Five Strangers Read online

  ‘So you’re one of the good ones, are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Excuse me?’ I reply.

  ‘That rare breed – a decent human being and a journalist,’ she says.

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ I say. ‘I’m uncertain whether I would even call myself a journalist any more. You probably know that for the last ten years I wrote a column for the News?’

  ‘Oh yes, “Being Jen Hunter”. You developed quite a reputation for yourself. So brave to “put yourself out there”, as my daughter would say.’

  ‘Well, for the most part I only ever wrote about myself and my … various problems. My disastrous attempts at dating to begin with, detailed accounts of my relationships. I’ve rather forgotten what it is like to do proper journalism.’

  ‘I heard that the News had to make some cuts. That must have been hard.’

  ‘Yes, yes it was,’ I say, as Louisa returns with a tray.

  She places the drinks on the coffee table and, sensing the charged atmosphere of the room, leaves without saying a word.

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Mrs Jones,’ I say.

  ‘Call me Julia, please.’

  I am conscious I have only one opportunity to convince her.

  ‘Losing my column has been hard, not just psychologically, but financially too,’ I say, taking a deep breath. ‘Around the same time I also went through … a number of personal issues. So the truth is, this piece could help me get back on my feet. But I also feel that the feature would help raise awareness of what it’s like to witness something as traumatic as this. I wouldn’t want to lessen the impact of the crime on the families of those involved. It must be truly awful to lose someone you love in this way. But what I don’t think has been explored is the impact this has on the unfortunate people who happened to see it. After all, none of us asked to be there that day.’ I take a sip of my coffee. ‘I don’t know about you, but I can’t get the horror of what I saw out of my mind. I keep seeing the incident unfold, in slow motion. I can see the bottle, that poor girl’s face, the blood, the knife …’

  Julia places her cup down on a side table. ‘Oh my God, you’ve taken the words out of my mouth,’ she says, almost in a whisper. ‘To be honest, I’ve been having nightmares about it. I’m waking up in the middle of the night in a hot sweat. Of course, I’ve been talking about it nonstop since it happened, but there’s only so much poor Neil, that’s my husband, and Louisa, can take.’ She studies my face as she decides how much she can trust me. ‘This is off the record, of course, but my glass or two of wine with dinner has … well, let’s just say it’s turned into more like a bottle … or two. It’s my way of coping. You see, witnessing all that horror stirred up some rather unpleasant memories.’ She takes out a tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. It looks as though she might be about to cry. ‘I lost a son. His name was Harry. He was only twenty.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She waves a hand in front of her face as if to brush away an invisible wave of grief. ‘It was a long time ago now, but of course it still feels like yesterday.’ She swallows and bites her upper lip. ‘It was nothing like what happened on the Heath – he died while trekking in India in the summer of 2000. He was from my first marriage. The grief tore me and my first husband apart. I met Neil as I was still grieving, and luckily we conceived – I think having that baby, Louisa, was the one thing that helped me survive. But …’ Her voice trails off and for a moment it seems as though she might be stuck in the prison of her past. She takes a deep breath and tries to blink away the memories. ‘Anyway, you don’t want to listen to me going on like this. As I said, I don’t have much time. What do you want to do next? With the piece for the newspaper?’

  ‘I hope to speak to the others, the others who saw it happen, so as to build up a picture of that awful day and its aftermath. I’m meeting with Jamie, Jamie Blackwood, later, but I haven’t heard back from Ayesha Ahmed, the doctor.’

  ‘I’ll never forget the sight of her hands covered in blood,’ Julia says. ‘They were so small, like a child’s hands.’ Tears return to her eyes as the memory drags her back to Parliament Hill Fields. ‘And I’ll never be able to go back there, you know? To that spot? It’s where we took Louisa, as a girl, when she had her first kite for Christmas.’ She stops as she composes herself. ‘So, yes, I’ll help. I’ll help in whatever way I can.’ She coughs as she reinhabits the tough facade she has constructed to protect herself from the outside world. ‘But if you want to use anything from me, I’ll ask for quote approval. Okay?’

  I agree. She tells me again she can’t do an interview today – she is due in Parliament soon – but she writes out her personal email for me.

  ‘And what about the others?’ she asks. ‘The teenager – why did he run away? And that jogger? I heard that the police are still looking for them?’

  ‘I’m going to try to track them down, but I’ve come up with nothing as yet,’ I say.

  ‘Well, let me know if I can help in any way,’ she says. ‘Now, I really must …’ She stands up, a sign that our meeting is over, and as she leads me out towards the hall she makes a joke about how perhaps we should start our own support group. Witnesses for the execution. ‘Sorry, when times get dark I revert to black humour,’ she says, waving her hand in the air as if to try to erase her words. ‘It’s a terrible habit. And, please don’t quote me on that.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I say.

  As she shows me out I thank her for her time. Before I leave I turn to her and ask one last question.

  ‘I wondered – have you received any odd messages, emails or tweets, about it – about the incident?’

  ‘Apart from the usual you mean?’ She pauses as she selects a few choice examples. ‘“DIE YOU BITCH!” “IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU, YOU COMMIE CUNT.” Or what about, “I’M GOING TO SLASH YOUR THROAT AND THEN FUCK YOU IN YOUR DIRTY PIPEHOLE”? That sort of thing?’

  The contrast between the foul language and her cut-glass accent could not be greater.

  I smile sympathetically and say goodbye, feeling more than a little guilty. The tweets I received, alleging that the murder was not committed by Daniel Oliver, were nothing compared to these offensive messages. And Julia Jones has to deal with that level of abuse all the time. The tweets sent to me were just the outpourings of a lunatic or, more likely, a pathetic coward hiding behind the anonymity of a screen. There are a lot of freaks out there.

  And one of them is watching me.

  10

  BEX

  Supposing Jen was to have another breakdown, who would help? Was there anyone else I could call on? I run through the list of Jen’s friends – Sarah, Lydia, David, Veronica, Laura – realising that she’d alienated most of them by writing about them in her column. There is Penelope, of course, but she’s the kind of person who would tell Jen that I was asking questions about her. Could I contact Laurence? Perhaps. And what was the name of her previous boyfriend, the one who dumped her just before they were due to be married? That was it, Chris. Or, as Jen called him in her column, Chris the Bastard. I’d heard that since that debacle he had actually married another woman, a solicitor called Steph, and that he was living very happily with her and their young son in Muswell Hill. Jen had told me Steph wouldn’t let her husband have anything more to do with her – she didn’t want Chris or herself to appear in ‘Being Jen Hunter’.

  Jen didn’t have any family left. She had told me that her aunt, Kathleen, who had cared for her after the death of her parents, was herself dead now. So Jen really has no one to help her in times of crisis.

  So for the time being, I will have to try to shoulder all the responsibility myself. Which is fine by me, as I enjoy looking after her and keeping her close. I was the one who held her head in my arms after she lost her job. I still remember the feel of her wet tears on my neck, the night she came round to my flat to tell me what had happened. After the wine-fuelled bravado had melted away she started to sob, great big ugly sobs that sounded like
the cries of a dying animal. At first, what she was saying didn’t make sense. Her eyes were red from the constant stream of tears. Her voice cracked as she tried to spit out the words.

  ‘I w-was only giving them what they w-wanted,’ she said, wiping a stream of snot away from her nose.

  I stood up and went to get her some more loo roll. ‘Here, use this,’ I said, handing it to her. ‘You need to start from the beginning and tell me what happened.’

  She blew her nose, but instead of putting the damp paper to one side she gathered it together in her hands, using her fingers to pull apart the tissue into a pile of white shreds that fell by her feet. ‘I was in the office – Fridays are the days I go, well … used to go into the office,’ she said, trying to choke back another sob. ‘I was sitting at my desk, I’d just filed my column and was waiting for any queries to come back when my phone rang. It was Debbie, the editor’s secretary – Jonathan wanted to see me. I stopped to say hello to her, but she was on another call, her head turned away from me. Of course, now I know she couldn’t … she couldn’t meet my eye.’

  Jen stopped as she tried to control her breathing.

  ‘Take your time,’ I said, squeezing her hand.

  ‘I went into the office and saw Jonathan there, with the managing editor, Janice, and the head of HR. There was no small talk or funny banter. Instead, Jonathan told me to sit down and he held up a sheet of paper from his desk. He cleared his throat and told me that they’d received a letter from a reader, making a series of allegations about me. I asked what kind of allegations and he replied, “That you’ve lied in your column. About something significant in your life.” I felt like I was going to be sick, but I had to try to control myself. I think I managed to laugh, say that it was absurd, but then I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes.’

  ‘Oh, Jen, I’m so sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Jonathan said that the reader – the reader was a he, he said – had gone through my columns and picked up various anomalies. He thought these might have been genuine errors, at first. But then he started to check, and discovered there was something more … sinister going on.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh God, I feel so bad about it all,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean – you’re saying that—’

  ‘You know how hard it’s been for me, you know the level of detail they wanted at the paper,’ she said. ‘The desperate need for me to tell the readers everything about my life, the more fucked-up the better. It started out with those dates, those evenings out that always ended in disaster. I’d told them all about my grim northern childhood. My bulimia. How I hated the way I looked. I wrote everything about my relationship with Chris, my love for him, the ecstatic build-up to the wedding, and then the humiliation of him dumping me. But no, that wasn’t enough for them!’ She snorted, a bubble of snot ballooning out of her nose. ‘Anyway, Jonathan said that they’d done their own investigation. He singled out a number of my columns and asked whether I could explain certain … discrepancies.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  She looked absolutely broken.

  11

  JEN

  I step out of Julia’s house and check my phone. The first thing I see is a message.

  @WatchingYouJenHunter Nice suit you’re wearing today.

  A second later there is another one.

  @WatchingYouJenHunter And heels. Sexy.

  I feel the light pressure of a stranger’s eyes caressing the back of my neck. Although it is broad daylight, and the area is an affluent one, I still feel scared. I hear the sound of footsteps behind me. I stop and look over my shoulder, feeling my heart pound inside my chest. I freeze to the pavement. Someone is coming closer.

  A pretty young mother with an expensive-looking pushchair stops and gives me a concerned glance. I smile apologetically and look down at my phone again.

  In my years as a columnist, writing about the most intimate aspects of my life, I’ve encountered my fair share of weirdos. My postbag used to be vetted for me, but latterly, as communication shifted from paper to the digital format, this became harder to do. I mostly tried to ignore it, believing that a certain level of abuse was part and parcel of the job. But occasionally people could be cruel, hitting you exactly where it hurt. After doing a column about my bulimia, a female reader wrote to me to say that it’s likely I had been sexually abused as a child. And God, the level of bile that came my way when I dared say that I’d had not one but two abortions.

  Of course, sometimes the readers made valid points. Did I not see that there was a link between my column and my less than perfect life? Perhaps if I gave up writing about myself altogether then I might find that I’d be happier? And no wonder I didn’t have any friends – that was another perennial observation. I could have told the readers about my close friendship with Bex, and how much she’d helped me over the years, but after an incident at my student newspaper when, in a panic, I’d mentioned her in a piece and she had gone absolutely mental, I vowed never to write about her again.

  A text comes through from her asking to meet for lunch. I say I can’t and leave it at that without going into detail. I don’t want to tell her about Julia Jones and my subsequent meeting with Jamie Blackwood in case she gets worried.

  I push the creepy tweets out of my mind and plot my route to Jamie’s house. There is no point getting the Northern Line because I would have to get off at Camden and catch another branch, and so I decide to walk. I have time. And the exercise will do me good. I cross Highgate Road and make my way down Gordon House Road, but just as I am passing Gospel Park overground I see a figure on the pavement in front of me that stops me in my tracks. A man – tall, dark hair, handsome. Oh fuck. It’s Laurence. Part of me wants to rush up to him. I feel like blurting out everything I’ve been unable to tell him. I could thank him for the sweet email he sent and apologise for the fact that I had to cancel our lunch.

  Just as I make a dash to go and talk to him an image of his face – dark, cruel eyes, a vein throbbing with anger in his temple – flashes into my mind. He is telling me that he never wants to see me again. That what I did was unforgivable. That I am a monster. And he had meant every word. This was from the man who had told me that he would never let anything or anyone harm me. A man whose strong arms had enveloped me, whispering to me that he would never let me go. At one point, we’d been as close as two people could get. Now, we are like strangers, or worse. I slip into a doorway and watch him melt away into the crowd.

  12

  BEX

  Jen didn’t respond and so I asked her again what her editor meant by ‘discrepancies’.

  ‘Oh God, I could do with a drink,’ she replied.

  She looked around the flat for a bottle that still bore a trace of wine, but we’d knocked back everything.

  ‘I think you’ve had enough,’ I said.

  ‘Can you go out and get another bottle? Or have you got any whisky – or gin? What about gin? I’m sure you must have something.’

  ‘No, Jen, I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what happened.’

  Jen took a deep breath and swallowed, but the disgust on her face as she did so made it seem as though she was being forced to gulp down a mouthful of her own vomit.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘It started small. And it was reasonable, and professional too. I told lies to protect those around me. Anyone would do the same, swapping Sally for Sarah, Lucy for Lydia. So do you remember that column I did about orgasms? In that, I used stuff Sarah told me, about how she always had to go into the bathroom to masturbate after sex, but I gave her the name Sally. That’s not bad, is it?’

  I told her that I understood, and encouraged her to continue.

  ‘But sometimes – well, sometimes there were weeks when I didn’t have that much to say,’ she said, looking down. ‘I mean, how many times can you open up your soul and talk about your latest dating disaster, your terrible row with a good friend, that embarrassing period
incident, or weird sexual fantasy, or whatever? Sometimes, life was, well, it wasn’t always that interesting. And occasionally, well, occasionally I had to make the odd thing up.’

  ‘So, what is it you’re saying, Jen?’

  ‘They’re saying I lied!’ she said, spitting the words out.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘I told them that I hadn’t, apart from the occasional need to protect the privacy of some of my friends. Jonathan pressed on and asked, “Apart from this, have you ever lied in your column?” He told me to think very carefully about how I answered. The readers of the newspaper expected only the highest standards of journalism. There was an unspoken bond between the reader and a columnist, he said. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women, bought the paper because of me, he added. It would do untold damage to the reputation of the newspaper if it came to light that I had lied about significant events in my life. And so he asked me again. “Was I lying to him now?”

  ‘I felt as though I was on trial. I couldn’t bear it. And so I shook my head and said no, I hadn’t lied. Jonathan looked away, as if he was disgusted with me. He said that he was disappointed and that he had evidence to show that I was lying. But how else was I supposed to keep up with that weekly deadline? It was punishing.’

  ‘So what are you saying? That you did lie? What kind of things did you lie about?’

  ‘Some of the stuff that happened with early boyfriends, certain incidents and conversations,’ she said. ‘Things they couldn’t check up on.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too bad,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand what the editor’s problem is. Surely it will blow over.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

  She went quiet again.