Perfect Stranger

by Jake Cross

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

A chilling thriller that will make you question everything you think you know about your loved ones.
Following a whirlwind romance, Rose and Chris's marriage has been unshakeable for twenty years. But when teenager Katie turns up on their doorstep, their perfect life threatens to crumble. Katie says she's Chris's long-lost daughter, the product of a forgotten summer fling. The couple is still reeling from shock when Katie tells them she has nowhere to go. Kind-hearted Rose invites Katie to stay, despite Chris's protests. But soon after Katie moves in, strange things start happening. With dark secrets about Chris's history coming to light, Rose no longer knows who to trust. Soon, she isn't sure whether she's invited a dangerous stranger into her home, or whether she's been living with one all along…
“A must-read book… I am an instant fan.' Heidi Lynn's Book Reviews

Release date: August 21, 2019

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

‘What on earth is this?’

Chris’s wife walked into the kitchen, mail in hand and favouring her right ankle today. She held up a note.

It was a piece of thick white paper the size of a postcard. It was blank. Blank except for those eight words which he could read even from six feet away.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO EVE LEVINE

‘Who’s that addressed to?’ Chris asked.

‘No envelope.’ Rose turned the note over. ‘And it’s not stamped.’

He took the note, turning it over carefully, hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t. No stamp. The sender hadn’t dropped the envelope into a post box half a country away. He or she had approached the house, had stood right at the front door and slotted it into their home, to guarantee the recipient would find it, read it, be shocked by it.

‘This can’t be for us,’ he said. ‘It must be a mistake.’

Julia sauntered into the kitchen, eye make-up smudged and long oak hair from her mother a wild mess. Her blue dressing gown was similar to Rose’s, but Julia’s had a frayed collar where she liked to chew it. Rose grabbed the note and slotted it into the mass of mail to hide it, and then put the mass into Chris’s hands. She needn’t have bothered because their eighteen-year-old was hypnotised by her phone yet again, which made the rest of the world white noise.

Rose put the kettle on then started to fix hair that had escaped from her messy bun.

‘Remember I’ve got the physiotherapist and then I’m off to Meadowhall. And you’re buying, remember?’

He did remember. He’d bought her the wrong phone charger. The last thing on his mind at the moment.

With both girls distracted, he went to the front door and peered out, left and right. No strange cars or faces. The same schoolkids drifting past, the same neighbours leaving for work, and not a one amongst them with a guilty look. He walked halfway down his path just to make sure there was no damage to his car or Rose’s or to the house. If someone was bold enough to post unsettling notes through their letterbox, who knows what else they might do? But the cars were fine. It was just another Monday morning no one would remember on their deathbed in a Sheffield suburb on nobody’s ‘places-to-die’ list.

Back in the kitchen, Julia was still hooked to her mobile, and Rose was writing on a sheet of paper stuck to the fridge door, using her special big pen and big letters because of her arthritic wrist. Always chirpy in the morning, she was mouthing the words to some song as she scribbled the day’s important tasks. A routine morning in the Redfern household. Same scene as yesterday, and the day before, and countless previous. Save for the note that Chris couldn’t get out of his head.

‘Grab my slippers, please. From the en suite,’ Rose said.

He did as asked, trudging up the stairs.

But when he came out of the bathroom, she was standing in front of their closed bedroom door. Clearly, she didn’t want this conversation to happen in front of Julia.

Chris noticed that he still had the mail clutched tightly in one hand, Rose’s slippers in the other. Rose took the lot and dropped everything but the note.

‘I just asked Julia if she knew the name Eve Levine. No. And it’s a no from me, too.’

She was awaiting something, leaning against the door with her arms folded. With her long bob now free of its bun, she looked healthy and radiant.

Chris said, ‘Same here.’

‘What about your work?’

Chris paused to think. As a microbiologist, he was often instrumental in saving lives, but not always. Sometimes patients were just too ill to save. But that didn’t mean…

‘Do you think this could be about my job? Someone blaming me because my lab failed to save Eve from her cancer?’

She stepped forward and touched his arm reassuringly. ‘Don’t panic yet. It could just be some kids playing silly buggers.’ Rose glanced down at the note in her hand. ‘But we have to be sure. So, when you go in today, would you ask about it?’

He nodded. She left and he took a shower and dressed.

But when he came out of the en suite, his wife was back. And was sitting on the bed with his phone.

‘What are you doing?’

She showed him. She’d loaded his Facebook app and sent a message:

You know what I did, do you? HA HA. PM me

‘I sent this to all your friends, even those old college pals you’ve not seen in nearly twenty years after you just walked out. It’ll sound vague to most of them. But if someone’s playing a game, they’ll think they’ve been found out and so they’ll private message you. I’ve done the same on mine and I’ll do Julia’s if she ever lets it go. So now all you have to do is swoon over your wife’s computer brain and then wait. Help me dress.’

While childbirth had put a little stubborn weight on her, and arthritis had stolen her ability to exercise, teenage years of gymnastics had kept her slender and young-looking. He kissed her insteps as he helped her into socks, and the smooth skin of her shoulders as he clumsily worked the clasp of her bra. She cast her hair aside so he could nibble her neck, but giggled and playfully slapped his hands when they tried to wander.

The rest of her clothing she could manage alone, so he went downstairs. She had left his packed lunch in the fridge. Another cold meal, yippee.

There was a note on the fridge.

Buy whiteboard so don’t have to stick paper on fridge and read what’s on damn paper stuck on fridge.

He was always forgetting to check the notes. He wrote ‘WHITEBOARD’ on his hand. He grabbed his coat. Julia didn’t even glance up from her phone, but en route to the car he got a text from her reminding him that it was their wedding anniversary on Saturday. He smiled. Sometimes it was easy to forget how sweet she could be.

Then he set off for another day of work, trying to ignore the ball of dread in the pit of his stomach. This was the only family he had, and he couldn’t let anything happen to it.

Saturday, 16 November

Double tragedy as mother of one takes own life following boyfriend’s murder

Eve Levine, 40, was found dead at her home in Bradford by her sister, Elaine, 44, early on Friday morning. Eve had been living with a terminal cancer diagnosis when Ron Hugill, 48, her long-term boyfriend and father to her daughter, was murdered in an altercation with a mugger at the gym where he was employed on 9 November. His funeral is on Monday.

Eve’s sister says, ‘I want to remember Eve in life, not death. She was suffering at the end, and Ron’s murder hit her hard. I hope there is a heaven and she’s finally at peace.’

Eve, whose funeral is on 22 November, is survived by her estranged sister and a young daughter.

‘Did you click the link in my text?’ Rose said as soon as she answered the phone. Chris had been walking across the car park to the lab when her message had pinged through, stopping him dead in his tracks. The concern in her voice upped his own store of anxiety tenfold.

‘Yes. What the hell is it?’

‘A newspaper article. Look at the date. I searched for the name Eve Levine online. It took some time because it’s a popular name, but I found her. This was the only mention of her that I could find. She was from Bradford, so it’s got to be her. Look, cancer. So she would have had tests. This really could be about your work after all.’

He stopped and leaned against someone else’s car in the car park to get his head around this.

‘Not possible, Rose. Cancer, it says. And even if I’d done something to cause this woman harm, and her family is pissed off, they would blame the GP first. They couldn’t get my name except through official channels, probably not even then. It would involve a complaint and I’d know about it. Rose, it’s just a big mistake. Forget about it.’

‘I can’t. Just make sure you ask your boss about it. I also searched for Eve’s sister, Elaine. But there’s nothing online or on Facebook or anything. I couldn’t find anything about her daughter, either. The one mentioned in the article. Poor girl, losing her mother to suicide. And her father, if that’s what the man who got killed was to her. The article doesn’t really say, does it? I hope she’s not a small child. How old do you think she is?’

‘How should I know?’ he snapped before he could stop himself. ‘Sorry, Rose. I just— I just don’t know why someone would want to mess with us like this.’

Rose’s voice came back softly. ‘It’s okay, Chris. You’re worried, I’m worried, and I guess it’s making us a bit snappy. But we’ll figure this out, together.’

‘You’re right, you always are. But right now I’m still sorry. And I’ll always love you.’

‘I love you too. Also always.’ Rose paused. ‘But, even if it’s just for peace of mind, would you ask at work? You never know.’

Chris sighed. ‘I will. I’ll ask.’

She thanked him and hung up. But he knew she was still upset at his outburst.

A headache was forming, and he didn’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

Sheffield Royal Infirmary’s microbiology lab. Here were the guys and gals who poked and prodded at blood or tissue or whatever else the nurse or doctor took from you. Their job was to work out what was messing you up. You’d never meet them, but they’d know you had HIV or Ebola long before you did.

Chris worked on Sterile Fluids, while the staff called ‘body bench’: a name that to the uninitiated painted a picture of corpses laid out for dissection. Body parts were not uncommon, but mostly Chris dealt with blood samples. One of the keen-to-please Medical Lab assistants had already taken all positive blood cultures from the machine and dumped them on his bench. Chris would go through the robotic routine of applying coloured dyes to highlight the invisible little alien intruders, so he could work out what kind they were. Then he’d call the medical staff in charge of the respective patients with news of how to wipe out whatever he’d found.

An intruder. Like the one who’d posted the threatening note.

Chris waited until Alan, his gangly boss, went into his office, then he sat at one of the computers and loaded I-Lab, the laboratory’s filing system. On his way upstairs, he’d copied Rose’s idea and checked Facebook for Eve Levine, but the result had mirrored what I-Lab now showed him. Nothing. Rose’s Facebook message had already fielded a blitz of replies that ended in question marks or puzzled-face emojis.

‘So, sixteenth anniversary on Saturday. That’s silver hollowware, by the way. Like a teapot. If you’d killed her on your wedding day, you’d be out of prison and a free man by now.’

He turned his chair. Hovering far too close was Louise, twenty-six going on fifteen with two oblivious-to-each-other boyfriends, and a habit of shoplifting cosmetics. Chris stood in order to hide the screen.

‘Dobbo, you done that shift swap form yet? You’re my last hope, remember?’ Louise asked, tapping at her lower lip with a forefinger. It was her bizarre version of fluttering the eyelids.

‘I’ll sort it.’

‘And while you’re not busy, order me an urgent BDMAX Enterics kit.’

He gave her a thumbs up and she meandered away.

Still hopeful the computer could shed light, Chris delved into Medway, the national system, and found an abundance of historical information about Eve Levine. Every test performed, treatment given, appointment made, the works. Even her GP’s name. All to do with her cancer, because anything much older wouldn’t have been transferred from dusty cardboard to digital yet. But what he wanted was her address.

The Blue Swan, Shipley, Bradford.

It stirred something deep down, almost lost within his memory banks, like a mild bout of déjà vu.

A quick scan down the list of websites containing ‘The Blue Swan’ paid a jackpot. A newspaper article, dated fifteen months ago, about a charity fun day held in the beer garden of The Blue Swan pub. And Eve Levine was pictured surrounded by playing kids, although none clung to her or otherwise appeared to be her daughter. She was standing with a thick-set middle-aged man with a completely bald head and a boxer’s twisted nose. The photo’s caption was ‘Eve and Ron, proprietors of The Blue Swan public house in Bradford’.

He zoomed in with shaking fingers, cutting Ron Hugill and the children out of the image. Amongst fun day revellers, Eve posed in a dress that hung on her bone-thin frame. So she already had cancer chewing her up from the inside out. Short hair, no style, messy: a cut designed only for comfort, and screaming that there was no one in her life to impress. Forty years old, so only a couple of years his senior, but while he still had youthful brown hair and very few lines on his face, she was grey and wrinkled. Good health and humorous times had kept him fresh, but Eve looked like she had been through the wringer. A clearly fake smile added to the impression that her life had been one of far fewer fun days than miserable ones.

The note flashed through his mind again.

I know what you did to Eve Levine.

But he wasn’t responsible for what had happened to this woman. He couldn’t be. Could he? Even if one look at Eve’s wasted face showed him features he knew he’d seen before.

On the way home, Chris stopped to buy a whiteboard. Hopefully, remembering would win him brownie points with Rose. On the corner of his street, the Swift sons, strapping twenty-year-old university rugby players, were finally getting around to fixing their garden fence, which some idiot had cut down with his car late at night two Saturdays ago. Chris waved as he passed.

As soon as he stepped through his front door, a heavy tension burst from his chest in a thick, loud sigh. He hadn’t realised how worked up he’d been. Someone who might have bad intentions knew where he lived, and by extension, where his wife and daughter slept, too. But Chris was blind and deaf to his enemy. They could be anyone. They were a stranger, and according to Chris’s Facebook profile all but 217 of the 6 billion people in the world were strangers to him. They existed in the aisles of the local supermarket, in the corridors of his hospital, on the pavements criss-crossing the city. They were everywhere, the world across, infesting it, and he couldn’t get from A to B without crossing their paths. His enemy could just as easily get to him in the town centre in broad daylight as in his bedroom during the dead hours. And Chris wouldn’t know the face of that enemy until it was too late.

‘Is that you, darling?’ Rose called out.

Chris found Rose and Julia eating in the kitchen. Theirs were hot meals, but Rose had prepared him a salad because she never knew exactly how long it would take him to get home – so she always claimed. He figured it was because he’d hit midlife, that period when fending away illness and weight gain became an uphill struggle.

He showed Rose the whiteboard and gave her a look that said he wanted a quiet word.

‘Love, there’s a problem with the bedroom curtains. Come up with me and have a look?’ Rose asked.

‘I’m not a fool, Mum. If you want to talk to Dad about things I’m not supposed to hear, you don’t need to make up an excuse to leave the room.’

Fair enough. A particularly bad day for Rose’s joints meant it took a while for her to get up the stairs, even with his help. And that she didn’t laugh when he pinched her bum on the way up.

‘How did your physio appointment go?’ Chris asked.

‘Yeah, it went fine,’ she said, sounding as if it had been anything but. She was happy to talk about her arthritis on good days, but the bad ones made her feel inept and embarrassed. He knew not to push the conversation. But she had more pressing worries, anyway.

Once in the bedroom, she shut the door and came right out with it.

‘So, did you ask at work?’

‘No, but I searched for her in the system and checked her file. She hasn’t had any treatment at my hospital.’

‘Maybe she went to the doctor under a false name,’ Rose said, taking a seat on the bed, leaning slightly to one side because it was more comfortable on her hips. ‘Makes sense if it was a sexual disease. So nobody would know.’

‘Perhaps, but I’m not sure that’s possible. She’d have to prove her identity before a surgery would put her on its books.’

‘Stranger things have happened. It’s just… I mean, I can’t help but think about what happened with Dana.’

Chris nodded, frowning slightly at the memory. Dana, while working Respiratory, had committed the cardinal sin of contacting a patient whose results she knew before the patient did. She had commented on one of his Facebook posts.

He’d written:

Going to get my suit tomorrow. Vegas in three sleeps, baby!

And she’d replied:

Don’t bother, get some pyjamas and a big book instead.

A throwaway comment no one gave a shit about, until two days later when the guy was in pyjamas in hospital, tuberculosis confirmed, and Infection Control was probing into his nearest and dearest. A sleuth-like friend of his put two and two together, kicked up a stink, and now Dana was suspended.

Chris sat beside Rose and took her hands in his. ‘You know I’d never do anything as reckless as that.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But if anything else comes through the door, we go to the police.’

He gave her a hug, told her not to worry and silently prayed that there would be no more notes.

As Chris made his way downstairs to half-heartedly eat his salad, he caught a snippet of conversation leaking through the gap in Julia’s bedroom door. Something she said stopped him in his tracks.

‘—kill herself.’

He virtually kicked the door open. Julia yelped, her phone now clutched to her chest in shock.

‘Christ, Dad, try knock—’

‘Who’s killed herself? What do you know about it, Julia?’

‘About what?’

He thundered across the room and snatched the mobile from her hand. She looked almost scared, but mostly annoyed.

‘Who’s this?’ he snapped into the phone.

Julia snatched it back. ‘What are you doing? I’m on the phone.’ She told the person on the phone she’d call back and hung up. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You said something about someone killing herself. What was it?’

‘Simone. My friend. She’s coming down from uni tomorrow. Why?’

‘And? What’s this got to do with…’ He left it there, because he was already starting to think he’d got the wrong end of this stick.

‘It’s her ex. He knows she’s in town soon. He’s been on Facebook saying she better not cross paths with him when she comes down.’

‘And?’

‘Calm down, Dad. What’s this about?’

‘Has someone killed herself?’

‘No. Marc said—’

‘Who’s Marc?’ he asked, more exasperated than afraid, now.

‘Simone’s ex. He reckons he’ll kill Simone’s new boyfriend if he comes down with her. He wants Simone to kill herself.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s a togmuppet. Why are you so bothered?’

He relaxed – somewhat. False alarm.

‘You think I should tell Simone what he’s said? She’s not on his Facebook and—’

‘You’ve got a good head on your shoulders,’ Chris cut in, turning to leave. ‘I know you’ll do what’s best.’

He paused at the door.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘If I scared you, I mean.’

Julia shrugged. ‘Whatever, it’s fine. Just don’t go morphing into the overprotective dad, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Chris said with a small smile.

But the note was already changing him, and with someone out there watching his family, he knew his promise to Julia was one he couldn’t keep.

On the stairs, Rose was giving him a burning look.

‘We can’t let this note get to us, okay?’ she said.

Chris rubbed a hand across his brow, sighed, and nodded. Rose was always right.

‘Good,’ she continued. ‘It’ll be good for us to get out of the house, have some fun. You drive because my hands are playing up.’

Rose clocked the quizzical look on Chris’s face.

‘How could you forget? The cinema.’

‘Sorry, yes, of course,’ he said. The cinema, every Monday evening. That damned note was eroding his concentration.

She stepped towards her husband and gave him a reassuring kiss. ‘Make sure you don’t bring Eve Levine out with us. Her and her ilk are not going to ruin our evening.’

He almost laughed. His entire day had already been torpedoed.

The local cinema was only half a mile away, but walls of woodland sent them on a circuitous route that increased journey time. Indefinitely, as it happened, because they had to ride Herries Road South, and that was where it happened.

Trees lined each side, cutting off the rest of the world, leaving them alone for the short drive through the dark woodland. Just them and whoever was in the car parked ahead by the side of the road. Its hazards were on, so Chris veered to the right to bypass it, edging into the opposite lane.

No cars swung around the corner towards him, but that was where he was looking when the C-Max, hazards still flashing, leaped into the road. Right into his line. No time to avoid it.

‘Chris, watch out!’ Rose yelled. But too late.

He crushed the brake pedal but had no doubt that the cinema was now a no-go. With luck, they’d drive away from this one, but this one was definitely happening.

He was almost cut in half by his seatbelt as his car struck the other’s rear. It was all over in the next second. A soft impact, no write-off, maybe no pain in the ass of awaiting a tow truck. With the stoppage of both cars, the whole world seemed to pause.

‘Everyone okay?’ He put his hand on Rose’s arm and looked at Julia in the back seat.

‘What happened?’ Julia said, unhurt but shocked. She’d been watching her phone when the crash happened.

‘Idiots,’ Rose snapped, as if that explained everything.

But Chris didn’t agree. He’d noted the grimy paintwork of the C-Max, and the dents and the old registration. And the paranoid part of him made a leap. Not the crash-for-cash scam leap, though.

Two guys jumped out of the Ford. Big guys. With baseball bats. Not crash-for-cash, and not an act of road rage. No matter how paranoid somebody was about confrontation, nobody kept a pair of long baseball bats sitting there in the front of the car.

Dark road, nobody about, and two guys who’d been sitting there, no seatbelts on, bats in hand, like army guys ready to deploy the second the chopper touches down. Prepared. With an intention. Following a plan.

‘Oh, God. Chris, what do we do?’ Rose asked. She looked round at their daughter, and a boosted expression of shock told him Julia must be terrified.

‘Julia, it’s fine, don’t worry. Nor you, Rose. I’ll handle this,’ Chris said.

When the two guys passed the back of their C-Max, they didn’t even look at the damage. That was what you did, no matter how angry. You checked out the damage in order to make a quick assessment of how much of your time and money had just burned, and maybe to decide just how much rage you were going to employ.

Instead, the men walked past their own car and alongside Rose’s. One down the left side of the bonnet, one down the right. Rose quickly buzzed her window up, and Chris jabbed the central locking button hard enough to hurt his finger.

Julia slid into the centre of the back seat. ‘Is this a trick to rob us or something?’ she said, throat croaky with fear.

‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ Rose whispered to her. She didn’t sound like she believed it herself.

The headlights were kissing the back of the C-Max, so there wasn’t much illumination. One of the guys was heavyset, bearded and wore a cap that a fisherman grandfather might have handed down. A versatile look. With a comic book in hand, he might have seemed like the neighbourhood weirdo. But here he definitely fit the profile of a thug.

His bat slammed down on the bonnet. It was a one-handed strike, designed to pass a message rather than cause damage. ‘Money or the bat,’ he said, very matter-of-factly. He sounded like a guy who’d done this before and had had it go his way far more often than not.

Chris already knew it was going to go this guy’s way tonight, too.

The guy on Rose’s side was skinnier, taller, with a shaved head and long arms like some cartoon character who’d had them stretched by lifting a too-heavy weight. He tapped the windscreen with his bat, also softly. Another message: locked doors weren’t going to save them here.

‘Toss your purse out,’ Chris said. Rose started to object. ‘Just do it.’

Chris lowered both front windows, a couple of inches each, just shy of thug-arm width, and a purse and a wallet thumped to the tarmac in unison.

Both guys bent down. Wallet and purse lifted off the ground in unison.

Two bats tapped the windscreen. The bearded guy Chris’s side said, ‘Jewellery.’

Rose gasped and threw her hands to her throat, as if to protect her necklace at all costs.

‘You’ll have to give it them, Rose.’

‘It’s my mother’s, Chris, I can’t just—’

Her words were cut off by a loud prompt from the skinny guy’s bat. Two-handed this time. It hit the roof with a mighty dong. A much clearer message.

‘Jewellery,’ the bearded guy repeated, nice and loud. He shifted his stance and swung back his bat. His intention was clear: the windscreen was going in if more goodies didn’t quickly appear.

Now Julia burst into tears, too. Rose’s hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t get the necklace off and resorted to trying to yank it free, although it held. Their panic hit him hard and he grabbed the door handle, knowing he had no choice but to try to reason with these men. Out there, where he could draw their focus away from his wife and only child. He grabbed the satnav from its dashboard cradle as a bargaining chip.

‘Rose, you’re going to have to drive away if this goes bad for me—’

He stopped as white sliced through black far ahead. A single, powerful ball of light like a moon dropped from the sky into their small patch of forest. A headlight. Both batsmen looked round, and then looked at each other. The skinny guy pointed his bat at the windscreen.

‘You’re one lucky bastard.’

Amazingly, beautifully, both men turned their backs and ran to their C-Max. Chris didn’t dare believe it was over, until it was. The C-Max leaped away and s. . .