Deadly Obsession (35 page)

A
t first Amy
didn't spot anyone. All she could see as she walked into the seclusion of the clearing around the waterfall was the bubbling of the water as it tumbled the thirty or so feet from the top of the falls down into the lagoon of water below.

The water was darker than she'd ever seen it before, almost black in appearance, the only disturbance on its surface coming from the semi-circular lines of bubbles marching forth from the tumbling of the falls as they reached their destination. The air was otherwise silent, not even a bird daring to make a sound.

Then it came. A shout from above, at the top of the falls. Amy looked up. A silhouette, bulky and hard to distinguish, was standing there. With the nebulous backdrop of the winter forest behind it, it was impossible for Amy to work out who it was.

The thought of seeing Riley again, of him finally being so close to her once more, coursed through Amy's body like a drug. A wave of nauseating dizziness smothered her. For a moment she thought she was going to be sick, her stomach twisting itself into knots.
Shouldn't she be feeling some kind of euphoria?
Her husband was alive.

The figure waved down at her. Amy narrowed her eyes, attempting some degree of recognition. In the dim light of the forest she was too far away to see clearly.

She was being beckoned, her journey not yet complete. She was being called to the top of the falls. Ignoring the ever-tightening lasso of dread and apprehension wrapping itself around her nerves, Amy began to climb the dirty and precarious set of steps laid out by the side of the falls. Each step was marked with a small piece of wood, spaced between the undergrowth. In summer, either side was festooned with a garnish of riotously coloured flowers. Now the steps were edged with just a few decayed weeds.

The ground was hard beneath Amy's feet, making the climb, short though it was, a tiring one. She'd climbed it countless times before, normally she and Riley together, her squeals of delight ringing through the trees as Riley playfully chased after her, the ground seemingly springy underfoot. When the weather was warm there was nothing more satisfying than the pair of them play fighting in the shallow waters at the edge of the falls. It was a sanctuary of fun, locked away from the world. Was that why Riley had chosen to meet her there, why he was waiting at the top of the falls?

But now, in the biting cold of the December air, the whole place possessed a different feel – one of desolation and foreboding. Something wasn't right. Why would Riley put her through all of this? Why bring her to a place that used to bring laughter after all this misery?

Amy reached the clearing at the top of the falls. Her breathing was fast and disjointed. The sickening feeling of dread within her stomach hadn't quelled. No more than five feet ahead of her, with their back turned to her stood the figure, wearing a long black coat with a hood pulled up over their head.

Now was the time. ‘I'm here. Riley?'

The figure turned to face her and pulled down the hood, revealing their face. ‘Afraid not. It's me.'

It was then that the lasso became too tight inside her. That was the moment when Amy bent double in fear and felt herself vomit. At the moment when she looked into the face of Grant Wilson.

W
iping away
the traces of vomit from her lips, Amy stared back into the face of Grant Wilson. He was grinning. But this was not the cheeky, roguishly handsome, boy-next-door grin that had won him armies of female admirers nationwide. This wasn't the caring, hand-holding Grant who had spooned Amy in his arms just a few short days before, and this certainly wasn't the dashing medical hero of
Ward 44
, ready to effortlessly save another life teetering on the edge of destruction. No, this was a Grant Wilson that Amy had never seen before. One whose eyes were snake-like and piercing, strangely cold yet burning with hatred, somehow darker than a midnight sky. This was a Grant who had nothing but contempt for the woman standing in front of him.

Terror coursed through Amy as she focussed on the man who had kissed her so tenderly on the cheek in his hotel room. She automatically brought her hand to her cheek at the thought.

‘You? What are you doing here?' Like she needed to ask. 'I thought you cared about me, Grant. You kissed me?'

‘Never heard of a Judas Kiss, Amy? Classic Oscar Wilde scandal? The David Hare play a bit highbrow for you? No surprise there, I suppose. Let me quote from Wikipedia, I learnt it specially …
A Judas Kiss is an act appearing to be an act of friendship, which is in fact harmful to the recipient.
'

He was playing with her. ‘I needed you to believe in me. I've needed you to be on my side all the way along, or else I would never have been able to arrive at this point. I needed you to believe everything that was required.' There was a vile sneer as he spoke, a bravado at finally being able to play out his ultimate role, that of the bad guy in the script of Amy's life over the last six months.

‘But I don't understand? This is my special place with Riley. Or it was ...' Amy's voice was streaked with fear, her words breaking with each and every syllable. ‘How did you even know that this place existed?'

‘All in good time, Amy. You can't tell me you're disappointed that Riley isn't really here. Did you really believe for one second that he was still alive? He had his face blown off for fuck's sake, you saw it with your own fucking eyes.'

‘But the letters ... we saw him ... you were stabbed? His clothes at the cottage ...' Questions slammed into every corner of Amy's shell-shocked mind, her brain action-replaying everything that had occurred that fateful night at The Kitty Kat Club and all that had happened since. ‘You were there when the letter was delivered to me in London.'

A pause. One of enjoyment from Grant. This was his moment. His spotlight. He was centre stage and in no rush. ‘I've been there all along, Amy. I was there the night Riley and poor Laura died. I was there at the beginning because I was the one who shot them, and I'll be here at the end when I do the same to you.'

Grant pulled out a gun and pointed it directly towards Amy. ‘This takes me back,' he sneered, his finger on the trigger. ‘This is how it was supposed to finish in the first place. You're the one who was supposed to receive the bullet ...'

A crush of confusion gripped Amy's brain. ‘But why me?' What have I ever done to you?' she trembled, attempting to understand.

‘You married that cunt of a man. Isn't that enough? You signed your own death warrant the moment he waltzed you up the wedding aisle.'

Nothing made sense to her. ‘But why kill me if it's Riley you hated? If I'm about to die then surely I have a right to know.'

Grant nodded with an almost jubilant smugness. There was a madness in his eyes. It was the speech that he'd had been waiting months to deliver. The moment when he could really let Amy know the truth ...

G
rant began to speak
, his words as cold as the winter air. ‘It all started with Lottie Webber, you know that. Riley crucified me with his humiliation of me at school. I'd never hated anyone as much as I hated him. But I let it pass, bided my time. He stole my first love, but I wasn't going to let him crush me for good. I knew that one day I would gain my revenge.' The gun wobbled in his hand as he spoke, a demonic mask covering his face. He was relishing the theatricality of the moment.

‘For years my hatred just kept gently brewing on a backburner in my brain. I got on with my life, Riley got on with his. I became a massive success in my field and so did he in his. Little did I know what his fucking shifty line of work was, though. I should have guessed – the prick never had an honest bone in his body. He was never a decent man, he could have ruined me.'

'How?' It was a simple question. 'Your worlds never collided, did they?'

'He knew too much about me. About my life, about things I'd done. He could have toppled everything I'd built up with one push.' There was a wobble in Grant's voice as he spoke. 'I made one mistake and suddenly he was the one holding all the aces. But now that's dead too, just like Riley.'

'What mistake?' If Amy was to die she wanted as many facts as possible to take to her grave.

'When I left school I struggled a bit with my acting. I couldn't get a break. It happens to all the big names, ask anyone in Hollywood. Makes you what you are. I needed money. My parents weren't backing me – they were putting me down again, so I made a film. A seedy, dirty romp filmed in some flea-ridden hotel room. It paid well and only took a day. Me, some other bloke and couple of cheap tarts taking it from every angle ...'

'A porn flick?'

'Yes, a skin flick. Me and this other fella degrading two women. Lots of sex and even more violence. Specialist market for Eastern Europe I was told, hence the decent pay. I regretted it as soon as I'd filmed it but what could I do? I just prayed it would vanish off to some far-flung country. I never saw it and hoped I never would. And as luck would have it, it did vanish – it never got released.'

'So, what does that have to do with—' queried Amy.

Grant cut her words off, mid-sentence, his voice angered. 'To do with Riley? Turned out the other guy in the film ended up working for your late husband years later and when Riley mentioned that he'd known me and hated me, the stupid prick told him about the movie. He'd asked for a copy and kept it. Seems he was actually pretty proud of his handiwork. Riley seized the opportunity to spread his poison and bought it off him.'

'How do you know?'

'Because he was trying to fucking blackmail me with it. I'd made it big, he needed more money. He had a copy and said he'd leak it somehow. My career could take a sex scandal maybe, but the violence in that flick ... that's something else. I'd never survive that. Riley needed to suffer. To know he couldn't mess with me.'

'So you decided to kill me? Over some sadistic bit of filth that could ruin your career. Why me?'

'To make him hurt even more. But that wasn't the only reason.' Grant continued, delighting in the unravelling of his tale. ‘I started going out with Laura. Yep, your Laura, the girl who was your best friend. I met her at a bar. Such a fun time girl – the ultimate star fucker, we were so alike. She couldn't get enough of me and I lapped it up. She loved it when she found out I was a successful actor and tipped as the next big thing. That was a major turn-on. Reckon she had me down as her fast ticket to a land of celebrity. Still, she was dynamite in bed, I'll give her that ...'

Tears began to flow down Amy's cheeks at the mention of Laura's name, but it was more than just sadness that caused them. ‘You and Laura were together? I don't believe you, she'd have told me. We shared everything,' she said. Suddenly Amy doubted herself. She and Laura were complete opposites in many ways. Did she know everything about her best friend? Maybe not.

‘But you didn't. She played you for a fool. You probably didn't know about half the men Laura went with.'

There was a pause, sheer melodrama from the actor, before he delivered his verbal killer punch.

‘You didn't know about her and Riley.'

Amy heard the words but they didn't compute. All she heard was the sound of betrayal as her memories of her friendship with Laura Cash burst into a million painful pieces.

‘
Y
ou didn't know
about her affair with him, did you?' Grant sneered, keen to watch the reaction on Amy's face as his most brutal blow of revelation so far took hold. The most hurtful. He was crushing the life out of her like a boa constrictor around its prey.

Amy felt like she had been punched in the stomach. Of all the disclosures she'd heard about her late husband, this was the hardest pill to swallow.

She could believe it of Riley, it was merely adding another name to the ever-increasing list of infidelities that Amy had discovered. But Laura? That was something horrifically different. Her one supposed true friend? The woman who had been there alongside her throughout all of her adult life. They'd shared laughter and tears, euphoria and rejection. But sharing Riley? No, that just couldn't be. She wouldn't have. She may have sampled the delights of many different men, but surely Riley was off-limits? The two people who had been at her side when she had buried her parents, the two people who had calmed her nerves about the opening of The Kitty Kat Club and the two people who she loved most in the world, how could those two people betray her so badly?

Suddenly a lifetime of images collaged her brain. Times she had been left alone while Laura ventured off with yet another rich and influential shag. Men before mates, as ever. Moments she had left Laura with Riley – at the club, sorting out her parents' affairs after their deaths … how many times had Riley nipped to Laura's Northern Quarter flat behind Amy's back? It was all feasible and horribly likely now Amy considered the clues. And Riley was Laura's type, rich, influential and given what she now knew about her late husband, as fickle as she was.

‘I can't believe it, that's bullshit.' Her voice betrayed her words.

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid girl! You really should have seen it coming!' Grant shouted, his voice somehow more amplified within the confines of the forest. The repetition of the same word gave him an increased air of demonic madness.

‘Why would I make it up? She left me to be with him. Laura and I were together for a long time. Riley stole her from me. As always he wanted to make me suffer and figured out how to woo her. It wasn't hard. Laura was hardly the settling down type was she? It was easy for him to make her believe that some filthy little bunk-up with him would be more exciting than with a life with me. She wanted excitement and danger and I guess being screwed by the charismatic Riley Hart ticked the boxes. They'd been at it for years behind your back. Yet again, Riley gets one over on me. And he knew it. He planned it. He did it with Lottie, he did it with Genevieve too, it seems, and he decided to do it with Laura. To deliver yet another petty blow. He couldn't wait to try and rub it in at every opportunity. How he was better than me yet again.'

Amy wiped the tears away from her cheeks, they felt cold against her skin. ‘But you hadn't seen Riley for ages, not before coming to The Kitty Kat—'

Grant cut her short. ‘Wrong yet again! Foolish, gullible girl. It's pretty easy to find out where I'm filming
Ward 44
or which party or awards ceremony I might be appearing at. Pick up any gossip magazine or go onto any celebrity website and there's good old me staring out from the screen. Riley constantly hounded me, threatening me with the porn film and belittling me about his affair with Laura. Handwritten notes telling me how great things were with her, how he was the best man she'd ever had. The greatest lover she'd ever known. He was a bully and he needed to be punished.'

‘You could have told me ... I would have been able to stop it ...'

‘You? Would you have believed me? Some bloke off the telly who your husband once went to school with and hated turns up and says that the two people you trust most in life are fucking each other. Who would you have believed, Amy? Not me, that's for sure. Plus he said that if I blabbed anything to you then the porn video would hit the internet.'

‘So you shot him? Killed him instead?'

The vein running down Grant's temple raised angrily as he yelled, his eyes red and bulging. ‘I've told you that wasn't the plan. Do you not see how easy that would have been? I needed to do something much more genius. I wanted to make him hurt like I was hurting. I liked Laura, more than any other woman I've been with. She had something about her. I thought I'd found my equal, but she didn't want us to carry on. She fell under Riley's spell and she left me. My agent wouldn't let me go public with her, said that it was better for me to be single and available to my fans. Laura hated that, so the decision to leave was easy. She went running into his arms like an imbecilic man-hungry fool!'

Amy could see Grant's finger twitching at the trigger of the gun. She knew that she was staring at death.

‘But why all this ...? Everything you've put me through. Why kill them?'

‘It should have been you. I came to the club to kill you. To make Riley suffer. Despite him not being able to keep his cock in his trousers you were always his number one. I needed to make him realise I meant business and that he couldn't mess with me. Not with my professional life and certainly not with my personal life. That he couldn't play God. He'd made me feel a failure yet again just like my parents used to, time and time again. Relentlessly telling me how pathetic I was.' Grant repeatedly banged the barrel of the weapon against his forehead. The force left a red pressure stain.

‘He took Laura, so I had to take you. He didn't love her. He used her, like all men did, apart from me. Laura thought she was happy being single and shagging everything with a pulse, but I was the only one who made her happy.'

Amy couldn't help but feel that perhaps Grant was right. Maybe behind all of Laura's bold, brash exterior was a sad little girl who just wanted to be loved. But she just didn't know how.

‘Stealing Laura away was just another swipe at me. I could have tried some Grant Wilson magic on you, schmoozed you into my bed to try and get even, but you're not the type, are you? Dedicated to your man. So I decided to kill you. I had the gun prepared and ready. It was easy to fool you all on the night at the Club, pretend I was drunk and drugged from all that crap Lily gave me. I didn't take any of it. I'm an actor for fuck's sake. It was easy to play drug-fucked and run past you like I was freaking out amid the chaos of the shooting. I needed to keep my wits about me if I was going to make my plan work, and have a steady aim of the gun to kill you. But Laura saw me with it and tried to stop me. I aimed at you and she put herself in the way. Took the bullet for you. She saved your miserable fucking life and gave her own. I killed Laura, the woman I wanted to spend my life with before Riley snatched her. I killed her.' It was now Grant who was crying, thick floods of tears running down his face.

An assortment of emotions boiled within Amy. Laura had betrayed her with Riley yet she had chosen to take the bullet for her. A selfless act that had cost Laura her own life. She may have killed their friendship with her adulterous actions, but every breath that Amy had taken since that fateful night had been thanks to Laura.

‘I watched her die. I couldn't take it. It should have been Riley set to suffer, not me again. So I killed him too. It was simple, the club was in uproar, panic everywhere. I went to his booth and shot him. Stupid black bloke tried to stop it so I shot him too. Then I ran as fast as I could and dumped the gun in the nearest canal. It was easy for me to get away with it, especially when everyone started saying it was a mob killing. Your husband had a load of enemies. Even the police were scared to investigate too much in case they started some gangland warfare. It was all hushed-up and I was scot-free. Winner. Which left me to concentrate on making you suffer again.'

‘But why do that to me? Hadn't I suffered enough? I'd lost both my husband and my best friend.' The description of Laura sounded somewhat hollow given what she now knew about her. Their friendship had now so clearly always been a one way street.

‘I could have left it there but it didn't feel right. It wasn't the complete picture. You needed to know what had happened. So call it my dramatic flair, Amy, I needed to complete the story. The thrill is always in the chase. To use an acting term, I didn't feel that my little production was “in the can” yet, so I decided to resurrect Riley from the grave. I'd shot the fucker's face off so he was hardly recognisable when the police carted him off was he? We all knew he was dead, really, but I just had to sow a seed of doubt in your vulnerable little mind and hope that you took it, and that was so, so easy. Which is why I wrote the letters.'

‘But it was Riley's writing, I know it was ...' spluttered Amy.

‘I'm an artist, Amy, a master of my craft,' stated Grant, pushing his tears across his face. ‘I can copy people, play a part. I knew Riley's handwriting inside out. I had seen it every day at school, I even have books and production programmes from school signed from classmates and I had Riley's bragging handwritten notes that he wrote to me to gloat about Laura. Copying his writing was no problem. Plus I had six months to perfect every ... how shall I put it? I was able to perfect my writing skills. The letters were easy. As was grabbing a stack of junk mail and sticking it all through your London letter box with the second letter when I turned up at your flat. I just had to make sure that you actually believed that what I'd written could be true. Compiling a list of suspects who would want to kill him off was simple. I just picked a few random names from low-life deadbeats at The Kitty Kat, adding mine in for dramatic effect. That way I knew that if you did believe the letter, even for the merest moment, you would work your way through the cast list, including me. Nearly everybody seems to have a reason to dislike Riley, it was the simplest thing in the world to compile a script of shady characters.'

‘You set the whole thing up? But so many people have been involved. And so many of them are dead because of your pathological jealousy and fear of failure. It's pathetic.'

‘Not all my fault. Jemima did herself in, I didn't know she was fucking that Winston bloke. Shit happens. She was screwed up obviously.'

‘And Lily ...?'

‘That was unfortunate, but she had to go. She knew too much. She caught me sticking a knife into myself in that back alley. A beautiful moment to put Riley as public enemy number one. When you play a doctor you know exactly where a blade can pierce your body without any danger of actually dying.'

‘She saw you? But you were chasing Riley. I saw him. He was there.'

‘All smoke and mirrors, Amy. Classic drama and legerdemain. What you saw was a man I hired. Thuggish thirty-somethings with your husband's build are easy to come by in this city, especially if you pay them well enough. He was so wrapped up against the cold all you saw was what you thought was Riley. Who spotted him first? Yep, me ... but then I knew exactly where he was going to be, didn't I? It was sowing another seed.'

‘But Lily didn't need to die ...'

‘Wrong place, wrong time. She shouldn't have been there, shouldn't have chased after me and shouldn't have seen me stabbing myself. But she did ... and became ultra fucking cocky and tried to blackmail me. Invited me to her house thinking I'd quake in my boots if she threatened to tell you I'd lied about Riley stabbing me and cough up some cash. So she had to go. You finding her was a stroke of luck. It all added to your suffering. Just like hiring someone to fire some bullets at you outside the church where your parents are buried. You told me where you were going, so I made a few calls and paid someone to scare you. All part of the game.'

‘You're a fucking cold-hearted callous bastard, Grant, and you'll rot in hell for all this.'

‘But I won't, will I? No-one will find out. Only you know. It was me who nearly ran you down outside Eruption in a hire car. I just wanted to scare you. I've been following you pretty much since the first letter. I brought the second one with me to your flat and coming back to the hotel to deliver the note telling you to come here was a doddle.'

‘But this was
our place
– mine and Riley's – the cottage and the waterfall. Riley wouldn't have told you about this place. How did you know about it?'

Grant swaggered closer to Amy, the gun only inches from her face, the rush of the water as it headed towards the falls bubbling behind him. Another smile painted itself across Grant's now ugly features, but it wasn't one of friendship, it was one of complacency.

‘Oh I have the lovely Genevieve to thank for that. She made this final scene for me. I never knew this place existed. I would have been quite happy to kill you off in some dirty backstreet, but you'd be amazed at what a drunk woman can let slip. Riley used to pay for this place and bring her here too. I confronted her and she told me everything. She's just a loose-lipped old lush who was banging your husband too. Those weekends you thought he was away on business, well he
was
on the job ... nuts-deep in Genevieve here at the cottage. She used to organise it, so I knew who to go to for the key, where to leave it, all about this place. How he called it 'your place'. I even saw the suit I laid out on the bed at the cottage in a photo at Genevieve's shop. Good brand, easy to buy another one just like it. He was wearing it in the photo. Her and Riley looking all cosy. Nice touch I thought, leaving the suit on the bed, even laying it out like he used to do with his clothes at school all the time. Old habits die hard, I figured. I wanted to keep you guessing right until this moment.'

Grant held out his arms in full stretch, his actions horribly triumphant. ‘I thought this would be the perfect setting for your ultimate demise. Poor Amy, so distraught about losing Laura and Riley and finding poor Lily, comes to the place where Riley used to bring her for weekends of love-making and decides to shoot herself. The flowing waters run red with the blood from a poor, helpless suicide. I'll come to your funeral and cry at your graveside, a bunch of monkshood flowers clutched in my hands. They signify treachery, did you know that? That's why I sent a bunch to Lily's funeral. It seemed kind of apt.'