I Follow You Read online

  I FOLLOW YOU

  PETER JAMES

  Contents

  1: Friday 7 December

  2: Friday 7 December

  3: Friday 7 December

  4: Friday 7 December

  5: Friday 7 December

  6: Friday 7 December

  7: Friday 7 December

  8: Saturday 8 December

  9: Saturday 8 December

  10: Saturday 8 December

  11: Saturday 8 December

  12: Saturday 8 December

  13: Saturday 8 December

  14: Sunday 9 December

  15: Sunday 9 December

  16: Monday 17 December

  17: Monday 17 December

  18: Monday 17 December

  19: Monday 17 December

  20: Tuesday 18 December

  21: Tuesday 18 December

  22: Wednesday 19 December

  23: Wednesday 19 December

  24: Wednesday 19 December

  25: Wednesday 19 December

  26: Wednesday 19 December

  27: Wednesday 19 December

  28: Friday 21 December

  29: Wednesday 9 January

  30: Thursday 10 January

  31: Friday 11 January

  32: Saturday 12 January

  33: Saturday 12 January

  34: Saturday 12 January

  35: Saturday 12 January

  36: Sunday 13 January

  37: Monday 14 January

  38: Monday 14 January

  39: Monday 14 January

  40: Monday 14 January

  41: Monday 14 January

  42: Monday 14 January

  43: Monday 14 January

  44: Monday 14 January

  45: Monday 14 January

  46: Monday 14 January

  47: Wednesday 16 January

  48: Wednesday 16 January

  49: Wednesday 16 January

  50: Wednesday 16 January

  51: Wednesday 16 January

  52: Wednesday 16 January

  53: Wednesday 16 January

  54: Wednesday 16 January

  55: Wednesday 16 January

  56: Wednesday 16 January

  57: Wednesday 16 January

  58: Wednesday 16 January

  59: Wednesday 16 January

  60: Wednesday 16 January

  61: Wednesday 16 January

  62: Thursday 17 January

  63: Thursday 17 January

  64: Thursday 17 January

  65: Thursday 17 January

  66: Thursday 17 January

  67: Thursday 17 January

  68: Thursday 17 January

  69: Thursday 17 January

  70: Thursday 17 January

  71: Friday 18 January

  72: Friday 18 January

  73: Friday 18 January

  74: Friday 18 January

  75: Saturday 19 January

  76: Saturday 19 January

  77: Saturday 19 January

  78: Saturday 19 January

  79: Saturday 19 January

  80: Saturday 19 January

  81: Saturday 19 January

  82: Saturday 19 January

  83: Saturday 19 January

  84: Saturday 19 January

  85: Saturday 19 January

  86: Monday 21 January

  87: Monday 21 January

  88: Monday 21 January

  89: Monday 21 January

  90: Monday 21 January

  91: Monday 21 January

  92: Monday 21 January

  93: Tuesday 22 January

  94: Tuesday 22 January

  95: Tuesday 22 January

  96: Tuesday 22 January

  97: Tuesday 22 January

  98: Tuesday 22 January

  99: Tuesday 22 January

  100: Sunday 8 March

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  TO MY BELOVED WIFE LARA – YOU GAVE ME THE IDEA AND THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS BOOK.

  1

  Friday 7 December

  Timing is everything.

  Marcus Valentine lived by those words. They were his mantra. He was always scrupulously punctual and, equally, punctilious in all that he did, starting with his attire. It was important to him to be appropriately dressed for every occasion, with each item of his clothing immaculately clean and pressed, whether the business suits he wore to work, his golfing kit, or the cardigan, polo shirts and chinos he favoured when at home.

  With his greying hair groomed immaculately, straight but prominent nose and piercing grey eyes, his perfect upright posture making his corpulent figure look closer to six foot than he actually was, he had the demeanour at times of a bird of prey, studying everything and everyone a little too sharply. Legions of his patients adored him, although a few of the hospital staff found him a tad arrogant. But they put up with it because he was good – in truth, more than just good, brilliant. Regardless of his particular field of expertise, he was the consultant many medics in the hospital would go to as first port of call for advice on any issue with a patient that concerned them.

  In his mid-forties, he was at the top of his game. He had to admit he lapped up the attention, but he’d worked hard to get there, sacrificing much of his social and family life for years. So now was the time to enjoy it.

  Today, though, had started badly. He was late. So late. He had overslept. He knew it shouldn’t stress him out, but it did.

  He glanced at his watch, then at the car clock, checking their times. Late. So late. All his timings for the day now out of sync.

  His wife, Claire, had told him mockingly more than once that the words Timing is Everything would be carved on his gravestone. Marcus knew he was a little obsessive, but to him timing was a matter of life and death. It was crucial, in his profession, in the calculation of due dates of the babies of expectant mothers, and equally so during those critical moments of delivery. It mattered in pretty much every aspect of his life. Of everyone’s life.

  Claire’s job, as an executive coach, was much more flexible, and she worked it around her schedule – something he could never do. He always wanted to be early for a train, a flight, even for his golf. He’d be at a concert for doors opening and at the cinema for the trailers, whereas Claire constantly drove him nuts by leaving everything to the very last minute. But then again, she’d arrived into this world three weeks overdue so maybe that had something to do with it.

  And this morning, at 8.40 a.m., squinting against the low, bright sun and reaching out with his left hand for his Ray-Bans, speeding in the rush-hour traffic along Victoria Avenue on his daily commute to the Jersey General Hospital, timing was about to matter more than he could have imagined.

  As he pulled on his glasses, he didn’t know it but the next sixty seconds were about to change his life forever.

  Well, forty-seven seconds, actually, if he had checked.

  2

  Friday 7 December

  Timing wasn’t happening.

  Georgie Maclean’s sports watch had frozen. The lights at the pedestrian crossing she took most mornings over the busy road to the seafront were red, against her, as they usually were. But for some moments she was fixated on her watch. She’d been running fast, on course for a personal best – and then the damned watch crashed.

  No, don’t do this to me!

  These lights were the slowest in the world. They took forever to change. They messed up her times for her run when she missed them, forcing her to wait, jogging on the spot to keep warm in the freezing early-morning air, with traffic streaming past too fast to risk a dash between the vehicles, almost all of them way exceeding the speed limit.

  She stared at her fancy new running watch, silently pleading with it, the all-singing, all-dancing, top-of-the-range m
odel that seemed to do everything but tell the time, and which wasn’t doing any of those other things either. Right now, it was a useless big shiny red-and-black bracelet on her wrist.

  All she had wanted was something to replace her trusted old sports watch that had died, something that had a heart-rate function and GPS that would connect her to the app RunMaster. The salesman in the sports shop had assured her this one had more computing power in it than NASA when they put the first man on the moon. ‘Seriously, do I need that just for a running watch?’ she’d asked him. ‘Seriously, you do,’ he’d assured her, solemnly.

  Now she was seriously pissed off. As she finally got a green and ran out into the road, she noticed too late the black Porsche. The driver hadn’t seen the lights were now red, against the traffic. The driver with fancy sunglasses who wasn’t even looking at the road.

  She froze. Flung her arms, protectively, around the tiny bump growing inside her.

  3

  Friday 7 December

  Marcus Valentine was irritated by what part of I have to go, I have an emergency operation, Claire didn’t understand.

  He’d been besotted with her the very first time he’d seen her. It was when he’d attended management development training she’d delivered at the hospital, the year after he’d moved to this island to start his new life as a consultant gynae-oncologist. She was tall, willowy, beautiful and always smiling. Although blonde, she’d reminded him so much of the girl he’d been infatuated with as a teenager – Lynette.

  He would always remember the first time he’d seen Lynette on that perfect mid-summer Saturday afternoon. He was sixteen, lying in long grass behind a bush, out of sight of teachers, smoking illicitly with a bunch of schoolmates, all of them skiving off from cricket. Jason Donovan had been playing on a radio one of them had brought along. ‘Sealed With a Kiss’.

  When an apparition had appeared across the field.

  Impossibly long legs, flowing red hair, dark glasses, in a tantalizingly short white dress that clung to the contours of her body. She’d walked over, introduced herself, bummed a cigarette, then sat and flirted with them all, asking their names. Each had done their best to chat her up, before she’d left, striding away and blowing a kiss, then giving a coy wave of her hand.

  At him, he was certain.

  ‘You’re in there, Marcus!’ one of his friends had said. ‘She liked you – dunno why she’d like a spotty fatso like you.’

  ‘She was probably blind – that’s why she wore those glasses!’ said another.

  Ignoring the comments and jeers, Marcus stood up and hurried after her. She gave him an inviting sideways glance and stopped. And right there, in full sight of his now incredulous – and incredibly jealous – friends, had snogged him, long and hard.

  They’d met three times over the next few days, very briefly, just a short conversation then a deep French kiss each time. Nothing else as she always had to rush off. Marcus was becoming crazy for her.

  ‘When can I see you again?’ he’d blurted on the third meeting, barely able to believe his luck.

  ‘Same time, same place, tomorrow?’ she’d replied. ‘Without your mates?’

  Marcus had barely slept all night, thinking about her. At 3 p.m. the following afternoon, half an hour before she was due, having ducked out of a cross-country run, he’d positioned himself behind the bushes. She’d arrived on the dot and he signalled her over, standing up to meet her.

  This time they’d kissed instantly, before they’d spoken a word. To his astonishment she’d slid her hand down inside the front of his shorts and gripped his penis.

  Smiling into his eyes, and working her hand up and down, she’d said, ‘Wow, you’re big, do you think it would fit me?’

  He was gasping, unable to speak, and seconds later he came.

  ‘Nice?’ she asked, still gripping him.

  ‘Oh my God!’

  She looked into his eyes again. ‘Let’s do it properly. Next Saturday, same time?’

  ‘Next Saturday.’ He couldn’t wait to tell all his friends. But equally he didn’t want them spying on him. ‘Next Saturday, yes, definitely!’

  ‘Bring some rubbers.’

  ‘Rubbers?’

  ‘Protection.’

  It had taken him most of the rest of the week, during which again he’d barely slept, to pluck up the courage to go along to the local town, which was little more than a large village, enter the chemist and ask for a packet of Durex. He’d been served, his face burning, by a girl only a few years older than himself, while he looked furtively around in case there were any teachers from his school in there.

  To his dismay, it had pelted with rain through the Saturday morning. And he realized he didn’t know Lynette’s number – nor even her last name. Lynette was all he had. By 3 p.m. the rain had eased to a light summer drizzle. With the condoms safely in his blazer pocket, trembling with excitement, reeking of aftershave and his teeth freshly brushed, he walked out across the field towards the bushes. He held his parka folded under his arm to keep it dry. They could lie on it, he planned.

  3.30 p.m. passed, then 4 p.m., then 4.30. His heart steadily sank. At 5 p.m. he traipsed, sodden and forlorn, back to his school house. Maybe she’d come tomorrow if the weather was better, he hoped, desperately, his heart all twisted up.

  Sunday was a glorious sunny day. He again waited all afternoon, but she never appeared. Nor the following weekend.

  It had been three agonizingly long weeks before Marcus saw Lynette again. Three weeks in which he’d fantasized over her, constantly. Three weeks in which she was never out of his thoughts or his dreams, distracting him hopelessly from his studies. On the Saturday morning, after class, he’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt and mooched down into the town, hoping against hope that he might find her there shopping.

  Then to his excitement he saw her! At last! Outside a biker’s cafe. She’d dismounted, right in front of him, from the rear of a motorcycle pillion. The guy she was with was a bearded, tattooed hulk, in brass-studded leathers.

  Marcus stopped dead and stared as she removed her helmet and shook out the long strands of her hair, tossing her head like a wild, beautiful free spirit.

  ‘Hi, Lynette!’ he said.

  She didn’t even look at him as she put her arm around her hulk and kissed him. Holding their helmets, they strode towards the cafe.

  ‘Lynette!’ he called out. ‘Hi, Lynette!’

  As he hurried towards her, she shot him a disdainful, withering glance and strutted on.

  The biker stopped and blocked him. ‘You got a problem, fatty?’ He held up a tattooed fist glinting with big rings. ‘Want a smack in the mouth?’

  ‘I – I just wanted to say hello to Lynette!’

  She had stopped and stared at him, then turned away, dismissively.

  Marcus had watched as, arm in arm, they’d entered the cafe.

  But he had never really stopped thinking about her. Sure, she wasn’t part of his everyday thoughts, but at milestones – like both his wedding days – he had to admit to himself she did come into his mind. Wondering. Wondering what if it had been Lynette he was marrying? After he’d graduated from Guy’s Hospital medical school he’d taken a post at the Bristol Royal Infirmary where he’d met and married his first wife, Elaine. The marriage had been a disaster. Within months, as he was working round the clock to build his career, Elaine, to his dismay, had fallen pregnant. But she’d had a miscarriage. In the aftermath, with Elaine in emotional turmoil and him working even harder, the marriage had disintegrated into an acrimonious divorce.

  It was while the proceedings were going on that he’d seen the post in Jersey advertised and had successfully applied for it.

  Then, working at the General Hospital in Jersey, he’d met Claire, and all the memories of that blissful summer’s day with the Jason Donovan song playing had come flooding back.

  Marrying Claire had made him feel whole. Those first two years in their beautiful hilltop home in St B
relade, with its striking sea view, they’d been so close. So very comfortable with each other that there had been moments – when he’d had perhaps a drink too many – when he’d been tempted to share with her a dark secret from his childhood that he’d harboured for years. But, always, he’d held back.

  Then the twins had come along, and their relationship had inevitably changed. Even more so when their next baby had arrived. Unlike in his previous marriage, he had now been ready for children. They completed him as a family man, but he didn’t like the feeling of being relegated to fourth place in Claire’s affections, behind the children.

  Claire kept her humour even though she was stuck in the house for much of the time with needy three-year-old twins, Rhys and Amelia, and an even needier nine-month-old baby boy, Cormac – the ‘Vomit Comet’. In hindsight, three children under five was hugely stressful and had taken a toll on their relationship. He could only hope it would improve as the kids got older. But despite his misgivings, to the outside world he was the proud, happy father.

  He’d seen so many friends grow apart when their children came along, and, Christ, his own parents had hardly been a shining example. He’d come to realize over the years that, far from being the glue that held relationships together, children could easily become the catalyst for their disintegration. Yet, though parents blamed the children, he knew the truth, that it was the other way around. Just like the words of that poem about your parents fucking you up.

  Would he and Claire break the mould?

  Not if this morning was anything to go by. She’d been so distracted by the twins fighting, she’d given Cormac milk that was far too hot. On top of that she’d begun firing questions at Marcus, blocking him from leaving the front door. A human barrier, as tall as him, long fair hair a wild tangle around her face.

  When are we putting up the Christmas tree?

  Who’s coming?

  What outside lights shall we put up?

  When are you going to give me a list of what you want for Christmas? And shall we get the twins the same presents or different? We’ve got to get them soon or they’ll all be gone.

  ‘I’ve got to go – later, please, Claire. OK? Friday’s my morning in theatre – and I have an emergency ectopic – everyone will be gowned up and waiting, they know that I’m never late for knife to skin.’