Read the book: «Dying For You»

CHAPTER ONE

ANNIE got the first phone call at midnight on a cold spring night.

‘Remember me?’ a voice whispered, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.

She had only just got back to her London flat, she was alone, and already on the verge of tears because her best friend, Diana, had just married the man Annie loved.

‘Who is this?’ she asked, then wondered if it was one of the band, who were all still drinking at the bar in the hotel where the wedding reception had been held. When they were drunk all five of them could do the silliest things.

But there was no reply. The phone went dead. She hung up, frowning, then switched on the answering machine. The last thing she needed tonight was crank phone calls.

She turned away with a swish of silk, comforted by the sensual feel of the sleek material against her skin. Annie loved good clothes. She had helped Diana choose her wedding-dress and had chosen the dress she herself wore as brides-maid—almond-green silk, a colour which exactly matched the colour of her eyes. She would be able to wear it for parties afterwards. There was a faintly Victorian look about the style of the dress, as there had been about Di’s wedding-dress; and Annie had put up her long black hair into a smooth chignon at the back of her head, carried a tiny Victorian-style bouquet of violets displayed on ferns.

She must take the best-looking flower and a spray of fern out of the bouquet, and put them between the pages of a book of poetry. She often pressed wild flowers in books; she liked finding them when she turned the pages years afterwards, being reminded of some special day, some important moment in her life. They always seemed to retain their scent, yet altered and nostalgic, a gentle, faded sweetness that gave her back instant memories.

However hurt she felt, she knew this had been a very important day in her life; she would want to remember it.

Yawning, she looked at her watch. Bed! she thought, seeing that it was way past midnight now. Annie kept strict hours when she wasn’t performing on stage. She would be in bed by ten most days, up very early, and tomorrow was no different. Tomorrow she had to be up at seven. She had a photo call at nine at the recording studio where she was just putting the final touches to her new disc.

She took off her green silk dress and hung it up carefully in her wall-to-wall wardrobe, put on a brief nightdress and matching négligé, then sat down at the dressing-table and started to take off her make-up, and smooth a toning lotion into her skin. However late, however tired she was, Annie always went through the same routine before going to bed.

‘When you’re in the public eye all the time people notice everything about you, so never forget to look your best. You are always going to be on stage!’ Philip had told her years ago.

She hadn’t been sure then that she liked the idea. In fact, it had been her first premonition that fame and success were not going to be without their drawbacks.

Philip had watched her shrewdly. ‘Not so sure you like that, kid? Well, now’s the time to make your mind up, before you really get started. If you want to be a star you have to take the rough with the smooth; there’s no two ways about it. If you want out now, you only have to say so. Nobody knows you yet; you can easily go back to your old life without anyone being any the wiser.’

She hadn’t wanted out. She had looked at him with wide, melancholy green eyes and sighed.

‘There’s nothing for me to go back to,’ she remembered saying. ‘I want to be a singer more than anything else in the world.’

It had been that simple then; it was that simple now, and yet it got harder every year, although that was something Philip hadn’t warned her about. The strain of being at the top and fighting to stay there was only a part of it; there was a more personal price to pay, because the public wouldn’t give you any space. They ate you up if you let them, and you never knew whether you could trust the people you met; you couldn’t be sure if they really liked you, or were starstruck, or wanted to use you in some way.

That was a hard lesson to learn. It hurt, and you were tempted to grow a second skin, toughen up; but Annie instinctively knew you couldn’t let yourself get too tough or the music would lose something vital. Getting hurt sometimes seemed essential to the music. Some of her best songs had been written about her secret feelings for Philip, feelings of which he seemed blithely unaware.

He had always treated her the same way from the beginning: as if to him she would always be the seventeen-year-old kid he had met all those years ago. In the beginning she had been relieved to find she could trust him to keep his hands to himself, not to proposition her or make off-colour jokes. Philip was a tough businessman, but he was kind and thoughtful to her; he treated her as if she were his daughter or his sister, and at first that had been fine. Until she had realised she was in love with him, but that Philip simply didn’t see her that way.

It was from that time that her songs had begun to have a deeper tone, she thought wryly, looking back. Until then she had just been pretending to write about love; like most people when they were young, she had loved sad songs, had acted out emotions she had never really felt. Falling in love with Philip had made her work far more personal, far more real, and in the past six months she had written some of the best work she had ever done, because her grief and loss when she heard that he was going to marry Diana had made the songs pour out of her, often two or three a week, a very high production rate, for her or any other songwriter.

It had helped to keep her busy. In preparation for her new disc and the forthcoming European tour she was to make, over the last six months she had been working so hard that she hadn’t had time to think too much.

For eight years she had had Philip and Diana to rely on, for help, advice, comfort and companionship. Philip was her agent and manager, and to look after her when she first came to London he had found Diana Abbot, who was then a twenty-two-year-old secretary in Philip’s office. Diana had gone on working for Philip, but she had also shared Annie’s flat, made sure she got to the studio on time, accompanied her on tours, and dealt with the Press and any other problems Annie ran into. A tough, capable, streetwise girl from the back streets of Liverpool, Di had a kind heart, warm brown eyes that smiled all the time and an infectious laugh.

Annie was as fond of Di as she was in love with Philip. He wasn’t handsome, but he had sex appeal. Tall and rangy, with steady, cynical blue eyes and hair the colour of toffee, he was always noticed by women. Annie had had to watch him dating other girls for years, a little comforted because none of his affairs lasted long. His life was too busy, too involved with work. The girls got bored with waiting for him to ring them, and moved on. Annie kept hoping Philip would finally realise that she was no longer a girl of seventeen, but a grown woman, but she had never once imagined that when Philip did fall in love it would be with Diana.

Three months ago a mix-up over luggage had meant that the two of them had missed a connecting flight during Annie’s coast-to-coast tour of America. A blizzard had raged for two days, making it impossible for them to fly on to catch up with Annie and the band. It had been the first time Philip and Diana had ever spent a long time alone together.

‘I really got to know him,’ Diana had said later, telling a pale, stunned Annie that she and Philip were getting married. ‘Funny, I’d known him for years without ever getting past the surface, but once we started talking it was like peeling an onion; there were layers I’d never suspected. We couldn’t go out of the airport hotel: the wind was like a knife, and the snow was six feet deep in places. There was a power cut, and we had no TV, no heat and no light, so we huddled under quilts, in our overcoats, and talked and talked.’

‘And fell in love?’ Annie had said, pretending to laugh, and Diana had turned a face glowing with happiness to her, nodding.

‘And fell in love. Crazy, isn’t it, after knowing each other for years? It was as if there had been a wall between us, and suddenly it fell down.’

Annie had felt sick at first. She had been hurt and jealous, bitterly shaken by this blow, but because she loved them both she had managed to hide her real reaction.

Neither of them had an inkling what the news had done to her. That was one good thing. She had never confided her love for Philip to Diana, and she had never let Philip himself glimpse it, either. At least they didn’t know how she felt, so all she had to do was go on acting, pretending to be delighted for them.

And in a funny sort of way, she was—she did love them both, and she wanted them to be happy, even if it meant that she was going to be left alone, after years of being the most important thing in both their lives.

She had first met Philip at a friend’s party where she had sung a couple of songs. It had never occurred to her to think of a life as a professional singer. When Philip told her he could make her a star she hadn’t believed him. She had no self-confidence and very little vanity, yet some instinct had made her trust him, and that instinct had been a sound one.

Everything he had promised her had come true, slowly at first, but over the last few years with dizzying speed. First she had worked in clubs, at night, while in the daytime she had had vocal training, stage training, dance lessons, and then Phil had got her that first recording contract, which really started her career. Now she was becoming known in America, and in two weeks’ time she would open her tour of Europe with a big concert in Paris.

She was becoming a star in the UK too, which brought its own problems, including getting crank calls, but she didn’t often get them now because her phone was no longer listed anywhere; only a handful of people knew her number. She had gone ex-directory several years ago when she started getting problems with fans ringing her day and night. At the same time she had moved to this flat in a rather exclusive district close to one of London’s big parks. The street was lined with trees; there was no passing-through traffic, just the cars of wealthy residents, or visiting tradesmen. There were big houses set in large gardens, so that one got a sense of living almost in the country, there was so much greenery around and on warm days a delicious country smell of leaves and flowers.

Even more important than all this, the large block of luxury flats into which Annie moved had a very thorough security system. There was a uniformed guard, with a savage-looking dog, on patrol all night around the grounds, and the electronically controlled doors of the building only admitted you if you had a card which you fitted into the computer by the door. You had to tap in your personal security number. Only then did the door open for you.

This was one of those anonymous blocks of flats where everyone behaved in a civilised fashion, not playing TVs or radios at top blast, not having riotous parties, not having violent rows with each other. There had been two bedrooms, one for her, one for Diana, who had shared the flat with her.

Now Annie would be living there alone, and she was finding it hard to adjust to that. She had never lived alone before. Before she met Philip she had lived with her mother and stepfather and her two stepbrothers in London. The family had all been relieved when she moved out: the house had been overcrowded, and Annie had never got on with her stepfather. She had barely seen any of them since.

Living alone was faintly nerve-racking. She listened to the silence: the only sound was the low hum of the central heating system, of the fridge in the kitchen. There were people living all around her, yet they were so quiet that it was like living alone, on the moon.

Every flat was occupied, in fact. This was a very popular apartment block; there was a waiting list of tenants wanting flats. A number of celebrities could be seen coming in and going out; often they had other homes and only kept their flat in this block for trips to London. It was well managed, comfortable, with a swimming-pool, saunas and a very well equipped gymnasium.

Life was easy here: lifts whisked you up and down, there was always a porter on the door, your garbage was disposed of by simply pushing it into a chute next to the lift. There was even an underground car park so that if fans did ever find out where she lived and waited outside she would be able to drive out of the building without being stopped.

Annie had felt totally safe there. Until now.

But it was stupid to let the phone call prey on her mind. After all, it hadn’t been obscene, just some stupid joke by one of the band, probably.

Yet as she climbed into bed she was still thinking about the call. If it was just a joke, why did it bother her so much? It did; she couldn’t deny it. The words kept ringing in her head. Remember me. Remember me? Had it been a question, or a demand?

Whichever it had been the intonation had somehow been disturbing, no doubt because she was here alone, for the first time in her life, feeling abandoned, left behind.

Tonight she was an easy target for whoever had rung. But nobody could have known that. She had tried to fool everyone at the wedding, tried to be the life and soul of the party afterwards—at all costs, Philip and Diana mustn’t guess at her real mood. They had every right to take happiness when they found it; she didn’t want to ruin their big day.

She wasn’t a teenager any more; she was twenty-five, for heaven’s sake! She could look after herself; she had flown the Atlantic several times, could speak French and Italian quite well, was learning Spanish—these days, as Philip said, music was an international business and meant a lot of travelling. The more languages you knew, the better.

So stop feeling sorry for yourself! she thought crossly. You’ve got plenty of life skills; you can manage on your own.

She could drive a car, cook; she had even had self-defence training and could throw a man over her shoulder if the need arose. Surely to heaven she could learn to live alone, and she could cope with grief and loss. You could cope with anything if you had to.

She turned over and settled to sleep, and some time during the night she vaguely heard the phone begin to ring, then cut out as the machine took over, but she was beyond caring by then.

In the morning she was in a rush to get to work, so she didn’t even bother to listen to the answering machine; she simply left it switched on.

The photo session was boring. She always felt like a dummy being arranged in a shop window, and her face ached from smiling by the time it was over.

‘Try to look happy, love!’ urged the photographer gloomily.

‘Sorry, I hate having my photo taken!’ she said.

‘It shows,’ the photographer told her. ‘Relax. Look, just a few more and we’re finished.’

The band lined up behind him and made elephant’s ears with their hands, and she laughed naturally.

‘That’s better!’ the photographer said.

The drummer, a huge boy of twenty called Brick because he was built like a brick wall, grinned at her as they all walked away. ‘I read in a book once that primitive tribesmen think that when you take their picture you’re stealing their souls—is that what you think, Annie?’

He was the band’s leading joker; the others all chuckled.

‘I just hate pictures of myself!’ she muttered, wondering if it had been Brick who had rung her last night, and he looked down at her slanting vivid green eyes, her sleek black hair and the small, pale-skinned triangular face which some journalist had not long ago described as giving her the look of a kitten caught out in the rain. That had made the band laugh their heads off! But it had infuriated Annie.

‘You can’t be serious!’ Brick said, shaking his head at her. ‘You’re amazingly photogenic, love! And you should be used to cameras by now; your face is always in some magazine or other these days.’

She shrugged without answering. Her dislike of cameras was another of her instinctive reactions, a gut feeling based on nothing rational, purely primitive, no doubt. People never understood; she rarely tried to explain any more.

‘Did you ring me last night, Brick?’ she asked, and he looked blank.

‘Ring you? No. Did you ask me to? I don’t remember anything much about the wedding after the reception started.’

The others all roared with laughter. Annie smiled wryly. No, it hadn’t been Brick, or, from the expressions of the rest of the band, any of them, either. She knew them well enough to be sure she would have picked up a self-conscious expression if the phone call had been a joke by one of them.

She and the band rehearsed for hours, not breaking for lunch, just having a yoghurt and an apple some time during the day. Philip got angry if she put on weight. It ruined the image he had spent years building up.

He was always telling her, ‘Image is everything in this business! It isn’t what you are, it’s what they think you are that matters, and you have to be certain always to look the way they think you should.’

The public saw her the way Philip intended they should—a street singer, small, sad, lonely, defiant.

She wore her long black hair down, framing her pale face. Her make-up highlighted her big eyes, her wide mouth. Her stage costumes were simple and inexpensive; she wore mostly black, accenting her slenderness, her frailty. And although the songs changed with the years, the mood of her singing remained the same. Her fans liked her that way.

Sometimes, though, Annie felt trapped inside a persona Philip had created but which she wasn’t sure fitted her any longer, even if it had when she first began singing.

‘Missing Phil and Di?’ Brick asked her as they left the rehearsal rooms. ‘Come and have a curry with us; we’re going to that Indian place down the street.’

She shook her head. ‘Too fattening. I’ll eat at home; see you all.’

When she got home she automatically switched on the answering machine while she was slitting open her private mail, all of it from friends in the music business. There was a letter from Philip’s office about the forthcoming tour, signed in his absence by his secretary, a telephone bill and a postcard from Budapest from a previous member of the band who had left to join another group, who were touring Hungary.

Annie read that first, smiling over the few scribbled words, and then her head lifted in shock as she heard the whispering voice on the answering machine. She had been so busy all day that she had forgotten last night’s crank call, but she remembered now as he said softly, ‘Remembered me yet?’

The phone clicked off again, but that wasn’t the end of it. The recording whirred on again. He had rung a second time; this time he whispered, ‘I remember you, Annie. I remember everything.’

Annie felt ice trickle down her spine. She stared at the machine, waiting, but there was nothing else on it; it clicked off.

Who on earth was it? Not Brick. It wasn’t one of his silly jokes. These phone calls were no joke. They were too disturbing to be funny. Were they veiled threats? Some sort of come-on meant to intrigue her? She had no idea what was behind them, but one thing was certain. She had never heard that voice before.

She was sure she didn’t know this man, that they had never met, or if they had it had been so brief, so casual, that she had simply forgotten all about it.

Why hadn’t he? She shivered, frowning. It was scary to think that out there was a man who thought he knew her when he didn’t. Was it some crazy fan who had started to believe his own fantasy? She had heard about things like that; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might actually happen to her.

And that accent of his... It was odd in some indefinable way, perfectly good English, but there was a faint note occasionally that made her wonder if he was a foreigner.

She was very aware of being alone in the flat. It was night again, very quiet. Was she the only person awake in the whole block of flats?

Walking over to the window, she looked out into the London sky, glowing with sulphurous yellow light from the street-lamps below. Annie gazed at the tall houses opposite, some rooms lit, others dark. There were people in all those houses, people in the other flats above and below her. Yet she felt intensely alone, and she was frightened.

The phone rang and she jumped violently. Swinging round, she stared across the room. She had forgotten to put the answering machine on again.

Well, she wasn’t answering him. She would let it ring and ring; he would give up in the end, believing she was out.

She went to the bathroom and ran the shower full on to drown the sound of the phone, had a lengthy shower. As she switched off the jet of water and stepped out, wrapping herself in a towelling robe, the flat was silent again and she heaved a sigh of relief, but as she walked towards the kitchen in bare feet the phone began to ring again.

She angrily shut herself in the kitchen and made some supper: a small mixed salad sprinkled with chopped nuts and fruit. The phone still rang and rang.

He wasn’t reacting the way she had thought he would. Why wasn’t he giving up? Surely it must be obvious that she was out?

She wasn’t, of course. But he couldn’t know that. Could he? Her nerves jangled. Could he? But what if he was out there, somewhere, near by, watching her?

Her heart almost stopped. If he lived near here, or was down there in the street, he could see her lights on; he would know she was in the flat.

Suddenly a new idea occurred to her. What if it wasn’t the guy who had been ringing her? What if this was Philip or Diana, ringing her from their honeymoon hotel, to check that she was OK? They would be worried if she didn’t answer, at this hour of the night.

She ran out of the kitchen into the sitting-room, snatched up the ringing phone.

‘Hello?’ she breathlessly said.

‘I wondered how long it would be before you answered,’ the smoky voice said, and her heart skipped a beat.

‘Why are you doing this? Stop ringing me; leave me alone—who are you?’ she gabbled, hardly aware what she was saying.

‘Haven’t you remembered yet? Never mind, you will.’

‘Look, it’s very late, and I’m tired; will you get off this line? And don’t ring again!’ Annie shakily said.

‘Are you ready for bed?’ he whispered, and she began to tremble, almost believing he could see her. He knew she was only wearing a robe and was naked underneath it. ‘You must be tired; you’ve had a long day,’ he said, and her eyes stretched wide, in shock. ‘I won’t keep you up; I just wanted to say goodnight,’ he murmured softly. ‘I’ll be seeing you soon, Annie.’

The phone went dead again, and she slammed her own down, panic pouring through her. He was coming here. What else had that meant?

She ran to the front door of the flat to check it was locked, stood in the hallway listening to the usual silence, waiting for the sound of his footsteps, for a ring on the door.

It was minutes before she remembered the security system in the flats. He couldn’t get in; the night porter downstairs on the desk would ring her, wouldn’t admit anyone until she said it was OK.

Yet somehow she wasn’t entirely sure. She waited, her heart in her mouth. The minutes ticked by; nothing happened. No phone rang; nobody came to the door. She shakily retreated to the living-room, sat staring at the silent phone, waiting.

It was two hours before she realised he wasn’t coming; not tonight, at least. She wondered then if she should ring the police, move out, go to a hotel, but she wouldn’t let this crazy person drive her from her home. When Phil and Di got back they would be horrified if they heard about it; they’d feel guilty, think that she couldn’t cope alone.

No, this was some sort of war of nerves. For some reason this man was trying to frighten her, but she wasn’t going to let him. What could the police do if she told them about it? Monitor her phone calls? Maybe she should have her number changed again. But then how had he got this number in the first place, and would he get the new one too?

Who was he? How did he know so much about her?

She went to bed, and managed to sleep after a while. When she woke up next morning she had a confused memory of a dream; phones had been ringing, a voice had haunted her sleep, there had been strange, terrifying flashes of light, and for some reason she had kept hearing the sea.

It must have been the traffic of London in the distance, she decided as she got ready. It sometimes sounded like the sea when you heard it at night, and the flashes of light must have been headlights from passing cars.

She and the band rehearsed hard for eight hours that day. She had no time to think about anything else, but as she drove home that evening she began to wonder what messages she was going to find on the answerphone, and her nerves leapt as she switched on the machine.

There were none. Relief made her feel almost sick, but the next day she rushed to the answerphone as soon as she got back to her flat. This time there was a short message from Philip’s office. No messages from the whispering voice. Perhaps he had got tired of playing cat and mouse with her, had given up the game or turned his attention elsewhere.

She got a card from Philip and Diana a couple of days later: blue skies, palm trees, a ludicrously blue sea and on the other side a message that made her laugh, ending with a reminder that they would meet her and the band in Paris in a week. They would need time to rehearse at the venue itself, and do Press interviews before the tour began, and Annie hoped to get in some sightseeing.

Annie was beginning to get used to living alone by the time she drove to Heathrow to catch the flight to Paris. The equipment was going overland, and then by sea, in large vans, and the band had all elected to go with it. Brick, in particular, had a neurotic fear of something happening to his amazingly expensive drums if they got out of his sight. Annie preferred to fly, though; it was quicker and more comfortable.

There had been no more of the weird phone calls; she was sleeping normally again and looking forward to seeing Di and Phil very soon. She was going to have to get used to the fact that they belonged to each other now, more than they did to her, of course. It would be painful, difficult at times; but Annie was determined to get over this first awkward phase of the new relationship. The other two meant too much to her for her to want to lose them. She would simply have to live with her feelings, as she had for years now, and maybe one day she would meet someone else, and get over Phil at last.

She would be the first to arrive in Paris, since the band would take quite a while to drive across France with all their equipment. They planned to stop en route at a hotel for the night, and they would join Annie at the hotel the following day.

Philip’s secretary had arranged for Annie to be met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car, and she had an escort on the plane, a couple of security men hired by Phil to make sure she had no problems on the flight. They all sat in first-class, the men on the aisle side, in case someone tried to talk to Annie, who sat by the window.

She was casually dressed in a black and scarlet skiing jacket under which she wore a white silk jersey shirt, and black ski-pants and boots. A few passengers walked past, staring, but she kept her face averted, staring out of the window, and when they landed she was whisked through the VIP channel at Charles de Gaulle and escorted almost immediately out of a side-door. A large black limousine was waiting. The two security men had words with the chauffeur in a dark suit, who got out as they approached. He held the door open for Annie, half bowing, murmured a greeting in French, and Annie climbed into the back and settled down in the luxurious, leather-upholstered interior, while her Gucci luggage was loaded on to the car.

The two security men weren’t coming with her in the car; they were returning to England. A French security team would take over whenever required. The driver closed the door and got behind the wheel, then the limousine purred softly away and from behind smoked glass windows she watched the airport terminal disappear as they followed the unwinding ribbon on the auto-route.

It was some minutes later that she turned her gaze to the front again, and noticed the driver. She hadn’t noticed his face when she got into the car, and now she couldn’t see it, but he had smooth black hair and wide shoulders. She caught a glimpse of his neck, tanned and powerful above a white collar. He hadn’t said a word to her since they set off, for which she was grateful, because now that she was in France she was nervous about practising her French. She had been learning it for years, and could talk quite easily to her teacher, but that was a very different matter from talking to French people in their own country.