Welcome To Wherever You Are (43 page)

But Geri’s bulky 4x4 offered him much more protection than the vehicle he’d collided with, which lay in the road like a crumpled concertina. He blindly fumbled around to unclip his seat belt, and struggled to find the handle to open his door. He staggered outside, his legs almost buckling beneath him.

Stuart stared in horror at the carnage before him, struck by the gravity of his actions. He remained motionless until he heard voices and turned his head to see figures hurrying towards the scene. It was only then that his survival instinct kicked in and he knew what he had to do.

He pulled his hood up over his head and limped past what was once a Mini, glancing through the broken windscreen. He clamped his hand over his mouth when he saw two mangled bodies lying in the front seats and he could just about make out a third figure in the back of the car, lying motionless but for his blinking eyes.

Stuart dry heaved as the voices behind him became louder; then with all the strength he could muster, he ran. And he didn’t stop for another three years.

TODAY

What had begun as Declan striving to chat up a girl he didn’t know had turned into something quite unexpected with a familiar face.

As he took a break from flirting with the girl Matty had pointed out, Declan trudged across the sand to check on his friend and bumped into a fellow hosteller. They’d seen each other around the building many times and had enjoyed brief conversations, but the beach was the first place either of them had taken any time to do more than exchange pleasantries.

The conversation flowed naturally without Declan relying on his tried and tested lines, jokes and flattery, and he became slowly aware that he was winning her over simply by being himself. For the first time in a long time, if ever, Declan found himself making plans to meet a girl the next morning for breakfast, rather than waking up with her.

Nicole was feeling the same way. Butterflies only circled her stomach when something awful loomed, but now, chatting to Declan, their wings felt lighter. Their easygoing repartee came as a welcome distraction from Eric’s betrayal, Ruth’s breakdown and Tommy’s mood swings. Declan made her laugh at a time when she’d have been well within her rights to cry until Christmas.

With plans made, Declan traipsed towards Matty with a spring in his step.

‘Lazy bollocks, you’ll never guess who I’ve been gassing with,’ he began, and sat down beside his friend. Declan couldn’t take his eyes off Nicole as she chatted to another hosteller, occasionally looking over to him but pretending she wasn’t. ‘That Nicole girl, Tommy’s mate. She’s a bit special that one, d’you hear me?’

When Matty didn’t acknowledge him, Declan turned to see him lying on his back, his head resting on a folded blanket and his eyes snapped tightly shut. Declan turned his head again to stare at the party in front of them.

‘Hey, sleepy head, party’s over. Let’s get you home.’

Even as the words tripped from his mouth, Declan knew Matty had left him. For a full minute, he remained as lifeless as his friend, processing the fact that the inevitable had arrived.

Then, gently, he placed Matty’s limp hand into the palm of his own and stared up into the night sky as a fireworks display illuminated them in whites, greens and oranges.

‘I’m not ready,’ Declan whispered. ‘I’m still not ready.’

‘
Stuart
.’

Tommy pronounced such a simple word with such venomous precision, there was no doubt in Jake’s mind his cover was blown. But he didn’t want to admit it.

‘No, that’s not possible,’ Jake muttered, his muscular shoulders dropping by the weight of his shame.

‘It is, Stuart, believe me. I am walking, talking, proof that it is possible.’

Jake took two steps back, and with wide-open eyes, he glared at Tommy, hoping to find something in his friend’s expression that revealed this was some kind of sick prank. But there was nothing but abhorrence etched deeply into Tommy’s face.

‘How did you find out?’

ONE DAY EARLIER – VENICE BEACH

In desperate need of solitude in a city of noise, Tommy slipped José a bag of weed and locked himself in the store cupboard of the hotdog trailer.

The 10 foot by 10 foot room was windowless and reeked of cheap frankfurters, but it was air conditioned, and most importantly, quiet. Tommy felt like someone had used his head as a football, leaving his thoughts jumbled and nonsensical. The dark clouds were rolling in as everything he thought he knew about Jake was in flux.

He removed his iPhone from his pocket and waited for a signal to appear, then he skipped through his photos until he found the one with Jake’s torso tattoos on display. Then, making a mental note of the final coordinates, he typed 52.2189N and 0.9202W into the search engine. He watched carefully as they threw up the location of where Jake’s journey had begun – Hunsbury, Northampton; the place where Tommy’s life changed with the speed of the car that smashed into him; the tarmac graveyard where his brothers were killed and he was left to die; where Stuart Reynolds ceased to exist and the journey of Jake Bellamy began.

A strangely calm Tommy took the memory card he had, until now, refused to view and placed it inside his camcorder. His finger hovered above a button, then he closed his eyes and braced himself before he pressed play.

First came what he’d recorded as their car drove through the streets of Northampton, and goosebumps bubbled across his arms upon hearing the voices of his brothers teasing him about porn websites they knew he secretly surfed. Then came their words of encouragement about finding a job, and Tommy knew what was coming next.

The footage was shaky as his camera had flown around the car upon impact, and then the screen turned black. Tommy sat in silence recalling the smells of broken fluid pipes, the sharpness of glass crunching beneath his legs and the sounds of panicked onlookers outside. He remembered the confusion over what had just happened before he realised Lee and Daniel’s fate.

He hadn’t realised he’d closed his eyes until a noise brought him back to his senses. He thought someone else was in the room, before noticing the camcorder hadn’t stopped recording that day. It must have landed somewhere near to him on the back seat, he thought, and when he’d moved, it had sprung back to life, the autofocus settling on the shattered windscreen.

At first he heard the concerned voices of witnesses in the distance, then slowly, he watched as a figure – a face mainly shadowed by a hoodie – slowly limped past the car.

Tommy rewound the footage and watched it again, and then pressed pause. When he zoomed in, Stuart and Jake’s bloody face filled the screen.

*

TODAY

‘We looked at each other, do you remember?’ continued Tommy. ‘You were running away from the Mini when suddenly you turned around . . . and just for a split second we made eye contact. Then puff, you disappeared, just like that.’

In rare moments when Jake’s subconscious caught him off guard, he recalled the moment that altered the course of his life with such clarity, it was like yesterday. Then in the days that followed as he plotted starting his life anew in a succession of cheap hotel rooms, he’d turn the television off and avoid newspaper pages when confronted by the names and faces of those he killed so as not to risk humanising them.

‘Tommy . . .’ Jake began, his eyes having conceded defeat. But Tommy wasn’t prepared to listen.

‘It was a journalist who tipped us off that the police were looking into you in connection with the crash, but the police refused to confirm it, even after you supposedly died. And I remembered seeing you on TV the morning of the accident; they said you had something to do with the death of that soap star. I mean, I knew who you and your shitty band were anyway, but I’d never really taken much notice of you. Then as hard as they tried, the police couldn’t find any concrete proof it was your fault. Your fingerprints were all over that car so it should have been a no-brainer, but there was never any evidence you were behind the wheel that day. Your manager refused to confirm you’d stolen it; there was no footage of you on CCTV, no blood or DNA on the airbag, and no you. They couldn’t even question you because you’d vanished. And then when they told us it looked like you’d killed yourself, everyone thought it was something to do with that girl dying. The police never named you as a suspect in our crash so you got away with it. But I knew who you were and what you did, and even hearing one of your songs, like the one the girls were dancing to on the Xbox game, made me so angry.’

Jake brushed his hand through his hair and rubbed his cheeks. He’d spent the last few years learning how to organise his thoughts and place those that frightened him to the back of his mind. He’d explored a multitude of religions and belief systems; he’d learned from teachers and seers and read books and pamphlets, all to help him understand how to move forward and turn his back on the reckless stupidity of his actions. His ribs were inked with the coordinates of every location he’d seen, to remind him of how far he had travelled both physically and spiritually. And just when he’d forgiven himself for his actions and found the peace he craved, his past and his present were colliding with the speed of a runaway freight train.

‘I was obsessed with you at first,’ Tommy continued. ‘I must have surfed a thousand pictures of your face to try and work out if it was you I saw while I was trapped in the back of the car and I could never be 100 per cent sure. But my gut instinct was that it
was
you. I hated you . . . in fact hated is probably too much of an understatement. But your suicide, well, that made the pain ease a little – not much, mind – but eventually it was just about enough to help me crawl out of my hole and start trying to live my life again. Only now I find out you’re not just alive but that you and I have . . . that we’ve . . . shit, I can’t even say it . . . now you’ve made me hate both of us, not just you.’

Jake swallowed hard, his arms and legs trembling with Tommy’s every word. Eventually, when he thought Tommy was ready to listen, he spoke.

‘I’m sorry, Tommy, I’m so, so sorry,’ he began. ‘I need you to understand, I was a different person then; I was so fucked up – I’d lost everything I’d ever worked for. I was at such a low point and I wasn’t thinking straight, and when that accident happened, I panicked and I didn’t know what to do.’

‘So what you chose to do was to run away. You killed my brothers and then you ran away.’

‘People on the street were coming to help you, I saw them, that’s why I left. There was nothing I could do.’

‘But you didn’t know that for certain, did you, Stuart?’

Jake’s lips parted and he wanted to defend his actions but he knew he couldn’t.

‘That’s what I thought,’ continued Tommy, before raising his fist and catching Jake clean on the jaw.

Savannah dreamed she was floating somewhere between the bed in her new home and the ceiling above her.

She felt her body drift through the door and turn mid-air above the landing and gradually descend the stairs. But when she felt two arms supporting her back and legs, she understood she wasn’t floating, she was being carried.

She opened her eyes but the walls surrounding her swirled like water slipping down a plughole. Her lips and throat felt parched and when she tried to speak, she could only hear herself mumble. Instantly she likened the feeling to when she stumbled out of the club and into the path of Peyk’s car and a new terror began to rip through her. But her body was too sedated to spring back into life.

Savannah was lugged across the hallway and paused when she reached the lounge. Through her misty eyes, she thought she saw Jane, sitting on a wooden chair with something covering the smile Savannah had found so kindly. Something wasn’t right, and when her eyes slowly began to focus, she quickly realised Jane’s mouth had been gagged and her arms and feet bound to the wicker chair legs.

Scared, Savannah desperately wanted to kick and punch the person carrying her, but her limbs barely twitched. However, it was enough to make the person whose arms held her notice the dead weight he was lifting was reviving.

‘It’s okay, Savvy, I’m gonna get you out of here,’ a male voice whispered. Savannah’s tired eyes slowly widened. She looked down at his strong, bare, brown arms and then up towards his face.

‘Michael?’ she mouthed, and felt the familiar warmth of his breath as he carried her out the front door, down the path and towards his station wagon that had been parked out of view for much of the day.

Jake staggered backwards and clutched the jaw Tommy had just whacked.

Tommy clasped his fist with his other hand, in obvious pain but trying hard to disguise it. Jake began to pace up and down, hoping the movement would jolt his thoughts back into a normal running order.

‘What happened, happened, and there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by where I haven’t prayed to God it hadn’t,’ Jake offered, his palm still clenched to his face. ‘You don’t know how bad I feel.’