I shake myself. I’m being far too cynical. This is just mating and dating at its most naked and obvious. Of course the people here are looking at each other hopefully—it’s a singles bar.
It’s ten forty. Surely Shannon must be here by now? I’m cursing myself for not realizing that a bar was a hopeless place in which to identify a total stranger. Does that mean Julia had met Shannon before? What I don’t understand is why she ever agreed to come here. She hated places like this. At least she always told me she did. I sip my wine, overwhelmed by the sense that I’m being watched. I look up. A middle-aged man across the bar is staring at me. I look away quickly. The last thing I need is to be propositioned.
The fear of getting hit on spurs me into action. Shannon clearly isn’t going to arrive with a name badge hanging around his or her neck. And I’ve come too far to give up this easily. I hold up my glass and wave at the bartender. A minute later, he appears in front of me.
“Another wine?” he asks. He has undone the entire front of his shirt, and I can’t help but stare at his six-pack as he speaks.
“Er, no, thanks!” I have to shout to be heard over the music—something tuneless with a heavy bass thump. “I was just wondering if you know anyone who comes here called Shannon?”
To my amazement, the barman nods. “Sure.” He jerks his thumb across the bar to where a round-faced, curly-haired young woman is sitting on a stool, legs neatly crossed.
As the bartender wanders away, I watch her, my heart drumming against my throat. This is Shannon. She’s dressed less provocatively than most of the girls here. Her dress is skintight, but it comes down to her knees and there’s no cleavage on show. As I watch, one man after another approaches her. Shannon flicks her gaze toward them for just a second, smiles, then mutters something. In the space of thirty seconds, she’s fended off three of them.
Well, whoever she is, I’m impressed. I ease myself off my stool and walk around the bar toward her. There’s no seat next to her, so I stand. Now that I’m closer, I can see she’s really pretty in a soft, baby doll–type way. Big blue gray eyes and long, highlighted hair in soft curls.
“Are you Shannon?” I say. I’m gripping my wineglass tightly.
She nods, her eyes wary. “Yes,” she says. “Why?”
“What’s your secret?” I ask, affecting a casual laugh. “For getting rid of the guys.”
She stares at me curiously. I guess it is a strange question to be asking in a singles bar. “I tell them the bartender’s my boyfriend,” she says. “He’s not really, just a mate. He’s actually gay.”
I follow her gaze over to the muscular bartender. A beat passes. I take a deep breath. “You’re here to meet Julia Dryden, aren’t you?”
Shannon says nothing, but her eyes betray her recognition of Julia’s name.
“I’m Julia’s friend. I saw your name in her diary,” I gabble on. “I had to meet you, to find out—”
Shannon frowns. “Julia’s not coming?” she says.
I bite my lip. So she doesn’t know. Which means I have to tell her. And it’s still hard to say the words, to face the truth. “Julia died,” I explain. The music blares out around me. Shannon’s eyes widen. “She died two weeks ago. Please, I have to know what … why she was meeting you?”
Shannon looks horrified. She gets off her stool. “What happened to her?” she demands. “Who are you?”
I sense the people on either side of us staring, but I’m intent on stopping Shannon from backing away. I reach out for her arm, desperate. “I’m Livy Jackson. I was a good friend of Julia’s. Please—”
“No.” Shannon wrenches her arm away. She takes a step back. “Why are you here?”
“I just want to find out why Julia was talking to you.” I’m close to tears now.
There is fear in Shannon’s eyes. “How did you know about me meeting Julia?”
“I told you, I saw it in her diary.”
“I can’t speak to you.”
“Why? Please, I—”
But Shannon has turned and is already weaving her way through the crowd. Considering her vertiginous heels, she’s remarkably fast. I hurry after her. She rushes through Club Room. I’m right behind. There’s a fire door I hadn’t noticed before, in the corner. Shannon presses the bar. Darts outside. I race after her, but as I reach the fire door myself, a large hand slams it shut.
It’s the barman.
“Sorry, madam,” he says with fake politeness, “but you don’t seem to have paid for your drink.”
Shit. I look down. I’m still carrying the glass of white wine in my hand. I set it down and fumble in my bag for my purse. I fish out a ten-pound note and shove it at the barkeep. He stands aside to let me leave. I rush past, through the entrance lobby and outside.
The air is cool on my face. I’m in a backstreet opposite the high walls of a multilevel parking garage. An empty plastic bag drifts along the tarmac. There’s no sign of Shannon. I head for the brightly lit end of the cul-de-sac, where it opens onto the main road. It’s dark and more than a little spooky, but I don’t notice. I’m only intent on finding Shannon. I’m halfway along the alley, running toward the traffic noise and the light.
And then a figure appears at the end of the cul-de-sac, cutting me off from the road.
I stop dead. The light from the streetlamps beyond cast a halo around his fair hair. He is tall and young and his eyes are fixed on me. He walks toward me, and I see his face more clearly.
It’s the man from the funeral. The man I assumed was Julia’s Dirty Blond.
I look around, hoping to spot some kind of escape route … some open door … an exit.…
But there’s nowhere to run.
CHAPTER FIVE
I’m frozen to the spot, consumed with fear. The seconds I stand in the deserted cul-de-sac seem to stretch into hours, the dark shadows around me suck out my breath. The man—his eyes glinting with fury—walks toward me. Even as my heart thumps I am telling myself to run. But there’s no way past him. No time.
He stands in front of me, his forehead creased with a frown. With a jolt, I realize that his expression is actually more confused than angry.
“You’re Livy, aren’t you?” he says. “At the funeral … you said you didn’t think Julia killed herself?”
I stare at him, startled by the sudden intimacy of his words.
“That’s right.” Several questions start to form in my head, but I’m still too scared to focus properly. And then the man’s shoulders release and I see just how much tension he was holding in them before. He extends his arm. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have spoken to you at the funeral, but it was all so…” He hesitates. “I’m Damian Burton. I was … a friend of Julia’s. A good friend…”
“Her boyfriend?” My hammering heart ratchets down a notch.
Damian nods. “I wasn’t sure how much she’d said about me … if anything.”
“I only knew a nickname.”
He raises his eyebrows. “You mean Dirty Blond?” he says with a smile. Close up, in the lamplight, I can see he is even more handsome than I’d thought from my brief glance at the funeral, with a strong, square chin; smooth, even features; and hazel eyes. My fear eases further. This man was Julia’s lover. I still don’t understand why he is here, but he doesn’t feel like a threat anymore. And then I remind myself that there’s no way I can know that for sure. A nice smile and an attractive face can mask unutterable evil.
“It’s a play on my initials,” Damian says. “D.B.—Dirty Blond.”
“Very Julia,” I say.
“Yes.”
A gust of wind blows along the alley, rustling the litter that’s escaping from the scattered garbage bags and sending the stink of rotting vegetables into the air.
“Why are you here?” I ask. “How did you know I was here?”
“I’ve been coming here since Julia died, every couple of evenings,” Damian says. “I walked in and saw you with that blond girl. Someone spoke to me a
nd when I looked round, you’d disappeared, so I came out the front. Saw the blond girl going up the road and thought maybe you’d come out with her, through the fire door, which you obviously had.” He pauses.
I wait for him to go on. This man clearly isn’t intent on harming me—at least, not here and not now. But what’s he doing at this singles bar—if it’s not for the obvious reason? And what is it that he wants to say to me?
“Julia’s funeral was awful, wasn’t it?” he says softly.
I look up, surprised. There’s real pain in his eyes.
“It was all wrong. Nothing of her,” Damian goes on. “That horrible brother … I’d never met him, but she used to call him ‘that dickweasel.’”
I nod. Julia did often refer to Robbie like that.
“… and she’d have hated the music and the flowers,” Damian goes on. “And everyone making out she was some kind of sad victim. It was like there was a script and everyone was forcing Julia to fit in with it.”
He’s reflecting my own thoughts so accurately, I can’t quite take it in.
“The only bit that made sense to me was when you were talking,” Damian says. “I mean, Julia had told me about you, of course, but when I saw you, it was obvious how much you loved her, how real your friendship was.…” He trails off.
“Julia talked to you about me?”
“Of course. She was so proud of you. And Hannah and Zack.” He stops talking for a second to acknowledge my surprise that he knows my children’s names, then clears his throat. “She said you’d had the courage to make a commitment to—to Will, is it?—and stick with the relationship through all the ups and downs of married life. And she adored your kids. Said she’d always been too scared to even think about being a mum.”
“Too scared?” It’s hard to imagine Julia being scared of anything. “She always said she didn’t want children of her own.”
“She did say that,” Damian agrees. “But there was more to it than just not being an earth mother.…”
This is surreal. Damian sounds like he really knew Julia. Understood her. “How long were you…?”
“Together?” Damian sighs. “Six months or so.” He looks like he wants to say something else, then falls silent again.
Six months? My suspicions rear up again. That surely isn’t possible. Julia never went out with people that long.
Damian looks up. “Julia told me once that the ‘no kids’ thing was because she was scared of … of loving anyone that much, of taking that risk.”
Another gust of wind sends litter swirling about our feet. My eyes fix on a burger wrapper, and I’m transported to the first time I met Julia, a few weeks or so after she and Kara became friends. They were both at the start of their first year at uni, and giddy with the excitement of living away from home for the first time. I was at the beginning of my junior year—jaded from a breakup with a boyfriend and long bored with the reality of having to sort out my own rent and shopping and washing. I remember the pair of them eating burgers as they got dressed up for Halloween. Kara was wearing tiny shorts and a basque, with dark, heavy makeup. She looked—to my eyes—ridiculous and disturbing, like a small child playing at being a whore. Julia was carrying off a similar look with much greater conviction—her hair teased into a wild frame around her head, the slight slant of her eyes accentuated with kohl and wearing a short leather skirt over ripped tights. I’d turned up, unexpected, at Kara’s student house and was fussing over her, trying to make her at least put a proper shirt over the basque. Kara, as always, submitted to my bossing in silence—I knew she’d put the shirt on to shut me up, then take it off again once she was out of sight—but Julia soon lost patience.
“You really put the mother in smother, Livy,” she’d drawled. “Go and have your own children and leave Kara alone.”
I resented her then and over the next few months, especially when she spent the whole of the subsequent Christmas break in Bath with Kara and our parents. I tried to be generous about that—after all, it was sad that Julia felt so cut off from her own family—but despite Julia’s charm, it was hard to have our normal traditions infiltrated. It was only after Kara’s death that she and I became friends, when all our earlier differences seemed so petty and unimportant. Because the irony was that the night she was raped and murdered, Kara had been wearing jeans and tennis shoes—nothing provocative at all. I’m still not sure whether that meant Julia was right not to worry or whether I was wrong to knock Kara’s confidence by trying to change the way she dressed.
“Livy?” Damian’s been speaking, and I haven’t heard a word. I look at him properly. “Would you like a drink?” He indicates Aces High. “I don’t mean that place. There’s a much nicer pub just up the road.”
“Sure.” We walk to the Lamb and Flag, an old-fashioned pub with ropy furnishings and a big pool table out the back. I’m surprised Damian considers it nicer than Aces High. There’s nothing fancy or designed about it, and Damian looks too young and too stylish for such a place. His hair glints in the harsh overhead lights: an attractive mix of browns and yellows. I’ve known women who pay good money to acquire hair like that, but Damian’s looks entirely natural. I wait while he buys a couple of mineral waters—he’s driving too—and we take our drinks over to a quiet corner table.
“What do you do?” I ask as we sit down.
“I’m a graphic designer,” he says. “That’s how I met Julia—on a shoot for a magazine I’d been working for. I was going out with the model. Then Julia turned up.…”
I smile to myself at the thought of Julia’s sex appeal being powerful enough to prize a highly attractive younger man away from a woman paid for how she looks.
“So you’re not married, then?” I say, remembering my previous suspicions.
“No.” Damian frowns. “Of course not. Julia wouldn’t have come near me if I was.”
There’s a pause. “You still haven’t explained why you wanted to speak to me,” I say.
“Okay.” Damian takes a big breath. “The reason I’m … Well, it’s that I don’t believe Julia killed herself either.”
Something releases inside me, a sense that I’m not alone. To my surprise, emotion rolls up in a wave from my guts and I have to press my lips together to stop myself from crying.
“I know from what you said at the funeral that you don’t think she did it,” Damian goes on. “But … the thing is … do you have a specific reason for thinking that? Or is it just that you knew her so well that you just can’t believe it?”
I set down my glass. “Mostly the latter,” I admit. “Except, well, she texted me the evening she died. She said she really wanted to talk to me. Everyone else seems to see that as a cry for help, but—”
“But she did want to talk to you,” Damian interrupts. “I know she did. We had a fight about it—that’s why I wasn’t with her that night.…” He pauses, his eyes filling with pain at the memory. He swigs his drink. “Julia had something important to tell you. I … I asked her what it was, but she refused to say. She said she had to talk to you first, before she could tell anyone else. She was so bloody loyal.…” He shakes his head.
Relief and gratitude whirl inside me.. All this is validation of the terrible and lonely thoughts I’ve been living with for over two weeks. Until this moment, I hadn’t realized how hard it has been to carry alone the burden of my belief that Julia didn’t kill herself. That someone else took her life. And yet, my suspicions rear up again. How do I know Julia didn’t want to talk to me about Damian himself? Can I really be sure that Damian is telling me the truth and not simply what I want to hear?
“What about the suicide note?” I ask.
Damian rolls his eyes. “I heard. ‘I can’t go on … please make no fuss.…’ Yeah, right. Julia wouldn’t have written that in a million years.”
“I know.”
“And it was found, open, on her computer screen, so no handwriting, no signature. Which basically means whoever killed her could have written it
as she was dying.”
I nod, hanging on every word. I want so much to believe what Damian is saying, tears prick at my eyes. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting you.”
Damian raises his eyebrows. “Funny. Julia said exactly the same thing to me once.” His eyes bore into me. He is powerful and masculine in that open, confident way Julia always went for. Not me. I’ve always preferred my men quiet and brooding. I wriggle on my seat. “Do you know what Julia wanted to talk to me about?”
Damian holds my gaze. “It was to do with Kara,” he says.
“My sister?” I frown. “What do you mean?”
Damian hesitates.
“Tell me. What do you know?”
Damian sits forward. “I know that Kara was murdered eighteen years ago. I know that you and Julia became friends after her death. I know the murderer was never caught.”