I Know Who You Were

by Nick Curran

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'Grabs the reader from the very first page - and never lets go' DAILY MAIL

'Taut and properly disturbing. . . Impressive' The Critic

EVERYONE HAS A PAST. . . YOURS IS COMING TO KILL YOU

Alex and Morven have a pretty perfect marriage. Still madly in love after ten years, they have no secrets from each other and their life in London with daughter Poppy is . . . happy.
Until one day it changes. Morven disappears, her car found abandoned. The police come around to Alex's house to tell him things about his wife he never knew: her real name, her past life, the secrets she kept from him. And Alex realises he's been loving a lie. He needs answers . . . and on the shore of a dark and remote lake in Wales he learns that the tragic events which shaped the past now threaten to rip apart the present.

Praise for I KNOW WHO YOU WERE

'A gripping, twisty and beautifully written debut thriller that marks Curran as a writer to watch.' Irish Independent

'Written with enormous panache and gentle empathy, it ratchets up the tension repeatedly before exploding into a grandstand heart-stopping finale' Daily Mail

'Oh boy, this is going to keep you up at night, or abandoning everything else to race through the pages' Peterborough Telegraph

'Throws out a great hook and then twists and turns its way to a heartstopping climax' Stephen Gallagher

'Not just a ruthlessly compelling novel of suspense but an unflinching examination of the repercussions of a crime. Disturbing, harrowing and moving, it signals the arrival of a new master of crime fiction.' Ramsey Campbell

'Taut, compelling, original. An emotionally charged story that will leave you thinking of the main character long after finishing the book. A true page-turner' J A Corrigan

'Curran's debut is an absorbing, dark and suspenseful thriller. He is a writer to watch' David Fennell

'An utterly gripping Cobenesque mystery keeps you turning the pages fiercely to find out what's happening' Crime Podcast FM

Release date: April 6, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 90000

Sample

I can’t imagine having to make my entire life up.

Think about it.

The sheer amount of energy it would take is mind blowing.

We’re this patchwork of life lived – all these random experiences that simply happen to us and around us. They dent us and shape us and eventually we become this person at the end of it. I’m not just talking about the big stuff either, the divorces and the broken hearts as well as the broken bones, or the whole nurture versus nature argument and how we’re all products of our environment.

It’s the stupid stuff that ends up defining who we are.

Like the fact I put the maple syrup on my plate before I put the pancakes down. It’s a nothing detail, but I always do it the same way. I do it because I’ve always done it.

Then there’s the stuff of our souls. I still listen to bands no one remembers because this girl that fourteen-year-old me was hopelessly in love with loved them. ‘Love is a Wonderful Colour’ is right up there at the top of my favourite songs with ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, just because she played them for me once and said they were the most beautiful songs she’d ever heard. She was over-the-top enthusiastic about everything, and it all came out of her in a breathless rush. Funny though, I can’t remember much more about her than the fact she loved a couple of songs I’ve carried with me through my life. I couldn’t draw a picture of her to save my life. The one in my mind is a cobbled together montage of false memories and people I’ve fancied in the years since that somehow distilled to put a face to this perfect childhood crush that couldn’t possibly be real.

Then there’s Vicky, who sat cross-legged on the floor, earnestly telling me why some other singer was the greatest vocalist of our age just a few months before she killed herself and guaranteed I can never listen to his voice without crying my eyes out.

I remember rushing out onto the dance floor as the first notes of R.E.M.’s ‘The One I Love’ came through the speakers, and how I was absolutely in love with this curly haired blond, Julie, who broke my heart by sleeping with my best friend, and for all the pain that came with that, I can’t remember her surname.

But there’s no getting away from how they chipped a bit off the shape of my soul and left me closer to being me than I was before I met them.

And then there’s the physical reminders we carry, like the inch-long scar above my left eye where Sasha slammed the door when we were fooling about and I ran right into the sharp edge and split my head wide open to howls of laughter from her; or the two-inch-long ridge of gristle on my arse where I fell out of that tree and the memories that were attached to that little humiliation, the team of student nurses watching fourteen-year-old me with my jeans and pants around my ankles, bent over as the doc practiced her macramé on my tender parts.

Let’s be honest, this stuff’s not even scratching the surface.

It’s not stuff I ever have to think about, it’s just there.

Like being nine years old and sitting on a street corner breaking my heart because dad had just said he was going away and I might never see him again.

The idea of trying to dream it all up like some immense forty-nine-year-long fiction of me is exhausting, now try to imagine keeping it up, living the made-up life day after day after day without getting caught in the lie, that’s the real twisted genius of it.

I really don’t know how the stranger lying beside me in bed that morning had pulled it off for the best part of the sixteen years we’d been together, but she had.

Morven rolled over, up onto one elbow and smiled that smile that always got me.

I’m a lucky man. I’m more in love with her today than I’ve ever been, and I wake up every morning safe in the knowledge that I’m going to be even more in love tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

She’s a morning person. I’m not. I tend to sit up well into the night knowing I should just drag my arse up to bed but unwilling to actually do it. I pretend it’s about creativity, and these hours somehow being more sacred, in tune with the rhythms of the universe. It’s all so much bullshit and we both know it, but she never calls me out on my need to sit up and watch crap TV shows in the name of research. Come morning I’m bleary eyed and shuffle around the place like an extra from The Walking Dead. Not Morven, she’s one of those monsters who leaps out from beneath the covers in a single bound, like some shiny happy superhero.

That smile, though…

If you’d have asked me at that moment, I would have told you I was lying beside the one person in the world I knew better than myself. It’s funny how a single day can make a liar out of the best of us.

She kissed me good morning, the lingering spices of last night’s jalfrezi on her tongue, and ran her finger through the tangle of my hair, nails dragging lightly across my scalp.

It was all just normal life. There was nothing remarkable about it. Nothing that said this would be the last time. I don’t know if I would have savoured it more if I’d known that, if I would have tried to burn the sensation of her touch into my skin or the taste of her sweat onto my tongue, committing every inch of her skin to a Braille memory, or if I would have taken it for granted anyway, because I’m basically an idiot? Probably the latter, if I’m being honest. I don’t want to admit how many things I’ve promised myself at the time I’d never forget that are long since consigned to the dustiest corners of my mind, while I can quote you the lyrics of every Postcard or Kitchenware record verbatim. It’s just the way I am.

The kiss became another, and that second kiss became a third, as Morven persevered dragging me out of my coma with her lips. I make a pretty lousy Sleeping Beauty, but she was 100 per cent committed to her role as handsome prince so there was no way I was sleeping the day away.

The clock radio perked up, the deejay deciding I was the ‘Only Living Boy in New Cross’ which felt about right, all things considered, as Morven guided me inside and for a few minutes longer life was normal.

God, I miss normal.

After, while she showered, I went down to make breakfast. We have never been the kind of partners who climb into the shower together, but more often than not we’d leave love notes for each other in the glass for the steam to reveal, sometimes hours, sometimes a day later. It was a nice little relationship shorthand. Something we’d done for years.

First things first, I put some noise on. The deejay had given way to Traffic and Weather. I shuffled around, fixing the coffee first. It’s all very ritualistic. Every morning it’s exactly the same, milk from the fridge into the centrifugal frother, power up the espresso machine, empty the drip tray, grind the fresh beans and then use the three-minute lag while the milk warms and froths to sort out the muesli and fresh berries compote and drown it in Skyr, this Icelandic yoghurt that tastes nothing like yoghurt. Little rituals.

Morven came down, dragging Popsicle with her. Poppy takes after me. She has this thing where she refuses to get out of bed, so Morven ends up dressing her while she’s still in her pit, one foot at a time, sock, sock then underwear, then skirt as the school uniform materialises around her tiny frame, and all the while she’s still under the blankets. It’s a skill. Once she’s up, that’s a different story. Then it’s Hurricane Pops and heaven help anyone caught up in her storm.

We’re not the most talkative family over breakfast, but unlike my own dad I’ve never been the kind of parent who hides behind the sports page and grunts a few sounds in answer to the yammering of his offspring. ‘So, what have you got this morning?’

‘Double Maths and English,’ which sounded nightmarish until you realised it was basically another way of saying guided play, because luckily for Pops she was still a few years away from the nightmare of algebra and quads, and the notion of the Oxford comma was every bit as mythical as Puff the Magic Dragon.

‘But that means you have gym this afternoon, right?’ I said, proving that I paid attention now and then. ‘So, it’s not all bad.’

Poppy looked at me like I’d just threatened to torture her teddy bear.

Morven just shook her head and refilled my coffee cup.

Sometimes I felt like a rose between two thorns.

‘How about you?’ I asked Morven, earning a shake of the head and look that proved I didn’t pay anywhere near enough attention while I was busy patting myself on the back for remembering gym was on the timetable. Ah the swings and roundabouts of a cluttered mind. I offered a wry smile. If in doubt, try and cute it out.

‘Are you going to remember to feed yourself without me around?’

‘Ah.’

‘Yeah, ah. You remember now?’

‘Of course. Fancy three-day corporate retreat, outward bounds, hiking, zip wires and trust exercises in the New Forest. All very Bear Grylls while me and madam here pine over the mum-shaped hole in our lives.’

‘That’s the one. I’ll try not to enjoy myself too much.’

‘Okay, so, what do we want mum to bring us back from her trip?’

Poppy wrinkled her nose up, like it was a trick question. That was another thing she got from Morven, this incredible sincerity and seriousness in the way she looked at the world. Most kids would have been bouncing in their chair firing off a stream of bright shiny things as they leapt to mind, but not my little ray of sunshine. I could almost see the cogs grinding away as she tried to decide what she could live without as opposed to what she really wanted.

‘Go finish getting ready for school while you think about it,’ I suggested, which sent her racing off up the stairs to stuff her duffle bag full of whatever mysteries nine-year-old girls needed to survive the school day.

Morven kissed me on the top of the head, then reached around my neck to run her fingers across my chest. ‘Can you do the school run this morning?’

‘I’m wise to your ways, woman,’ I grinned, reaching up to close my hands over hers.

Little gestures of intimacy. Those are the things I remember most. Those are the things that cut the deepest.

‘I’m sure you are, but I’ve got to pack. Someone kept me busy this morning.’

‘I think that was entirely your fault, not that I’m complaining.’

‘You’ll miss me when I’m gone.’

Oh, how true.

I kissed her palm. ‘Fear not, I’ll get madam to school on time.’

We live in a narrow house in Shoreditch. It always amused me to call it that, given the fact that’s an old nickname for a coffin. But it was true, at least from the front. The three of us could stand, arms outstretched, fingertip to fingertip, and reach across the entire width of the red brick façade. I love this part of London. It’s a riot of colour. Nearly every wall around us is a work of art. There’s a stork on one building, and evil eyes and lightning bolts on another, but Poppy’s favourite is the giant panda head that dominates a black wall beside a message urging us to adore and endure each other, which, given the state of the world feels fairly prophetic.

I was always more fascinated by the train carriages threatening to plunge off the roof of the next building along, but that’s me.

The endless creativity is inspiring.

Plus, everything smells so good in the morning. There’s a small bakery that fills the air with the cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla, and a coffee roastery that is like a hit of pure caffeine as you walk beneath its high windows. The place has changed a lot in the ten years we’ve been living here. It isn’t so much that it has gentrified as it has become this bohemian paradise in the heart of London, filled with brasseries and rooftop restaurants, artisan confectioners and microbreweries.

Poppy skipped along beside me, her little hand in mine.

We’d never intended for her to be an only child, but we were what they rather horrifically termed geriatric parents – even accounting for me being a couple of years older than her – and after two miscarriages in the two years after she was born, we reached the unspoken conclusion that Penny and Alice and our ideal world of three little girls filling the new house with laughter and life wasn’t to be and we stopped trying. It wasn’t a conscious thing, not at first at least. It had just been easier not to try than to deal with the ache of it, the fact that we were in bits, so we kept telling ourselves that even though all the bits weren’t there we could put together the ones we had and make a good life for the three of us.

I walked her all the way to the school gates, ruffled her hair and marvelled at the fact she could race away across the playground without looking back once. Her home room teacher saw me and waved. I offered a nod in return. There were dozens of other parents up and down the street going through their own little rituals.

One of the joys of being a freelancer is not being tied to a desk. I decided I was going to do a couple of hours in this nice little café around the corner from the school and start in on my third cup of coffee of the day while I borrowed some free WiFi to research the piece I was playing with. Walking through the door I was rewarded with smiles from the pushchair mafia and took up one of the free tables near the window. I prefer the window seats. I like to watch the world go by while I pretend to work. It helps me to feel connected to the world.

‘Hello stranger,’ Maggie, the owner, said from behind the counter.

‘Hey Maggs, how are you this fine morning?’

‘Can’t complain,’ she told me in that rich Jamaican accent of hers as she busied about measuring out the Blue Mountain beans to grind. There were more than a dozen different bags on the shelf above the grinder, each one originating from some slope on the Blue Mountains, each one claiming to deliver the authentic flavour of Jamaican coffee.

She didn’t bother asking me what I wanted because the order was the same every day. One day, I swore, I’d surprise her and mix it up, but not today. She came over with the latte and one of her thick homemade coconut Totos – though she pronounced it toeto, conjuring an extra vowel in there somehow. It was a simple cake of molasses and coconut but tasted exactly how I imagined island life would.

The aromas of Jamaican spices were infused into her skin like culinary perfume.

I took the laptop out of my bag and set it up on the small reclaimed-wood table. Part of it had been a railway sleeper in another life. The laptop chimed as I took my wireless ear buds and reading glasses out of my bag.

Ear buds in, the pushchair mafia disappeared into the background as Apple Music predicted my needs and wants for another day in the word mines, kicking it off with something random from the playlist. I’m big on playlists based on my mood, I’ve got work ones, walking ones, late-night-chill ones, all carefully curated to hit the right spot.

I hate being between projects. It’s this weird limbo where I’m never sure what comes next. It needs to be more than just a good idea. The last one, a deep dive into the manipulations of social media on our children and the rise of teen suicide, had been picked up by Channel Four, which meant we’d get to eat for another six months. But there’s the whole ‘you’re only as good as your last failure’ aspect to it all; that dread-infused panic that this time the idea won’t be good enough, or hard-hitting enough, or thought-provoking enough for anyone to give a shit about it and actually want to part with cold hard cash for.

I ended up wasting three hours getting nowhere, just copying and pasting reference images and article links into my notes and listening to a lot of Scottish ’80s Indie Pop while I drank a fourth and fifth coffee of the day, taking me up to lunch. Music is important to me. I’m one of those people who measures out the key moments of my life by tune and can remember what song was playing when I lost my virginity, when I broke my elbow, when I first stumped up the nerve to ask Morven out, and so many other sliding doors moments of my life. It’s why I tend to be fairly aware of the soundtrack of my life. The more obscure the better. I interviewed a guy from one of these bands a few years back, asking him if he’d ever been tempted to get in on the reunion circuit thing and cash in on the nostalgia boom. He’d just looked at me and laughed saying, ‘Could you imagine the stench of failure on the tour bus?’ I kind of liked that, the way something that felt fundamentally important to me could be nothing more than a bitter reminder of their failures to someone else.

I figured I’d walk home to the empty house and try and work out what we were going to do without Morven to keep us both in line. Okay, I’ll admit it, I love these daddy daughter days where we get to pretend the world revolves around us.

Morven had left her phone on the kitchen counter, still plugged into the wall.

I shook my head. Sometimes, I swear, that woman would forget her head if it wasn’t screwed on. I figured I’d give her a few hours to get settled in, then call the hotel and give her some stick about it.

In the meantime, I put my laptop on charge, taking her phone out of the socket, and woke Siri up and got her to carry on working her way through the playlist as I made myself busy around the kitchen. I like to cook. I had ever since my dad had died six years ago. I’d been struggling and Morven had suggested I needed to find something I could just lose myself in. It was pretty good advice. Sometimes we just need a place to hide. I’d tried collecting old vinyl records, meaning there were about two thousand of them taking up wall space. For a while it had been more like an addiction than a hobby, and every bit as hard to quit as the cigarettes were after those two weeks back when I was fourteen.

There was something about cooking that was cathartic. I got to lose myself in the precision of the recipes, the exacting timings and trying to decipher the chemistry of flavours. And it worked, to a degree. We ate better, and after six months the grief was less all-consuming.

I ended up making three days’ worth of meals to a soundtrack of my youth. I put them in the freezer before I went to check the details of the hotel that Morven had pinned up on the fridge door.

I hushed Siri and called through.

The receptionist picked up on the third ring, all bright and breezy. She was having a good day and she really hoped her infectious enthusiasm could spread down the phone. ‘Hi,’ I said, nowhere near her level of perky. ‘Could you put me through to Morven Kerr’s room? It’s her husband, Alex.’

‘One moment, Mister Kerr.’ I heard the flutter of keys, followed by, ‘I’m sorry, sir, Mrs. Kerr hasn’t checked in yet.’ I checked the time. It was maybe two hours from our place to the New Forest. Three with traffic jams. She should have been in her room before lunch.

Two hours late wasn’t anything to panic about.

Even so, I’ve got that creative brain which immediately hurtles off into the dark places. I was imagining the worst, a multiple car pile-up on the M3, mass fatalities south of Basingstoke. It was always the same. My mind went dark. I know why it happens. I can rationalise it. It’s ingrained. One a.m., aged nineteen, someone came knocking on my dorm room door. I dragged myself out of bed and went down to the communal phone. I was shaking. I remember that. One a.m. phone calls are never good. Ever. But this one … my mum was in tears. She couldn’t get any words out. My dad took the receiver off her. He wasn’t much better. But he managed to tell me that my older brother Matt had been killed in an accident. He’d been coming home from Uni in Nottingham for Christmas. A long-distance lorry driver had fallen asleep at the wheel – only for a second or two, but long enough to go through the line of orange cones dividing the lanes of traffic around the roadworks, and straight into Matt’s crappy little Fiesta. They told us he hadn’t suffered, but I’ve never believed that. A spur of metal had torn free and lanced clean through his spine and out the other side. There had to be seconds … minutes even … when he felt his life bleeding out across the cheap seat fabric … so yeah, my mind always went there. Without fail. Scars.

‘Are you sure?’

‘It would appear several of her party are already checked in, but she’s yet to join us, I’m afraid.’

‘Okay, thanks. Could you let her know she’s left her phone at home, but that doesn’t mean Poppy’s going to let her get away without saying goodnight come bedtime, no matter what damage your obstacle course does.’

‘I’ll make sure to pass that on,’ she said, amused.

I went back to thinking about ways to keep food on the table and distract myself from worrying, then wandered back to make sure I was waiting outside the school gates when Poppy came skipping out less than thirty seconds after the bell had rung out across the playground. I don’t know how she did it, but it was the same every day; she’d come racing across the spongy tarmac net-ball court, trailing her backpack behind her, and hurl herself into my arms like she hadn’t seen me for a month. We spun around, her legs flying out behind her as she giggled, and then I plonked her down on the ground again and we set off back to the house, Poppy skipping, me trudging. Thinking. And hating myself for it.

I knew something was wrong before I set foot inside the door.

There was glass scattered across the welcome mat, and a little way down the hall, half a brick.

‘Stay there,’ I told Poppy, my hand across her chest.

My mind raced. It’s London. Shit happens. Bricks get put through windows, walls get graffitied, cars get torched. It didn’t have to mean anything more than that. But it was the second time it had happened to us in less than a month. My skin crawled as the glass crunched underfoot. I could still smell the lingering fragrances of the food, like a ghost that had remained long beyond its last breath, unable to let go. I crouched down beside the half-brick. There was a powdered white corner, but otherwise nothing remarkable about it. A prank. Probably. I mean, not a funny one. But not targeted violence. Even so, I closed my fingers around it, and walked from room to room, ready to use it like a cosh if I had to.

Everything was just as I’d left it.

There is nothing stranger than walking through your own house dreading that you’re not alone in there. That old chestnut about your heart hammering? It was as though it had stolen a pneumatic drill and was splitting a way out through my ribs.

I double-checked upstairs before I let Poppy into the house.

We bolted the door behind us. ‘Go and change out of your uniform, kiddo,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got to call someone to fix the window.’

For once there were no smart-arse comments. She sprinted up the stairs two at a time and slammed her door behind her, Hurricane Poppy in full force.

I still had the guy we’d used the last tim. . .