Try Not to Breathe: A Novel Page 6

It didn’t work.

  For the next three weeks Fiona had audited his every transaction, calling him over to the screen frequently so he could explain every pound and penny. They got a joint bank account after that.

  Financially at least, Jacob had nothing to hide.

  —

  Jacob didn’t know how long he had been sitting outside his home, staring at the back of the big Volvo and gripping his steering wheel with white knuckles. Eventually, he eased himself out of the car and trudged toward his house.

  He knew that Fiona was waiting inside. Jacob opened the front door and walked slowly into the hall. The Fiona on the phone earlier had sounded like his Fiona. Now, with her back to the door so her bump was invisible, she even looked like the old Fiona.

  Jacob stayed standing in the hallway. Fiona spun around a little unsteadily so that the bump swung into view.

  “Hey,” he called quietly, and as she walked to his open arms he saw that she had been crying.

  “Fi…” he started, pulling her into a hug.

  “Don’t,” she answered quietly, “just cuddle me.”

  They stayed locked in a tight hug for a long time, saying nothing.

  “You’re very quiet, Amy.”

  “I feel really bad.”

  “You don’t need to feel bad, no one will blame you.”

  Amy closed her eyes and turned her head toward the passenger window. Her shoulders faced the door and the seatbelt cut into her chest. No hand on her knee, no murmuring in her ear. Tears began to form and she struggled to hold them in.

  “He shouldn’t have been there, why was he there?”

  No answer came.

  “I shouldn’t have done this. You won’t be able to help me now,” she started to sob again.

  “You’re overthinking this.”

  Sniffing, she scrunched her eyes as tight as she could. These could be her last few hours before the shit hit the fan and she wanted to sink into the darkness of them as much as she could. What would the others say when they heard? Everything was about to change. No one would keep her secrets for her.

  She should never have got into the car. She should never have gone there and she should never have had sex with him. So many things she shouldn’t have done in such a short space of time.

  Amy opened her eyes and saw the dull brick outskirts of Edenbridge falling away.

  “Where are we going? I need to get home.”

  “Somewhere nice, you’ll like it.”

  “I have to go home though—please, can you just turn the car around?”

  “That would spoil the surprise.”

  His voice was once the source of such dizzying excitement. That voice, her hanging up the phone with seconds to spare as Bob’s key clattered in the lock. Leaving her so flustered she had to skirmish to her room to hide.

  Now the voice just sounded mean and patronizing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to face him but unable to make eye contact. “I don’t want to spoil whatever the surprise is, but I really have to go home. You can just leave me here if you have to, I can walk.”

  “I can’t do that, Amy,” he said, and turned to flash her the briefest of smiles.

  Alex woke early, a surge of adrenaline forcing her to sit upright before she had a chance to slip back under. Her bed was dry for once and she checked her emails on the phone as she sat on the loo.

  As soon as she opened the inbox she saw Matt’s name. The email had been sent at 5:32 a.m., presumably after he returned home from a nightshift. Where was home, Alex wondered, realizing she knew so little about Matt’s life. His name in her inbox seemed so right, barely exciting…just…normal.

  From: Matthew Livingstone

  To: Alex Dale

  Subject: Amy

  Hey, Alex,

  Good to talk to you yesterday, forgot to ask what you’re up to, sorry about that.

  Like I said, I have to be careful, but here are some bits and pieces I found to get you started. Please keep this confidential, I’m trusting you with this.

  It seems like there were three main suspects:

  1. The stepdad, who you know about. Robert Stevenson, known as Bob, born 22-01-1962. You know as well as I do that it’s almost always someone who knows the victim. It’s more often birth dads than stepdads, depending on who you listen to, but the stepdad is always going to be in the frame unless he has a cast-iron alibi. They would have bugged him, followed him, gone through every job he’d had, spoken to ex-girlfriends, all sorts. Looks like he was squeaky clean, because they made a big thing of publicly clearing him later, but I suspect the damage was done and most people thought “no smoke without fire.”

  2. A neighbor in the road Amy lived in, John Rochester, known as Jack. Local nonce, Peeping Tom, long track record of low-level child abuse, taking pictures in parks, flashing, that kind of thing. He was eliminated as a suspect because he was physically too frail to have assaulted a healthy young girl. The Sex Offenders Register wasn’t around in 1995, but he’s on it now.

  3. Amy used to go to a church youth club. Obviously with that group we hauled everyone in that was involved: a reverend and quite a few volunteers from the church. It came to nothing but the investigations turned up some unspent convictions for one of the old boys and he was booted out. There wasn’t anything to tie him to Amy, plus he couldn’t drive and it’s unlikely Amy was abducted on foot or more people would have seen her.

  She had a boyfriend, but he was cleared early on. They’d not even slept together, all very innocent.

  Doesn’t look like there was anything to find along Amy’s walk home. No witnesses once she left her friends in the road outside the school and nothing in her room that offered any clues (although the photos will exist somewhere, but I really can’t look for them).

  There was a lot less CCTV back then, and no one reported a car acting suspiciously.

  Did you know they’d done a Crimewatch re-enactment? Might be one to look into.

  The mum, Joanne, killed herself a year or so after Amy was abducted.

  The stepdad left the area and changed his name. He’s now living in Devon and is known as Robert Bell. You CANNOT tell anyone where you got that from though, seriously. I doubt he’s particularly savvy—he changed his name himself, I didn’t get that from police records, I got it online—so you may turn up his info with a quick search too.

  Good luck. And please do look after yourself.

  Matt

  As hard as it was not to reply and say everything, Alex sent Matt a friendly but brief thank you and tried to put the source of the information out of her mind. She knew that he was laying himself on the line just by talking to her about this stuff. No doubt out of pity, which stung.

  The pedophile neighbor was almost certainly a red herring, the church guy just sounded unfortunate. And it wasn’t the stepdad.

  Alex had never been a roving reporter, never wanted to be. But there was something about this static victim that chewed away at her, something that sat just outside of her eye line at all times.

  She had wanted to find out what really happened out of journalistic curiosity. But now that Matt was involved in a whisper of a way, she wanted to nail it. To present him with proof that she still had something about her, besides the whiff of ethanol and ammonia.

  Alex carefully worded a letter to Robert Stevenson/Bell, asking him politely to put his side across and help her fill in some gaps for a sensitive feature on Amy. There was one Robert Bell with the right date of birth listed in Uffculme, Devon. With no phone number, no email address and none of the tools of the trade her crime reporting peers would employ, it seemed the only route to reach him.

  —

  Two days later, at 2:45 p.m., a man’s voice spoke carefully and quietly into Alex’s voicemail.

  “This is a message for Alex Dale. My name is Bob. You sent me a letter about my daughter, Amy. I might be willing to answer some questions but I’d like to talk to you first…I don’t use the name Stevenson anym
ore and I’d need to know that you wouldn’t publish my name now. I mean, the name I have now. Can you call me back, please, on 07781 257 539? Thank you.”

  Bob spoke in an oddly formal voice; it sounded rehearsed. Alex wondered how long it had been since he dealt with “the press.”

  “Hello?” Bob’s voice was gruffer and less practiced than on his voicemail message.

  “Hello, it’s Alex Dale here, returning your call.”

  “Thanks for calling me back.” A long pause. “I got your letter. I don’t wanna talk about any of this but I know what you journalists are like and I don’t want you turning up at my door.”

  Alex was taken aback. Writing her fluffy features and naval-gazing pieces, she tended to forget that to most people “journalist” meant “doorstepper.”

  “Thank you, but I would never do that. I hope you don’t think I’m trying to do anything disrespectful to Amy or your family.”

  Bob murmured something.

  Alex took a deep breath and trudged on. “Mr. Stevenson, I’d really like the chance to interview you.” She waited a second to gauge his reaction but silence was the stern reply. Alex realized she’d used his old name.

  “I would really like to sensitively portray what happened in your life after Amy was found and get a better understanding of Amy’s life in general.”

  No reply, but she could hear breathing, she knew he was still there.

  “I could transcribe our interview afterward and send it over for you to look at, to make sure you were happy that I’d written everything accurately? Give you what’s called ‘copy approval’?”

  The deeper the silence Bob held, the more Alex was giving up to him. She could never be a tabloid hack, she’d be eaten alive.

  “All right,” came the gruff voice, finally. “That sounds all right.”

  —

  They arranged to meet the following Monday, halfway between Tunbridge Wells and Uffculme, just off the A303. Didn’t want it hanging over him, he’d said. Bob didn’t want to be seen talking to a strange woman near his home in case his new wife saw but he hadn’t returned to Kent since Jo’s funeral, and wasn’t about to now.

  Alex sat in the arbitrarily chosen Little Chef roadside café, convinced she would be stood up.

  If she were Bob, would she turn up? Almost certainly not. She’d probably drive up and down the road outside, trying to peer in, or perhaps she’d sit in her car in the car park, heart jangling, hiding behind a magazine whenever the Little Chef door swung open. She wondered if that’s what Bob was doing now. He was already late.

  It was 10:20 a.m., and Alex could feel the dry rot settling in her throat and creeping to the back of her mouth. She had emailed Matt after putting the phone down on Bob. She had kept Matt up-to-date in a breezy, neutral email that had taken nearly three hours to write and rewrite. He hadn’t replied.

  While she waited, Alex repeatedly clicked the refresh symbol on her iPhone inbox, but the number of unread emails stayed the same. Zero.

  She felt out of place. She was out of place. Her trusted Moleskine notepad and Cross pen at perfect right angles on the table. With her iPhone positioned equally anally next to them, her Ted Baker dress and Chloe handbag she knew she stood out like a dismembered toe.

  The plastic coating on the chairs was peeling off, the table corners looked like they’d been chewed. Discarded nappies had been piled in the corner of the toilet cubicle that she’d used upon arrival.

  A doughy-faced young woman of around nineteen was walking around with a warm pot of thin coffee, refilling cups and glaring at people.

  Behind Alex sat a foursome of pensioners, all with thick middles, nylon T-shirts and red, raw hands.

  Three middle-aged men in badly-fitting suits sat alone at three different tables, all throwing back coffee, tapping away at old-fashioned mobile phones and shuffling dog-eared bits of paper around. Alex wondered who would ever buy what they were selling.

  Bob was now forty-five minutes late, and Alex had received no emails apart from unwanted newsletters and irrelevant press releases. She didn’t want to harass Bob but she wanted him to know she was waiting, and that she understood and would be patient. She sent a text message:

  Hi, Bob, it’s Alex. Just to let you know I’m at the Little Chef so just get here when you can, don’t worry if you’re caught in traffic, I’ll wait.

  As she set her iPhone back down on the yellowing table, a short, dumpy man in overalls barreled through the doors. His graying dark hair had visible comb-marks where he had used gel or pomade and he had a speckled doormat mustache.

  After waiting unattended at the “Wait Here to Be Seated” sign, he walked into the middle of the seating area, obviously looking for someone.

  “Bob?” Alex asked quietly, doing the half-stand, half-stoop standard to these situations.

  Bob spun around; his overalls were tight on his buttocks and his belly was like a block, swinging slightly later than the rest of him. He half smiled and walked toward Alex.

  “Alex? Sorry I’m late…” He trailed off.

  Alex gestured for Bob to sit down and looked around for a waitress. The plump, pudding-faced girl with mousy hair was nowhere to be seen but a friendly older woman with a blond bouffant walked slowly over, smiling.

  “What can I get you, sir?”

  Bob smiled, warmly. “Hello, err, yes, can I have a pot of tea and some Jubilee Pancakes please?” He looked awkward. “I’ve not had breakfast yet.”

  The waitress—Valerie by her name badge—turned to Alex. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “Actually,” Alex smiled, “I’ll have some Jubilee Pancakes too.”

  The room seemed brighter, more sunlit. Alex had finally recovered from the nappy-filled toilet. She’d stopped scowling long enough to remember how she’d loved stopping at Little Chefs on childhood journeys to stay with her mother’s various boyfriends and, rarely, to visit her father while his wife was away.

  She’d adored the Jubilee Pancakes, and the orange lollies by the till. As a seven-year-old she hadn’t even known what a calorie was.

  Valerie left them to it, they both sighed a little, at nothing, as if perhaps they could make this meeting about pancakes and gray tea. A nice little rest stop.

  “I’m really pleased you agreed to meet with me, Bob,” Alex started. “I really do want you to know that I’m not out to do a hatchet job. I’ve never written about crime or anything like it before. I mainly write about health, and that’s how I came to see Amy.”

  In her hopeful letter to Bob she had explained her chance encounter with Amy, but she wasn’t sure if he had believed her. She wondered how many offers to “tell his side” to the tabloids he’d received in the immediate aftermath.

  Bob cleared his throat. “Do I have your word that you’re not going to stitch me up or tell everyone where I am?” he asked. His voice still had its gruff edge but he had shrunk a little smaller in his chair.

  “You have my word.”

  She tried to imagine how Bob would have fared in a police interview. Snarled up with grief over his stepdaughter, probably terrified about his wife’s ability to cope, being accused of crimes he couldn’t comprehend.

  Alex and Matt had never seen eye to eye on police matters. Fairly early on in his career he’d stopped talking to her about his shifts, about the terror on interviewees’ faces, about the casual decisions he made or the acts he witnessed.

  “Bob, I have a recorder on my phone and I’d like to use that because I’m not very fast at shorthand, would you mind if I did?” Alex asked.

  “I s’pose not, I’d rather you recorded it than wrote it down wrong. That’s what’s done for me in the past.”

  Drawing a deep breath, Alex pressed record.

  Jacob frequently drove past the shop where he’d first met Fiona. It had changed from a printers into a pet shop but it still made him smile. Sometimes.

  As he drove past today he tried to shake the memory of this morning, tried to think of t
he Fiona he’d first met and not the Fiona who demanded to know why he’d deleted the Internet history on the computer in the home office. Jacob had just stood there, dumbfounded. He had thought he was being paranoid deleting his Google Map searches, and everything else.

  “It’s a surprise,” he said.

  “What surprise?”

  “Well, I didn’t want you to see what I’d looked at because I was ordering a present for you,” he said.

  She’d rolled her eyes and turned away quickly. “You should have said you were looking at porn, I’d have believed you then.”

  Six years ago, he’d been rushing in to collect some business cards for his boss. Fiona had been manning the till in the print shop; although, as she told him several times within that first conversation, she was just covering—she was actually a designer and she even had a desk. She designed the business cards and leaflets for local hairdressers and plumbers.

  Fiona had astonishing flame-red hair back then. That first day she was wearing a kind of floral-patterned dress, a half cardigan he didn’t understand and Converse trainers. He’d have guessed she was eighteen but found out later she was twenty-two. She’d passed him the business cards in a box with a flourish and before he could stop himself he said, “You remind me of someone.”

  “Someone awesome and hot?” She’d deadpanned, without cracking a smile.

  “Yes, that’s the one.” He’d smiled and she’d laughed.

  “Want to take me to lunch?” she’d asked, without showing a shred of the anxiety she later admitted to hiding really well.

  “Um, right now?” he’d asked.

  “Yeah, why not, I’m owed a break.”

  He’d been running late as it was but he didn’t say no. That was the part of the story she loved to hear again and again.

  They had paninis and bottles of beer in the Wetherspoons pub near the shop. Nothing like that had ever happened to him before, or since. It was like a cheesy film and he’d not stopped smiling for the rest of the day, partly in bewilderment.

  Fiona had listened to bands he’d never heard of, and would push CDs into his car stereo when he picked her up from work. Bands with complicated, ironic names that made him feel out of touch.