Still Bleeding Read online

  So a part of me felt bad for this selfish behaviour of mine. However, a larger part was far more apathetic. My wife had died. Could people please leave me the fuck alone?

  'And you're my friend too,' Sarah said. 'So talk to me.'

  'I don't know what to say.'

  'Tell me what you're thinking.'

  I shrugged. Most of the time, I didn't dare think anything. Because, when I did, it felt dangerous. I'd picture myself standing in the middle of the street and screaming so loud that it levelled the place. The sound I'd make would strip leaves from the trees. It would pulverise houses and scatter brick dust and glass for miles. Shatter streetlights and knock birds from the sky. And none of it would achieve anything because, at the end, when I closed my mouth, I'd still be there.

  I said, 'I miss her.'

  And then looked down at the bench and got a grip on my tears. How flimsy I was: just saying it out loud had been enough to puncture my resolve. I was disgusted with myself. Back then, I didn't even know about the insurance policy, but the feeling of guilt was already overwhelming. How could I have let her down so badly? How could I not have known?

  Sarah reached out and rested her hand gently on mine.

  'Me too,' she said.

  'I miss her so much.'

  'But you've got to hold on to the good memories, Alex. That's where Marie is now, and you need to try to remember her smiling. I know it seems impossible at the moment, but you've got to believe that it won't do for ever…'

  She looked at me, then sighed.

  'Let's get out of here, OK?' she said. 'Go somewhere else.'

  'I don't want to see anybody.'

  'You don't have to. We'll just go together. You and me. I'll leave the car somewhere, and we'll disappear off, get pissed out of our minds. Talk about whatever. And if you don't want to, then I'll talk at you and you can pretend to listen.'

  I almost smiled.

  'But I'm not leaving you on your own, Alex.'

  That was for certain. I knew her too well to think I'd be able to shake her off now. To Sarah, tragedy and loss were contagious, and she wasn't about to lose me too.

  I nodded. 'All right. Thank you.'

  'It's nothing,' she said. 'We're always there for each other, aren't we? Always have been. Always will be.'

  'Yes.'

  'And if it was the other way round,' she said, 'you'd be there for me too.'

  I didn't know exactly what I'd been planning on doing that day, but I think it's very possible that Sarah saved me. Not in a dramatic way, but in the ordinary and everyday sense - by just finding me when I was stumbling, then hooking an arm round, determined not to let me fall. And she kept doing that. She had a knack for reading between my lines and knowing when I needed her, and, on those occasions, she'd come over and be there for me.

  Looking back, it reminds me of when someone is seriously injured, and a friend sits with them, determined to keep them awake until help arrives. Come on, they say; stay with me. If I let you slip away now, you might never come back.

  But in the end, that's what happened. As hard as she tried, she couldn't save me for ever.

  The last time I saw Sarah was six months after the funeral, just after I'd learned about the insurance policy Marie had taken out. It was the middle of the night, and I turned up at her house drunk out of my mind, and wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, even though it was pouring down with torrential rain. At that moment, I simply had no idea where else to go.

  Only a few weeks after that, I was sitting in a hotel room, writing her a letter. I was trying to explain. I told her that she'd been right all along: that death has to be faced down, or else it spreads and destroys your life. I told her I couldn't bear what my life had now become, and that I had to get away from it: to try to find a new Alex Connor. I told her I was sorry and that I hoped she could forgive me.

  Then, in the morning, I left for the airport.

  You could sum up those six months with a single image: my friend's fingertips brushing against mine as I stubbornly refused to take her hand. As we fell slowly, sadly apart, until I wasn't touching her any more. Until I wasn't touching anything.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  The guy at reception shrugged when I asked him about the TV volume. It was remote control only, he said, and he didn't know where it had disappeared to.

  'Somebody has perhaps…'

  He made a throwing gesture, and I made a mental note to be less forgiving in future of the young, care-free spirits in the lounge.

  I headed out to the railway station round the corner. It was full of frustrated international travellers: guys with shades balanced on their heads talking into mobiles, and girls sitting on luggage, knees together, looking forlorn. There was a magazine stand at the far side of the station, and I bought an English newspaper, took it back outside and sat down at the top of the steps.

  My hand was shaking as I flicked through the pages, one by one. I was searching for any coverage of what might have happened. Already, I was doubting what I'd just seen on the television. Only a few minutes had passed, but that was long enough for it to have become surreal.

  It couldn't possibly be…

  But on the fifth page, there it was

  MAN CHARGED: POLICE APPEAL FOR HELP

  IN HUNT FOR WOMAN'S BODY

  by Barry Jenkins

  The boyfriend of a woman he confessed to killing appeared in court yesterday and was charged with her murder.

  James Connor, 32, was remanded in custody. He is accused of killing Sarah Pepper, 30, his partner, who was living with him in Whitrow at the time of her death.

  Outside Whitrow Crown Court, police continued to ask for help in locating Ms Pepper's body.

  Det. Geoff Hunter, who is leading the murder inquiry, appealed for farmers and ramblers to report anything unusual they saw in fields and woodland.

  He said: 'This is obviously a very distressing period for Sarah's friends and family, and we need the public's help in locating her remains as quickly as possible.'

  Officers have conducted extensive searches of the Whitrow countryside since Mr Connor approached the police on the morning of 2 June. The unemployed man claimed the couple had argued over his drinking and Ms Pepper was planning to leave him. He confessed to killing her at their home on 1 June, but was unable to remember where he had hidden her remains.

  A local taxi driver confirmed he had been booked to collect Ms Pepper from the couple's home address, but upon arrival was told by her boyfriend she had already left.

  Ms Pepper's body is thought to have been left in woodland, and may be partially concealed under leaves and branches.

  Det. Hunter said: 'We would ask the public to be on the lookout for a wooden gate set in a drystone wall. Our information leads us to believe there may be two empty vodka bottles nearby.'

  Mr Connor appeared in court accompanied by a police guard. He gave his name, date of birth and confirmed his address. There was no application for bail.

  I looked up. The top of the steps was shaded by the station building, and a slight breeze rustled the pages of the newspaper. Below, an expanse of bright, sunlit stone spread out, dotted with people. As I watched them all, my heartbeat was visible in front of me: a red pulse appearing like silk at the edges of my vision.

  Living with him, I thought.

  The newspaper had yesterday's date, so this report was from the day before, when Sarah had still been missing. According to the television back at the hostel, she had just been found. That wouldn't appear here in the papers until the day after tomorrow.

  Her body had just been found, I reminded myself.

  Not Sarah. Sarah was gone.

  I wasn't sure what I was feeling. It wasn't grief exactly. There was the same initial sense of disbelief - the same slap that knocks you off-kilter - but it still didn't seem real and I couldn't fit the facts into my head. Sarah was dead and my brother had killed her.

  Ridiculous. Couldn't be happening.


  But then, I thought about it some more. One of the earliest memories I have is of my brother. In it, James is red-faced and screaming, the cords in his neck standing out as he throws a cushion at our mother.

  Put like that, it doesn't sound so bad. It was only a cushion, after all. But she was a small woman, and the frightening part was that it wouldn't have mattered what he'd been holding at the time. The cushion had just been the nearest thing to hand. If he'd been able to reach a knife, he would have thrown that instead.

  I was three or four years old at the time. I remember pushing the heels of my palms into my eyes and screaming, trying to make it all go away. My mother said something, James shouted back, and then a door slammed. Then I felt my mother's arm around me, holding me close. Afterwards, she was upstairs in James's room, talking softly. I could hear him crying, and perhaps she was too.

  That had always been my brother's way, and he'd kept it up well into adulthood. He got angry, lost control and struck out at the world. Acted without thought, and then said sorry afterwards.

  So I tried to imagine it: James squatting down beside Sarah's body, knocking back vodka to numb the panic and remorse from what he'd done. At first, he would probably have been blaming her. Then he would have begun to panic as he drank more and more, and the realisation hit that he'd gone too far to say sorry this time. Making some stupid attempt to hide what he'd done, then waking up the next morning and knowing there was no way to carry it off.

  Horribly, it wasn't so hard to do.

  Five days.

  I felt that inside me. Sarah had been missing for that long: the days flicking on and off as she lay there, discarded and forgotten. I'd gone about my business without the slightest inkling that anything had happened to her. And back at the hostel, I'd been watching real-time coverage of the scene. Breaking news. Which meant that, hundreds of miles away, my friend's body was lying beneath the white tent I'd seen on the screen right now.

  At least I'd seen it. My plan after Venice had been to head South towards Rimini, with a possible eye to catching a ferry. If I'd missed the report today, it might have dropped from the schedule by the next time I caught any international-news, and I would never have known.

  And that would have been better.

  The thought came from nowhere.

  For a moment, I didn't do anything. I could hear the gulls reeling overhead, and the trick of wheeled cases pulled along by travellers. Ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. The warm air smelled of the sea.

  It wasn't an actual voice in my head, more of a feeling inside me, roughly associated with the small curl of panic that had appeared close to my heart. But if it was a voice, it would have had the no-nonsense edge of someone being practical about something that might look unpalatable but was, actually, very important to get right. The kind of voice that said: let me take charge of this delicate matter. You go put your feet up. When you get back I'll have done what needs doing and you won't need to think about it again.

  These people are not part of your life anymore.

  And no. They weren't.

  In the letter I sent to Sarah before I left, I wrote: At the moment, I'm not sure where I'm going. All I know is that I have to get away. It had been true. But in the time since, I'd slowly lost touch with my old life entirely. The visits to Internet cafes had fallen by the wayside. If there was any guilt attached, I'd shrugged that away too. I hadn't thought about Sarah for weeks, if not longer. Losing touch and cutting yourself off can look remarkably similar, assuming they take place so gradually that you never have to look too carefully.

  You don't want to remember how bad it was.

  The panic throbbed gently inside. On one level, I knew it was justified. Because it was easy, with two years' distance, to forget how hard something had been. The weeks before I left had been so difficult I found it hard to remember them now, but I knew that leaving had stopped them from destroying me, and travelling ever since had kept me one step ahead. If I had cut off my old life, I'd been doing it to save myself.

  But it also struck me now that leaving had never properly worked. Could I carry on like this for ever? Everywhere I went, I felt nothing but emptiness, waiting to be filled; every few days, I still found myself packing up and moving on. It was as though staying in one place for any length of time provided me with an address there, and then mail I'd left behind began to be forwarded on. However painful it had been, I hadn't escaped those feelings. They'd trailed after me.

  Maybe it was everything else that I'd lost.

  I opened the newspaper again. Beside the article, there was the same photograph they'd used on the television, only this time in black and white. Sarah looked so unguarded in it, caught almost by surprise. The tilt of her head, her smile: they were instantly familiar, just as I would have pictured her.

  And I recognised where it had come from now.

  It was from when we'd all gone away to the Lakes years ago: six of us crammed into a camper-van we rented for the week. Me and Marie. Julie and Mike. And Sarah had been with some randomer called Damian at the time. We'd arrived at Coniston on the first day, and that was where this photo had been taken. It was my wife who was holding the camera. The shoulder that Sarah was leaning back against, in that checked shirt, would be mine.

  The memory brought a wave of guilt. How could I have forgotten this? Even Marie - I remembered her holding my hand back then as we walked slightly behind the others. Her grip had felt tentative, but it had been there, and it had been determined in its own way: a small expression of hope. At that moment in time, whatever happened afterwards, I'd made her happy.

  I sat there for a while, staring blankly at the photograph, carefully prodding at the memory and checking for any signs of pain. There weren't any. The only thing that came was a terrible sense of sadness, not just for the things that had been taken from me, but for all the things I'd given away afterwards. All the things I realised now that I missed so badly.

  Sarah…

  And most of all, I remembered how hard she'd fought to help me in the months after Marie's death. She'd always come searching, determined not to let me slip away as well. And yet, when she'd needed me in turn, I'd been deliberately looking the other way.

  We're always there for each other.

  I closed my eyes.

  If it was the other way round, you'd be there for me too.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Rebecca Wingate was standing right there in front of him.

  She was wearing the black trouser suit he recognised from the photograph, and it stood out, clear and sharp, against the swirl of mist around them both. One strand of her hair was loose, hanging down beside her ear like a ribbon. He watched her stare anxiously to the left and right, as though she couldn't quite remember what had happened for the last few hours and didn't know where she was.

  Kearney took a step forwards.

  He'd found her.

  'Rebecca,' he said. 'It's OK now.'

  She turned at the sound of his voice. That was when the man emerged from the mist behind her. He was emaciated and his skin was jaundiced and hazy with fuzz, like the forearms of an anorexic. But he moved quickly, wrapping his arm around Rebecca Wingate's neck from behind and yanking her backwards. She screamed.

  Kearney started running towards them. But the man was impossibly strong. Rebecca was disappearing into the mist, with one hand reaching out for him. He gritted his teeth and concentrated on that hand. When he reached the place it had been, everything around him was simply grey, and all he could hear was screaming, so far in the distance it might just have been an echo in his head.

  And then he was half out of bed, one of his feet stamping uselessly against the rough carpet, like he was trying to kick- start a motorcycle.

  Jesus Christ.

  His heart was bouncing.

  Just a dream. Deep—

  But his breath caught as he saw the yellow man was crouched at the end of the bed, the knuckles of his spine sta
nding out, like some bony creature hunkered down at the edge of a pool. A split-second later, the yellow man resolved himself into the outline of a washing basket, full of old clothes.

  Kearney stared at it. He was a grown man and he was trembling. It took a few more seconds before he managed a quiet, humourless laugh at his own expense. The details of the nightmare were already fading, the way they always did, leaving behind only the knowledge they had been awful.

  He rubbed his face. Damp with sweat.

  A wedge of pale blue morning light was cutting in through a gap in the curtains. Around him, the pipes in the walls had already begun their early morning creaking and clicking. The alarm clock at the side of the bed was silent, the red numbers bright in the gloom. It was nearly half-past five. That was too late to bother with any more sleep, assuming he could even have managed it, but he was still shaking a little, and so he simply sat there.

  On the other side of the bedroom, his computer monitor - old, grey and lifeless for the moment - was balanced on a cheap plywood desk. The bookcase beside it was full of his files, printouts and carefully written notes. He'd stayed up there working last night, bathed in the soft light of the screen, and then fallen into bed about two or three hours ago. As always, it was no wonder the bad dreams had been able to find him so easily. They only needed to follow him across the room.

  Never again.

  But he thought that every day, and it never worked. Every evening, he still found himself sat across there, trawling online for answers. And then, every morning, he woke up with the same sense of futility. This determination to stop. It was the way he imagined an alcoholic might feel after a long night alone in a bar.

  And in between, the nightmares. He had always suffered, but this year they'd become far worse: horrific, breathless, and endlessly inventive. Sometimes he dreamed there were ghosts crowding him, watching, their features as stern and frozen as the faces in sepia photographs. There were shadows that crawled in flickering stops and starts. And of course, there was the yellow man.