I Know What You've Done

by Dorothy Koomson

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'The very definition of a page-turner, it's suburban noir at its finest' HARRIET TYCE

Do you have any idea what the people you know are capable of? Bestselling author of All My Lies Are True, Dorothy Koomson, asks how well you can really know your neighbours. Fans of Lisa Jewell and Louise Candlish will rip through the pages of this addictive new thriller.

What if all your neighbours' secrets landed in a diary on your doorstep?

What if the woman who gave it to you was murdered by one of the people in the diary?

What if the police asked if you knew anything?

Would you hand over the book of secrets?

Or ... would you try to find out what everyone had done?

I Know What You've Done is the unputdownable thriller from the Queen of the Big Reveal.


Readers love Dorothy Koomson:

'Koomson just gets better and better' Woman & Home

'An instantly involving psychological thriller' Daily Telegraph

'This is devastatingly good' Heat

'The suspense was on another level' Black Girls Book Club

'Written with verve and insight' Stylist

'We just couldn't put it down' Closer

'The author plays a blinder' Sun

'The novel simmers with tension' Daily Express

'You'll be gripped by this tense, twisty thriller' Fabulous

(P) 2021 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: July 8, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 432

Sample

1 June 2021, Brighton

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock!

Loud and unexpected, the banging at my front door makes me jump.

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock! Comes again, louder this time. That should, technically, be impossible since the brass door knocker, something unique and beautiful when we got it six years ago, has pretty much rusted into place and hasn’t been properly lifted in at least a couple of years.

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock!

All right, all right, all right, I mumble, more irritated at the noise than the fact they are taking me away from the deadline I’ve been fighting the past week.

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock!

It genuinely sounds like whoever is on the other side of my door is properly trying to enter my house via the door knocker.

KnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnockKnock!

‘There is NO NEED for all of that,’ is teetering murderously on the tip of my tongue when I yank the door open, but it evaporates when I see who is on the other side.

Priscilla.

I draw back.

Priscilla is my neighbour who lives at number 21 to our 11 Acacia Villas. And I could not be more surprised to see her standing there.

I’ve spoken to her a couple of dozen times – mainly, when I’m delivering her stuff that has been sent to our house by mistake, and a couple of times at our Neighbour–2–Neighbour Watch meetings.

We live in a well-to-do area of Brighton and a lot of the people are ‘well-spoken’, but even among them Priscilla is in a different league: her clothes are always bespoke or casually designer; her black, grey and white hair is cut into the sharpest bob; her make-up is always perfectly applied – smoky eyes, glossy coloured lips, flawless foundation; and she is always – always – scented to perfection. From the moment I met her, I knew she held herself above us. Not just from looking at her, but also from the way she would respond to anyone saying hello to her in the street. She would look at you, ever so slightly lift her chin – so slightly, you’d barely notice – and then offer a short, curt nod, before moving on.

Even at the Neighbour–2–Neighbour Watch meetings where I got the chance to speak to her for more than two seconds, it was highly controlled – she swept in, spoke to each person in turn, asking a few perfunctory questions, often making pointed and unsettling comments, then moving on to someone else. By the time the person who had called the meeting had stood up to talk, Priscilla would have spoken to everyone, settled with no one and made sure she left before the end, so, I guessed, she wouldn’t be forced to walk home with anyone.

That is why I’m confused about her being on my doorstep. What could she possibly want with me?

‘Hello?’ I ask cautiously.

Priscilla lives by herself in one of the biggest houses on Acacia Villas. She’s older than me, maybe mid-fifties, but with what I’m sure is a lifetime of expensive products and a commitment to skincare, her pale-cream complexion makes her look younger than my forty-eight.

Although, as my eyes sweep over her, I have to admit I’ve never seen her looking like this before – her usually pristine clothes are dishevelled, her hallmark bobbed hair is a bird’s nest halo of messiness, her eye make-up is like a Rorschach pattern smudged under her eyes, while her trademark glossy lipstick (today’s colour is pink) is smeared from her mouth to her right cheek. Her usually dewy skin is a blotchy mass of sweat.

‘Are you all right?’ I ask, worried and a little scared. Why is she here? bolts through my head again.

‘I know what you’ve done,’ she gasps, her voice laboured, as if speaking is difficult, arduous, painful.

‘What did you say?’ I ask her.

Instead of replying, she sways dramatically on her pink, heeled shoes and I realise all of a sudden that all it’ll take is for her weight to be off balance for a moment too long and she’ll topple backwards down the stone steps leading up to our front door, possibly breaking something on the way.

Priscilla pants and gasps a while longer before saying again, ‘I know what you’ve done . . . I know what all of you have done.’ She suddenly thrusts what she’s holding in her arms at me, and it takes me a moment to work out what it is: a book. A large blue hardback notebook, the type Clark uses to write his notes in. But this one is thick, the cover battered and worn, pieces of paper stuffed into its pages bulking it out even more.

‘It’s . . . it’s all in here . . . I know what you’ve all been up to.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I ask her, not taking the book she is holding out to me. ‘What’s going on?’

She doubles over so suddenly, so violently, almost guillotining herself in half on the book in her hands.

I reach for her, but she brushes me away before slowly uncurling herself to shove the book at me again. ‘Take this,’ she orders. ‘It’s all in there . . . Who’s done this . . . Why . . . It’s all in there . . . Take it . . . Take it and find out who tried to kill me.’

I don’t take the book – why would I? – instead I say, ‘You’re not making any sense, Priscilla. Look, come in. Have a cup of tea. Is there anyone you want me to call for you? Anyone who can come and be—’

‘No,’ she wails with such a strangled voice, it’s as though someone has their hand around her throat and is squeezing tight. ‘No . . . time . . . attacked . . . attacked.’

She sways again and this time the force throws her weight completely off balance, and she starts to fall. Without thinking, my hand snaps out to grab her and my fingers close around her bicep. In the beat that follows, the revulsion of having to touch her – anyone – shudders through me. I can’t do this, I decide, and my fingers are desperate to let her go, to just let her fall, while I dash to the bathroom to scrub my hands. This is a nightmare, I can’t just touch someone like this.

Before I can snatch my hand away in disgust, Priscilla lifts her gaze to meet mine. Her usually aloof blue eyes are tainted with terror, full of fear. She is scared. That is it: she is scared. Something bad has happened to her, something bad is still happening to her, and she is scared. I can’t release her. I have issues that spark my anxiety, but I can’t just let her fall and live with myself, especially not when I know that type of acute fright in her eyes, and so instead, I pull Priscilla towards me over the doorstep.

Once in my corridor, she lets out a silent scream and folds in half, dropping the book, which spins halfway across our golden, oak-floored hallway.

It is horrible to see what is happening to her; dreadful to watch and be so powerless to help.

‘Are you saying someone attacked you?’ I ask gently, not sure whether to cuddle her, ease her onto the ground or leave her be.

‘Trust no one,’ she manages between gasps, answering an entirely different question. ‘Not even him.’

Him? Does she mean Clark? My husband?

I don’t understand any of this – why has she come here in this state when she could have called an ambulance or the police? And why me of all people? I’m sure there are other people who live on this stretch of Acacia Villas that she’s known longer and she can trust more.

‘Trust—’ Her breathing is so heavy now, forced, strained, awkward, that a new terror shoots through my heart. She’s going to die. In my hallway. In my hallway. Not only will that be horrific for her and those who love her, I will not be able to live here any more. I can’t let that happen.

‘I’ll call an ambulance!’ I cry, before I rush down the corridor and partially trip on her book. I stop to scoop it up and then continue into the kitchen. Dumping the book on the table in front of the unit nearest the door, I snatch the house phone from its cradle by the stereo. It doesn’t bleep, which means . . . I check the display . . . yup, it’s dead. Momentarily furious, I notice someone has unplugged the phone to plug in the stereo but didn’t bother to put the phone back on charge when they’d finished. Just yesterday, when the phone had bleeped a warning that it was running low on battery, I ignored it. It wasn’t important. I have my mobile. No one calls me on the landline except ‘Your computer has been hacked’ creeps and very occasionally, my mother. So no, I didn’t need to worry about the house phone being charged. And now look. Now look!

My heart is racing and my body is trembling. This is bad. This is very, very bad. A terrible situation has landed – literally – on my doorstep and rather than being able to sort it efficiently, I have to run upstairs to grab my mobile, causing more delay.

I practically throw the handset down and rush back to go upstairs for my mobile, completely forgetting about the handset in the living room. I’m almost halfway down the corridor before it registers that my hallway is empty. Completely empty.

The front door is wide open, but there is no Priscilla, there is no sign that she was ever there.

I stop and stare, shock mingling with the adrenalin whizzing around my body. ‘Where is she?’ I ask myself out loud. ‘Where did she go?’

How long was I in the kitchen? I think. Because you don’t go from being pretty much at death’s door to completely disappearing . . . unless . . .

Unless it never happened. Unless I imagined the whole thing.

No, surely I can’t have? Surely not.

I stand very still in the middle of my wide hallway, staring at the open front door, and trying to work out what is going on. And what I should do next.

The thing is, if I shut the door and go back to what I was doing, it could be a sign that I am admitting there is something wrong with me. I mean, there must be for me to have conjured up something so detailed and terrifying and realistic about Priscilla.

But on the other hand, if I go outside to see if I can spot Priscilla, then I could be either taking a step towards actively seeking out the trouble she brought to my door . . . or immersing myself even deeper into the delusion I have conjured up.

What do I do? What’s the best thing to do?

Right, the grown up part of me decides. What I need to do is shut this door and pretend none of this ever happened. I won’t think about it and I certainly won’t talk about it. I am going to put Priscilla out of my mind until I hear something else about her.

I’m about to shut the door, when my eyes snag on a smudge of something against the magnolia-painted wall of our hallway near where Priscilla initially stood. The faintest hint of red. Blood? Is that blood?

I go to step closer to have a proper look, when a flash of pink catches my eye from outside. I peer at the pink at the bottom of my grey stone steps: a shoe. The type Priscilla was wearing.

Maybe I’m not going crazy after all, maybe she was here.

From somewhere to the right of the house, a shout cuts through the Tuesday afternoon quiet. Right now, most people are out shopping, or working, or exercising. Lots of us who worked from home before it was forced on us, now deliberately go out to sit in cafés and libraries and shared office spaces rather than be trapped at home after more than a year of doing it. I don’t mind being at home – I know it’s safe, I know it’s clean, I know I very rarely have to interact with people and have my anxieties triggered.

I pause, strain my ears, wondering if I did hear a shout or not?

‘Help!’ comes again. A man’s voice, again shouting: ‘Help!’

Cautiously, I leave my hallway and go down the stone steps. At the bottom the pink shoe is lying on its side waiting to be rescued, and just to the right of my gate is its twin, lying on its opposite side but waiting just as patiently to be picked up.

Now on the pavement, I can see clearly where the shout is coming from: one of my male neighbours is leaning over someone. Without my glasses, it takes me a moment to properly realise that it’s Priscilla on the ground.

‘It’s Priscilla!’ Dunstan, my neighbour, yells when he spots me, standing there frozen and, basically, useless. ‘She’s hurt! Get an ambulance!’

Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. Get an ambulance. It’s like I know the words but I can’t get them to connect in my head. I can’t get myself to understand what to do.

‘Rae!’ Dunstan shouts, his voice loud and stern. ‘Wake up! Get an ambulance! I think she’s dying!’

That startles me out of my stupor, puts words into my brain in a place where they connect and I understand what actions I need to take.

Spinning on my sock-covered feet, I run back up the stone steps, into my house and then dash up to my office to get my mobile and dial 999.

1 June 2021, Brighton

Dunstan and I stand at the bottom of my steps, both of us awkward, acting as though we’ve been on a date that hasn’t gone very well, but we both fancied each other so we slept together and now we’re both desperate to get away so we can properly blame the other person for how bad the non-sex part had been.

Dunstan lives in a flat around the corner at number 36. I’m pretty sure Dunstan is his surname, but I haven’t heard anyone call him anything else; I think he even introduces himself as Dunstan.

There isn’t much to say to each other. The air is only just calming down, the molecules seeming to settle like soft-falling snow after the violence of the ambulance people trying to revive and then save an unconscious Priscilla, and I think we’re both trying to formulate what to say, or even what to think. There wasn’t much time to talk before and now we’re not sure what to say. I keep wanting to say out loud that I wished I smoked or didn’t mind drinking in front of my children, because I could do with a drink and/or a ciggie right now.

After I’d called the ambulance, I had returned – with shoes and gloves on – to wait with them. Dunstan had continually taken her pulse as though he knew what he was doing, and I’d had nothing to do but hold her hand saying soothing things – at least, I hoped they were comforting and not just generic and dull. Then when the ambulance pulled up and the paramedics took over, we lurked in the background, answering the questions we could and generally feeling utterly useless.

I am a freelance magazine and newsletter editor and Dunstan is a policeman – not sure of the grade or anything – so neither of us had anything to offer. But we exchanged looks several times when the paramedics kept repeating that her injuries – mainly on the back of her head from where she’d been hit quite hard, apparently – didn’t match the wildly fluctuating vital signs.

The ambulance people stayed for a long time trying to stabilise Priscilla, and nothing had really worked. In the end they carefully loaded her into their vehicle and took her away.

Clark, my husband, approaches at a near run because our two dogs – Yam and Okra – are dragging him along as they bound home. The funny part of that is they are Yorkshire Terriers who are actually quite small for their breed. But from day one they have had the ability and stubbornness of much bigger dogs, and even someone as big and strong as Clark sometimes struggles to not be swept along by them. ‘Dunstan,’ Clark says with a nod, coming to a halt near us. ‘What’s up?’

I shoot my husband of twelve years a ‘where do I even start’ look and he instantly understands that something huge has happened and tries to pull the dogs back on their leads so they don’t get involved. Yam, who has been a good girl since she arrived with her human dad, slinking around Clark’s ankles like a snake, suddenly decides that she doesn’t actually like Dunstan. She’s looked at him, assessed his smell and his physique – all of which are more than acceptable to most humans – and has decided she’s not impressed. In fact, she is completely unimpressed and she needs to express that displeasure – loudly. She plants her back legs wide, sits back, lowers her tail and starts to remonstrate at him, telling him what she thinks of him in no uncertain barking terms. Okra, on the other hand, has made a similar assessment of the man standing with me and has been taken in completely by him, so much so, she wants to get as close as possible to him and starts to strain on her lead, her front paws in the air as she tries to get to him.

‘Stop it, girls,’ Clark says.

The reactions of our dogs seems to wake up Dunstan from the silent stupor he has been standing with me in, and he bends to chuckle Okra under her chin, blows a wry kiss to a still-complaining Yam and then nods a goodbye to Clark and me. His gaze lingers on me, asking, I think, if I’m all right because he certainly isn’t. I nod in reply, while trying to express that I am not OK either.

‘Yam, stop it,’ Clark says again, this time sounding more absent and disengaged because he knows the barking will soon stop now the source is walking away.

My husband is wearing his usual work fug; it sits on his broad shoulders like a heavy, velvet cloak that he has to drag home with him every night. I can’t imagine who he’s spoken to today, what stories he’s heard and how he’s tried to resolve those issues that are, technically, nothing to do with him. Being a property solicitor you’d think that it would be very straightforward and emotionless, but the buying and selling of people’s homes, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, has so much emotion, sentiment and feelings of identity wrapped up in it, that he often acts like an unpaid therapist to his clients as he gets the necessary paperwork in order.

Clark used to travel to London three days a week after we moved to Brighton six years ago, but after the period when we were all forced to work at home for months on end, Clark had needed office space outside the house. We were fortunate to have a house big enough that while we were all at home, it wasn’t as difficult for us to work under the same roof as it was for some. He still has an office upstairs but when we were all allowed out again after the first lockdown, Clark declared, more than once, that he really needed a way to physically separate work from family life. He needed that commute, even if – like now – it was a fifteen-minute stroll along the seafront to a building that had been converted to accommodate lots of small offices with a communal café-type area downstairs.

He needed the decompression time, he told me. I understood completely. And, because he was getting a nice space to himself in a building full of other people who’d also had to reassess their working environment, it’d been agreed he take our two Yorkies with him every day. (‘Agreed’ makes it sound like I gave him a choice. If he wanted out of the house during working hours, then he took the dogs with him, that was the deal.)

‘What’s gone on?’ Clark asks as we climb the steps together, his gaze constantly going to Dunstan’s retreating form.

We enter the house and ‘Oh, it’s—’ I begin, but my sharing of my despair is cut short by Yam, the bigger of the two dogs, making a dash for the stairs the second Clark drops her lead.

‘Oh, what!’ he says, letting go of Okra’s lead, causing her to make a similar dash for freedom. Our one-year-old puppies are not allowed upstairs, which is precisely why they rush up there whenever they get the chance. I’m always telling Clark as well as our daughters, Bria and Mella, to hold on to the leads until they’re in the kitchen to stop them darting upstairs like it is the gateway to doggie wonderland.

Clark looks at me, the expression on his handsome face appealing for me to do my usual dash up after our dogs. Out of everyone, I am the one who hates dog hair all over the house the most, so I am the one who is always running to catch them and bring them back. Today, my other half is out of luck. Even with the expert way his beautiful liquid-brown eyes gaze at me, and his full, delicious lips are twisted to make him seem vulnerable, I ain’t playing.

I will not be running up after dogs today.

In the second or two after he realises that his ‘puppy dog’ expression is not going to work on me, Clark dashes up the stairs, calling after the dogs as he goes.

As I turn away, the smudge of blood confronts me. And it immediately turns my stomach. It reminds me of the stillness of Priscilla’s features as they fitted an oxygen mask over her face, the way the paramedics kept changing places as they worked on her. She might be dead now, for all I know. And I might be the last person to have held her hand before she died.

That reminder catapults me into the toilet under the stairs, where I rip off my burgundy gloves and dump them into the small washing basket under the sink. I pump copious amounts of organic peppermint handwash over my fingers and palms, before foaming them up and scrubbing and scrubbing until my hands have got some semblance of cleanliness back.

Once my hands are as clean as they can be without being dunked in bleach, I head for the kitchen and as I move, I realise a cold, burning-hot sensation has taken over my body – I am cold and burning hot at the same time, my muscles quivering out the disparity as I move. I think I’m in slight shock. All of this with Priscilla, being confronted by her mortality, has shaken me. It’s one of the worst things that has ever happened.

I am almost halfway across the room when I see it.

Sitting on the table, where I threw it as I went to grab the house phone, is the thing that Priscilla tried to give me earlier.

The item that ended up on the floor and I scooped up on the way to get help.

The diary.

The book of everyone’s secrets.

1 June 2021, Brighton

‘I don’t get it – we’ve stabilised the head wound. Why is she still so tachycardic?’

Nora Helling has been a paramedic for fifteen years and she still finds ways to be surprised. She often feels that she’s seen every type of injury the human body can experience, but then she’ll be called to another emergency and there will be something she hasn’t seen before.

Like this woman. Fifty-something, white female. From one of the posh roads in Brighton. Assault victim, not sexual, an easy-to-treat wound, not much blood loss. And yet, she keeps crashing. Her vitals erratic, her heart promising to either race its way out of her chest or stop beating altogether. Nothing they do is working for any length of time. ‘Her heart rate is all over the place,’ Nora calls to her partner. ‘She seemed stable then her vitals just went haywire again. There’s something else going on. What is it, though?’

‘Poison?’ replies Fenn, the paramedic driving the ambulance.

Nora shakes her head. ‘If it was a poison, she’d most likely be dead by now. And she doesn’t have anything to indicate it is – no discolouring of her lips or nails or skin.’

‘Maybe it’s a slow-acting poison? One we’re not familiar with? Either way, we’re going to have to call the police.’

‘Surprised those two didn’t while they were waiting for us to arrive,’ Nora replies. ‘But wait, are you saying someone tried to poison her and then caved her head in just to be sure?’

Nora looks over the patient on the stretcher in front of her. The rush of an emergency rarely allows her to do this: to look at a person, see them in serenity. Even with her face obscured by an oxygen mask and her top ripped open to put the pads on to monitor her heart, she is still beautiful.

This is one of those surprises for Nora. This woman – Priscilla Calvert, the others called her – didn’t look like the sort of woman anyone would hate enough to try to murder – twice. Assault, that’s the sort of thing that happens all the time. But possibly poison? That is intentional. That is planned. That is executed. And this Priscilla really doesn’t look like the sort of person you would try to murder once, let alone twice.

‘Why would someone try to murder her twice?’ Nora says out loud, not really expecting an answer.

‘Why do people do anything? You’ve been doing this long enough to know that people will do anything for any reason.’

‘True,’ Nora says. But that doesn’t seem enough. There has to be more to this than that. There has to be a proper explanation. Yes, she’s constantly surprised – by the human body, by what happens to it, by the things that humans do – but at times like this, she isn’t just surprised. She is also baffled. Appalled. And ever so sad.

1 June 2021, Brighton

I’ve been standing here staring at this book my neighbour gave me for a long time. More than anything, I can’t believe I just tossed it onto the table without wiping it down with bleach first. . . .