Chapter 46
FORTY-SIX
ERIN
I clasp my hand tightly over my mouth, but it’s no good. I can’t stop it from coming.
Groaning, I open the car door, lean out, and empty my guts out all over the pavement below – whoosh!
My eyes water as I retch, my whole body violently spasming and heaving and sweating as it expels the contents of my stomach – around ￡120 worth of contents, last night’s overindulgent supper, including ice cream.
My head starts spinning as I begin to hyperventilate, struggling to catch my breath between intermittent bursts of vomiting.
‘Hey, you OK?’ A woman stops as she’s walking past, her brow crinkled in concern. She makes to come towards me but, seeing the mess I’ve made over the side of the road, takes a step back.
‘Mm-hm’ is about all I can manage in response. ‘Stomach bug…’ I croak, doubled over.
‘Yeah, there’s a lot of it about at the moment.’ She gives me a sympathetic, lopsided smile, hands me a bottle of water, stretching her arm out as far as it can go to avoid getting too close.
‘You don’t look well. You should go home to your bed.’
‘Yes… thanks.’ I nod gratefully. ‘I will.’
But there’s no chance of that happening. Not after what I’ve just seen.
At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me and that it was a mirage as I watched them both, saying their goodbyes by the door, like someone stranded in the burning heat of a vast desert sees a stream in the distance.
I thought that perhaps I was just seeing what I wanted to see. Only there was no mistaking it was her.
I recognised her immediately, even though she looks so different, a far cry from the glamorous blonde bombshell I remember her being.
Her hair is now mousey brown and hangs in lank curtains around her noticeably thinner face, and she’s dressed in the most awful clothes – a shapeless grey cardigan and baggy leggings – clothes that ordinarily she would never be seen dead in – though today just may well be the exception to that rule.
Samantha Valentine.
I gulp back some water with a shaking hand, spilling it down my front as I swallow greedily.
I’ve been dreaming and fantasising about this moment for seven years now, the moment when I would finally see her again. And yet now it’s here, now this day really has actually materialised, I feel paralysed, unable to move, unable to think.
I watched them as they’d embraced at the door, watched as Dan had made his way down the pathway towards his car. As he was about to step inside, he stopped, turned and waved at her, like an old friend.
‘I’ll see you soon, Tilly!’
Tilly?
Oh. My. God. It hits me hard, like a hammer to the back of my skull. Tilly Ward? I feel sick again. ‘Oh no…’ I clutch my mouth, willing the nausea to pass. I don’t want to throw up in the hire car – they’ll charge me.
Samantha Valentine is Tilly Ward.
I sit in the driver’s seat, motionless for a moment as I try to let it sink in.
‘My God!’ I breathe the words aloud. Yet again, she’s fooled everyone, including me, including Dan Riley.
By default though, he has at least fulfilled the role I had hoped he would, and led me to her.
I take it back – I was right to choose him all along.
I glance at the burner phone in my tote bag and, bizarrely, think about calling him.
Instinctively, I want to give him the heads-up, tell him who Tilly Ward really is and how she’s tricked him, how she’s deceived and manipulated him into believing her cock-and-bull story, just as she did me.
In a sudden burst of rage, I bang the steering wheel with my hand, over and over until it hurts so much that I scream. That evil bitch!
It was all becoming clear now, horribly so.
It had been deliberate, all of it, planned and plotted and executed with aplomb.
She had killed Milo Harrison and blamed Samantha Valentine, my supposed fictitious friend, my ‘other self’.
She must have known that I had been released from Larksmere and wanted to make sure I could never come after her with the truth, never try to expose her, by framing me for a murder she deliberately committed to silence me.
I was right; she had to have planted my hair at the crime scene, to try to incriminate me, turn the spotlight onto me, mad Erin Santos, the crazy woman who was a pathological liar.
In what is perhaps the most twisted part of all though, in a bid to ensure that I’d be held accountable and thrown back in the nuthouse, she’d committed her own crime on herself.
She was playing both the victim and the perpetrator.
I take a breath, scrabble around in my tote bag for my lipstick and a hairbrush.
‘You can do this, Erin.’ My voice sounds oddly detached as I talk to myself out loud – maybe I really am going mad. Laughter suddenly bubbles up out of me. If that psycho bitch wants to see madness, then I’ll damn well give it to her!
Finish this, Erin, you can finish this once and for all.
As I start to rake the brush through my frazzled hair, I’m thinking of all those years I have spent holed up in that hospital – a place that makes a mockery of the word itself – hospitals are supposed to be safe places after all, places of nurture and care and comfort.
Larksmere was none of these things. It was a cold, desperate, lonely place of pain and despair, the antithesis of care.
No one cared about you in that hell pit. Frankly, I hope it burns to the ground.
I redo my make-up, add a touch of mascara and a fresh coat of vibrant red lipstick.
Then I take the bottle of Baccarat Rouge from my bag – I’d picked up a bottle from Space NK at the train station after my charity shop run – and spray it liberally all over myself, until I start to cough and choke.
Opening the window a touch, I check myself out in the mirror.
I want to look good, no, I want to look better than good, when I face my nemesis.
I want her to know, to see, that she hasn’t broken me, right before I put a bullet through her messed-up head.
I reach over, open the glove compartment and retrieve the gun.
The pockets on my charity shop coat purchase are thankfully deep and roomy, perfect for concealing a weapon.
I place it inside before throwing on a pair of reading glasses, check myself in the rear-view mirror.
Ideally, I don’t want her to instantly recognise me like I recognised her.
She mustn’t. I need a few seconds at least, the element of surprise, to give me time to push my way through the door.
The din of the outside world hits me and I wince as I step out of the car and make my way towards the front entrance of the drab apartment block.
The Samantha I knew would never live in such shabby-looking accommodation.
She really must be slumming it. Though it’s all part of the convincing disguise of course, the act.
To be fair to her, I suppose she’s nothing if not dedicated to her craft.
Luck must be on my side today because an older gentleman is in front of me as I reach the entrance, punching the code into the main doors.
‘After you.’ He graciously gestures to me, smiling as he invites me to go before him.
‘That’s so sweet.’ I smile back at him. ‘Thank you. Um…’ I turn to him.
‘You don’t happen to know which apartment my friend lives in, do you?
’ I clutch my chest, flashing him a smile as I flutter my eyes.
‘I’ve only been here once before and I’ve clean forgotten it.
Her name’s Tilly, Tilly Ward. She’s got brown hair and green eyes, and she… ’
‘The deaf girl? Number 66, two floors above.’ He points upwards. ‘I’m the floor below, thankfully.’ He places a shaky hand on his knee. ‘These ain’t what they used to be – and that lift is always on the blink. Bloody disgrace really, what with the service charges they want out of you…’
‘Oh, I know, appalling, isn’t it? Just pure greed at the end of the day. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, you know.’
He gives me a slightly surprised look before he turns away.
‘Yeah, well, God bless you on your way.’ He smiles at me once again.
‘God bless you too.’
I take the stairs. I’m not fond of lifts. And I don’t want to run the risk of seeing too many people. Not that it matters now. I’m already on camera. The final act in this horror story will be caught on film for everyone to see. Coming to an Odeon near you now, rated 18!
But this is what happens, you see, when justice is denied.
Sometimes people are forced to take matters into their own hands.
And this way, in what is, I realise, one crazy-assed, messed-up, ugly and tragic story, I get to write the ending, the final chapter.
This is where I get the answers I need to reclaim my sanity, to take back the power and the control that she stole from me seven years ago and right the wrongs.
Every dog has its day, right? And today it’s mine.
Perhaps I really should’ve worn my onesie.
I stand outside the door of apartment 66.
Huh. All it needs is another six at the end and that would be about right.
I take a breath. I take two. And then I knock on the door.
It really can’t be good for my heart to be beating at the rate it currently is.
It feels like it might actually burst, explode inside my chest and kill me.
My hand goes up to it as she opens the door.
At first I see the anticipated flicker of surprise, quickly followed by a smattering of confusion, but then, boom! There it is, right there! Recognition. I watch as her expression clouds over and darkens, like a black veil falling over her face.
I give her my best smile.
‘Hello, hun.’