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  THE LIFE I LEFT BEHIND

  Six years ago Melody Pieterson was attacked and left for dead. She coped by locking away her memories, burying herself. The man responsible was caught and convicted. Even his release from jail won’t derail her new life. She’s a survivor after all. Then the body of another woman is discovered in identical circumstances. Like Melody, she has blond hair and green eyes. Like Melody she is found holding a gold bird cage chain.

  Her name is Eve Elliot.

  The women were strangers, so Melody thinks. But Eve knew all about Melody’s life. She’d been talking to her friends, she knew their secrets. She knew the man who attacked them had never been caught.

  Eve has left behind her story, the clues that will force Melody to confront her own lies and the lies she’s been told.

  The clues that will put her life in danger all over again.

  Copyright © 2015 Colette McBeth

  The right of Colette McBeth to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an eBook by Headline Publishing Group in 2015

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 0600 8

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Liz and Danny,

  with love.

  Contents

  Cover

  About THE LIFE I LEFT BEHIND

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  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

  Part Three

  Acknowledgements

  About Colette McBeth

  Also by Colette McBeth

  Praise for Colette McBeth

  Sit. Feast on your life.

  ‘Love After Love’, Derek Walcott

  Prologue

  October 1987

  THE FIRST THING that strikes him is the cold. When he comes in from the garden he’s always greeted by a hot blast at the door, like running into a band of warm cotton wool. Except today there’s no cotton wool. This is his first disappointment. Outside. Inside. If there is a change in temperature between the two it’s so minuscule it doesn’t register. It’s certainly not enough to thaw his fingers, which are the pink of raw meat. He inhales. Has he missed lunch? The kitchen clock tells him he has. It’s gone three. What he fancies is some of his mum’s chicken soup, with a hunk of the bread they baked together yesterday. He’d spread butter on it so thick he’d see teeth marks when he bites into it. Or a crispy pancake. He’s fond of those too but he doesn’t fancy his chances. ‘If you eat that rubbish you won’t grow tall like your dad,’ she says, to which he always gives the same reply: ‘Fine by me,’ because really, he’d rather not be anything like his dad.

  As it is, he can’t smell anything. Not even cheese on toast bubbling under the grill. Don’t tell me it’s sandwiches, he thinks, clocking up his second disappointment. He’s been out in the field all morning building a den with Christopher and Jamie from the house on the other side of the lane. They used a discarded wooden panel propped up against the ash tree, three old cushions from the shed and a sheet of tarpaulin he found in the back garden. A sandwich hardly seems adequate reward.

  The silence strikes him as odd too. Plain weird. It’s never quiet. Not like this. Most of the time there are only two of them but they make a lot of noise. There’s always a record playing on the turntable. His mum’s a Doors fan, which is why he knows all the words to ‘Riders on the Storm’, but she’s partial to a bit of Abba too, a good old shimmy to ‘Waterloo’ when the mood takes her. He likes that, the way she shakes her head down and lets her long blond hair fall about her face. Sometimes she’ll relent, allow him to play ‘Pump Up the Volume’ or Rick Astley, but only if he promises to duet with her afterwards: Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. He pretends it’s a chore, tut-tuts and hangs his head to one side like he’s seen teenagers do, but secretly he loves it, the way they close their eyes, roll their heads about and pretend to call each other on imaginary phones. Afterwards she’ll try to scoop him up, surprised that she can’t, because he’s ten now and he’s been too big to lift for years. So instead she just gives him those tickly kisses on his neck. She smells of Parma violets, which have been his favourite sweets for as long as he can remember.

  He wanders into the kitchen. It’s a big space with a cooker, cupboards and an unnecessarily large table at one end and a living room with a green velvet sofa and matching armchair off it. This used to be his grandmother’s cottage and she had umpteen kids, which is why everything is bigger than it needs to be for just him and his mum and his dad when he graces them with his presence. Now they only come here for holidays. Opposite the sofa is a massive fire. Not one of those gas ones with fake coals plonked in the grate either. This is a real one with proper logs that snap and spit when they come alive, and flames that cast dancing shadows across the room. Sometimes, for supper, he toasts bread on it, stabbing a slice with the big barbecue fork and waving it as close to the flames as the heat allows. He keeps it there until he feels his own face toasting and then eats it with butter, washes it down with a glass of milk.

  He’d love to warm his hands on the fire now but it is dead. Not even the faintest hiss or pop can be heard. One charred log sits in the grate, frosted with grey and white. ‘Mum!’ he shouts. ‘I’m starving. What’s for lunch?’ His gaze comes to rest on the table, where he sees a glass of milk and a ham sa
ndwich. What a letdown. Ham is only his fifth favourite sandwich but hunger doesn’t allow him to be fussy. He sits at the table. He used to be able to swing his legs from the chair but they’ve grown too long now. ‘Where did my baby go?’ his mum asks sometimes, like it’s a mystery she’s never managed to solve. He wolfs the sandwich down without even washing his hands and is about to take the last bite when he notices her shoes across the room poking out from the gap between the sofa and armchair. She can’t have gone far if her shoes are here. It’s only when he looks again that he thinks it’s a bit odd that each foot points to the ceiling, like the Wicked Witch of the East when Dorothy’s house fell on top of her. Only her shoes were red and shiny and his mum’s are scuffed brown leather.

  He goes to investigate. When there are only a few steps separating them he sees the shoes are still attacked to legs. Jeans that have a rip at the knee. The jeans lead up to a stomach, clothed in a red and white stripy top. Around the neck is a chain. It’s a gold chain with a little bird in a cage. This brings a smile to his face. She’s never taken it off, not since he bought it for her birthday last year. ‘As long as I wear it, you’ll be next to me,’ she told him. His eyes drift up to her face. His mum’s face. Her eyes are closed, although not completely, which makes him think she might be playing a trick and is ready to jump up and say ‘BOO!’ She’s like that, either joking or crying. Never a happy medium, his dad complains, but he couldn’t care less what his dad says. He prefers it when it’s just the two of them. Joking or crying.

  He stands over her, deciding against shouting ‘MUM!’ because he thinks she’s asleep and there’s nothing worse than waking up with a start. Besides, she looks so peaceful, like when he creeps into her bed at night and sees her face warm and soft with dreams. He just wants to watch her for a while. When his legs begin to ache from standing, he crouches down next to her and takes her hand. She always has cold hands and feet but they’re extra cold now, like ice pops from the freezer. He gives her a little shake but she doesn’t open her eyes.

  It’s at this point it occurs to him she might be dead. He’s ten years old after all, not stupid. And they have talked about this, about death. Just last night when they were saying their prayers together, blessing Granny Julia and Uncle Billy in heaven, she told him that they were watching down on them. Just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean they’re not next to us. She ruffled his hair and kissed his cheek and held him really tight and said, ‘Sometimes people get tired, they need to rest. That’s when they die. So you shouldn’t be afraid of it or be sad. Even if you miss a person, they will always be with you.’

  He runs a muddy finger down her cheek. It looks and feels like the dough they made bread with yesterday. The red of her lips is faded, like a strawberry mivvi when he’s sucked all the juice out of it.

  He contemplates running to ask Mrs Docherty across the road to come over but she has five kids and is always hassled. ‘What is it now?’ she says with her angry face, which is actually the only face he’s ever seen her wear.

  So he stays put. He doesn’t want to leave his mum. Don’t be scared. He repeats her words out loud until he believes them. Don’t be scared. What is there to be scared of? It’s just the two of them. He feels the delicate links of the chain around her neck. As long as she’s wearing it she won’t forget him, wherever she’s gone. This gives him comfort. He likes the idea of straddling two worlds: the world of green velvet sofas and ham sandwiches and another one he can’t see. It makes him feel like he has special powers.

  Outside, the light shrinks. It’s late October, the nights are rolling in. Darkness grows in the room, shrouding it in a veil of blue and grey. He goes to fetch his He-Man duvet from his bed. He’s too old for He-Man now, which is why it’s in the cottage and not at home. When he returns he lies down, pulls the duvet over both of them and wraps his arms around her. His eyes close and sleep holds him tight until he is woken by his father’s screams the next day.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Eve

  I HAVE THE dog to thank. If it wasn’t for him I might still be there and none of this would have happened. Strange, you might say, given that the place teems with life. But it’s a hurried life that doesn’t veer off its chosen track: cyclists in streaks of neon, joggers chasing personal bests, harried parents tailing their offspring. Not a chance they would have spotted me twenty or so metres away, hidden in dense woodland. I was easy to miss, which was the point after all.

  ‘It’s immaterial now.’ This is the echo of my mum’s voice from years back. She wasn’t a fan of my hypothetical musings.

  ‘You should have been here five minutes ago, I could have been kidnapped,’ I’d say if she rocked up to Brownies five minutes late.

  ‘Well you weren’t, were you?’

  ‘But I could have been.’

  ‘Why do you always think the worst?’ she’d ask, as if the worst could never happen.

  Sunday 15 September 2013, a shade after seven o’clock. It was a fine morning, one to snap in a picture and post on your Facebook page if you did that kind of thing, which Jim Tierney didn’t. Mist rose in columns from the ground. The vast sky was tinged red. He gazed out across the park, studiously ignoring the early thrum of traffic. He liked to think that he had the world to himself in these early hours, walking through a wilderness, albeit one at the edge of the city within striking distance of a café and a cooked breakfast.

  Sure, it’s a bugger dragging yourself out of bed, but here’s your reward, Jim boy.

  By rights the dog, a red setter, should have been on a lead because it was rutting season and deer can feel threatened by dogs. I know this courtesy of a Year Six project when my class went on a field trip to Richmond Park and a park ranger told us how the large males roar and clash antlers to attract as many females as possible and we laughed at the thought of them having a shag and then laughed even more when Peter Kelly fell over and landed in a pile of deer shit. Our teacher Mr Connolly marched us all back to school and said we were a disgrace and he would never take us anywhere ever again.

  He would be surprised that I retained that fact nineteen years after the event.

  So I know that from September to October dogs should either be walked outside the park or kept on a lead but I’m also thankful that Jim Tierney disregarded the rules that morning. It wasn’t a blatant disregard, more of a lapse that came with the territory. At sixty-seven and having been retired for three years, the weeks and months all seemed to roll into one. As far as Jim was concerned it could still have been July. Added to that he was long-sighted and couldn’t read the signs that would have alerted him to his misdemeanour. Wellington was free to roam.

  Jim was well aware that Wellington was a ridiculous name for a dog.

  It wasn’t even his dog. His daughter left it behind when she decamped to Seattle with the family last summer. ‘Keep you company,’ she’d said, as if it was adequate compensation for not seeing his grandkids once a week. ‘That,’ he had told his wife more than once, ‘was a bum deal.’ To everyone he pretended the dog was ‘a royal pain in the arse’. What he rarely admitted was that he loved these walks, the purpose they gave him, and he’d grown fond of Wellington, even if there were too many syllables in its name for a man with a heart condition to pronounce repeatedly.

  ‘WELL-ING-TON, come back here.’

  He was off.

  ‘Daft dog.’

  It had been hard at first when Jim first took him out. The dog was lithe, too fast for him, but over time they had found their rhythm. Wellington would run ahead and then run back to Jim, who would chuck him a stick or a ball in reward.

  Not today.

  He was streaking out in front, his shape shrinking in the distance.

  ‘WELL-ING-TON!’ Jim shouted again, but the exertion left him breathless. He used the stick to beat his way through the long grass. Ahead he could just about see the dog, running in the direction of the park’s huge iron gates. He needed to quicken his pace
to stop him but he was aware of the familiar whistle of his chest.

  Wellington had gone from sight now, disappeared through the gates that opened and closed at first light and dusk.

  Wait till I get a hold of that dog.

  Jim headed down the hill, grateful for the unusually light traffic outside the park. Wellington was daft enough to run into the road, he didn’t doubt it.

  When he was through the gate himself, he heard it bark. Turning to his right, to the strip of common land, he saw him further down the muddy path, running into the bushes and then back out again. Thanks to an overnight downpour mud oozed and squelched underfoot as he slid along towards the dog. He raised his hand in readiness: give it a whack, put it back on the lead. In the event he did neither. When he reached it he simply looked and saw. Wellington’s barking faded out, or at least it did for Jim, whose world stilled. He stood, hands hanging by his sides, because he had lost all power to move them. His instinct was to turn away, as if he was looking at something he had no business seeing, but his eyes remained there, transfixed. He felt the sky dip and turn, like he himself was being spun around. The context: that was what he was struggling with. He was only taking the dog for a walk and the day was too fresh and young and the sky too bright for this to happen. No, he thought, managing to pull his eyes away. This has no place here.

  He waited, counted to ten to allow the scene enough time to disappear. The dog started barking again.

  Jim looked once more.

  ‘Sweet Mary mother of Christ.’

  Minutes elapsed until he remembered there was something he needed to do. Only then did he call the police.

  Chapter Two

  Melody

  SUNDAY LUNCH. SHE’S been preparing it all morning, longer if you include the time spent choosing a recipe, ordering the ingredients, setting the table, selecting a wine that will complement the beef. Cooking, she knows, can take as much time as you have available, which is why she has come to like it. Time is not something Melody Pieterson is short of.