Friend Request Read online

  It’s so hard to make her understand without telling her the truth about what I did to Maria.

  ‘It’s complicated. It’s all to do with stuff that happened when we were teenagers. There’s something I don’t want the police to know. I… I can’t explain.’ My voice catches and Polly looks at me in concern.

  ‘What on earth do you mean? Why can’t you tell me?’

  I shake my head, my face in my hands.

  ‘Louise.’ She pulls my hands away and looks me in the eye. ‘There’s nothing you can’t tell me. Come on, we’ve been friends for what… thirteen years? You won’t get rid of me that easily. What is it?’

  I want so badly for her to understand. I can’t bear feeling so alone with this. Before Sophie was killed, I could cope, I could manage it, but everything’s spiralling out of my control. The thought of telling Polly everything, letting her in, feels like sinking into a feather bed.

  ‘You know I told you that Sophie got the Facebook request too, from Maria, the girl who drowned? Well… I didn’t tell you everything.’ I breathe deeply, trying to get my voice under control.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Sophie and I, we… we weren’t always very nice to Maria.’

  Polly frowns. ‘Not very nice how?’

  If I look up, I’ll lose my nerve. ‘We were… mean to her. When I told you that I’d experienced something similar to what Phoebe’s going through… well, I did, but more from the other side.’

  I daren’t look at her. I swallow and continue.

  ‘I was friends with Maria when she first joined the school, and then, later, well… I wasn’t. Sophie didn’t want me to be friends with her, you see, and Sophie was so… And then on the last night, at the leavers’ party, the night she died, we did something terrible.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  I glance up quickly. Polly’s face is pale, confusion written all over it.

  Just say it. I close my eyes.

  ‘We spiked her drink with Ecstasy. Nobody ever saw her again. She must have wandered off and fallen from the cliff.’ I open my eyes and risk looking up. Straight away I know I’ve made a terrible mistake.

  Polly is staring straight at me, white-faced and horrified.

  ‘You spiked her drink? Were you not listening to me at all when I told you what’s been happening with Phoebe? I can’t believe you talked to my daughter about it, gave her advice when all the time you…’ She pushes her stool back and stumbles off it, backing away from me until she hits the kitchen worktop, clutching it for support.

  ‘Do you know why I look like shit this morning?’ Her voice is harsh with accusation. ‘It’s because I’ve been up half the night with Phoebe. She was meant to be at a sleepover last night but I had to go and get her in the middle of the night after the mother became “concerned” because Phoebe was causing trouble and upsetting another girl. No prizes for guessing which particular girl came up with that little story. She cried for two hours when we got home. Two solid hours. Do you know what that’s like, to watch your child like that?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened last night. It’s awful. But it’s not a good day for you to be telling me all this, Louise. Not after what I’ve just been through. I’m not in the mood to be understanding or forgiving, or whatever it is you want me to be. Not about this, not about teenage girls being fucking vile to girls who are supposed to be their friends.’

  I had half-expected, and dreaded, ranting and raving but this hard, cold fury is worse. I thought Polly was in my corner, but of course she’s not. She has children, and children trump everything, like a royal flush in poker.

  ‘I think you’d better go actually. I need to focus on Phoebe today; I don’t have any headspace for you… for this. I can’t deal with it right now. I’ll give you a call.’

  I’ve known all my life that I couldn’t tell anyone about what I did to Maria, but this thing with Sophie has thrown everything up in the air. I thought it made things different, but it doesn’t, of course it doesn’t.

  As I drive away from Polly’s house, I start to cry silently, and find that I can’t stop. Henry is prattling away in the back about what he had for dinner and how Phoebe read to him before she went out. Thank God I didn’t let him sit in the front as he had wanted to. I keep wiping the tears away with my hand, but more come. As I sit at the traffic lights, an old woman with a wheeled shopping trolley looks at me curiously.

  I try to force my mind to concentrate on something else. I need to be not crying by the time we get home; I don’t want Henry to see me like this. Naomi Strawe. I know there was no one of that name in my year at school. Strawe is an unusual name, one I’m sure I’ve never heard, although as Mr Jenkins said it could be her married name. I don’t remember a Naomi though. I think of him spelling out the name, with his emphasis on the ‘WE’ at the end. The first two letter of Weston. With a churning sensation, fear beginning to shift within me, I whisper the letters out loud, jumbling them around in my head, the realisation gradually dawning. Naomi Strawe is an anagram of Maria Weston.

  Someone followed me through the tunnel at South Kensington. Someone was watching me as I sat alone in that bar, waiting for a date who was never going to show. Was that someone there last night at the reunion, unseen, hovering at the edges, waiting for who knows what? I’ve been running on pure adrenaline since the initial, numbing shock of the discovery of Sophie’s body, but that’s wearing off now, and the implications are crowding in on me. I can’t ignore the possibility any longer that Maria is still alive. Or if she’s not, then whoever killed Sophie knows what happened to her; knows what I did. And Polly’s reaction has hammered home another truth to me: I glance in the mirror at Henry’s face, with its impossibly smooth skin, rounded, still babyish cheeks and long eyelashes fringing deep chocolate-brown eyes. Before today, even though I had let my other friendships slide, I wasn’t alone, because I had Polly. But now, it’s just Henry and me. We are completely alone, and we are in danger.

  Chapter 25

  2016

  Once Henry is in bed, I pour myself a glass of wine. I wince at the taste, still suffering from the effects of overindulging at the reunion last night, but I need something to soften my sharp edges, to make sense of what is happening to me. In the sitting room I put the news on. Sophie is still the headline story. They’ve named her now, and Reynolds pops up, making a plea for information. They also give the cause of death, which hadn’t been mentioned previously: strangulation. I feel sick, unable to stop imagining hands closing around her neck, the struggle for breath. Everything going black.

  When my phone vibrates, I know with a dull certainty that it’s going to be another message. I’m right.

  Oh dear, poor Sophie. We wouldn’t want something like that to happen to you, would we?

  I can’t stay on the sofa, relaxing as though this is a normal evening, so I walk from room to room, jittery, jumping at every creak of the floorboards. Every now and then I sit down somewhere I never usually sit – the floor in the hallway, my back to the wall; on the side of the bath, the hard edges pressing into the backs of my legs. I keep imagining Sophie’s broken body lying in the woods, still dressed in that ridiculous white fur coat, her beautiful caramel hair splayed on the ground; face white, lips blue, dark angry bruises on her neck. I think of the same fate befalling me: Henry in a small suit, solemn but not really understanding, clutching Sam’s hand but looking around for me as if I might have just popped into another room.

  I know the police will want to talk to me again and my body cramps with anxiety at the thought of what I have to keep from them: my night with Pete, the friend request and messages from Maria. I can’t let DI Reynolds sense for a moment that there is more to this than meets the eye, that there is any hint of a connection between what happened to Sophie last night and that June evening in 1989. If they find out that Sophie’s murder is linked to Maria’s disappearance, it could start them down a path that leads
to me, sixteen years old in an emerald green dress, a bag of crushed pills between my breasts. There are more ways than death for Henry to lose me, and I mustn’t ever lose sight of that. I think of the conversations I had with Sam when we were together, about how we must never let our involvement in Maria’s death become public knowledge; and of Matt so close to me last night: terrified, angry, his voice hot and urgent in my ear.

  But now that my initial, instinctive response to lie to the police about our night in the Travelodge has died down, I realise what I have done. The police are going to be looking for Pete. They may even have found him already. Will he think, as I did, that the fact that we spent the night together is so open to misinterpretation that he needs to conceal it? He’s got to be their prime suspect after all, and the fact that he left Sophie at the reunion and spent the night with another woman is bound to give the police pause. I can’t rely on that, though. I need to speak to him before the police do.

  There’s a tiny part of me that wonders whether there would be a certain release in being found out, in being able to stop hiding and lying, to put down this heavy load that I’ve been carrying since I was sixteen years old. To be punished, yes, but maybe also forgiven. But then I remember Polly’s reaction, and I know there won’t be any forgiveness. And as I stand in Henry’s room, draining the last of my wine, watching his flushed, sleeping face, I know I can never let this out. Quite apart from the shame of everyone knowing what I did, it’s Henry who will keep me from speaking out. Even if it’s only the remotest of possibilities, I can’t risk going to prison and leaving my son without his mother. I’m going to have to carry this close to me for the rest of my life.

  I sleep badly, my uneasy mind twisting and writhing. At two o’clock I wake with a start, drenched in sweat, certain I’ve heard a noise. The darkness is more than I can bear so I reach out a quivering hand to switch on the lamp. The house is in silence, but I can’t shake the idea that something woke me. If Henry wasn’t here I’d probably bury my head under the pillow and wait for morning, but I can’t take that risk. In the absence of a weapon, I gulp down the stale water in the glass on my bedside table and slide out of bed with it in my hand. I steal around the flat, flinching at every creak of every floorboard, switching the overhead lights on as I go, leaving an eye-watering trail of blazing brightness in my wake. In the kitchen I swap the glass for a sharp knife with a gleaming blade, its handle smooth and cool beneath my fingers. I banish the darkness from each room in turn, all of them exactly as I left them, until the only place I haven’t been is Henry’s bedroom. I stand outside his door, dry-mouthed, my T-shirt clinging to me, cold and damp with sweat. I am paralysed by the fear that what lies behind it is all my worst nightmares come true. I have a strange sense that this is the last moment of my life as I know it, that I will look back and know that after this, things were never the same. I put my hand on the handle and push. My eyes are drawn straight to the bed. It’s empty. The knife falls from my hand, landing with a soft thud on the blue carpet, and a second later I am on my knees, making a sound I’ve never heard from my own lips, a whimpering, like an animal in pain. Terror engulfs me, like a tidal wave. The breath has been knocked from me, coming only in short gasps between the low keening sound that I am making.

  And then I see him. He’s on the rug by his bed, fast asleep, still holding Manky to his face. He must have fallen out of bed without even waking, the thump as he hit the floor the noise that roused me. I fall to my knees next to him, burying my face in his hair, inhaling the sweet scent of him, weeping in sheer thankfulness.

  In the morning I wake early, still shaky from the night’s adventures. I’ve already looked up the address, so all I have to do is get us both dressed as quickly as possible and leave the house. I drop Henry at breakfast club at 7.30am; we’re the first ones there. He soon gets over his confusion at my chivvying this morning, delighted to have the place to himself, running straight off to get the train set out.

  It’s dark as I walk towards the station, but I can see my breath in the stillness, a reminder that I’m still here, just. Some of the houses are still in darkness but there are squares of yellow light here and there and I glimpse the occasional domestic scene: a man in a suit on his sofa eating his breakfast, the flickering light of the TV casting shadows on his face; a smartly dressed woman checking her face in the mirror over the fireplace in her front room; a young mother at an upstairs window in a tired dressing gown, whey-faced and dead-eyed with exhaustion, holding her baby against her shoulder. I jump as a car revs into life as I pass, and when a tall man opens his front door and steps out into the street in front of me it’s all I can do to stifle my yelp of fear. The man looks at me curiously before striding off ahead of me in the direction of the station. I stand for a minute, my hand on the streetlight, reminding myself to breathe in and out. When did I become this jumpy, terrified person? I give myself a mental shake and walk, more slowly this time, towards the station.

  There’s a café opposite the offices of Foster and Lyme so I order a coffee and settle myself in a seat by the window, eyes trained on the entrance. Suited figures are already going in and out. There’s some kind of code that has to be tapped in, which should give me time to run out and catch Pete before he goes in.

  I’m on my second cup when I feel a hand on my shoulder, making me jump and slop coffee onto the table.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Pete’s eyes stray furtively across the road to where his oblivious colleagues greet each other, takeaway coffees in hand.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I say in a low voice. ‘I’m sorry to ambush you at work but I couldn’t think of any other way. I don’t even know your surname. You know… what’s happened?’

  ‘Yes, of course I know.’ He sits down in the seat opposite me. ‘It’s so awful. I’m… sorry. I know she was your friend. I spent the whole day yesterday walking around London, thinking about it, too scared to go home in case the police were waiting for me. I’m going to be their number one suspect.’

  ‘So you haven’t talked to them yet?’ Hope flares in me.

  ‘No. I know I’m going to have to. I just wanted to… get my head together first. I’ll call them today.’

  ‘But aren’t the police going to wonder why you haven’t come forward before?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ll have to say I didn’t see the news yesterday or something. Have you spoken to them?’

  ‘Yes. I went into the school yesterday morning.’

  ‘And did you tell them… about us spending the night together?’

  I look down, turning the salt pot around and around.

  ‘No.’

  I had anticipated anger but he looks more confused than anything else. There’s something else, too. Relief?

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I… I’m not sure. I panicked.’ I can’t tell him that I am so used to lying about everything connected with that night in 1989 that the lie had tumbled out of my mouth before I’d had a chance to consider it. That my fear of anyone knowing what I did to Maria is so much a part of me that hiding anything that could possibly associate me with her disappearance is second nature to me. I need to tell him something though, give some idea of why I’m behaving like this. ‘It’s complicated.’ I stare at my hands, my forefinger tracing patterns in the spilled sugar. ‘When we were at school, Sophie and I, we… weren’t very nice to another girl in our class. Maria.’

  ‘What’s a bit of schoolgirl bullying got to do with this? God knows we’ve all done stuff we’re not proud of when we were younger.’

  I so want to believe him, for this to be true, for what we did to have had no consequences. But there are no actions without consequences, are there? Even without the drink spiking, the way we treated Maria would have had an impact on her, possibly for the rest of her life. It would have affected her relationships, her friendships, her confidence. Maybe it did. Maybe it’s still affecting her now. The thought skims across the surface of my mind, unbidden, and I see her i
n my mind’s eye, not as smooth-skinned as she was and with a few lines on her face, but still recognisably Maria, with her hazel eyes and long brown hair, sitting in front of a computer, sending out her hatred over the ether to Sophie, to me.

  ‘It’s hard to explain. I just don’t want it to come out more than it needs to. My – association with Sophie. The police already know that Sophie and I met up that night in her flat – the night you were there. If they find out I spent the night with her boyfriend, they’re going to start digging around in the past, asking questions. This doesn’t have anything to do with her being killed, I swear. It’s just… past stuff that I don’t want dragged into the present.’ Any more than it has been already. ‘Oh God, I don’t know, maybe I should tell them. Call that detective, tell her I panicked, come clean?’

  ‘Yes.’ He doesn’t look sure. ‘You need to do what you think is best.’

  ‘But you don’t think I should?’ I just want someone to tell me what to do, tell me everything’s going to be OK.

  He stares out of the window. It’s starting to rain and people are walking faster, pulling their coats closer as if that will make a difference.