I Found You (30 page)

He followed the now-familiar route from the station to Mark’s apartment block, but before he got there he stopped and peeled back the rip in the hoarding he’d discovered yesterday outside the construction site next door. He’d googled the development yesterday and, as he’d suspected, having never seen a builder at work on it, confirmed that it had run out of money and building works had been suspended while the developers looked for a new investor. The site had been sitting in a state of limbo for nearly a year, according to the report he’d read in a trade magazine. Completely abandoned.

He made his way, as he’d done yesterday, around the back of the frontline block, the only block that had been fully fitted out. There was a ditch around the back of the building, the kind of area where the wheelie bins might eventually be stored, Gray imagined, and at the bottom of the ditch was a small door into the basement level. And, as it had been yesterday, it was unlocked.

He lowered himself down into the ditch on his bum and bowed his head slightly to get through the low door. Then he took the same route he’d taken yesterday across the polished cement floor of the basement, through a pair of heavy swing doors at the other end and up a service staircase into the foyer.

There were cameras here and there in the foyer, but after nearly a year of abandonment, Gray very much doubted that anyone was watching any more. Still, he kept his face at a low angle and stayed close to the walls. Then he skipped up the next flight of stairs and pushed open the door to the first apartment on his left.

Here. Here was where he would bring Mark Tate. Here, where no one could hear him or see him, where he could keep him for as long as he liked. It was a ‘loft style’ apartment, open plan with some exposed brickwork here and there and a shiny white kitchen built around a central island made of wood. Quickly he prepared the room. There was no mains electricity, but he’d discovered that the light on the extractor hood for
the hob worked independently of the mains, as did the pale green strip lighting under the kitchen cabinets. There was no running water either and he unpacked the bottles he’d bought just now from the off licence by the station. He left the various pieces of rope in a pile by the trendy radiator that he intended to tie Mark Tate to. He blew up his pillow and spread out his sleeping bag. He unpacked the food into the kitchen: enough biscuits and crisps to last a week. He placed the toilet roll in the never-used bathroom and in his rucksack he kept his knives, the pillowcase and the torch.

Then he retraced his steps back towards the high street and found a coffee shop where he sat for four hours writing a long-overdue progress report for the head of maths while he waited for Mark Tate to return from work.

If anyone had told Gray that one day he would hide in the shadows of an abandoned building site with a knife in one hand and a pillowcase in the other, watching the minutes tick from 5:50 to 5:51 to 5:52 while a tsunami of adrenaline surged through his veins, waiting to abduct someone at knifepoint and take them prisoner – well, he clearly would not have believed them. But here he was, hand clammy on the handle of a freshly sharpened kitchen knife, and here were the footsteps of the man who had killed his father and maybe killed his sister. And here was Gray,
diving from the shadows, an arm around the man’s neck: ‘
Don’t move, don’t speak, I’ve got a knife against your throat, don’t fucking move
.’

He wrenched him backwards through the split in the hoarding, Mark Tate’s feet dragging doggedly against the cement, his hands grasping at Gray’s arm around his neck. ‘
Stop struggling, just stop, I’ve got a knife. Do you want to die?
’

Mark Tate did as he was told. Gray threw the pillowcase over his head and dragged him by the arms down into the ditch, through the basement, up the stairs and back to apartment number one. Here he flung him to the ground and quickly fastened him to the radiator with the ropes and plastic ties. He did all this without saying a word.

‘I’ve got nothing,’ Mark Tate was whining through the cotton of the pillowcase. ‘Like a tenner. And a shit phone. But I’ve got money at home. Let me go home. I can get it for you.’

‘Mark,’ said Gray. One syllable. That was all. He saw Mark stiffen. ‘Mark Tate.’ As if he’d just come upon an old mate in the pub.

Gray approached him and removed the pillowcase.

Oh, it was a beautiful moment. He wished he’d filmed it. The spread of awe and disbelief across Mark’s smooth-skinned, ageless face. The slight flinch. And better still, the comically disordered hair that Gray could see him aching to rearrange.

‘What the . . .?’

‘Last seen on a wild summer’s night, disappearing into the North Sea with my sister. Wow. Long time no see!’

Gray felt strangely high, as though he’d had a couple of shots on an empty stomach.

‘How’ve you been?’ he continued. ‘I see you’ve made a great new life for yourself! Lovely wife, good job. Wow. Got any kids?’

Mark shook his head numbly.

‘No,’ said Gray, ‘probably for the best really. You being a psychopath and all.’

He saw Mark gulp, his winter suntan fading to grey before his very eyes.

‘Can I get you something?’ he said. ‘Some water? A Penguin bar? Doritos? I’m thinking now I should have got some beers. But actually, since you’re going to be tied to a radiator for the foreseeable it’s probably best to keep your bladder empty.’

From outside came the sound of the plastic hoarding flapping in the wind and the drone of rush-hour traffic petering its way out of London through the commuter belt. Gray could hear the rasp of Mark’s panicked breathing and then the insistent
buzz buzz buzz
of Mark’s phone buried somewhere inside his smart suit.

‘What will she do? Your child bride?’ Gray asked when the phone stopped buzzing. ‘When you don’t come home from work?’

‘She’ll be worried,’ Mark said quickly. ‘She’s new to the country. She doesn’t know anyone. She’ll be scared. Can I just text her? Let her know I’m running late?’

‘No, you may not. Question one: what the actual fuck? I mean . . . you
drowned
.’

‘Clearly I didn’t.’

The phone began buzzing again. Gray sighed. ‘So, what happened? Come on, think of scared wifey wondering where you are. Talk.’

Mark rearranged himself awkwardly, pulling against the plastic ties and the ropes, flicking back his head in an effort to get his fringe out of his eyes. ‘I got out. I was a mile up the coast. I got out and there was a phone box and I called my aunt and she came and got me and took me to Harrogate. And I nearly died. Blood loss. Hypothermia. It was all a blur; I was in and out of consciousness for days.’

Gray thumped the floor with his fist. ‘I don’t give a fuck what happened to you. What happened to Kirsty? If you got out alive, then what happened to her?’

Mark looked almost surprised to be asked. ‘She just . . . faded. You know. I had her; I was pulling her into shore. She was there. And then she just . . . went.’

‘Did you let go of her?’ Gray envisaged Kate Winslet letting Leonardo DiCaprio slip into the freezing water at the end of
Titanic
, imagined the blue lips and the
waters closing over Kirsty’s face, felt sickened by the idea that the last thing she ever saw was the cold, hard face of Mark Tate.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘no. I don’t know. Like I said, I was slipping in and out of consciousness. I was freezing. I was holding her. And then I wasn’t holding her. And she was gone. I didn’t have the energy to look for her. I just kind of floated back to shore.’

Gray sat up straighter. ‘You floated back?’

‘Yeah. I think. I don’t know. I’d lost a lot of blood. It’s a blur . . .’

‘But if you floated back, then why didn’t she?’

‘I don’t know. OK?’ And there it was, that steel in his voice, that dark emptiness which Gray remembered. It was the voice of the guy he’d seen through the bedroom window kicking the wall when Kirsty didn’t want to kiss him, the guy who’d tried to barge his way into Rabbit Cottage to get to her when she didn’t want to see him, the guy who’d held a knife to his sister’s throat and jumped into the North Sea with her. It was the voice of the man who’d stolen Gray’s life.

Mark’s phone started buzzing again. Gray resisted the temptation to dig into Mark’s pockets, pull it out and stamp on it.

‘Did you look for her?’ he said. ‘After you were rescued? Did you look?’

Mark shook his head, a tiny jerk of a movement. ‘I told you, I was half-dead. Literally. I didn’t wake up
until three days later. By that time the whole world thought I was dead. I couldn’t have gone back. I couldn’t go anywhere.’

Gray clamped his hands to the sides of his head. ‘Fucking
hell
. She might be there. She might be there, on the rocks, right now. All these years and we might have been able to bury her. I mean, Jesus
Christ
, do you have even the slightest clue? My life has been . . . it’s been
shit
. It’s been
shit
. Because of you. Because of what you did to my family. What you did to my mother. To me. We were . . . we were a
perfect
family. Literally. The best family. Just boring and suburban and predictable and dull. All our furniture was brown. All our food was brown. Our car was brown. My sister was so innocent. And my parents were . . . Well, we didn’t exactly have lively conversations about current affairs over the dinner table. We didn’t talk about anything important, ever. And it didn’t matter. Because we didn’t matter. Nothing we did mattered or was ever going to change anything. In fact, you could have killed the whole fucking lot of us and it would have made no difference to anything. But we were perfect. And you destroyed us. You destroyed
me
.’ He stopped, aware of tears building in the base of his throat. ‘And what about
your
family?
Your
mum? How could you and Kitty let your mum think you were dead?’

‘Because . . .’ Mark sighed heavily. ‘My mum hated me. My father too. And me and Kitty, we had this
bond. From when I was a child. And she just knew. Without me saying anything. She knew that whatever had happened had something to do with me. And she wanted to protect me because that’s what she always did. And then she heard via the Ridinghouse grapevine that you’d lost your memory, that the police were calling it misadventure, that they’d given up hope of ever finding the bodies. So she hid me away for two years. And all that time we were just waiting for the knock on the door, waiting to hear that you’d remembered. And it never came and you never did and bit by bit I started a new life. I moved down to Cornwall for a year, did cash-in-hand jobs, then up to Scotland, back down to Cornwall, kept as far from Harrogate as I could without a passport. Rented bedsits. Saved up enough to buy a fake identity. Got a job. Got promoted. Promoted again. And then I . . .’

He stopped, cast his eyes right, towards his own apartment block. ‘I met a woman. Got married. It’s been hard, without a family. Doing everything by myself. Not having any real friends. But now, finally, I’ve got something. I’ve got someone. Someone all of my own.’ His phone began buzzing again, right on cue. He dropped his head into his chest, waited for it to stop, then looked up again. ‘And I love her more than I’ve loved anything in my life and . . .’

Gray stared at him. And then he laughed.

Mark flinched at the sound.

‘Seriously? You seriously expect me to feel sorry for you? Are you fucking nuts? Oh, yes, I forgot – you are.’

A muscle in Mark’s cheek twitched and he tried once more to flick his hair from his eyes. ‘So, tell me, when exactly did your memory
miraculously
return?’

‘The minute I saw you, last week.’

‘You saw me, last week?’

‘Yeah. In town. Victoria. Going into your office. And it all came back. All of it.’

‘And what exactly do you remember?’

Gray blanches as the scenario passes again through his mind’s eye. His voice shakes as he restates the details. ‘I remember it all. I remember you following us out into the garden. We were looking at the peacock. It was dancing. I remember that room you took us to. I remember you touching my sister. Trying to rape her. Then you following us down to the rocks, taking my sister into the water. My dad . . . dead . . . on the beach. All of it. All the stuff that’s been locked away in there for over twenty years. All the stuff that’s stopped me living my life. And now it’s out. I’ve remembered. And you’re finally going to pay for what you did. I’m going to call the police. They’re going to arrest you and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail.’

Mark laughed hoarsely. ‘Really? You think so? Based on the frankly unreliable memories of a man who was taking recreational drugs on the night in question? Who claimed at the time to remember
nothing of what happened that night? Who
miraculously
regained his memory more than twenty years later? Do you really think they’d believe a man who is capable of taking someone off the street at knifepoint and breaking into private property and holding him prisoner? A man who, frankly, if you don’t mind me saying, looks quite, quite insane?’

‘But you pretended to be dead!’ said Gray. ‘You have a fake passport!’

‘So you say.’

‘What do you mean, so I say?’

‘I mean, if you bring the police here I will simply tell them that I must bear some similarity to some man who died a long way from here, a long time ago, and that you attacked me and that you are very dangerous and possibly mad. I will deny all knowledge of being this so-called
Mark Tate
.’

‘But they’ll check your identity. They’ll know Carl Monrose doesn’t really exist.’

Mark shook his head slowly. ‘I paid a lot of money for my ID. One
hell
of a lot of money. It’s police-proof. It’s everything-proof.’

‘Bullshit.’

Mark shrugged. ‘I pay my taxes. I vote in elections. I travel abroad freely. I
am
Carl Monrose. Go on.’ He gestured towards Gray’s phone with a nod of his head. ‘Call them. See what happens to you then. Do it.’