Destroy Me Read online

  ‘Then I was angry with my parents. It wasn’t until I was seventeen or eighteen that I realised I was blaming all the wrong people . . . that I should have been blaming the one person who was really responsible – the person driving the car. But of course, I didn’t know who that was. Until Charlotte came along. Do you believe in God, Catherine?’

  I don’t answer. Tears are rolling down my cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know if I do,’ Lizzie continues. ‘But it certainly seemed as though some higher power brought Charlie to us. She confessed to everything. She thought she could make up for what happened to Daisy by giving Mum that flat,’ she snorts, scornfully. ‘As if money could make up for what we lost.’

  I try to raise my head. ‘So, you killed her,’ I choke out.

  She shrugs. ‘She would have died anyway. Killing Charlie was a kindness. It was you I wanted, not Charlie. I only killed her to get to you. I knew I could persuade my mother to tell the police that she’d seen you. It was only what you deserved. Okay, you didn’t kill Charlie, but you are guilty of murder and you have never paid for it.’

  I feel her hatred as if it’s a physical force, and a wave of despair and hopelessness washes over me. Because she’s right. I am guilty, if not of murder than at least of manslaughter.

  ‘As soon as she told us about you,’ Lizzie says, ‘I started digging up all I could about you. It didn’t take me long to find out you were Ophelia Black, the writer.’ She practically spits out the words. ‘I read your book – a pile of trash. You even had the nerve to write about a girl killed in a car accident. You used Daisy’s death for your own gain.’

  I want to explain that if I did use Daisy, it wasn’t for any financial gain – that it was a way to exorcise my own demons. But she continues before I can speak.

  ‘That made me so angry. I wanted you to feel afraid. That’s when I started sending you messages on your writer page.’

  ‘You’re George Wilkinson.’ I realise this with a flash of insight.

  ‘Why yes, little lady,’ she drawls, mimicking an American accent. And I realise with a sinking feeling that she’s completely unhinged.

  She carries on dreamily, almost as if she’s talking to herself. ‘Of course, I knew your real name from Charlie and with that, it was easy enough to find out your address. So I visited your house and watched you playing with your son. You know you leave your curtains open a lot.’

  I feel sick at the thought of this gross invasion of our privacy.

  ‘I guessed that you would enrol Dylan at Green Park Primary School. You were in the right catchment area. So I decided to apply for a job there. I didn’t really have a plan at that point, I just thought it might come in useful. And, you see, it did.’

  Dylan. I can feel blackness creeping at the edge of my mind. ‘Dylan,’ I gasp. ‘Don’t . . .’

  But I can hear the sound of another car approaching and Lizzie leaps to her feet and runs back to her car. I hear her engine starting and the car turning. Then nothing.

  Thirty-eight

  I dream I am running, running through a corn field with Charlie. The sun is shining, and we’re happy and free. We’re running for no reason, like excited puppies. I’m young and strong, and I feel as if I could run for ever. But suddenly the scene changes as sometimes happens in dreams. I am at the edge of a fast-flowing river and dark storm clouds are gathering, swallowing the sun. Charlie is still there but she looks worried and a little embarrassed and she points down at my legs.

  ‘Er, Cat, there’s something wrong,’ she says.

  And when I look down, I see that a crocodile is gnawing on my knees, blood gushing out of the stumps, staining the river red.

  I wake with a start in hospital to the groans of other patients and the clatter of the nurses. Feeling disoriented, I open my eyes and look around. I’m in bed with a blue curtain partially drawn so I can see part of the ward. There’s an elderly woman in the bed opposite mine; she’s doing a crossword, reading out the clues loudly to her husband, who is looking bored and munching chocolates.

  And Theo is here. He’s sitting by my bedside holding my hand.

  What’s going on? I am confused and a little scared. What’s going on? Am I still dreaming?

  ‘You’re awake,’ Theo smiles at me. ‘You drifted off for a while. But you’re back now.’ I can feel his hand in mine. It’s warm and real. His brown eyes are kind and full of something that looks unnervingly like pity.

  ‘Look, I brought you a packet of fudge. It’s homemade. I bought it at the craft fair. He unties the ribbon and opens the bag and I get a whiff of sugar and vanilla. ‘If you don’t eat it, I will,’ he says.

  I turn my head away. I feel sick. Everything is flooding back. Charlie, Daisy. Lizzie. The accident. I was in a car accident. Dylan . . .

  ‘Dylan?’ I exclaim, panicked. I try to sit up, to swing my legs out of the bed but nothing happens. No movement. No feeling. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Shh, relax, he’s okay. He’s with your mother,’ says Theo.

  I reach down tentatively with my hands and touch the cool, flabby flesh of my thighs. My legs are still there but there’s no feeling in them.

  ‘But Lizzie Hamlyn . . . is Dylan hurt?’ I stammer out the words.

  ‘Meg Darley phoned the police. They arrested Elizabeth Hamlyn on the Swindon Road. She gave him up without a struggle. Dylan’s okay. He’s traumatised by the whole experience, obviously, but the doctor says that with time he’ll be just fine.’

  Tired tears of relief roll down my cheeks. If Dylan is alive and well, then the world is still on its axis and I can face anything.

  ‘I want to see him,’ I say.

  ‘He’ll be here tomorrow. He came this earlier this morning, but you were asleep.’

  I try not to think about how frightening it must have been for him to see me in hospital like this.

  Tentatively, I reach down under the covers and touch the tops of my thighs again. At least I think they’re my legs. They feel waxy and soft and there’s stubble growing where I’ve shaved. I take a piece of flesh between my thumb and forefinger and pinch hard. Nothing. They might as well be a stranger’s limbs in the bed with me. It’s strange, and very frightening.

  ‘I can’t feel my legs,’ I say, fighting back a wave of alarm.

  Theo nods and his brow furrows. He has that panicked look he gets when I’m upset. He looks around over his shoulder as if he wants to escape. ‘Yes, you had a car accident. The impact damaged your spine.’

  I feel a heavy weight dropping in my chest. Spinal injuries are never good, and I can tell from the way Theo is avoiding my eyes that this is bad.

  ‘Am I paralysed?’ I whisper. I don’t really believe that I could be, but I’m a worst-case-scenario kind of person. The flawed logic being if you think of the worst, then it can’t possibly come true. It’s worked for me many times before, but I suppose simple statistics mean the worst-case scenario will happen eventually, even if you try to pre-empt it.

  Theo meets my eyes for a second, then looks away.

  ‘Perhaps it’s better if the doctors explain it to you.’

  Coward.

  ‘I want you to explain it. Am I paralysed?’ The fact that he hasn’t outright denied it is making me nervous and my voice is rising in alarm. I try moving again, nothing happens. I feel a cold chill run through me.

  He brushes his hand through his hair. ‘Um, I’m not sure I really understood what the doctors told me. There may be a temporary paralysis.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me please. People don’t recover from spinal injuries.’

  ‘There are some exercises you can do. We’ll get through this, Cat. We’ll fight this together.’

  We? Together? ‘You, me and Harper, you mean?’ I say bitterly.

  ‘Harper’s out of the picture. You know that. I want us to get back together. I want to take c
are of you. I want to take care of Dylan.’

  I stare out of the window, at the clouds sailing past in the blue sky. I don’t like the way he says he wants to take care of me – the implication being that I’m not going to be able to take care of myself. And I’m still desperately worried about Dylan. Is he really safe? Could Lizzie try to take him again?

  ‘What about Lizzie Hamlyn?’ I ask.

  ‘I told you, she’s been arrested and charged. The police are doing a psychological evaluation.’

  ‘You don’t understand. She’s really dangerous. She killed Charlie Holbrooke.’

  ‘Yes, I know. The police know too.’

  ‘They do?’ I digest this information with mixed feelings. ‘What I don’t get,’ I say, ‘is how she did it. How did she get Charlie to let her in, in the middle of the night?’

  Theo shrugs. Apparently, she knocked on Charlie’s door and pretended that Meg had fallen and needed bandages.’

  Hence the ransacked medicine box out on Charlies kitchen table, I think. It was nothing to do with Ben.

  ‘And she’s in custody? Because I don’t want her anywhere near Dylan,’ I say, trying to sit up again, alarmed at the thought that Lizzie might be free to roam around.

  ‘Shh, don’t worry,’ he says soothingly. ‘She can’t hurt Dylan now.’

  I sink back on to the pillow feeling dizzy and only a little reassured.

  ‘What about Delilah? Was it Lizzie who poisoned her?’

  Theo nods grimly. ‘Yes, she confessed. According to the police, you left the back door open and she let herself in.’

  I think about Delilah and shudder. How much must Lizzie Hamlyn hate me to do something like that to such a sweet, innocent creature just to hurt me?

  My voice lowers to a whisper. ‘Did she tell the police about the hit and run? About Daisy? Do they know?’

  He frowns and nods slowly. ‘The police will come to speak to you later when you’re better. But you shouldn’t worry about that for now. You need to concentrate on getting better.’

  Clouds sail past my window, shape-shifting as they go, and I pass the time by trying to work out what they resemble. That one, with the hint of grey at the edge, looks like a crab claw; another is like an embryo or a mermaid – I can’t decide which. I wish I could defy gravity and float up there with them. It seems blissful, the idea of resting my head on a cloud. But I know that in reality a cloud would just be damp and cold, like fog.

  I notice things like clouds now. I notice a lot that I never noticed before – for example, the way the leaves on the bush outside my window shiver in the wind and the spider’s web that’s tangled in its branches. There’s no sign of the spider, but I can see a fly caught in the deceptively delicate thread. It isn’t moving but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s dead.

  I know how that fly feels. I know what it feels like to be trapped – how quickly anger and frustration can turn to despair, and despair to resignation. I know that prisoners try to find ways to keep their sanity – that they jealously store memories and feed off them slowly, rationing them so there will be enough to last. And that when they run out of memories their imaginations expand to fill the void.

  Thirty-nine

  Dr Blake tells me I’m lucky. Ha! Ha! According to her, I’m lucky that the damage to my spinal cord was in my back and not my neck because that means I still have full use of my upper body. Lucky, lucky me!

  ‘I’ll be straight with you,’ she said as she sat opposite me this morning, her frank blue eyes unflinching. ‘It’s not likely you will heal completely from a spinal-cord injury, but you can maybe regain some motor function if you exercise regularly.’

  I’m lucky. Well, everything is relative, I suppose.

  After Dr Blake leaves, the physiotherapist arrives in a waft of positivity, badgering me to exercise, bending my legs, moving me around like a slab of meat. Then she leaves me alone again to sit and stare at the white walls and listen to Mary snoring in the bed next to mine. I must have drifted off to sleep because when I wake up, it’s visiting time. And here is my mother, marching in like she owns the place, with Dylan clinging to her hand, grinning.

  ‘Ah, thank goodness you’re awake this time, Catherine,’ she says in her usual disapproving tone, as if I’ve been deliberately unconscious, just to inconvenience her. ‘How are you feeling, darling?’

  ‘I’ve been better.’

  She pulls up a chair and starts unloading her bag on to my bed. ‘Now, I’ve brought you some books and some grapes. And Dylan’s done you a drawing, haven’t you, Dylan?’

  Dylan nods bashfully and unfolds a piece of paper with an indecipherable scribble on it. He has written in a shaky hand: to Mummy love Dylan.

  ‘That’s beautiful, sweetheart,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

  He’s looking wide-eyed at the wheelchair next to my bed.

  ‘That’s my new chair,’ I tell him, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘Pretty cool, don’t you think?’

  ‘Can I sit in it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  Dylan clambers into the wheelchair and sits there, legs swinging, while Mum gives me the rundown on things that have been happening at the WI and on her street.

  ‘And Theo’s been helping with fixing the fence,’ she says. ‘He’s such a treasure, that man. You know, he’s been here to the hospital every day. He slept here the night of the accident. He’s so devoted to you.’

  ‘Hmph,’ I say. I don’t want to say too much in front of Dylan, but she gets what I mean.

  ‘You need to forgive him, Catherine. You know, “Forgiv­eness is the attribute of the strong”. I think Gandhi said that.’

  Perhaps my mother is right. Maybe I should forgive Theo. If he can forgive me for what I’ve done, then shouldn’t I forget about Harper and give him another chance? There is no point in holding on to anger. It only festers and corrodes. I know that. But forgiving isn’t always so easy. I’m not sure I can ever excuse Theo. And forgiving myself is even harder. What is it they had in South Africa? A truth and reconciliation commission. It was a good idea. Before you can even begin to forgive you have to start with the truth, not a vague semblance of it, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth – like in a court of law. I’m not so bad at the ‘nothing-but-the-truth’ part, but the whole truth? Now that’s a different matter. And if I’m completely honest, there are a few things I’ve left out – that I’ve found hard to admit even to myself.

  There’s one thing in particular. A small detail. But the devil is in the detail, as they say.

  Epilogue

  2002

  ‘Shit, shit. Is she dead?’ Charlie appeared beside me. She looked like the Joker, mascara-blackened tears rolling down her cheeks. She tugged at her hair, as if she wanted to pull it out at the roots.

  ‘Yes. I think so.’ I tried to gather my wits. ‘I suppose we need to call an ambulance,’ I said. ‘Have you got a phone?’

  Charlie stared at me, her features frozen in horror. ‘I left it at Nessa’s.’

  ‘It’s okay. Mine’s in my handbag.’ I stood up and walked to the car in a dream and fumbled for my phone. My fingers were wet with the rain and the phone was slippery in my hands as I held it. I switched it on with shaking fingers and started to dial.

  But my finger froze, poised over the last nine. I was suddenly paralysed. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. If I called an ambulance now, I’d be in big, big trouble and what good would it do? The little girl was already dead. It wouldn’t make any difference to her. I looked over at Charlie who was crouching by the side of the road with her head in her hands. No one need ever know, I thought. And quickly, before I could change my mind, I pressed the button on the side, turning off the phone and I shoved it in the side pocket of the driver’s seat.

  ‘Shit,’ I called out to Charlie.

  ‘Did you get hol
d of them?’ Charlie asked, as I got closer. She was shivering, whether from cold or shock I couldn’t tell. I felt completely numb, as if I was in a dream, but at the same time all my senses were alert, like I was superhuman. It was the shock, I suppose.

  ‘No,’ I said through the rain. ‘I couldn’t. My phone’s run out of battery.’

  Acknowledgements

  I owe a big debt of thanks to my brilliant, tactful and patient new editor, Florence Hare, to Anne Newman, whose thorough approach was very helpful in establishing an accurate timeline and to the whole team at Quercus, who have helped make this book a reality. I also want to thank Toby and Max for putting up with me talking endlessly about plots and characters and for never failing to make me laugh. Finally, as always, I would like to thank my partner, Jim, for more than I can express in words.