Perfect Stranger: A gripping psychological thriller with nail-biting suspense by Jake Cross

Author:Jake Cross
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781786814425
Publisher: Bookouture

Twenty-Six

In the Manor, he didn’t even sit before his first drink. He upended the whiskey bottle and took a giant swig. Throwing his head back cracked it on a wooden rafter, but it didn’t interrupt his guzzling. He stopped for a breath only when the fire in his throat became too much. Then he sat, hard enough to hear a crack from the plastic chair.

He wasn’t drinking to blot the shock but simply to sleep. And it worked because one second he was swallowing whiskey, and the next he was groggy and hearing what he thought was sniffling. He realised he’d fallen asleep.

He went to the trapdoor. Now the sniffling was definitely that. Rose, he knew. Upset. He slapped his pocket, realised he’d left his phone in the bedroom and got hit by a wave of dread. Now he understood.

Sure enough, he entered the dark bedroom to find Rose sitting up, crying softly, and with his phone in her hands. Its bright light displayed her grim expression. He had left the phone unlocked, screen lit up, and it must not have gone to sleep. She must have woken to see it alive and bright and displaying what he saw now.

The media player on his device showed a symbol of a square inside a circle, backdropped by the final frame of the suicide video. Eve lying, unmoving, with a big STOP symbol planted across her. He wished he’d deleted it.

She sensed him at the doorway and turned her head, which cast half of her face in shadow. ‘Where did you get this?’

Even now he was unsure why he had set his phone to record the video as it played on the laptop. ‘Katie had it on a disc.’

She didn’t ask why. Only one person could answer that question. She wiped her eyes one at a time with the same palm. The other still held the phone before her face.

He got into bed and lay back, stared at the darkness above, and willed himself to talk in order to ease his wife. But she got there first.

‘She was with Eve, wasn’t she? At the end.’

He remembered what Katie had said about that night: how she’d pottered about, doing housework, and while I did this my mother was killing herself ten feet above me…

But when he started to relay this story, she stopped him.

‘No, Chris. I mean she was with Eve. She was in the room. Eve is talking to someone.’

He sat up. She moved closer to him, arm touching his, and restarted the video. He couldn’t not watch as Eve returned to life for yet another go at death.

The first time she spoke was when nineteen pills were gone. The second of what he’d called glitches in the loop.

Nineteen pills.

Eve flicks a glance to her left, beyond the camera, something there having caught her attention. A pause. Something happening behind that camera. A pause, and then Eve’s mouth moves.

‘She said no,’ Rose said. He agreed. Eve had said no to someone. To Katie?

Twenty-one pills.

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