Killing Kate - Alex Lake

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course,’ she said. ‘I promise.’ It was a promise she felt she would be justified in forgiving herself for breaking.

      As she put the phone in its cradle, Gemma’s eyes opened.

      ‘Who was that?’ she said, her voice little more than a croak.

      ‘Phil,’ Kate said. ‘He tracked me down.’

      Gemma frowned. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I know he’s hurting, but he needs to get over it. And tracking you down like this is – well, it’s kind of fucked up, Kate.’

      ‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘But he means well. You know Phil, he’s—’

      ‘Don’t make excuses for him,’ Gemma said. ‘He can’t do this. And you’d think he’d know better, after what happened to Beth.’

      There was a long pause. ‘It’s not like that,’ Kate said. ‘Beth was a totally different situation.’

      ‘We didn’t think so at first, though, did we?’ Gemma said. ‘And things might have worked out a hell of a lot better if we’d paid a bit more attention to how serious it was.’

      ‘We were young,’ May said. ‘We didn’t know any better.’

      ‘We do now,’ Gemma said. ‘That’s my point, and Phil needs to know he has to give this a rest.’ She looked at Kate. ‘Anyway, let’s not argue. Forget Phil. Which is something you didn’t seem to have any problem doing last night. Where were you, you dirty slapper?’

      Kate reached down and picked up a handful of the clothes that Gemma had strewn around the room. She tossed them to her friend.

      ‘Put these on and I’ll tell you over breakfast,’ she said. ‘And then let’s go to the beach and enjoy the last few days of this holiday.’

       7

      She was back. Phil knew this because he had been waiting for this day to come the entire time she had been gone, had been thinking about her incessantly every minute of every day, had been hard-pressed not to call her on the hour, every hour, contenting himself with a few – well, maybe a few more than a few – phone calls each evening.

      None of which she answered, until, desperate, he had tracked her down by calling nearly every hotel in Kalkan, a place which was, it seemed, littered with hotels. It wasn’t very big, looking at it on Google Earth – which he had done at least three or four times every day in the stupid hope that he might see her, even though he was fully aware that Google Earth was not a live feed from a satellite and that the images he was looking at were months or years old – but, small size notwithstanding, there were a lot of hotels.

      And all of them full of men looking for someone to have a summer fling with, perhaps a pretty woman in her mid-to-late twenties who’d recently broken up with her boyfriend and was emotional and vulnerable, and would easily fall for their cheesy lines.

      Only once in the entire week had he heard her voice and it had been such a relief to know she was alive, to be in touch with her again, to be connected to her in however paltry a form, at least until she had hung up on him and then it had all been even worse than before.

      Yes, it had been a long week, but now she was back. She. Was. Back. He’d tracked her flight on the Internet, watched the tiny plane crawl across the screen from Dalaman airport to Manchester airport, then, when it landed, gone online and checked the arrivals board just to be sure.

      Of course, he was only sure that the plane had landed, not that she was on it. So, unable to sleep, he got on his bike – a cyclo-cross, designed to work both on and off-road, that he had bought second hand a few months back – and rode to her house – their house – at midnight (when he was pretty sure she’d be through Customs and back home). He used his bike as often as possible these days; riding it cleared his mind. He tended to stay off the roads, preferring the paths and snickets and alleys that connected most parts of the town, routes that most people didn’t even know existed, leaving them quiet and unused, which was perfect for the solitude he craved.

      As a cloud obscured the moon, he turned into the street their house was on, and there it was.

      Her car. Parked outside the house. Proof, absolute proof, of her return.

      And upstairs, a light on. Her – their – bedroom was at the front of the house. The house he had offered to move out of, even though she wanted to break up, an offer he now regretted. He’d hoped it would show her how unconcerned he was, how magnanimous, but all it meant in the end was that he was squatting at a friend’s flat.

      He stared up at the windows and, as he watched, her silhouette appeared behind the blinds that they had installed together.

      Even though it was only a silhouette, the sight of her shocked him, and he gasped. She was safe. She was home. She was back.

      And now he was going to fix this.

      He was going to fix this, whatever it took.

       8

      Kate’s alarm – a loud, old-fashioned bell sound that she had chosen on her phone as it was the only noise that could reliably wake her at six a.m. – was ringing. She opened her eyes. It took her a few seconds to remember where she was – back home, Monday morning, a week of work ahead.

      The first day back from holiday was always a struggle. It was the contrast: the day before you’d been immersed in a free, technicolour life, doing new things, meeting new people, living life the way it should be lived. And then: a six a.m. alarm, and back to normality.

      She stared at the ceiling. Her eyes felt swollen. She was very tired; much more than she would have been on a normal Monday. It was amazing how exhausting holidays were. Late nights, too much to drink, bad sleep (on one night in someone else’s bed, which was a memory she was glad she could leave behind. What happens on holiday, stays on holiday, after all), and then, on the way back, a delayed flight which meant she had finally got home shortly after midnight.

      And discovered that she didn’t have her house key.

      Before leaving for holiday she’d detached her house key from her key fob – on the grounds that she wouldn’t need the back-door key, electronic pass for work, keys to her mum and dad’s house or any of the other things she had attached to it – and then stashed it in a side pocket of her bag and forgotten about it, in the expectation that it would be there when she got home.

      Well, it wasn’t. Under the dim glow of the interior light in her car, she’d emptied her bag onto the front seat and scrabbled around.

      No key.

      Then she’d unpacked her suitcase, spreading the contents all over the inside of the car.

      Nothing.

      So she’d slammed the car door in frustration, which had woken her neighbour, Carl, an engineer in his fifties, who, on hearing the commotion, came downstairs.

      Need a hand? he said.

       I’ve lost my key. Left it in Turkey. It must have fallen out of my bag somewhere.

       Oh. Want me to help you break in?

       Can you do that?

       Sure. It’s easy. All you have to do is tell me which window you don’t mind being broken and we’ll be away.

      Ten minutes later, she was in, with a broken kitchen window and a promise from Carl that he’d call a friend of his in the morning who would be able to replace it.

      So, all that, less than six hours’ sleep, and now back to work.

      Back

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