Lost in the Lake (Dr Samantha Willerby Series Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Lost in the Lake

  A J Waines

  Copyright © 2017 AJ Waines

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and

  any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

  in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author.

  Find out more about the author and her other books at www.ajwaines.co.uk

  In memory of Tigsey,

  my treasured companion, who was

  by my side throughout the writing of this book

  (1996-2017)

  Contents

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Coming soon from AJ Waines

  About the Author

  Also by AJ Waines

  Prologue

  Did I make you jump? Turning up like that in your own kitchen? You have to admit, it must have been a nasty shock.

  I bet you thought you’d been ever so smart at covering your tracks. But, be honest, you made a complete hash of things. You made out you were one step ahead of the game all along, but once you scooped the ultimate prize you couldn’t work out what to do next! Face facts, you were too ambitious for your own good and hadn’t thought things through properly.

  You took great delight in explaining your cunning scheme to me, even though it was bound to leave you with egg on your face. I could see you thought you’d have the last laugh. I could tell your little brain was ticking over, thinking that once you’d told me the whole story, there was no way I’d be walking out of there. But that’s where you went wrong. You underestimated me. Most people do.

  I could feel rage burning up my insides as you brandished that bottle of whisky like we were mates – in it together.

  ‘Let’s toast our windfall’, you suggested, trying to make me smile. By then, however, my fury with what you’d done had ignited from a niggling spark into a white-hot ball of fire. Every moment I was forced to endure with you, a growing, uncontainable frenzy was building inside me.

  You reached over to the draining board to find two glasses and that’s when you made your fatal mistake.

  You should never have turned your back.

  Chapter 1

  Sam

  October – Four months earlier

  ‘I was early,’ she said, as I invited her inside my consulting room. ‘But you know that already, don’t you? You’ve been watching me.’

  Her directness took me by surprise, but I didn’t let my welcoming smile falter.

  She eased past me and helped herself to the wrong seat, the one I always use that’s closer to the door with a clear view of the clock. ‘I’ve been observing people coming and going,’ she went on without a beat. ‘Humans are weird, don’t you think?’ she laughed. ‘But then, you know that too. That’s what you’re interested in, isn’t it?’

  Rosie Chandler had barely been in the room ten seconds and already I felt like she’d spun me around. I casually pulled up the other chair, outwardly cool and unruffled. Working within the field of psychotherapy is strange; you have to be a blank screen and usher all your own feelings out of the way.

  Rosie was right; I had spotted her, nearly two hours earlier. As a psychologist well practised in interpreting behaviour, I should have read the signs there and then. A young woman not clutching a mobile phone and with nothing better to do than sit alone amid a bank of plastic hospital chairs. It was out of the ordinary, to say the least, and I should have recognised the implications.

  I took a breath ready to launch into my usual introductions, but she beat me to it.

  ‘I knew it was a mistake,’ she continued. ‘None of us wanted to be there. Shall I just tell you about it?’

  I’d been caught in the starting blocks.

  ‘Yes, go on.’ I reached for my notebook. She was here to tell me her story. The formalities could wait until later.

  ‘It happened two weeks ago. I was in the back of the van, not far from Penrith in the Lake District; we were on our way to the B&B after our final rehearsal. I was looking at the curve of the road behind us as it cut into the hillside. Stephanie and Max were in the front with Richard. He was driving. The man with the van. Everyone likes a man with a van, don’t they?’

  Her words came tumbling out with tiny snatches of air between each sentence. Then she stopped.

  ‘You were in the van…’ I nudged.

  Her cheeks flushed a little. ‘Oh, right. Yeah. It was pretty clapped out; one of those small delivery vans with seats only at the front. One of the windows at the back was missing. I didn’t know it then, but…well, that botched-up piece of cardboard saved my life.’

  There was an unfor
tunate whine in her voice and she stared into the far distance with a puckered brow, as though struggling to see something.

  ‘I’m not even sure why I ended up in the back...’

  It sounded, although straws weren’t mentioned, like she was used to being the one who drew the short one.

  ‘Do you believe in fate?’ she said, staring straight at me as if she genuinely wanted to know.

  ‘That’s a big question,’ I said. ‘Can we come back to it later? Why don’t you tell me more about what happened, first?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said cheerily.

  I’m meant to be a sounding board, a flawless mirror so patients have space to explore how they genuinely feel, without interruption, opinion or judgement. The job suits introverts like me. I’m naturally private and it’s second nature to me not to give anything away, but I know the downside is I can seem detached. Lacking in personality even. So much so, that most of my patients wouldn’t recognise me if they saw me ‘off duty’. A male patient once spotted me shaking full-blown shimmies on the dancefloor in a bar and turned away in horror. I worried for days that it might have undermined all our work together, but I’m only human. In reality, I love gossip, filthy jokes, too much champagne and wearing off-the-shoulder dresses with stilettos. Just not between nine and five.

  Rosie drew her knees together.

  ‘The road was windy and I was getting thrown about in the back without a seatbelt,’ she went on. ‘Did I say Richard was driving? He was going far too fast. Showing off and trying to shake us all up…’

  Again, she seemed to float off into a daydream.

  She had dense but patchy freckles on her face that gave her the look of an unfinished pointillist painting. She tugged at a loose ginger curl trapped under the arm of her clunky specs and as she let it go, it sprang back into a tight coil. Her hair was busy like that all over. An unkind person might have said it was the most interesting thing about her appearance.

  ‘The van…’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yeah…the engine was revving like we were on a racetrack and Max was yelling at him to slow down. Richard tugged the wheel to take the next bend and that’s when it happened. All of a sudden the view from the back shifted completely. The road disappeared and it felt like we were flying. My stomach was sucked up inside me; that lurching feeling, you know, when you go down too fast in a lift?’

  She pressed her knuckles into her mouth. Her twitchy mannerisms and trilling voice reminded me of a teenager. I had to check my notes again; was she really in her mid-thirties?

  ‘We were diving, dropping…branches and foliage scraping the paintwork. Instinct told me to duck down, wrap my head in my arms and squeeze my eyes shut. Then, with a smack, we hit something, but it wasn’t the landing I was expecting. I was waiting for a metallic, bone-rattling jolt, but it was more of a dull thud like an egg dropping into flour.’

  I was disconcerted. Lots of patients describe a traumatic experience in a deadpan tone, skimming over the details, as if it had happened to someone else. It’s a common defence mechanism. But Rosie was the opposite. She was embellishing her ‘story’ as if she’d been asked to engage a bunch of school kids at morning assembly. I made a mental note to address it if our sessions continued.

  ‘The cold made me yelp and the sounds went hollow and boomy,’ she went on. ‘The light was kind of silvery, then too dark. The shapes were so blurred I couldn’t recognise anything anymore. There was a roaring sound, pressure on my eardrums and I couldn’t work out which way was up. I lost my glasses.’

  Her sultana-brown eyes glistened behind the thick lenses; alert and intense.

  ‘Everything happened in slow motion. There was a heavy clunk and that’s when we hit the bottom of the lake. I yanked at the back door handle, almost wrenched it off, but it wouldn’t budge. Then I remembered the sheet of cardboard and kicked at it in a frenzy with both feet.’

  Rosie suddenly looked up as if to check I was still there.

  ‘More water gushed in and the van filled up faster and faster. In seconds I was right under. I thought I was going to die.’ She tugged her lip. ‘What I did next was stupid, I know, but it was pure instinct. Instead of getting straight out through the back window, I felt around and grabbed my viola. Can you imagine? What was I thinking?’

  Her knees had been jiggling up and down the entire time.

  ‘Then, somehow, I was through the broken window and out. I kicked frantically against the water, but it took forever to reach the light. Eventually, I broke the surface, gasping for dear life, the viola case floating beside me.’

  She was silent for a while, breathing hard, still inside the memory of it.

  ‘The first thing I noticed was how quiet and still everything was. It was like bursting out of a bubble of chaos into bliss. Like suddenly finding I’d gone to heaven. Then I realised there was no one else up there on the surface with me. It was the first time I’d properly considered the others. For a second I wondered about diving back down, but I didn’t have enough energy left. I’m a pretty good swimmer, but not that good. I knew I’d die trying. Besides, my glasses had gone and everything was fuzzy. I couldn’t tell one shape from another.’

  Her eyebrows dipped towards each other and she dropped her gaze. ‘I felt this terrible pain trying to rip open my chest, so I rolled onto my back and just floated. For a while I just let the water lap around me. I remember thinking the sky was perfect, like a thin skin of forget-me-not blue wrapped around the earth. I heard a bird squawk, clear and close by, and I knew then that I was going to be okay.’

  She reached forward and gulped down a sip of water, then looked up and gave a small smile.

  I pressed my hand against my chest. I wanted to stand up, walk around, take deep breaths, but I didn’t want to look shaken. At this stage in our encounter it was better for me to stay in tune with Rosie’s emotional response, not distract her by bringing my own reaction into the equation. Nevertheless, I needed a moment to pull myself together; I felt like I’d been down there, drowning in the lake beside her.

  ‘I managed to get to the bank with my viola,’ she said, her voice slow and barely audible. ‘I was dizzy, shivering with the cold; I didn’t know a body could shake so violently. It’s all a bit hazy after that.’

  ‘You must have been terrified…’ My voice came out in a scratchy whisper.

  ‘You know what? I was on autopilot when it happened. There was no time to feel anything. I was too busy fighting to stay alive.’

  I nodded, not taking my eyes off her.

  ‘You only get scared afterwards, don’t you?’ she said. ‘When you think about what actually happened…about what it meant…about the others…’

  Rosie’s incomplete medical notes stated that she’d spent two days drifting in and out of consciousness in a Carlisle Hospital, before being discharged. Ultimately, she’d escaped very lightly and returned to London with only bruises, scrapes and minor respiratory problems. The extent of the psychological damage, however, remained to be seen.

  ‘We can talk about the full impact of it when you’re ready.’

  ‘Does that mean I can come back?’

  ‘If you think it could be helpful. The NHS will let you have six sessions, then we’ll see if you need more.’

  A wave of triumph seemed to envelop her and I invited her to give me more background details. She told me more about the quartet, how they’d originally got together at college fifteen years earlier.

  ‘I was in my second year,’ she told me. ‘It was college policy for tutors to select players to form chamber ensembles, based on performance level and personality. To start with, I wasn’t picked for anything. Then the viola player in Max’s quartet dropped out and they needed someone to fill the place.’ She shrugged. ‘I think I was the only viola player left without a group, so they asked me.’

  Before long our time was up.

  ‘Everyone said it was one of those things,’ she said as she got to her feet. ‘The police put it down to a comb
ination of driver error – the sun in Richard’s eyes, driving too fast round the bend, brakes not as sharp as they should have been – and bad luck. But I know that’s not how it was. That’s why I’m here, really.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What I mean is, I don’t need any support, you know, to deal with what I went through.’

  ‘You’re not here for psychotherapy?’

  ‘Oh, no, absolutely not.’

  ‘Psychotherapy can help you deal with the trauma, Rosie; the shock, the complex and often contradictory feelings people have after a— ’

  She cut me off. ‘Oh, no, I’m not in a bad way or anything like that. I’m fine – you know, emotionally. I just need to remember.’

  I didn’t quite understand. She’d been to hell and back, but seemed to be dismissing the experience out of hand.

  ‘So, it’s your memory you’re concerned about?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s why I’m here. There are so many gaps.’ She took hold of the door handle, ready to leave. ‘The thing is, I knew as soon as it happened…’

  She turned to go.

  I stood up, took a hasty step after her. ‘You knew what, Rosie?’

  ‘Oh. That it wasn’t an accident. I know that for definite. Someone meant it to happen.’

  Chapter 2

  Rosie

  I think it’s going to be all right.

  Her name sounds very grand: Dr Samantha Willerby, and I was expecting someone older, so that was a pleasant surprise. She’s pretty too, with glossy hair that’s nearly black and swings like a hairspray ad when she turns her head. She looks like a character from the cover of a Mills & Boon novel.

  I asked if I could call her Sam and she looked a bit taken aback. She said most patients call her Dr Willerby, but that I could use whatever I felt comfortable with. Nice touch, I thought – letting me decide. I prefer ‘Sam’; it makes our relationship less formal.

  So here I am, sitting on the wall outside the staff entrance to the hospital. London Bridge is easy to get to in my lunch break from work and my GP says St Luke’s has a good reputation. Besides, the place I go to is called a ‘Mental Health Unit’, which sounds so much better than ‘Psychiatric Department’. I don’t like labels; people get pigeonholed and then spend their whole lives being treated like nutters.