Try Not to Breathe: A Novel Read online

  “Okay, I think I’ve heard of that, we watched something on Five a few months ago,” said Matt.

  We? Who are we? Not her right to ask. Not her right anymore. Her chest hurt. Alex wished she was on the wireless handset and could run downstairs and gulp down a second, third and fourth drink.

  “Ooh, we, eh?” she tried to be breezy as tears fell fat and hot onto her lap.

  Matt laughed politely, more of a snort than a laugh. An acknowledgment.

  “Well, while I was in the ward I saw a girl I recognized. It was Amy Stevenson. Do you remember her from the news? The girl who was kidnapped and attacked and then they found her half-dead a few days later? She lived near me but it would have been on the national news too. Back when we were teenagers.”

  “It rings a bell…but what has this got to do with me?” In the background she heard a door slam as Matt sighed.

  Alex imagined her mother, hand on hip, eyes rolling. “Oh this is a sad sight,” she’d say, shaking her head. “You must learn when to walk away with your head held high.”

  Alex had weaned herself off Matt once before, cutting off all contact for both their sakes. Now she was putting the gun in her own mouth and pressing his finger on the trigger. But there was no one else to ask. She’d burned all her bridges with his police friends. She tried to tell herself that was why she was calling him.

  “Well, it’s an interesting one. Her attacker has never been caught, the stepdad was taken in and released, the mum died soon after…This girl has just been stuck in this state for fifteen years, while everyone else has moved on around her. I know it would make a great story, and I know that cold cases are notoriously hard to solve, not that I’m trying to crack the case, but I wanted to see what I could do, see if I could find any new angles to write about.” Alex drew a long breath.

  “But where do I fit in?” Matt asked, a slight disquiet to his voice.

  “Well, I’ve got some newspaper clippings from the time but it would be really good to know things from a police perspective. The lead detective on the case has left the force and I can’t find her anywhere. I wondered if you could look up the case for me, see if there’s any information that might be useful? Any suspects they didn’t track down or—”

  “Christ, Alex! You’re asking me to pass you confidential documents. I’m a detective! I’d get myself sacked, or worse. What the hell?”

  “Sorry, Matt. I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward spot, I don’t expect you to pass me documents or anything.”

  “Well, what are you actually asking?” Alex didn’t know. She’d sorely misjudged Matt’s likeliness to help her. After everything she’d put him through, she’d still hoped that he’d open himself up like this, just because she asked. She cradled the embarrassment in her belly. Because she still thought of him daily, still dreamed of them together (when she dreamed). She’d imagined a mutual connection that was entirely one-sided.

  “Just take a look with your detective’s hat on. Have a look at the case. It was a long time ago, policing has moved on, so has technology. You might see something that seems iffy.”

  Matt made a sort of “hmn” noise.

  “Just have a look, see if you think it’s worth exploring, tell me what you can—if anything—and I’ll let you know anything I find out, before it goes anywhere near an editor. And I won’t mention your name to anyone.”

  “Oh God, Alex, look, it doesn’t really work like that. I can’t look up police records and then pass them to a journalist.”

  A journalist. She was just “a journalist.” Of course he couldn’t pass information to a journalist. Foolishly, she’d allowed herself to imagine a gradual working relationship emerging. As she’d passed out the night before, she’d even allowed herself to imagine some kind of reconciliation. Memories of her nocturnal naivety made her cringe deeply. After everything she’d done, as if he’d come back.

  “Okay, I’m sorry, I got this wrong. I fucked up, I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. Look…You don’t need to tell me anything that isn’t already out there. I’m not a proper reporter, Matt, you know I’ve not done this stuff before. There must be a lot of information, clues even, just out there in the public domain, but I don’t fully know what I’m looking for. Perhaps you could just take a look at the details I’ve found, and let me know what jumps out at you?”

  A pause. “Maybe.”

  “Do you have a pen, Matt?”

  Matt always had a pen. Well, he had always had a pen. A Montblanc she’d bought him as a wedding gift.

  “Her name is Amy Jeanette Stevenson. Date of birth, 28th of February 1980. She lived on Warlingham Road in Edenbridge, Kent. She went missing on the 18th of July in 1995. Her mum was Joanne Stevenson. Father was unknown, stepdad was Robert Stevenson. He was fingered for it the day she was found but police released him. No one else was pulled in, according to the press, but I’m guessing they actually grabbed every pedo in a thirty-mile radius.”

  “And the rest,” Matt murmured, audibly scribbling on some paper.

  Alex’s stomach fluttered. As artificial as the situation really was, it felt good to be focusing, digging around. It felt good to be talking to Matt.

  “Okay, Alex, I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Look…you know I said ‘we’ earlier?”

  It was a clumsy segue. Alex didn’t want to have this conversation.

  “It’s fine, you don’t need to tell me anything.”

  “I know I don’t, but I’d rather it came from me, I wouldn’t want you finding out from someone else.”

  “I never see any of your friends or family, I don’t see anyone. Don’t worry.”

  He ignored her protestations and blurted out his news.

  “I’m getting married, Alex. I’m getting married and I’m having a baby.”

  “With the same woman?” Alex countered, while her heart shattered and her throat furred.

  More awkward laughter.

  “I’m really pleased for you. Congratulations. What’s her name?” She really, really didn’t want to know.

  “Her name’s Jane, she’s a police officer at my station, so—” Matt stopped.

  So she understands.

  “So she understands the hours, then?” Alex helped him out.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “And when’s the baby due?”

  “Next month. We’re having a girl.”

  “Matt, I’m so pleased for you, that’s lovely news. Congratulations to you both. So…do you have my number or is it easier to drop me an email if you find out anything about Amy?” Alex dragged her nails along the mattress, moving them up to her leg and digging them into her skin to stay focused. She had to hold it together.

  “I’ve still got your mobile number,” he continued, oblivious. “And your email address, if it hasn’t changed?”

  “I’ve never got round to changing it, even though it is a bit cringey.”

  “Oh it’s fine, it’s who you are—Alex Dale Writes.”

  “At Gmail dot com.”

  “At Gmail dot com. Anyway, I’ll be in touch. It was good to hear from you, Alex.”

  “Thanks, Matt.”

  “Alex?”

  “Yes?”

  “What about the…about you, are you looking after yourself? I mean properly? Are you going to appointments?”

  “Matt, you don’t need to worry about me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  —

  Alex put the phone down primly. She lay on the bed, grasped the bare duvet in her fingers and pulled it up over her legs, her belly, her chest, her face. A baby. He was having a baby. With his new wife. A healthy baby and a nice normal wife. Everything he ever wanted and always denied needing.

  Twisting the unsheathed duvet around herself until she was completely swaddled, womb-like. Crying, bucking her body, swallowing tears. Howling, Alex contorted and writhed, trying to twist herself away from the pain until she was spent.

  Exhausted and nauseous, she
threw the duvet from her face and dragged herself from the scratchy mattress like it was cartoon quicksand. She was determined not to think about Matt and his new wife and their new baby. Determined but damned.

  The shadows were so long, she didn’t know what time it was, or how long she had been lying there.

  Alex paced into the bathroom. She peed, washed her face with expensive cleansing wash that made her gray skin squeak and then cantered quickly downstairs. Down to the glass and the bottle, and the bottle next to that. And a “fuck it” number of bottles after that too.

  Jacob had spent an hour in the ward and it hadn’t been enough. Time is not a good healer. Time is a blank page on which the left behind scribble their regrets and their confessions.

  This weekly trip to medical purgatory was taking its toll.

  Jacob had sat with Natasha Carroll as his final patient. He had held her expensive porcelain hand in his and felt his eyes grow watery and heavy. She had kept her peaceful expression, a sacred statue with its face up to someone’s god.

  Natasha Carroll was in a better place. Not philosophically, or religiously, but mentally. Her thoughts were elsewhere, a summer’s dream, set somewhere far more cheerful than this clinical tomb.

  Jacob, on the other hand, was very much stuck here. After saying goodbye to Natasha and waving to the nurses, he had stumbled out of the hospital and into the bright sunlight. He was not sated but utterly spent by his time with Amy.

  Jacob caught sight of his wrung-out reflection in the window. His sandy hair was speckled with a new gray, the skin around his squinting eyes shriveled like burnt plastic. Guilt was rotting him from the inside out.

  He’d staggered just a few feet and then sat down heavily on the gravelly, uneven floor outside the old hospital block, which loomed over him like a prison tower.

  Cross-legged and perfectly still, shoulders slumped, Jacob felt his lower back brush the cool of the crumbling brickwork building. His spine felt anchored. So rooted that if an ambulance suddenly veered toward him, he’d be incapable of moving out of its path.

  The morning before the hospital visit had been tough. Fiona was allowed half days off work for midwife appointments, and she’d wanted Jacob to take her for brunch after they went for the checkup. The checkup would finish around 10:45 a.m. and the surgery was at least ten minutes by car from the hospital, not including parking time. If he’d had brunch with Fiona, he’d not have had any time left to visit. It was that simple. Fiona or Amy.

  He had decided that he would avoid the hospital this week. He would avoid Amy. He told Fiona that, yes, it would be lovely to go for brunch together before they both returned to work.

  But in the midwife’s room at the surgery he had watched Fiona’s tummy shiver as the cold gel was dolloped onto the bump; he had held his breath in the half second before the Fetal Doppler whooped into life; he had felt his eyes prickle at the runaway heartbeat of his unborn baby.

  With a room filled with the very sound of life and potential, he had thought of Amy.

  He had thought of Amy’s heartbeat, weak and whispering. He thought of her years ago when her broken body was threaded with wires and drips and sustained by great hunks of machinery. Back then her heartbeat was barely audible, the needle that recorded it skittered so sporadically up and down the lined paper that every pause seemed like an end.

  Right now, Jacob’s unborn baby was gearing up for life, armed with this thundering heart, determined little fists and unspoilt mind. Meanwhile Amy lay trapped, souring like milk on a windowsill.

  Jacob’s phone trilled, scattering his thoughts away. Fiona. Jacob shook his head, slapped his face a couple of times and answered.

  “Hi, sweetheart, what’s up?”

  As he spoke, the liquid-gold sunshine prickled all over his bare arms.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, I was just a bit worried.”

  He cleared his throat. “You’re not bothering me, Fi. Why are you worried?”

  “You just seemed so choked up at the surgery this morning, and then when you rushed off you were so funny with me. I’m not accusing you or having a go, I honestly don’t mind about brunch but you were off. It was like you needed to be away from us as quickly as possible.”

  Jacob swallowed hard. None of this was Fiona’s fault but at least she was an adult, what kind of man was he to run away from his tiny son or daughter?

  “Fiona, I’m so sorry. You’re right…” He slowed down. He had to remember to pick his words carefully.

  “It really got me this morning,” he continued, slowly, “it was the heartbeat, it was so strong. I was so amazed and so scared at the same time. I don’t know why. The closer it gets to the due date, the more I worry that I’m going to let you both down.”

  Gray clouds swooped out of nowhere and rushed the sun away, like minders. Shadows raced across the hospital yard and Jacob heard Fiona’s voice. “Jacob…J, don’t cry, it’s okay, don’t cry.” Before he realized it, he was gargling on huge, salty sobs and wiping his gritty eyes with his free hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” he heard himself burbling. “I’m so sorry.”

  —

  Jacob had a scheduled face-to-face in half an hour’s time at a client’s office, near the Sussex border. As he made his way into the hospital car park, coughing away the last of the sobs and wiping his eyes with the flesh of his thumb, he called Marc, his colleague—his junior—and asked him to call the client to postpone.

  “Thanks for doing this, mate. I owe you,” Jacob told him. Marc didn’t ask what was wrong—of course—but Jacob knew he’d assume it was something to do with Fiona and the baby and Jacob didn’t put him straight. Another guilty notch on the cot bed.

  He called Fiona again as he was about to start the engine. He told her to blow work off that afternoon—that he was coming home. She sounded so genuinely concerned that Jacob started sobbing again, head on the steering wheel, and had to wait another five minutes before turning the key.

  —

  Jacob turned slowly into their road, his black company Audi purring its low whirr. He could see that Fiona’s car—their car—was already in the driveway. A big black shining example of another expense they didn’t really need and couldn’t afford. A seven-seater Volvo XC90, bought on hire purchase the day after their twelve-week pregnancy scan.

  They were only having one baby, he’d protested; they were future proofing, she argued. And before he knew it, he was signing the hire purchase agreement while she stroked her barely-there belly and smiled adoringly at the huge car.

  His job in field sales for a specialist software company was well paid, but not as well paid as their spending would suggest.

  When Jacob and Fiona bought the house, before the baby was a twinkle in its mother’s eye, they just took care of respective bills. He earned more, so he paid a few more. A few months after that, imbibed with two-for-£10 white wine, Fiona had caused an almighty row, bemoaning the unromantic financial arrangements.

  The marriage and the mortgage were not, Fiona had declared, worth squat. The real mark of a lifelong commitment was a joint account. Jacob had argued that this would obliterate the romance of secrecy. That he couldn’t buy her a present without it coming off their shared balance, printed clearly on a shared bank statement.

  “When was the last time you bought me a present?” she’d yelled. “You just don’t want me to see your bank statements!” and with an adolescent flounce, she’d run upstairs, thrown herself on their bed and howled dramatically.

  At the time, Jacob was terrified. Who was this woman in their house? The Fiona he’d first met was so cool and in control, and would have rolled her eyes at anything resembling a tantrum. If she ever cried, she cried in secret, in the bath. Only her eyes would give her away and it took him a long time to learn that. Was that other woman, the Fiona he had fallen in love with, just a siren, drawing him onto the rocks?

  After a while, the tantrum had died down and he had heard Fiona moving frantically around thei
r bedroom. He heard drawers open and close, heard the wardrobe sliding open. It took a few minutes to realize that she was going through his things: she was looking for a bank statement.

  Jacob had been mystified. He regularly gave her his bank card to get cash with, or pick something up for him, she could have easily checked the balance or got a mini-statement, so why would he hide his bank statements?

  After pouring himself a large whiskey from the expensive Christmas bottle his father, Graham, had given him, Jacob had thrown it to the back of his mouth and trudged wearily up the stairs. He wasn’t a whiskey man and the spirit had burst across his forehead and fogged his thoughts.

  He had seen Fiona on the floor on her knees in their bedroom, surrounded by bits of paper, old receipts and bills.

  “Where the fuck are your bank statements?” she’d demanded, with eyes so fierce he’d had to look away.

  “Fiona, look…” he’d begun, trying to shake the whiskey mist.

  “Don’t say anything! Don’t tell me anything other than where your fucking bank statements are!” Her eyes had burned red and her face was so wet with tears that her shining auburn hair had stuck to it.

  He had walked out of their newly decorated bedroom and into their smaller spare room, which had been appropriated as a makeshift office. Slowly, so that he didn’t make any mistakes, he wrote down a web address, username, password and PIN.

  He walked back into the bedroom, placed the piece of paper next to Fiona’s foot and said carefully, “I haven’t been sent paper statements for years ’cos I get them online. Here are my Internet banking details so you can see my statements for the last few years and can check my account anytime. If that’s what you need to do, then that’s what you need to do.”

  Jacob had hoped this would snap Fiona out of it. Put a stop to it and have her realize how sad an end to their honeymoon period this would represent.