Friend Request Page 20

  I don’t remember anyone of that name. My heartbeat slows a little.

  ‘Was she in our year?’

  ‘She said she was. I think there was a Naomi, wasn’t there? Maybe Strawe was her married name. To be honest we didn’t really check whether anybody was actually from the class of 1989.’ He looks worried. ‘I just assumed that anybody who wanted to come would be from your year – I mean, why else would you go to a reunion?’

  ‘So did she show up, this Naomi?’

  ‘No. That’s the strange thing. There was a badge for her – she sent me all the badges of the people who’d said they were attending, and hers was one of the only ones left.’

  Not the only one. There would have been a Tim Weston badge left on that table as well. I’m about to ask more, when I see a tall, bulky woman in a dark trouser suit making her way over to us.

  ‘Louise Williams?’

  I agree that I am, and she introduces herself as Detective Inspector Reynolds, asking me to come and sit down with her in the corner where there is a desk with a laptop and a few chairs.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Ms Williams.’

  ‘Louise,’ I say automatically.

  ‘Louise. PC Wells tells me that you were here last night at the school reunion.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ I feel as if I am in a dream, floating above myself. What has happened to my carefully ordered life, where has it gone? How did I end up here?

  ‘You’ve heard what has happened, obviously?’

  ‘Yes, I saw it on the news.’

  ‘So, as you know, we have found the body of a woman in the woods. The victim had her bag with her, so we’ve been able to make a provisional identification.’

  ‘So… are you able to tell me?’ Please God, let it be someone I don’t know.

  ‘Yes.’ I can tell that she is watching me closely. ‘The victim is Sophie Hannigan.’

  My face somehow stays neutral but my body feels trembly and effervescent, as if my blood has been replaced with carbonated water.

  ‘You didn’t know her?’ She sounds disappointed. She was expecting a gasp, tears, even a small scream. But as I stare at her unmoving, clearly struggling with the simple task of breathing in and out, the truth begins to dawn on her.

  ‘You did know her?’

  I nod without speaking and Reynolds sits in silence too, allowing me the time to process the information. She probably thinks I am in shock, but I am not shocked. All that happens is that the dull ache in my stomach that has been there since I first heard the news back in the Travelodge intensifies. It twists and grips. This is what I have been expecting all along.

  ‘Yes, I knew her,’ I manage eventually. Did I really? ‘I mean she’s not a close friend now, but she was once. I hadn’t seen her since school, apart from once, a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Why was that? Where did you see her?’ She looks interested. I think fast. I can’t tell her about the friend request from Maria; it brings up too many other questions, questions I don’t want to answer.

  ‘I contacted her when I found out about the reunion… thought it would be nice to meet up beforehand. I hadn’t really stayed in touch with anyone since school, and I thought it might be a bit much, turning up at the reunion cold, if you know what I mean. Meeting up with Sophie that night made the whole thing easier.’

  ‘How did you get hold of her?’

  ‘On Facebook.’ I try to keep my voice level.

  ‘And how was she, that night?’

  ‘Fine. Looking forward to the reunion. She didn’t seem to have changed much since our school days, not really.’

  ‘And was there anyone she was looking forward or not looking forward to seeing at the reunion?’

  ‘She was excited about it, but she didn’t mention anyone in particular. I don’t think she had any qualms or fears. She was one of those popular girls at school, you know?’

  ‘Mm hmm.’ She tries to maintain her blank facade but I can tell she wasn’t one of those girls herself, and also that she knows I wasn’t either. I can see DI Reynolds at sixteen, as tall and wide as she is now, her hair longer then, hanging greasily down her back, lumbering into the classroom, tripping over her chair, the pretty girls sniggering. Always at the front of the class, top marks for everything. Knowing, however, that popularity at school isn’t everything, waiting it out, best results the school has ever seen, and then off. Off to university where she could reinvent herself, find her tribe.

  ‘OK. Moving on to the reunion itself, do you remember when you last saw Sophie?’

  ‘Around ten o’clock, I think.’

  ‘Is that when you left?’

  ‘No, I left around eleven, but I don’t think I saw her later than ten.’

  ‘Did you spend much time with her?’

  ‘Not a great deal, no. We chatted, caught up, you know. There were a lot of people there.’

  ‘And how did she seem?’

  I think of Sophie clutching my arm, panicking. She was frightened.

  ‘She seemed fine,’ I say, unable to quell my own panic. I’m digging myself in deeper and deeper here, so scared of saying the wrong thing that I’m not telling Reynolds anything at all. ‘Although, as I said, I hadn’t seen her for years, so I don’t know if she was her usual self or not.’

  ‘Did she spend time talking to anyone in particular?’

  ‘I saw her talking to Claire Barnes, Sam Parker, Matt Lewis…’ I list a few more names, trying to recall each time I heard her laugh, saw her kissing people extravagantly, tossing her hair. Reynolds is taking it all in.

  ‘And did she come to the reunion with anyone?’ she asks.

  I hesitate – just a tiny bit, but she’s good, she notices straight away. For some absurd reason I feel guilty about dropping Pete in it, which is ridiculous as other people are bound to mention it.

  ‘Sophie was at the reunion with a man. Pete.’

  ‘A boyfriend?’ Reynolds’ ears prick up. I’ve got the stick and she can sense that I’m about to throw it for her. ‘Do you know his surname?’

  ‘No, sorry. I don’t think he was exactly a boyfriend either; apparently they’d only been out a couple of times before. She met him online.’

  ‘And she brought him to her school reunion?’ She looks sceptical.

  ‘I know. I asked her about that, but she said she didn’t want to come on her own, not with everyone else married and talking about their children and stuff.’ My voice falters and tears gather in my throat. Poor foolish, vain Sophie. I’ve been so busy berating myself for being wrapped up in what my teenage friends think of me, it never occurred to me until now that Sophie had cared even more than I did, with her pretend job in fashion… her borrowed flat… Pete. I think of Esther with her trophy husband glued to her side, passing round pictures of her children on her phone. None of us are immune, it seems.

  ‘Take your time.’ Reynolds’ voice is kind, but she is watching me carefully.

  ‘It looked like they were having an argument, towards the end of the evening. Not long before I last saw her.’

  ‘And was that the last time you saw him? Did he leave without her? Or was he there looking for her at the end?’

  It’s like I’ve walked into a brick wall that I didn’t even see coming. I’ve heard the expression about sweaty palms, but until now I didn’t realise it was a real thing. I’m going to have to tell Reynolds that I spent the night with Pete. But how does that look? He was Sophie’s boyfriend. Who would believe me if I say nothing happened between us in that hotel room? It will set Reynolds off on a chain of questioning that could lead to the friend request from Maria. They’re bound to be looking at Sophie’s social media accounts, but at the moment, all they will see from Maria is a couple of innocuous messages: Still looking good, Sophie; See you at the reunion, Sophie Hannigan. There’s nothing to arouse suspicion there.

  But if Reynolds suspects that I slept with Sophie’s boyfriend on the night of her murder, she’s going to want to look at m
e very closely. And if she looks at my social media, and finds the messages from Maria to me, she’s going to have questions. Questions I don’t want to answer. I can’t bear for anyone to know what I did to Maria. And more than that, I can’t risk the possibility of going to prison. Of course there’s no body, but there are other people who know what happened at the leavers’ party. Maybe not even just Matt and Sam – I wouldn’t be surprised if Sophie let it slip to other people over the years. As Sam always used to say to me, it’s just not worth the risk of letting anyone know what happened. And I have Henry now. If there’s even the slightest chance that I could go to prison, I need to take what I did to Maria to my grave. I can’t leave Henry without his mother. I’ve spent so long hiding in the shadows, covering up the truth that I can’t stop now.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, my whole body itching with panic. ‘I didn’t see him.’

  ‘Do you know where we might find him, this Pete?’

  ‘Sorry, no. I only know his first name. And that he lives in London.’

  ‘OK,’ says Reynolds, leaning back in her chair. ‘We’ll want to speak to you again in due course, but if there’s nothing else significant that you think we should know now?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Just one more thing,’ she says, pulling a brown envelope out of her inside pocket. ‘We found something near the body.’ She reaches into the envelope and pulls out a clear plastic bag. I can see what it is before she says any more, and it takes all my strength to keep my hands relaxed in my lap and my breathing steady.

  ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ she asks.

  It sits there innocently on the table between us.

  ‘No.’ I try to answer naturally, evenly, speaking neither too quickly nor too slowly.

  ‘Sophie wasn’t wearing it?’

  ‘No, definitely not. She was wearing a big, silver statement necklace.’

  Reynolds doesn’t say anything, just slips the clear plastic bag back into the envelope. A plastic bag containing a slender chain with a small golden heart hanging from it. Even though it’s been more than twenty-five years since I last saw it, I would know that necklace anywhere. It haunts my dreams. Without a shadow of a doubt, that is Maria Weston’s necklace. The one she was wearing the night she disappeared.

  Chapter 24

  2016

  Polly takes a while to get to the door. She looks awful, like she’s been crying. Her hair is unbrushed and there are dark circles under her eyes.

  ‘Oh! What’s the matter? Is everything OK?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes,’ she says dully. ‘Come in.’

  I follow her down the hall, nonplussed. I texted her briefly before I left Norfolk to let her know what had happened, so I was expecting more of a reaction from her to the cataclysmic events of the last twenty-four hours. Of course, Polly has no idea of the implications for me, but it’s shocking news nonetheless.

  I pop my head into the sitting room. Henry and Maya are curled up together on the sofa, Henry sucking the soft edge of Manky.

  ‘Hello, H. I’m back. Hi, Maya.’

  They barely look up from the cartoon.

  ‘Hi Mummy. Can I watch the rest of this?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Polly and I carry on into the kitchen and I swing myself up onto one of the high stools at the breakfast bar. I love the idea of a breakfast bar, but as usual the stool is uncomfortably small and I don’t know what to do with my feet.

  ‘Was he all right?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, good as gold. No trouble.’

  ‘Where’s everyone else?’ The house is very quiet.

  ‘Aaron and Phoebe are still in bed. Tea?’ she asks perfunctorily, already filling the kettle.

  ‘Yes, please.’

  As the water boils, Polly comes to herself a little, as if she’s making a deliberate effort to snap out of whatever state she is in.

  ‘So, come on then, tell me. It was definitely this girl that you knew, the one you went to see the other week?’

  ‘Yes, it was Sophie.’

  ‘So had you talked to her much – at the reunion, I mean?’

  ‘A bit. Not that much. There were so many people there.’ I find myself playing it down again. It’s easier since I’m lying to the police to tell everyone else the same lie. It frightens me how smoothly the untruths slip from my tongue, even to Polly. She’s supposed to be my best friend yet she knows so little about me.

  ‘It’s so awful. The poor woman. Who do you think did it? Is she married?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, they say in ninety-nine per cent of cases it’s the husband, don’t they?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s that high, but… she was there with a man though, a boyfriend.’

  ‘Ooh, what was he like?’

  I don’t reply straight away, which Polly misinterprets.

  ‘Do you think he did it?’ She takes a biscuit and dunks it in her tea.

  ‘No!’ We are both a bit surprised by my vehemence.

  Suddenly the effort of lying to Polly feels too much. I am so desperately tired of carrying this terrible weight around with me, and surely Polly would be the best person to help me to bear it. She loves me. She would understand.

  ‘This is going to sound weird, but… Pete – that’s Sophie’s boyfriend – spent the night in my hotel room.’

  Polly’s hand halts halfway to her mouth and half her dunked biscuit plops into her tea.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. They had a row, and it was too late for him to get back to London on the train, so he came back to the Travelodge with me but they didn’t have any rooms. So… I said he could share with me. Nothing happened. We just went to sleep, and when I woke up this morning, he was gone.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Louise.’

  ‘I know.’

  Polly stands up and crosses the kitchen, rummaging in the cutlery drawer for a spoon to fish the soggy biscuit out of her tea.

  ‘How did it even come about?’

  ‘Like I said, he and Sophie had a row, so he waited for me in the car park.’

  ‘He waited for you? That’s a bit creepy.’

  ‘Not really… I was the only other person he knew there – I told you I met him at Sophie’s flat. He thought I’d be coming back to London.’ Didn’t he? A thought niggles at me – surely he knew how much I’d been drinking, can he honestly have believed I’d be driving?

  ‘Still. You do realise you might have spent the night snuggled up to a murderer?’

  Of course this has occurred to me, but I can’t let that distract me right now. My mind is too full of other things.

  ‘We weren’t snuggled up. And he’s not a murderer. He’s a nice bloke.’ Why am I defending him?

  ‘Oh my God, do you fancy him? You do! You fancy the murderer!’

  At any other time I would be delighting in Polly’s ability to lighten any given situation, however grim. This one can’t be lightened though. It’s too dark.

  ‘No, it’s not that.’ I don’t really know how I feel about him. Maybe, if things were different, there would be something there. But they’re not different. They are dark and ugly and Pete is entangled in it somehow.

  ‘And seeing Sam? How was that?’ she asks as she sits back down at the breakfast bar.

  ‘Fine,’ I say, thinking of wine running down my wrist, Sam’s eyes on my tongue.

  ‘Just fine?’ says Polly, instantly suspicious.

  ‘Yes, honestly. I hardly spoke to him.’ More lies.

  ‘Good,’ says Polly. ‘Probably just as well you ended up sleeping with that Pete bloke.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him! Not like that anyway.’ It was probably the most peculiar night I’ve ever spent with anyone, and that’s saying something.

  ‘I know, you said. So what did the police say about the fact that you spent the night with him?’

  I consider lying again but I can’t bear for this to get any more complicated than it already is. ‘I didn’t tel
l them.’

  ‘What? Why on earth not?’

  Oh God, how to explain this to her?

  ‘It was instinctive. I didn’t really think about it. It just seemed better if they didn’t know.’

  ‘But why? Louise, don’t be crazy, you can’t lie to the police. Call them now – tell them you made a mistake. It’s better if it comes out now, from you, rather than down the line.’