‘Of course,’ was all he said, a tremor in his own voice. ‘I’ve missed you so much, Mez.’

42

Present Day
Gemma

Mavis put on his reading glasses with a frown and an air of reluctance that implied he resented having to wear them. As if either of us cared, thought Gemma, suppressing an eye roll. He cleared his throat.

‘I’ve been looking again at the details of your previous attack, back in 1995. Obviously it was a very long time ago, but we can’t rule out the possibility that whoever’s behind it has been out of the country, or in jail for another crime, in the intervening years. I see from the transcripts that you had a conversation on the night of the attack with somebody from your record company, an Iain McKinnon, who tried to blackmail you into having sex with him, in exchange for keeping some personal information to himself; and that a third party, a woman named Samantha Applebaum, had tried to extort money out of the record company, threatening to go to the papers with the same information: i.e., that you’d had a sexual relationship with her.’

Meredith turned to Gemma. ‘Iain’s the guy we were talking about earlier. Sleazebag who did that interview for TMZ and let slip where I worked. He’s a nightmare. But I’m sure it’s not him. He had an alibi for the night of my attack – that night, after I turned him down, he apparently went home with some girl he picked up in the pub.’

‘But if your attacker has been trying to track you down for years, that interview could have given him the clues they needed,’ Gemma said.

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Meredith miserably.

‘And both McKinnon and the woman denied the blackmail attempts,’ Mavis said. ‘Who else knew about your relationship with Samantha Appelbaum at that time?’

Meredith thought back. ‘Not many people. I was so young. At first I was embarrassed to tell anyone – I told my best friends from school that I was moving to London, but not who with. The boys in the band were the only ones who knew, unless someone was stalking me and found out that way. We – I – did have a stalker, but that was a lot later. You know about the green paint thing, but there were loads of other things too: hate mail and death threats and so on.’

‘Did you not go to the police then?’ Mavis sounded incredulous.

Meredith glared at him. ‘Yeah. They didn’t get anywhere, not even after the paint incident.’

‘And you’re sure it couldn’t have been a friend of one of the other band members – someone hanging round with you back in the day, who you pissed off somehow?’