Don't Let Me In Read online

  I retreat and close the door behind me. Henry can put a mask on and get rid of it later.

  I walk down the stairs to the second floor. On this floor there are two more bedrooms and a family bathroom and I can’t resist taking a look in Finn’s bedroom. He’s obsessed with Star Wars at the moment. His duvet has a picture of the Death Star, Darth Vader and Obi Wan Kenobi on it, and all available shelf space and every horizontal surface is covered in plastic figurines and Star Wars related books. It is like stepping back in time to my bedroom in 1984 and it brings me a sense of closeness with him that sometimes I struggle with when he is actually here. I sit down on his bed and then lie down, stretched out, face first, smelling the sheets, smelling my boy. The emotions this brings are almost too much for me at times, the sheer love and with it the almost crushing fear about what the world, about what adults, will do to him and his innocence. I think of Finn and then Khalil, sitting alone in a cell. What does his mother feel? This last thought is what stops me from spending the rest of the day on his bed and somehow, despite the heaviness I feel, I move my legs and get off Finn’s bed.

  I close the door and head downstairs to the real world.

  The stairs lead to the hallway and from here I can turn right to the kitchen and open-plan living area, or left to the front door at the end of the hallway. I head left, I always do. Henry is on strict orders to lock the door from the outside, but I decide to check just in case he forgot. He never does of course and the door is locked. But one thing he can’t do from the outside is slide the two bolts home. I do this and the noise of them slamming home is as satisfying as the first hit of a cigarette when I used to smoke.

  On the way back to the kitchen I stop for a moment next to the closed door. The door that leads to the dining room. It’s a plain, waxed pine door, old and worn, with a dark iron door handle and lock. Standing here makes me feel colder than anywhere in the rest of the house but I know it’s not the temperature that makes me shiver here and at least I’m not shaking so that’s progress.

  Suddenly, from behind me, there is a loud bang on the front door. It’s a man’s knock, I can tell, a man who means business and expects the door to be opened. Men knock on doors like they demand to be let in. Even Finn knocks on the door like this.

  I hold my breath and slowly, so as not to be heard, turn around and face towards the door. There is no glass of course, that would be a weak point, a culvert under the castle, but there is a spy hole. I’m not moving that way though; instead I slide, as quiet as a mouse – a scared, terrified mouse – my socks slipping on the oak floor like ice.

  There is another urgent barrage of heavy knocks.

  The ball of tension in my stomach escapes and with a moan I run back into the kitchen, hoping he won’t hear my muffled footsteps. Once there I check the video camera feed on the intercom. There are two cameras: one is positioned just below Finn’s bedroom window and gives an overhead view of the man standing fifteen yards away from me, on the other side of the door, and the second camera is at doorbell level with a fish-eye lens which gives me a slightly warped face-on view. The man is big, gym sculpted and bald; his shiny head speaks of nightclubs, the smell of cheap alcohol, fast food, sweat and violence.

  His round face looks angrily at the camera and I know he knows I’m watching him. He’s wearing a black leather jacket that stretches tautly against his back, barely restraining his bulk.

  I have no idea who he is. I’m not expecting anyone or any deliveries and Henry knows better than to arrange anything without informing me of the exact time I can expect someone to be appear at the threshold.

  I rationalise away, my rational brain providing me with the ordinary explanations one by one, but each “it’s just a market survey, pollster, canvasser, tinker or dishrag seller” is eaten alive by the rampaging, adrenaline-fuelled beast called MURDER AND RAPE that kills everything I can throw at it.

  The man mouths “fuck” and then kneels down on his haunches and shoves something through the letterbox. Once he’s satisfied it’s through, he gets up and retreats down the path, leaving the gate open, and then disappears from the camera’s frame.

  I wait thirty seconds to make sure he’s not returning and then run to the door. There’s a plain brown manila envelope on the mat.

  For a few seconds I stare at it like it’s alive and could bite me and then I tell myself to stop being so fucking paranoid, and this thought makes me snort out loud with derision at my own weakness.

  I pick it up; it’s addressed to me and carries a return address of a street in the city. I tear open the envelope and remove the crisp white letter within. There’s an embossed font declaring the letter is from Fingersmiths Solicitors.

  Dear Mrs Kelly

  We are instructed by our client Tom Ellis and hereby give you immediate notice to cease and desist from making further defamatory comments in respect of our client.

  On 8 November 2017 you broadcast an episode of your weekly podcast (title World’s End:Pick One), and made comments which we and our client consider to be untrue and defamatory, namely that our client was implicated in the murder of Lauren Grey.

  As you are fully aware, our client co-operated fully with the police investigation and as a result of that investigation the police concluded there was no material evidence to link him in any way to that murder. He was, and has never been, a suspect in that case and your attempts to link him to the murder are without foundation in law or fact.

  The real culprit, Khalil Bukhari, is currently serving a life sentence in HMP Strangeways, a fact which of itself makes your assertions defamatory and providing a clear cause of action in libel against you by our client.

  You have defamed our client by raising matters that do not even amount to circumstantial evidence but rather are pure speculation on your part. This has been done as far as we can see for no legitimate reason, as it clearly does not relate to the appeal process currently being undertaken by Mr Bukhari and therefore we can only conclude that the motivation for such comments is for entertainment and the furtherance of your professional career.

  We have sent a copy of this letter to OFCOM and our client is at this stage reviewing his legal options which may include a claim in damages or injunctive relief. We insist you make no further such allegations or unfounded insinuations linking our client to the murder of Lauren Grey. We reserve, to the fullest, all our client’s legal rights.

  Yours sincerely

  Howard Beard

  Shit.

  I place the letter down on the worktop. They are right of course, I probably have defamed him. I’m no legal expert, but I’ve certainly speculated on his involvement and hinted at it on the podcast. But I don’t feel any guilt about this, I do about everything else but this, in fact. Instead of guilt I feel something else, I feel my journalistic senses tingling. I’ve lifted a stone and things are moving. Tom Ellis may not be involved, and I have only raised the issue to highlight the focus that was paid to Khalil Bukhari, but one thing I do know already from my research is that Tom Ellis is one twenty-four carat gold-plated shit and I’m not wasting any sympathy on him.

  Mo brought a file to our first meeting. I can still remember his excitement as he spread the contents of his canvas shoulder bag over my kitchen table; it was the breaking of nervous tension for someone who was finally being listened to. It was strange watching this urbane man, whose hands usually wielded a scalpel, become twitchy, words tumbling over each other as they fought for prominence. I’ve seen it before of course; it’s the rush of finally having an audience willing to listen, and I witnessed it on many occasions during my professional career, that moment when the frustration of being ignored, denied, is replaced by a voice being heard, and that listener is feeding their hope. It’s an intimate moment as well, from subject to journalist, in much the same way as patient and doctor.

  Mo had been working on the case since his brother’s conviction and, together with what he and the family could raise and donations from the local com
munity, they had funded the legal bills for Khalil’s so far unsuccessful defence and appeals.

  As part of the legal process Mo collected an enormous amount of information on everyone at that party the night Lauren was killed and there were thick lever-arch files filled with, on the face of it, reams of printouts of social media screenshots detailing the online lives that those kids had gone on to lead. But by far the most interesting information concerned Tom Ellis. Right from the start Mo told me that he thought there was something too good to be true about Tom and so, it appeared, it was the case.

  Tom’s lever arch file was the first Mo handed to me and he told me I had to read this before any of the others. And so I did, and as I read I learned about Tom Ellis.

  At school Tom was a good guy, so it seemed, never in trouble, excellent grades, a brilliant sportsman. Mo had a private detective interview his teachers. They all said he was a model student save for one. The teacher in question was his English teacher, Mr Cartwright. He told Mo’s investigator about an incident regarding George Orwell’s 1984, one of the set texts for that year’s A level exam. In a classroom discussion about the book they had talked about the use of metaphor and in particular the phrase Orwell uses when O’Brien tells Winston “if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

  Apparently, Tom’s reaction differed from the rest of the class. In the midst of the discussion of why this was so terrifying Tom had commented, “Depends if you’re the one wearing the boot or not.”

  A glib remark maybe? But one the English teacher said left a deep impression on him as no child he had taught had ever said such a thing. He felt it important enough to recount it over ten years after the event.

  But aside from that there was initially very little to suggest that there was anything fishy about him. Tom came from a good family with no reports or evidence of any dysfunction. There was certainly nothing in his background to suggest he would be capable of being a killer.

  Setting aside an old teacher’s recollections (and this was an English teacher who generally tend, by their nature, to be unrepentant romantics in my opinion), where things began to get interesting was in the stuff Mo dug up that happened a long time after the murder. All of it is completely irrelevant to the legal case of course, and therefore inadmissible, but fascinating to the journalist and amateur student of human behaviour which I, as most journalists I know whether they care to admit or not, happen to be.

  The murder took place in 2006 and in the years since the murder it is fair to say that Tom Ellis has led an interesting life.

  He had been in the combined cadet force at school and when he left the sixth form, instead of going to Durham University where he had secured a place to study PPE, he joined the army. This was late 2007 and he would have known that there was a high chance of him being deployed to a combat zone. This happened to him and he served two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He was eventually invalided out in 2009 after being blown up by a roadside IED. He got off lightly with a perforated eardrum, two of his colleagues were seriously injured and he was honourably discharged at a captain’s rank.

  Our war hero went on to join a property investment company, Wheeler and Sons. One of the eponymous “sons” was a fellow officer in his old unit and fixed him up with a job when he hit “civvy street”. He went on to make, lose and make back again a small fortune in the turbulent times after the global financial crash. He found time to marry his wife Emma, a cousin to the same son who had set him up with a job. Life seemed to be working out for Tom.

  On the day of Tom’s marriage to Emma, Khalil was in the fifth year of his life sentence with an early parole date fixed for 2025. Tom and Emma had their only child, Ben, in 2016. All this is easily found on the Internet and Mo had screenshots of it all, local news sites reporting on the injured war hero, wedding photographs, Facebook entries, the works. I wonder whether the work of a private detective is easier in the days of social media or whether it will make them redundant, as we are all detectives these days? Henry won’t go to a dinner party, when we used to go out to dinner parties that is, without Googling all of the guests in advance and making a long list of assumptions based on their profiles as though the truth of who we are online bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the real “us”.

  But this wasn’t the real juice; the real juice was that in June 2016 Tom Ellis was arrested after a complaint of domestic violence. He had turned up drunk at the family home, started shouting to be let in and then, when Emma opened the door, he got into an argument with her. This is confused and I haven’t seen the police report but somehow Emma hit her head and had to be rushed to hospital. A neighbour called the police and he was arrested soon after.

  And the weird thing is, he wasn’t charged. To this day Tom Ellis has a clean record. Mo’s private investigators got the details of the arrest from a neighbour who had witnessed the drama, and then from a special constable who had been on hand when the arrest took place. “A bog-standard domestic” is how he had described it, which probably tells you as much as you need to know about the ubiquity of male-on-female violence in the UK.

  Why wasn’t he charged? I don’t know, but I can guess that Emma chose not to press charges. It’s not unusual for the victim of spousal abuse to not co-operate but here’s the thing, was this the first time Tom Ellis had walked away from justice?

  All inadmissible evidence, but the lead wasn’t a dead one. Firstly, it gave us an insight into Tom’s character and secondly, just maybe Emma would speak to us. This was a false hope, however, despite both me and Cathy attempting to contact Emma by phone, text, email and in Cathy’s case actually door-stepping the poor woman. The most we had got was “I’ve got nothing to say, if you continue to harass me I’m calling the police”, which Cathy had received on the doorstep.

  But the third thing, and the most important thing this gave me, was the confidence to pick up Tom’s lawyer’s letter, tear it up and throw it in the bin. Tom Ellis is a wife beater and a coward when it comes to legal action. His job in the city is high profile, lots of networking required – the regimental tie and pride – and the last thing he wants is a court case, so Tom Ellis and Fingersmiths are just going to have to go and fuck themselves.

  Feeling empowered, I say “yeah” out loud. Lil’Bitch, as is usually the case, is my only witness to this defiant moment.

  “You know it, Lil’Bitch,” I say to her and she blinks. I take this as an acknowledgement, and it’s the best I’m going to get.

  I crack open my laptop and open up Outlook. I have a motive to discover in time for the next podcast in five days’ time.

  I type:

  Dear Emma,

  I know that you have ignored my requests to give me an interview before and that you have been very clear in this but you should know, unless you already do, that in my last broadcast I mentioned new information about the night that Lauren was murdered. Specifically, Amy Wilder has given a statement to the effect that when she saw Tom shortly before midnight there was a bicycle nearby. The significance of course is that Tom can now be at the murder scene in the relevant time frame. I am making no accusations but I will be revealing further information in the next podcast which will cast serious doubt on the safety of Khalil’s conviction.

  I hesitate, as I don’t like lying to get a witness to co-operate but in the spirit of empowerment, fuck it.

  I want, need, your help and I think you may know something about the character of your husband that may shine a light on this case. I want to give you the opportunity to do this before that podcast goes out as I anticipate you may receive more media enquires if you stay silent.

  This is approaching blackmail and is certainly bordering on harassment but the scales are easy to balance: one rich middle-class woman’s embarrassment versus a potentially innocent man rotting in prison. In for a penny, I think, and continue typing.

  And one last thing you should know, as it is relevant to this case in
every way: Khalil Bukhari’s mother Yaminah was diagnosed with incurable liver cancer a month ago, and she has been given six to nine months to live, so as you can see anything you might know about what happened, to you or to Lauren, could mean the difference between her seeing her son on the outside before she dies. Please contact me.

  It is so shitty, but I hit send anyway. The way I figure it is that I can do things the police can’t, and who knows, maybe an innocent man will walk free?

  Being a shit makes me thirsty so I make myself an espresso. There’s something about the ritual of grinding the beans, Ethiopian in this case, smelling the freshly ground coffee, spooning it into the holder, patting it down and then the satisfying chug of the machine as it forces hot water through the coffee mix, that I find at once relaxing, and at the same time it is an act that symbolises everything I love about my life at this moment, at the beginning of what is looking like is going to be a dark century.

  My Mac pings.

  It’s an email from Emma; it’s short and to the point.

  I’ve given you my answer already, I will not be changing my mind. LEAVE ME AND MY FAMILY ALONE. And STOP your fake news it helps nobody.

  I can’t say I expected anything different but I am disappointed nevertheless. I wonder if she has actually listened to my podcast and then find myself snorting out loud. Of course she has listened, I’m talking each week about her husband and the murder of one of his friends. Who wouldn’t be able to listen to that?

  Back to the coffee, and this is my favourite bit. I hit the button and the machine starts to chug and then the water is pouring out of the machine. Solitary pleasures, I think, and feel slightly sad.

  But this is where social media comes in and as soon as I have made my coffee I take a seat at the table and WhatsApp Hannah.

  Speaking with Hannah is like bathing in cold water after the heat of Twitter, Facebook and all the other social media channels. It is the joy of real connection versus the superficiality of the instant. As well as our “averseness to the outside” we have other things in common too: we both studied English at university (me at Bristol, her at Manchester) and we both adored Sylvia Plath, both had major crushes on Patti Smith and Thom Yorke and on politics we were even more simpatico. We chimed. And perhaps the most important thing of all, something that Hannah first mentioned a few weeks after we first started swapping messages – she too was trapped. She told me after inviting me to meet up for a coffee. She only lives a few miles away in Crouch End, not far from Hampstead, and she invited me to her flat. I put her off, made up an excuse and I told her, I just came out with it: “I can’t leave the house”. I hadn’t told anyone before. Even with Cathy it was unspoken, a topic we skirted around. She had replied, “Thank God, I HATE leaving the house”. It was an invitation and so easy to open up to her, to tell her without the shame I feel when talking to people I’ve known all my life, my friends, that I too was frightened, no that’s the wrong word, prevented by myself, from leaving the house. Her reply was “Hell is Homes Under the Hammer”, a reference to the daytime TV show of your nightmares and one which I became too familiar with in the early months of my confinement. I decide to WhatsApp her.