Just Like You

by Alison Percival

Genres: Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

You have everything she ever wanted. How far will she go to take it? When swimming instructor Isabel meets up-and-coming actor Iain, the attraction is instantaneous. The pair fall hard for one another and, just a few months later, they are starting to imagine a future together. But everyone has a past... Heartbroken Nicky is convinced that Isabel has stolen the life she was meant to lead. Soon Nicky finds herself becoming fixated on Iain's new girlfriend, and envy quickly turns into a dark, dangerous obsession, with devastating consequences. A chilling psychological thriller that explores love, jealousy and obsession, perfect for fans of Karin Slaughter, Lisa Gray and Robert Dugoni. ********** 'A taut psychological thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. A delicious sense of uneasiness settles in and refuses to be shaken. This one will give you chills' Netgalley reviewer 'WOW! What a twisty thriller!' Netgalley reviewer 'I loved this book . . . keeps you on the edge of your seat' Netgalley reviewer

Release date: June 1, 2019

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 296

Sample

Isabel

JUNE

I stand facing away from the showerhead, head bowed, letting the hot water thrum onto my back and shoulders, the smell of my rosemary shampoo mingling with the steam. The water is so much hotter than it ever gets in my shower at home, even with the dial turned right round, and sometimes it just turns freezing cold, with no warning. I’d like to stay under here for longer but I’m meeting Nendie at half past for a quick drink. I roughly dry my hair, rub some body lotion onto my legs, fish my pants out of the bottom of my gym bag, pull on my jeans and T-shirt, and turn around to grab the swimming costume I slung on the back of the cubicle door.

It’s gone.

It must have fallen down. I open the door, fully expecting to see it lying on the tiled floor, but it’s not there. I shake my towel out, look under the slatted bench, rummage through my bag. Shit. Someone’s nicked it. It would have to be a relatively new one too, not one of my ones where the elastic is beginning to go around the legs.

Out in the staff changing room, Kate, one of the other instructors, is drying her hair in front of the mirrors and Shelley, the lifeguard, is sitting with one foot up on her knee exposing a neat triangle of pubic hair, shaking talc onto her feet. I ask them if they saw anyone take it but they both say they didn’t. No members of the public are allowed in this bit so it’s horrible to think it might be someone I know.

I see Nendie before she sees me, sitting on one of the white tables outside the café in the bright sunshine, underneath the orange canopy. She’s on her mobile, chatting away, and gives me a smile when she spots me.

‘I got you one of your disgusting turmeric latte things,’ she says, moving her bag off the chair she has saved. She lifts her cheek to be kissed. ‘You look pissed off.’

‘It’s fine – it’s just someone nicked my costume off the back of the door when I was in the shower.’

‘Oh, that’s a pain. Paula got a pair of brand new goggles pinched from the side the other week; she saw this woman wearing them the next day crawling along in the slow lane.’

‘Did she ask for them back?’

‘She did but the woman insisted they were hers so what could she do? Maybe she had the same ones.’

‘How is Paula?’

‘She’s good – she says hello.’

We catch up on our days. I tell her about what happened in my ducklings’ class; one of them, a girl with plaits, had managed to put her face in the water for the first time after sitting on the side for the last five sessions. And my seventy-nine-year-old, with a lifelong terror of the water, had successfully swum a whole width. The look of joy when she touched the side and realised she’d done it was wonderful. Nendie tells me about a woman in her hot yoga class who’d walked out mid-way through, leaving a little heap of sunflower seed shells on her mat. She tells me about how she and Paula went again to the Ladies’ Pond in Hampstead last weekend and how amazing it was, and that I’d love it too and should come with them next time. Nendie and Paula always have something on the go, some plan. As well as teaching yoga and Pilates, Nendie runs a pop-up shop selling things like acrylic necklaces that spell out words like ‘yay’ and ‘meh’ and silk-screened T-shirts featuring her own designs. Paula, who has a full-time job in legal aid, also manages to run a monthly supper club which has a waiting list every time she puts it on.

Nendie gets to her feet, bends her left knee and puts her leg up behind her, then the other, stretching out. ‘We’re going to catch a film at the Rio later if you want to come along.’

‘Thanks, but Iain’s coming round.’

‘How is love’s young dream? You still not been to his?’ she says.

‘Not yet.’

‘That’s a bit weird, don’t you think?’

‘I told you. He’s having work done on his. He’s staying on a friend’s couch.’

Although she says it lightly, jokingly, her questioning makes me feel defensive – of course I’ve asked him why I haven’t been invited round yet.

‘Hmmm. I still don’t see why you can’t go over. How’s your flat hunting going?’ She puts on her bike helmet and clicks the buckle into place under her chin.

‘I saw one last night near Victoria Park. When you opened the front door, you could see straight through to the bog, and the bed was up on a shelf. Ugh.’

‘Well, you know our offer still stands. Okay, I’m off. Speak to you later.’

She unchains her bike from the fence, wheels it to the edge of the pavement, checks over her shoulder and then swings into the traffic, waving her hand to me behind her.

I walk home through London Fields. The plane trees are a vibrant lime green, pollen moving in great drifts in the air. Runners in headphones pass me, plugged into their own little worlds, two men throw a yellow Frisbee to one another whilst a sheepdog bounds between them, a couple are having a picnic on a checked green rug. I love it round here; I really don’t want to move but my greedy landlord is selling up. I’ve been given three months’ notice to leave – I have to be out by 1st September and June is already nearly over. Now I have to make myself scarce during viewings and keep it tidy whilst people richer than me decide whether to literally pull the rug from under my feet. How will I ever find anywhere else that’s better? Or that I can afford? From my flat, I can walk to work and the lido, it’s a minute’s walk from a row of shops, near a tube and the overground. I can get into central London if I want to easily, although I rarely do. It has everything.

I’ve registered with all the lettings agents and they send me stuff incessantly but my heart’s not in it. I really don’t want to live with other people and their peculiar habits again. I’m trying not to think about it but it’s there, a low-level background hum of anxiety.

I grab a bottle of wine from the corner shop, buy a watermelon, let myself in and take the stairs two at a time up to my flat. Inside, I bung my wet stuff in the machine, stick the wine in the fridge, and just have time to change before the buzzer goes. I press the intercom and a voice says, ‘It’s me.’ I hear him walk up the stairs and then he’s here, clutching takeaway bags. Every time I see him anew, I get the flutters. Today he’s in a chambray shirt I haven’t seen before that makes his eyes look navy. He puts the takeaway bags down, wraps his arms round my waist. I put mine around his and we sway and kiss.

‘You taste of chlorine,’ he says.

‘Oh, sorry.’

‘No – I like it.’ He bends his head to kiss me again. ‘We better eat this whilst it’s hot,’ he laughs. We go into the kitchen.

‘What did you get?’ I say, opening the cupboard and taking out plates.

‘Pork balls and that chicken in black bean sauce you like. With extra rice.’

In my tiny little kitchen, where you can’t open the oven door if the door to the cupboard opposite is open, we work well together. He takes out the food from the trays and puts it on plates, and I chop up the watermelon for after and pour the wine. We settle down with our food on our laps in the living room.

‘How was your rehearsal?’ I ask.

‘Not good.’ He pulls a face.

‘Oh no – why?’

‘Dom – that’s the director – had a bit of a freak-out. He said we shouldn’t still be blocking scenes at this stage, then bollocked Oliver for not being line perfect. To be fair, Oliver only has one big scene, so he should be on top of it by now.’

‘It’s still quite a few weeks off, isn’t it? You have time.’

‘I suppose so,’ he shrugs. ‘I did manage a quick swim at my gym. I’m getting better.’

‘Ah – did you? My good influence!’

I think back to the randomness of how we met. He’d phoned up to book an intensive course of swimming lessons and I’d answered. Most people book online. I’d thought at the time that he had a nice voice – a deep Scottish burr – one of those voices you don’t forget. I looked through the rotas to see who had a free slot, and was going to give him to Yousef, but at the last minute swapped him to my list.

On the day of his first lesson, I was standing by the side of the pool just finishing with another client when I saw him coming out of the men’s showers. He sat down at the shallow end, dangled his legs in the water. Right away, I had felt an initial jolt of attraction.

‘Iain?’ I’d said, walking over when it was his allotted time.

When he spoke, I put two and two together with the voice on the phone. He’d got into the water gingerly, swum half a width, thrashing about, his head sticking up like a tortoise’s, before coming to a stop. I’d taken off my tracksuit with my costume underneath and got into the pool with him. I had to touch his neck, his shoulders, his wet skin, position his arms, his legs. I told him a little about the Alexander Technique for his breathing and he nodded that yes, he’d heard of it. All the time I had running through my head, Keep it professional, keep it professional. I kept telling him to concentrate on his breathing, that breathing was the key, when I was a little short of breath myself, a little light-headed.

He was in the bar afterwards, not with anyone, wearing a navy twill jacket, and jeans, good shoes – brown brogues. No wedding ring, I noticed – but then lots of married men don’t wear one. Where his hair was still a bit wet, two little tufts stuck up on either side of his head – like some type of bird that Mum would know the name of. Would have known the name of. I’d wanted to reach out and smooth those tufts down. There was something endearing about it.

I found myself looking forward to his weekly lesson, feeling a little bubble of excitement when it was the day. Sometimes he would use the gym for a couple of hours before his lesson with me, sometimes after, and I wondered what he did for a job to have so much free time. We didn’t talk about anything personal during the lessons. Soon there was only one lesson left. I knew that I’d probably never see him again. After that last lesson, in the bar afterwards, I took a deep breath and went over to where he was sitting. By the end of the conversation, he’d asked me out for a drink.

On our first ‘date’, he didn’t want to meet in a bar or a restaurant but asked me to choose somewhere that meant something to me, somewhere I loved. London Fields Lido was the obvious choice but that would have been a bit too much like another swimming lesson for him, so I took him to Hackney Marshes, then for salt beef bagels at Monty’s and pisco sours. He told me he was an actor and I had been a bit put off, to be honest. Actors are luvvies, aren’t they? Self-obsessed, posh private school boys. But he was nothing like that. It sounded as if he’d had a similar upbringing to me – went to a state school; even his parents sounded similar to mine, a bit older. He had grown up in Portobello, just outside Edinburgh, with an older sister who he’s close to. He was funny and charming and made my stomach dip every time I looked at him, and he seemed to find it almost refreshing that I wasn’t impressed by his job. He’d been in some series I’d never heard but then I don’t watch much TV. I’d googled him on the way home and looked at his agent’s website with a list of his acting credits. There was nothing personal on there, but he was who he said he was.

On the tube home I remember I couldn’t stop smiling. I had already fallen pretty hard for him. I just had to figure out how and when I was going to finish with Dan.

‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ I say now. ‘Let’s go outside.’ We take our drinks and crawl through the window; Iain has to stoop low, so he doesn’t bash his head on the frame. I light a citronella candle and we squash into my battered deckchair, our feet up on an enamel stool. I lean back against him. I turn my head and we kiss, slow and languorous. After a while, I get up and lead him by the hand to the bedroom.

Much later, when we are both asleep, my phone rings with an Unknown Caller ID. I quickly answer so I don’t wake Iain.

‘Can I come over? Issy? Please?’ Dan’s voice is wheedling, slurred.

‘No, Dan, you can’t.’

‘I just want to talk. I miss you.’

‘Please stop this, Dan.’

‘Is he there? Is he there right now – is he in your bed? Is he fuc—’ I cut him off. My hands shake as I scroll down to block his number, trying not to let the light from my phone spill out.

Iain stirs, lifts his head from the pillow. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Yes, everything’s fine – go back to sleep.’ He turns over and, within seconds, his breathing slows again.

I never thought Dan would take me ending it like this. This is the third time he’s called, always late at night, always pissed, maudlin. I’d tried to finish with him gently, and even though I’d said there was no one else, he’d known straightaway I was lying. He always knew when I was lying. He had railed about what a cold heartless bitch I was, had I forgotten everything he’d given up for me, had I forgotten how his girlfriend of seven years had begged and sobbed when he’d left her for me, had I forgotten how she’d trashed his precious vinyl, dragged a brooch pin across the grooves, how she’d dumped half his possessions in a skip? I don’t see how he can blame me for her behaviour – he left of his own volition. I’ve been the dumped and the dumpee many times. We can’t choose who our hearts lead us to, can we? Someone always has the upper hand, someone is always deeper in. Someone always gets hurt, comes off worst.

I lie there, unable to get back to sleep, listening to the sound of Iain’s breathing, worrying about how long Dan is going to keep this up for. My mind keeps ticking until, finally, I drift off myself.

Nicky

I have found her.

It was easy. It was surprisingly easy, in fact, but then she does have an unusual name, so it didn’t take much detective work. I discounted the teen with braces in Wisconsin and a woman with steel-grey helmet hair who works at GlaxoSmithKline. Leugh – it’s an odd name. I wonder where it comes from. Is it Leugh as in lewd or Leugh as in bleurgh?

I want to see what she looks like. I don’t want to see what she looks like. My fingers hover over the keys.

Oh. Her profile picture is of an outdoor swimming pool so I can’t see what she looks like anyway.

Isabel only shares information with people she knows. If you know Isabel, send her a friend request.

I can’t see her posts, but her privacy settings aren’t on full lockdown, so I can still see her friends. She has three hundred and eighty-nine friends. Is that a lot? Maybe she’ll be tagged. I begin to make my way through the ones who have left themselves wide open, skimming their updates, flicking through their albums. There are pictures of people I don’t know, don’t want to know, will never know, but I scan them anyway, methodically looking for clues. You can tell a lot about someone from their friends. I’ve always thought that. Your friends reflect you and you reflect your friends.

There are a lot of wedding photos. All her friends seem to be getting married or having babies; I wonder how she feels about that. I wonder if she feels left behind, out of step. There are pictures of black and white ultrasound scans, which to me just look like fuzzy indecipherable static – then pictures of gummy new-borns, now they’re crawling, babies in highchairs, their faces smeared with gunge. Then there’s memes and arguments about politics, chain letters and quizzes and progress on games. But none of these things reveal much about Isabel. I’m wasting time.

I shiver in the night air, pull a throw from the end of my bed, wrap it round my shoulders. Night times are the worst, when I can’t sleep, despite the pills. Who else is up at this time? Just the lovesick, insomniacs, nursing mothers. It’s Saturday night – I should be out, I should be out having fun, I should be showing him what he’s missing. I can’t see what he’s doing because he’s already gone to ground – conveniently deleted himself from every platform.

Next, I find her on Google Plus. Isabel hasn’t shared anything on this page with you. She’s in fifteen circles – what can she be saying? It’s like she’s behind a high wall that I can’t scale, but I know she’s there, lurking somewhere, just out of sight. I’m getting closer, getting warmer.

I find her work profile. And there’s a picture. It’s just a head-and-shoulders shot but here she is.

Isabel Leugh has shoulder-length brown, almost black, hair. It’s not cut in any discernible style – it just hangs there. She has a heart-shaped face. She’s smiling in the picture but not showing her teeth. She has a scattering of brown freckles across the bridge of her nose as if someone has blown them on like paint through a straw. A mole high up on her left temple. Her ears are pierced, once in both ears, but she’s not wearing earrings.

I don’t know what to think. She’s not all that. What does she have that I don’t? If I was more like her would he want me back? Is she really prettier than I am, more attractive? Don’t all women see where they fit on the scale, compare themselves to an ex to see how they rate, play Your Face or Mine? Any woman who says she doesn’t is a liar.

Underneath the photo it says:

Isabel is a fully qualified swimming teacher with over five years’ experience of teaching children and adults. She specialises in water confidence, stroke technique and water safety for all abilities and ages. Stroke technique? I bet. Then there’s a list of her qualifications – a whole string of them: ASA and UKCC and STA and blah de blah de blah. Why does he need a swimming coach anyway? Is it for a part? He always said he would never do any of that method shit.

Another search, another result. God, she’s everywhere.

Isabel Leugh is on Twitter. Don’t miss any updates from Isabel Leugh.

@lidolove Drinks at @midnightapothecary

@lidolove Just eaten the best ever almond and polenta cake

@lidolove Flat hunting?

Why the unhappy face

@lidolove Just posted a photo.

I follow the link. And I find her pictures. Now the information is coming all at once – like a river bursting its banks, like those poor people on the news who said the water just came up so fast they had no time to save anything and all their chairs are up on the sofa and there is thick brown mud ruining everything, leaving chaos and devastation and despair in its wake.

I can hardly breathe. My fingers are shaking so much I’m terrified I’m going to accidentally like her pictures. I’m moving forwards and backwards in time, excavating, watching her life unfold. To think there she was, living her life, all this time up until now.

Her pictures are mostly of water, a lot of pictures of a tortoiseshell cat, friends at barbecues, round campfires, summer picnics featuring drinks with red and white striped straws topped with sprigs of mint, geraniums on windowsills, vases of flowers shot from above, tomatoes in blue cardboard punnets, artichokes and cherries, lemons in terracotta bowls. There are a lot of pictures of lemons. Who wants to see a bowl of lemons? Who gives a shit you’ve seen a bowl of lemons? Stop the presses. Ha! There’s a shot of two orange-coloured drinks, the orange is as orange as the sun with a slice of real orange floating on top and a fat green olive skewered by a cocktail stick. There are lots of pictures of ice creams in waffle cones, tagged #gelato – as if we didn’t know – two hands side by side holding them.

But there’s no photos at all of Iain. Why not? It’s as if she’s not proud of him – doesn’t want to show him off. She doesn’t deserve him. I bet she doesn’t know I’m sitting here in one of his T-shirts, so soft and warm.

There’s a photo of her in a floppy black straw hat with a pattern of little cut-out squares round the brim, making tiny square shadows on her skin and bare shoulders. And in the next photo, tagged #santamarinella, oh so helpfully, she’s in a costume the colour of emeralds, standing on the edge of a white boat, guarded by a silver rail, turquoise sea all round, the bluest I’ve ever seen, grey towering cliffs behind. In the right-hand corner is a video camera sign and she comes to life. She’s moving. She’s actually moving. She’s looking at the camera, mouthing something – I can’t make out what it is, something like ‘Come in.’ I can see the tendons in her calves flex, the muscles in her brown thighs contract, her hands are held together as if she’s praying, arms above her head tapered to a point. She bends her knees, oh so slowly, and she springs off; she dives in in slow motion – a perfect, graceful arc. First just her arms are under, then she’s halfway, then all the way in apart from her feet, and then white spray blooms. The water sparkles and glitters and then at the very last second, before the video stops, I hear his laugh. He sounds so happy.

Oh god it hurts, it hurts so much. I can’t bear it – it’s like wearing your skin on inside out, like death by a thousand tiny cuts, to see someone else living your life, the life you should have had, to be replaced like this. But even though it’s pure torture, I just can’t stop looking.

I play the diving clip again and again. I don’t know how to save it or else I would. It says it has sixty-five views – will she notice the count has gone up? I’m not quite sure how it works. She doesn’t do Stories – on that, I know, someone can see who’s watched it.

I search for Santa Marinella on Google Earth. The little cursor flutters and flies, the earth spins on its axis, zooming over the sea so blue, so many fathoms undiscovered, until it gets closer and closer and lands, little points popping up everywhere. I check the weather there. I can almost smell the bougainvillea, the lemon trees, sipping their drinks on the wooden veranda and then at night, or in the heat of the day, in the bright blazing heat in cool cotton sheets, they are making love.

I feel bile rising in my throat, a sick hot chill. She’s shoving it in my face, taunting me. But now something else is gnawing at me. Why is she flat hunting? And why is she sad about it? At least she hasn’t been spat out, found herself having to move to a different part of London north of the river, which is practically a foreign country, where you know no one and no one knows you.

I flick back to Twitter and wade through her followers. She’s followed three estate agents and a lettings agent, and they follow each other. People just don’t realise how much they give away online – what’s wrong with the telephone? Or an email or text? I comb through the estate agents’ list of instructions, narrowing it down, cross-referencing photos that show tiny glimpses of her flat, with ones on their site. Finally, I find it.

Ideally located moments from London Fields, this bright and airy one-bedroom flat with a delightful balcony offers well-presented interiors throughout situated on the first floor of a converted period house.

I peer and peer at the photos, trying to blow them up, to enlarge them to a higher resolution, to see more, to see everything. If only I could swoop through the bedroom window, land on the bed like Peter Pan, I would hover over them, wrap myself in an invisibility cloak. Maybe if I look closely enough, they will appear through the door. These photos don’t tell me enough. I have to see it in real life.

First thing Monday morning I will make an appointment to view her flat.

The blue light of dawn is creeping under the blind. As I close my laptop down, I catch sight of my face in the black mirror of the lid, hovering like a pale moon.

Isabel

The morning sun is making stripes of light on the floor. Iain is still asleep – he looks so sweet, so peaceful. He sleeps with his arms thrown wide, as if he is welcoming the world in. He has a scar above his left eyebrow; I wonder how he got it. Another tiny scar, no bigger than a grape pip, near his left ear – a chicken pox scar, it looks like. I wonder how old he was when he had it. We’re still at that stage of sharing all our stories, finding things out about each other. He comes to, maybe aware of my eyes on him, and reaches for me. He’s all warm and toasty.

‘Come here,’ he says, drawing me to him. ‘What do you want to do today?’ he murmurs into my shoulder, kissing it. ‘I could make you breakfast. Have you got any eggs? I do a mean scrambled egg with thyme.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Let’s go to Columbia Road. We can grab brunch out.’ I get out of bed, pull on my kimono. ‘If you don’t get there early it gets too crowded.’

He gets up and walks round the room, naked. He scratches his head, picking up his clothes from the floor. Everything about him turns me on, his shoulders, his forearms – just the whole way he’s put together – and I know if we don’t make a move to go out now, we’ll go back to bed for hours. I jump in the shower, get dressed.

Columbia Road is already bustling, as I knew it would be. Each side of the road is packed with stalls, leaving a narrow tunnel in the middle for people to walk down. Steel shelves and trestle tables topped with green and white striped awnings are crammed with plants and flowers in every conceivable colour. The smell is divine. I love the patter of the traders – the air is full of All right darlin’, Pick out what you like or what you don’t like, Eyes down, Everything a fiver. I come here so often, some of them know me by name; I got all the flowers for Nendie and Paula’s wedding from here, armfuls and armfuls of chocolate cosmos and black dahlias.

There’s not enough room to walk two abreast so I hold my hand behind me, and Iain follows along behind and, when it’s wide enough to walk side by side, we link hands. He’s wearing a Baker-Boy-style cap pulled right down, even though it’s warm.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask.

‘Yes, it’s just I don’t like crowds much. Are you going to buy anything?’

‘On the way back. I’ll have to carry it round for hours otherwise.’

We bump into my friends Sasha and Greg, carrying a banana tree plant between them. They put it down to chat. Sasha opens a bag to show me a fifties tea dress she has just bought. Sasha winks at me and does the thumbs up as they walk off. We run into more of my friends who come over and say hello. Iain is charming and funny to them. After they’ve gone, he says, amused, ‘Do you know everyone?’

My phone buzzes in my pocket with a text from Sasha. Where do I know him from?!! Bring him for dinner!

We stroll with no real purpose or direction, looking in the windows of all the interesting independent shops that line the street. I see a framed graphic print I like of a swimmer’s head and shoulders emerging out of a Hockney-blue pool.

‘Where do you fancy eating?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know this area. You decide.’

In the pub, Iain orders a full English and I opt for eggs hollandaise. He chats away, waving his cutlery about, stabbing the air to make a point. We talk more about our childhoods, about what we wanted to be when we grew up. He says he wanted to be a photographer, not an actor, originally, that no one in his family has ever acted. As he’s speaking, I suddenly ge. . .