Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
ERIN
Dan Riley didn’t know it, but I was sitting outside his house – or apartment building, as it is – looking up at a lit window – his lit window – throughout the entire duration of our last phone conversation, which I’d ended abruptly right after I’d told him that I’d kill Samantha if I ever saw her again.
He could tell it wasn’t a lie; I sensed it from him.
And so if Dan can tell when I’m not lying, then by default he also knows when I’m telling the truth, right?
It was really much easier than I’d thought it would be to find Dan’s private home address, which is kind of worrying when you think about who he is and what he does for a living.
Once I had the name of his son though, it was pretty much a straight line from there.
In his newspaper interview, Dan mentions both his children’s ages, so it wasn’t difficult to do a search on babies registered in that month and year with his name.
His address is right there on Jude Joseph Riley’s birth certificate, written in black, florid ink, along with his parents’ names and occupations, which were stated as journalist and police officer, respectively.
Dan’s so humble, he didn’t even state his full rank on his own son’s birth certificate. I wish I liked him less than I do.
During my stay at Larksmere – which hilariously makes it sound like a grand country spa hotel when I say it like that – I’d honed my research skills down to an art form, eventually anyway, once they started to let me use the library and gave me limited internet access.
With a bit of hard graft, I can discover where someone lives and who they live with, how many kids they have and where they work.
I can find out where they went to school, or if they have a mortgage, or whether they shop at Waitrose or prefer to bulk-buy in Costco.
I can even find out how much money they have in the bank or if they’ve ever ordered a sex toy online – it’s all there if you look hard enough, you’ve just got to be prepared to put the effort in.
In a long list of ironies, I have more of a criminal mind now than I ever did before I set foot inside the prison system.
It’s still sinking in, the conversation I’ve just had with Dan, but it would seem that Samantha has, once again, set me up.
That psycho bitch has deliberately planted my hair at Milo Harrison’s murder scene to make it look like I was there and that I was somehow involved.
Only she didn’t bank on Tilly Ward finding my email address and sending me a message, did she? No. She. Did. Not.
Tilly Ward, God bless her, is my get-out-of-jail-free card, literally.
I have been so hung up on finding Samantha, so distracted, that I almost missed the fact that she is the key to this.
She can confirm that I am not Samantha Valentine.
One look at me and she can tell the police that I’m not the woman who befriended her and took up residence inside her head, subsequently coercing and controlling her into ending Milo Harrison’s life.
Together, we can prove that it’s all just an elaborate set-up, nothing but a con.
This is just one more piece of evidence that supports the claims I have made all along, claims no one listened to.
Samantha is the one who should be sitting where I’m sitting now, fresh out of the funny farm, a convicted criminal on the run, with the police and the media on her tail.
Yet again, she has managed to flip the script and place the spotlight firmly back on me.
There’s a touch of Machiavellian genius to it, I’ll admit.
‘Can you forward me the email exchanges between you and Tilly Ward, Erin? It would be good to have them on file, for our reference, and it may help with your defence.’ Dan’s soft voice had a sage edge, as though he was trying to convince me that it would be in my best interest if I did.
‘Sorry, Dan – they’re private, just between us.
And I won’t need any help with my defence.
I don’t need one anymore. Anyway, I’m done defending myself.
It’s all I’ve been doing since the day this shitshow started.
I know that eventually it will all come out because the truth always does, Dan – years, sometimes decades, even centuries later.
Only I’m not waiting around that long for justice. ’
It turns my blood to ice when I think that Samantha has kept my hair for all these years. She retained a piece of me with her, part of my DNA, like a trophy. I shudder.
‘You have the most beautiful hair I think God ever gave a woman, do you know that, hun?’
Sam liked my hair. And I liked her liking it. I wanted her to like everything about me, as much as I liked everything about her. Sometimes she would brush it for me until it shone, just as I had told her my mum used to do when I was a child.
‘Keep still!’ she would chide me as she roughly raked a brush through it. My mum was always much gentler. ‘I need to get all the knots out.’
Aside from it giving me the creeps, the idea that Samantha had purposefully collected and kept my hair shows me just how calculated she really is, how premeditated all of this must’ve been from the beginning.
She had been plotting, and pre-empting, and planning all of this way back then.
She even had the foresight to keep something she could potentially use as a future weapon against me down the line – my hair – just in case.
Why had she done that? What had I done to her to make her hate me that much that she would want to destroy my life like she has?
All the while I was being this faithful, caring, doting friend, she was covertly and purposefully plotting my complete destruction.
Sometimes, when I was at Larksmere, I thought the not-knowing why any of this happened might actually kill me, along with the guilt I felt about Bojan’s death.
Both of these things haunted me daily and continuously, the nagging question, ‘Why?’ following me everywhere, whispering torturously in my ear until I wanted to bash my own brains in.
Another thought has just struck me, one that is equally as sickening, or perhaps more so.
Had Samantha deliberately plotted and orchestrated Milo Harrison’s murder just to enable her to frame me for it and have me sent back to the booby hatch?
Was it all just for my benefit? A small part of me feels secretly pleased that it even could be.
It means that Samantha considers me a real threat, just as she should, because I’m the only person who knows that she really exists, you see. Until Tilly Ward popped up.
‘Did you speak to Tilly on the phone, Erin?’ Dan sounded worried. He’s probably pissed at her for reaching out to me – she’s on bail after all. But as it turned out, she had wanted to speak to me as much as I wanted to speak to her – and she found me.
Can we meet face-to-face, Erin? PLEASE? Tilly had typed the word in bold upper case in her email.
Clearly, she was desperate, craving comfort and solidarity too, only I couldn’t rule out the idea that Dan may be using her as a double bluff in a bid to get me to open up, to let my whereabouts slip, or arrange to meet her somewhere so that they could ambush me.
It could very well be a trap. I had to play it safe.
I’m so scared, Erin. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What if the police don’t believe me, like they didn’t believe you? Will they put me in prison? Her fear and confusion felt so much like my own that my eyes instantly welled up with tears. Truthfully, I’m amazed I still have any left.
You won’t have to worry about any of that soon, I wrote back.
There was so much I wanted to say to her, so much I wanted to ask and to know about her own experience of being under Samantha Valentine’s spell, but I was paranoid of being watched, or traced, or set up. I had to keep it short. Soon it will all be over. I promise.
Why do you think she chose you, Erin? Why, out of everyone, do you think Samantha chose you to be her victim? I stared at the words on screen.
I thought I’d know exactly how best to respond to Tilly’s question; after all, I’ve spent seven long years asking myself the very same thing.
But when it came to my reply, I struggled, my fingers hovering over the keyboard as I tried to find the right words.
A reason for everything, and everything for a reason, right?
There’s this belief that all of life’s events – even negative ones, or perhaps especially those – have purpose or meaning behind them.
Often ‘the reason’ is attributed to a higher power, or a deterministic view of the universe, kind of on par with that other irritating phrase, ‘it was meant to be’.
I think it’s a whole heap of crap, myself.
Imagine saying something like that to a mother who has just lost her child to cancer, or in a fatal car accident, or murder…
‘Hey, chin up, everything happens for a reason – it was all meant to be!’
I wanted to tell Tilly that I thought perhaps Samantha had chosen me because of my deep childhood trauma – witnessing the brutal death of my mum – or the fact I was a recovering addict who’d suffered a psychotic break as a result.
Maybe it was because I was unstable, or overly suggestible, or that I was vulnerable and considered weak.
In the end though, I settled for just three words: ‘I was lonely.’
A small black-and-white cat suddenly runs out into the road, triggering a neighbour’s security light.
The bright white light arches above me, illuminating the entrance to the apartment block, and I slide a little further down into the driver’s seat, pulling my scarf up over my face until the light times out.
It’s a smart-looking apartment complex, I suppose – the Rileys have not done too badly for themselves – tucked back and away from the main road, although if you listen carefully you can still hear the faint sound of the ever-present traffic, humming in the distance.
Like New York, London is a city that never sleeps.
Not that I care especially, because neither do I much anymore.
Once upon a time though, I used to love nothing more than a leisurely, long and lazy lie-in of a weekend.
I’ve never been good on little or no sleep – who is?
Previous boyfriends have even been known to comment on how grumpy I could be of a morning if I wasn’t well rested enough.
Jason Willis – more of a friend-with-benefits than a proper boyfriend at the time – used to refer to me as ‘crotchety’, which I always thought made it sound like I had a personal hygiene problem.
At Larksmere though, I learned how to get by on just a few hours a night.
Sometimes, I was frightened to shut my eyes, fearful that I might never get to open them again.
I stare at the glove compartment and think about the gun that’s inside it – the gun I placed there.
It had felt so heavy and so powerful in my hand, like I was holding the very tangible embodiment of life or death right there in it.
I have to admit, despite my general, overall pacifistic nature and ‘be kind’ philosophy, it gave me a tiny electric thrill knowing that now, at last, I would be the one yielding that power.