Chapter 1
2016. Somewhere near Hastings.
Jack Anderson had no words left to say to his wife. All he could think to do, as the long hours of night closed in, was hold Rebecca close. She felt distressingly limp in his arms. Her face, naturally pale, was as white as the bedsheets, making her long hair look even blacker. Her eyes – the bluest eyes he’d ever seen – stared into nowhere. Every so often he kissed her gently, feathering his thumb over the gold wedding band on her ring finger. She showed no sign of knowing he was there.
He didn’t want to take his eyes off her, but during the early hours sleep ambushed him. He awoke with a jolt. Rebecca’s side of the bed was empty! He sprang from beneath the duvet to search the upstairs rooms. All were unoccupied, except for one with a little girl sleeping in it. The girl’s hair was as glossily dark as her mother’s. Her soft round cheeks were flushed with the warmth of bed.
Jack winced as the question Naomi had asked the previous day came back to him: “What’s wrong with Mum?”
He’d looked into his daughter’s eyes – the eyes of a seven-year-old coming to terms with the realisation that the world isn’t all love and laughter – and it was as if a vice was squeezing his chest. “She’s just tired, sweetie,” he’d replied in a voice that sounded dishonest to his own ears. “She’ll be fine once she’s had a good night’s sleep.”
Wrenching his gaze away from the sleeping child, Jack hurried downstairs. There was a note on the bottom step: ‘Gone for a walk’. Normally there wouldn’t have been anything unusual in that – Rebecca loved walking along the towering coastal cliffs a short drive from their home – but things had been far from normal lately.
He looked out of the front door. Rebecca’s Toyota was gone. He snatched up the phone and dialled her mobile. His call went through to voicemail. He tried again with the same result. Uncertainty creased his forehead. He couldn’t go out in search of her and leave Naomi alone in the house. He considered waking Naomi and taking her with him, but decided against it. She’d been through enough worry already.
Jack paced around, phoning Rebecca every few minutes to no avail. When he heard Naomi get out of bed, he forced his lips into the semblance of a smile and went upstairs. Naomi was sleepily clutching a stuffed doll that Rebecca had bought her. His heart hurt at the sight. “Morning, sweetheart. Did you sleep well?”
“I dreamt Mum was better. Is she better?”
“She’s a lot better today.” Jack hoped with everything in him that he wasn’t compounding yesterday’s lie.
Naomi’s face brightened. “Can I see her?”
“She’s gone for a walk.”
There was no point telling Naomi her mum was asleep. She was like Jack – she had sharp eyes. She’d spot that Rebecca’s car was gone the moment they left the house. Naomi’s big blue eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing. He noticed something shining on her wrist – a silver bracelet. His heart skipped. The bracelet had been a first anniversary present from him to Rebecca. She’d never taken it off from the day he’d put it on her until now.
Why now?
The question increased his anxiety tenfold. “When did your mum give you that?”
Naomi’s porcelain-smooth forehead creased faintly. “I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I went to bed. Shall I take it off?”
Jack concealed his anxiety with another smile. “No, sweetheart.”
He rushed Naomi through the morning routine – eat breakfast, wash face, brush teeth and hair, put on school uniform – then drove her to school and kissed her goodbye. For the first time in weeks, she ran into the playground with a smile on her face.
Jack sped off towards the coast. He found Rebecca’s Toyota parked in the usual place. He sprinted along the windswept clifftop path as if he was in a race for his life. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. People were out walking and admiring the sparkling views from the sandstone cliffs. The vice in his chest turned several twists tighter when he spotted a small crowd at the cliff’s edge.
“What’s going on?” he gasped with what little breath he had left.
“A woman fell,” someone replied.
“She didn’t fall,” put in someone else. “She jumped.”
Jumped. The word almost crushed Jack to his knees. He gaped over the cliff – thirty-odd metres straight down to broken rocks and churning waves. There was no sign of a body, but no one could have survived such a drop. He grew dizzy and swayed on his feet. Hands caught hold of him and pulled him to safety.
After that things became blurry. Jack remembered the police and coastguards arriving. He remembered the witnesses providing them with a description that fitted Rebecca. He remembered a helicopter circling above the sea in search of her. But all of it was filtered through a black-and-white haze of pain. The next thing he remembered with vivid colour was finding the text message from Rebecca on his phone.
Chapter 2
One year later. Manchester.
All the photos scattered across the bed were of the same willowy, almost ethereally beautiful woman. Jack Anderson lay amidst them, his bloodshot eyes fixated on a photo of Rebecca and himself. She was wearing a simple white satin wedding-dress and holding a bouquet of pink roses. He was standing beside her in a pin-striped grey suit with a blue carnation in the lapel. Both were beaming into the camera from the arched stone porch of the church where they’d just said, “I do.” They looked like the perfect couple. There was no hint in their faces of the heartbreak to come.
Jack asked the question that had passed his lips a thousand times and more since his wife’s death, “What happened, Rebecca?”
There was no answer and never would be, but that didn’t stop the question from hammering at him.
His mind looped through the weeks that had led up to that day. Rebecca’s depression had deepened relentlessly. Nothing – no pills, no therapists – had stopped her deterioration. It wasn’t the first time she’d been depressed. After Naomi’s birth, postnatal depression had laid her low for months. But this was different. It had hit her out of the blue, like a breezeblock dropped from an airplane.
“Where’s this coming from?” Jack had asked her in bewildered desperation. “We love each other, we’ve got a beautiful daughter, a house of our own, good jobs. What is there to be depressed about?”
In reply, Rebecca had looked at him with her big sad eyes as if to say, If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.
At first there had been lots of tears. Rebecca would lock herself in the bathroom and Jack would listen to her sobbing through the door. Then came the silence, the staring off into a place only she could see. That was infinitely worse than the tears.
A sob rose from the pit of Jack’s stomach as scenes from the day Rebecca died spooled out in front of him. He saw everything as if it was happening right that second – the crowd on the cliffs, the waves frothing against the rocks, the circling helicopter, the text message.
Jack reached for his mobile phone and found the message: ‘I love you and Naomi more than I can bear. I’m so sorry.’
That ‘sorry’ haunted Jack. What did it mean? Was Rebecca sorry for killing herself? Was she sorry for something else she’d done, something that had pushed her over the edge? Or had she simply been sorry for being depressed? Maybe she hadn’t killed herself. Maybe she’d been on her way home, determined to defeat her depression when she slipped and fell. He would never know. The coastguard hadn’t recovered Rebecca’s body. A verdict of accidental death had been recorded. Jack and Naomi had wept over an empty coffin at the funeral.
Jack’s phone rang. It was Laura. He didn’t answer the call. He couldn’t speak to his sister right now. Not on this day, this first anniversary.
Like a merry-go-round of pain, the images came around and hit him again. The crowd, the cliffs, the sea, the helicopter... Oh Christ, it was too much to bear.
He needed to drink – not merely to get drunk, but to obliterate himself. That was the only way he knew to escape the memories for a few hours. He headed down to the kitchen, stepping over cardboard boxes. He’d been in the new house for nearly two months, but still hadn’t got around to unpacking. He grabbed a bottle of vodka from the work-surface. Vodka had been Rebecca’s favourite drink. Now it was his chosen route to oblivion. There were only a few centimetres of liquid left in the bottle. Not nearly enough for his purpose. He knocked it back and made for the front door. He hit the street at a jog. The constricting sensation in his chest was agony. He hadn’t realised until Rebecca’s death that heartbreak was a physical thing. Every sober second of every day since then it was as if his heart was literally being ground into dust.
He bought 70cl of vodka from the nearest off-licence and gulped it down. He retched a few times, drawing glances of indifference, disgust or sympathy from passers-by. He knew how he looked – unshaven, crumpled clothes – but he’d long since ceased to care what others thought of him, except that is for Naomi. He would be mortified if she saw him like this.
A spasm of guilt tugged at Jack’s haggard features. Naomi. He wasn’t the only one suffering. She was in pain too. Oh Naomi. My beautiful little girl. “You selfish prick,” he muttered at himself. “You should be with her.” It was too late for that though. He was too far gone to get himself straight tonight.
The guilt and pain subsided as the drink did its work. Head bowed, not noticing where he was going, Jack continued walking. The night-time streets were quiet. He paused in the pool of a streetlamp to take another swig from the bottle. A woman came around a corner and pulled up at the sight of him. She stared at him nervously for a heartbeat before crossing to the opposite pavement.
“What happened, Rebecca?” he mumbled as he continued on his path to nowhere.
After a while, he became aware that his legs were struggling to carry him. Lifting his head, he saw that he was walking alongside a park. He staggered through a gate and slumped to the grass beneath a tree. A sultry summer breeze brushed his face as he stared through the branches at glimpses of stars and space.
He finished the bottle. The alcohol weighed down his eyelids. His eyes fluttered open as a scream split the night. He struggled up onto an elbow, squinting blearily into the encircling darkness. There was no one to be seen. “Anyone there?” he slurred. Silence. He tried to stand up, but his limbs were reluctant to cooperate. “Fuck it.” He fell back, closing his eyes again. He drifted in a fog of drunken self-pity for a while before merciful blankness took him.
Chapter 3
Pale morning light streamed through the branches, illuminating drops of dew on Jack’s face. He awoke with a pounding headache and a mouth like sawdust. Sitting up, he dug out a packet of Marlboro and lit one with a scuffed old Zippo. His gaze landed on a group of people gathered around something towards the far side of the park. A frown touched his forehead as he hazily recalled the scream. On stiff legs, he headed over to the people. From beyond the park’s perimeter came the wail of approaching sirens. A woman was sobbing into a man’s shoulder. Other people were pressing their hands to their mouths as if they might vomit.
“Don’t look,” a pasty-faced man said to Jack. “Trust me, you don’t want to see it.”
Jack made his way to the front of the little crowd. The woman was lying on her back between bushes a few metres from the path. She was slim with long dark hair. She looked to be in her twenties or early thirties although her face was so bloody it was difficult to tell. There were what appeared to be knife wounds on her face, neck, chest and arms. The surrounding grass was black with blood. She was dressed as if for a night out: shoulderless black dress, matching high-heels. The dress was pulled up to under her small breasts. Her underwear had been removed and lay nearby along with an unopened handbag. Her legs were splayed as if she was waiting for someone to climb between them. Her buttocks and inner thighs were stained with faeces. Most horrifyingly of all, her stomach was horizontally slashed open just below her belly button. Glistening coils of vital organs bulged through the wound.
A shudder of disgust shook Jack – not simply at the sight of the dead woman, but at himself. It was surely her he’d heard screaming. She might still be alive if he hadn’t been too drunk to get up and investigate. He turned his back on the sickening sight. Police cars had pulled up at the park’s main gate. Constables were getting out of them. Jack moved off in the opposite direction. There was nothing for him to say to the police. He didn’t have a clue what time he’d heard the scream.
He went into a cafe for a coffee. “What are those sirens about?” wondered the man who served him.
“A woman’s been killed in the park,” said Jack.
The man’s eyebrows lifted. “Another one.”
“What do you mean?”
“A girl was killed three nights ago. Not in Alexandra Park. Over in Didsbury. Don’t you watch the news?”
Jack hadn’t kept up with the news in a long time. Since Rebecca’s death his world had shrunk to a tiny bubble of his own misery. There was no space in there for anyone else’s. “How was she killed?”
“She was stabbed like twenty or thirty times. Whoever did that’s got to be crazy, don’t you think?”
Jack nodded. He drank his coffee as he walked. The caffeine cleared away the cobwebs of his hangover. He was no longer thinking about the dead woman in the park. His mind was back in the same old loop: What happened, Rebecca? What were you sorry for? He stopped at an off-licence to buy a bottle of vodka for when the need to escape himself overwhelmed his need for answers.
He heaved a sigh at the sight of the little suburban semi he’d bought for Naomi and himself to make a new start in. The house had an unoccupied look – the lawn was overgrown, there were curtains in some windows, others were blacked out with newspaper. As he stepped into the hallway, he was struck by how lifeless and alien it felt. A blanket and pillow were screwed up on the sofa in the bare-walled living-room. He’d rarely slept in a bed since Rebecca’s death. He doubted if he would ever get used to sleeping alone in a double-bed.
He dropped into an armchair and closed his eyes, but not for long – too many images, too many questions. “She’s gone and there’s nothing you can do to change that,” he told himself sharply. He knew his words were true, just as he knew they would have no effect. When Rebecca died, it was as if he’d died too and been plunged into hell.
An insistent knocking started at the front door. Jack knew it had to be Laura. No one else knocked on his door like that. He wearily rose to his feet. Ignoring her wasn’t an option this time. Laura wasn’t the type to give up easily. Besides, it occurred to him with a little tightening of his chest that she might have something to tell him about Naomi.
“About bloody time,” Laura said as he opened the door. She was wearing her pale blue nurse’s uniform and holding a full carrier bag in each hand. Her hair – mousey brown like Jack’s – was tied back in a ponytail. She had the same hazel eyes as him too. But unlike his, her eyes were clear and keen. They examined him as if he was a patient – firmly but with care. “God, Jack, look at the state of you.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she continued, “Before you ask, Naomi’s fine. I dropped her off at school on my way over here.”
“Did she mention Rebecca at all last night?”
“Once or twice. She had a little cry, but I put a movie on and she settled down.”
Jack gave his head a shake of self-recrimination. “I’m sorry, Laura, I should have come over.”
“From the looks of you, you wouldn’t have been much use if you had done.”
Jack acknowledged the truth of Laura’s words with a sigh and repeated, “I’m sorry.”
“Listen, it was the first anniversary of Rebecca’s death. I understand that you needed to be alone.”
“But does Naomi understand?”
Jack waited for Laura to say, Yes. Instead, agonisingly, she avoided his gaze. She manoeuvred past him into the hallway, sniffing the air. “This place smells worse than the geriatrics ward,” she joked grimly, putting the carrier-bags down in the kitchen. She pointed at Jack. “Upstairs now. Shower, shave, put some clean clothes on if you’ve got any. I’ll make breakfast.”
“There’s no food in.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I brought some with me.”
There was no point arguing with Laura when she was in this mood. Jack went upstairs. He stood under the shower, trying to feel the hot water and nothing else. Then he shaved at the sink. The face that emerged from under the heavy stubble was thinner than it had been a year ago, more lined. The eyes stared back at him from hollows of grief. He dug jeans and a t-shirt out of a suitcase. Mixed in amongst his clothes was one of Rebecca’s blouses. He pressed it to his face and inhaled. He could still smell her on it, but the scent was fading.
“Breakfast’s ready,” Laura called to him.
The sizzle of frying bacon greeted Jack as he descended to the kitchen. The windows were wide open. Laura surveyed her brother approvingly. “There you go. You almost look like a member of the human race.”
Laura had set the table. She served up two fried breakfasts, which they ate in silence. Laura leaned back in her chair, looking steadily her brother. Now it was his turn to avoid her eyes.
“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” she began. There was no firmness in her voice, only compassion. “I love having Naomi. She’s welcome to stay with me for as long as necessary. But it’s not me that she really needs. She needs her dad.”
Jack lifted his guilt-wracked gaze to Laura’s. “Don’t you think I know that? She’s the most important thing in my life. I want to be there for her more than anything. I just... I can’t stand the thought of her seeing me like this.”
“So sort yourself out.”
“I wish I could, Laura, but I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start by doing something to bring you out of yourself. Go back to work.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Well you can’t keep on like this, Jack. You seem hell-bent on slowly killing yourself, but you don’t have that luxury.” Laura reached to rest her hand on Jack’s. “You have to be strong for Naomi.”
He almost scoffed at the platitude, but caught himself. “Look at me. How am I supposed to be strong?”
“I don’t know, but you won’t find the answer in a bottle of vodka.” Laura glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I’m due on the ward in twenty minutes.” She gave Jack’s hand a squeeze and pushed her chair back.
“Leave them,” he said as she cleared the table. “I’ll do it.”
At the front door, Jack kissed Laura on the cheek. “Thanks for breakfast, sis. Tell Naomi I love her.”
“Phone and tell her yourself. Or better yet, come round and see her.”
The crow’s feet at the corners of Jack’s eyes deepened. “I will.”
“You’d better,” Laura said in a mock-threatening tone.
Jack watched his sister get into her car and waved as she accelerated away. He returned to the kitchen and picked up the breakfast plates. He thought about Naomi’s blue eyes, black hair and china skin. It was impossible to look at her without seeing Rebecca. He’d promised himself time and again that he would hold it together for his daughter, but every time he saw her he fell apart. He dropped the plates into the sink and moved through to the living-room. He drew the curtains and slumped into the armchair. Rebecca. He closed his eyes. What happened, Rebecca? What happened?
Chapter 4
Jack stood outside Laura’s little terraced house for a long time, working up the nerve to knock on the front door. All he could see in his mind’s eye were the cliffs and the sea. All he could hear was the whoosh of waves and the whump-whump of rotor-blades. His hand clenched into a fist, but instead of knocking he thudded it into his thigh. What was the matter with him? He hadn’t lied to Laura. Nothing meant more to him than Naomi. So why was he standing out here instead of showing her how much he loved her? He already knew the answer. It wasn’t simply that she reminded him of Rebecca. That was part of it, for sure, but there was something else. The way she looked at him with such need, hope and vulnerability. It terrified him because he knew he was going to fail her the same way he’d failed to save Rebecca.
He turned suddenly and walked away from the door. “You’re a fucking coward,” he told himself.
As he trudged along, Jack tossed vodka down his throat. His face glistened with the drizzle that had been falling for the past hour or so. The fine droplets were thickening into heavy rain. He glanced upwards as thunder rumbled across the starless night sky. On the other side of the road were tall wrought-iron gates set between stone posts. Beyond the gates a tree-lined avenue led through ranks of graves.
Jack had spent a lot of time in graveyards since Rebecca’s death. He’d visited her memorial plaque at Hastings Crematorium a few times, but he felt no connection to her there. Rebecca wasn’t in the urn behind the plaque. She was somewhere at the bottom of the Channel. Besides, the Crematorium was always busy. He preferred the solace of old cemeteries. He felt more comfortable with the dead than the living. They didn’t judge or expect anything of you.
He staggered across the road and rattled the gates. Padlocked. He put the bottle through the bars and scaled the gates. His t-shirt caught on a fleur de lis spike. He pulled it free with a tearing sound and lowered himself to the path.
As Jack wandered deeper into the cemetery, the sounds of the city receded and silence stole over him. He looked almost jealously at the graves. For their occupants the suffering was over. No more memories. No more questions. No more pain.
Most of the graves were marked by standard headstones. Interspersed amongst them were clusters of elaborate memorials – tall pedestals with winged angels atop them, miniaturised classical temples, pointed obelisks.
The rain was weighing Jack down. He felt as if he could barely take another step. He veered off the path, dragging his feet along in search of somewhere to shelter. Neatly tended graves gave way to weed-choked plots occupied by cracked and fallen headstones. Light from a building that formed part of the cemetery wall faintly illuminated an altar tomb half-shrouded by ivy and enclosed by a low rusty fence. The altar tomb was carved into the likeness of a church ornamented with spires and arches. The church roof overhung the walls sufficiently to provide some shelter.
Jack stepped over the fence and squatted under the overhang. He put out a hand to balance himself. It passed straight through the ivy. He lifted the tangled veil aside, revealing a collapsed section of wall. He sparked his Zippo into life. The flame illuminated a patch of compacted earth long enough to lie out on. He crawled into the tomb’s hollow interior. It smelled of old stone and damp earth. Rain drummed against the arched roof, dripping through unseen cracks. He swallowed more vodka and closed his eyes. He imaged he was the grave’s occupant, buried six feet under, and that all he knew was darkness. He wished he could stay in that place where there was no past to torment him – not forever, but long enough for the pain to fade. He would gladly have given up a year or two of his life if only it allowed him to live again.
A drip hit his forehead. He wiped it away. A sliver of bright light at the rear of the tomb caught his eye. Had someone seen him climb the gates? Were they searching for him with a torch? He pressed his eyes to a flared horizontal crack. His breath stopped in his throat. The crack looked towards the nearby building – a big old house with tall windows. A light had come on in a first floor window. The curtains were open and the sash-window was drawn up as if to let in the sounds of the storm.
A woman was sitting in the window. A red blouse hung off one of her slender shoulders. She was brushing long black hair that framed a china-white, strikingly beautiful face. Jack watched the motion of the hairbrush as if mesmerised. His gaze glassily traced the lines of her neck, jaw, lips, nose, cheeks and eyes. She was about fifteen metres away. He couldn’t tell the colour of her eyes from that distance, but in his mind they were startlingly blue. It was as if he was looking through a window into heaven.
“Rebecca,” he murmured. “Rebecca.”
His heart plummeted as the woman rose and moved away from the window. “No,” he whispered. “Come back.”
A light came on in a larger neighbouring window. Jack exhaled as the woman reappeared. She stood at the window, staring into the rain. Her blouse’s plunging neckline revealed a swell of cleavage. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rebecca would have worn, but that didn’t matter. Everything else was as it should be – the hair, the skin, the facial features, the build. She even looked about the same age as Rebecca had been. Jack ached to reach out and touch the woman, pull her into his arms and crush her to him.
She glanced over her shoulder as if at a sound. A low moan rose in Jack’s throat as she moved away from the window. Long minutes passed with no sight of her. The light went off in the larger window. Seconds later, she approached the other window and closed the curtains. The light went off behind them too.
Jack continued to stare through the crack until it became obvious that he wasn’t going to catch another glimpse of her. He collapsed face first to the earth, trembling all over. Behind his eyelids he saw Rebecca, only now she was wearing a red blouse. Tears filled his eyes as he asked her, “What happened?”
If you don’t know, I can’t tell you, she replied in her soft Sussex accent.
2016. Somewhere near Hastings.
Jack Anderson had no words left to say to his wife. All he could think to do, as the long hours of night closed in, was hold Rebecca close. She felt distressingly limp in his arms. Her face, naturally pale, was as white as the bedsheets, making her long hair look even blacker. Her eyes – the bluest eyes he’d ever seen – stared into nowhere. Every so often he kissed her gently, feathering his thumb over the gold wedding band on her ring finger. She showed no sign of knowing he was there.
He didn’t want to take his eyes off her, but during the early hours sleep ambushed him. He awoke with a jolt. Rebecca’s side of the bed was empty! He sprang from beneath the duvet to search the upstairs rooms. All were unoccupied, except for one with a little girl sleeping in it. The girl’s hair was as glossily dark as her mother’s. Her soft round cheeks were flushed with the warmth of bed.
Jack winced as the question Naomi had asked the previous day came back to him: “What’s wrong with Mum?”
He’d looked into his daughter’s eyes – the eyes of a seven-year-old coming to terms with the realisation that the world isn’t all love and laughter – and it was as if a vice was squeezing his chest. “She’s just tired, sweetie,” he’d replied in a voice that sounded dishonest to his own ears. “She’ll be fine once she’s had a good night’s sleep.”
Wrenching his gaze away from the sleeping child, Jack hurried downstairs. There was a note on the bottom step: ‘Gone for a walk’. Normally there wouldn’t have been anything unusual in that – Rebecca loved walking along the towering coastal cliffs a short drive from their home – but things had been far from normal lately.
He looked out of the front door. Rebecca’s Toyota was gone. He snatched up the phone and dialled her mobile. His call went through to voicemail. He tried again with the same result. Uncertainty creased his forehead. He couldn’t go out in search of her and leave Naomi alone in the house. He considered waking Naomi and taking her with him, but decided against it. She’d been through enough worry already.
Jack paced around, phoning Rebecca every few minutes to no avail. When he heard Naomi get out of bed, he forced his lips into the semblance of a smile and went upstairs. Naomi was sleepily clutching a stuffed doll that Rebecca had bought her. His heart hurt at the sight. “Morning, sweetheart. Did you sleep well?”
“I dreamt Mum was better. Is she better?”
“She’s a lot better today.” Jack hoped with everything in him that he wasn’t compounding yesterday’s lie.
Naomi’s face brightened. “Can I see her?”
“She’s gone for a walk.”
There was no point telling Naomi her mum was asleep. She was like Jack – she had sharp eyes. She’d spot that Rebecca’s car was gone the moment they left the house. Naomi’s big blue eyes widened in surprise, but she said nothing. He noticed something shining on her wrist – a silver bracelet. His heart skipped. The bracelet had been a first anniversary present from him to Rebecca. She’d never taken it off from the day he’d put it on her until now.
Why now?
The question increased his anxiety tenfold. “When did your mum give you that?”
Naomi’s porcelain-smooth forehead creased faintly. “I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I went to bed. Shall I take it off?”
Jack concealed his anxiety with another smile. “No, sweetheart.”
He rushed Naomi through the morning routine – eat breakfast, wash face, brush teeth and hair, put on school uniform – then drove her to school and kissed her goodbye. For the first time in weeks, she ran into the playground with a smile on her face.
Jack sped off towards the coast. He found Rebecca’s Toyota parked in the usual place. He sprinted along the windswept clifftop path as if he was in a race for his life. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. People were out walking and admiring the sparkling views from the sandstone cliffs. The vice in his chest turned several twists tighter when he spotted a small crowd at the cliff’s edge.
“What’s going on?” he gasped with what little breath he had left.
“A woman fell,” someone replied.
“She didn’t fall,” put in someone else. “She jumped.”
Jumped. The word almost crushed Jack to his knees. He gaped over the cliff – thirty-odd metres straight down to broken rocks and churning waves. There was no sign of a body, but no one could have survived such a drop. He grew dizzy and swayed on his feet. Hands caught hold of him and pulled him to safety.
After that things became blurry. Jack remembered the police and coastguards arriving. He remembered the witnesses providing them with a description that fitted Rebecca. He remembered a helicopter circling above the sea in search of her. But all of it was filtered through a black-and-white haze of pain. The next thing he remembered with vivid colour was finding the text message from Rebecca on his phone.
Chapter 2
One year later. Manchester.
All the photos scattered across the bed were of the same willowy, almost ethereally beautiful woman. Jack Anderson lay amidst them, his bloodshot eyes fixated on a photo of Rebecca and himself. She was wearing a simple white satin wedding-dress and holding a bouquet of pink roses. He was standing beside her in a pin-striped grey suit with a blue carnation in the lapel. Both were beaming into the camera from the arched stone porch of the church where they’d just said, “I do.” They looked like the perfect couple. There was no hint in their faces of the heartbreak to come.
Jack asked the question that had passed his lips a thousand times and more since his wife’s death, “What happened, Rebecca?”
There was no answer and never would be, but that didn’t stop the question from hammering at him.
His mind looped through the weeks that had led up to that day. Rebecca’s depression had deepened relentlessly. Nothing – no pills, no therapists – had stopped her deterioration. It wasn’t the first time she’d been depressed. After Naomi’s birth, postnatal depression had laid her low for months. But this was different. It had hit her out of the blue, like a breezeblock dropped from an airplane.
“Where’s this coming from?” Jack had asked her in bewildered desperation. “We love each other, we’ve got a beautiful daughter, a house of our own, good jobs. What is there to be depressed about?”
In reply, Rebecca had looked at him with her big sad eyes as if to say, If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.
At first there had been lots of tears. Rebecca would lock herself in the bathroom and Jack would listen to her sobbing through the door. Then came the silence, the staring off into a place only she could see. That was infinitely worse than the tears.
A sob rose from the pit of Jack’s stomach as scenes from the day Rebecca died spooled out in front of him. He saw everything as if it was happening right that second – the crowd on the cliffs, the waves frothing against the rocks, the circling helicopter, the text message.
Jack reached for his mobile phone and found the message: ‘I love you and Naomi more than I can bear. I’m so sorry.’
That ‘sorry’ haunted Jack. What did it mean? Was Rebecca sorry for killing herself? Was she sorry for something else she’d done, something that had pushed her over the edge? Or had she simply been sorry for being depressed? Maybe she hadn’t killed herself. Maybe she’d been on her way home, determined to defeat her depression when she slipped and fell. He would never know. The coastguard hadn’t recovered Rebecca’s body. A verdict of accidental death had been recorded. Jack and Naomi had wept over an empty coffin at the funeral.
Jack’s phone rang. It was Laura. He didn’t answer the call. He couldn’t speak to his sister right now. Not on this day, this first anniversary.
Like a merry-go-round of pain, the images came around and hit him again. The crowd, the cliffs, the sea, the helicopter... Oh Christ, it was too much to bear.
He needed to drink – not merely to get drunk, but to obliterate himself. That was the only way he knew to escape the memories for a few hours. He headed down to the kitchen, stepping over cardboard boxes. He’d been in the new house for nearly two months, but still hadn’t got around to unpacking. He grabbed a bottle of vodka from the work-surface. Vodka had been Rebecca’s favourite drink. Now it was his chosen route to oblivion. There were only a few centimetres of liquid left in the bottle. Not nearly enough for his purpose. He knocked it back and made for the front door. He hit the street at a jog. The constricting sensation in his chest was agony. He hadn’t realised until Rebecca’s death that heartbreak was a physical thing. Every sober second of every day since then it was as if his heart was literally being ground into dust.
He bought 70cl of vodka from the nearest off-licence and gulped it down. He retched a few times, drawing glances of indifference, disgust or sympathy from passers-by. He knew how he looked – unshaven, crumpled clothes – but he’d long since ceased to care what others thought of him, except that is for Naomi. He would be mortified if she saw him like this.
A spasm of guilt tugged at Jack’s haggard features. Naomi. He wasn’t the only one suffering. She was in pain too. Oh Naomi. My beautiful little girl. “You selfish prick,” he muttered at himself. “You should be with her.” It was too late for that though. He was too far gone to get himself straight tonight.
The guilt and pain subsided as the drink did its work. Head bowed, not noticing where he was going, Jack continued walking. The night-time streets were quiet. He paused in the pool of a streetlamp to take another swig from the bottle. A woman came around a corner and pulled up at the sight of him. She stared at him nervously for a heartbeat before crossing to the opposite pavement.
“What happened, Rebecca?” he mumbled as he continued on his path to nowhere.
After a while, he became aware that his legs were struggling to carry him. Lifting his head, he saw that he was walking alongside a park. He staggered through a gate and slumped to the grass beneath a tree. A sultry summer breeze brushed his face as he stared through the branches at glimpses of stars and space.
He finished the bottle. The alcohol weighed down his eyelids. His eyes fluttered open as a scream split the night. He struggled up onto an elbow, squinting blearily into the encircling darkness. There was no one to be seen. “Anyone there?” he slurred. Silence. He tried to stand up, but his limbs were reluctant to cooperate. “Fuck it.” He fell back, closing his eyes again. He drifted in a fog of drunken self-pity for a while before merciful blankness took him.
Chapter 3
Pale morning light streamed through the branches, illuminating drops of dew on Jack’s face. He awoke with a pounding headache and a mouth like sawdust. Sitting up, he dug out a packet of Marlboro and lit one with a scuffed old Zippo. His gaze landed on a group of people gathered around something towards the far side of the park. A frown touched his forehead as he hazily recalled the scream. On stiff legs, he headed over to the people. From beyond the park’s perimeter came the wail of approaching sirens. A woman was sobbing into a man’s shoulder. Other people were pressing their hands to their mouths as if they might vomit.
“Don’t look,” a pasty-faced man said to Jack. “Trust me, you don’t want to see it.”
Jack made his way to the front of the little crowd. The woman was lying on her back between bushes a few metres from the path. She was slim with long dark hair. She looked to be in her twenties or early thirties although her face was so bloody it was difficult to tell. There were what appeared to be knife wounds on her face, neck, chest and arms. The surrounding grass was black with blood. She was dressed as if for a night out: shoulderless black dress, matching high-heels. The dress was pulled up to under her small breasts. Her underwear had been removed and lay nearby along with an unopened handbag. Her legs were splayed as if she was waiting for someone to climb between them. Her buttocks and inner thighs were stained with faeces. Most horrifyingly of all, her stomach was horizontally slashed open just below her belly button. Glistening coils of vital organs bulged through the wound.
A shudder of disgust shook Jack – not simply at the sight of the dead woman, but at himself. It was surely her he’d heard screaming. She might still be alive if he hadn’t been too drunk to get up and investigate. He turned his back on the sickening sight. Police cars had pulled up at the park’s main gate. Constables were getting out of them. Jack moved off in the opposite direction. There was nothing for him to say to the police. He didn’t have a clue what time he’d heard the scream.
He went into a cafe for a coffee. “What are those sirens about?” wondered the man who served him.
“A woman’s been killed in the park,” said Jack.
The man’s eyebrows lifted. “Another one.”
“What do you mean?”
“A girl was killed three nights ago. Not in Alexandra Park. Over in Didsbury. Don’t you watch the news?”
Jack hadn’t kept up with the news in a long time. Since Rebecca’s death his world had shrunk to a tiny bubble of his own misery. There was no space in there for anyone else’s. “How was she killed?”
“She was stabbed like twenty or thirty times. Whoever did that’s got to be crazy, don’t you think?”
Jack nodded. He drank his coffee as he walked. The caffeine cleared away the cobwebs of his hangover. He was no longer thinking about the dead woman in the park. His mind was back in the same old loop: What happened, Rebecca? What were you sorry for? He stopped at an off-licence to buy a bottle of vodka for when the need to escape himself overwhelmed his need for answers.
He heaved a sigh at the sight of the little suburban semi he’d bought for Naomi and himself to make a new start in. The house had an unoccupied look – the lawn was overgrown, there were curtains in some windows, others were blacked out with newspaper. As he stepped into the hallway, he was struck by how lifeless and alien it felt. A blanket and pillow were screwed up on the sofa in the bare-walled living-room. He’d rarely slept in a bed since Rebecca’s death. He doubted if he would ever get used to sleeping alone in a double-bed.
He dropped into an armchair and closed his eyes, but not for long – too many images, too many questions. “She’s gone and there’s nothing you can do to change that,” he told himself sharply. He knew his words were true, just as he knew they would have no effect. When Rebecca died, it was as if he’d died too and been plunged into hell.
An insistent knocking started at the front door. Jack knew it had to be Laura. No one else knocked on his door like that. He wearily rose to his feet. Ignoring her wasn’t an option this time. Laura wasn’t the type to give up easily. Besides, it occurred to him with a little tightening of his chest that she might have something to tell him about Naomi.
“About bloody time,” Laura said as he opened the door. She was wearing her pale blue nurse’s uniform and holding a full carrier bag in each hand. Her hair – mousey brown like Jack’s – was tied back in a ponytail. She had the same hazel eyes as him too. But unlike his, her eyes were clear and keen. They examined him as if he was a patient – firmly but with care. “God, Jack, look at the state of you.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she continued, “Before you ask, Naomi’s fine. I dropped her off at school on my way over here.”
“Did she mention Rebecca at all last night?”
“Once or twice. She had a little cry, but I put a movie on and she settled down.”
Jack gave his head a shake of self-recrimination. “I’m sorry, Laura, I should have come over.”
“From the looks of you, you wouldn’t have been much use if you had done.”
Jack acknowledged the truth of Laura’s words with a sigh and repeated, “I’m sorry.”
“Listen, it was the first anniversary of Rebecca’s death. I understand that you needed to be alone.”
“But does Naomi understand?”
Jack waited for Laura to say, Yes. Instead, agonisingly, she avoided his gaze. She manoeuvred past him into the hallway, sniffing the air. “This place smells worse than the geriatrics ward,” she joked grimly, putting the carrier-bags down in the kitchen. She pointed at Jack. “Upstairs now. Shower, shave, put some clean clothes on if you’ve got any. I’ll make breakfast.”
“There’s no food in.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I brought some with me.”
There was no point arguing with Laura when she was in this mood. Jack went upstairs. He stood under the shower, trying to feel the hot water and nothing else. Then he shaved at the sink. The face that emerged from under the heavy stubble was thinner than it had been a year ago, more lined. The eyes stared back at him from hollows of grief. He dug jeans and a t-shirt out of a suitcase. Mixed in amongst his clothes was one of Rebecca’s blouses. He pressed it to his face and inhaled. He could still smell her on it, but the scent was fading.
“Breakfast’s ready,” Laura called to him.
The sizzle of frying bacon greeted Jack as he descended to the kitchen. The windows were wide open. Laura surveyed her brother approvingly. “There you go. You almost look like a member of the human race.”
Laura had set the table. She served up two fried breakfasts, which they ate in silence. Laura leaned back in her chair, looking steadily her brother. Now it was his turn to avoid her eyes.
“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” she began. There was no firmness in her voice, only compassion. “I love having Naomi. She’s welcome to stay with me for as long as necessary. But it’s not me that she really needs. She needs her dad.”
Jack lifted his guilt-wracked gaze to Laura’s. “Don’t you think I know that? She’s the most important thing in my life. I want to be there for her more than anything. I just... I can’t stand the thought of her seeing me like this.”
“So sort yourself out.”
“I wish I could, Laura, but I don’t even know where to start.”
“Start by doing something to bring you out of yourself. Go back to work.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Well you can’t keep on like this, Jack. You seem hell-bent on slowly killing yourself, but you don’t have that luxury.” Laura reached to rest her hand on Jack’s. “You have to be strong for Naomi.”
He almost scoffed at the platitude, but caught himself. “Look at me. How am I supposed to be strong?”
“I don’t know, but you won’t find the answer in a bottle of vodka.” Laura glanced at her watch. “I’ve got to go. I’m due on the ward in twenty minutes.” She gave Jack’s hand a squeeze and pushed her chair back.
“Leave them,” he said as she cleared the table. “I’ll do it.”
At the front door, Jack kissed Laura on the cheek. “Thanks for breakfast, sis. Tell Naomi I love her.”
“Phone and tell her yourself. Or better yet, come round and see her.”
The crow’s feet at the corners of Jack’s eyes deepened. “I will.”
“You’d better,” Laura said in a mock-threatening tone.
Jack watched his sister get into her car and waved as she accelerated away. He returned to the kitchen and picked up the breakfast plates. He thought about Naomi’s blue eyes, black hair and china skin. It was impossible to look at her without seeing Rebecca. He’d promised himself time and again that he would hold it together for his daughter, but every time he saw her he fell apart. He dropped the plates into the sink and moved through to the living-room. He drew the curtains and slumped into the armchair. Rebecca. He closed his eyes. What happened, Rebecca? What happened?
Chapter 4
Jack stood outside Laura’s little terraced house for a long time, working up the nerve to knock on the front door. All he could see in his mind’s eye were the cliffs and the sea. All he could hear was the whoosh of waves and the whump-whump of rotor-blades. His hand clenched into a fist, but instead of knocking he thudded it into his thigh. What was the matter with him? He hadn’t lied to Laura. Nothing meant more to him than Naomi. So why was he standing out here instead of showing her how much he loved her? He already knew the answer. It wasn’t simply that she reminded him of Rebecca. That was part of it, for sure, but there was something else. The way she looked at him with such need, hope and vulnerability. It terrified him because he knew he was going to fail her the same way he’d failed to save Rebecca.
He turned suddenly and walked away from the door. “You’re a fucking coward,” he told himself.
As he trudged along, Jack tossed vodka down his throat. His face glistened with the drizzle that had been falling for the past hour or so. The fine droplets were thickening into heavy rain. He glanced upwards as thunder rumbled across the starless night sky. On the other side of the road were tall wrought-iron gates set between stone posts. Beyond the gates a tree-lined avenue led through ranks of graves.
Jack had spent a lot of time in graveyards since Rebecca’s death. He’d visited her memorial plaque at Hastings Crematorium a few times, but he felt no connection to her there. Rebecca wasn’t in the urn behind the plaque. She was somewhere at the bottom of the Channel. Besides, the Crematorium was always busy. He preferred the solace of old cemeteries. He felt more comfortable with the dead than the living. They didn’t judge or expect anything of you.
He staggered across the road and rattled the gates. Padlocked. He put the bottle through the bars and scaled the gates. His t-shirt caught on a fleur de lis spike. He pulled it free with a tearing sound and lowered himself to the path.
As Jack wandered deeper into the cemetery, the sounds of the city receded and silence stole over him. He looked almost jealously at the graves. For their occupants the suffering was over. No more memories. No more questions. No more pain.
Most of the graves were marked by standard headstones. Interspersed amongst them were clusters of elaborate memorials – tall pedestals with winged angels atop them, miniaturised classical temples, pointed obelisks.
The rain was weighing Jack down. He felt as if he could barely take another step. He veered off the path, dragging his feet along in search of somewhere to shelter. Neatly tended graves gave way to weed-choked plots occupied by cracked and fallen headstones. Light from a building that formed part of the cemetery wall faintly illuminated an altar tomb half-shrouded by ivy and enclosed by a low rusty fence. The altar tomb was carved into the likeness of a church ornamented with spires and arches. The church roof overhung the walls sufficiently to provide some shelter.
Jack stepped over the fence and squatted under the overhang. He put out a hand to balance himself. It passed straight through the ivy. He lifted the tangled veil aside, revealing a collapsed section of wall. He sparked his Zippo into life. The flame illuminated a patch of compacted earth long enough to lie out on. He crawled into the tomb’s hollow interior. It smelled of old stone and damp earth. Rain drummed against the arched roof, dripping through unseen cracks. He swallowed more vodka and closed his eyes. He imaged he was the grave’s occupant, buried six feet under, and that all he knew was darkness. He wished he could stay in that place where there was no past to torment him – not forever, but long enough for the pain to fade. He would gladly have given up a year or two of his life if only it allowed him to live again.
A drip hit his forehead. He wiped it away. A sliver of bright light at the rear of the tomb caught his eye. Had someone seen him climb the gates? Were they searching for him with a torch? He pressed his eyes to a flared horizontal crack. His breath stopped in his throat. The crack looked towards the nearby building – a big old house with tall windows. A light had come on in a first floor window. The curtains were open and the sash-window was drawn up as if to let in the sounds of the storm.
A woman was sitting in the window. A red blouse hung off one of her slender shoulders. She was brushing long black hair that framed a china-white, strikingly beautiful face. Jack watched the motion of the hairbrush as if mesmerised. His gaze glassily traced the lines of her neck, jaw, lips, nose, cheeks and eyes. She was about fifteen metres away. He couldn’t tell the colour of her eyes from that distance, but in his mind they were startlingly blue. It was as if he was looking through a window into heaven.
“Rebecca,” he murmured. “Rebecca.”
His heart plummeted as the woman rose and moved away from the window. “No,” he whispered. “Come back.”
A light came on in a larger neighbouring window. Jack exhaled as the woman reappeared. She stood at the window, staring into the rain. Her blouse’s plunging neckline revealed a swell of cleavage. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rebecca would have worn, but that didn’t matter. Everything else was as it should be – the hair, the skin, the facial features, the build. She even looked about the same age as Rebecca had been. Jack ached to reach out and touch the woman, pull her into his arms and crush her to him.
She glanced over her shoulder as if at a sound. A low moan rose in Jack’s throat as she moved away from the window. Long minutes passed with no sight of her. The light went off in the larger window. Seconds later, she approached the other window and closed the curtains. The light went off behind them too.
Jack continued to stare through the crack until it became obvious that he wasn’t going to catch another glimpse of her. He collapsed face first to the earth, trembling all over. Behind his eyelids he saw Rebecca, only now she was wearing a red blouse. Tears filled his eyes as he asked her, “What happened?”
If you don’t know, I can’t tell you, she replied in her soft Sussex accent.