CLAIRE ALLAN
HER NAME WAS ROSE

Copyright

Published by Avon, an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Claire Allan 2018

Woman with Rose © Michelle Mackie / Arcangel 2018

Condensation © Henry Steadman

Cover layout design © Avon 2018, design by Henry Steadman

Claire Allan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008275051

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008275068

Version 2018-11-05

Praise for Claire Allan:

‘Amazing. I read it in one go.’

Marian Keyes

‘Utterly addictive! Literally couldn’t put it down all day! Compulsive, twisty, tense. And LOVED the ending.’

Claire Douglas

‘A powerful and emotional psychological thriller that will keep you guessing and leave you breathless.’

C.L. Taylor

‘SUCH a good read! It made me feel so uncomfortable, but I still kept gobbling up the pages.’

Lisa Hall

‘Her Name Was Rose is heck of a read! It’s a psychological thriller with a heart; it’s taut, emotionally challenging and, unlike so many thrillers, each twist and turn is here because it deserves to be and not for the sake of it.’

John Marrs

‘An exciting debut that I couldn’t put down, Her Name Was Rose got under my skin in a way I wasn’t expecting. An intriguing and menacing page turner.’

Mel Sherratt

‘The depth of characterisation and its fast pace is what makes Her Name Was Rose stand out as a thriller. It had me hooked until the end.’

Elisabeth Carpenter

‘A tight and twisted tale with a set of seriously complex characters – kept me guessing right ’til the end. This is going to be one of 2018’s smash hits.’

Cat Hogan

‘All I can say is wow! Such a great concept, expertly delivered to keep you turning the pages. This book toys with the reader until the last page. Trust me, this will be THE book of 2018!’

Caroline Finnerty

‘Mesmerizing to the point of complete distraction. I was totally engrossed in this book.’

Amanda Robson

Dedication

To my parents,

Peter and Karen Davidson,

for all that you are, all that you do and all that you have taught me.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Claire Allan:

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty–Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Book Club Questions

About the Author

Keep Reading …

About the Publisher

Chapter One

It should have been me. I should have been the one who was tossed in the air by the impact of a car that didn’t stop. ‘Like a ragdoll,’ the papers said.

I had seen it. She wasn’t like a ragdoll. A ragdoll is soft, malleable even. This impact was not soft. There were no cushions. No graceful flight through the air. No softness.

There was a scream of ‘look out!’ followed by the crunch of metal on flesh, on muscle, on bone, the squeal of tyres on tarmac, the screams of onlookers – disjointed words, tumbling together. The thump of my heart. A crying baby. At least the baby was crying. At least the baby was okay. The roar of the engine, screaming in too low a gear as the car sped off. Footsteps, thundering, running into the road. Cars screeching to a halt as they came across the scene.

But it was the silence – amid all the noise – that was the loudest. Not a scream. Not a cry. Not a last gasp of breath. Just silence and stillness, and I swore she was looking at me. Accusing me. Blaming me.

I couldn’t tear my gaze away. I stood there as people around me swarmed to help her, not realising or accepting that she was beyond help. To lift the baby. To comfort him. To call an ambulance. To look in the direction in which the car sped off. Was it black? Not navy? Not dark grey? It was dirty. Tinted windows. Southern reg, maybe. It was hard to tell – muddied as it was so that the letters and numbers were obscured. No one got a picture of the car – but one man was filming the woman bleeding onto the street. He’d try and sell it to the newspapers later, or post it on Facebook. Because people would ‘like’ it. A child, perhaps eight years old, was screaming. Her cries piercing through all else. Her mother bundled her into her arms, hiding her eyes from the scene. But it was too late. What has been seen cannot be unseen. People around me did what needed to be done. But I just stood there – staring at her while she stared at me.

Because it should have been me. I should be the one lying on the road, clouds of scarlet spreading around me on the tarmac.

*

I stood there for a few minutes – maybe less. It’s hard to tell. Everything went so slowly and so quickly and in my mind it all jumps around until I’m not sure what happened when and first and to whom.

I moved when someone covered her – put a brown duffle coat over her head. I remember thinking it looked awful. It looked wrong. The coat looked like it had seen better days. She deserved better. But it broke our stare and an older lady with artificially blonde brassy hair gently took my arm and led me away from the footpath.

‘Are you okay, dear?’ she asked. ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’

‘I was just behind her,’ I muttered, still trying to see my way through the crowds. Sure that if I did, the coat would be lifted in a flourish of magic trickery and the lady would be gone. Someone would appear and shout it was an elaborate trick and the lovely woman – who just minutes before had been singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ to the cooing baby boy in the pram as we travelled down in the lift together – would appear and bow.

But the brown coat stayed there and soon I could hear the distant wail of sirens.

There’s no need to rush, I thought, she’s going nowhere.

‘I’ll get you a sweet tea,’ the brassy blonde said, leading me to the benches close to where the horror was still unfolding. It seemed absurd though. To sit drinking tea, while that woman lay dead only metres away. ‘I’m fine. I don’t need tea,’ I told her.

‘For the shock,’ the blonde said and I stared back blankly at her.

This was more than shock though. This was guilt. This was a sense that the universe had messed up on some ginormous, stupid scale and that the Grim Reaper was going to get his P45 after this one. Mistaken identity was unforgivable.

I looked around me. Fear piercing through the shock. There were so many people. So many faces. And the driver? Had I even seen him? Got a glimpse? Could it have been him? Or had he got someone else to do the dirty work, and he was standing somewhere, watching? It would be more like him to stand and observe, enjoy the destruction he had caused. Except he’d got it wrong. She’d walked out in front of me. I’d let her. I’d messed with his plan.

I’d smiled at her and told her to ‘go ahead’ as the lift doors opened. She’d smiled back not knowing what she was walking towards.

A paper cup of tea was wafted in front of me – weak, beige. A voice I didn’t recognise told me there were four sugars in it. Brassy Blonde sat down beside me and nodded, gesturing that I should take a sip.

I didn’t want to. I knew if I did, I would taste. I would feel the warmth of it slide down my throat. I would smell the tea leaves. I would be reminded I was still here.

‘Let me take your bags from you,’ Brassy Blonde said. I realised I was gripping my handbag tightly, and in my other hand was the paper bag I had just been given in Boots when I’d picked up my prescription. Anxiety meds. I could use some now. My hands were clamped tight. I looked her in the eyes for the first time. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘My hands won’t work.’

‘It’s the shock. Let me, pet,’ she said softly as she reached across and gently prised my hands open, sitting my bags on the bench beside me. She lifted the cup towards me, placed it in my right hand and helped me guide the cup to my mouth.

The taste was disgustingly sweet, sickening even. I sipped what I could but the panic was rising inside me. The ambulance was there. Police too. I heard a woman crying. Lots of hushed voices. People pointing in the direction in which the car had sped off. As if their pointing would make it reappear. Beeps of car horns who didn’t realise something so catastrophic had held them up on their way to their meetings and appointments and coffees with friends. Faces, blurring. Familiar yet not. They couldn’t have been.

The tightness started in my chest – that feeling that the air was being pushed from my lungs – and it radiated through my body until my stomach clenched and my head began to spin just a little.

He could be watching me crumble and enjoying it.

The noise became unbearable. Parents covering the eyes of children. Shop workers standing outside their automatic doors, hands over their mouths. I swear I could hear the shaking of their heads – the soft brush of hair on collars as they struggled to accept what they were seeing. Breathing – loud, deep. Was it my own? Shadows moving around me. Haunting me. I felt sick.

‘I have to go,’ I muttered – my voice tiny, distorted, far away – as much to myself as to Brassy Blonde, and I put down the teacup and lifted my bags.

‘You have to stay, pet,’ she said, a little too firmly. I took against her then. No, I wanted to scream. I don’t have to do anything except breathe – and right now, right here, that was becoming increasingly difficult.

I glared at her instead, unable to find the words – any words.

‘You’re a witness, aren’t you? The police will want to talk to you?’

That made the panic rise in me more. Would they find out that it should have been me? Would I get the blame? Would I become a headline in a story – ‘lucky escape for local woman’ – and if so, what else would they find out about me? I couldn’t take that risk.

I consoled myself that I probably couldn’t tell them anything new anyway.

No, I didn’t want to talk to the police. I couldn’t talk to the police. The police had had quite enough of me once before.

Chapter Two

A hit and run, they said. That was the official line. A joyrider, most likely. Joyrider is such a strange name for it, really. There was no joy here. The words of the police did little to comfort me. After I ran from Brassy Blonde, I checked the locks three times before bed, kept the curtains pulled on the windows of my flat and for those first 48 hours I didn’t go out or answer my phone. The only person I spoke to was my boss to tell him I was sick and wouldn’t be in. I didn’t even wait for him to answer. I just ended the call, crawled back into bed and took more of my anti-anxiety medication.

I tried to rationalise my thoughts and fears in the way my counsellor had told me. A few years had passed since Ben had made his threat; five to be exact. Life had moved on. He had moved on. Moved to England, if my brother Simon was to be believed. Simon, who I secretly suspected believed Ben about everything that went wrong with us.

Simon, who most definitely, did not believe that his former friend was waiting in the wings to destroy my life for a second time in his twisted form of revenge.

‘You’re letting him win every day,’ my counsellor had told me. ‘You’re giving him power he doesn’t deserve.’

But she didn’t know him. Not the way I did. I spent those two days in a ball in my bed, sleeping or at least trying to sleep, and compulsively checking Facebook to find out as much as I could about the woman who had died when it should have been me.

There was no fairness to it. She had everything going for her while I, well, if I evaporated from this earth at this moment no one would really notice. Except perhaps for Andrew who would be waiting to give me a final written warning.

I had to go to the funeral. I was drawn to it. I had to see the pain and let it wash over me – to salve my guilt perhaps or to torture myself further? See if she really was as loved as it seemed.

I needed to remind myself just how spectacularly the gods had messed this one up.

Perhaps I was a bit obsessed. It was hard not to be. The story of her death was everywhere and I had seen her life extinguished right in front of my eyes. Her eyes had stayed open – and they were there every time I closed mine.

Her funeral was held at St. Mary’s Church in Creggan – a chapel that overlooked most of the city of Derry, down its steep hills towards the River Foyle before the city rises back up again in the Waterside. It’s a church scored in the history of Derry, where the funeral Mass of the Bloody Sunday dead had taken place. Thirteen coffins lined up side by side. On the day of Rose Grahame’s funeral, just one coffin lay at the top of the aisle. The sight stopped my breath as I sneaked in the side entrance, took a seat away from her friends and family. Hidden from view.

All the attention focused on the life she’d led, full of happiness and devotion to her family and success in her career. I thought of how the mourners – the genuine ones dressed in bright colours (as Rose would have wanted) – had followed the coffin to the front of the church, gripping each other, holding each other up. I wondered what they would say if they knew what I knew.

I allowed the echoes of the sobs that occasionally punctuated the quiet of the service to seep into my very bones.

I recognised her husband, Cian; as he walked bowed and broken to the altar, I willed myself not to sob. Grief was etched in every line on his face. He looked so different from the pictures I had seen of him on Facebook. His eyes were almost as dead as Rose’s had been. He took every step as if it required Herculean effort. It probably did. His love for her seemed to be a love on that kind of scale. His grief would be too.

He stood, cleared his throat, said her name and then stopped, head bowed, shoulders shaking. I felt my heart constrict. I willed someone – anyone – to go and stand with him. To hold his hand. To offer comfort. No one moved. It was as if everyone in the church was holding their breath, waiting to see what would happen next. Enjoying the show.

He took a breath, straightened himself, and spoke. ‘Rose was more than a headline. More than a tragic victim. She was my everything. My all. But even that isn’t enough. As a writer, you would think the words would come easily to me. I work with words every day – mould them and shape them to say what I need to say. But this time, my words have failed me. There are no words in existence to adequately describe how I’m feeling as I stand here in front of you, looking at a wooden box that holds the most precious gift life ever gave me. When a person dies young, we so often say they had so much more to give. This was true of Rose. She gave every day. We had so many dreams and plans.’

He faltered, looking down at the lectern, then to Rose’s coffin and back to the congregation. ‘We were trying for a baby. A brother or sister for Jack. We said that would make our happiness complete – and now, knowing it will never be, I wonder how life can be so cruel.’ He paused again, as if trying to find his words, but instead of speaking, he simply shook his head and walked, slowly, painfully, to his seat where he sat down and buried his head in his hands, the sound of his anguished sobs bouncing off the stone walls of the church.

There was no rhyme or reason to it. No fairness in it. I tried to tell myself that Rose had just been spectacularly unlucky. I tried to comfort myself that on that day luck had, for once, in a kind of twisted turn of fate, been on my side. I needed to believe that – believe in chance and bad luck and not something more sinister. I had to believe the ghosts of my past weren’t still chasing me.

I tried to tell myself life was trying to give me another chance – one that had been robbed from me five years before. It was fucked up. George Bailey got Clarence the angel to guide him to his second chance. I got Rose Grahame and her violent death.

I got the sobs of the mutli-coloured mourners. And I got the guilt I had craved.

It might have helped if I’d have found out Rose Grahame was a horrible person – although the way she sang to her baby and smiled her thank you to me as I let her go ahead of me out of the lift and into the cold street had already told me she was a decent sort.

I wondered, selfishly, if this had been my funeral, would I have garnered such a crowd? I doubted it. My parents would be there, I supposed. My brothers and their partners. My two nieces probably wouldn’t. They were young. They wouldn’t understand. A few cousins, a few work colleagues there because they had to be. Some nosy neighbours. Aunts and uncles. Friends – maybe, although many of them had fallen by the wayside. Maud may travel over for it from the US, but it would depend on her bank balance and the cost of the flights. They would be suitably sad but they’d have full lives to go back to – busy lives, the kind of life Rose Grahame seemed to have had. The kind of life that allows you to pick up the pieces after a tragedy and move on, even if at times it feels as if you are walking through mud. The kind of lives with fulfilling jobs and hectic social calendars and children and hobbies.

Not like my hermit-like existence.

Five years is a long time to live alone.

Of course, being at the funeral made me feel worse. I suppose I should have expected that. But I hadn’t expected to feel jealous of her. Jealous that her death had had such an impact.

I crept from the pew, pushed past the crowds at the back of the church, past the gaggle of photographers from the local media waiting to catch an image of a family in breakdown, and walked as quickly as I could from the church grounds to my car, where I lit a cigarette, took my phone from my bag and logged into Facebook.

Social media had become my obsession since the day of the accident. Once I had got home, and I had crawled under my duvet and tried to sleep to block out the thoughts of what I had just seen – what I had just done – I found myself unable to let it go.

I didn’t sleep that day. I got up, I made coffee and I switched on my laptop. Sure enough the local news websites were reporting the accident. They were reporting a fatality – believed to be a woman in her thirties who was with her baby at the time.

A hit and run.

A dark-coloured car.

The police were appealing for witnesses.

The family were yet to be informed.

The woman was ‘named locally’ as Rosie Grahame.

No, it was Rose Grahame. Not Rosie.

She was thirty-four.

She was a receptionist at a busy dental practice.

Scott’s in Shipquay Street.

The child in the pram was her son – Jack, twenty months old.

She was married.

Believed to be the wife of local author, Cian Grahame, winner of the prestigious 2015 Simpson Literary Award for his third novel, From Darkness Comes Light.

The news updated. Facebook went into overdrive. People giving details. Offering condolences. Sharing rumours. Suggesting a fund be set up to pay for the funeral and support baby Jack, despite the fact that, by all accounts, Cian Grahame was successful and clearly not in any great need of financial support.

Pictures were shared. Rose Grahame – smiling, blonde, hair in one of those messy buns that actually take an age to get right. Sunglasses on her head. Kissing the pudgy cheek of an angelic-faced baby. A smiling husband beside her – tall, dark and handsome (of course). A bit stubbly but in a sexy way – not in a layabout-who-can’t-be-bothered-to-shave way. He was grinning at his wife and their son.

It was all just an awful, awful tragedy.

Someone tagged Rose Grahame into their comment saying, ‘Rose, I will miss you hun. Always smiling. Sleep well.’ As if Rose Grahame was going to read it just because it was on Facebook. Does heaven have Wi-Fi?

Of course I clicked through to her profile. I wanted to know more about her – more than the snippets the news told me, more than the smile she gave me as I held the door to let her through, more than the gaunt stare she gave me as she lay dead on the ground, the colour literally draining from her.

I expected her profile to be a bit of a closed book. So many are – privacy settings set to Fort Knox levels. But Rose clearly didn’t care about her privacy settings. Perhaps because her life was so gloriously happy that she wanted the whole world to know.

I found myself studying her timeline for hours – scanning through her photo albums. She never seemed to be without a smile. Or without friends to keep her company.

There she was, arms thrown around Cian on their wedding day. A simple flowing gown. A crown of roses. A beautiful outdoor affair. The whole thing looked as if it could be part of a brochure for hipster weddings.

There she was, showing off her expanding baby bump – her two hands touching in front of her tummy to make the shape of a heart. Or standing with a paint roller in one hand, the requisite dab of paint on her nose, as she painted the walls of the soon-to-be nursery.

There were nights out with friends, where she glowed and sparkled and all her friends glowed and sparkled too. Pictures of her smiling proudly with her husband as he held aloft his latest book.

And then, of course, the baby came along. Pictures of her, perhaps a little tired-looking but happy all the same, cradling a tiny newborn, announcing his birth and letting the world know he was ‘the most perfect creature’ she had ever set her eyes on.

Pictures of her bathing him, feeding him, playing with him, pushing him in his buggy, helping him mush his birthday cake with his chubby fists. Endless happy pictures. Endless posting of positive quotes about happiness and love and gratitude for her amazing husband and her beautiful son.

The outpouring was unreal – I hit refresh time and time again, the page jumping with new comments. From friends. From family. From colleagues, old school friends, cousins, acquaintances, second cousins three times removed.

And then, that night, at just after eleven – when I was considering switching off and trying to sleep once again, fuelled by sleeping tablets – a post popped up from Cian himself.

My darling Rose,

I can’t believe I will never hold you again. That you will never walk through this door again. You were and always will be the love of my life. My everything. My muse. Thank you for the happy years and for your final act of bravery in saving our Jack. I am broken, my darling, but I will do my best to carry on, for you and for Jack.

I stared at it. Reread it until my eyes started to hurt, the letters began to blur. This declaration of love – saying what needed to be said so simply – made me wonder again how the gods had cocked it up so spectacularly.

Poor Cian, I thought. Poor Jack. Poor all those friends and family members and colleagues and second cousins twenty times removed. They were all plunged into the worst grief imaginable. I felt like a voyeur and yet, I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

So that was why, then, even outside the church, fag in my hand, smoke filling up my Mini, I clicked onto Facebook and loaded Rose’s page again. The messages continued. Posts directly on her timeline, or posts she had been tagged in.

‘Can’t believe we are laying this beautiful woman to rest today.’

‘I will be wearing the brightest thing I can find to remember the brightest star in the sky.’

‘Rose,’ Cian wrote. ‘Help me get through this, honey. I don’t know how.’

I looked to the chapel doors, to the pockets of people standing around. Heads bowed. Conversations whispered. A few sucking on cigarettes. I wondered how any of us got through anything? All the tragedies life throws at us. All the bumps in the road. Although, perhaps that was a bad choice of words. A black sense of humour, maybe. I’d needed it these past few years. Although sometimes I wondered if I used it too much. If it made me appear cold to others.

Cian had changed his profile picture, I noticed. It was now a black and white image – Rose, head thrown back, mid laugh. Eyes bright. Laughter lines only adding to her beauty. She looked happy, vital, alive.

I glanced at the clock on my dashboard. Wondered if I should wait until the funeral cortège left the chapel to make their way on that final short journey to the City Cemetery as a mark of respect. I could probably even follow them. Keep a distance. Watch them lay her to rest. Perhaps that would give me some sort of closure

I took a long drag of my cigarette and looked back at my phone. Scrolled through Facebook one last time. A new notification caught my eye and I clicked on it. It was then that his face, his name, jumped out at me. Everything blurred. I was aware I wasn’t breathing, had dropped my cigarette. I think it was only the thought of it setting the car on fire around me that jolted me to action. I reached down, grabbed it, opened my car door and threw the cigarette into the street; at the same time sucking in deep lungfuls of air. I could feel a cold sweat prickle on the back of my neck. It had been five years since I had last seen him. And now? When my heart is sick with the notion that he could finally be making good on the promise he made to get back at me, he appears back in my life.

A friend request from Ben Cullen.

In a panic I looked around me – as the mourners started to file out of the chapel. I wondered was he among them. Had he been watching me all this time? I turned the key in the ignition and sped off, drove to work mindlessly where I sat in the car park and tried to stop myself from shaking.

The urge to go home was strong. To go and hide under my duvet. I typed a quick email to my friend Maud. All I had to say was ‘Ben Cullen has sent me a friend request’.

Maud would understand the rest.

Andrew – my line manager in the grim call centre I spent my days in – wouldn’t understand though. He wouldn’t get my panic or why I felt the need to run home to the safety of my dark flat with its triple locks and pulled curtains. As it was, he thought I was at a dentist appointment. He had made it clear the leave would be unpaid and it had already been an hour and a half since I’d left the office. I was surprised he hadn’t called to check on me yet. If I were to call him to try and verbalise the fear that was literally eating me from the inside out, he not only wouldn’t understand, he would erupt. I was skating on perilously thin ice with him as it was. My two days’ absence after Rose’s death had been the icing on the cake.

But my head hurt. I saw a couple of police officers in uniform as I drove and momentarily wondered whether to tell them Ben Cullen had sent me a friend request and I thought there might be a chance he was caught up in all this. Saying it in my head made me realise how implausible that would sound to an outsider; but not to me, I knew what he was capable of.

I had to get away from here. I wanted to go home but I needed my job. Maybe I would be safer at work anyway? Desolate as it was, we had good security measures. I made sure all the doors on my car were locked and I drove on, the friend request sitting unanswered on my phone.

Chapter Three
Rose

2007

Rose Maguire: is thinking this could be the start of something new! :)

I knew – the minute I saw him – that there was a connection there. It wasn’t like a bolt of lightning or a burst of starlight, just a calmness that drew me to the dark and brooding figure sitting hunched over a table at the library, pen in hand, scribbling into a leather-bound notebook.

A Styrofoam coffee cup at his side, his face was set in fierce concentration and I knew – even as I stood there returning the books I had borrowed – that he was going to mean something to me. Maybe my brain was a little too turned with the romantic novels I had been reading, but it felt right. It just felt like it was meant to be. I couldn’t help but look at him – wonder what had him scribbling so intently into that notebook. I clearly stared a little too long, or a little too hard, because when he looked up he caught me and stared straight back, his expression at first curious, serious even, then he smiled and it was as if I saw the real him.

The strong jaw, the twinkling eyes, the slightly unkempt hair that was just messy enough. If Disney drew a modern prince, one who hung about in libraries looking intense and wearing checked shirts, they would do well to model him on the man in front of me.

I should probably have looked away when he caught me staring. Ordinarily that’s exactly what I would have done – but something about him made me keep staring. I didn’t even blush. Not really – although I did feel a little flushed.

I tilted my head to the side, smiled back. Flirtatious, I suppose. As soon as the librarian had scanned the books I was borrowing, I walked over to him. I never expected to find any sort of connection here of all places. The Central Library – close to work. A functional building that lacked any charm. It had the air of a doctor’s waiting room about it but as I approached him, and he stood up, I felt something in my core flip. I blushed then, of course, wondering if he could read my mind – see how my breath had quickened just a little at the sight of him.

‘Leaving?’ I asked him.

‘My coffee’s gone cold,’ he said, gesturing to the cup on the table. ‘I thought I’d nip out and get a fresh one. Want to join me? We could walk up to Java? They do great cappuccinos. You look like a cappuccino kind of a girl.’

‘You’re right, and I’d love to,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He smiled before extending his hand to shake mine. ‘I’m Cian.’

‘Rose,’ I replied.

It wasn’t how I had thought my weekend would start. I had been planning on curling up on my sofa, throw over my knees, cup of tea in my hand and losing myself in the books I had borrowed. The last few weekends had been hectic – this one was for regrouping. Having time to myself.

It didn’t work out that way. It started with two hours over coffee where we talked about all sorts of everything and nothing. He told me he was a writer, working on his first novel. I blushed a little when I told him I worked in a dental surgery – nowhere near as glamorous or creative as his job, but he smiled and said people would always want good teeth.

I asked if I could read any of his work but he was shy, bowed his head. It wasn’t ready to be seen by anyone else yet. He wanted it to be more polished, he said. I knew it would be good though – he oozed a brooding intensity that no doubt came across in his writing.

We left the coffee shop having exchanged phone numbers, and he sent me a text later that night asking if I wanted to meet him the following day – a picnic in St. Columb’s Park, just across the river, he suggested. The weather was to be lovely and he always felt more inspired outdoors.

Giddy at the thought, I got up early and went to the Foyleside Shopping Centre to buy something that looked picnic casual but still a bit alluring. I showered, spent time making sure my hair was straightened to within an inch of its life, applied a ‘no make-up make-up’ look and made some pasta salad to take as my contribution along with a bottle of wine that had been chilling in my fridge.

The picnic was everything I hoped it would be. We walked through the wooded pathways of the park, down as far as the riverbank away from the noise of the play park. He took my hand. We chatted. We sat beneath the dappled shade of the trees and he read some of his favourite poems to me – and even though poetry had never, ever been my thing, I found myself completely entranced by him. The emotion he found in the words – the way he made the lines that had always baffled me before suddenly make sense. He didn’t sneer when I asked a question – he answered.

He asked about me too – about my life. My work. My friends. My family. The music I liked, the films I watched. He wasn’t ever going to be a huge Nora Ephron fan, he said – but he could see the appeal. After a glass of wine and some food (he said my pasta salad was delicious), when the afternoon sun had made us both feel a little sleepy, we lay side by side on the blanket listening to the sounds of families playing close by and the chatter of teenagers, feeling liberated by the sunshine. He took my hand and told me he’d had the best afternoon he’d had in a long time. I looked at him – there was something there – an expression I couldn’t read. I tried to find something to say, but before I could, he raised himself up on his elbow and leaned across, kissing me so tenderly I thought I might just float away.

I know it sounds sickening, but it felt so right. So right that he came back to my flat and we kissed some more, and talked, and laughed and drifted in and out of sleep in each other’s arms until we couldn’t actually resist a proper sleep any longer and he followed me into my bedroom. We slept curled around each other until morning.

It didn’t feel awkward or odd when we woke up. It didn’t even feel weird that we had spent the night in bed and hadn’t, you know, had sex. Not that I didn’t want to – but he said we should take our time. Enjoy the kissing stage, he said. The promise of it. It made me feel special. Cherished. Turned on.

We spent Sunday watching old movies – one of my choices and one of his. Well, I say watching old movies, but that’s when most of the kissing took place. It was a wrench when he went home that night – and we had kept up our chatter through text messages, which turned into a phone call, that turned into a happy Facebook status just before I went to work. I knew I couldn’t wait to see him again.

Chapter Four
Emily

My heart was in my mouth all the way back to my office – a stark, concrete building on the main road out of the city towards Donegal with tinted glass in the windows lest any of us peek out of the window and see the world in all its true colour and wonder. I wanted to get there and to immerse myself in the routine of my day-to-day life to the point where I couldn’t think about everything else that was going. Rose, Ben, it was too much to take in.

I thought of how I had passed the last five years sitting in my cubicle, in front of my computer screen, tapping on my keyboard, lost in a routine that suited but didn’t challenge me. It was all I could manage in the aftermath of him leaving. Somewhere I could sit and do my work, go home at five and be done with it until the following morning. It was boring. Soul destroying even. But it was safe.

I wondered about Rose Grahame. Had she enjoyed her work? Had it fulfilled her or had it simply been somewhere she hid away from life? I couldn’t imagine she wanted to hide from anything. Colour marked her funeral, just as I imagine it marked her life.

‘All good?’ Andrew asked when I got into the office, before I had so much as hung my coat up.

‘Yes. Yes, fine,’ I lied. I missed Maud at that moment. Wished she was still here and I could drag her into the kitchen and weep on her shoulder and have her reassure me in the way only Maud could.

‘You were gone a long time. I wondered, did you need a few fillings? Or an extraction? Or perhaps an entire new set of teeth chiselled out of enamel there and then by Capuchin Monks or similar?’

Andrew was younger than me by a good eight or nine years. While in his mid-twenties, he still looked as if he only needed to shave once a week and even then, only with a fairly blunt razor just to make him feel more manly. Short in stature and slight, he favoured slim-fit clothes, which far from flattering his petite physique made him look like a child playing at being a grown up.

‘No. Nothing like that,’ I said before breaking eye contact and walking across the room to my desk and hoped he wouldn’t follow me. It had been hard enough trying to keep it together as it was without him being on my back.

My desk was in a particularly bleak spot, devoid of any access to natural light. Management had a strict clear desk policy, with no personalisation of our cubicles allowed. It was supposed to increase productivity, but instead it just made each workspace feel cold and clinical. Like we were battery hens. I plugged myself into my computer terminal, watched the beeping light on my keyboard tell me a caller was waiting and wondered how long they would keep me chatting.

Rose would be buried by now. Part of me wanted to go online and hunt through the pictures of the funeral. See more of her life. See if I could spot Ben among the mourners. A bigger part of me was terrified to look in case he was. And that friend request was still waiting. I felt a headache start to build behind my left eye, warning me that a migraine was on the way.

I was, admittedly, less patient than usual with the man on the other end of the line who seemed unable to understand my most basic of requests. He was muttering madly, in a panic about how he didn’t know how to switch his router off, or even which piece of hardware his router was.

It was one of those times when I felt angry. Frustrated. Cross at the mundane nature of people’s lives. How could they get flustered over broadband when a woman was dead? Killed. Wiped out.

People could carry on even though the police hadn’t found her killer. When he was still out there. When he could be sending friend requests to ex-girlfriends on Facebook. Paranoid, I told myself. I was just being paranoid but as the man wittered on about what lights were and weren’t flashing on his finally located router I couldn’t stop thinking about Rose’s killer.

I wondered if, as they ploughed into Rose, they had looked at the other people in the street? Had they seen me? Mouth agape? Eyes wide with fear and shock?

The man on the phone barked something into my ear which pulled me from my thoughts. I apologised and asked him to repeat himself.

‘Oh you are still there then?’ he said, scorn dripping from every word. ‘I thought you’d gone for a nap, or maybe a holiday.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, sir,’ I repeated, trying to diffuse the situation. These calls were monitored and the last thing I needed was for this to end up in a training session at the end of the month. ‘You have my full attention now – let’s get this problem solved.’

Ten minutes later he was appeased and I was able to hang up the call and take a moment to rub my temples; to try and regain focus on what I was being paid to do.

Thirty seconds, that was all it would take to check online for pictures. Then I could settle myself and get back to work. Properly.

I picked up my phone, refreshed the internet app and happened upon a picture of the weeping relatives, their bright colours looking garish, standing at a graveside. Jack, thumb in mouth, being carried by an older woman wearing a bright pink coat who looked as though she was resisting the urge to hurl herself into the grave. Cian – ashen faced – was captured tossing a cream rose into the hole in the ground that now contained his wife. She was gone. It was done. But looking at the faces of the mourners, I realised it was just beginning for them.

*

I had put my phone away and answered another call when I saw Andrew walk over towards my soulless desk. He was trying his very best to look intense and managerial, but the unmistakable glint in his eyes implied he was about to impart news that made him feel important. He stood a little too close while he waited for me to finish the call I was on, and just as I was about to answer the next call waiting in the queue, he lifted the headphones from my ears and forced himself into my direct eyeline.

‘A word?’ he said, head tilted to the side.

‘Any word or had you something particular in mind?’ I said, a weak attempt at a joke.

As feared, it went right over his head and he looked at me as if I was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. A human Rubik’s Cube. ‘My office?’ he said, an eyebrow raised. He led the way. A bad feeling washed over me. Nothing good ever, ever happened in Andrew’s office. Still a part of me lived in hope he was going to break the company-wide tradition of demoralising and humiliating staff and offer me a pay rise or a promotion or both.

‘Close the door,’ he said as he took his seat behind his desk. He probably imagined he looked foreboding – but he didn’t. He was too small, too fine a creature, too weedy to intimidate me. I wondered whether his mother still took his trousers up for him.

‘Sit down,’ he said, and I did, straightening my skirt and taking a deep breath. I looked at him.

‘So the dentist?’ he said.

I shrugged, unsure what he wanted me to say.

‘You were there this morning?’

I nodded. ‘I told you that, and I took unpaid leave.’

‘Is your dentist a very Godly person?’ he asked, and I was sure I could see the hint of a sneer.

‘I can’t say we’ve discussed theology,’ I replied. Tone light. Not rattled.

‘Well, it’s just you seem to have been in church this morning, so I wondered was your dentist moonlighting as a priest? Confession and tooth removal a speciality?’ A wave of dread shot right to the pit of my stomach.

I willed myself to think fast.

‘Who? What? I don’t know … what?’ I stumbled, feeling the heat rise in my face as my cheeks blushed red.

He turned his computer screen towards me, and I saw my image frozen in pixels, creeping from the church ahead of the mourners. Looking shifty. Ducking out of view – but clearly not enough.

‘I had to go to the funeral,’ I stuttered, ‘and I knew the company policy about compassionate leave being only for immediate family. I took unpaid leave. It doesn’t really matter, does it?’

That was clearly the wrong thing to say.

‘Of course it matters. We have targets to hit and you took time off on the premise of a medical issue and instead you were getting a nosy at the big funeral of the year. Did you even know her?’

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. The blush in my cheeks was now so hot, I could almost hear the roar of the blood rushing to my face. ‘I saw it. I saw the accident. I was a witness. I had to go. I had to get closure.’

The words were spilling out. My hands were shaking – maybe not enough for Andrew to see but I could feel them jittering as I tried to get enough air into my lungs between my short, sharp sentences. I willed the panic not to take hold.

I saw Andrew shake his head. Heard him sigh. I wanted to scream at him.

‘You know we can’t carry dead weight here, Emily. We’ve talked before about this. About your attendance. About your attitude to being here and being part of the team. You’ve had enough warnings. We can’t keep giving you chances. And lying to management? That constitutes gross misconduct.’

I stared at him. ‘But I had to go. Don’t you understand?’

He shook his head again. I wanted to grab him and shake the rest of his weak, puny body along with his stupid head.

‘And you never mentioned it before now? Really? You want me to believe that?’ He snorted. A short, derisory laugh that made the room spin a little more. All sense of balance, of calm, was leaving me. ‘Regardless, Emily, you know that it’s not good enough. I have no choice but to dismiss you with immediate effect. You’ve had more chances than most. More chances than you deserve, if I’m being honest. I am very sorry it’s come to this but really, you have no one to blame but yourself.’

He sat back in his seat, either oblivious to or unmoved by my growing distress. I tried to find the words to reply, but my tongue felt heavy in my mouth. ‘No one to blame but yourself’ reverberated wildly around my head.

Blame.

It was all down to me. It was always all down to me. Isn’t that what Ben had always said? That I brought things on myself? Then and now – it was a fault I couldn’t escape.

I could hear a faint humming; he was talking again. Muttering about clearing out my desk and leaving immediately. HR would be in touch. He hoped I wouldn’t make a scene.

‘Don’t make it worse for yourself,’ he said, head tilted to the side. False compassion that made me want to cry more than any true compassion would have.

I felt my nails dig into my palms – the sharp, scratchy sensation at least making me feel grounded in the room that was becoming increasingly stifling. I willed myself to get up, to remember the breathing techniques I had learned in hospital. I willed my tongue to loosen – to tell him to go straight to hell. I willed myself to turn sharply on my mid-heeled court shoe and slam his office door behind me. But my legs were like jelly.

No one to blame but yourself.

I stood up, using the back of the chair for leverage. I was vaguely aware that Andrew was still talking but I couldn’t hear. All I could hear was the humiliation pounding through my veins.

Sacked. At thirty-four. With rent to pay on a flat I didn’t even like that much and credit card bills that were already a struggle.

No one to blame but myself.

And Rose, I suppose. For taking my place. For walking in front of me and getting hit by the fucking Toyota Avensis.

But I had let her, hadn’t I? I had smiled at her beautiful curly-haired baby and, touched by her cooing and singing and the baby’s toothy grin, I had said: ‘Mothers and children first’ and let her walk through the door before me.

No one to blame but myself.

I could have stayed and talked to the police. Had some sort of proof to show Andrew I had been there. But I had bolted. Like I wanted to bolt now. Or faint. Or throw up. React in any of the ways one would normally react to a shock.

At least, I thought, as I shovelled the contents of my desk drawer into my handbag without making eye contact with anyone else in the office, the company’s bleak clean desk policy meant I didn’t have much to pack up. A Cup–a–Soup that was long out of date. A mug with our faded company logo on it. A strip of paracetamol. A strip of Buspirone (my anti-anxiety medication, rarely used at work but a safety net in case a panic attack crept in, as they were prone to do, with no warning). A couple of faded business cards. Forty-seven pence in loose change. Three paper clips, two salt sachets and a torn, half-empty pepper sachet, spilling its dusty brown contents in my drawer. A button from a long-forgotten clothing item. Two pens.

Not much of a life. I popped two Buspirone from the packet and threw them back with a mouthful of water. They would knock me a little silly – take the edge off. Probably shouldn’t drive though. Wouldn’t be safe. Wouldn’t be right. And we all know how driving dangerously ends, don’t we?

Might as well have a drink, I thought. End the day on a big fat high of having no one to blame but myself.

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