Forty
Pip shook her head.
‘I’m not Layla,’ she said, the words dented by the fast beating of her heart. ‘I sent that text to you tonight, but I’m not her. I don’t know who she is.’
Stanley’s face reshaped in the shadows, but all Pip could really see were the whites of his eyes and the white of his shirt.
‘D-do, do you . . .’ he stuttered, voice almost failing him. ‘Do you know . . . ?’
‘Who you are?’ Pip said gently. ‘Yeah, I know.’
His breath shuddered, his head dropping to his chest. ‘Oh,’ he said, eyes unable to meet hers.
‘Can we go inside and talk?’ Pip nodded to the entrance. How long would Ravi and Connor need to break open the chain and the door and get Jamie out? At least ten minutes, she thought.
‘OK,’ Stanley said in barely more than a whisper.
Pip went first, watching over her shoulder as Stanley followed her down the dark corridor, his eyes down and defeated. In the living room at the end, Pip crossed through the wrappers and beer bottles over to the wooden sideboard. The top drawer was open and the large torch Robin and his friends used was propped up against the edge. Pip reached for it, glancing up at the dark room filled with nightmare silhouettes, Stanley lost among them. She flicked the torch on, and everything grew edges and colour.
Stanley screwed his eyes against the light.
‘What do you want?’ he said, fiddling his hands nervously. ‘I can pay you, once a month. I don’t earn a lot, the town paper is mostly voluntary, but I have another job at the petrol station. I can make it work.’
‘Pay me?’ Pip said.
‘T-to not tell anyone,’ he said. ‘To keep my secret.’
‘Stanley, I’m not here to blackmail you. I won’t tell anyone who you are, I promise.’
Confusion crossed his eyes. ‘But then . . . what do you want?’
‘I just wanted to save Jamie Reynolds.’ She held up her hands. ‘That’s all I’m here for.’
‘He’s OK,’ Stanley sniffed. ‘I kept telling you he’s OK.’
‘Did you hurt him?’
The sheen over Stanley’s brown eyes hardened into something like anger.
‘Did I hurt him?’ he said, voice louder now. ‘Of course I didn’t hurt him. He tried to kill me.’
‘What?’ Pip’s breath stalled. ‘What happened?’
‘What happened is that this woman, Layla Mead, started talking to me through the Kilton Mail’s Facebook page,’ Stanley said, standing against the far wall. ‘We eventually exchanged numbers and started texting. For weeks. I liked her . . . at least I thought I liked her. And so last Friday, she messaged me late, asking me to meet her, here.’ He paused to glance around at the old, peeling walls. ‘I arrived but she wasn’t here. I waited for ten minutes, outside the door. And then someone turned up: Jamie Reynolds. And he looked strange, panting like he’d just been running. He came up to me, and the first thing he said was “Child Brunswick”.’ Stanley broke into a small, crackling cough. ‘And obviously I was in shock, I’ve been living here over eight years, and no one has ever known, except . . .’
‘Except Howie Bowers?’ Pip offered.
‘Yeah, except him,’ Stanley sniffed. ‘I thought he was my friend, that I could trust him. Same thing I thought about Layla. So, anyway, I start to panic and then the next thing I know, Jamie lunges at me with a knife. I managed to get out of the way and eventually knock the knife out of his hands. And then we were fighting, out by those trees beside the house, and I’m saying “Please, please don’t kill me.” And as we’re fighting, I push Jamie off into one of the trees and he hits his head, falls to the ground. I think he lost consciousness for a few seconds and after that he seemed a little dazed, concussed maybe.
‘And then . . . I just didn’t know what to do. I knew if I called the police and told them someone had just tried to kill me because they knew my identity, that was it. I’d have to go. A new town, a new name, a new life. And I didn’t want to go. This is my home. I like my life here. I have friends now. I’d never had friends before, ever. And living here, being Stanley Forbes, it’s the first time I’ve been almost happy. I couldn’t start over again somewhere new as a new person, it would kill me. I’ve already done that once before, when I was twenty-one and told the girl I loved who I was. She called the police on me and they moved me here, gave me this name. I couldn’t go through that, starting everything again. And I just needed time to think about what to do. I was never going to hurt him.’
He looked up at Pip, his eyes shining with tears, straining like he was willing her to believe him. ‘I helped Jamie up and led him to my car. He seemed tired, dazed still. So, I said I was taking him to the hospital. I took his phone off him and turned it off, in case he tried to call anyone. Then I drove him back to my house, helped him inside. And I took him into the downstairs toilet, it’s the only room with a lock on the outside. I . . . I didn’t want him to get out, I was scared he might try to kill me again.’
Pip nodded and Stanley continued.
‘I just needed time to think about what I could do to fix the situation. Jamie was saying sorry through the door and asking me to let him out, that he just wanted to go home, but I needed to think. I panicked that someone might trace where he was from his phone so I smashed it with a hammer. After a few hours, I put a chain across the door handle and the pipe outside the wall, so I could open the door a little without Jamie being able to get out. I passed him through a sleeping bag and some cushions, some food, and a cup so he could fill up water from the sink. Told him I needed to think and shut him in again. I didn’t sleep at all that night, thinking. I still thought Jamie was Layla, that he’d spoken to me for weeks as her so he could lure me into a trap and kill me. I couldn’t let him go in case he tried to kill me again, or told everyone who I was. And I couldn’t call the police. It was impossible.
‘The next day, I had to go to work at the petrol station; if I don’t turn up or I call in sick, my parole officer asks questions. I couldn’t raise suspicions. I got home that evening and I still had no idea what to do. I made dinner and opened the door to pass it through to Jamie, and that’s when we started talking. He said he had no idea what Child Brunswick even meant. He’d only done what he did because a girl called Layla Mead told him to. The same Layla I’d been speaking to. He fell for her hard. She gave him all the same lines as me: that she had a controlling father who didn’t let her out much, and she had an inoperable brain tumour.’ He sniffed. ‘Jamie said it went further with him, though. She told him there was a clinical trial her dad wouldn’t let her do and she had no way of paying for it and would die if she didn’t. Jamie was desperate to save her, thought he loved her, so he gave her twelve hundred pounds for the trial, said he had to borrow most of it. Layla instructed him to leave the cash by a gravestone in the churchyard and to leave, that she would collect it when she could get away from her dad. And she made him do other things too: break into someone’s house and steal a watch that had belonged to her dead mother, because her dad had given it to the charity shop and someone else had bought it. Told Jamie to go beat someone up on his birthday night because this guy was trying to make sure she wouldn’t get on to the clinical trial that would save her life. Jamie fell for it all.’