Read the book: «If You Love Me: Part 1 of 3: True love. True terror. True story.»
Copyright
Certain details in this story, including names, places and dates, have been changed to protect the family’s privacy.
HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2017
FIRST EDITION
© Alice Keale and Jane Smith 2017
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover photograph © Stephen Carroll/Arcangel Images (posed by model)
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Alice Keale and Jane Smith assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008205256
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008214920
Version: 2016-12-20
Dedication
For my family and friends, who never gave up on me. I wouldn’t be where I am today without their continued love and support.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Moving Memoirs eNewsletter
About the Publisher
Prologue
I glanced down at the luminous hands of the large watch that made my wrist look as thin as a child’s. Surely that couldn’t be the right time. It couldn’t possibly have taken me as long as that just to get this far. Then I remembered that he’d set the watch before I left, so I knew it was accurate. Which meant that I would have to run even faster if I was going to reach the pub, take a photograph on his mobile phone and get back to the house in the few minutes that remained before time ran out.
Quickening my pace, I scanned the darkness of every side street and every shop doorway I passed. And I listened too, for the sound of approaching footsteps or distant voices.
As I ran past the café where we had sat together just a few hours earlier, I thought I saw a flicker of movement, and the ever-present knot of fear tightened inside me. It was almost 1 a.m. on a Wednesday night and I’d been certain I was the only person out on the street. But, suddenly, a man stepped out of the shadows directly in front of me.
I had to swerve off the pavement and on to the road to avoid being caught in his outstretched arms, and as I did so I was engulfed in the alcohol-laden breath he exhaled when he lunged towards me. I gasped in shocked surprise, but kept on running, ignoring the sharp objects I could feel cutting into the flesh of my bare, bruised feet and the incoherent shouts of the man who stumbled after me down the dimly lit street.
I couldn’t really blame him for pursuing me – a woman running naked through the streets of London in the middle of the night. Perhaps he thought I was playing some salacious game. It was certainly an explanation that would have made more sense than the real reason, which I didn’t understand myself – and I was completely sober.
I was frightened of the drunk man, and of what he might do if he caught up with me. But I was even more frightened of what would happen if I didn’t get home within the next three minutes. ‘Maybe this time it will be enough,’ I thought, as I ran, sobbing, through the darkness.
‘Please, God,’ I whispered into the night, ‘let it be this time.’
Chapter 1
Although my love life was pretty much a disaster, things were going well at work and I’d managed to save enough money for a deposit on a flat of my own. So when my flatmate, Connie, went to live with her boyfriend, I arranged to rent the spare room in my friend Cara’s flat until I could find somewhere to buy.
It was August 2011 and I was alone on what would be my last night in the rented flat Connie and I had shared. I’d already taken almost everything I was going to need in the short term to Cara’s place and stored the rest in the garage at my parents’ house in Devon. So all I had to do that evening was pack a small suitcase to take with me the next day. I was looking forward to buying a place of my own and starting the next phase of my life, and after having a nice dinner out with friends I was just thinking about heading off to bed for an early night when I heard the sound of breaking glass.
The flat was above some shops on quite a busy street, and my first thought was that there’d been a car accident. But what I saw when I looked out of the window was like a scene from a dystopian film. There were people running in every direction, most of them wearing hoodies and scarves that concealed their faces and some of them hurling what looked like bricks and bottles through shop windows. At first, I couldn’t make any sense of what was happening. Then, as I watched, with my back pressed against the wall beside the window so that I couldn’t be seen, a group of people started rocking a car from side to side, before stumbling backwards when smoke began to curl around it and then flames exploded out of it.
I was shaking as I phoned the police. ‘There’s rioting all over London,’ the police operator told me. ‘So it might be some time before anyone gets there. Just stay in your flat. Whatever you do, don’t go outside.’
I moved away from the window after speaking to her, and was crouched in the hallway when my phone rang. ‘Dad and I have been listening to the news,’ Mum said, sounding less worried than she would have done if she’d known the true situation. ‘Is there rioting where you are?’
‘It’s fine,’ I told her, walking from the hallway into my bedroom at the back of the flat and closing the door as I spoke, so that she wouldn’t hear the sounds from the street.
I didn’t know the neighbours, who’d only recently moved in to the flat next door. But after I’d reassured Mum, I knocked on their door and asked if I could sit with them for a while, because I didn’t want to be on my own. Something had been thrown through their living-room window just a few minutes earlier, and after they’d shown me the shards of glass that covered the carpet we sat in their bedroom, as far away from the street as we could get, and waited for the police to arrive. In fact, things had already started to calm down a bit by the time they got there, and I decided to go back to my place and try to get a couple of hours’ sleep.
It felt as though my head had only just touched the pillow when my phone rang again. It was Connie this time, and her voice was tight with anxiety as she asked, ‘Are you in the flat, Alice? It’s on TV. I’m watching it now. They’ve set fire to the shops underneath. You’ve got to get out.’
I’d been so tired I’d fallen into bed fully clothed and I was just grabbing my suitcase when there was a knock on the front door. The fireman who was standing there when I opened it told me, ‘We’re evacuating the building. They’ve fire-bombed the shop on the corner. You need to leave – now.’ So I followed my neighbours out on to the smoke-filled street, where the last of the rioters were being herded past the burning buildings and around the corner by police.
Someone had opened up a café a few doors down from the flat, to provide a refuge for people who’d had to be evacuated from their homes. It was about four o’clock in the morning by that time, and all the other people there looked as exhausted and dazed as I felt. Fortunately, the fire didn’t spread to my flat, and when the fire-fighters eventually got it under control, I was able to go back and try to sleep again for a couple of hours.
Someone from the letting agency was due to do an inventory later that morning, but I was so tired by the time he arrived that I left him to it. Cara was away for a couple of days, so she’d given me a key to let myself in to her flat, and although I had been planning to go there first to drop off my bag, being at work suddenly seemed like a much better option than sitting there on my own.
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