Touched (16 page)

He didn’t ask her. Instead he tried to concentrate on revising his CV.

His mobile rang making him jump. He picked it up and looked at the display; it was Jenny. He hesitated – then pressed ‘accept’.

‘Hi Jen, you OK?’ he said, keeping his voice soft so as not to disturb the TV so much, again thinking how considerate he was being to his imagination.

‘Yes, I’m fine. Where are you?’

‘I’m just at home. Why?’

‘Oh nothing. I just thought…well…am I disturbing something?’

Only my mental breakdown, he thought.

‘No, not at all,’ he said, his voice still hushed.

‘Are you with somebody?’ It was more of an accusation than a question. ‘Why are you keeping your voice down?’

He struggled to come up with something to explain it. ‘
Er…’ he began.

‘You ARE with someone! Well, OK, I guess I’ll call you sometime. Bye.’

She abruptly rang off leaving Dan looking incredulously at his mobile, trying to work out what had just happened.

‘Was that your girlfriend?’

‘No. Well she’s not my girlfriend. She’s a friend of a friend at work that’s all.’

‘Oh.’

‘Well, OK, I did go and see a film with her last night though.’

Now he was being defensive. This was getting worse!

‘Oh,’ said Tess, ‘I wondered where you were.’

Dan looked up from his lap top. This was getting creepy now.

‘Have you been spying on me?’

‘No…I was just…’

‘Just what?’

Her answer was not what he expected.

‘I was just…lonely,’ she gave a little apologetic shrug..

Dan put his head in his hands. This was just getting stranger, not easier but harder and harder to understand. And he was just sat here accepting it all! That in itself had to be insane. Well enough was enough, he had to sort out what was going on rather than just so willingly either accepting his own insanity or accepting that that she was a stalking head case and nit throwing her out and calling the police like he should have done.

There was no easy way, he just had to grasp the nettle.

‘Tess,’ he said, ‘How did you get in here?’

He expected either a long pause or some long winded explanation. Instead she answered immediately and succinctly:

‘You let me in.’ Her voice was quiet but firm.

‘I did?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

This time there was a long pause, so long that Dan wondered if she was ever going to answer.

‘The other night?’ she said at last.

He noticed that this wasn't a statement; there was a definite lift at the end of the word. She had been asking a question. But he couldn't get away from the actual words. The other night. Of course. The night that he had brought her back here. It explained nothing but instead it begged the obvious question which he had to ask.

‘If that really is the case, Tess, then where have you been since then?’ He was surprised at how angry he was, and how easily and quickly the anger came out in his voice.

But then he was also surprised by her reaction; Tess got to her feet and went over to the window, staring out into the now gathering gloom. Again it took her a long time to answer but Dan, despite his anger, waited patiently.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, her voice barely audible. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I’m here, sometimes…I just don’t know. Sometimes I’ve been here and I’ve talked to you but you’ve just ignored me.’

She turned, tears were now rolling down her cheeks.

‘I don’t know what’s happened to me Dan. Since I was attacked I have blanks in my life. Huge ones. And people ignore me. I speak to them and they ignore me. I’m so scared, Dan, so scared.’

Dan found his anger had gone. He walked across to her, not caring about finding out more, he just wanted to put his arms around her. However, Tess though looked alarmed and held her hands up in front of herself defensively.

‘No!’ she said sharply, ‘No you can’t. Please, I don’t know why but please don’t touch me.’

Dan stopped.

‘I only wanted to give you a hug,’ he said. ‘I really think you need one.’

She nodded. ‘I think I do. I just know I can’t let you. I just don’t know why I know.’ She wiped her tears away, ‘I’m OK, really. This is stupid. I never cry. That's for softies. I don't know why my eyes have got so damned leaky!’

She gave Dan a weak smile.

‘OK,’ he said gently, ‘Come and sit down again, where you were,’ he nodded at the settee, ‘and I’ll go back to where I was when you came in. Please.’

She nodded and they both went and sat down, Tess wiping the last of her tears away.

‘I feel so silly,’ she said, ‘I was never one for crying. I was always the one in control, always the one that everyone came to when they needed a shoulder to cry on. Now look at me! Pathetic.’

‘You’re not pathetic. I can understand you being upset under the circumstances.’

Tess looked up quickly.

‘Why? What circumstances? What do you know?’

Dan was stumped. What could he say? What was safe or right? Was it safe for him to tell his imagination that she was just that?

But what if it wasn’t that? What if she was something else?

No. No Dan, those things don’t exist.

But who was she?

What was she?

She read the discomfort and confusion in his face and her eyes filled with tears again.

‘Please explain this to me. Please? Explain it how I can’t remember touching anyone since I was attacked. No one at all. I have not had any human contact since. How can that be? How?’

Dan stayed silent. He just couldn’t think what to say.

‘Wait,’ she said, clearly remembering something, ‘I
have
touched someone. I think I touched you the other night.’

‘Me?’ said Dan, ‘You touched me?’

She nodded, looking slightly guilty.

‘I kissed you. You talked to me and you were nice and…I kissed you when you fell asleep. Sorry, that was a bit wrong of me.’

Dan brought his fingers to his lips. He remembered…something.

‘I kissed you,’ she went on. She was frowning now. ‘I kissed you and then…another blank. And the next thing I knew, it was suddenly daytime and you were gone.’ She put her head in her hands, ‘Oh Dan, what’s happening to me? What
happened
to me?’

Dan took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. What could he say to her?

He opened his eyes and put his glasses back on.

Tess had gone.

Chapter Eleven

Tuesday Night

Dan sat on the settee for a full ten minutes before moving. He found that he was shaking.

Then he decided that, tonight of all nights, that a whisky would be justified.

Once he had poured it he sat down again, sipping it slowly, trying to sort out his thoughts. Was this it then, was this insanity? Was this how it felt?

Should he call someone? Probably. Was he going to? No, the prospect of admitting to going crazy was not a welcome one. Mental illness. Not something that looked great on a CV. What would they do, would they commit him?

He wasn't exactly sure what she was but that was one thing he was absolutely sure about; Dan didn’t want to be committed. Sure, he obviously needed help but that was far too drastic a step. Wasn't it?  He had had an uncle who was sectioned, then committed. It took him years to get free of it, to convince the authorities that he safe. His uncle had never really got over it. He had previously held down a directorship at an engineering works but afterwards no one would give him a job, even a chance of a job. He ended his days as a gardener, literally scraping a living.

Dan didn't want to risk that; the stigma of mental illness was too strong. After all, he was functioning wasn’t he?

He laughed.

Yeah he was functioning. He was functioning so well he was seeing dead girls.

No not seeing. Not just seeing;
talking
to dead girls. More than that in fact, having a two way conversations with them.

Well not
them
. Just one.

Just one. Well that made it all right then, didn’t it?

She was in his head. She had to be, didn’t she? Well what was the alternative? A ghost? Dan didn’t believe in ghosts or anything like that.

But he did believe in Tess. She seemed so real. Tess was more real than almost anyone in his life at the moment.

He laughed out loud at that thought but then, abruptly stopped. Laughing out loud at thoughts would definitely get him committed.

But she was so real.

He stared at the spot where she had been sitting. He thought about what she had said, about the blanks, about being ignored, about being scared.

Feeling only slightly self-conscious he said; ‘Tess, I can’t see or hear you but…if you’re there I’m here for you.’

Yes, he thought, that was better. Now he was talking to imaginary girls who weren’t there too.

So what to do? He decided that maybe he could go and talk to someone if this kept happening. Nothing could be done now. The best thing was to carry on as normal and just accept whatever his mind served up for him. He needed to occupy himself, not brood. The best thing was to get on with things, like his application.

He gave it his best shot over the next ten minutes but he knew it was no good. He just couldn’t concentrate on it.

He found himself back on Google, running the same search as he had run the previous night but this time delving deeper, reading around, reading the other articles published at the time of the murder and the follow-up ones published over the next few weeks and months.

He learned a lot.

He learned that the murder was particularly shocking. Tess was a respected professional, a young solicitor with a very bright future. She also seemed to be genuinely nice; OK when someone died, even if they were the world’s biggest bastard people found something nice to say about them because that was the
done thing but the outpouring of grief and shock seemed totally genuine; Tess didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world. Her friends, work colleagues and family were in shock both straight after the murder and long afterwards. The story was long lasting, there were a number of follow-up articles in the local papers, at least one of which had been taken up by the nationals. Dan now had a vague memory of it; it was about the time when he was still in London doing agency work and hating every moment of it. He was surprised anything had stuck; he wasn’t really interested in anything at the time.

It was also shocking how little progress had been made in finding the killer. Tess had been killed in her own flat only minutes after coming off a long call with her sister. There was no sign of a forced entry, no fingerprints, no murder weapon, no DNA left at the scene. There was speculation that Tess had known her killer and had let him (or her) in but Tess’s family had been adamant that she wouldn’t have done that once she was settled down for the evening.

The police seemed to think that this was a stranger killer preying on young women and issued a warning to those living on their own to keep a chain on the door and not to let anyone in they were not absolutely sure about. There was even some lurid press speculation about the existence of a ‘Salford Ripper’ that linked some violent and unsolved attacks in with Tess’s murder that had occurred in and around the Quays over recent years.

To Dan’s admittedly unprofessional eyes the links looked very tenuous and the other attacks very dissimilar to the attack on Tess – indeed they all looked to be different from each other, the only common thread was that women were always the victims.

The last article he read solved another mystery and saddened Dan more than any other: It was a follow-up article on Tess’s family that was dated in February, some two months ago. It reported the death of Jill Johnson from cancer. She had been in remission after chemotherapy that had been carried out some five years before but then the disease had returned suddenly and more virulently and had killed her in just a few brief, painful weeks. Her daughter said that she had no fight left in her when the cancer came back.

Her only surviving daughter, Annie. Tess’s sister, for Jill Johnson was her mother, divorced and remarried, hence the change in name. The newspaper article was sympathetic and considerate but ended with a simple statement that Dan felt must be true; ‘Sadly, it seems that the Quay’s killer has claimed a second victim’.

Jill Johnson, The estate of the late J Johnson, the name on the probate forms.

It was as he sat back from this article that he glanced at the time. He had spent over an hour on the search and he hadn’t even touched his whisky.

He needed a sip now though.

He mulled over what he had found out. Had he got any further? Well he did no more, things that he hadn’t known before. That had to suggest that he wasn’t going mad.