‘How can I be sure? I have no idea who you are. You’re a stranger.’
‘As are you, but we all change, Catherine. All of us change.’
‘But we don’t all change into murderers and kill our friends!’
He couldn’t disagree. ‘Come back downstairs and let’s talk.’
‘About what? There’s nothing you can say that can justify what you did.’
‘And I’m not going to try to. What’s done is done and I won’t take anything back. I’ve come a long way to see you, Catherine. Please.’
She paused and heard him walk slowly down the stairs. She took a few deep breaths and then splashed cold water across her face. She patted herself dry with a hand towel and was surprised by her reflection in the mirror. An old woman stared at her. In the time he’d been in her house, she’d been thirty-three again. Now she was every inch her fifty-eight years.
She cleaned up the mess on the bathroom floor, then disregarded common sense and unlocked the door. As she made her way to the landing, she resolved that, if she was going to die at his hands, she was going to put up a bloody good fight first.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SIMON
Colorado, USA, twenty-three years earlier
2 May
The faces of the others I’d killed hadn’t haunted me like Paula’s.
Again and again, I recalled the warmth of her soft cheeks and her hair as it brushed against the back of my fingers. I remembered thinking how surprisingly light she felt when I threw her body into the road.
I could still hear the bursting of her skin and bones as the van crushed her. I still felt the adrenaline soaring through my blood as I ran back to my hotel to grab my backpack and then vanished into the night.
But when my foot pressed hard on Betty’s accelerator and Key West faded behind me, all I saw was my imaginary passenger Paula’s face in the rear-view mirror.
Over the next three months, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado all flashed past like a wheel of photos in a red plastic View-Master. The majority of my time was spent on the road manipulating fellow runaways into helping fill my hours – new groups of friends for the days and women for the nights. And when female volunteers were sparse, I’d seek out those who required payment by the hour.
Bony or Rubenesque, dark-chocolate complexions or as pale as death – appearances never mattered when I knelt behind them as they balanced on their hands and knees. And if they could provide the chemical stimulants I’d grown to enjoy since my first time with the two girls in Miami, then even better.
I offered transportation to anyone who needed to be somewhere else, even to a state hundreds of miles from the route I’d intended. I did anything to avoid being ensnared by myself, because that’s when I dissected my actions.
I didn’t doubt for a moment that killing Paula had been the right thing to do. In fact, I was still galled by her for backing me into a corner. Paula had had a choice; I hadn’t. By following me, she’d made the wrong one. I had made the correct one.
I’d gone to great pains to keep my past and present separate. And when she’d demanded reasons, I could predict the chain of events that would’ve followed my allowing her to walk away. She’d have hurried back to the hotel to inform Roger his departed friend was actually thriving under the Floridian sun. Then, on their return to England, he’d have felt duty-bound to tell Catherine that she’d been abandoned, not widowed. While I was missing, there was doubt and an assumption of death. With confirmation came certainty and I did not want to be thought of in either a negative or positive light.
Paula had paid the price of interfering with what was meant to be. And I was not responsible for that.
Utah, USA
20 July
I removed my belongings from my backpack and spread them out in a semicircle across the saline terrain. I built two heaps – the ‘keep’ pile and the ‘toss’ pile. The first contained essentials such as clothing, maps, Darren’s passport, and money.
The second pile was for items I wouldn’t need or use again, such as the telephone numbers of people I’d already forgotten. Souvenirs only served to remind me of experiences I’d already had. It was what was to come that interested me. And if I wanted to travel light, sentiment would only weigh me down.
I placed a faded denim shirt between the piles, repacked my backpack and stored it behind a nearby boulder. My discarded items were consigned to Betty’s trunk. I cut through the denim shirtsleeve, then unscrewed the petrol cap and carefully fed it inch by inch into the hole.
Betty had been the perfect travelling companion for six thousand miles, but her time had reached an end. Her rear axle throbbed over the feeblest of bumps. She required a thirty-minute rest after every three hours of travel, or steam would burst from her radiator like Old Faithful.
I chose the Bonneville Salt Flats as her final resting place. Its fifty square miles of empty, horizontal earth was so flat and brilliantly white, it was like God had run out of time when creating the world and thrown his paint pots down in frustration. Betty could make her mark there.
I pulled a cigarette lighter from my jeans, and after several flicks of its flint, the shirt’s cuff caught light. I stepped back and stared hard into her windows, desperate to find the memories of those I’d been forced to sacrifice, slowly cremating in the flames inside the car. But the only thing to burn was my reflection.
I lit a cigarette, walked away from Betty and awaited a climactic explosion. Instead of a giant fireball came a belly rumble. Flames slowly lapped from under her doors and scorched her windows. One by one, her tyres burst, then her windows popped and shattered.
‘You okay there, sir?’ a man shouted from inside his truck as he pulled over to the side of the road. ‘What happened to your wagon?’
‘She overheated and caught fire.’
‘Shit, man. You’re lucky you got clear, I guess. Can I give you a ride?’
‘That would be great.’
‘Where to? The nearest town?’
‘Anywhere you’re headed, actually. There’s nothing to salvage here and I can’t afford to pay to deal with it.’
The man considered Betty’s blazing remains, then looked me up and down, as if asking what kind of person wasn’t more bothered that their only mode of transport had just gone up in flames. Then he shrugged. ‘I’m heading to Nevada. That okay?’
I accepted his offer, and as we drove off into the distance, I watched through the wing mirror as my girl smouldered, then bid farewell by finally exploding into the sky like a comet.
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-three years earlier
17 July
‘I’m retiring, Catherine,’ began Margaret. I nearly spat my tea across the kitchen table.
‘Jim and I are moving to Spain,’ she continued, oblivious to my dismay. ‘We’ve bought a nice little villa on the coast in Andalusia. I plan to start scaling down next summer, and all being well, we should be there by New Year.’