Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins

‘All right, taking all this into consideration, would you say that, on the whole, you were happy – or at least content – at the time of the accident at Burrator?’

‘Yes,’ I say, with some force: because it is true, and the truth is easy to say. ‘Tessa, that’s what makes it so awful! What gives me flashbacks, the horrors: I nearly lost it all. I have a husband I love, a daughter I love, a home I love, and I nearly lost it all, because of some stupid ice on a stupid Dartmoor road. I am very lucky. I’ve been given a second chance. I was actually technically dead for a few seconds!’ I shake my head, marvelling at my own luck. ‘Yes, life could be better: we need more money, Lyla needs help, it’s far from perfect, but what is money compared to life? No one ever died wishing they’d bought a bigger TV.’

Tessa smiles politely, yet I think I detect a faint, sad blush on her face. For a moment we both listen to the wind, knocking things over in the farmyard outside, like a drunk returning home from the pub. I wonder what Lyla is doing now. At school. Sitting alone in assembly, perhaps. Not talking to anyone. Ignored and friendless. Her mind wandering on to the moor, thinking of her newest bird feathers, and that piece of antler-felt her father found.

‘Kath, you clearly know you have retrograde amnesia? Because of the brain trauma?’

‘Yes. Of course! I know I’ve forgotten some stuff from before the crash, a week or so, but there are fragments, and the psychiatrists at the hospital say it will all come back. But, Jesus, I wish I could forget the actual crash! I still see the ice, the skid, the water – ugh—’

I close my eyes to dull the mental pain. When I open them, Tessa is frowning.

‘Well, the thing is, Kath: what the doctors at Derriford Hospital might not have properly explained about this amnesia is that you can forget that you’ve forgotten. That is to say, there are holes in your memory that you don’t even realize are there, and the mind tries to fill them.’

The wind has stopped abruptly. The whole house is quiet. I realize that the dogs must have gone with Adam and Lyla. All I can hear is Dartmoor rain on the window. A tinkly-tankly sound. I feel a sense of congealing fear. Some kind of horror is approaching. Like a moorland witch, creeping along the hedgerow. And we don’t have any hag stones. We have nothing to keep the witches away.

I can’t stand this any longer.

‘OK, this really is enough, Tessa. Tell me why you are here, in my kitchen?’ I am close to shouting. ‘I’ve told you everything. You know most of it already. So now it’s my turn to ask. Why are you here?’

‘Because,’ she says, looking deep, deep into my eyes, ‘you didn’t have an accident, Kath.’

‘What?’

‘Your mind has invented this. Invented the ice, invented it all.’

‘What?’ The panic rises in my throat, an acrid, metallic taste. ‘What? What do you mean? I had the bruises, I’ve seen the doctors. The bloody car is at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. I had to buy a new one!’

‘Yes, it is. The car is down there. But that’s because you drove it in there, deliberately.’

I sense my life pivot around this moment. A ritual dance. ‘You mean – you mean – you can’t possibly—’

Tessa Kinnersley shakes her head, and I see the most enormous pity in her eyes. ‘Kath, there was no accident. You tried to leave your husband and daughter behind, to destroy yourself, to destroy everything. You tried to commit suicide. We just don’t know why.’

Later Thursday morning

Absolute stillness. That’s what it feels like. Absolute stillness, as if the beating heart of the world has slowed to a stop. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then a lash of rain hits the windowpanes, breaking the quiet, and my words rush out.

‘How can you think that?’

Tessa remains calm, doing her job. She’s not here as a friend, but as a professional psychologist.

‘You were observed.’

‘Sorry?’

‘There was a witness at Burrator. By the reservoir. Walking his dog. It was night but there was a full moon, and he saw you drive your car, quite deliberately, into the water.’

‘But—’ The panic rises, like that black cold water, the water I can so vividly remember, and yet I can’t? ‘But. No. No way. Can’t be. There was ice. I skidded.’

‘Check the records, Kath, go back and look.’ Her arms folded, Tessa continues, her voice deliberately low and kind: overtly calming. ‘Go online and look at the weather for that night, December thirtieth. It was one of those dry and mild winter evenings we get. Twelve degrees centigrade. A southwest wind. There was no ice. Also …’ I flinch, inwardly.

‘Also, Kath, there is a wall around Burrator, you must remember that. A big, thick brick wall, a solid Victorian construction, far too strong for a car to smash through. You know Burrator well, you must recall this?’

She’s right. I do. There is a wall. Yet my mind has deceived me, recreated a different place: a place where I might drive in accidentally.

‘So how did I … I don’t get it—’ I swallow. I mustn’t cry.

Tessa guesses my question. ‘They were doing some construction at Burrator, rebuilding part of the wall, leaving a gap, barely wide enough for a car to slip through. The chances of skidding on ice, or whatever, and hitting the right spot would be pretty tiny, infinitesimal. But anyway you didn’t skid, and there was no ice, and you simply aimed the car, very carefully.’

‘There must have been someone else in the car.’

‘I’m sorry, it was you, just one person was seen, driving, and it was you. Only you drove into the reservoir; only you came out.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

The tears gather now. I stare, blurrily, up at that calendar. Kitty Jay’s grave, covered in snow, the flowers so forlorn against the whiteness. This is the famous beauty spot near Chagford, where my mother’s ashes are scattered: and I shrink inside. I huddle from the thought, the irony: what would Mum think of me? Of this terrible thing. Suicide? Like Kitty Jay herself? My mum loved life, she devoured it, despised the idea of suicide, and she taught that to me.

The words come again, all too quickly. ‘But why would I kill myself, Tessa? Why on earth would I do that? It’s hateful, suicide: it’s so selfish, the most selfish thing, and I was quite happy, I was. Yes, we had problems, with money, and Lyla, but I love her, I love – I love my husband – I love my daughter!’

And now the waters engulf me, and the truth pours in through the car window. Adam obviously knows all this, hence his cold anger, his strange distance, these past weeks. And I don’t blame him. What must he think of me? I tried to kill myself, for no apparent reason, I was prepared to leave him without a wife; and, worst of all, far worse, the deepest, darkest water of all, I was prepared to leave Lyla without a mother.

‘No,’ I say, flatly, defiantly. ‘NO. I don’t believe it. I would never do that. Never leave Lyla without a mother, never ever, ever. I am not that kind of woman, not that sort of mother! I love Lyla to bits. I would die for my daughter. Not die and leave her here. Oh God.’

I have to take a huge breath or I will shatter. I am a monster, a gargoyle. I am a leering thing made of dead birds and smeared blood. A horrible Inuit spirit-doll with feathers and yellow teeth. Here I sit in this warm bright kitchen with its ancient walls and the Come to Dartmouth tea towels: and yet I am something grotesque, a woman who would leave her lovely, fragile daughter without a mother … No.

‘I didn’t do it, Tessa. I didn’t! There has to be some other explanation.’

Tessa looks at me assessingly, as if judging how much I can take; reaching into her bag she lifts out a folded piece of paper, places it on the table. As she unfolds it, carefully, she reveals an image. The image looks scanned, photocopied. There seems to be handwriting on it, and it is small, introverted handwriting: scratchy and spidery.

I recognize this distinctive handwriting, from all the way across the kitchen table.

It is mine.

Tessa advises me, gently, ‘Adam has the original. This is a copy.’

I know what I am about to see: it is obvious. It doesn’t have to be said. But I also need to see it, to secure the lid on this. To hammer in the iron nails, so that no hope can escape.

Tessa pushes the paper across the table. With trembling hands I turn it around, and read my own handwriting:

The words are mine. I don’t remember writing them, don’t remember them at all, but this is my handwriting: I wrote this.

I tried to kill myself.

I shunt the paper aside, lean forward on my folded arms, gently rest my head on them. I can smell the clean, honest wood of our kitchen table, where I have spent so much time, with my husband, with my daughter, cooking suppers, drinking wine, laughing loudly, being a family. Here at this table. And now, at this same table, I quietly break into a sob, and keep sobbing.

Tessa says nothing, I stare down at the darkness between my arms, and sob and sob, in my white-painted kitchen. But I am not crying for me, I am crying for Adam, for my dead mother, for my brother, for this house, for this place around me, for the wildflowers on the high moors in the summer, for the meadowsweet at Whitehorse Hill, for the foxgloves down at Broada Marsh, for the sundews and shepherd’s dials and pennyroyals and roses – all the flowers my daughter loves, all the ones that she can name and I cannot, all the one she shows me, all the flowers and rocks and feathers she collects, because I am crying, crying, crying for my daughter, the little girl I was prepared to hurt, to damage, to dismiss, to throw away; the girl I picture, standing alone in the farmyard, listening for the tiny animals, puzzled in her anorak, wondering why her mother tried to run away forever.

To kill herself.