The motion of the train must’ve caused me to nod off at some point though, and I had hit the ground running, straight into a nightmare. Snippets of my subconscious mind and past memories flash up in random five-second frames, like the trailer of a particularly twisted horror film.Coming to an Odeon near you soon, rated 18!At one point I see Bojan Radulovic’s face, the stunned look of surprise and shock on it, like he can’t quite believe that I just stabbed him through the heart and now he’s going to die.
‘Help me, Erin, come quick… he’s got a knife… I think he’s going to kill me!’Samantha. Her voice resonates like an echo chamber. My mum is there too of course – no nightmare would be complete without her. At one point in the dream, I’m a baby and she’s cradling me in her arms, only somehow, I have the understanding and vocabulary of a grown adult.
‘Why didn’t you protectme, Erin? Your own mother? Didn’t you love me?’ She’s crying, only as I look up at her face, I see that it isn’t my mum’s image at all –it’s Samantha’s.
I woke with a start, hyperventilating and sweating, as we slowly ground into the station, the ugly, high-pitched screeching sound of metal on metal setting my teeth on edge. Passengers were staring and I quickly dropped my head. Had I been calling out in my sleep? I pulled my bobble hat down over my forehead and sank into my coat. I don’t want to be memorable, not now, not today.
With the burner phones purchased, I head towards a chemist. Mindful that I could be seen on CCTV, I wrap my scarf tightly around me and pull my hood up. I’m not a big fan of cold weather, but tonight I’m grateful for it. Making my way over to the haircare section, I begin to peruse the boxes of hair dye. There’s so many of them, rows and rows with names like Liquorice Brown and Bodacious Blonde. I grab a box of peroxide, a mixing pot, a brush and some toner, and throw them into a basket along with a pair of scissors, and try not to make eye contact with anybody.
It takes me a good twenty minutes to find the Bull and Barrow pub from the station. I’m indifferent to my reflection in the windows of the posh designer shops as I hurry past them, not exactly sure where I’m headed, just another faceless person in the crowd.
King’s Cross had long been a particularly unsavoury part of the capital, a grimy, industrial haunt, notorious for thieves and unfortunates. Now though, it looks like it’s been given the mother of all makeovers with its sleek, high-rise trendy offices and water features, surrounded by designer boutiques, posh restaurants and art galleries. For a brief moment, it makes me believe that redemption really is possible.
The Bull and Barrow pub is tucked away down a small side street that’s more of an alleyway really. It’s poorly lit and refuse bags of overspilling rubbish and rotten food line the narrow pavement. Deliciously greasy cooking smells waft out from an open back exit of a fast-food restaurant, reminding me that all I’ve consumed in twenty-four hours is a bottle of wine and a Kit Kat. I hear the staff in the kitchen shouting to each other in a foreign language that I can’t identify. One of them glances over at me as I pass by and I quickly turn away.
I check in using the name, Molly Malcolm. Not the most original perhaps, but it’ll do.
‘How long you staying for, Molly, one or two nights?’ the man behind the bar asks. If I’m correct, I think his name might be Pete. He has multiple piercings in almost every part of his face, and the skin on his forearms is blurred with ink, which is exactly how he was described. I imagine he thinks he’s quite an imposing figure to look at, but I’ve seen far worse than Pete.
‘A few days,’ I reply. ‘Maybe more…’
He gives me a bit of a hard stare, like he’s sizing me up.
‘London’s a big city,’ I say. ‘Lots to see.’
He looks at me for a moment longer before breaking into a smile.
‘It sure is, sister. Eight point eight million people living here today, though I reckon that’s a bit of a conservative estimate myself. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to count everyone, put it that way. We need a £50 deposit in case you trash the room,’ he sniffs. ‘You paying cash or card?’
As anticipated, the room is poky, but it’s clean and perfectly adequate for my needs with a bed, a small dressing table, a chair and a tiny bathroom that’s just big enough to stand up in. I plug in my laptop before I take a hot and cold shower. The thermostats in the showers at Larksmere were forever faulty. One minute they’d be scalding hot and then the next, a blast of ice-cold water would take your breath away. Eventually, through necessity, I learned the rhythm between the two temperature extremes and knew when to take a step back. Oddly, since my release, I’ve found myself manually doing this little dance whenever I shower, turning the tap from hot to cold, and back again. I wonder what my therapist would make of that? Not that it matters. I won’t be seeing her again.
I’m thinking of Molly as I empty my medication, pill by pill, down the toilet, and then start to wash my hair. Little round, foraging, mousey Molly and her inherent need to help others so that she can reassure herself that she’s a good person by doinggood things. I wonder how long it will be before she realises that I’ve absconded? I hope she won’t get into any trouble on my behalf. When all of this is over with, I hope someone will explain everything to her. Maybe Molly will understand –maybe they all will.
After my hot and cold shower, I towel dry my hair in front of the old, de-silvering mirror and rake a brush through it. I’ve read somewhere that there are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it. I’m not sure which of these I am, or indeed if I am either. A mirror is little more than a belief system anyway. We only ever see what we want to see in the mirror.
I take a deep breath in as I begin to cut at my hair with the scissors. I’d inherited my thick, dark hair, along with the green eyes, from my Venezuelan father, who died when I was four years old from prostate cancer. I often wonder what my life would’ve been like if he’d lived. For one thing, I know my mother would still be alive today. I’ll be sad to see it go – my hair is almost the last thing I have left of him.
I start off gingerly with the scissors, but after a while it begins to feel more like fun than I thought it would and so I hack away at it with abandon until it’s just below my ears, in a short, and not-so-neat bob. I stand back from the mirror, admire my handiwork for a second before I begin mixing up the peroxide in the small red plastic pot. I’ve never dyed my hair in my whole forty years on this planet. I’ve never needed to, although, admittedly, a few stray greys have started slipping through. I play the YouTube video I’d found earlier as a guide and separate my hair into small sections with clips before carefully pasting the smelly blue gloop onto my head. Eventually though, I give up on the video and just slap it all on and wrap a plastic bag around it. I can feel the burn of the chemicals, harsh and hot against myscalp, almost instantly as I tear open the Snickers bar with my teeth.
There’s 8.8 million people in London, though I think that’s a conservative estimate…Pete’s words loop around my head. Now that the police have released an artist’s sketch of Samantha’s face and requested the public’s help in locating her, I suspect she will have gone into hiding, maybe even in plain sight.
She’ll probably be using a new alias and identity, or she could even have fled the country, and yet something tells me that she’s here, in this city somewhere, watching herself going viral on social media from a place of safety, relishing the notoriety.I can feel her close. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that she has used the name Samantha Valentine again deliberately. What other explanation could there be? Does shewantto be found? Is it the thrill of the chase that she’s after, by outsmarting the police and the public,by outsmarting me? I can’t help feeling that this is all very personal somehow and that she’s taunting me.But I just don’t know why?Had she thought about me over the years, kept abreast of my case? Did she know where I was all the time I was in Larksmere? I’m convinced that she did, and that it gives her a frisson, knowing that I was convicted of killing Bojan Radulovic and subsequently sent to a mental institution for the criminally insane. It made me want to smash things up when I imagined her sense of delight at having duped me into killing for her, congratulating herself at being clever enough to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and then – pouf! – disappear without a trace. ‘Where did that evil bitch go?’I bang out the beats of the words with my fist against the small wooden dressing table.
Sometimes, like now, the rage overwhelms me. The injustice and the hatred and the vengeance, slowly choking me to death. I want it to end, but it won’t until I find her. And it won’t end untilI know why she’s done this to me. It’s like a funeral without a body. I can never move on.
I finish off the Snickers bar and start on a tube of fruit pastilles that I’d forgotten I had in my handbag. I pop two into my mouth at once, not even bothering to check what colour they are. Now that her name is out there in the public domain, it’s only a matter of time before the cops will link me back to her.
My crime went largely unreported at the time it was committed six years ago, and the name Samantha Valentine remained elusive to the press at large. But the police knew about it because I told them,theyknew her name –and did nothing. Soon it will flag up, if they do their intel correctly, and they’ll come looking for me. Only they won’t find me. This time I’m one step ahead. This time I’m armed with knowledge and, unlike the police, I know exactly what and who I’m up against.
Anyway, I can’t rely on those bozos, or trust them – that would be a grave mistake – but I need more information; information that only the police will have access to. It’s their job to find people, and like old, pierced Pete downstairs at the bar said,There’s over 8.8 million people in the city, sister…
The cops don’t know it yet, but they are going to be the ones who lead me to her. They have the resources to find her far quicker than I could working alone. Finally, with their help, I hope to be able to right the wrongs that have been done to me, to Bojan Radulovic and his family, this time using my own kind of justice. But first I’m going to have my say, tell them my story in all its glory and gory detail.And this time they’re going to listen.
I pick up the burner phone, switch it on and fire it up before punching in the digits.
‘Hello, yes… Hi… My name is Erin Santos. I’d like to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Dan Riley, please.’
FIFTEEN
