Stalk Me Read online

  Beth didn’t feel as if she were walking across the road. Sound ceased with the pain, and it seemed as if she were gliding to the row of faces on a conveyor belt.

  She could hear the screaming in her head and discerned some of it as hers. The crowd was suddenly dispersing, scattering before her waving fists. But even though they retreated, one young guy wearing a blue camouflage bandana impassively stood his ground and held out his phone as if it were a talisman to ward her off.

  She lunged forward to strike him, her shoulders tensing painfully as she heaved her fists. The yellow tape was gone but they were all recording her from further back.

  Her hair undulated as if animated by her fury. A potent gust of wind was at her back and blasting her scalp. It was accompanied by a frenetic buzz overhead. She looked skywards and saw the helicopter shakily descending, the branches of the trees violently billowing as its blades whipped up the loose leaves from the road.

  Beth could feel them scratching her face as she returned her attention to the crowd. They’d retreated, seeking safety from her attack and the barrage of energised air. They now had their phones pointed upwards to capture the air ambulance’s entrance.

  Hands were about her and she turned to see another paramedic being joined by two male gendarmes as she was gently restrained. The aircraft’s engines whined in her head, and under its high-pitched whistling, she could hear her own unheard scream grinding in her throat. As the helicopter touched down, Beth’s overwrought emotions short-circuited her and she blacked out.

  Chapter 3

  The young, pretty nurse silently left the room as soon as Beth woke, and in that moment, she knew Luc was dead. A slim, middle-aged female doctor with glasses on a chain and puckered smoker’s lips entered a few minutes later. The draught of her arrival smelt of nicotine and antiseptic hand wash, and her grey hair was clipped untidily to the back of her head. Was she to be the messenger?

  When the doctor gently put her hand beside Beth’s head, she wanted to sit up but felt as if every one of her muscles had seized. Was she paralysed?

  “Good morning, Mrs Jordan, I’m Doctor Falconer.” Her scrutiny played around Beth’s face but she didn’t meet her eye. “A nurse will be in shortly to make you a little more comfortable.”

  “Luc?” she enquired, but it hurt to say his name. Pain locked itself tight to the left-hand side of her face, and her mouth filled with saliva. She didn’t want the preamble. Didn’t want to delay the revelation by being told that she, at least, was going to live.

  “You’re going to be in this position for at least another couple of days. Your jawbone was in fragments. You had titanium plates inserted to hold it together.”

  “Luc,” she repeated flatly. She could feel the resistance of the dressing around her cheek.

  The doctor met her gaze, blinked slowly and nodded as if acknowledging her wishes. She swallowed quickly and Beth watched the moment between ignorance and confirmation bounce in her throat. “I’m afraid your husband didn’t survive the crash.”

  She’d hoped her instincts were wrong, that she was girding herself for words that wouldn’t come, but the doctor’s sentence was a thick blade thrusting into her sternum.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  There were too many implications to absorb. She knew the reality of Luc being gone was something she couldn’t begin to acknowledge, but it was the immediate certainties that were overwhelming. She hadn’t been there. Luc had died without her. She’d been oblivious. “How?”

  “His neck was broken.” The doctor put her hot hand on Beth’s wrist and it felt like it would scald her. “He didn’t regain consciousness during the flight in the air ambulance and died before they reached the hospital. He didn’t feel any pain.”

  Beth remembered tenderly touching the back of Luc’s head in the car and his agonized expression as he lay on the stretcher. The doctor’s features blurred, the tendons in Beth’s neck hardening as she attempted to sit up.

  She put her other hand gently on Beth’s chest. “I know how difficult this must be, but please try to remain still. You’ve been transferred to the UK. You’re now in St Andrews, Wandsworth.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “You were in a coma.”

  Beth felt panic stampede through her. “How long?”

  “Just over nine weeks. You woke briefly last night and then fell into a deep sleep.”

  Beth needed to rise but couldn’t; the blade felt like it was thrusting in deeper, pinning her to the mattress.

  When she looked up, she caught the doctor slyly glancing at her watch. Her pale green eyes returned to Beth’s, and they were briefly devoid of emotion. They softened in sympathy again. “Nobody was able to predict how long you’d be in the coma. I’m afraid arrangements had to be made in your absence.”

  Beth tried to see past the euphemism and quickly guessed what it meant.

  “Your husband’s funeral had to go ahead...”

  Husband? She hated that label. She was talking about Luc, but Beth was trying to remember whether he wanted to be buried or cremated. He couldn’t be gone. Not just like that. How could everyone who had known him but her have said goodbye to him? Buried or cremated? “When?”

  “I don’t have the exact date.”

  “Find out!” The painful vibration of the outburst travelled down her body and her bones amplified it. Buried or cremated? She imagined his body in a coffin under the earth. Saw it burst into flames. “What date is it today?”

  “Today? The 19th... of March.”

  How long since Luc had been–

  “We’ve notified your family; your brother’s on his way. You mustn’t upset yourself.”

  Buried or cremated? The doctor’s words were losing their meaning.

  “If you want, I can get somebody to sit with you.” Just sounds about her wrinkled lips.

  Beth closed her eyes.

  “Can I get you some water?”

  She kept her eyes sealed until she heard the doctor leave. She lay there, listening to the tile polisher in the corridor outside. She wanted her world to sound different somehow: vacant and inhospitable, not full of trivial background noise. It didn’t. It just didn’t have Luc in it any more.

  For hours she just lay looking at the spotless white ceiling, waiting for tears that didn’t come.

  Chapter 4

  When she was fit enough to leave St Andrews, Beth was picked up by her younger brother, Jody. As he slowly wheeled her in a chair past the garish artwork in the hospital corridor, she was still unnerved by how such a catastrophic episode in her life hadn’t rippled the world around her. It just sounded small, like she was listening to everything through a tinny speaker.

  In her head was the same circuit of thought she’d woken with. She’d been driving. That much was certain. Was Luc’s death entirely her fault? Why had he been whispering “sorry”? Did he feel he was to blame? She had no recollection of how they’d ended up in the wreckage. However much she tried to negotiate the solid block of darkness lodged between their setting off for the restaurant and their being suspended from the ceiling of the car, it remained immovable. Was she deliberately blocking out the trauma to avoid facing her responsibility for it?

  But she couldn’t understand how Luc had broken his neck when his airbag had inflated. The police had said he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. But he’d been hanging in the car as she had. If he’d released himself, it didn’t seem possible he could have sustained the injury with such a short fall. Would he still be alive if the driver from the brown camper had helped instead of assaulted her? Why had he kicked her? Was it because they’d struck him? Had he also attacked Luc?

  During their visits, Jody and her parents had relayed everything that had occurred while she was oblivious, did their best to fill the other void between the French roadside and waking in St Andrews.

  Beth visualised her unconscious self being wheeled from the first casualty department, where the doctors had worked on he
r, and flown to the ward at home, and at the same time Luc’s lifeless body being transported to the morgue, the undertaker’s and then to the Rouen crematorium near his mother’s house. She tried to imagine what she might have read for him if she’d been at the service but found it impossible to even project herself there.

  Luc had been cremated. Even though they should have just moved into their new home together, he was now in an urn at his mother’s. She’d taken charge of the ashes in Beth’s absence and they were now in Quincampoix. His father had died before their wedding, and Luc had been estranged from his mother because of the handful of men she had chosen to make his interim stepfathers. He had plenty of friends and work colleagues to grieve him but no other family.

  The holiday in the Forêt domaniale de Lyons had been their escape from solicitors, paperwork and an attempted mugging that had been the reason for their move from Edgeware to Wandsworth. The move date had been delayed and had made them both fractious. They’d spent the fortnight prior to it living out of boxes, sitting on telescopic chairs and yelling at each other. The rows had always come back to the same issue.

  They’d decided to abscond and rent their usual holiday accommodation, Gîte Saint Roch, a converted timbered barn in Luc’s favourite corner of Normandy. It was in one of the most beautiful European beech forests, and it was where she’d proposed to him three years earlier. She’d beaten him to it by one day.

  Luc had delayed asking her while he’d waited for the perfect conditions. When the sun shone through the slender trunks, it was like being inside a natural cathedral. But Tuesday had been overcast so he’d decided to wait.

  They’d both known it would be a race to that question on that first holiday. The time had felt right. He’d produced the citrine ring after she’d proposed. Citrine was her birthstone and it had still been on her finger as she’d watched her hands dragging her body away from the car wreck.

  It was Beth who’d suggested the last-minute January getaway. If she hadn’t, they would now be safely ensconced in their new house. Everything waited for her, boxed and in storage. She thought about the two of them wrapping up their life in newspaper and how she’d never conceived she might have to unwrap it alone.

  It seemed like a premonition now. Luc had been ruthless when they’d emptied out the memory chest as they’d packed up in their Edgeware home. Most of its contents had gone to the dump. All their cards to each other, birthday and otherwise, all the mementos they’d kept from restaurants they’d eaten at and postcards from places they’d visited – they’d all been disposed of, and she’d felt a pang as they’d tipped them into bin bags. It was almost as if he’d been preparing for what happened. All those ephemeral keepsakes took on a new significance now. She supposed they’d been covered over in some landfill or incinerated as Luc had been.

  Jody wheeled her out into the car park’s cold morning air and opened the passenger door of his muddy tungsten Golf Mk7. She delicately climbed in. He’d been doing his best with the clichéd platitudes. Beth acknowledged how difficult it must have been for her younger brother to comfort her when their communication from childhood had always steered clear of any displays of emotion.

  “You hungry?” Jody broke the silence as they pulled out into the main road.

  “Not really.”

  “Sorry, I’m fucking famished. Do you mind if we stop somewhere?”

  “Sure.” She looked through the window at the grey sky mirrored in the tower blocks on either side of them. Her own reflection barely registered behind the bright white squares of the remaining gauze plasters around her mouth. She glanced down and found she had a tissue-wrapped bunch of canary-yellow lilies in her lap. She vaguely remembered Jody handing them to her in the ward. Cars beeped behind them, and Beth realised Jody was driving deliberately slowly. It had barely occurred to her she was back in the front seat of a car.

  They stopped off at a down-at-heel burger bar that smelt of stale cooking oil. Beth seated herself in the window seat and examined the smudges on the glass while Jody ordered. After a few moments she noticed a young couple in the car park having an argument while they loaded up their car with shopping. She wondered how many times she and Luc had fought and how much time it had accounted for – days, months? Their last major quarrel at home had been pretty intense. The fallout from it had hung about like a bad smell for days afterwards.

  Jody dropped onto the red plastic chair opposite and his arms trembled as he raised the meat-stacked bun to his mouth. Beth noticed they were the only customers. What time of the morning was it, anyway? She glimpsed his watch and saw it was just after eleven.

  He chewed robotically, and a string of melted cheese undulated on his ginger beard. A closely cropped crown of the same colour circled the sides of his bald head. Beth had seen him like this plenty of times. Low blood sugar turned him into a zombie. He’d put on a lot of weight since last year. That was the last time she’d seen him prior to the crash. Her mother had told her he’d developed type 2 diabetes. Good to see he’d modified his diet. She decided not to point out that he’d bitten off a corner of the wrapper as well.

  Jody swallowed a lump of ground beef and briefly closed his eyes to savour the moment like a much-needed fix. He breathed with difficulty past his adenoids and then continued munching with his mouth open, sucking in air so he didn’t have to stop eating. When he opened his eyes, there seemed to be more of his personality present. “Sorry, but I would have keeled over.”

  “Thanks for picking me up...and sorry they made you wait so long.”

  Jody nodded, but his gaze left hers. He was uncomfortable with anything that wasn’t a joke or a statement of fact. Fortunately, it suddenly started raining hard and they both sought refuge through the pane. The couple got in their car to resume their squabble and thick rivulets poured down the window as if the burger bar were going through a car wash.

  “Your swelling has gone down.”

  Beth found Jody studying the bottom portion of her face when she turned back to him.

  “Looks much better now.” He took another bite, not shifting his eyes from her mouth.

  “Considering...” Beth knew she didn’t need to elaborate.

  Jody had listened to her account several times and didn’t appear to want to hear it again. For a moment it looked as if he was going to use his chewing as an excuse not to answer. “They’re still saying your airbag didn’t deploy properly?” He knew they were.

  “It deployed. Both of them did. And before you quote the accident report again, we both had our belts on. We were hanging from our seats by them.” She could see Jody’s eyes glaze. He’d been understanding but had been trying to persuade her that constantly analysing an incident she could only partially remember was going to drive her crazy. She repeated her version of events anyway. “I only undid mine to crawl out of the car. Luc probably removed his after I blacked out. Why does nobody believe that?”

  He examined her injured face as if it were explanation enough and then looked back out at the couple again. “Like they say, maybe your memory is still dealing with last year’s mugging.”

  “I know what I saw. There’s no connection between what happened at the roadside and what happened in a car park five months ago.” But even though they were becoming less frequent, Beth still had her own nocturnal flashbacks to the first incident.

  She had been watching Luc put the groceries in the car when she saw the shadow of the hoodie with the baseball bat on the concrete wall. She’d turned and lashed out at them and her fist had connected with their mouth. She’d felt it wet on her knuckles and their teeth had left several dents in them. The attacker had run off, leaving them both unharmed but shaken. The police had done little even though CCTV had captured the incident.

  “Luc was still depressed about it. He needed the trip to France more than I did. I knew it was because he felt he should have protected me. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have been on that road.”

  “You can’t think lik
e that.”

  She knew he was right, but the idea of one trauma leading to another had occupied her thoughts the whole time she’d been recuperating. “I told him we couldn’t run from violence. Look where it got us. We left muggings and drug culture and moved to a neighbourhood targeted by the East Hill Sniper.”

  The sniper had hit the news while they were still waiting for the keys to the house. The gunman had taken random shots at wealthy residents from a high-rise block less than half a mile from where their new home had been built.

  “I’ve been told you either live amongst it or in a place that invites it.”

  It was what one of her witnesses had said to her. Even having spent six years as a victim-support counsellor, she’d still rejected it. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  “But I didn’t expect to find it when I crawled out of our car.”

  “Every doctor who examined you said your injuries were sustained in the crash.”

  “I know the man who attacked me was real, Jody. Luc was the one still troubled by the mugger.”

  “Your brain took a real knock. I’d be surprised if things didn’t get all shook up.”

  “Then why did the other driver flee the scene?”

  “The camper was unlicensed.” Jody closed his eyes to relate the fact to her once more.

  “Maybe he thought he could rob us first.”

  “But from your account, he could have done that very easily, without any resistance from either of you. And nothing had been taken from your bag or... the wallet.”

  Beth realised he was avoiding mentioning Luc’s name. “Perhaps he was disturbed when the coach arrived–” but she didn’t continue. There was no point sustaining a conversation she’d already had with him and the police a dozen times over. She hadn’t been able to alert them to the assault until after she’d emerged from her coma. By then there were no longer any palpable leads to the vanished driver or his trashed camper. It had been scrapped weeks after it had been towed from the site. Plus the Normandy police had barely hidden their suspicion that the assault story had been an attempt to cover up the fact she and Luc had been less than safety-conscious in the car.