Keep Your Friends Close: A gripping psychological thriller full of shocking twists you won’t see coming

She let the question drift.

‘You always said how wonderful this place is, and I thought—’

‘Of course in a good way.’ Karin leaned into him to show her appreciation. ‘It is amazing. I-I suppose I just never imagined I’d return here again. Not as a guest. Well not as anything really. And it costs a fortune to stay in one of these suites in peak season.’

‘Well you’re worth it, aren’t you?’ Aaron replied, squeezing her shoulders together as he opened the door with his other hand. ‘I know you hate extravagance, but I can assure you I negotiated a very good rate in exchange for putting some corporate events their way.’ He tapped his nose, adding, ‘It’s all about connections.’

Once they were inside with the door closed, Karin began to feel a sense of relief. Able to process things without such trepidation racing through her mind, and she told herself that she would soon get over the shock. It was unlikely that Louie still worked here; had probably moved away by now.

‘Well, you weren’t wrong,’ Aaron remarked, flinging himself onto the bed, hands behind his head, lapping up his surroundings. He beckoned Karin over, so she went and perched beside him, sinking into the luxury of the mattress. Aaron may have noticed that she was clutching her stomach, but didn’t say anything if he did. She could feel the tension knotting like seaweed inside it. A knock at the door saved her from having to explain, although she still sprung off the bed and prepared to dart into the bathroom. On seeing that it was one of the older members of staff, who didn’t seem to register her presence, she could relax again.

He set their suitcases down by the bed and gave Aaron a nod after a tip was pushed into his fist on his way out. Aaron closed the door, his hand lingering on the handle. He took another moment or two to consider Karin, then crossed over to the window.

The panoramic view of Morecambe Bay was stunning. But it unnerved her. Nevertheless she made an effort to see it through Aaron’s eyes and went to join him. Aaron seemed grateful for this and draped his arms around her neck.

Karin shuddered at the memories circling out there beneath the darkening sky: throwing her pebbles into the sea; two figures grappling on the wet sands.

‘Not too shabby a view. Is it?’ said Aaron.

She couldn’t allow him to see the swell of tears gathering behind her eyes and turned away from him.

He was distracted though, luckily, checking the time on his phone. ‘I think we should go and get some supper,’ he said. ‘Are you okay to go straight down? It’s getting late.’

Karin sniffed. She had somehow managed not to let a single tear fall and was fanning her arms down her dress. ‘Come ready, you said.’ It did occur to her at that point to suggest room service, but she knew this wasn’t really an option. And what if Louie was on duty and brought it to their room? She tried to rid herself of that thought before it expanded any further. Besides, Aaron had already said how much he was looking forward to dining in the Sun Terrace and what a stunning location it was. Karin didn’t want to disappoint him. He had gone to such lengths. All for her.

He guided her out into the corridor in a gentlemanly fashion. She liked those old school touches, the way he held doors open for her, the small gifts he presented her with and the way he sometimes took her in his arms and glided her round the room in a slow dance. She welcomed his calmness too. With Louie it was always fast and intense, driven by the brashness and daring of youth. A rough-and-ready sort of love which spun out of control. Karin should have ended it far sooner than she did.

Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath and made herself smile. Louie no longer worked here. She was absolutely certain of it.

‘Oh. But we ought to take the stairs,’ she said, immediately thrown into turmoil when Aaron started heading back down the corridor to get the lift. ‘They’re really something. You need to see them.’

The staircase was indeed a stunning feature of this hotel, but it was a delaying tactic on her part. To chance upon Louie directly out of the lift would be like stepping in front of that train. At least the slow, downward twist of the stairs would give her more time to think, and Aaron seemed pleased that she was at last entering into the spirit of this special place.

Karin forced him to linger at the top of the Art Deco stairway, the red carpet spiralling all the way down in an elegant shell shape to the entrance hall below. ‘Wait though,’ she said, still not permitting him to set off until he had also looked up to admire the fresco on the ceiling.

The curved handrail offered itself to her like an old friend. Smooth and solid, it seemed to want to take away some of her stress as her hand wrapped tightly around it. Karin closed her eyes again, feeling for the first step with her toes. These were stairs not to be rushed, like red piano keys unfurling underfoot; a stairway to be seen on, to savour, evoking a bygone era but with a modern-day twist. Karin turned to Aaron and smiled. She was about to remark on some of these things but stopped herself when all the other memories came crashing against her chest; feeling like she was being crushed; causing her to stumble. Aaron was there to catch her, insisting on holding her arm the rest of the way down. Karin couldn’t help thinking that every step she took was delivering her that bit closer to Louie.

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Louie (#ulink_a61c1c10-c5fc-58b9-a366-2156456b2360)

Louie woke up that morning with the same thing on her mind as every other morning. Her hand reached out across the bed.

But she wasn’t there.

Louie pulled back the curtain, flinging the window upwards to fill her lungs from the salty mists of sea air floating past, using the broken broom handle to prop the window open once the frame had stopped rattling. Even before filling the kettle, she felt her nostalgia settling in once again, knowing it would tighten its grip as the day wore on.

Today was Karin’s birthday.

Breakfast in bed, small gift to open. Later on, they would take a stroll on the beach. A few hours painting and lovemaking, then maybe popcorn and a film in the evening when they had finished their shift. Karin wouldn’t want to go out; she rarely did after work, and certainly not with anyone else. She liked to have Louie all to herself.

Louie moved the mannequin into the corner on her way to the bathroom, having to dodge the various canvases as she went. Some propped against walls, pieces of furniture, some already bubble-wrapped and others still waiting to be framed. The whole place looked more like an artist’s studio these days. When Karin was around she had forced Louie to confine the art to one area of the room with a screen round it, as a way of keeping the living space separate. Now it was allowed to spill everywhere. Strange artefacts occupied many of the surfaces, things washed up by the sea. They had collected most of it together. Shells. Bits of wood, all shapes and sizes. Lengths of rope and faded fishing nets. Glass bottles, of interest because of their shape or colour. Broken toys, back from unexpected voyages, nibbled by sharks and other weird-looking sea creatures. Rusted chains. A selection of worn-out coins. A pile of pebbles. Large and small.

The kettle fizzed into a frenzy and switched itself off. Louie slopped a generous amount of milk into her mug but left the teabag in the other to brew a bit longer, the way Karin liked it. After a few seconds of staring at Karin’s mug, she tipped it away and flung it into the sink, breaking the handle.

This room was full of reminders.

The mannequin had on one of Karin’s old T-shirts and a pair of cut-off denim shorts which she had also left behind. Louie rubbed the ends of the T-shirt between her fingers, releasing a tiny bit of her into the air, because it still held a faint trace of Karin’s scent. Something caught her eye on the shelf. A previous birthday offering, a flick-book of the sea that she had made for Karin’s twentieth. As she fanned the pages, a mini-breeze wafted into her face and a tiny seahorse bobbed up and down on the watercolour waves in the bottom corner of each page.

‘Don’t you like it?’ she had asked, because Karin hadn’t said anything at first. Then she realized she was crying, said it was the best birthday present she had ever been given and kissed Louie on the lips.

Louie tried desperately to recreate that, how it felt to have Karin’s lips pressing warm against hers. As time went on she could feel it less and less. Karin had left a void in her life the size of Morecambe Bay. Equally unpredictable, the swirling tide pulling her down when she least expected it. For a long time afterwards, Louie tried to find her. In the note that Karin had left, she said she had gone to the States, although Louie didn’t necessarily believe that. She phoned and messaged her constantly in the hope that Karin would let slip where she had really gone. Was she okay? Why had she left in such a hurry? Did Louie do something wrong? Wasn’t she happy? Had something happened? Why wouldn’t she speak to her? Then the voice of an American girl had finally convinced her, but it had wounded Louie more than anything to think that Karin might have found someone else so quickly. Not long after that, she must have changed her number because Louie couldn’t get hold of her any more.

Despite this, she viewed the separation as a temporary thing. Karin would come back to her one day because they were linked by an inexplicable force, connecting them through life, death, and forever. Meanwhile, Louie found a certain amount of peace in her painting. Her obsession had become her therapy. Although it was as bitter as it was sweet, because Karin was the one who had always encouraged her, and Louie found she was at her most productive in the vacuum Karin left behind. Where this might lead, she wasn’t entirely sure. Selling paintings was a tough way to scratch out a living and, even when the odd commission came her way, she could only afford to treat herself to new canvases and more paint with the proceeds. Karin had left a small amount of money in their joint account to cover a few months’ rent on the bedsit. Louie had blown that in one go, drinking and smoking it away as a kind of protest.

She continued with her shifts at The Midland, arranging for her wages to be paid into her business account instead of the joint one. Of course, she hoped Karin had enough money to live on and that she had found another job, wherever she was, but Louie didn’t want to be subsidizing her relationship with someone else, if that was what was going on.

On her days off, Louie didn’t eat or sleep properly. She just painted, took walks on the beach and thought of Karin.

The invitation to exhibit had given her a new and much-needed focus. It had come out of the blue. Someone had seen her display of portraits on the walls of the Royal Lancaster Infirmary and subsequently got in touch. So at least she now had something to aim for while waiting for Karin to come home. As the exhibition date got closer it became increasingly difficult to move around the bedsit without banging into something. The paintings had taken up enough space as canvases, but in their bulky frames that she made herself from driftwood found on local beaches, they took up even more.

The thought that Karin would not see the exhibition, however, made her achievement seem empty.

She was everywhere.

Only yesterday Louie had come across another of her hairs. It was hanging from the light fitting in the bathroom of all places. Long, twisting and red. She didn’t think there would be any more. Not now. But there it was, glinting in the sunshine streaming through the window. Louie put it with the others.

Her shift at The Midland started at three thirty on a Friday. When Louie stepped out of her block onto the street, in her black trousers and one of Karin’s long-sleeved white shirts, she immediately broke into a sweat. Walking down Albert Road the seagulls laughed mockingly from above. The smell of fish and chips and last night’s beer slops filled her lungs as she turned onto Marine Road West. They had walked this route together many times and Karin was everywhere on the outside too.

Louie thought she could hear her voice. A burst of laughter carried along by the wind. She was even in the cracks in the pavement. They had once spent hours searching for an earring because it was a special gift from her dad. Louie could still identify which crack it had slipped down, and picture the smile on Karin’s face when she said she had found it.

A coach was pulling in up ahead, the next batch of hens and stags arriving into town. Coming towards her was a procession of old cars, tooting their horns as they passed the sign for ‘Vintage Evening of Tunes from a Bygone Era’ at the Winter Gardens. Morecambe was a curious mix of the best and worst of English seaside; like many other resorts, in pursuit of its former glory. Apart from the resplendent Midland hotel and the continuing restoration of the Winter Gardens it was still waiting for the rest of the town to catch up.

But Morecambe was in Louie’s blood. She was born, bred and bullied here and had a fondness for it which she had never been able to shake off, nor did she want to. From a young age she had found her own way of coping with the physical pain others chose to inflict on her – for whatever reason; they must have had one – simply by inflicting greater pain on herself. Burning, cutting, striking, jumping, falling, kicking. Thereby raising her tolerance to pain in general.

The first painting she ever did was in her own blood taken from the wounds given to her by her tormentors. It was of a young girl walking across the waves. The girl was red, the waves were red, the sky was red; everything was red and bloody. It gave Louie back control.

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Karin (#ulink_8740361c-0914-541f-a4be-8402c97c3f00)

Karin paused to look out of the window on their way to the restaurant. The beach, the pier, the sea, they all brought back a rawness in her and made her feel panicky again. She blamed her mother for the way things turned out. If it wasn’t for her total failure at being a mother then she would have stayed on at school, finished her studies, maybe even gone to university. Instead she unravelled, finding herself washed up on the beach in Morecambe, a wreckage of a human being with no one in the world she could to turn to.

Until Louie showed up.

Whether or not her mother had deliberately set out to hurt Karin, the pain still cut deep, even now. Losing her dad was bad enough, but then for her to remarry just a few weeks after he died was truly unforgiveable. How did she expect Karin to feel? The way she had done it, too, in secret, and to someone Karin had never even met. It was cruel and disrespectful, an insult to her dad’s memory.

Nothing was ever Karin’s business. Not the small stuff, not the big stuff. She was even the last to know that her father had died. What mother does that? Waits four days to tell her daughter that her dad has passed away? Four days. ‘It was better to wait until after your exams, Karin. Those are important.’