Until Death: a thrilling psychological drama with a jaw-dropping twist

by Ali Knight

Genres: Romance; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

'An engrossing tale of corruption and obsession' ALEX MARWOOD A gripping thriller about the dark secrets hiding behind an outwardly perfect marriage, for fans of BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. Marriage is a prison for Kelly. Her controlling and manipulative husband Christos videos her in the house, has her followed and tracks her every move. She may be desperate to leave, but she's not stupid. If she runs, he'll make sure she never sees her children again. Christos has a mistress, Sylvie, keen to pander to his every whim and even keener to step into Kelly's shoes, should she ever vacate them. Kelly thinks it's stalemate for their twisted threesome, but something is about to happen that will change all their lives forever. If Kelly is to escape, then people will get hurt...

Release date: November 7, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 385

Sample

Georgie spent a good few minutes driving round the back streets south of St Pancras, not seeing Kelly anywhere. She was frustrated by one-way streets, blocked-off pedestrian access and cycle paths. She swung a right back on to the Euston Road and spotted Kelly sitting on a doorstep, sobbing. She pulled over and waited, unsure what to do next.

After a few moments Kelly took a deep breath, dried her eyes and stood up. She looked around and spotted Georgie sitting in the car. She froze, and then casually turned full on to her, mouthed something Georgie didn’t catch and walked to the kerb and stuck out her hand for a taxi. A man standing a short distance away came to the kerb too. A few moments later Kelly and the man both got in a taxi. Intrigued, Georgie pulled out into the traffic and followed.

The taxi headed to Oxford Street and parked down the side of a small shopping centre. Kelly and the man got out and went inside. Georgie put her customs sticker in the window of the car and rode up the escalator a few shoppers behind them and watched Kelly enter a gym on the top floor. The man waited outside; he obviously wasn’t a member. Georgie went up to reception and showed her ID to the manager and he let her in. She followed Kelly into the changing area.

She walked towards a bench facing a row of lockers and could see Kelly from a corner starting to take her clothes off. Georgie thought she was changing for a class, but she didn’t put on sportswear; she wrapped a towel round herself, speared a pair of flip-flops with her toes and headed for the sauna.

Georgie stripped and scrabbled around in her bag for change for the locker, and then realised with a jolt of embarrassment that you didn’t have to pay for them. She stuffed her clothes in hurriedly and picked up a towel. It was mid-morning, the changing rooms empty before the lunchtime office crowd descended. Georgie glanced around and pulled at the thick sauna door.

It was gloomy inside, the faint smell of pine and sweat not unpleasant. Kelly was sitting on the top shelf near the steam source, the hottest part of the room.

‘I take it you want to talk to me?’ Kelly said.

‘Yes. But you make it difficult.’

Kelly shrugged. She looked exhausted, with dark rings under her eyes and her shoulders slumped.

‘Who’s that man waiting outside?’

‘The guy Christos has following me. When I got in the taxi I thought he might as well come with me, it’s partly my money that’s paying him, after all.’ Her attempt at wry humour was lost on Georgie, whose questions were piling up.

‘Your husband has you followed? Why?’

She gave a little irritated shrug of her shoulders. ‘He’s paranoid. He wants to know what I do all the time, who I see.’

‘But why?’

Kelly rubbed her eyes with her fingers and let out an exasperated groan. ‘Because some men are just like that. But there are always places a man can’t go.’

Georgie felt the heat beginning to make her scalp itch. ‘You were upset earlier. Care to share?’

Kelly wiped a hand through her hair, which was damp with steam. ‘Share with you? You’ve threatened to take my kids away.’

‘About our last meeting, I’m sorry, I felt maybe we got off on the wrong foot—’

‘You’re lucky you came into the toilets at the play centre to talk to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have given you the time of day. There was probably someone watching me that day too.’

‘Why is there so much security in your flat? What’s he hiding?’

‘He’s not hiding anything. He’s keeping something there.’

‘What?’

‘Me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m desperate to leave. But a man like that, he decides, he has to be in control. So I can’t go, certainly not with the children. Now he’s punishing me through the kids, he’s sending them away and I’m really worried he’s going to do something to me when they’ve gone.’

Georgie saw the tears beginning to form. ‘But you’re married, you have rights—’

‘You only say that because you’ve never been in my situation.’

‘But the law is on your side.’

‘He’s just threatened my lawyer in such a way that he’s abandoned the practice he had for twenty-three years. I’d just left his offices when you saw me earlier.’ She was getting agitated again.

‘I’m the law, I can help.’

‘No one can help me.’ She jumped to the floor in a sudden burst of energy, yanked her towel away and stood defiantly before Georgie. ‘Just take a look at what it’s really like.’

The sauna was narrow, and with Kelly standing, Georgie felt the shock of forced intimacy, of having to see a stranger’s naked body. Her face was only inches from Kelly’s pubic hair, but something caught her eye. And then she couldn’t do anything but stare. Even in the gloomy light of the sauna, the white puckered skin on Kelly’s stomach was impossible to miss, the tracery of lines and twisted skin that showed a burn.

A woman’s history is written on the skin of her stomach, but Georgie wasn’t looking at the folds and sags of impending old age or a lifetime’s battling with body image, the welts of stretch marks from her pregnancies, a scar from where a baby might have been yanked. The burn had a definite outline, starting wide by her pubic hair and tapering to a point below her belly button. Within it were two lines of small circles of unburned skin that made the shape understandable, which told the real story.

The mark left permanently on Kelly’s skin was from an iron.

‘He did that to you?’ Georgie’s tongue felt huge and dry in her mouth.

‘That burn took about twenty seconds. It will last a lifetime. The law takes about three months, then there are appeals, and more appeals and then my kids don’t know me any more, and I’m in the nut house or the cemetery.’ She turned away and in contrast to the violence inflicted on her stomach Kelly had a small dolphin tattoo low down on her back.

She turned back to Georgie again, her voice full of conviction. ‘One day he’s going to get rid of me. He’s going to take me out on one of his ships and put me in the world’s biggest grave – the ocean.’

‘Are you the tip-off?’

‘What?’

‘Someone’s phoning us, feeding us information about his illegal business activities.’

‘He never shares his business with me. He thinks it’s beneath him. He’s got Sylvie for that.’ She gave a bitter little laugh. ‘You must think I’m sick in the head. How did I end up here? Such a doormat. You know there’s no word for what I am. No word for the person I’ve become.’

Georgie tried to reassure her. ‘You’re in a relationship with a very violent and controlling—’

‘No, I don’t mean that. There’s no word in the English language for me. For a mother who’s lost her child.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘England has some of the biggest and most dangerous tides in the world, do you know that?’

Georgie was nonplussed. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘Neither did I, until my child died in one.’

‘Your child?’

Kelly was somewhere else now, her eyes glazed, her voice low. ‘I grew up in Southampton. Poole, near Southampton, sits on one of the biggest natural harbours in the world but it has a tiny entrance, like a huge bottleneck. All the water has to be pulled in through the bottleneck, and back out. The current’s so strong there it’ll pull you over at ankle height. The ferry across the entrance has to be attached to chains.’

Georgie had been there once, on a school trip to the Isle of Wight. She remembered liking the azure water of the south coast, so unlike the greeny-grey sludge of her native Thames.

‘We were out in a friend’s boat, my first husband Michael, Florence was four and Amber was two. The fog came down, thick and fast. We heard a distress call from another boat and we went to help. Its engine had broken and it was drifting fast in the fog so Michael tried to get on board to help the man in the other boat restart the motor. If boats get too close to the ferry they can be pulled right under it. I was at the front of our boat, steering, the girls were sitting in the middle, and Michael was trying to get from the side of our boat on to the deck of the other, but he slipped as he tried to climb out and he fell in. I had my hand on the wheel, looking behind me and Amber, puffed up in her life jacket, leaned right over to see where her dad was. I was screaming at her to get away from the side, but before I could reach her she toppled right in after him. And then they were being pulled away, so fast they were pulled away from the boat and I was desperately trying to follow their life jackets in the water, chasing after them in the boat, and I could hear we were so close to the ferry. And I lost them. The broken boat was carried right out to sea past the ferry. The guy was fine.’ She paused. ‘But neither Amber nor Michael was ever found.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Georgie underwent a very rapid reassessment of Kelly.

‘After something like that, I don’t trust my own judgement any more, I’m overprotective of the kids, I’m a mess.’ She leaned forward and looked Georgie straight in the eye. ‘But I want to bring him down, before he decides he doesn’t need me at all.’

‘Tell me everything you know.’

‘That’s the problem, I don’t know anything.’

‘Does he keep papers at home that we wouldn’t have found when we searched the flat? Do you listen to messages on the phone?’

‘The cameras stop me looking.’ She paused. ‘Anything incriminating would have to be in his office. That’s the place in the flat I can’t go.’

‘We looked there,’ Georgie added with a sigh. She thought for a moment. ‘The tip-off said something important was coming on your husband’s ship, the Saracen. It’s docking here in London in two days.’

Kelly sat up. ‘On October 30th?’

‘Yes. Why is that important?’

Georgie saw her pause, thinking through some problem. ‘Sylvie crowed to my daughter that I was going away at the end of the month. Christos is sending the kids away to school on November 1st, his mother’s going with them. He’s clearing the decks of everyone. Why?’

Georgie looked at her. ‘We need to find out what’s on that ship, Kelly.’

But Kelly was thinking something else. ‘Where am I supposed to be going?’

The next day Georgie rang Kelly but her phone was switched off and went straight to voicemail. There was nothing left to do but go and call at the flat, so she took a pool car and drove into central London. She was sitting in a queue of traffic in front of St Pancras Station, waiting to turn right and park outside Kelly’s flat, when she saw Kelly walking east past her on the other side of the road. She pulled a U-turn when the light went green, prompting a crescendo of horns from all directions and tried to follow, but Kelly had crossed four lanes of traffic to the other side of the street and was standing outside an Underground entrance, looking behind her. Georgie thought she was about to enter but she turned and began walking again, cutting down a side street.

Georgie swore. The traffic she was caught in flowed away from Kelly on a long one-way system round some Victorian buildings, cutting Kelly from view. By the time Georgie had waited at several red lights and driven back round, Kelly was nowhere to be seen. She hung a right into a side street and began looking for her.

Kelly felt like she’d been awake all night. She had spent many hours on the chair in her children’s room, staring at them as they slept. The idea that in only a few days this room would be empty, that their bags would be packed and they would be gone, was a pain she was unsure she could endure. She had already sat in a room where a child should have been, where Amber should have been sleeping, where that child’s breath would never be again. She couldn’t repeat that, would not let that be repeated. She would fight Christos in the courts for custody of their children, for a right to live a life without abuse.

In the morning she got the kids ready for school, tiredness overwhelming her. It was best that they keep their routine, she decided, much as it pained her to see them leave for the day, but she also had somewhere she needed to go. She let Sylvie take Yannis horse-riding and then took Florence to school, came back and parked the car. She got out and walked down the side of the building to the Euston Road.

It was when she had crossed the road and was approaching the Underground that she felt she was being followed. A man in a dark suit with heavy stubble crossed the road with her at the lights. She glanced behind her and he looked away. The lawyer’s office was nearby, but she walked past it and round the corner. The man followed. She picked up speed and turned another corner into a square with a football pitch encased in green fencing. He was still behind her. She held her bag tighter against her shoulder, her discomfort increasing. The square was quiet, no one was out and about on a cold day in October. He wasn’t trying to hide what he was doing. She walked a whole circuit of the square, her anger building in her. Then she turned and ran at him. ‘What are you doing? Leave me alone.’

He put up his hands. ‘I’m employed to follow you, to make sure you’re all right.’

‘Bullshit. I’m calling the police, this is stalking,’ she hissed.

‘Really, Mrs Malamatos, it’s just my job. Christos wanted me to make sure you’re OK. He’s worried about you.’

‘Leave me the fuck alone.’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you call the police, there’ll probably just be someone else here tomorrow. Try not to think too much about me, I’m just doing my job. I can stay further back if you’d prefer.’

She stomped off, but what he said had an absurd logic. There would be someone else here tomorrow, and the next day and the next. She turned around and headed back to the lawyer’s office, making no attempt to hide where she was going.

She came to the door of Mr Cauldwell’s offices, opened it and climbed up the stairs. She pushed open the door and stopped, confused. She must have the wrong floor.

She looked around. Bethany’s desk was still there; a thin layer of dust covered the veneer. The chairs were gone. She ran through into Mr Cauldwell’s office. It was bare, the law books taken from the shelf, the filing cabinets half opened and empty. The only trace of him was a McDonald’s wrapper in the bin.

I’ll be here for years, he’d said.

Not unless something or someone made him leave – in a hurry.

She went down a floor to another office, was buzzed in, and asked the receptionist there when the lawyer upstairs had left and why. The receptionist called an Indian manager out of a back office and they decided between them that he had left last week. No, the lease wasn’t up, he hadn’t said goodbye. No, he had left no forwarding address or number with them.

Returning upstairs, Kelly picked up a pile of unopened mail on the lawyer’s floor. She ripped the envelopes and found normal day-to-day correspondence, even cheques. She sat down on the narrow steps with the hard blue carpet, stunned. Christos had done this, of that she had no doubt. He had frightened him away with just one visit. In twenty-three years Mr Cauldwell had never come up against anyone as determined to get what he wanted as her husband.

She felt the last threads of hope begin to unravel, her night-time vigil and determination fading to grey. The futility of her efforts to get out pushed down on her so heavily she feared she would stop breathing. She came out of the building and sat down on its shabby steps and wept. The man sent to follow her stood politely a good distance away and waited calmly for her to finish.

‘There’s something I need to talk to you two about,’ Kelly said. ‘Something important.’ The kids were upstairs in the kitchen, popping olives into their mouths and crunching through breadsticks. They had their shoes on to go to the theatre but they wouldn’t be needing them now. She stood in the doorway for a moment just watching them, trying to hold on to every second of the calm before the storm. There was a vivid red sunset beyond them, a strong wind pushing clouds at speed past the windows, throwing shadows fleetingly across the kitchen.

The kids didn’t answer, their mouths were too full of food. She pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I need to talk to you about school.’

Yannis groaned.

‘Your dad and I …’ She tailed off. They were still now, sensing the struggle in her voice. She swallowed. ‘Your dad thinks you should go to boarding school. That it would be a really great opportunity for you both if you went to boarding school.’

She’d said it. She tasted something on her tongue like ash. She dragged her eyes up from the table to look at them. They glanced at each other.

‘What’s boarding school?’ Yannis asked.

‘It’s a school in the country where you go and stay with lots of other children and you get a fantastic education.’ She was trying to keep her voice upbeat, trying to believe what she was saying herself. ‘There are lots of fields and green grass and you can play outdoors loads and make lots of new friends. You can still do your horse-riding, right at the school too.’

Yannis was looking excited, but his joy was punctured by Florence.

‘And we have to sleep in a dorm every night and we no longer live with you.’ Her voice was cold.

‘It’s like a sleepover?’ Yannis asked.

Florence scoffed. ‘No, stupid. You sleep there every night for weeks and weeks.’

‘Florence—’

‘Will you be there too, Mummy?’ Yannis’s face had clouded now, his confusion evident.

‘No, I won’t. I will be here at home, but I will come and see you very often, whenever you want, and at weekends.’

‘So you won’t be there with Florence and me?’

‘No, not all the time. There will be other people who will look after you. But also, Florence will be at one school and you will be at another one. Dad’s picked schools that best suit your characters.’

‘But I want to be with Florence.’

‘I’m afraid that’s not possible, Yannis.’ He was trying to process what this meant, and she could see he didn’t get it. ‘You’ll have so much more freedom at boarding school, it’s a much better place than the city—’

‘We went to Lindsey’s place. But that wasn’t better.’ Florence was staring at the floor, her face closing down.

‘Yeah, Lindsey’s place wasn’t better.’

She needed to get this conversation back under control. ‘It’s hard to imagine what it will be like until you’re there.’

‘I don’t want to leave my friends.’ Florence again.

‘You can still see your friends in the holidays and you’ll make new ones too.’

‘Do we have a choice?’ she asked.

‘It really is for the best.’

‘It’s the best thing for you, you mean.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Her daughter was tracing her finger in a random pattern on the tabletop. ‘Look at me, Florence. What do you mean by that?’

She did look at her. The pale eyes stared back at her, but they didn’t show confusion or hurt. They showed pity. ‘We have to go away because you’re ill.’

‘What makes you say that?’ She could feel the anger beginning to thump its way through her skull.

‘You’re not well, in the head. You can’t look after us.’

‘There is nothing wrong with me at all. Who said there was?’

‘Dad said you would deny it.’

Kelly opened her mouth and then shut it again. She was teetering on the edge of a world that made no sense, where the more she protested her point of view, the more something else was inferred or believed. ‘Look at me, Florence, look at me.’ She reached across and put her hand over her daughter’s. ‘There is nothing at all wrong. I love you both, more than anything; boarding school is a great opportunity that many families would kill for. It will take some adjusting to, that’s all.’ Kelly pushed the school brochures that she had in her hand over the table towards them. Florence wouldn’t touch them. Kelly saw a tear roll silently down her perfect cheek. ‘Flo …’

She watched her daughter trying to hold back the tears. ‘I’ll go, but only if it makes you get better quicker. Granny said she didn’t think it would, but you have to promise me you’ll get better.’

‘Mummy! Are you going to die?’ Yannis could evidently feel the emotional cross-currents in the room, but he was too young to understand what they meant. Tears were beginning to crest on his bottom lids.

‘I am not going to die. There is nothing wrong with me. It was your dad’s decision to send you to boarding school. Medea is a silly old woman who really doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You mustn’t worry.’

A large cloud slid across the low sun, plunging the room into early evening cold. ‘Do you have any other questions?’

She saw her children looking at each other, cutting her out. She got up from the table and left the room. She walked on autopilot down the curving stairs, into her bedroom and into her bathroom. She opened the cabinet and pulled out the bottle of pills. She gulped down two, feeling the wash of shame lap at her as she did so. Two really pulled her away from herself. It was just what she wanted right now.

Kelly could feel the manic energy pulsating from Christos as he paced the living room. He was putting her on edge. Twelve steps across to one bank of windows, swivel, turn, twelve steps back. She moved silently past him to pick up a discarded cup on the coffee table and glanced at his iPad. Before the screen switched to black she saw a weather chart of the Atlantic, large concentric rings radiating out from a tight centre. A storm at sea.

She moved into the kitchen to get out of his way and glimpsed Medea placing some papers back in the bin and closing the lid. She had been rifling through its discarded contents again. She could hear the loud drone of the TV from downstairs where the children were watching cartoons.

Her husband came in after her. ‘Sit down.’

She wasn’t going to disagree.

Medea walked over to the far counter and picked up a pile of papers, walked back slowly to the table. Kelly bit down her irritation. It was all an act; the woman could sprint if it was to her advantage. ‘I’ve got the brochures,’ Medea said to Christos.

The vein began to twitch in Kelly’s eye. ‘What brochures?’

‘Have a look,’ said Medea. ‘You need to study them and then we can all make an informed decision.’

Kelly felt the floor slide away from her. She caught a glimpse of a large Edwardian building set in landscaped gardens on the cover of one of the brochures in her mother-in-law’s hands. She was going to be shut up in a madhouse, walled up in a psychiatric facility, like a Victorian melodrama where a wife who had become inconvenient was stored, never to see the light of the world again.

‘We think the children should go to boarding school.’

So this was how he planned to punish her, through the children. ‘They are not going to boarding school.’ She saw Christos and his mother exchange looks. Kelly felt the anger beginning to flare inside her. They’d already decided. It was another sign that she didn’t exist. ‘Yannis is only seven years old.’

‘He’s been getting into trouble at school,’ said Christos.

‘Lots of children get into trouble at school,’ Kelly answered. ‘You can’t send him away so young.’

‘Hush, child,’ said Medea.

‘Stop calling me a child – I’m a grown woman.’

Medea narrowed her eyes at Kelly and took a deep intake of breath. ‘Be careful, Kelly. Children need a calm environment. Shouting is bad for everybody.’

Kelly gripped the sides of her chair to stop losing control. The hypocrisy was breathtaking. This, from a woman who had never lived further than a mile from her son, who was still living with him when he was nearly fifty, like an East German Stasi spy, noting, judging and condemning.

Kelly knew defiance wouldn’t work so she tried to reason with them. ‘They are so young. Just wait a few years till we know more about how their characters are forming, then we can make the decision.’

‘This needs quick and decisive action,’ Christos said. ‘They will have the benefits of some of the finest schooling available. How can you not want that for your children?’

‘This is too soon, they are too young. They need the love and guidance of their family.’

‘After what’s happened, I think this is the best for everyone,’ Medea added.

Kelly picked up the brochures and scanned the front pages. One of the schools was in Somerset, the other in Yorkshire. He’d chosen well, they were miles apart. It would never be possible for her to collect them both without him knowing beforehand …

Put the children far away and she had no reason to run. Put the children far away and she would never be missed by anyone. They were the last tie making her real. He would, and could, make her disappear.

‘I think they should start at the beginning of November.’

‘But it’s October 27th!’

‘The schools are amenable to them starting right away, halfway through the term. That way they’ll be fully adjusted to it by Christmas.’

It couldn’t be. She began to beg. ‘Please, Christos, I won’t run away again, please don’t send them away.’

‘Yannis is acting up, and Florence, she’s so silent, too withdrawn for a child of her age. A change of scene will bring her out of herself,’ Medea said.

‘She is not withdrawn.’ Kelly was getting exasperated. ‘When did you go and see these schools anyway? Why was I not consulted?’

‘Sylvie went to take a look at the schools,’ Christos said.

‘Sylvie. Does Sylvie have children?’

‘Hush, child—’

‘I’m not a child.’ She turned to Christos. ‘You send your PA, who has no children, to choose a school for them? It’s a bloody insult. They need their mother.’

‘Kelly—’ Medea was too close to her now, her sandalwood perfume cloying.

‘And you, you talk about childrearing like you made a success of it – look at the monster you raised!’

Medea slapped her across the cheek. Not hard, her arms were old and her aim poor. ‘A dog from the street will always be a dog from the street.’

Kelly got up from her chair, her anger in full flow. Christos grabbed her arm to stop her. He was looking at the door; the children were standing there. All five of them were frozen in a horrid silent tableau of twisted relationships.

‘Mum?’ It was Florence, her voice straining to be heard in the large room. ‘You said you were going to drop in to the theatre this afternoon and give out the Halloween invitations. Can we come?’

Kelly had to take the time to sit back down and collect herself, shame and anger and disgust battling through her. ‘Yes, of course. Go and put your shoes on and we can go.’

They hovered for a moment in the doorway and then retreated.

‘Kelly.’ Christos was looking at her. ‘You can only take one.’

‘One what?’

‘One child. Not both. You can see my point of view.’

She paused for a moment to let what he was saying sink in. ‘You’re telling me I can never take both my children—’

‘Never.’

She could hear the scratching and cooing of the pigeons trapped in the attic. She could feel the panic beginning to lap around her chest.

‘And the school thing has already been decided. They’ll go after Halloween. Medea will take them. No point in hanging around once a decision has been made. Sylvie can arrange the details if it’s going to stress you.’ He paused. ‘And one more thing: I want . . .