Look Behind You (22 page)

Sod the water. I need alcohol now. I pour myself some icy cold wine and swallow, feeling an instant hit of mellowness hit my empty stomach. It’s probably not a good idea under the circumstances. I need to keep my wits about me. But I’m having a hard time keeping the fear at bay, and mellowness is exactly what I need.

After rummaging around in the cupboards, I find a packet of dried pasta, so I put together a veggie dish with the tomatoes and onion and some dried herbs, topping it with a thick grating of cheese. In between mouthfuls of food and wine, I think about what I should do next. Liam will guess I’m here, even though I’ve kept my ongoing friendship with Sara hidden from him as best as I can. Where else could I possibly be? Maybe I should check into a hotel. But I don’t have many funds and won’t be able to stay there indefinitely.

Or maybe I should ask Jordan if I can stay with him after all. I trust him. At least I think I do. But…well, you never
really
know someone. Especially if you can’t remember things. I thought I knew Liam, and look how that’s turned out.

If I stay here, though, anything could happen.

After finishing my food and drink, I wash my plate and glass, and leave it on the draining board. Then I phone the bank on my new mobile and go through an annoying automated system, pressing one key then another until I finally get to talk to a real person and not a robot.

‘Hi, my husband cancelled my debit card the other day because I lost my purse, and I just wanted to update you with a new address to send it to instead.’

The woman on the other end asks for my name and my previous address then for my telephone banking PIN. I hear her tapping away and fiddle with my earring as I wait.

‘Oh, it looks like you’ve already updated us with that address, Mrs Benson.’

‘Really?’ I gasp. ‘When?’

‘On the sixth of May.’

The same day I left Liam and came here.

‘We don’t have any record of your husband cancelling your bankcards, and even if he did call, we couldn’t have cancelled them because they’re in your name. Although it’s a joint account, we always need to talk to the card holder for security reasons.’

Well, well, well, Liam’s lies were just stacking up on top of each other. I couldn’t trust anything that came out of his mouth. ‘You’re absolutely sure he didn’t call you?’

‘Yes, definitely.’

I’m speechless. If he didn’t cancel them like he said, why not? I told him my bag and purse was missing, and surely, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to find them and use them. I can come up with only two possible scenarios. One, he knew where my purse was all along. Here, safe and sound in Sara’s house. Which would mean he’d already been here and found me once before. Or two, he genuinely thought I’d made up the whole thing about being abducted and didn’t believe they were really missing at all.

I think back to one Saturday about six months ago. Liam was taking me food shopping, and I couldn’t find my handbag. He got increasingly annoyed with me as I searched the house for it, opening drawers, checking in the cupboards, and even under the bed. I looked everywhere and still couldn’t find it.

‘For fuck’s sake, I’m not waiting any longer. You can bloody well meet me at the supermarket. I’m not messing around on my day off because you’ve got a brain like a sieve.’ He stormed out of the house and drove off.

By the time I walked the twenty minutes to the supermarket, I was flustered, trying hard to keep the hurt in check. I saw him in the café at the front, having a Danish pastry and a latte and calmly reading the newspaper.

The next day, when I was vacuuming, I found my bag behind the small gap between the wall and the sofa. God knows how it had got there, and I could’ve sworn I’d already checked.

The woman’s voice jolts me back to earth. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you today, Mrs Benson?’

Yes. Find out who’s trying to kill me?

‘Er… no, thank you.’ I hang up and stare at my mobile. If I phoned them on the day I left Liam and came here, what did I do next?

Something flashes in my head. A blurred picture. A distant memory. Something about my mobile phone. I try to hang onto it, but it’s gone, retreating just out of reach. I know I didn’t call them from my old mobile phone, because it was smashed in the bin at home, and when I checked the call log on the SIM card, the last call was from Sara to me. So that means I must’ve used Sara’s landline to call the bank. Perhaps I made some other calls, too. I go into her lounge, pick up her receiver, and press the
call
button. It rings in my ear before I get my bank’s automated system again. Damn. Now I have no way of knowing whether I called someone else, since it only stores the last number dialled.

I’m replacing the phone back into the base unit when the memory hits me fully…

I was rushing along the upstairs hallway in my house, clothes clutched in my hands, mobile phone tucked under my arm, preparing to leave. Liam had already left to go to Scotland. At the top of the stairs, my phone rang. The sudden loud sound in my panicked state made me jump and drop it with fright. The phone bounced down each step until it reached the bottom with a clattering smash. When I picked it up and examined it, the screen was cracked and completely unreadable. But I thought maybe it was a good thing. I didn’t want Liam to be able to call me, anyway. I threw it in the kitchen bin and quickly scribbled the letter to him, which I left on the kitchen worktop. Then I shoved my few clothes in a heavy-duty plastic bag and rushed out of the front door.

My breath comes in hard pants. It’s the first memory that’s come back to me, and it’s vivid and sharp until I get to the door, where it fades away into blankness. I drop onto the sofa, forcing my brain to think. It’s useless, though. My mind is a black hole once more.

But this could mean there’s hope I’ll eventually remember the rest.

I clutch my arms around me, shaking, as I piece all the little bits I know together. I physically walked out of my house and came here. I called the bank to give them Sara’s address. I obviously went to the supermarket. To Waitrose, by the labels on the food. Then I came back and did what?

I go to the kitchen, get the notes I’ve written out of my bag, along with a biro, and update them.

21
^st
March

Liam stayed in the Royal Lodge Hotel, but said he was in Scotland.

23
^rd
March

Liam’s party. Was going to tell him about the baby.

25
^th
March

Had miscarriage in early hours of morning. Became depressed.

10
^th
April

Went to GP. Was prescribed antidepressants and sleeping tablets.

13
^th
April

I’m sectioned. Liam told doctors he found me clawing at garden path.

In psychiatric wing having treatment. (Dr Drew and Dr Traynor told me I was paranoid and hallucinating. I thought a man was chasing me and I was trying to get away.)

20
^th
April

Released from hospital. Still mildly depressed but otherwise OK.

22
^nd
April

Liam bought locket that Julianne is wearing in the photo taken at the launch party for Exalin drug.

Around 26
^th
April

I went to the Royal Lodge Hotel to check up on whether Liam stayed there with someone.

29
^th
April

Jordan phoned me to see how I am. I told him about Liam’s affair with Julianne and said I was going to ask Sara if I could stay at her house.

I phoned Sara, and we spoke for over an hour.

6
^th
April

Liam left for Scotland? (Did he really go there?)

Dropped and smashed mobile phone. Left it in the kitchen bin.

I packed clothes and left note for Liam.

Went to Sara’s house.

I phoned the bank from Sara’s and tell them of my new address.

Bought food from Waitrose.

Spent the night at Sara’s? (Her spare room was slept in, and my missing clothes were there).

Sara called me at her flat and left an answerphone message. Did I call her back?

8
^th
May

Sara left another message on her answerphone saying she was on a yoga retreat and had a new phone number. (Most likely, that I was already missing then if Dr Traynor thought I hadn’t drunk for 1-2 days).

9
^th
May

Rescued by a woman on the Great North Road. Ran through woods from an underground structure where I was being held. Lost memory of everything since the party.

Blood test showed I’d taken Silepine sleeping tablets. Dr Drew and Dr Traynor thought I’d had another reaction to them that made me hallucinate things.

I chew on the end of the pen, staring at the notes. Sometime between the sixth and eighth of May is when I went missing.

Something’s niggling at me, but I can’t work out what. The more I think, the more my brain feels blurry, and my memories are more unreachable. I make myself a coffee, pour in a splash of milk that I must’ve bought before, and take it back into the lounge. Curling up on the sofa, I stare at the floorboards.

Come on, Chloe, think logically!

So far, everything is pointing to Liam being involved in my abduction, but I wonder if there was any way he couldn’t have done it.

If Liam really did think the letter I left him was a suicide letter, that would mean he didn’t know I’d left him. If things happened as
he
said they did, he went to Scotland on the sixth of May and didn’t phone me because we’d had a row. Then on the ninth of May, he gets a call from the hospital saying I’d been admitted and had lost my memory. He then flew back to see me.

Is it possible he was in Scotland all that time and really didn’t know I’d gone at all? That he genuinely believed I was having some kind of break down or allergic reaction again?

But that doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. His version that we’d had a row about the plate and I’d thrown it at him, for starters. I didn’t believe that for a second, and there was no evidence of a smashed plate in the bin. It would be a perfect reason to give to the police as an excuse why he hadn’t contacted me while he’d been away, but in all the time we’ve been together, there hasn’t been a single day when he hasn’t called me. Not one. That points to him knowing my phone was already smashed and in the bin, or he knew I couldn’t answer the phone because he’d already abducted me. In which case, he must’ve really been here when he was supposed to be in Scotland.

He was also having an affair and had lied to me about taking clothes to the charity shop and cancelling my bankcards. He was head of manufacturing where the Zolafaxine was made, so he had plenty of opportunity to tamper with those drugs.

There was only one way to find out for certain if Liam was involved. I find Summers’ card that I packed this morning, along with my meagre clothes, and punch in his number.

‘DI Summers,’ he answers after a long time.

‘Hi, it’s Chloe Benson.’

‘Chloe. How are you?’ He sounds polite but bored.

I hesitate for a second, wondering how to answer that. In the end, I don’t bother. ‘I’ve been trying to find out what happened, and I really need to check some things urgently.’

‘Did you recover your memory?’

‘No. Not exactly. Are you free?’ I ask breathlessly, worried he’ll make up some excuse, and I need to know. Need to know right now.

A pause. Then, ‘Do you want to come to the station? I can be free in an hour.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I’ll be there.’

23

After I finish talking, I hand Summers the page of my scribbled notes. He reads it with an impatient roll of his eyes that he thinks I don’t see. I fidget in my chair opposite him in his office, trying to distract myself by picking at the crusty scabs left on my fingertips. Eventually, he looks up at me, and I can’t read the expression on his face. Sympathy, perhaps, or disbelief.