Five Strangers Read online

  ‘Help! We need the police!’ shouts Jamie. ‘Where are the police? Where did he get that fucking knife from?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ cries Julia. ‘Can’t anyone help?’

  ‘Shit, shit,’ says the teenager.

  Dan lets go of his girlfriend and her body collapses in a heap by his feet. As she falls, a line of blood spurts from her neck and splashes across the cheek of the woman sitting on one of the benches. Her eyes take in what is happening; she whips the headphones from her ears and runs across to the body.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ she says, kneeling down as she quickly assesses the young woman’s wounds. ‘Sir, you need to step away from her,’ she says to Dan, who is still clutching the knife.

  But Dan does not move.

  ‘Be careful,’ shouts Jamie. ‘He’s dangerous.’

  It hardly needs to be said; the evidence of the man’s capacity for violence lies at his feet.

  ‘What happened here?’ asks the doctor, as her fingers delicately examine the wounds.

  A number of people start talking at once – me, Jamie, Julia, the teenager – and from these fragments the doctor pieces together a horrific sketch of the events of the last few minutes.

  ‘There’s still a pulse,’ she says. ‘But it’s weakening. I need to stem this bleeding. I need something to stop—’

  But she is cut off by the teenager’s cry. ‘Watch out – the knife!’

  Dan raises the knife once more. What the fuck is he about to do? He has clearly gone insane. Anyone in his line of sight is at risk. We are all potential targets. Me. Julia. Jamie. The doctor, who is doing everything in her power to save the life of the woman who had once been Dan’s girlfriend.

  I reach out and, with shaking fingers, touch the doctor’s shoulder. ‘Can we move her?’ I whisper. ‘Get her away from here?’

  Dan must hear me, or realise what I was asking, because he lurches forwards, stabbing the air. Globs of spit bubble in the corners of his mouth and there is a fury in his eyes, a mania that gives him the look of a rabid animal.

  ‘She’s not going anywhere,’ he says. ‘Vicky’s staying here, with me.’

  In the distance, I hear the sound of sirens. Thank God they’ve arrived. But will they be in time to save the life of the poor woman, Vicky, who is bleeding to death in front of us? The imminent arrival of the authorities makes the teenager panic, and he runs off in the opposite direction.

  Now that the doctor knows the girl’s name, she repeats it over and over again. ‘Stay with me, Vicky, stay with me,’ she says. The doctor’s hands are smeared in blood, so too her face, as she attempts to stem the thick ooze flowing from Vicky’s neck and breathe life back into her dying body.

  ‘That’s the police and the ambulance,’ I say. ‘How much time do you think …’

  My voice trails off as I witness Dan raise the knife and bring it close to his own face. He smears the blade across his skin, the blood from his girlfriend staining his cheek. I hear the sound of footsteps running closer, the police fast approaching the scene. Surely the horror of it will all be over now.

  But then Dan places the knife at his own throat and slashes deep into his skin. As he falls to the ground I see a necklace of bloody redness, a mocking smile, as if Dan is insulting all of us even at the moment of his own death.

  2

  BEX

  It’s normal for there to be a crowd of people up there. From a distance there’s nothing remarkable about the semi-circle gathered at the top of Parliament Hill Fields. It’s only when I get nearer and I realise that the people are not looking out towards the glittering city that I suspect something might be wrong. The ragbag group of strangers, tourists, well-heeled residents, young lovers, and dog walkers are focusing on something on the ground.

  I quicken my pace. I hear cries of, ‘Oh my God’, ‘I can’t believe it’, and, ‘Just so tragic, so awful’. A trickle of blood snakes its way down the incline. Faces are ashen.

  This is where I’m supposed to be meeting Jen. But where is she? I look from person to person, but can’t see her.

  Just then a police car and an ambulance speed up the hill, lights flashing, ripping up the grass verges with their tyres. A moment later a policeman and woman jump out of the car and push their way through the group.

  ‘Out of the way, please, let us through!’ shouts the policewoman.

  ‘You need to stand back, all of you, please make some room,’ orders the policeman. ‘Over here!’ he cries to the two paramedics. ‘A female and a male.’

  ‘Oh fuck,’ says one of the paramedics under his breath.

  I take a step nearer and peer over someone’s head. I see a pool of blood, flaps of skin gaping open, the blade of a knife glinting in the winter sunlight. There is a young woman whose hands are covered in blood. The paramedics speak to her quietly, thanking her for what she has done, and then try to work life back into the two bodies that lie on the ground. But still I can’t see Jen.

  ‘Do you know what happened here?’ I ask an elderly, smartly-dressed woman.

  ‘Stabbing, that’s what I heard,’ she replies.

  ‘What? Not another teenager?’

  ‘No, it’s a man – apparently he killed his girlfriend and then himself.’

  ‘Did you see it for yourself?’

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ she says. ‘But I think those people over there did.’

  She points a bony finger to a group of people sitting around one of the benches, whose figures have been hidden from me by the crowd. I walk around the cluster until I have a better view. There is a woman in her sixties in grey sweat pants who I recognise. A handsome man with auburn hair and fair skin whose hands look like they have been badly cut up. And there, sitting on the ground, is a blonde-haired woman who looks like Jen. I say looks like, because it is as if someone has taken her face and sucked all the life out of it.

  ‘Oh my God, Jen!’ I shout. I push my way through the crowd, past people who are reluctant to give up their ringside seats to this gory spectacle.

  ‘Please, miss, I must ask you to stand back!’ orders the policewoman. ‘This is a crime scene now and we’re going to be sealing off the area.’

  ‘But that’s my friend – there!’ I say, pointing at Jen, who has dropped her head between her legs and still hasn’t seen me. ‘I want to make sure she’s okay.’ The thought that she might have been injured in some way spurs me forward and I try to make a run for her.

  ‘I must ask you to step away from the area,’ says the policewoman, placing a firm hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Jen! It’s me. It’s Bex.’

  At this she looks up.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I shout.

  Stupid question, I know. She is far from all right. She could really do without this. Everything seems to have gone wrong for her. First, that terrible thing with her cat. And her job: she lost her well-paid column, ‘Being Jen Hunter’, her only source of income. Then she split up with Laurence, her boyfriend of five years, which meant that she had to move out of his house – although I’ve tried to convince her that she’s better off without Laurence, it’s clear she’s still in love with him. I doubt they’ll get back together though. After living with me in my tiny Kentish Town flat for a couple of months, she recently moved into a huge pile in Hampstead belonging to a dreadful old hack, Penelope Frasier. I shouldn’t think that that arrangement will work out well either.

  I watch as Jen pushes herself to her feet, steadies herself by the bench as she gazes down onto that scene of horror, and makes her way towards me. She is stopped by the policewoman, who says that she will need to provide a statement. Did she touch or come into contact with either of the victims?

  ‘Yes, but I just need to talk to my friend for a moment,’ she says. Her voice is flat and lifeless. ‘Don’t worry, I promise I won’t go anywhere.’

  ‘Did you see anything?’ the policewoman asks me.

  ‘No, I just got here,’ I say. ‘I was due to meet my friend Jen, Jennife
r here, but I got held up, and …’

  More police have arrived now and the officer has to go and talk to them. She nods her head and tells me not to move any further towards the crime scene. She also asks us not to touch one another as Jen’s clothes will have to be taken away for forensic testing. The woman in grey sweat gear is now being sick into the grass.

  ‘Oh my God, Jen, what the fuck happened?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head as if trying to make sense of it all. Her blonde hair falls across her pale face like a sun-bleached curtain. She raises a hand to her cheek and as she does so I notice that she is bleeding. She wipes her eyes and nose, leaving a trail of blood on her skin.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ I ask.

  ‘Just a bit winded from a kick – and this is from a surface wound, I think,’ she says.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was such a beautiful day,’ she says, as if the crime that has been committed here has turned the sky black. ‘We were all looking at the city, and I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Oh, God, Jen, I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘If I’d known you were going to have to witness something like this …’

  ‘When this guy turned on his girlfriend. He had a bottle of champagne. They’d been drinking it. They seemed so happy. But then something happened between them, I don’t know what …’

  ‘When I heard it was a man who had attacked a woman, for a moment I thought it might have been you,’ I say. ‘I thought it might have been Laurence.’

  She doesn’t respond. It’s almost as if she hasn’t heard me. Instead, she begins to talk more about what happened.

  ‘They started to argue and then he took her, held her. He smashed the bottle on the ground and threatened her. Someone, this guy, tried to stop him, but it was no use. She tried to speak, but the man rammed the bottle into the girl’s mouth. Oh God, the blood. So much blood …’ She is forced to stop as shock racks her body. She begins to shake and looks as though she might faint.

  ‘We need to get you to a hospital,’ I say. ‘Doctor – please help! It’s my friend and she—’

  But Jen stops me. ‘I’ll be fine, honestly.’

  ‘Can I help?’ It is the young woman who I had seen kneeling over the bodies. ‘My name is Ayesha Ahmed, I’m a doctor.’

  ‘Yes, my friend here, I think she’s in shock,’ I say.

  ‘Not surprising after what happened here,’ says Ayesha.

  She asks Jen some questions – how she is feeling? does she feel sick? how is her breathing? – before she looks in her eyes and takes her pulse. She goes and speaks to one of the paramedics who is treating the wounds on the hands of the handsome man with the auburn hair, and returns with a special blanket. She drapes it around Jen’s shoulders and tells her that she will be fine.

  ‘Is there no hope?’ I ask, taking the doctor to one side so Jen can’t hear.

  ‘None, I’m afraid,’ says Ayesha. ‘I tried my best, and then the paramedics did too, but there was too much blood loss.’

  ‘Jen said the man used a champagne bottle,’ I say.

  ‘He did to begin with apparently,’ she says. She lowers her head as she silently curses to herself. ‘If only I hadn’t fallen asleep on that bench. I’d been up all night – I work at the Royal Free – and was due to start work again soon. I only intended to close my eyes for a minute or so. And because I had my headphones on I didn’t hear it. It was only when … well, when I felt something on my face. Blood. And by then the man had a knife and had used it to cut the young woman’s throat. She was called Vicky.’

  ‘God, that’s awful,’ I say. ‘But you mustn’t blame yourself. You did everything you could, I’m sure.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s kind,’ she says, trying to smile. ‘And don’t worry, your friend will be okay.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘It’s just that she’s had a tough time lately. I’ve been worried about her. I hope it doesn’t trigger another …’

  ‘Bex?’ It’s Jen. She needs me.

  ‘Coming,’ I say.

  When Jen asks for help I drop everything. I always have. And I always will.

  3

  JEN

  After I hand over my clothes to forensics and have various swabs taken from me, I give a detailed statement to the police. As I relate what happened on Kite Hill I still can’t believe it. It’s all so unreal.

  Finally, in a stranger’s clothes, I return back to the house in Hampstead. Bex is an angel, refusing to leave my side, constantly asking if I need anything to make me feel better. But just having her there with me is enough. She offers to call Penelope to tell her what has happened, but there is no point in causing undue stress. It will be best to explain in person later.

  ‘What a fuck-up of a Valentine’s Day,’ says Bex, as she takes my hand in the back of the police car. ‘I always thought it was toxic – all that love heart bollocks and romantic meals for two – but … murder?’

  ‘I suppose you never know what’s going on in any relationship,’ I say. ‘It may look nice enough on the surface, but …’

  The thought of my own relationship with Laurence and its breakdown brings fresh tears to my eyes.

  I feel Bex’s gaze on me.

  ‘Jen, I’m worried about the effect of all this on you. We don’t want a repeat of …’

  ‘You don’t need to worry, I’m much better,’ I say.

  Bex continues to hold my hand as she accompanies me up the long pathway through the brick-paved front garden. Penelope’s house is one of a kind. It is a mad, mock-Gothic affair, huge and rambling with a grand stone staircase, and tucked down a side street in the heart of Hampstead village. Penelope had bought the detached house with her first husband, a publisher, in the sixties and, after various other husbands and lovers had come and gone, and her two sons had left home, she found herself in the position of living alone in a seven-bedroom property.

  We’ve known each other for years, had judged various prizes together and sat on numerous panels, and had always admired and respected one another. Although we often disagreed about politics, I loved her tales of derring-do: dodging bullets in various hotspots around the world, her hilarious anecdotes of charming insane generals and flirting her way out of danger, and of course no one could deny she had been a first-rate reporter.

  She seemed fearless, a tigress with fuchsia-pink lipstick, long painted nails, and extravagant false eyelashes like fat caterpillars. I couldn’t believe that she was nearly eighty. She lived at the very top of the house and, although friends had tried to persuade her to move down to the ground floor, she wouldn’t have any of it. And despite her gung-ho attitude, Penelope is kind at heart. When she knew that I’d been forced out of Laurence’s place and I was living with Bex in her cramped flat in Kentish Town, she offered me a place to stay. For as long as I wanted, and for a nominal rent.

  I let us into the house and walk down the long hallway to the tiled kitchen at the back.

  ‘Is that you, darling?’ calls Penelope. ‘I’ve got a glass of pink fizz ready for—’

  But the sight of me stops her words.

  ‘Oh my, you look awful – what’s happened?’ she says, getting up from her chair at the head of the wooden kitchen table.

  As I begin to tell her something of what I had just witnessed on the Heath, Penelope confines the bottle of champagne to the fridge and gets out the whisky instead. She listens like a true professional, nodding, mostly staying silent, while I complete the narrative.

  ‘And did you see anything of this, Bex?’ she asks.

  ‘No, I was late, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Well, I say afraid, even though I’m pleased I didn’t see it. It must have been horrific.’

  Bex could have said more about how worried she was for me, what with my history. But she knows that I haven’t told Penelope much about my past. My landlady believes, as do most people, that I had been let go due to a round of cuts at the newspaper.

  ‘And has the couple been identified yet?’ asks Penelope
, always keen to stay up to date with a developing story.

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘I’m sure the police will be waiting to inform the parents or next-of-kin. All I know is that the man was called Dan and his girlfriend, Vicky.’

  ‘I suppose the motive must have been jealousy,’ says Penelope. ‘But it would be interesting to find out more.’ She looks at me, her eyes lighting up. ‘I’ve got an idea — why don’t you write a news story about it?’ She knows how hard it has been for me to get commissions since losing my column. There has been an interview with an actor, another with a writer, but they only pay a pittance at £300 or £400 each, nothing compared to my previous £150,000 a year contract.

  ‘I’m not sure that would be good for her,’ says Bex.

  ‘Why not?’ replies Penelope. ‘It’s exactly what she needs to do. Get it out of her system. I saw some horrors in my time, I’m sure you know that, and I found there was nothing better than writing about it. It was like a purging.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ says Bex.

  ‘If you don’t write it, you know someone else will,’ says Penelope. ‘That or one of the papers will interview the witnesses. You say Julia Jones was there too? How extraordinary. I’m sure someone is chasing her right now for an exclusive.’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be upsetting for you, Jen?’ asks Bex. ‘Wouldn’t it be best to put it all behind you?’

  ‘Perhaps Penelope is right. I’m hardly flavour of the month at the moment. Beggars can’t be choosers and all that.’

  ‘I thought the News didn’t want anything more to do with you?’ asks Bex. ‘After … well, after letting you go.’

  I fire a warning glance at Bex. But she’s right. They will never commission me again. After the problems I had with them I know I was lucky to get away with the severance of my contract. At one point the managing editor said she could take legal action against me; she also threatened to make the whole sorry mess public.