Follow You Home (15 page)

Chapter Thirty

L
aura noticed the man watching her on her second circuit of the park, but as soon she looked towards him he turned his attention to a woman walking her greyhound.

She had needed to get out of the house, to get some air. Not only were the walls of her room closing in on her but the inside of her head itched like there were hundreds of baby spiders crawling about in her skull, feathery legs tickling her brain. She couldn’t sit still. She went into the garden to look for Alina but she wasn’t there. Since that night at the hospital, Alina had visited her here several times, shimmering between the bare trees. But she only came at night, it seemed.

Although the path around the park was mostly clear of snow, patches of black ice lurked like land mines, and Laura had watched a fellow walker thump to the ground before her, eliciting a chorus of laughter from a group of children having a snowball fight nearby. Laura had paused to help the fallen man to his feet before pushing on, feeling his eyes on her back.

On her third circuit, she tried not to look directly at the
man. He
was a pensioner, in his sixties, or perhaps a fit-looking
seventy
. He was broad and ruddy, wrapped in a wool coat and wearing a black hat and gloves. And he was definitely watching her, but in the same way she was watching him, surreptitiously, pretending to be looking past her.

She stole another glance at the man. The air around him appeared to waver, like he was giving off heat, and something struck her like a punch in the chest, making her gasp. He wasn’t a man. He was a
devil
.

She entered a thicket of trees and he was obscured from view. She stopped and caught her breath.

‘Are you OK?’

She looked up. A young woman in a black woollen hat was regarding her with concern. ‘You were talking out loud. I just wanted to check you’re OK.’ She had an accent—German, Laura thought. A native Londoner would never have asked if she was all right. They would have assumed she was a nutcase or a drunk and given her a wide berth.

She beckoned to the German woman.
Follow me
. The woman hesitated but followed Laura to the edge of the thicket.

‘Over there,’ she said, as they emerged from between the
trees. ‘Ther
e’s a devil sitting over there.’ She pointed over to
the benc
h. The German gawped at her with alarm.

There was no one there.

‘You need me to call someone?’ the woman asked.

Laura couldn’t react. She stared at the empty space where the devil had been sitting, tuning out the woman’s questions. She f
elt dizzy.

What if he was another ghost? Only yesterday, on her way home from the Tate Modern, when she had felt the need to get away from Daniel, she thought she’d glimpsed Beatrice again for the first time in twenty years. She had been standing beneath a lamppost in the snow, and Laura had stopped dead. Beatrice looked so unhappy, her face accusatory. It was the expression of someone who had been betrayed. But when Laura stepped towards her, she vanished.

Was this what was going to happen now? She had unlocked the doors of perception; was she going to start seeing ghosts and devils everywhere? Was she going to become a magnet for the unliving?

She scuttled away from the thicket of trees, leaving the
German
woman standing open-mouthed, and hurried towards the park gates. She needed to get to the safety of her room before any other ghosts came looking for her.

As soon as Laura unlocked the door of Rob and Erin’s home, Erin called out, ‘Rob?’

‘No, it’s me.’

‘Oh.’

Laura went into the kitchen, casting a glance over her friend’s shoulder, hoping that Alina would be waiting for her at the end of the garden so she could tell her about the devil in the park. Her attention snapped to Erin, who was pacing up and down alongside the table, blowing out breaths like a two-year-old attacking the candles on a birthday cake. Laura wanted to go to bed, to wait until dark so she could talk to Alina. Wanted to pull the covers over her head and block the world out.

‘I’m in labour,’ Erin said. ‘I’ve been trying to call Rob but he’s not answering.’ She gasped. ‘Fuck. I knew this baby was going to come early.’

Erin’s words seemed to come from a great distance away.

‘Laura? Wake up! Did you hear me?’

‘I . . .’ Laura tried to stay calm. ‘Have you called the hospital? Are they going to send an ambulance?’

Erin’s laugh was cut short by a contraction. ‘Ah. No, they don’t do that . . . unless it’s an emergency.’

‘Isn’t this an emergency?’

‘Not yet. Oh, shit, I’ve been waiting for Rob. He wants to be the one to take me to the hospital. But I can’t wait any longer. I called a cab but they said it would take an hour because of the fucking
inclement
weather.’ She grimaced and blew out air. ‘I’m assuming you don’t want to be the one to deliver the baby.’

‘No! God, no!’

Erin studied her curiously. ‘My God, you should see your face. It’s all right . . . But you’re going to have to drive me.’

‘I . . . But I don’t have a car.’ Laura felt like she was being dive-bombed by black birds. They swooped about her, screeching, drowning out Erin’s words.

‘Well, duh.’ Erin snatched her own car key from the hook on the wall. ‘We’ll take mine.’

Laura stared at her.

‘Come on. My bag’s in the hallway.’

Still, Laura hesitated.

‘For fuck’s sake, Laura. If we don’t get a move on, you
are
going to have to deliver the baby.’

Erin ushered her out the door and they headed for Erin’s Golf. The front and back windows were covered with snow, but the road was clear. Erin handed Laura a scraper and a can of de-icer before getting into the back of the car. As Laura removed the snow and ice, she told herself repeatedly not to panic, to ignore the birds that flapped about her head. They weren’t real. This was real. She needed to help her friend and her baby. OK, she hadn’t driven a car for over a year. The streets would be liable to bear the same patches of black ice as the path in the park. And snow had begun to fall lightly again, the sky dimming like someone had thrown a muslin square over the sun.

What if they crashed? What if Laura killed Erin and, even worse, the baby inside her? She thought of her bed, the cosy
darkness
. That’s where she wanted to be. Where she needed to be.

She opened the door to tell Erin she couldn’t do it. Erin was lying on the back seat, her face scrunched up, timing the gaps between contractions on her iPhone.

‘I can’t—’ Laura began.

Erin glared at her. ‘Just. Fucking. Drive.’

Laura got behind the wheel and started the engine.

Chapter Thirty-One

B
aby arrived at 10.15 last night! Oscar James Tranham, 8 lb
4 oz
. Erin was brilliant! Oscar is amazing!
The text from Rob was accompanied of a picture of a tiny, pink-faced infant in a transparent plastic cot, wearing a crocheted white hat. Then a separate text arrived a few seconds later.
Mate, Laura was a hero. She drove Erin to the hospital through the snow. Got there just in time.

So while I’d almost been having sex with a Romanian woman, Laura had been pacing up and down outside the maternity war
d, waiti
ng for Erin to give birth. It added to my sense of shame. What had I been thinking?

But layered over the shame was something worse: fear. The questions she had asked, wanting me to tell her my secrets. Was it just sex play, or something more? And if it was something more, what was she trying to get from me?

She was Romanian. Was there any way she could know what had happened in the forest?

Or was she trying to find out?

I wanted badly to cling to the belief that Camelia’s words had been part of a game, the equivalent to asking someone to talk dirty, and that her being Romanian was a coincidence. But as soon as she had left I had checked the CCTV video of the intruders with the dog, studying the shape of the female intruder’s body. Slim, small breasts, a hint of blonde hair beneath the hood she wore. The more I studied the video and replayed our encounter in my mind, the more convinced I became.

Camelia was the female intruder. And that probably—almost certainly—meant she was one of the burglars who had taken then returned my laptop. I paced the flat as I thought it through. She had followed me to Jake’s gig, tried to seduce me then, for whatever reason. She must have dropped her phone deliberately, knowing I would take it home, not realising I would switch it off. I had no memory of turning it back on—probably because
she
had done so when she came into my flat with the dog.

I felt cold and shaken. Why was she following me? Why had she broken in? Had she been trying to kill me? Was it connected to what had happened to Laura and me in Romania, and if so, how?

I felt sober now, as sober as if I’d never touched a drop of alcohol in my life. I could still feel the echo of Camelia’s body against mine, could still taste her on my lips. But who was she? And what the hell did she want?

The next morning I went out for a long walk, then decided to take the bus home. There was a man my age on the top deck with three small children who were acting like they were full of E numbers and sugar. Every time he got one of them under control, another would run off shrieking down the bus, or start banging on the windows. I watched him as he eventually gave up, letting them do what they liked as he stared at his phone, pretending they weren’t his, probably wondering how his life had got like this. I empathised, except
my toddle
rs were in my head. Every time I felt like I’d got a grip on one problem, another—Jake, Laura, the break-ins and
Camelia
—would run screaming into the forefront of my mind. Like the dad on this bus, all I wanted to do was sit and stare at something unconnected to my problems, to hide from everything, switch my br
ain off.

But I forced myself to stay switched on. I remembered something Laura used to do when she was overwhelmed at work. She would sit and write everything that was bothering her on a sheet of paper, get everything out. Then she would put it into priority order, bearing in mind the consequences if she didn’t tackle each particular issue. A common technique, but one I seldom used. Now was the perfect time to start.

I didn’t have any paper with me, so used my phone, tapping words in a stream of consciousness into the Notes app:

Laura left me, crazy, ghosts, want her back.

Jake—suicide??

Who is Camelia? What does she want?

Health, sleep, alcohol. PTSD.

This was it. The total of my problems on a single phone screen. Studying the list, it struck me that it could be displayed in a
different
way, as a mind map. Romania would be in a circle in the centre, with lines leading to all the other problems. Unless Jake’s death shortly after I’d started telling him about my experiences was a coincidence, everything stemmed from that night.

The thought of somebody pushing Jake from the bridge made me clench my fists, a red mist swirling around me. The anger must have been evident on my face because one of the errant pre-
schoolers
saw me and ran off crying to his dad, saying something about ‘the scary man’.

So far, ever since getting back from Romania, I had allowed things to happen to me, a passive victim. Even my attempts to win Laura back had been ineffectual. Installing the security cameras had only led to more questions.

It was time to change. To be active. I needed to find out exactly what was going on. But how? The first step, surely, was to find
Camelia
. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do that, but if I could track her down, I could make her tell me what she knew. There had to be a way to find her. But I didn’t know anything about her: her surname, where she lived, what she did. What was I supposed to do, wander around London looking for her?

I could, I supposed, sit and wait for her to make her next move. Surely there would be one. But I wasn’t going to do that. I needed to get the upper hand.

As I approached my flat, I saw the fox, tearing into a bin bag that, yet again, one of my neighbours had left on the pavement. It had crept out beneath the cover of twilight and dug out a KFC box, scattering chicken bones and half-chewed corn-on-the-cobs across the entrance of the building. Sick of the mess, I shouted, ‘Hey!’ and broke into a run, chasing it up the street until it vanished into a garden and shot round the back of somebody else’s house.

Indoors, I went straight to my laptop and onto Google.

I typed in ‘private detective London’. There were over one
million
results, although of course the vast majority of these would be junk. I skimmed through the listings. Most of the private
detectives
listed specialised in finding out if your partner was cheating, checking up on employees or tracking down debtors. Grim stuff. I was looking for someone who had experience finding people.
Clicking
onto the various private detective sites, most of which looked like they were designed in 1998, made my sense of determination leak away. I could just pick one at random and hope they were competent, but there had to be a better way of finding the right person to help me, especially as I felt the need to find Camelia quickly.

Trying a different tactic, I filtered the results so they showed only news stories, expanding my search to ‘private detective London missing’. I wanted to find a news story about an investigator who’d been successful finding a missing person. Again, most of the results were completely unhelpful, but after clicking through a dozen pages I found a news story from the summer, something that had taken place while Laura and I were on our Grand Tour.

I read through the story. A young Eastern European woman, from Belarus, had been reported missing by her employer. A private detective, based in Kentish Town, not far from here, had discovered what happened to her. It was a dark tale involving London’s immigrant population, illegal employment practices and rough sex gone wrong. The investigator had discovered the truth before handing the case over to the police. His name was Edward Rooney and his website consisted of a single page, filled with basic information and a couple of glowing testimonials, and a contact form.

I completed the form and hit ‘send’ before I could change m
y mind.