lose me that day. I suppose you made use of your advantage: you know these country roads much better than me. I’m more of a big-city man myself. But, even so, when you lost me, when you didn’t return to your house, I thought to myself, “She won’t be stupid enough to go up against me. She’ll come back here, because she knows what happens if she doesn’t.” And yet, there I was, day after day, week after week, sitting there in my car outside your home, waiting for you to return. And you never did.’

She swallowed. ‘You would have killed me.’

‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘But, back then, I would have made it painless.’

Out of nowhere, a knock at the door
.

‘Charlie?’ a muffled voice said
.

Reynolds didn’t move. He stayed there, standing over her, looking down into her face. She glanced from him to the door into the hallway
.

‘It’s my neighbours,’ she said
.

‘Charlie?’ the voice said again
.

Another knock at the door
.

‘What do they want?’ Reynolds hissed
.

‘They always cook a big stew on a Friday night.’

‘So?’

‘So they always bring some down for me.’

‘Charlie?’ the voice repeated. ‘Are you there?’

Reynolds grabbed her by the throat, pinning her against the wall. His fingers felt as hard as bullets. ‘Answer it. Get rid of them.’ He pressed harder. ‘Don’t fuck with me.’

She didn’t react
.

‘Are you listening to me?’

She nodded this time
.

‘If you warn them, if you shout out, if you run, I will kill them all: him, her, their girl. And I will do it all in front of you.’

He held her there a moment more
.

‘Are you listening to me, Casey?’

She nodded again
.

His eyes narrowed – and then he let go
.

Casey hurried across the kitchen, heart pounding, stomach knotted, but then hesitated in the doorway, looking along the hall to the front door. She could see the silhouette of the man from upstairs
.

Anthony
.

A nice guy. A nice couple
.

A nice family
.

They’ve got a little girl, Casey thought. I can’t let Reynolds hurt her
.

As she hesitated, as Anthony knocked on the door again, Reynolds came forward a step, fists at his side. ‘Answer it,’ he snarled. ‘And get rid of him.’

She turned back to face the door
.

‘Charlie?’ Anthony said again
.

She walked along the hallway
.

‘I’m coming,’ she said softly, her voice betraying her fear, tears slowly filling her eyes as she realized this was the end. She’d never been scared of dying. Not after Lucas
.

But she was scared now
.

And, in those final moments before she answered the door – before she took the food from her neighbour and closed off the outside world for ever – she thought of how Len wouldn’t get a voicemail message from her tomorrow
.

How he would realize something was wrong
.

Realize Reynolds had forced her to confess everything
.

And realize – inevitably – that the end had finally come for them both
.

70

It felt like the room had grown roots, pinning me to the floor. I looked up at the blank card, a letter from Franks to Bullock saying how much he missed his son, and then to the picture of the three of them: in 1997, Franks would have been forty-six, Bullock would have barely been twenty-two. I thought of her husband at the time, Robert Collinson, and wondered if he, even for a minute, had suspected that the boy wasn’t his. I doubted it, otherwise their marriage surely wouldn’t have continued for three years. From what I’d read, it had been the death of their son that had split them up. Except his son, the boy he spent two years bringing up as his own, had never been his.

He had been Franks’s.

It all started on the Pamela Welland case
.

Franks was the lead. Bullock was the witness in the bar. They’d come together by chance, by fate, whatever it was they believed in – and then I saw now that it became something more. But the pregnancy
had
to have been a mistake. She was already married to Collinson by that time, Franks had been married for twenty-six years to Ellie, and their kids – their son, their daughter – had flown the nest: Carl was twenty-three, Craw was twenty-five.

Even older than Bullock.

My thoughts shifted to Craw, to whether she’d had knowledge of her father’s secret life, to why she’d asked me to find him in the first place if that was true. And then I felt a pang of sadness for Ellie. She had no clue that the last seventeen years of her marriage had been built on a lie; that her husband’s reasons for moving down to Devon might not have been because he loved the wide-open spaces of the county, like he’d told her – but because he loved another woman.

He wanted to be closer to her.

To the memories of his son.

She said he made her worried
, Garrick had told me on the phone.
That was her choice of words
. But I understood now: Bullock wasn’t worried about what Franks would do to
her
. She wasn’t scared of him. She was worried
for
him. She was worried about their secret coming out. She felt no fear of him, and she never had.

She loved him back.

There were so many questions now, one after the other, that I realized I’d tuned out all the other sounds in the room. The mechanical buzz of the generator. The soft purr of the video and the television. The gentle crackle of the light bulb above me.

And something else.

I reversed away from the wall and looked back along the storage room. The noise had stopped now. Tightening my grip on the flashlight, I returned to the false wall, to the hole in the cavity, crouched and shuffled through.

The day room was lighter than before: the sun was up, passing through the only window, washing in from the corridor, from the windows on the eastern wall.

I moved through the disturbed dust, to the double doors of the day room, and looked out. In both directions, it was quiet: a breeze passed me, from one end of the hallway to the other, coming in through the broken holes in the windows and drawing itself deeper into the hospital. To my left, the corridor carried on, one of the doors flapping back and forth. Twenty feet further along was the proper entrance to the storage room I’d just been in: as I’d expected, the doorway had been secured shut with a thick metal plate, making the false wall the only way in and out.

Slowly, I kept going, checking behind me every ten paces. I passed identical rooms, some closed, some open, some with furniture, some with none. The light seemed to change a little more every second, sun spilling in from everywhere, through the glass, through skylights, through breaches and schisms in the structure itself. A mesh of streams emerged in front of me, sunlight criss-crossing like laser sights, and then I got to another corridor, heading left in the direction of the island’s southern tip.

I know this part
.

The corridor had windows on either side, each of the windows made up of twenty separate glass blocks. The walls and ceiling were discoloured, peeling, paint marbled as it shed like a skin. And at the end was an open door, flanked by two stained-glass windows.

Just inside, an IV stand stood, covered in cobwebs.

Reynolds’s photograph
.

I moved towards the open door, pieces of old tile, of dried paint, scattering against the toe of my boot. At the door, I stopped, looking through the gap. The benches I’d seen in Reynolds’s photograph were still in place, just like the IV stand. To the right of the room was an elevated platform, with a lectern on it. Above that was a circular window, entirely stained glass, with an image of Christ being tempted by Satan.

It was a chapel.

I placed a hand against the door and pushed. It was made from thick oak, similar to the one at the front entrance, and wheezed gently as it fanned back to reveal the rest of the room. But, as I started thinking about the reasons Reynolds might have chosen to take a picture of the hospital’s chapel, I heard something behind me.

A soft crunch.

I went to turn – but then a hand locked in place at the back of my neck, and a knife slid in against my throat. The blade was so sharp it nicked my collarbone.