‘What?’ I say.
‘Can’t you see it?’
I shake my head. ‘See what?’
‘The resemblance. She’s the spitting image of you when we met.’
There’s a vague similarity; the hair is certainly very alike and our mouths have a similar shape but her eyes are prettier than mine and her cheekbones higher.
‘Interesting that you should say that, Mr Jackson,’ Mrs Matthews reaches for the photograph and tucks it back in the paper wallet in front of her.
‘Why? Who is she?’
She leans her weight on her forearms and looks me straight in the eye. ‘The prostitute James Evans murdered twenty years ago.’
I stare at her in disbelief. ‘What?’
‘My God.’ Brian reaches a reassuring arm around my back and I wince as his hand makes contact with my shoulder. My arm’s been in plaster for seventy-two hours but I’ve already taken a week’s worth of painkillers. ‘You said he was dangerous and I didn’t believe—’
‘James murdered someone?’ I can’t stop staring at the paper wallet in front of the lawyer. What else is in it? A photocopy of the card he enclosed with the booties? Shots of Charlotte’s blood-splattered room? A photo of the severed artery in his leg? ‘When? Who was she?’
She flicks open the notebook that’s lying beside the wallet. ‘Sarah Jane Thompson. The autopsy states the date of her death as 2 October 1992.’
‘That’s three weeks after I left him.’
‘Yes,’ she looks down at her notes. ‘The police say they tried to contact you but no one knew where you were and there were a lot of Susan Maslins on the electoral register. The search was stopped after a few weeks and they went to trial anyway. Evans pleaded not guilty but the police had enough evidence to convict. Apparently he spent a while looking for a prostitute who fitted his precise requirements,’ she looks back up at me, ‘someone who looks like you it seems.’
‘But he got out.’ I shake my head. ‘How can that happen? How can he murder someone then be set free twenty years later to come after me? How is that even possible?’
She shakes her head. ‘He served his time and fulfilled the conditions of his release by reporting to his parole officer once a week. He even had a job,’ she checks her diary again, ‘working in a nightclub in Chelsea. Greys. Apparently he was very popular, particularly amongst the VIPs.’
‘Keisha!’ I say. ‘How is she?’
A dog walker found her naked body, bloodied, beaten and barely recognizable, in woodland near Devil’s Dyke. She hasn’t been able to tell the police much but what she did manage helped fill in the missing pieces of what had happened.
James found out that I was married to Brian and living in Brighton by searching Google – it was that easy. Once he had my new surname and the town where I lived it was easy for him to track down the Facebook profile Charlotte forced me to create a year ago to prove I ‘wasn’t living in the dark ages’. I hadn’t looked at the thing in months so wasn’t surprised when the police told me that my security settings were so poor James had access to all of my updates, photos and, worst of all, a link to my daughter’s page. Her page was as public as mine and when he read that Breeze was her favourite club it was the link he needed to wheedle his way into her life. He already knew Keisha, he’d been one of her clients when she was sleeping with the footballers and rock stars that frequented Greys and she’d liked him enough to tell him she was leaving London because she’d met a great guy in Brighton who managed a club called Breeze. He visited the club on the pretense of being Keisha’s friend but, when he spotted Charlotte and Ella, and Keisha told him that Ella had a crush on her boyfriend he’d made his move – he told Keisha that unless she introduced him to them and kept her mouth shut he’d tell Danny about her past. She thought that was it, and it was for a while as James got to know Charlotte better and lent her his spare room so she and Liam could lose their virginity to each other. She had no idea that James would use that most intimate of moments to blackmail her.
‘Keisha’s not great,’ Mrs Matthews closes her notebook, ‘but she’s stable. Twenty-four hours longer and she wouldn’t have made it.’
‘My God.’ I press my hands to my forearms but my warm palms do little to flatten the goosebumps that have appeared on my skin.
‘We need to go and see her,’ I look at Brian. ‘If she hadn’t told me what she did. If she hadn’t told me—’
‘Sssh.’ He pulls me towards him again, but his time I don’t complain at the pain in my shoulder.
‘When will the recording be destroyed?’ he asks the lawyer, his tone hushed. ‘If Charlotte wakes up we want to be able to tell her that it’s gone.’
‘When?’ I say. Yesterday her eyelids fluttered when I told her there was no need to be scared of ‘Mike’ anymore. The doctors say I mustn’t read anything into it, not when she’d just come out of an operation to reset her nose and little finger, but I know it’s a sign. She’s trying to come back to us. She’s fighting harder now she knows it’s safe.
‘Recording?’ The lawyer frowns at Brian. ‘The sex tape, you mean?’
He cringes at the description. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid the police will have to hang on to it as evidence. Evans was threatening to send it to the papers and post it on the internet. If he’d done that he’d have done more than tarnish Charlotte’s reputation,’ she looks at Brian, ‘he’d have destroyed your career too.’