Tell Tale (42 page)

All this was happening because Betsy was dead; because of one phone call; because I’d told.

‘Will I get some new clothes?’ I asked. I flipped through the leaflets and knew immediately what I wanted to study at college. I showed Mark.

‘Theatrical make-up it is then,’ he said, as if the rest of my life was unfolding before us – all apart from one small detail. ‘There are certain things I can’t reveal to you about this case, Ava . . . Nina,’ he corrected. ‘I’ve successfully relocated lots of endangered witnesses during my career, but there are several reasons why things go wrong. Every day of your life, I want you to live by two simple rules.’

I was bracing myself for a lifetime of being hunted.

‘Firstly, you must trust no one. Absolutely no one. They come from all walks of life. Last week, for instance, a police officer was arrested.’ He spread his hands incredulously. ‘He was part of that ring, Nina. We know for a fact they haven’t all been caught yet. I am the only person who knows of your new identity. If there is a crisis, it is me you come to. I will give you a telephone number and you must keep it with you at all times.’

I nodded, shaking from the inside out.

‘Secondly,’ Mark continued, ‘you must never, ever return to Roecliffe or its vicinity. Someone will recognise you. Someone will tell someone who will know someone else.
You will be in danger immediately. I don’t see any need for you to return there, so keep away.’ He saw my expression, reached a hand across the table. ‘But you’ll be fine. Just live by those rules. Trust no one and don’t go back.’

I repeated that mantra on the long journey south. I had a suitcase packed with new clothes, and a handbag containing a passport, bank account details, a national insurance number – everything I would need to start again. The only thing Mark McCormack hadn’t done was erase the memories. They were the heaviest part of my luggage as I dragged my new life up the stairs to my bedsit.

‘At least I won’t go hungry,’ I said, pointing at the fish and chip shop sign below.

Pretending to be a father sending his daughter off to college, Mark introduced me to my landlady. He showed me the bus route I’d need to take each morning. Term had already begun but I was slotted into the course with a credible back story. Soon, I’d made a couple of friends; soon Mark’s visits dwindled to every six months until he telephoned to say he wouldn’t be visiting again.

‘You have my number,’ he said. ‘Call if you ever need help.’ Trust no one and don’t go back, he repeated before hanging up.

I felt strangely excited, as if I was stepping onto a West End stage as the leading lady. I could be whoever I wanted and, with every new person I met, I made up a different tale about my past.

Eventually, Nina Brookes took on a life of her own. Eventually, I found happiness and became Nina Kennedy
when I met Mick, the man who was to finally take me away from everything I feared. Never before had I felt so safe, so secure, so certain that nothing would harm me ever again.

Nina had never imagined saying goodbye forever. Equally, she’d never once thought that the danger she’d lived with – the same danger that had faded to glorious happiness over the years – would harm anyone’s life but her own.

If I don’t do this then their lives are over too, she told herself in a moment of doubt. By leaving them, I save them.

The stage was set. The only thing left to do was die.

The day was warm, the air thankfully still. As ever these days, Mick had woken with a face lined from broken sleep and stress.

‘Juice?’ Nina offered. Mick shook his head, and poured coffee, intending to take it down to the studio.

The glass skidded across the floor and juice sprayed the room.

‘What the . . . ?’ Mick turned abruptly as something flew past his head.

Nina was red, shaking, crying and kicking the kitchen cupboard as she acted.
I’m so sorry,
she screamed in her head. ‘I can’t stand this any more,’ she wailed, tearing at her
hair, sobbing, gouging at her skin with her nails. Mick tensed, shook his head, and went to the studio.

Her skin was clammy beneath the wetsuit. She’d changed in public toilets at the edge of a park. The rubbery legs trailed in the disgusting mess on the floor. Her hands shook as she zipped up. Her face shone with sweat.

Over the top of the wetsuit, she wore a skirt. A special skirt she’d sewn from material Reacher had mentioned was sometimes used in such stunts. It was rigged with parachute cord and two thin flexible poles. If it worked, it might just buy her an ounce more chance; if it didn’t, she wouldn’t be around for regrets anyway.

She recalled Mick’s story from years ago, about the Victorian woman who had survived a fall from the bridge only because her old-fashioned skirt had saved her. She thought about Ethan Reacher’s advice, the detail he’d gone into about the dos and don’ts of a similar stunt for her make-believe film. She might just have a chance. She had to hurry and catch the tide before it turned.

Her heart beat an unusual rhythm, stretching the rubber of the suit beneath her top. She bagged the clothes she’d taken off and dumped them in a lay-by rubbish bin. She drove off towards the Clifton suspension bridge without looking back.

Earlier, Josie had been preparing her things for school, grumpily seeking out games kit that had been scattered around her room during the long summer break. Nina held
up an inside-out hockey sock that hadn’t made it into the wash. Silently, Josie snatched it from her mother, and stalked off, rejecting Nina’s embrace.

Mick was painting, of course, stewing from Nina’s earlier outburst with the glass. The last time she’d seen him was as he disappeared into his studio, as he’d done a thousand times previously.

She prayed that her behaviour over the last couple of weeks, the harsh words they’d had, the six empty packets of paracetamol she’d left lying on the kitchen worktop, her handbag containing her purse and mobile phone still hanging on the hook in the hall, all pointed to what she needed everyone – including the police, the local papers,
Burnett –
to believe.

That she was dead.

Nina parked on double yellow lines on the approach to the bridge. A dead woman wouldn’t care about getting a ticket. She blanked her mind, knowing that if she stopped to think now, she would never go through with it. She left the keys in the ignition and the car door open, wondering how long it would take before it was stolen. A suicidal woman wouldn’t have had the wherewithal for security.

Nina ran up to the bridge, her footfalls recognising that each one was a step closer to the finish line. She swallowed, but her throat locked up around a lump of fear. She passed the giant cables that stretched up to the stone towers. Her breathing quickened as she ran over the sandy-coloured stone paving, the spotlights that made a beautiful spectacle at night, the benches where lovers sat to take in the view. On
she ran, over the expansion joints and on to the bridge itself, the white lattice railings casting a vague shadow on the paving.

Up ahead, she saw a woman walking, her hair billowing in the wind. Nina pulled a nose-clip from her pocket, wondering what good it would really do. She couldn’t look down; couldn’t face the brown stretch of flowing water several hundred feet beneath until it wrapped around her body and dragged her under.

She felt sick from the height.

Nina forced her legs to carry her along the bridge footpath, approaching the halfway mark. She thought about each present moment – not the one before, not the one ahead. All she could see was the next step in front of her, and all she could hear was the breath she was taking.

She stopped. She reached for the rail that ran along the white lattice. Glancing up, her body burning from adrenalin, she saw the high stretch of the wires above designed to prevent people doing exactly what she was about to. With immense effort and a strength that she’d not drawn upon for a long time, Nina hauled herself up the lattice and clung on to the wires above.

Somehow, as others before her had managed, she clambered over. The wire gouged her hands. The metal bruised her shins, her shoulders, her face and neck. She didn’t care.

A car hooted and someone called out, waving as they sped past. Urging her on.

Nina stood, her hands gripping the wires, her skirt
billowing loose around her legs, and finally she looked down.

She stared at the rest of her life.

She knew it would take three seconds to die.

‘Wait!’ She heard a cry. Nina looked along the bridge. The woman’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes, even at that distance, clearly bursting with shock. A fat, uniformed man lumbered towards her from behind the woman, screaming and yelling, shouting out.

Nina looked away.
He
had told her to do it. He had told her that if she died, he wouldn’t harm the others, that he would leave her family alone.

She was doing the right thing, wasn’t she?

‘Look for the bubbles,’ she whispered. Her final words swept away on the wind.

‘It’s pitch black down there,’ Reacher had said. ‘Follow the bubbles to the surface. Then swim for your life,’ he told her, laughing. ‘If you were really going to do it. No one would, though,’ he said. ‘Not without equipment.’

The river below was as far away as another planet, another life.

Nina stepped off the bridge.

She was right. Three seconds to die, yet it took the rest of her life.

The water sucked her down and everything went black.

‘Adam, Adam! Wake up. It’s me. Frankie.’ My tap soon turns into an urgent thump on the wood. ‘Adam. Open up.’

I hear a groan. ‘What?’

‘Adam, please open the door. I need your help.’

A moment later, the door pulls back and Adam stands there in tracksuit bottoms. His sandy hair is only slightly more dishevelled than usual, and his top half is naked. He wipes his hands down his face and yawns. ‘What’s wrong?’ He stands aside and lets me in. ‘People will talk, you know,’ he jokes.

‘I’m so sorry to wake you.’ I’m shifting about, from one foot to the other. I pull my robe tightly around me. ‘Oh God, please help me, Adam. I’m so worried.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ he asks, sitting on the bed. He pulls on a grey T-shirt.

‘I need to use your computer. It’s . . . it’s about the girl I told you about. She’s in trouble. Really in trouble. I’m certain of it.’

‘Then why don’t you call her mother? It’s hardly your problem, or mine for that matter, at this time of night.’
Adam’s head flops back and hits the pillow. ‘It’s three thirty. And help yourself.’ He waves at the computer.

I sit at the desk and open up the laptop. In a couple of minutes, I’m logged in to Afterlife. Of course, at this time of night, there’s no sign of Josephine online. As fast as I can, I go into my email folder. I open up a new message and begin to type. She’ll get it next time she logs in.

I don’t sign off as Amanda. I nearly type ‘Mum’, but the shock of this may stop her acting on the message. I click send.

‘Oh God, what have I done?’ I say to Adam. He sits up, frowning at me.

‘I have no idea. Tell me.’

I fling open the small window and lean on the sill, drawing in lungfuls of night air. For a moment, it’s calming, as if the darkness holds all the answers and as long as I keep sucking it all up, everything will be OK. I turn abruptly.

‘I have to go back,’ I tell him. My eyes are wide but don’t see anything clearly. My nails dig into the wood. How can this be happening?

‘For God’s sake, go back where?’ Adam pours two
measures of whisky from his emergency supply. He makes me drink.

‘Home,’ I whisper as the liquid burns my throat. ‘I have to go home to put an end to this nightmare.’ I’m an animal, pacing, not making sense of my surroundings. I’m thinking, thinking. Nothing’s clear.

‘Whoa,’ Adam says. ‘You’re not going anywhere like this.’

‘He’ll kill her,’ I sing out in a crazed whimper. ‘I was mad. Insane to think this would ever work.’ My fingernails claw down the paintwork. Adam refills my empty glass. ‘Will you drive me?’ My eyes drill into Adam’s. ‘Now?’

‘Drive you where?’ He puts down his glass.

‘Home. Bristol.
Please
.’ I turn to face him, sobbing, desperation leaking from every part of me. ‘I did something so crazy it hurts, Adam, and now I have to go back and fix it. Before it’s too late.’

A pair of stern hands land on my shoulders. ‘Let me get this straight. You want me to drive you to Bristol in the middle of the night. In my old wreck of a car?’

‘At least it goes. Mine won’t even start.’ I bend my cheek on to his forearm. ‘She’s in such danger if I don’t get to her. It may be too late already.’ I’m sobbing, slurping my drink in the hope it will help, even though it doesn’t, pulling at Adam’s T-shirt. ‘I’d take a taxi, but I don’t have any—’

‘Yes,’ he says quite clearly. He’s already putting on a shirt and sweater.

‘What?’

‘Yes, I’ll take you.’

‘But?’

‘Tell me who’s in such danger.’ Adam shrugs into a coat.

‘My daughter, Adam. If I don’t get to her, my daughter will die.’

Adam asks how long I reckon it will take to get to Bristol. I think back to my fraught trip up here weeks ago, punctuated by a couple of nights in a motel, long recovery sleeps in lay-bys, me staring vacantly across fields for hours, hardly able to believe what I’d done.

‘Maybe four hours. Perhaps five in this.’ I tap the dashboard. Adam has already filled up with petrol at an all-night service station. He bought coffee and snacks to keep us going. I can’t eat but the coffee keeps my heart beating.

‘I always knew you’d be trouble. Right from the start.’ Adam glances at me as we wait at red traffic lights. We’ve not even made it to the motorway yet. ‘Something about you when I first saw you at the pre-term meeting. Something in your eyes. That gash on your cheek. The way you avoided everyone. There was a story to tell, I knew.’