The Butterfly Effect (13 page)

I close my eyes, and let my mind travel around the room. There is something there, some little thought that won’t quite come to the surface, so I get up and pace up and down. There’s the wardrobe; only clothes and bedding in there. There’s the fridge-freezer; only food in there. There’s the little cupboard; nothing substantial in there. There’s the bed. Nothing there, but what is it made of? It’s made of wood, and it’s new, and it’s almost certainly self-assembly. Somebody brought it up here in pieces, so … That’s it! If it has been put together, the chances are it can be taken apart. I am gripped by a great rush of excitement. This could be the answer.

But there is a problem with this bed. Not only is it fixed to the floor, but most of the sections are held in place by metal fittings with a hexagonal head. Some kind of Allen key will have been provided in the pack, and Greg is not stupid enough to have left it behind. I would have found it by now if he had. However, I pull the mattress onto the floor, and I can see that some of the slats are not fixed at both ends, and that they are held in place with screws. Nothing complicated, not even cross-head, just normal screws. If I could only find some way to loosen those screws, I could remove some of the slats and use them. I don’t know how yet, but I will think of something, if I can get them off.

I sit there for quite a while, pondering. Sometimes the answer to a problem will come to me if I do that, but not this time, so I try pulling one of the slats, jiggling it around, tapping it from underneath with my shoe, but it does not loosen. Surely there must be a way.

It is quite a while later that I remember my little coin. It is so tiny, that it might just fit into the grooves in the screw heads, so I find it in the drawer and take it across to the bed. Some of the screws are tight, and flush with the wood, but some are not. Greg’s craftsmanship seems to have been a bit sloppy, or maybe he was in a hurry when he got to this part of the assembly, but this could work to my advantage as several of the screws stand proud of the wood and are not completely tight.

I take my little coin and try it in one of the promising screws, and yes, it fits. It will only work on those that are already a little loose, but I persevere, until I have two slats and four screws there on the floor in front of me. Quickly, I drag the mattress back onto the bed frame and arrange the bedding. If Greg were to arrive now the game would be up, so I hide the slats and the screws in the wardrobe and lie back on the bed. My fingers are sore from twisting the coin, and I am sweating from the exertion, but there is no way I’m going back into the shower, so I try to relax. I need a few minutes to think clearly.

***

Dreams are funny things, aren’t they? I can remember no nightmares after Richie was killed, no horrific visions of dark figures approaching, wielding knives. I had plenty of dreams in which Richie explained to me, in apparently reasonable terms, how he was able to continue talking to me despite being dead, and quite a lot of dreams in which he wasn’t dead at all, but they were not scary. He would just be there, his usual self, often in a quite mundane context, and sometimes, if my dream self remembered that he was supposed to be dead, he would tell me that it had all been a mistake. This would provoke a huge wave of happiness and relief that would only dissipate as I awoke, and this was hard at first, but after a while, there could be something approaching comfort in waking up and remembering what I had dreamed.

I’d had a particularly vivid dream on the morning the next stage started. That’s probably why I remember it so well. Richie and I had been in the staffroom together, and I was explaining to colleagues that he hadn’t died really and now he was back to take up his post again. It was only a brief snippet, but Richie himself was very clear, even to the point of wearing his school suit – a shiny blue one that had seen better days, with an open-necked shirt. The image kept popping into my mind as I made my breakfast, so I went through into the lounge to watch TV whilst I ate. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to think about Richie, I still thought about him all the time, but this dream was making me sad.

I heard the letterbox rattle as I put my plate and mug on the coffee table. It was unlikely there would be anything exciting in the post, but I went to fetch it anyway as it might help to take my mind off that recurring image of Richie in the staffroom. There was one brown envelope on the mat. My name and address were on a printed label, but I didn’t think anything of that. This looked like an official communication, although I suppose, if I had been thinking clearly, I would have remarked on the fact that it was stamped rather than franked. Anyway, I started to open it as I walked back to the lounge, and put the contents on the coffee table whilst I turned on the TV. Sitting down, I picked up the single, folded sheet of paper and opened it out, and it is just as well I hadn’t picked up my coffee, or I would quite probably have tipped it all over myself.

Dear Amy,

I understand how difficult it must be for you to receive my gifts at your workplace. None of us likes our private lives to be on display, and you have suffered enough of that in the past few months. That is why I have decided to stop communicating with you at school but to use your home address instead. This way it will be just between ourselves, and our relationship will be able to develop normally.

I must say that I have huge admiration for the way you have picked up the pieces of your life. You often seem to be smiling these days, and it was lovely to see you back on stage. Now I can’t wait for your next appearance – will there be a solo this time?

I’ll finish now. I just thought it was important to let you know that I do understand why you didn’t feel able to receive anything at school and I’m not at all offended! I know you would never want to upset me, so you can put your mind at rest on that score.

Bye for now, and I’ll be in touch again soon,

Your friend

I was stunned. Assaulted by waves of conflicting emotions: anger, fear, disbelief. I think I may even have laughed out loud. What on earth was he thinking? How could he possibly believe that our relationship – which did not even exist – could ‘develop normally’ through the medium of unsolicited letters and gifts? Did he really think that I had been worrying about upsetting him? Even more concerning were the remarks about how happy I appeared to be and about seeing me sing. There had been no sign of him at the gig, and I had not seen his car outside school since Richie and Nat warned him off. That meant he was somehow watching me in secret, and that was very scary indeed.

I grabbed my mobile, and it was Nat that I called. I had been seeing much more of Olga recently, but Nat understood about all this. He had been there from the start and I knew he would take it seriously. Of course I had told Olga about what had happened before Richie died, but her response had been that we had been much too soft and, if she’d known, she would have got some friends to hold him down whilst she kicked him where it would hurt the most. She had been joking, but it wasn’t the kind of response I was looking for now, with the letter lying on the table in front of me. I wanted someone who was calm, sensible and practical, and Nat was all of those things and more.

Of course he dropped everything and came round straight away, and we spent ages analysing the letter, looking for clues. What were his intentions? Could he really be that deluded? We decided not to confront him, at least not for the moment, as he had stopped signing his name and there was no actual proof that he was involved. Nat said this demonstrated that he was not completely mad, as he would have seen no reason to withhold his name if that were the case, and that meant we would have to tread more carefully. He told me not to worry, then took my laptop and showed me a security website.

“I deal with these people at work, and they’re good,” he said. “Plus, I can get a discount. All we need is a security light that comes on if anyone approaches the door, and a couple of these little cameras that link up to your laptop. You will be able to look at the footage every day when you get home, and see who has been to your door. We can make one of them look outwards, to the street, in case he is standing there watching.”

The thought of Greg standing there watching my flat made me shiver, but I agreed to everything Nat said. He didn’t even want any money in advance, and then he took me out for a late lunch before dropping me off again, right at my door. He wouldn’t even hear of me walking down the street by myself and made me promise to take the car everywhere for the time being.

“Just until we get the cameras in place,” he said. “I’ll feel more comfortable then.”

I spent the next few days feeling anxious and jittery. Olga and I had planned to go out that night, and it would have been much more sensible to have gone, to have put it all behind me and had a good time, but I was queasy and my head was thumping, so I cried off. I made it to band practice the next day, and that gave me a few hours of respite, but I had a terrible sinking feeling as I drove home.

As if to confirm all my fears, there was a bouquet of flowers on the doorstep. I could hardly leave them there, it would look as if the flat were empty and that could attract trouble so I picked them up, gingerly, as if a bomb or a venomous snake might be hiding between the blooms. There was no snake, only a small card. Nothing was written on it, just a rather badly-drawn heart, but that was worse if anything. I took the flowers inside and spent five minutes cutting them into tiny segments and cramming the whole lot into the bin. It was far too full really, but I would have had to go out to the bulk bins at the back of the flat, and that felt unsafe. This was the first time I had felt this way, even in the aftermath of Richie’s murder, so I phoned Nat and asked him to order an extra camera for the back. That would do the trick.

So, by the end of that week, there were cameras trained on both the entrances to my flat, and one on the area of the street beyond the front gate. Nat fitted it all himself, as he said it would save me a fortune, and then he showed me how to log into the system and replay the footage. I have no idea how it all worked, and haven’t to this day, but it was not difficult to operate once it was all installed. The cameras would only record any significant movement, so I did not have to scan hours and hours of footage in which nothing happened, but as we flicked through on the first evening, it was a surprise to find out how many of the neighbourhood cats considered my flat to be in their territory.

Two or three weeks passed and I developed a routine. The minute I was inside the flat I would check the post for any of Greg’s cards or letters, any odd little gifts he had ordered from online providers, and then I would log on and check the security footage. I could not relax until I had done this, although it only proved what we had suspected from the start: Greg was clearly unbalanced, but he was still lucid enough never to approach the flat himself and never to stand anywhere within the range of the cameras. He used the postal service, and online services that would not divulge the details of their clients. We had enough information to know what he was doing, but not enough to do anything about it.

Nat said the next thing we should do was to cut off Greg’s oxygen supply. Not literally, although there were times when I wouldn’t have argued a lot about that, but in terms of information. It was time to block him on Facebook and other social media sites, and I should take the opportunity to reduce the number of friends I had.

“It’s not that they are a risk in themselves,” he said. “It’s just that you can’t control what they do. If they have accepted friend requests from Greg, that gives him access to some of your posts. It won’t be for long, but you need to be quite drastic and cull everyone you don’t know very well.”

So, that’s what I did. I posted a vague explanation then unfriended the vast majority of my contacts, leaving a small group of the people I knew best. I sent a different message to them, via email, asking them to block Greg if he was already a friend, and never to accept him if he was not. Most people replied quickly, asking if I was alright and promising their support, but only three had Greg as a friend, so it seemed that he preferred the personal approach to online snooping anyway.

I did feel better though. It was good to know that my posts were not winging their way to a group of people who were virtual strangers. I don’t know why I had been so careless in the old days before all this started, but I was a changed person now. I rarely posted anything, and used my account to keep track of my friends’ much more exciting lives, rather than to record my own.

I can’t remember what happened next. Whether it was Olga texting to say she had found the perfect flat for us or the first of the nasty letters. It doesn’t really matter, as I know I had already begun to doubt the wisdom of moving in with her. Looking back, this is hard to justify, but I suppose it demonstrates the siege mentality I was already beginning to develop. Surely there would have been safety in numbers? Surely Greg would have been put off by the close proximity of another person? That may well have been true, and it is possible that it all would have stopped if I had taken a different path, but at the time, I could not see how it would work.

For a start, I could not see Olga agreeing to the level of security upon which I now depended. She was characteristically cavalier about the whole thing – or maybe I played it down when I was with her, that is possible – and I could just imagine her response to the idea of multiple cameras trained on every visitor who came to the flat. She is an extremely sociable person, and the idea that everyone she invited back would be recorded as they arrived and left would have horrified her.