Now She's Dead: A psychological suspense thriller that unwinds in dizzying spirals Read online

  Now She’s Dead

  Ben Cheetham

  Copyright © 2018 by Ben Cheetham

  Ben Cheetham has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author.

  Find out more about the author and his other books at

  bencheetham.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  About the Author

  Other Books by the Author

  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.”