Can't Let Go Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Acknowledgements

  CAN'T

  LET GO

  Also by Jane Hill

  The Murder Ballad

  Grievous Angel

  CAN'T

  LET GO

  JANE HILL

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781407006031

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by William Heinemann, 2008

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Jane Hill, 2008

  Jane Hill has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

  William Heinemann

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:

  www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781407006031

  Version 1.0

  Prologue

  When I was eighteen I killed a man and got away with it.

  I've never said those words out loud. I hoped I'd never have to. But now the time has come. The axe has finally fallen. And very soon I will have to say them to you.

  I'm sitting on a bench in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, waiting for you to make everything okay. It's early in the morning on a chilly late-August day. From time to time there's a hint of drizzle in the grey sky. My jacket, my favourite green velvet jacket, the one I've been wearing all night, is not designed for weather like this. I pull it tighter around me and do up the silver buttons.

  Edinburgh's old town looms above me like an illustration from an old-fashioned book of fairy tales, from an era when it was acceptable to terrify children. Tall, crooked, pointed grey buildings huddle around the giant's castle. It's a city from a nightmare: a city of ghosts and goblins and witches, of dark alleys and whispers and hauntings. Looking up at it makes me dizzy. I feel I might fly away on a broomstick or on the wings of a bat.

  I must look like a zombie. Maybe I'm about to reach a place beyond fear. I had almost no sleep last night. I spent the night running and hiding: running and hiding from shadows, from shapes; running and hiding from someone unknown who plans to kill me. This morning I have been creeping around the city looking for a quiet place to sit and think, and hide. And now I'm hiding in plain sight, sitting here with my phone in my hand, plucking up the courage to call you; waiting for you to make everything okay.

  But you won't be able to make everything okay. Nothing can ever be okay again because today I have to say these words to you: when I was eighteen I killed a man and got away with it.

  I look at my phone. I look at your name and your number on the screen. I look at your name and I feel a warm rush of love when I think of our friendship and everything it's meant to me. I never intended to get involved with anyone. Bad things happen to the people I love. And very soon our friendship will be over too: there's no way you'll be able to go on caring for me (and you do care for me, I know you do) after what I have to tell you.

  Just before I call you, before I tell you my awful secret, while I'm still sitting here in the stasis of this pre-confession moment, I reach into the deep back pocket of my jeans. I pull out the piece of paper I've been carrying since last night. My hand trembles as I straighten out the creases. There's blood on the paper, blood from my fingers. I read it over again to myself.

  'You murdering bitch,' it says. 'Now you know what it feels like.'

  One

  There he was again, my own personal ghost. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. My own personal ghost, sitting at a table in a motorway service station, drinking coffee. He was there, somewhere over to my left and a little in front of me. If I had turned to look at him full on he would probably have disappeared as if he'd never been there. But that night I didn't want to risk it. I didn't want to look. I knew he was sitting there, his hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, grinning at me with that familiar twinkle in his eye. My own personal ghost: the man I killed. It wasn't the first time I'd seen him. I knew that it wouldn't be the last.

  Leicester Forest East Services was a strange place to see a ghost. It's one of those old-style motorway services, built into a bridge over the Mr. You need to remember where you are and where you're going at Leicester Forest East, because if you were to lose your sense of direction and come down the wrong staircase, you could work yourself into a panic searching the wrong car park in vain, looking for your car amongst the northbound vehicles when in fact it was right across the motorway in the southbound section. Leicester Forest East has a Burger King, a K F C and a Coffee Primo, but late at night – the time I sometimes found myself there – the only food available was from the hot counter at one end of the restaurant. There was usually one greyish coiled Cumberland sausage sitting alone on a stainless-steel platter under a heat lamp, and maybe the remains of a chicken curry and a single pepperoni pizza.

  I was on my way home from a weekend at my sister's ho
use, theoretically to mark the fact that I had turned thirty-five a couple of days earlier. My sister Sarah was four years older than me and I loved her house and the way she lived. Maybe I was envious. She lived in Sheffield, miles further north than anyone else in our family had ever ventured. She owned a Victorian redbrick three-bedroom terraced house with stripped floorboards and original fireplaces. She had a cluttered kitchen with photos and postcards attached to the fridge door with magnets. Every time anyone opened the fridge another photo would flutter to the floor. The house was at the top of a steep hill. From the front windows, if you peered hard enough, you could catch a glimpse of the Peak District in the distance. At the back, the house overlooked dramatic grey industrial chimneys and the MI. Sarah lived there with her bright, charming teenagers Josh and Katie. Her husband left her six years ago for another woman. Or maybe Sarah threw him out when she discovered he was cheating – the story would vary with the number of glasses of wine she drank. Either way, she was doing fine without him.

  I had arrived late on the Friday evening and we cheek kissed on the doorstep. Then I looked at her to see what was different this time. Sarah always had something new about her appearance every time I saw her, probably because I only saw her a couple of times a year. She would be a few pounds lighter, or have a different fringe or a new way of doing her make-up. This time, it was the colour of her hair – blonde and golden streaks lifting the light brown. 'You look great,' I said, like I always say.

  She laughed. 'And you look . . . the same.' She always said that too and she was always right. I had found my look, my unnoticeable, blend-into-a-crowd style, and I was planning to stick with it.

  Later we sat out on her tiny patio drinking cold cava, enjoying the sudden warm spell, watching the sky darken and the lights of the lorries on the motorway. We talked about family stuff: how our parents were enjoying their retirement and whether our younger sister Jem would ever grow up and stop getting tattoos. We talked about Sarah's kids – Katie choosing her GCSE subjects, Josh applying for university. The next morning we all went shopping at Meadowhall, then stopped for a K F C on the way home. That evening Josh stoked up the barbecue in the back garden and we ate burnt sausages and big bowls of salad. It was fun. Until it wasn't.

  Saturday night. I was on the road and it was only Saturday night. I had been planning to stay at Sarah's until Sunday afternoon. But it was still only Saturday night and I was on my way home. I walked away. That was what I did, a lot. I would walk away, especially from my family.

  It wasn't because of arguments or disagreements or anything like that. There would just come a moment when things got on top of me, when the conversation danced too close to subjects I didn't want to talk about, and I felt the need to disentangle myself before it all got too deep. In this case? We were all sitting around in the garden when my sister said to Josh, 'You should ask Aunt Lizzie all about her gap year.'

  Sarah still called me Lizzie. She and her kids were pretty much the only people who did. She was married and had left home by the time I got back from my summer in America aged eighteen and announced that my name was now Beth.

  'I didn't have a gap year,' I said, hoping I sounded spiky enough to warn her off the subject.

  'Yes, you did. You went to San Francisco.' It had always rankled with her that her own godmother had invited me, not Sarah, to stay with her in California.

  'I only went for the summer. It wasn't a gap year.'

  Sarah made a noise with her lips, a kind of raspberry, as if to say 'whatever'. Then she said to Josh, 'Your Aunt Lizzie went off to San Francisco after she left school, and she came back all grown-up.'

  For that was the family myth. Of course I couldn't have told her, I had never been able to tell her, what had really happened: why it was that I went to California as a loud, flirty, flamboyant, full-of-myself teenager called Lizzie and returned home as a sombre, quiet woman called Beth.

  Josh wanted to know more, so I walked away. I could feel the mood come over me. I knew it so well. I got itchy. I would feel it in my extremities. I would feel myself wanting to scream, to let it all out. Not straight away, because then it would be obvious, but a little later, during a lull in the conversation, I said: 'Listen, Saz . . .'

  'Lizzie, don't . . .'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You're going to do it, what you always do. You're going to say something like, "Look, the thing is, I need to get back. I've got loads of marking to d o . " '

  'I have.' Marking: it was such a useful excuse.

  Everyone knew that teachers had marking, and it sounded so dull that they never asked any more questions, and then I didn't have to go into details and get caught out in a lie.

  'Well, piss off, then.' Sarah made a joke of it but I could tell she was upset.

  She gave me a hug on the doorstep. 'You're weird,' she said.

  'I know. Sorry.' I hated myself for leaving.

  And so there I was, sitting at a table facing north up the Mi. I was watching the white lights of the southbound carriageway and the red lights of the northbound one until they became a blurry abstract pattern. I was picking at the chewy pepperoni slices and stringy cheese from my pizza. I was drinking a can of Red Bull and I was trying to pretend that I was somewhere – anywhere – else. That was when I saw him.

  He wasn't there and then suddenly he was, as solid and stocky and dark and vivid as he ever had been when he was alive. He was sitting in the smoking section, just under the big screen showing BBC News 24. From what I could see, looking obliquely at him out of the corner of my left eye, his chin was resting on the knuckles of his right hand, and he was looking straight at me, a half-smile on his face. I could feel his gaze. I knew that the little dimple to the right of his mouth was twitching, the way it used to do when he thought that he knew what I was thinking. Rivers Carillo, the man I killed. Why wouldn't he just leave me alone?

  I ignored him, as much as it was possible to ignore him. I tried to concentrate on my pizza, picking off the pepperoni with my right hand, my left hand held up to my temple to cut off my view of Rivers Carillo. In a moment I would try doing what usually worked for me. I would start counting. I would count to four, eight, sixteen, maybe as high as sixty-four – and then I would turn suddenly, to face him full on. And he wouldn't be there. He'd disappear. His image would break up and I'd know that it had been nothing, just my imagination, just the ghost of an idea disturbing my vision.

  Deep breath, start counting. And then, hands firmly poised on the edge of my table, a sudden turn of my head in his direction – to face him, to make him disappear.

  But he didn't.

  He was still there; still sitting there with his coffee, solid and dark and smiling. And he winked at me.

  My chair clattered and fell over. A table slammed into my right hip as I raced out of the food court. I nearly lost my footing as I ran down the stairs. I made it out to the car park, breathless and scared. I didn't dare look behind me. I found my car, pressed the key fob and heard the comforting beep as it unlocked the door. As I got into the driver's seat I automatically checked the back seat. I didn't even know what I was looking for – a bomb; a booby trap; a bloody horse's head, perhaps – or maybe for the now adult offspring of the man I had killed, brought up by their grief-crazed mother to exact bloody revenge on me, and lurking in the back of my car with a jagged-edged hunting knife in their teeth. But there was nothing there. Of course there wasn't. There never was.

  I put the key into the ignition and tried to start the car. It didn't work. The steering wheel was locked, from where I had made a sharp left to get into the parking space.

  I could feel my palms sweating as I rocked the wheel to try to release it.

  The knock on my window made me jump so much that my chest hurt. Trying hard to control my breathing, I turned to my right. There was a face at the window, a pleasant, solid-looking face surrounded by dark curly hair, a face I had never seen before. No. A face I had seen before, drinking a cup of coffee up
stairs. I felt very stupid: this was the man I had run away from. He made a gesture to tell me to wind down my window, and I did. 'You left your bag, duck,' he said in a soft northern accent, and he held up the carrier bag that contained the bottle of water and bag of wine gums that I had bought earlier at the motorway services shop. I must have left it behind when I ran out of the café.

  I took it from him, and managed to thank him.

  'Are you all right, love? You ran off a bit sudden, like.'

  'I'm fine. Thanks.'

  'It wasn't because I winked at you, was it? I'm sorry about that, duck. You looked a bit worried and I wanted to reassure you, like. You know, because we were the only customers there. I winked at you to let you know I was all right, that I wasn't a perve or anything to worry about.'

  'It's okay. Don't worry about it. I just thought you were somebody I knew. Thanks for bringing me my bag.'

  He gave me a thumbs-up. I wound up the window, managed to get my car started, and pulled out of the space so quickly that he had to step back sharply to avoid being knocked over. My tyres squealed on the tarmac and I ground my gears as I headed back towards the MI, berating myself as I drove. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  I thought you were somebody I knew. I thought you were somebody I killed. I thought you were the ghost that I keep seeing. I thought you were Rivers Carillo.

  I drove down the MI in a daze, my heart still beating hard. I told myself it was the caffeine from the Red Bull.

  Why had I been so scared of a normal, friendly bloke sitting quietly and drinking a cup of coffee? Why had I thought that he was my ghost? It was a trick of the light. I was tired. I'd had the southbound headlights flickering in my eyes. It was my brain playing games with me, sending me false messages.

  I had seen him so many times before, you see, the ghost of Rivers Carillo, when I was tired or stressed or hormonal, or visiting a strange place. Sometimes I would see him in the crowd at a parents' evening, or in the corner of a busy pub, just sitting there, somewhere near the back, a smirk on his face that said: Go on, then – pretend you haven't seen me. Always, I would glimpse him out of the corner of my eye and always, always, he would disappear as soon as I turned to look at him. Sometimes seeing Rivers Carillo would presage a migraine, and then I would wonder if there was a scientific explanation, if I could explain him away as a mere visual disturbance, the kind you were supposed to get just before you have one of those appalling sick headaches. But I didn't let him bother me. Not much, anyway. I had come to the conclusion that he was never going to stop haunting me. Seventeen years he'd been at it. Why would he stop now?

 
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