Dying for Christmas (30 page)

The Super moves closer to the bed and starts addressing the prone body, telling Lacey that the police need to question him urgently about events in an apartment in Wapping.

There is no response. Lacey remains staring straight ahead. He is staring at Kim, blue eyes like lasers boring into her.

Chapter Forty

Travis is still sleeping on the sofa.

I don’t bother asking him why. In the context of all the inexplicable things that have happened to me in the last few weeks, his new darkness of mood hardly registers. I imagine that now the initial relief at my rescue has died away, he’s gone back to questioning just what I was doing going home with a man I’ve only just met. I’m waiting for him to quiz me about it, but he doesn’t. There is a sense in which my ‘ordeal’, as it has euphemistically become known, has moved me into a different dimension to everyone else.

So Travis contents himself with angry glances and sleeping on the sofa every night, but doesn’t confront me.

Which leaves me free to lie awake in our bed with the white waffle-pattern duvet, trying to drown out the voices of Dominic’s dead by thinking about all the things that have gone wrong.

After Natalie made her reappearance on the Edinburgh jeweller’s grainy CCTV, and the pressure on Dominic lessened, I knew it was only a matter of time before he crawled back out of the woodwork. Every time my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize, or my computer pinged to tell me an email had come through, my chest tightened like it had been bound with wet bandages that were slowly drying and shrinking.

The whole reason I got involved in the first place was so that Natalie would find the video of me and him and delete it, but there was a hard nugget of doubt inside me that wouldn’t go away. When I finally managed to get hold of her, she was non-committal.

‘I was in a very dangerous position,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what that man is capable of. I was in fear of my life.’

‘Not so much fear that it stopped you blowing your cover just to cash in a bloody necklace.’

‘I was broke. Don’t forget, I haven’t got access to my bank account. My friends can’t be expected to support me for ever.’

By friends I’d now realized she meant one friend – that very rich Arab friend.

And he – it turned out – wasn’t really a friend.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘That photo of the vault shelves probably isn’t even real. Didn’t it occur to you that he might have photoshopped it? Superimposed the image of a DVD on to a picture of the vault?’

Despite my brothers’ theory about the Facebook-account photo, somehow the thought that Dominic might have doctored the photograph of the vaults had never crossed my mind. Too late I saw I’d allowed him to take on almost superhuman powers in my head, able to stroll into heavily secured buildings without being seen.

‘So I did all that to help you, and only now it occurs to you to tell me that the photograph wasn’t even real? You tricked me.’

She was unconcerned, brushing off my anger like a speck of dust on her jacket.

* * *

After that I tried to convince myself that Dominic would move on. He was attractive, rich and now free. He could jump into bed with whomever he chose. Why would he bother with me? Looked at objectively, I should have felt safe. But I didn’t. What I’d learned of Dominic Lacey was that he was driven by a lust for power rather than sexual desire. Power and possession. Now he was no longer under the shadow of suspicion, Dominic was free to turn his attention back to me. Which he eventually did.

‘I’m willing to remove the film from the vaults, Jessica, but I’m afraid it will cost you a bit more now that you’ve been so obstructive. I want you again for a night. No interruptions.’

He’d called while I was on one of my daily lunchtime walks. Whenever the rest of my colleagues made for the nearest café, it was my habit to pull out my old trainers from the bottom drawer of my desk, head in the opposite direction and walk randomly for an hour, trying to clear my head.

When the display came up as
no caller ID
, even though I hadn’t given him my number, I guessed who it was. I was determined to face him down, to call his bluff.

Now, when I think back to that terrified but defiant Jessica, standing in the car park of a Perivale industrial estate in her work skirt and grubby trainers, I’m embarrassed for myself.

‘I know the photo is a hoax, Dominic,’ I said, hoping that the fuzzy quality of the line might just disguise the wobble in my voice. ‘You photoshopped it. I’m not playing your games any more. Leave me alone or I
will
go to the police.’

When I ended the call, I was shaking but euphoric. I really thought I’d got rid of him. I felt lighter than I had done in months. I even ran back to work, savouring my own power and energy, arriving at my desk flushed and smiling, and full of magnanimity towards the workmates I usually avoided. I blocked Dominic from my Hotmail account. I felt free.

* * *

Kim has tilted her chair back so that she can’t see the photograph on Lennie Fraser’s desk. It shows her colleague and his wife on their most recent wedding anniversary, arms around each other, flanked by their four children, and whenever she catches sight of it unprepared, her grief is like barbed wire around her heart. No one ever asks Lennie how he manages to juggle the long hours at work with having young kids. No one ever glances pointedly at the clock when he comes in late, assuming he got held up on the school run, which is somehow less acceptable an excuse than oversleeping after a heavy night down the pub.

She has to stop thinking like this or it will drive her mad.

She calls up the screen grab of the fake Facebook page they’d found on Jessica Gold’s work computer. Even though she’s now seen the image several times it still shocks her all over again. Jessica is so exposed, naked there on the bed. Her expression is a mixture of so many things – clearly there’s sexual excitement there, but also a kind of shy appeal, as if she knows how much trust she is placing in the photographer and is hoping he won’t let her down. When she told them about the guy she’d stupidly slept with, her shame and embarrassment were palpable. But where was the anger? She should have been full of rage that someone had done that to her and got away with it, and yet Kim hadn’t detected any of that. Either Jessica Gold is keeping her emotions on a very tight leash, or she has found some way of exorcizing that anger. She opens her notebook and makes a note to call Sonia Rubenstein.

* * *

I am so enamoured of my new Nest in a Bed that I eat my dinner in there, cursing when a solitary baked bean drops with an orange splatter on to the white sheet. It’s so womb-like in here surrounded by pillows. I find I am able to think about hurtful stuff without it actually touching me. Stuff like what happened after I called Dominic’s bluff over the photograph of our sex tape in the television company’s vaults.

For a few blissful weeks, I heard nothing. I threw myself into making it up to Travis. I cooked him complicated meals from the cookbooks people were always giving us for Christmas but sat largely unused on a special shelf in the kitchen. I took an interest in his job, quizzing him about his patients and taking the time to learn the names and domestic set-ups of the other junior doctors so I could comment on the workplace gossip he brought home. I even steeled myself to go into a sex shop in town, walking past its entrance four or five times before working up the courage to go in, emerging some time later with scratchy, ill-fitting underwear and various pink plastic ‘toys’. It almost made me laugh, perusing the shelves, at the innocence of it all. After the things Dominic had done, his stash of leather and chains and harnesses and buckles, the pink feathers and fake fur seemed like a child’s idea of a bedroom fantasy.

Travis was startled by this sudden change in me. ‘But what exactly does it
do
?’ he wanted to know, sitting up in bed, mystified, turning a purple plastic nipple clamp over in his hand.

Then in November my Hotmail account once again pinged with an email that changed everything.

It was from an address I didn’t recognize. The subject line said
selfie surprise
and there was a paperclip to indicate a photo attachment. I don’t know why I didn’t just move it straight to the trash, but maybe because it was in my regular inbox rather than my spam folder, or because the name looked genuine, I double-clicked and instantly a photograph came up in the main body of the message.

I remember I was sitting cross-legged on our sofa at home with my laptop resting on my knees. It was a Saturday morning, around eleven thirty, which is the one time of day when the sun manages to infiltrate our north-facing flat, falling in slants of light across the laminate flooring near the television. As the meaning of the photograph registered there was a split second when the whole world stopped.

The photo was taken in a park, from above and from arm’s length, in usual selfie style. It was of Dominic. He was dressed in black jeans and a dark blue Levi’s jacket with a crisp white T-shirt underneath. His brown hair was slightly messy, his eyes appeared particularly blue against the white cotton of his T-shirt and he was gazing up into the lens with a half-smile. But my attention wasn’t on him, it was on a couple of girls sitting on a park bench a few metres behind him. One of them was plump and blonde and unfamiliar. The other was my thirteen-year-old niece, Grace.

The girls, both wearing school-uniform black blazers and short black skirts rolled up around their waists as they all seem to, were deep in conversation. The blonde one was gesturing with her hands and Grace was listening intently and smiling, her thick brown hair tumbling over one shoulder. She has reached that age girls get to where they might be anything from twelve to twenty-five. She has huge brown eyes with thick – and when she can get away with it, mascaraed – lashes, a long thin nose and beautifully shaped dark brows, and she is the kind of skinny you take for granted at that age.

The girls didn’t seem to be aware of the man standing in front of them taking a picture on his phone, and even if they had noticed, they probably wouldn’t have thought it remarkable. In Teenage Girl World chronicling your every movement photographically is as natural as breathing.

I don’t know how long I stared at the image on the screen, but after a while I became aware that I was rocking backwards and forwards, with my hand over my mouth.

He was sending me a message. That much was clear. Telling me how easy it was to get access to the people I loved. How easy it would be to do them harm.

But
Grace
. Funny, smart, silly, lovely Grace on the cusp of her life.

My first instinct was to call her, warning her to look out for a handsome stranger with blue eyes, but I knew it would just pique her curiosity. Plus, I didn’t want my brother James getting involved, demanding to know what it was all about.

Anyway, I knew that any warnings would be too little, too late. Now Dominic knew how to find her there was nothing to stop him doing so again. I thought of the long black sports bag he’d brought to the second hotel and the things that were inside. Things with studs and clamps and heavy chains. I thought of the candles he’d used to drip hot wax on to my skin and the metal cuffs that left my wrists red and bruised, and how I’d had to tell Travis I’d been carrying heavy shopping with the plastic bag handles wrapped around my wrists so that they cut into my skin, and how he’d looked at me as if he didn’t believe me, but said nothing.

I thought of all these things. And then I thought about my niece who I first held when she was only five hours old and who I’d read stories to and taken swimming and cooked fishfingers for and tucked into bed.

For a few minutes, I thought again about going to the police. But there was nothing to link Dominic to the fake Facebook account, and if the vault photograph turned out to be a fake also, there’d been no crime committed there. And there was certainly nothing illegal about taking your own photograph in a public park. Would I really risk everything only to be disbelieved anyway?

That night I didn’t sleep. The next morning I got up and rang the number I had for Natalie, and kept ringing every five minutes until finally she answered.

‘You owe me,’ I told her.

That didn’t sway her. Who was I kidding to think she might feel some kind of loyalty to me for helping her run away from her husband. Dominic had already started looking for her. Now he knew she’d been in Edinburgh trying to sell on the diamond necklace, he was coming to find her, closing in on the trail she’d left behind. The woman who owned the cottage I’d rented for her had emailed me telling me there was someone who wanted to get in touch with her, a friend from the past. Dominic wouldn’t leave her alone, just as he wouldn’t leave me alone. We would never ever be free of him.

Unless we fought back.

* * *

In Heather’s spare room, Kim hears her phone vibrating on the bedside table. The screen lights up with a text from Sean.
Been to talk to a lawyer about a divorce.
She lies back on the single bed and tries to go back to sleep, but every time she closes her eyes she sees Dominic Lacey staring at her from the hospital bed. It’s like his face is glued to the inside of her eyelids. Next to him, Sean appears reassuringly safe, normal, decent. She reaches out for her phone once more and clicks on to the wallpaper image – a photograph of Rory and Katy, arms wrapped around each other on a beach in Cornwall just four months ago. They are dripping with water and shining with excitement and cold. Kim tries to memorize their smiles as a talisman against the man in the hospital bed.

Chapter Forty-One

Sunday lunch around the big table at my parents’ house. It’s the first time since I went missing that all of us have been in the same place at the same time – brothers, sisters-in-law, niece, nephews, Travis. I’m dreading an inquisition but at the same time I’m relieved to be spared another awkward meal at home in our flat with both of us determinedly steering clear of the things we most need to say.