The Day She Can’t Forget: Psychological suspense you’ll just have to keep reading Read online

  The Day She Can’t Forget

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  Copyright

  The Day She Can’t Forget

  Meg Carter

  1

  February 2016

  A road appears through the shifting whiteness. Along it walks a woman.

  She is beyond cold. Coatless and sodden, hobbled by city shoes, she staggers forward. Her nostrils flare. Her mind struggles to focus. She doesn’t stop to think why she has no coat, or what brought her here, stumbling along this tarmac lifeline, in an ice-bound landscape, however long ago. Yet two things are certain. She must keep walking: left then right, repeat. And she must not turn back.

  A tree looms to her left, cresting a brittle verge. The image distracts her; obliterates, for a beat, the approaching pulse of an engine. Almost too late, she decodes the jarring squeak of tyres on snow. A shape emerges, tentatively feeling its way through the fog. It is a white Ford.

  Panicking, the woman lurches to a halt, as the car pulls over a short distance away. It waits beside a group of sheep standing by the roadside like an ancient stone circle. No longer lulled by her footsteps and their rhythmic swing, the woman’s throat constricts.

  Who is this? she wonders, bleakly.

  Is it him?

  ‘Excuse me.’ The driver of the Fiesta winds down the window and leans out. Her breath hangs heavy in the air. ‘Do you need any help?’

  ‘What is it, Mummy?’

  The walker looks up. No, it’s not him. She is OK. As the child in the back of the car leans forwards for a better view, though, her heart quakes. Where have you been, Baby Boy? Because they are the same age, this child before her and her own. Though the face gazing at her is pale, not golden, with clumsy freckles and copper hair.

  No, not Matty.

  ‘Who’s the lady? Why’s she got blood on her face?’

  ‘That’s enough, Billy,’ says the driver, calmly, releasing her seat belt. ‘Sit tight, OK?’

  The door opens and out climbs a slender, auburn-haired woman with a round face. She looks to be in her mid-thirties. A rainbow-knit hooded cardigan hangs loosely over her nurse’s uniform. Thick black tights tuck into purple quilted boots that have a dark red stain on the left toe. Spilled wine, perhaps, the walker thinks – I should know. The car door slams shut. Tugging the cardigan tight around her, the driver seems momentarily unsure what to do. After weighing up possible threats, she takes a tentative step forwards.

  ‘My name is Jean,’ the driver tries again. Her voice has an unfamiliar burr, Scottish. ‘Can I help you?’

  The walker struggles to find some words, any words, or an appropriate response. For she has now glimpsed her reflection in the window. Her pale face, smeared with red. Dark flecks in her hair, too. Where have I come from? she wonders, dropping her hand and seeing the red streaks across her right fist.

  What. Have. I. Done?

  ‘I think you’d better come with me,’ Jean coaxes, reaching out her hand. At the stranger’s touch, the walker registers her own skin, cod-cold beneath the damp sleeve of her ripped shirt. She shivers softly as Jean’s fingers close around her wrist. ’We can’t have you wandering around like this, can we?’

  Jean scans the walker’s face for any sign of injury but apparently finds none. Despite the scarlet criss-crossing her ashen cheeks. The clots stubbornly lodged in the fine hairs just above her temple. The splash of something on her left shoe, which makes Jean glance down, self-consciously, at her own.

  ‘Been in the wars, too, haven’t we. Mmm?’ Jean punctuates her words with a reassuring smile as she steers the walker around the front of the car, pausing only once to shoot a warning glance at Billy, who is sitting in his car seat wide-eyed with excitement. Silently, she implores her son to hold his tongue. Then, carefully, she helps the stranger climb into the front passenger seat of the Fiesta.

  After helping her with her seatbelt, Jean walks around to the driver’s door.

  ‘You’re in luck, you know,’ she says, lightly, as she carefully executes a perfect U-turn. ‘The nearest A&E is only a few miles from here, it won’t take long. And you—’ Shooting a glance in the rear-view mirror, Jean catches her son’s eye. ‘You have the perfect excuse to be late for school.’

  ‘Hey!’ the boy cries, happily drumming his heels on the back of his mother’s seat. ‘A real life emergency! If only we had a siren…’

  With her eyes fixed on the icy road, Jean reaches forward and twiddles a knob on the dashboard. A sudden burst of rap music makes the other woman flinch. The volume drops as the dial is hastily retuned. As the car pulls away, the stranger’s body softens.

  Three pips sound and the local DJ starts reading the headlines. Fragments of news from the real world herald the beginnings of a subtle thaw. Stories about falling oil prices. The refugee crisis. The Scottish Government’s concern about Britain leaving the EU. A boy missing in Kent. Mid-way through the details, the driver taps the dashboard and the radio falls silent.

  The fog is thinning. A T-junction has appeared by the dry stone wall now looming ahead, where they will turn left onto the B-road to the nearest town. The road is clear, apart from pocks of ice and clumps of frozen earth. But the stranger sees none of this, because her eyes are closed.

  Jean risks a cautious sideways glance at the passenger beside her, her gaze drawn by something shiny in the woman’s hand. It is a chain, stubbornly gripped between her frayed fingers, and from it hangs a silver charm in the shape of a tiny piano.

  2

  Kensington, September 1974

  ‘Over there, Dad! On the left – there’s a white Fiesta about to pull out,’ cries Alma. Infuriated as she always is by the slowness of her father’s reactions, she leans forward to poke her head between the two front seats, then jabs an urgent finger at the gap in the parked cars a short distance ahead.

  ‘White Fiesta?’ mutters the Reverend Dean. A pearl of sweat courses the contour of his cheek before dispersing into his salt and pepper beard. Adjusting his black-framed spectacles, he peers once more along the closely-packed cars parked along either side of the street. ‘Where?’

  ‘Beneath the sycamore, Gordon,’ sighs Alma’s mother, Angela. ‘Do get a move on, dear, or someone else will get it.’

  The car nudges forwards into the empty space. Sinking back into her seat, Alma watches her father’s hands clench the steering wheel so tightly the white leather of his driving gloves shines, taut. She scowls.

  It has been a tiresome drive into London – far slower than any of them expected, with many ill-tempered drivers stubbornly refusing to give way. She could just as easily have carried a couple of cases up by train – and would have preferred to, only he wouldn’t hear of it. Doing the right thing matters most. And if Reverend Dean’s only daughter had travelled alone, what might other people think?

  So they drove. But the closer they got, the slower they progressed and her father’s mood be
gan to sour. The obvious explanation was bad traffic and the late summer heat. But there was another, his daughter knew. Because for all his grand ambitions, there was one thing that Reverend Dean loathed more than anything – more than blue jeans, garlic, even Tony Benn – and that was change.

  A flurry of activity on the pavement draws Alma’s attention, as students hurriedly converge on the building ahead. Laden with boxes of books, bags of clothes and armfuls of bedding, they then disappear in an ant-like stream into the building which will be their – and now her – home for the next nine months.

  Over the lintel above the main front door hangs a sign welcoming all first year music students. Freshers ’74, it says, humorously replacing the ‘e’s with treble clefs. Quickstep This Way! Alma eyes the plaque on the wall below bearing the building’s name, Engel House. The name sounds elite but fusty, just like her impressions of the Conservatoire when she had first auditioned.

  And judging by the assortment of bluestockings before her, she grimaces, the traditional element remains strong.

  Yet this privately-run music academy – discreetly tucked away along a south Kensington backstreet – was not the Deans’ preferred place of further education for their only daughter. Despite being the best musician in years at Burford High, the girls school Alma attended on a church scholarship, both the Royal Academy and the Royal College had turned her down.

  The place in front of her is third best, then. But given that most of the classical performers it turns out will earn a respectable living, it’s good enough.

  Alma exhales, slowly, and thinks back to when imagining being grown up meant playing in a small chamber ensemble. It was a dream her father was only too happy to indulge. Having bought her a toy piano for her fifth birthday and private tuition before her sixth, he watched his little angel’s rapid progress through grades one to eight with swelling pride.

  By the time Alma turned ten, she was regularly called on to perform to family, friends and visiting parishioners. She did what was expected, always. But then, around her thirteenth birthday, something changed. Tired of daily practice, she started to rail against the twice-weekly private tuition and the impromptu home concerts, and buck against the never-ending rounds of rehearsals and performances. However, when Burford’s third formers chose their O-level options a few months later her future suddenly fell into dreary focus.

  The simple fact of the matter was that Alma wasn’t much good at anything else. And with little else to set her apart from the less academic girls in her class, chances were she’d end up sleep-walking into secretarial college. Only then did she understand that buried in her music lay the keys to her escape.

  As Reverend Dean kills the engine Alma flings open the door and clambers out onto the pavement.

  Tilting her face, her gaze roams across the rooftops of the densely-packed townhouses, beyond which, barely glimpsed through the trees, she can just make out a chapel spire and gothic arches. This will do, Alma thinks, letting slip a secret smile at her first taste of the city. Its baked concrete and petrol fumes catch in her throat; the smell of hope. This place promises the perfect antidote to the church-fete, small-town tedium that has defined the boundaries of her life so far. Her salvation.

  ‘Darling,’ urges Angela Dean, warily eying the white van roughly parked with two wheels on the kerb a short distance away. ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ blares through its open window. ‘Don’t you think someone should keep an eye on the car?’

  Alma tries not to laugh at how out of place her mother now seems. So small and awkward in this alien city, far from the South Downs hamlet where she was raised. A closed society where the parishioners are as upright as they are well-heeled and where the local vicar’s wife is universally known and respected; her opinion valued, her ministrations to her local community welcomed.

  Like her husband, Angela Dean takes pride in doing the right thing, like preparing care parcels for the less fortunate. As a homemaker, she takes pleasure in simple cooking – milk puddings, boiled vegetables, basic stews. Hers is a world in which everything has its place and everyone knows theirs – the complete antithesis, then, to London. To Alma’s mother, this alien city with its loose morals, its high rate of crime and now its terrorist threat feels like a jungle.

  It’s only been two months since the IRA bomb blast at the Tower of London, and everyone has been on edge for weeks in anticipation of another attack. Which almost led to an eleventh-hour change of plan. Thank God, then, for Reverend Dean’s blind ambition for his only child. Her father’s vanity had narrowly outweighed his wife’s anxiety. Without it, Alma would still be at home, her future hobbled. For what I am about to receive may the Lord make me truly thankful, she murmurs, softly.

  ‘You take the navy suitcase and I’ll start bringing in some of the heavier boxes,’ her father declares, clicking open their car’s boot. ‘What floor did they say your room is on?’

  Reaching into the back pocket of her cotton skirt, Alma tugs free the confirmation letter from the admissions secretary. ‘Third.’

  ‘Come along, dear,’ he motions to his wife. ‘You can bring the potted fern.’

  Alma’s room would be a spacious bedsit for one, were it not for the two single beds positioned on either side of the large bay window. To the left is a small kitchenette – more an alcove, really. To the right, a wooden door opens into a tiny bathroom that smells of bleach. Beside each bed stands a narrow, white-washed cupboard. Yet with the lower sash of the bay window thrown open, the room’s tired furnishings and modest dimensions seem light and airy.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve already taken the one on the left,’ announces a slender stranger. Her hooded eyes, sculpted cheeks and bobbed hair, the colour of burnished copper, remind Alma of Faye Dunaway. The girl pauses in the open doorway, as if unsure, before making her entrance. Stepping forward, she introduces herself as Alma’s new roommate. Her name is Viola.

  Alma straightens her cheesecloth shirt and tucks its hem back into her waistband.

  Tall and slim, Viola has a boyish air. But the sharp tilt of her chin and the angularity of her shoulders are confounded by what she is wearing. Her sundress is ankle length and halter-necked with a vibrant pattern of blues and greens. There is a natural, peacock elegance to the way she moves. She has the air of someone who’s never bothered to compete, because she knows she’s already won.

  ‘The kettle’s just boiled,’ Viola beams, turning towards Reverend Dean. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  Viola had arrived only an hour before, she explains as she unwraps porcelain cups and a matching teapot from cocoons of newspaper. Her family are based north of Edinburgh, though thanks to her father’s job – something important in finance – they lived for three years in Hong Kong. Her mother is a painter. Her older brother has just left Cambridge, where he read law.

  All of this Alma takes in silently as the tea brews, busying herself with opening bags and boxes, though for now she is blind to the contents. Surrounded by small talk in which she plays no part, she feels diminished and infuriatingly child-like. She glances down to check her watch, wishing her parents would leave.

  Her attention is snagged by a page of newspaper loosely crumpled on the floor. County Orchestra Takes Top Honours in Vienna, the headline reads. But it is to the accompanying picture that Alma’s gaze is drawn. The familiar face with its aquiline nose, pale eyes and high forehead topped by a crown of receding silver hair. His expression, staring directly into the camera as if challenging the photographer, makes her shudder.

  Sharing the plaudits at the 1974 European Music Festival, reads the caption, was Burford High School’s former head of music, Leonard Parmenter.

  Bending down to adjust the strap of her sandal, Alma deftly crumples the paper into a tight wad then kicks it out of sight beneath the bed. Only when she straightens up does she notice that Viola is watching. Alma holds the other girl’s gaze until she looks away.

  ‘So you travelled down from Scotland alone, t
hen?’ enquires her father. Perched on the edge of his daughter’s bed, he takes a sip of tea.

  ‘I did, but I’m used to that,’ Viola demurs. ‘I went to boarding school on the south coast, not far from Brighton.’

  ‘St Jude’s?’ Reverend Dean ventures, carefully placing his cup and saucer on the floor. ‘Such a wonderful reputation for its music. We had hoped Alma might…’ He hesitates, steeples his fingers, then slowly shakes his head. ‘But no, it was not to be.’

  Alma frowns.

  At Burford, ever since she could remember, she had always been the best.

  As a result of her third year epiphany, she practised her music with near religious zeal and even mentored a group of enthusiastic first years. Then, a few months before her A-levels, she led the county orchestra at the grand final of the prestigious European inter-schools youth competition. Yet the rigorous selection process for music college with its assessments and auditions had proven sobering. It wasn’t enough to excel at piano: applicants were also expected to be able to demonstrate both vocal skills and theoretical abilities. The first refusal had knocked her confidence, making the second almost inevitable. Only by her third audition, for the lesser-known Conservatoire, did Alma’s spirits rally sufficiently to secure a place.

  ‘Take good care,’ Angela Dean whispers in her daughter’s ear as they embrace. ‘And remember to be careful about who you go out with, where you go. Stay central, where there are crowds.’

  Avoid Kilburn, Van Morrison, Guinness, books by James Joyce, poetry by Yeats, any West End play by Wilde or, for that matter, George Bernard bloody Shaw, she might as well have added, Alma fumes. As if boycotting all things Irish would make any difference to what was going on in the world. As if, just for one moment, the woman really cares.

  True, her parents have made sacrifices to get her to this point. But when did they ever stop to listen to what she said or wanted? And why had they never tried to understand who she is; her hopes and dreams and fears, not theirs?

  The stultifying nature of their relationship made Leonard Parmenter’s interest in Alma appealing at first. But she doubts she can ever forgive her parents for what happened next. How, when she told them what he did in Vienna, they’d disbelieved her – for fear of the mess that the truth might unleash.