I Found You (31 page)

Gray stared hard at Mark and then down at his phone. A wave of nausea passed over him as the reality of his position became clear.

‘Go on,’ said Mark. ‘What are you waiting for?’

The phone was damp inside Gray’s clammy fingers. He turned away from Mark. His body began to shake. He couldn’t think straight.

‘You may as well untie me,’ Mark said. ‘Untie me – let me go. You get on with your life. I get on with my life. Yes?’

Gray spun round. ‘No!’ he said. ‘No! I haven’t got a life to get on with. Don’t you see? I haven’t got a fucking life because you took it away from me!’

Mark sighed. His phone vibrated again. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘She’s getting desperate now. She’ll be calling the police soon herself. They’ll track my phone to here. They’ll find an innocent man tied to a radiator and a wild-eyed lunatic with his prints all over a knife. Let me go now and I’ll tell her some lie about a delay on the train.’

Gray closed his eyes and thought of his mother. Broken, alone, entirely dependent upon Gray for any semblance of meaningful life. He thought of the small things that made him human: his job, his students, his cat, his five-a-side football team. And then he thought of the humiliation of being taken away in a squad car to a strip-lit room, trying to explain himself to a pair of steely-faced detectives, who would look sadly at him
over steepled fingers as though he was mad. And then he thought maybe he was mad. Surely? What had he been thinking? Stalking this man around London and Surrey? Kidnapping him off the streets? Tying him up? What had he been hoping to achieve?

The phone vibrated again. The sound of it passed through his consciousness like broken glass. He waited until it went silent and then he turned to face Mark.

He was smiling at him, smugly, like a car salesman about to close a deal on an unsellable car. ‘Come on, Graham. Let me go.’

Red heat descended upon Gray.

His vision blurred. His body shook. He lunged towards Mark with his arms outstretched.

Lily grabs Frank’s arm and she almost shouts, ‘So? What? Did you kill him? Is he dead? Or is he still there? Tell me! Tell me now!’

He stares at her blankly, shakes his head, and she cries out, ‘Enough!’ and pulls out her phone, but she pauses before pressing WPC Traviss’s number. What if this strange man is right? What if her husband did do those terrible things? What if they take him away and send him to prison? No, she decides, not the police. Not yet. Instead she takes her phone outside the café and brings up Russ’s number. He answers within one ring.

‘Lily?’

‘Russ, where are you?’

‘I’m in the office.’

‘Russ, you need to leave, now. You need to go to a place. It is called Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. It is a building development on London Road. Next to the flat where I live with Carl. There is no one there because it is bankrupt. You have to—’

‘Lily, stop. I’m at work, I’m about to walk into a meeting.’

‘You must not walk into the meeting, Russ. You must go to Wolf’s Hill Boulevard. It is Carl. He is there. I am with the man who put him there. He tied him to a radiator there. On Tuesday night. You must go now and find him. He is in apartment one. Please.’

She hears him sighing. ‘Lily,’ he says softly, ‘start from the beginning. Where are you?’

‘I’m in a café. In Ridinghouse Bay. I came in here to find out about the woman who owns that house. And there were these people here. And they heard me asking. And they have a friend who had lost his memory, who came here on Tuesday. And he saw the photo of Carl and he knew him. He says that Carl used to be called Mark, that something bad happened in this town twenty years ago, that Carl hurt someone. He says he followed him home last week, and took him into the building site and tied him up and left him there. So please, Russ, please go and find him! Now!’

‘Lily,’ he sighs, ‘I think maybe you should probably call the police?’

‘No! I can’t do that, Russ. This man, in the café, he says Carl was a criminal. That he did bad things. I don’t think I believe him . . .’ She pauses momentarily, thinking of that night when she’d woken up with his hands around her throat, of the blackness that descended on him for no discernible reason from time to time, the fake passport, the fake mother. ‘But still,’ she rallies, ‘I don’t want to take the risk. Not until I’ve seen him myself.’

She hears the tone of his voice change, the acceptance softening him. ‘OK,’ he says, ‘OK.’ She hears the background noises stop, a door closing, a rustle of paper. She can tell that he has sat down. ‘Right,’ he says, ‘tell me exactly where this place is and what to do when I get there.’

Alice glances at Lily through the window of the café. Then she passes Derry her door keys and says, ‘Can you pop back to mine – just quickly? Open the back door, let the dogs out. Ignore anything you find on the floor.’

Derry shrugs and leaves. Lesley goes to the counter to buy another round of coffees. Outside the coffee shop, Lily paces and gesticulates while talking to whoever she is on the phone to.

Alice turns to look at Frank. ‘How are you?’ she says, her hand resting on his shoulder.

He shrugs.

‘Any more memories?’

He stares through the window for a moment, then sighs and shakes his head.

On the pavement outside, Lily has finished her phone call.

‘What did they say?’ says Alice when she walks back into the cafe.

‘I did not call the police,’ she says tersely. ‘I called my friend. He will go to the building site. Soon we will know.’ She looks at them, one by one. ‘What do we do now?’

Lesley answers: ‘It’s obvious really, isn’t it? There’s only thing we can do. We need to find Kitty Tate.’

‘We should go back to the house,’ says Alice. ‘See if we can find an address for her there.’

‘I have looked in the house already,’ says Lily. ‘I found nothing.’

‘It’s a big house,’ says Alice gently. ‘Might be worth another search?’ This girl is just five years older than Jasmine. She imagines her daughter in a strange country frantically searching for the man who brought her there. She imagines how she and Frank and Lesley must appear to her: old and other, discomfitingly unfamiliar. She smiles at her for the first time.

Lily wavers for a split second but then pulls back her shoulders and her resolve. ‘You can do that,’ she says. ‘I will keep asking the people in this town. I will come later.’

Alice watches her turn and leave the café, hesitating momentarily in the doorway before turning left. What twist of fate brought this girl to this quiet,
gently bohemian town hidden away in a dip of the Yorkshire coast? And what would she be doing now, right now, if Mark Tate had never walked into her life?

She pictures him now, tied to a radiator in an empty flat. And she thinks of what the man she knows as Frank says he had to do to put him there: the knife to the throat, the bag over the head, the tying of hands and the issuing of threats, the kidnapping and the taking hostage. She cannot conflate these actions with the soft man who has been living in her house for the past five days, the man she has slept with, who has sat with her daughter in the early hours of the morning, who has been befriended by her least trusting dog and given the seal of approval by her teenage son. She is reminded once again that the man she found on the beach last week was not a man at all, just an empty box in which to put whatever she wanted. She’d imbued him with qualities and character traits that suited her. She’d ignored the possibility that underneath the gentle, golden façade, Frank might well be a sociopath or even a killer. She’d put her children in danger. She’d put herself in danger.

And yet still, as she walks with him, side by side, towards Kitty Tate’s house, her heart aches for him, her arms yearn to embrace him. Whatever he is. Whoever he is. Whatever he has done.

Frank turns to Alice and smiles uncertainly. What is she thinking? he wonders. Is she regretting every minute she has spent in his company? Is she recoiling at the memories of their night together? Is she already repainting him in her mind’s eye as the twisted monster that he might well turn out to be?

From the very beginning of his slow emergence from the fugue he has felt echoes of violence, of hands around a throat, the slow burn of murderousness. What will Lily’s friend find when he opens the door to apartment number one? An empty room? A dead body?

He finds that he has begun walking away from the others as they head up the hill towards the main road out of town.

‘Frank? Where are you going?’ calls Alice.

He looks up at them and then down towards the coastal road. ‘Can we . . .? Just quickly?’

Something’s tugging him down the hill, down that alleyway, towards the sea. He’s walked this way before. Many, many times. The others nod and follow him and as he emerges from the other end of the narrow alleyway he instinctively turns right and there it is, Rabbit Cottage. Except it’s not called Rabbit Cottage any more. The engraved slate plaque outside says ‘Ivy Cottage’. It’s been painted a soft sky blue and the windows have been replaced with double glazing.

He stares at the tiny house and feels his soul opening up like a sinkhole. This was the last place they’d all been together. If he’d come home from the pub that night with his family, if he’d stayed with his family instead of chasing girls, if he hadn’t drunk three shots of tequila and brought those people here, they’d all have gone to bed that night, woken up together, spent another day together, and another, and another; they’d have driven back south together, spent the rest of their lives together. Kirsty would have met a man who wasn’t mentally ill; Gray would have had a niece or a nephew, a brother-in-law. He may even have had a wife of his own, a child or two. His mother would have dealt with her empty nest like a normal human being instead of an anxiety-ridden lunatic. His father would have grown older and greyer and they would have been normal and boring and perfect forever and ever.

It was all his fault. All of it.
All of it
.

Derry appears then from the mouth of a cobbled alleyway, holding Alice’s door keys. She looks at them in surprise. ‘Nice of you all to say where you were going,’ she says. ‘Just went back to the Sugar Bowl; woman outside said she saw you all heading this way.’

Alice apologises and Derry shrugs and puts her hands in her pockets. They all start walking towards town. Frank finds himself side by side with Derry. For a while they walk in silence, then Derry says, ‘So, Frank, did you kill him?’

He starts. ‘What?’

‘Mark Tate. Did you kill him? You keep looking at your fingers’ – she glances down at his hands – ‘like you don’t recognise them. Like they don’t belong to you.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘I mean . . . it would be the logical explanation. It would explain your memory loss, your midnight flit to the middle of nowhere. Wouldn’t it?’

He looks at her, trying to gauge her stance. Is she challenging him? Attacking him? Or merely trying to introduce him to some interesting concepts?

‘I genuinely don’t know,’ he says. ‘I might have killed him, yes. I might well have. And with my hands.’

‘And if you have?’

‘Then he deserved to die. And I deserve to go to prison for what I did.’ He shrugs, feeling a sense of balance and release at this idea.

They walk the rest of the way in silence.

Mark’s phone rang again.

Gray stopped dead, stepped back from Mark, dragged his fingers through his hair. The concerned wife. He pictured her perched nervously on the edge of a sofa, a wrinkled tissue in her curled-up hands, pressing the call button, obsessively, over and over. She would keep pressing it until Mark’s phone ran out of charge. He leaned down and yanked the phone from Mark’s pocket and then, uttering a deathly, reverberating war cry, he hurled it across the room. It hit the extractor hood with a terrible crack, skidded across the kitchen floor and came to rest in the far corner. The bulb in the extractor hood fizzed and blinked. Then silence fell upon them and Gray felt a wave of relief.

‘Nice one, you twat,’ said Mark. ‘Now she’ll be even more worried. You really are a loser.’

The rage, momentarily quelled, resurfaced, twice as red, twice as strong.

And then Gray finally succumbed to the primal urge that had been haunting him since the first time he’d set eyes on Mark Tate twenty-two years ago and he let his hands lead him to Mark Tate and he watched as they circled together around his neck and he mentally applauded his hands as they worked together to squeeze the breath out of Mark Tate, to squeeze and obstruct and block until finally Mark Tate stopped fighting Gray’s hands, until finally he softened, flopped into himself, stopped breathing, shut the fuck up, for ever.

As they approach Kitty Tate’s house on the cliff, Frank takes Alice’s hand and pulls her urgently towards him.

She turns and looks at him. It strikes him that her face is now more familiar to him than anything else in the world. And then he realises that he may never see this face again after what he is about to tell her.

‘I remembered,’ he says. ‘I strangled him. I strangled him and he’s dead.’

‘Fuck.’ She pauses. ‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be about anything.’

She puts her hand to the back of his head and strokes his hair. The gesture makes him want to weep.

They exchange a look. Frank nods.

Alice catches up with the others. ‘Frank remembers,’ she says heavily. ‘Mark’s dead. Frank says he killed him.’

There is a sharp and terrible beat of silence before Derry breaks it by saying, ‘Well, high five, Frank. The fucker totally had it coming.’

Lily sees them standing outside the house, deep in conversation. She sighs and pulls herself taller, then heads towards them with a cheery, ‘Hello!’

They turn at her greeting and she flinches.

‘What is it?’ she says.

They exchange panicky looks and then the Lesley woman smiles and says, ‘Nothing. It’s all good. So, how did you get on?’