BooksBarbecue
Back Because She Loves Me
Chapters (50)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication Page
  4. Contents
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Ninteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-one
  26. Twenty-two
  27. Twenty-three
  28. Twenty-four
  29. Twenty-five
  30. Twenty-six
  31. Twenty-seven
  32. Twenty-eight
  33. Twenty-nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-one
  36. Thirty-two
  37. Thirty-three
  38. Thirty-four
  39. Thirty-five
  40. Thirty-six
  41. Thirty-seven
  42. Thirty-eight
  43. Thirty-nine
  44. Forty
  45. Forty-one
  46. Forty-two
  47. Epilogue
  48. Letter From the Author
  49. Acknowledgements
  50. About the Author

I left the room, leaving him curled into a ball on the sofa. I wanted to go, to get the hell out of here, but I had come here looking for information. This could be my only chance. I had already found out why Charlie had taken so long to contact me after that first night. She had been with this loser. I had taken an instant dislike to him, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him about yesterday. Had he already been in the cafe when I went in? I couldn’t remember. On balance, he was probably telling the truth about it being a coincidence.

Charlie’s bedroom was almost as empty as the living room. Half a dozen boxes were piled up in the corner, along with a few carrier bags stuffed full of clothes. The bed was stripped to the mattress, the walls bare. The room smelled stale, musty.

Then I spotted half a dozen canvases leaning against the wall, one against the other. I crouched and studied them. A couple were abstract: jagged lines and swirls, blood reds and blacks. They looked angry. Another was a charcoal sketch of a man, but he had no face. Was it supposed to be me? The canvas at the back startled me. It was a collage of photographs arranged in the shape of a female body. The photos had been cut out of a book: my Rankin book, to be precise. Various models, either naked or nearly nude. Charlie had painted sharp, jagged lines in red across their flesh. It was a powerful picture. But why hadn’t she asked if she could take the book if she wanted to cut pictures out of it?

‘Not much, is there?’ Fraser said, startling me. He was leaning in the doorway. ‘You could probably take it home on the bus.’

‘She never had much stuff,’ he continued, swaying in the doorway, his eyes pink and unfocused. ‘I used to joke that she always acted like she was preparing to go on the run.’

‘How did the two of you meet?’ I asked.

‘I was working at King’s.’ Kings College Hospital was just up the road from this flat. ‘I’m in IT and she was on a temp contract there, just before she started at Moorfields.’

‘And do you know where she lived before that?’

He stared at me and a sly smile crept on to his face. ‘She’s as secretive with you as she was with me, isn’t she? It used to drive me crazy. Trying to get any info out of her about her past was like trying to get a cat to go walkies. Her line was that it didn’t matter, that it was all about the here and now.’