Killing Kate. Alex Lake
it online. I haven’t been following it, though. It happened about a week after I got here, and you know what it’s like on holiday. You tend to switch off. One of my friends has been keeping track of it. He said they still haven’t found whoever did it.’
‘I heard they arrested her boyfriend,’ Kate said. ‘One of my friends is addicted to reading about it, but she’s like that with every news event.’
‘Did you know the victim?’ Mike said. ‘She was about your age, wasn’t she?’
‘She was,’ Kate said. ‘But I didn’t know her. She moved from Liverpool a few years ago. We would have been at high school together though, if she was from Stockton Heath.’
What she didn’t say was what her friends had been teasing her about ever since: she and Jenna Taylor could have been sisters. They had the same long hair, lithe figure and dark eyes. It was no more than a coincidence, but still, she didn’t like it. It wasn’t the kind of coincidence that you found intriguing; it was the other kind, the kind that you found disturbing.
Mike shook his head. ‘Unbelievable,’ he said. ‘I go away for a few weeks and all hell breaks loose.’
Kate gave a half smile. She wasn’t listening any more. She’d had enough of making conversation. All she wanted was to go back to her hotel and her friends.
She finished the drink and put the cup on the counter. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I have to get moving.’
There was a flicker of disappointment on Mike’s face. ‘You want to meet up later?’
Kate paused. For a second she felt almost obliged to say yes, but she caught herself. She didn’t have to be polite. She owed him nothing.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. She searched for an excuse – what? A prior engagement? Didn’t want to leave her friends – but none came. ‘I don’t think so,’ she repeated, simply.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I understand. From the look on your face, I’m guessing that you won’t want to meet up another night, either?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
She put her hand on the front door to open it.
‘You know your way home?’ Mike said. ‘Where are you staying?’
She didn’t want to give him the name of their hotel. ‘Near the harbour.’
‘Go out of the main door and turn right,’ he said. ‘It’s not far. I can call you a cab, though, if you’d like?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No thanks. I’ll walk. I could do with the fresh air.’
‘All right,’ he said, with a rueful grin. ‘Maybe I’ll see you round and about in Stockton Heath.’
She hoped not. She really, really hoped not.
Phil Flanagan signed the change order on his desk. He’d barely read it; he was a project manager on a residential housing development, but given how he was feeling it was a struggle to muster up the enthusiasm to care about his job. It was a struggle to muster up the enthusiasm to care about anything.
Not with Kate gone. It was bad enough that she’d broken up with him, but now she was on holiday, living it up in the sun. Surrounded by men who would be ogling her by day and pawing her in the pubs and clubs by night. God, he couldn’t stand the thought of it. Couldn’t bear to picture it.
But he couldn’t stop himself. All day long images of her in bed with a faceless man, their naked, suntanned limbs passionately entwined, tortured him. Which was the reason he was barely paying lip service to his job.
He stared at his signature on the paper. He hated his name, hated the alliteration of Phil and Flanagan. He’d always had the idea that he was going to change it someday; originally he’d planned for that day to be the day he got married, when, in a grand romantic gesture that would both impress her and get rid of his horrible name, he would take her name. But that plan was out of the window now that she’d dumped him because she needed some fucking space, needed to see what life was like without him. Well, he could tell her what it was like, it was rubbish, totally fucking rubbish, just a series of minutes and hours and days all merging into one big morass of him missing her and wondering where she was and if she was in bed with some greasy fucking foreigner on holiday. And at the back of it all, the question: why, why had she done it?
And what was he supposed to do now? His whole life had been planned around her: get married in the next year or so, then kids, then grandkids, then retirement, then their last few years eating soup together in a home somewhere, before dying, her first, then him a few days later of a broken heart.
It wouldn’t say broken heart on the death certificate, but that was what it would be, and all the people in the nursing home would agree about it. They’d smile at each other and say how lovely it was – sad, but lovely – that he couldn’t live without his wife of seventy years.
Well, that wouldn’t happen now, and the loss of it stung.
He’d known there was something wrong a few weeks back, when he’d suggested that they get started on planning their wedding. They weren’t engaged, not yet. Not officially, at any rate. Not in the announced-to-the-world sense. That would come in due course, but he saw no reason not to start at least discussing the main points of their wedding-to-be – possible locations, numbers, all that stuff – because they were going to get married, of course they were. Everyone knew that. Everyone had known it for years.
Sure, she said. We should start thinking about it.
We should check out some venues. I was thinking Lowstone Hall, or maybe the Brunswick Hotel, if we wanted something more modern.
Yeah, maybe, she said. Let’s think about it.
So should I contact them? Do you like those places?
Er – let me think about it. I’m not sure.
Not sure? Phil said. We talked about both those places a while back. What changed?
She wouldn’t look him in the eye. Nothing. I just – let me think about it, OK?
He’d thought it was odd, that there was something different in her manner. But he had not been expecting what came a week after that.
Phil, she said. We need to talk about something.
And then she told him. Told him that they’d been together since they were teenagers and she wasn’t sure he was the right person for her any more. She wanted a break. Wanted some time apart so she could live her life, make sure she knew who she was, that she was not sleepwalking into a bad decision.
So it’s a break? He said. For how long?
Maybe a break, she said. Maybe not.
But if it is, how long for?
I don’t know, Phil. I can’t say.
He felt his world slipping through his fingertips. You don’t have to be exact, Kate. But what order of magnitude are we talking? A week? A month?
More, probably. Six months? I don’t know. She looked at him, tears in her eyes. I think it’ll be easier if we say it’s for good. That’ll stop you wondering.
No, he said. That’s not easier. Not at all. It’s a lot worse.
And that was how they’d left it. Him: broken, devastated, unsure of what to do from minute to minute, staying in his friend Andy’s scruffy flat. Her: on holiday in Turkey, living it up with her friends.