He turned away as soon as he saw me looking, but it was the man who’d waited outside the school, the man I’d cut up in the car. I knew him by his squared shoulders, his unmoving form. The baseball cap was still on his head. At first I’d thought he belonged in a uniform – my quick glance saw an almost military precision in his bearing, although his features were hidden in the darkness.
I walked on, not varying my pace, and not looking back, trying to give no sign that I perceived that anything unusual was happening.
I checked out the houses as I went, calculating which door to bang on if this strange man should get out of his car and come after me. I listened for his engine to rev up, or his door to open. I heard nothing, the nothing you hear when you are convinced someone is watching your back.
I’d reached my own house. My keys were already balled in my fist, sticking out from between my fingers, more vicious than knuckledusters when used correctly. I preferred not to speculate as to whether this creature knew I was in the house alone. I jammed the front door key into the lock, twisting it so hard that for a horrid moment I thought it would snap. Then the door opened, letting me into light and relative safety. As I turned to shut it behind me, I risked a look up the street. He was still there, unmoving; simply waiting.
I don’t think he realized that I’d recognized him, or even noticed him. I put the milk down near the kettle and tried to sort myself out. I was breathing hard, and my heart beat a skipping tattoo beneath my jacket. I felt light and panicky.
I ran upstairs to our, or rather my, bedroom, which overlooks the street. I didn’t turn the switch, but instead crept forward to the window. Fractionally, I pushed aside a tiny fold in the curtain and peeped out.
I could just about see him, at the very edge of the perspective the window gave me. He was still in the dark Megane, though it looked brown in the sodium light. Other parked cars near him hid his registration plate from me. He was still waiting.
I don’t know how long I watched him watching my house, as my breath condensed slightly on the cold glass and my legs started to cramp. Then, with appalling suddenness, the engine started with a faint roar and the headlights came on, dazzling me.
I held my breath.
He shot away from the kerb with a growl, and headed off, at speed, past my house and off to the main road. He was gone.
I breathed again. The street was blameless and empty once more. I waited and waited, but he did not return. Eventually, I got up and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and phone Lily.
‘Following you, you say,’ said Lily, leaning back on her shabby couch, pausing to yank a small green stuffed dinosaur out from behind her back before settling in. There were tired lines around her eyes, and I realized guiltily that it was late, and she had a sick toddler to look after and school in the morning. ‘Are you sure?’
Lily has three small children that she has pretty much raised alone, with occasional input from her harried, perpetually gloomy mother. She specializes in short, passionate, fraught relationships with desperately unsuitable men. The last one was a married master at one of the colleges who was on the brink of resigning over her, and the one before that had to leave the country after he was caught trying to sell cocaine to the bevy of privately educated female undergrads he was coaching in tae kwon do. Perhaps, all things considered, there’s a good reason that Lily’s mother looks old before her time. If the single life is an urban jungle, Lily hacks through it with a giant machete, and engages romantically only with hungry jaguars and cannibal tribesmen.
I moved my hands through my hair and sighed. ‘It was the same guy that was at the school today. I’m positive. And I think he was probably the same guy who phoned the school looking for me, but I’m not sure about that.’
‘Whoever phoned probably had nothing to do with it,’ she replied with a flick of her ochre-painted nails. ‘Did this guy in the car follow you all the way home from school?’
‘I didn’t go straight home. I went up to the paper first. Then Waitrose.’ I was exhausted.
‘But did he follow you there?’
‘I don’t know!’ I burst out in frustration. ‘I don’t keep a constant lookout for sinister types spying on me!’
Lily frowned at me.
‘I’m so sorry, Lils,’ I said, mortified. ‘I’m bang out of line, I know. I’m very tired and maybe I’m imagining the whole thing.’
She rubbed her chin thoughtfully. ‘Maybe. But you know, perhaps you want to be careful. People see you on TV, and…’
‘How do you mean?’
She opened her mouth, as though about to say something, then shut it again. ‘Did you see his face?’ she asked.
‘I did the first time. It was too dark the second. But it was definitely him.’ I shrugged helplessly. ‘And there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘but I’m starting to wonder whether I’ve met Bethan Avery before.’
She did not reply, merely stared at me.
I found this unaccountably difficult to discuss. I do not enjoy talking about my past, even to Lily, who doesn’t know the full extent of it.
‘It’s just… I met, well, I met a lot of very, very damaged people in those years with the nuns,’ I say. ‘And now I’m starting to wonder whether she was one of them.’
‘Have you told this to the police? Or that friend of yours, the criminologist?’
I shook my head. ‘Not yet. I mean, I can’t… What would I say? I have no memory of ever meeting her.’
Lily frowned, her jaw jutting slightly. ‘It doesn’t change the fact that this is a man following you, not a woman. You know, I think,’ said Lily, about to pronounce her final word on the subject, ‘that you should phone the police if you see this creep again. Get them to come over and ask him what the hell he thinks he’s doing.’
The drive home passed in a strange kind of dream. I reflected not on the man, but instead on the hostel and the girls I had met there, trying to recall any nugget of information that would help.
But mostly I thought about Angelique, the Queen of the Night.
I was sitting in a church the second time I met her.
I had wandered into the church after being shooed away from a library, and then the blissfully warm lobby of a department store. I was huddled in a pew at the back, contemplating the stained-glass window behind the altar.
I still had four hours to kill.
St Felicity’s had strict requirements for those receiving its largesse. First and foremost, if you weren’t back by nine at night, you lost your bed. No ifs or buts.
Furthermore, no single women were allowed to stay in the hostel between eight in the morning and six at night, while the nuns and volunteers scrubbed the cheap linoleum in the rooms and boiled the sheets in their constant and bitterly fought rearguard action against lice and bedbugs.
As a consequence all I remember of that first week, before the nuns took me in semi-permanently, was a cold, dreary nomadism where I shifted from place to place, looking to wear out the hours until I could return – eat, wash, go to bed, get up, eat, leave, and do it all over again.
Now I was in one of those tiny dark churches London is littered with – medieval boltholes overshadowed on all sides by high industrial buildings. This one was dedicated to St Eugenia who, from what I could see, had been some sort of martyr, and perhaps cross-dresser, who had disguised herself as a man if I understood the mosaics correctly.
I’ve never been a particularly religious person, though I have my beliefs. But I was drawn to the church’s shelter and peace, harbouring me against the bitter wind outside. Above my head, someone was practising on the wheezy old organ – some elaborate classical piece – and a trailing fugue of falling notes came from above.