Author: Alison James
Category: Thriller
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/alison-james/page,11,480702-the_friendship_pact.html
Sinking down onto the spare bed, Lucy drops her head into her hands. She can still hear her heart, its wild pounding filling her skull. The fact is, part of her believes Marcus is serious. She has no idea how long she sits there, but eventually becomes aware of Marcus’s footsteps stumbling away, and the master bedroom door slamming. She waits, and waits, shivering even though the heating is on. When she hears the muffled sound of the clock in the dining room striking two, she drags the chest of drawers back into position and opens the spare room door. Silence.
She heads towards the master bedroom. Marcus is asleep on his side of the bed, breathing heavily. Lucy creeps towards him and stands there looking down at his face. There are hollows under his eyes, and even though he’s asleep, the impression he gives is not one of peaceful rest but something more comatose. As her eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, she notices a prescription bottle on his nightstand; not one she’s ever seen before. She leans over her husband’s upper body and picks it up. It’s too dark to read the label, so she carries it onto the landing where the light is still on.
Temazepam 20 mg. Take one tablet daily, as required. MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS. Do not drink alcohol or operate heavy machinery.
The dispenser is St Mary’s Hospital pharmacy, and there’s no patient name on the label. He must have prescribed the drugs for himself. She removes the lid of the bottle and, without knowing exactly why, removes a few of the tablets, hiding them in one of the drawers of the spare-room dresser. Then she tiptoes back into the bedroom and replaces the bottle on Marcus’s nightstand. The digital display on his alarm clock reads 2.17.
Confident that he’s not going to wake, she goes downstairs to the kitchen and presses the ‘on’ switch on the kettle. While she waits for it to boil, she pulls her second phone from its hiding place at the back of the drawer, where she keeps spare napkins and tea towels, and turns it on. It vibrates immediately with a text. Denny.
don’t keep me hanging ok gorgeous
She exhales hard, a breath it feels as though she has been holding for hours.
Please go ahead and get the stuff I need. I’ll organise the money.
Fifteen
Disorientation overwhelms Lucy when she wakes the next morning. Why is she lying on the spare bed, partially clothed? And then, with a hollow, sinking sensation, she remembers.
‘Marcus?’
She steps out onto the landing, but the house is eerily still. In the master bedroom, the plastic pill bottle is gone from the bedside table and the empty bed is unmade. Pulling back the bedclothes, she undresses, showers and changes into clean clothes. As she’s coming downstairs to make coffee, rubbing a towel through her damp hair, the doorbell rings. A large, balding man is standing there with a clipboard clutched against his chest like a shield.
‘Mrs Wheedon?’
‘Yes?’ She blinks at him, the wet towel hanging limply in her hand.
‘I’m here to take the car.’ He frowns down at the clipboard and haltingly reads out the registration plate. ‘I understand it isn’t needed any more.’
‘Your understanding is quite wrong,’ Lucy says hotly. ‘It’s very much needed. My husband’s just doing this out of spite.’
The man reddens slightly. ‘Nevertheless, I am legally authorised to take it. You can give me the key, or I can come back with a tow truck. Up to you.’
Sighing, Lucy goes into the kitchen and pulls the electronic fob from the ring with the house keys, placing it on the man’s outstretched hand. There’s no point arguing, and no real point in keeping the car, which, like a giant tracking device, would allow her to be found. It just would have been useful to have it for a few days longer.
Once the man has left, she takes out her laptop and boots it up, realising that she will have to leave this behind too. After all, a PC can be hacked, and its flow of information monitored. It’s too much of a risk. She copies her half-finished thesis project and course notes onto a USB stick, still intending to finish her degree even though she has let her studies slip in recent weeks. After this, she has some financial housekeeping to do. She creates a Google Pay account on her new phone and sets it up to receive funds from eBay, before listing three pieces of jewellery on the auction site. Then she phones her broker and sells her shares, transferring those funds to Google Pay too. That will be her backup money; her subsistence. The balance that remains in her old savings account will have to be withdrawn in cash to pay Denny.
It’s strange but exhilarating to have to think about budgeting and being careful with her expenditure. For the past eight years, she has been cushioned from financial worry, all her bills covered, a shiny credit card always on hand, linked to an endless supply of credit. She has been able to buy exactly what she wants, whenever she has felt like it. To live in this large, stylish house without a thought to how much it costs to furnish and to run. And yet that no longer gives her pleasure. Quite the opposite; it’s a desolate feeling. The house is a cage – one worthy of a spread in House & Garden, but a cage all the same. And yet she can’t help but be aware that to cut herself off from Marcus will be to cut herself off from the financial safety net forever. If she arranges to disappear, there will be no coming back at a later date to take half the house and a share of his earnings. This is it.
The turnaround time for her new documents is unavoidable, but she’s not going to wait it out here, in the house. Not after last night. She needs to stay a step ahead and somehow throw Marcus off the scent. And once she has left, she can never come back to fetch anything. Anything she leaves behind is lost forever. What was it that the former FBI agent said in that documentary about witness protection? ‘Even your memories become a liability.’ These words echo in her head as she packs her suitcase. She takes photos of her mother, the remainder of her jewellery and as many of her favourite clothes and shoes as she can fit in the case, making sure to leave behind a few key pieces, like her treasured Burberry raincoat, so as not to fuel Marcus’s suspicions. Then she texts Marcus.
Going to Vicky’s place in Bath for a few days. You and I both need time to think.
‘Good God, Luce, this is a surprise! A very lovely one though.’
Vicky Leland is her best friend from her undergraduate days at UEA, now living in a pretty golden-stone cottage in Bath and working as a probation officer. Lucy texted her once she was on the train from Paddington, simply saying that she would be in Bath and in need of a bed for the night. She mooched around the city’s coffee shops and boutiques, dragging her suitcase, until five thirty when Vicky would be returning from work.
‘Come in, come in!’ Vicky hugs her, then straightens up and eyes her suitcase. She’s a slight, wiry girl with spiky red hair and an excess of nervous energy. Fun for short bursts of time, a little exhausting after that. ‘That’s a bloody big case… anything I should know?’
Lucy gives her an edited version of the state of her marriage, leaving out both Marcus’s worst transgressions and the fact that she never intends to go back.
‘I dare say a couple of days apart from one another will do you good. Give you some perspective. As will wine, of course.’ Vicky ushers Lucy into her small, brightly coloured sitting room. ‘Glass of rosé?’
They drink several glasses, then go through to the kitchen and continue to talk as the perennially single Vicky throws together a chilli con carne and regales Lucy with tales of dating disasters. They drink more wine in front of the log-burning stove and eventually climb, a little tipsily, up to the small but cheerful bedrooms.
‘I’ve got to head out at eight for work, for my sins, but take your time in the morning,’ Vicky says, fetching towels and a glass of water and giving her friend a warm hug. ‘Let yourself out when you’re ready. Paracetamol in the bathroom cabinet, coffee in the cupboard to the right of the fridge.’
Lucy hugs her back, harder than she would normally, painfully aware that it might be a very long time before she sees her friend again, if ever.
In the morning, she fully charges her reg
ular phone, then leaves it under Lucy’s guest bed, pushed back out of sight. Of course, she had the option to leave the phone somewhere much nearer to home, or to destroy it altogether, but she and Vicky were very close as students, and she wanted the chance to say a proper goodbye. And now – at least for the next twenty-four hours or so while the battery has charge – if Marcus tries to locate his wife, he will think she’s still here in Bath.
She catches the train back to London, checks into a cheap hotel in Earls Court and begins the wait for her new life to start.
Sixteen
For three days Lucy drifts around West London like a ghost.
She thinks about catching the tube to Russell Square and going to the Social Sciences building to mingle with her fellow students. But now that the taught component of her coursework is over, few of them will be around and the risk of Marcus looking for her there, while not high, does not seem worth the risk. Instead, she sells a gold charm bracelet and a string of pearls online and uses the proceeds to buy the cheapest laptop she can find, filling the empty, angst-ridden hours with working on her thesis. It occurs to her that once she’s no longer Lucy Wheedon, she won’t be able to use the qualification and this thought nags at her. But complete the thing she must: it’s in her nature. At school she was never late with homework, always finished every assignment.
‘Teacher’s pet.’ Adele’s childhood jibe comes back to her. With her link to Denny, Adele is the only friend who will potentially be able to track her down: to find who she is, and where she is. Part of her really hopes that Adele will defy her embargo and do it. The thought of having one remaining link to her past comforts her.
After three days, a text arrives from Denny, as she is sitting on her single hotel bed with her laptop on her knees.
got yr stuff now, where shall we meet
Her heart thumping, she types back.
I don’t have a car any longer, so will have to be London. Can you make it this evening?
She can’t bear the thought of further delay.
busy tonight will have to be tomorrow where?
Lucy ponders this for a few minutes. She considers asking him to come to the hotel – after all there is privacy in her room – but something holds her back. The thought of being near a bed with Denny makes her uncomfortable. A public space would be better. If they meet in a crowded café or bar, there’s a chance that they’ll be overheard, or seen handing over forged documents. They need to be somewhere where they can be inconspicuous, not under scrutiny.
Meet me at Tate Britain. At the foot of circular staircase. Midday.
‘What is this bleeding place?’ Denny bunches his huge shoulders and gestures upwards with his chin, in the direction of the beautiful rococo ceiling above the rotunda.
‘It’s an art gallery,’ Lucy says, displaying patience she certainly doesn’t feel. ‘Free to the public.’
‘Personally, I don’t see the fucking point,’ Denny grumbles. ‘They’d do better putting that money into housing or a sports stadium.’ He’s wearing a zipped tracksuit top, baggy branded sweatpants with logos down the side and trainers so blindingly blue-white that sunglasses are required to look straight at them.
The gallery is quiet on this weekday morning, despite it being the school holidays. A few teenagers amble aimlessly around, taking photos with their phones, while older visitors take their time in front on the artwork, standing back to admire what they see and reading from their guidebooks. Lucy leads Denny into a deserted room full of Old Masters and sits on the leather bench at its centre, gesturing for Denny to sit down too. He does so reluctantly, then starts tweaking the laces on his incongruous footwear. They’ve clearly never been worn before: the soles pristine, unscuffed.
A middle-aged couple in anoraks and sensible shoes wander into the room and embark on an earnest discussion of one of the paintings, the man pointing and gesturing with his hands while the woman nods enthusiastically.
‘Just look at those fucking twats,’ Denny says, baring his feral front teeth. ‘Tossers.’
Lucy feels a frisson of distaste. But she doesn’t have to like this man, she tells herself, she just has to trust him to do what he’s promised to do. He’s just here to provide a service, and in doing so to free her from an untenable situation.
I’ll kill you myself first…
‘Show me what you’ve got,’ she says in a low voice as the art-loving couple move on.
‘Cash first.’
Lucy reaches into her coat pocket for the manila envelope of cash that’s been hidden under her hotel mattress for the past three days. The scene would be like something from a spy thriller, if it weren’t for Denny’s ludicrous shoes.
He glances around them, then thumbs through the notes quickly, counting them.
‘It’s all there,’ Lucy says, because that’s what they always seem to say in films.
Denny reaches inside his pocket, pulls out a white A5 envelope and hands it to her. Inside is a UK passport with the headshot she sent to Denny on the photo page.
And her new name. Joanne Louise Chandler.
‘Joanne?’ She queries.
‘Yeah,’ he says defensively. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
She can’t explain her discomfort to Denny; of course she can’t. ‘I just wondered why they chose that.’
‘Listen, it’s done with some sort of random generator, using popular names from the year you were born. A sixteen-year-old bird called Gladys is going to attract attention, right?’ He warms to his theme. ‘And a ninety-year-old granny called Kylie would be even worse.’
Lucy looks at the passport again, trying to absorb this shifting picture of her own identity. She consoles herself that at least she’s not likely to forget this name. Recalling that witnesses in the FBI protection programme had to practise saying and writing their name in order to retrain their brain not to react if someone called their real name. She tries saying it aloud. ‘Joanne Louise Chandler.’
There’s a driving licence in the envelope too, registered in Penrith, Cumbria. 25 Asher Road.
‘Is this a real address?’ she asks, pointing to it.
‘Nah. Made up,’ Denny says, with pride.
‘And Penrith?’
‘The idea of it being that far away is that down South fewer people will know if it’s real or not.’
She nods, unable to fault this logic. The only other things in the envelope are a print-out of a reservation for a home-sharing site – eight days in a one-bedroom flat with a sea view in Brighton – and a forged council tax bill for that address, in the name of J. L. Chandler.
‘Brighton?’ she queries. ‘But I don’t know the place.’ She doesn’t like it much either, from the few times she’s visited, but doesn’t say so.
‘That’s exactly the bleedin’ point. It’s got to be somewhere you wouldn’t normally go. Too easy to guess otherwise.’
‘And after the eight days are up? It’s not long.’
‘You’ll have to sort out somewhere else. That’s all the money would run to.’ Denny fiddles with his shoelaces. ‘I’ve got to make a profit, you know.’
‘Does Adele know where I’ll be? Will you tell her?’
Denny shakes his head firmly. ‘You don’t get it, Blondie. Nobody’s got to know. Not your parents, your best mates, nobody. That’s the only way it works.’
He’s right, Lucy has known this all along, but now feels herself wavering. She couldn’t confide in her father anyway, that much is clear. He would almost certainly tell Marcus. But someone like Jane Standish? Someone who could be trusted. Perhaps, eventually, that will be possible.
‘One other thing… what about academic qualifications?’
Denny stares at her.
‘Has Joanne Chandler got any A levels, or a degree? Only, I’ll have to apply for jobs, and I might have to produce evidence of my qualifications.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Denny sneers. ‘Are you serious? Your old man’s such a dangerous lunatic that you have to
run away, and you’re worrying about your fucking exams?’
Lucy feels the heat of anger rising in her but manages to quell it. ‘I’ll need to make a living, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Make up whatever exams you need, then. That’s the whole point, Joanne Chandler isn’t a real person.’ Denny stands up and bends to brush an imaginary mark from his trainer. ‘And if you need any more forged documents down the line, you know where to come, don’t you?’ He winks at her and lopes off. ‘See ya, darling.’
I hope I don’t, Lucy thinks as she watches him go.
Seventeen
The flat in Brighton calls itself a one-bedroom but is really no more than a studio, with a bed-sized alcove off the living room. The furniture is cheap and functional, the curtains grimy and ill-fitting and the windows so smeared with salt water that they let in little light. The sea view turns out to be a glimpse of a drab grey stretch of horizon.
Reminding herself that this is only for a week, Lucy vows to spend as much time as she can in the fresh air. But wandering streets full of uncleared rubbish, dodging beggars and drunks, does nothing to raise her spirits. Every spare patch of wall is covered in graffiti, every shop doorway a bedroom for the homeless. Walking on the beach is no better. Sinking into pebbles is far from enjoyable, and made worse by the need to dodge dirty nappies, discarded tampons and broken glass. She sticks to strolling around Old Steine Gardens and Queen’s Park when the weather is sunny, and when it’s not, sits hunched over her laptop working on finishing her master’s thesis, often with tears rolling down her cheeks.