Fracture

  Fracture

  Heleyne Hammersley

  for Diane

  Copyright © 2016 Heleyne Hammersley

  The right of Heleyne Hammersley to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2016 by Bloodhound Books

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Also by Heleyne Hammersley

  The best-selling psychological thriller Forgotten

  Amazon UK – Amazon US

  The utterly gripping new release Closer To Home

  Amazon UK – Amazon US

  PROLOGUE

  I can smell smoke. I think I’m awake but I’m not really sure. I feel groggy and sluggish as though I’m drunk or drugged. Simon’s there, though. His eyes are kind as he gently shakes me into full consciousness.

  ‘Sshh,’ he whispers, his breath warm against my cheek as he sinks down onto the bed next to me. ‘Let me hold you. It’ll be okay.’

  I slip into his arms without realising that I’m moving, allowing him to envelop me and keep me safe. But the smell of smoke is getting stronger and I can taste it deep in my mouth. I struggle, trying to get up, to shake Simon off and get us both to safety.

  His eyes open and fix on mine and the kindness is gone. He’s angry.

  ‘Stop struggling, you stupid bitch,’ he hisses. He rolls me over on the bed, straddling me and holding my wrists at head height as he looks down at my face. ‘You deserve this. You’ve had it coming for a while.’

  I struggle. His hands tighten around mine and the pain from the raw cuts and burns on my skin intensifies.

  ‘You’re hurting me,’ I hear myself whimper.

  He tightens his grip further.

  ‘And you like it,’ he says.

  But I don’t.

  ‘It’s time,’ he says, his eyes losing focus as he retreats to that place deep inside himself that I can never reach. ‘Time for us to be truly together. Forever.’

  The smoke is almost suffocating me and I’m straining for each shallow breath, desperate not to faint. I know what he wants. What he’s always wanted. He’s going to kill us both.

  The fire is closer now. I can feel the heat and hear the flames but beyond the horror there’s something else. A knocking, a pounding, louder than my heart. The door.

  Somebody’s come to save me.

  ONE

  ‘This is fascinating, Rosemary, but none of it brings us any closer to the answers to my questions, does it?’

  Detective Sergeant Pete Norton pushed his chair back from the table and stood up to pace the room – behaviour I had grown to recognise as a symbol of his frustration and his response to my supposed unwillingness to co-operate. The problem was that I was co-operating – I was doing everything that he asked of me. I was trying to tell my story as clearly and fully as possible, to miss no detail out and to be as convincing as I could. It had quickly occurred to me that the only way I would get out of this mess was if I told the complete truth and, if that dropped Alfie in the shit from a great height, then so be it. She hadn’t exactly stood by me.

  The room was getting stuffy as the morning crawled its way gradually towards noon and the heat started to build. I could feel a greasy sheen of sweat on my back, sticking my t-shirt to my skin and I knew that, in the next hour or so, droplets would start to form at my hairline. I’d started to hate the heat. It had energised and revived me when I’d first arrived in Australia, but now it was oppressive and claustrophobic. I was convinced that, in the first chapter of the police training manual, new recruits were told that a sweating suspect is a guilty suspect. I was just an overheating suspect, but I was having a lot of trouble convincing anybody. I stuck out my lower lip and blew upwards, trying to cool my forehead while the policeman had his back to me. He would probably just see this as another sign of guilt if he caught me trying to cool down.

  I needed a shower and I wanted to get changed. I was still wearing the same clothes that I’d had on yesterday afternoon when a police car had pulled me over just outside Apollo Bay. I thought I’d been speeding, or maybe even driving erratically – my head had refused to clear properly since I’d woken that morning with a hangover and no Alfie. I hadn’t really believed that she’d gone and I was half-expecting to see her hitching or lying in wait for me further along the road. But now I was beginning to accept that she really had left me this time. Her rucksack had been missing, there was no note, no sign that she’d ever been in the motel room with me. She must have left in the middle of the night. After we’d stopped talking ourselves round in circles I’d fallen into a deep sleep. Nothing would have woken me.

  I wasn’t exactly clear about how I’d ended up in this room. I’d been held somewhere else – smaller and more like a cell – until a uniformed constable had led me here through a labyrinth of dingy, narrow corridors. It wasn’t much of an improvement on the cell, though. The windows were narrow slots high up in the walls and didn’t let in much light and the furniture was placed in the centre of the space – four chairs huddled round a plain wooden table.

  The policeman settled himself in the chair opposite me and pressed the record button on the tape-recorder that sat between us like a referee at a boxing match. He glanced at his watch then at the silent constable who was standing impassively next to the door, her arms behind her back and her eyes fixed on a point on the opposite wall. Norton’s gaze settled on my hands which I’d spread out on the surface of the table during my last protestations of innocence and he studied the marks and scars as though reading a confession in them. I instinctively curled them back into tight fists – it might look more threatening but it was much safer. For me at least.

  ‘Resuming interview with Rosemary Lomax. Fifth of March 2016, eleven thirty-five am. Miss Lomax is not under arrest and has waived her right to have a lawyer present at this time.’ Norton tucked his own knotted hands under his nose and leaned his elbows on the table as he studied me with eyes that were so dark they looked almost black. I assumed that there was some Italian in his genetic mix and I suspected his mother because his features were gentle and his hair was soft-looking. In a past life I would have pretended to find him attractive.

  ‘So where were we?’ he said, lifting his head and moving his hands lower to support his stubbled chin. ‘You’d just stolen this fella’s wallet for a laugh?’ His expression was unreadable but his voice gave him away. He was taunting me, trying to trick me into saying something incriminating. The truth just wasn’t enough.

  ‘I didn’t steal anything – I’ve already told you. It was Alfie. I was the one who went back and checked that he’d be okay. I made sure that he had a cash card. It didn’t feel right, just leaving him there with nothing.’

  ‘But you helped her to spend the money.’

  It was a statement rather than a question. We’d been here before.

  ‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘I know it was stupid but Alfie’s like that. She can convince me of anything. And, if I’m honest, I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to like me. But it was only about fifty dollars. I can give it back if that’s what he wants.’

  Norton frowned. ‘You wanted her to like you? Do you know how that sounds?’

  I bristled at his sarcastic tone. ‘I don’t know how else to say it. I know I sound like a ten-year-old i
n the school playground with a stupid crush, but that’s how she made me feel.’

  ‘So what else did you do to get her to like you? You’ve already said that you offered her money, paid for train tickets.’

  I shrugged, unwilling to discuss my feelings but aware that he’d think I was hiding something. How could I possibly explain how Alfie made me so aware of myself? How she’d been so much a stranger to me and yet so achingly familiar that I could have known her all my life. And how could I even begin to express the void she’d left in my life when she’d disappeared?

  Norton’s expression changed and his voice softened. ‘Look, Rosemary, I’ve been in touch with the police in the UK. I know a bit about what happened to you. I can understand if things got a bit out of hand with Toby MacDonald and you panicked. I just want you to tell me the truth about what happened out there.’

  ‘I have. I’ve told you everything that I can remember, exactly as it happened.’

  He looked sceptical. ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything.’

  He nodded and sighed heavily. ‘Right, let’s start again. From the beginning.’

  TWO

  My parents thought Australia would be a good idea. I’m not sure quite what they were thinking except, perhaps, that it’s a big country and a long way away. They sat me down one dark winter evening and turned off the TV. I realise now that they wanted me to hear the patter of sleet on the windows and the icy wind rattling the letter box. It was the perfect setting for a ghost story, with the coal effect electric fire turned up high, the plastic rotating flames casting their fake flickering onto the cream hearthrug.

  ‘It’s a cold one tonight,’ my dad commented, as if he needed to underline the sound effects.

  ‘Mmmn,’ I agreed. Lost in the latest Kathy Reichs book, I was only dimly aware of my surroundings and keen not to get too well reacquainted with them this side of bedtime.

  ‘There’s more like this forecast. They reckon it’s going to get worse before it gets better.’

  ‘Mmmn.’

  My mum tried a different approach. ‘Listen to your father, love, we need to talk to you about something.’

  Typical Mum. We need to talk so listen to Dad. It was as though they were one unit with father providing the voice and mother providing the subtle means to tweak my conscience or to make me feel ungrateful.

  My parents had married young. Dad was twenty-one and Mum was twenty. I was a late baby; I was so late Mum didn’t know if she was pregnant or menopausal. Their relationship was well established long before I came along and I had to fit in with their patterns and routines. But I was a child; I had my own needs and routines and they hadn’t really expected that. Dad had been a train driver and he mostly worked night shifts. Mum, of course, didn’t work. When Dad was on nights it was common for them both to shift the pattern of their week to suit his shift pattern. They became nocturnal. Dad came home in the early hours of the morning, they had ‘dinner’, listened to the radio (these were the days before early-morning television) and went to bed. They’d be up again about 4pm, Mum would cook a fried breakfast and Dad would go off to work with his midnight ‘lunch’ in the pocket of his overcoat.

  I arrived at ten past two in the afternoon. Of course I didn’t fit in. And then there was school; that didn’t open in the middle of the night, so I had to attend the usual hours – forcing my mother to adapt to my shift pattern. I’m not sure she ever really forgave me for that. Still, later, there were bigger things to deal with, so maybe my unsociable hours got forgotten somewhere along the way.

  By the time I was finally released from hospital and decided to come home from university my father was retired and comfortable. He pottered. In the house, in the garden, just pottering. Nothing much got done, no project was ever completed but he seemed content to spend the rest of his life in aimless activity. I envied him. I would have loved to spend time weeding half a flower bed then painting a door, maybe a bit of tidying in the shed, then back to the flower bed, the weeds having grown back on the weeded half. But that was not to be my lot. I was brainy, a boffin, a swot and all those other oddly derogatory terms that my school ‘friends’ used. I was destined for university and then… well, we never really got to find out.

  Just when I thought the weather conversation had been forgotten for something more important – hence Mum’s suggestion that I listen to Dad – he tried again. Tapping the ash out of his pipe into the waste bin next to the hearth and fiddling with his tobacco pouch he spoke without looking at me.

  ‘Be nice to be somewhere warm for the winter, eh? Like your Uncle Charlie and Auntie Rita. I bet they’re sunning themselves by that big pool of theirs while we’re sitting here in the dark at half past four with the heating on full blast.’

  I did a quick calculation and worked out that Charlie and Rita would be tucked up in bed if they had any sense. It was 6.30am in Sydney. I decided to keep quiet and see where the conversation was going.

  ‘I’ve always fancied that, you know, being somewhere hot for the winter.’

  My mother glanced up from her magazine and raised her eyebrows in surprise.

  This was news to me as well. The only opinion I’d ever heard Dad express about his brother’s life in the sun was that he wouldn’t fancy always having to be on the lookout for snakes and spiders. His image of Australia was of an untamed country where only the most intrepid could live. When Charlie went there I’m sure Dad thought he’d be back within a year but instead he built a life for himself – literally. He was a trained builder and constructed his own home, including the aforementioned pool; he’d then married and settled. Like Dad he was now retired although he still owned a building company in Sydney; unlike Dad he was still young enough to really enjoy his free time. He regularly sent postcards from his travels – pictures of Bali, Japan and New Zealand often adorned Mum’s kitchen pin board until more important documents such as shopping lists and receipts quickly replaced them. Mum didn’t enjoy disruption and the postcards were just that. She liked to plan a full menu for the week and to keep the supermarket receipts so she could work out how much it cost to feed the three of us. I’m certain that she was able to work out the percentage difference for the five and a half years that I spent at university and equally certain that she resents my coming home as it disrupts her planning.

  I think she also gets rid of the postcards because they represent a different way of life and she doesn’t want my father to be tempted out of his settled existence. Perhaps she was worried that, inside, he was really like his brother and ready to take off at the slightest opportunity. I don’t think he’d have been able to bear to leave all those unfinished jobs.

  So it looked like I was to be the next family member destined for travel, if my parents got their way.

  As the bitter wind fought a losing battle with the newly-fitted double glazing, my father settled more comfortably in his chair and outlined his plan for my future. I was to stay with Charlie and Rita for an unspecified period until I felt sufficiently ‘recovered’ and ready to come home. How this would help my ‘rehabilitation’ wasn’t clear – I suspect it was based on some Victorian notion concerning the therapeutic properties of heat and water, both of which Sydney seemed to offer in abundance.

  Ever since my return from university my parents had seemed uncertain about what to do with me and how to treat me; I could see they wanted to treat me normally but couldn’t seem to remove their metaphorical kid gloves whenever they thought they had something difficult to ask me or when they thought I needed to talk. I always felt as though they tensed up whenever they spoke to me, as though they were afraid of my reaction. They never asked me anything about my therapy beyond ‘Everything all right?’ and they had never asked me about the drugs that I had been on for months and had struggled to stop taking. Their policy seemed to be, if we don’t talk about it then it’s not really happened, despite the physical evidence of my scars and the screaming night terrors. Now that
I wasn’t attending therapy any more and the hospital had officially discharged me they seemed at a bit of a loss. Australia offered the perfect solution – get rid of the problem for a while and, hopefully, it would go away. Dad couldn’t even look at me as he outlined the plan.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Australia,’ I lied. I’d never really thought about it but it seemed to be something that they had both considered as an option for me so I decided to play along and at least see where this might lead.

  ‘I think a change of scenery might do me good, help me to relax.’ I’d been doing nothing but relaxing since my return but neither of them seemed inclined to mention this. Actually, questions about my future plans had been carefully avoided, which was something of a relief as I didn’t have any. I felt like I’d left my whole life behind when I came home and I had no idea how to create a new one. Australia seemed as good or bad as anything else – though it was better than staying at home because I would feel less pressure to ‘talk about it’ or to find myself some sort of gainful employment.

  ‘Do you think Charlie and Rita would mind? They might be planning to go on holiday or something.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Mum leaned forward on the sofa and leapt in to the conversation. ‘They’re thinking of going to Thailand next month but they don’t mind if you stay on in the house. In fact, they’d be glad to have someone looking after it while they’re away and your Uncle Charlie’d really like to see you.’ Her words tumbled out in a rush allowing me no time to ask any questions or offer an opinion.

  So, it was all arranged then. Everything had been organised behind my back and I was the last person to know. I’m sure my parents had decided that they didn’t need to bother me with details in case I felt stressed or pressured but I found myself resenting their assumption that I would go along with their plans. In principle, the idea really did appeal to me, especially the empty house with a pool – it was the deceit that I didn’t appreciate.