Friend Request Read online

  ‘I’m frightened of telling them,’ he says, watching as raindrops ooze their way down the window.

  ‘But why?’

  His eyes flicker to me and then back outside again. I get the feeling that he’s weighing something up.

  ‘Well… just because, you know, I’m going to be their main person of interest, aren’t I? Top of the list. Who do they always look to when someone’s killed? The boyfriend. If they find out that I spent the night with another woman, a friend of Sophie’s who I hardly knew – how does that look?’

  ‘Not great,’ I admit, although I sense he’s not telling me the whole story. It’s certainly true – who would ever believe that nothing had happened between us? There would be witnesses who could testify to seeing us talking and laughing together at the reunion. It wouldn’t prove anything, but if the finger of suspicion is already hanging over Pete, this is going to make it worse. He must have been hovering around in the car park for an hour or so waiting for me, with no one to vouch for his whereabouts. I push down the vague feeling of unease that this thought gives me and turn back to Pete.

  ‘So are you going to tell the police?’ He holds my future in his hands.

  ‘I don’t know. Obviously I was going to, because I thought you would have told them already. But as you haven’t… well. I don’t want to give them any more reason to suspect me than they already do.’

  ‘What would you tell them, then? If you don’t tell them we spent the night together?’

  ‘I’ll just say that Sophie and I argued and that I drove back to London and went home to bed.’ His enthusiasm for the idea is growing.

  ‘They’ll know though, they’ll be able to check traffic cameras, CCTV, that sort of thing. There’s no way you could have got back to London without being picked up on some camera or other.’

  ‘OK, well…’ He picks up a paper napkin from the table and folds it in half again and again, until it’s too fat and tight to fold any more. ‘I know. I’ll just say I slept in my car. It was really near the school, I bet there’s no CCTV there. All we need to do is hold our nerve and this will all blow over. We’ve done nothing wrong, and us spending the night in a hotel room has no bearing on anything to do with Sophie’s death, so it doesn’t matter if we don’t mention it. We want the same thing here, don’t we? For all this to be over.’

  He must have read something in my face, because he blushed. ‘Oh God, sorry. Look, I’m not a totally heartless bastard, you know. I do understand that someone’s died here, and I know she was your friend.’ Was she, though? Certainly not now, and maybe not even when we were at school.

  ‘The thing is,’ he goes on, ‘I barely knew her. I wasn’t expecting to ever see or hear from her again after I walked out of that hall. To pretend I feel grief would be hypocritical. To be honest I’m struggling to feel anything apart from this… terrible fear. What if they can somehow pin it on me? I could be going to jail for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Surely that couldn’t happen, though? There wouldn’t be any evidence.’ It’s not lost on me that you could say the same about my role in Maria’s death. But the difference is that unlike Pete, I did do something wrong. And there are other people who know about it.

  ‘Not physical evidence, no. But we did… you know… in the B&B before we went out.’ He has the grace to look shamefaced. ‘They’ll be able to tell, won’t they? That doesn’t look great. And then we were seen arguing at the reunion. It all starts to stack up, and if they then find out that I spent the night with you…’

  ‘Are you sure nobody saw us in the car park?’ I say. ‘No one saw us leaving together?’

  ‘As sure as I can be. I didn’t see anyone, did you?’

  ‘No.’ I trace my spoon around the bottom of my empty cup, circling the dregs of my coffee, my pulse racing from a mixture of caffeine and fear. ‘Are you sure you’re OK with this? I don’t want to… pressure you into this, just because I’ve already lied.’

  ‘No. This is what I want. We’ll just keep it to ourselves, and everything will be OK. Why don’t we swap contact details, in case we need to talk again?’ He scribbles his mobile number on the back of a napkin and passes me another so I can do the same. ‘Yes, I’m sure this is the best thing to do.’ I’m not sure who he’s trying to convince here, me or him, but I don’t need any convincing. Since that first conversation with the police, my every instinct has been screaming not to tell, to keep my head down and my mouth shut. After all, I’ve already got someone after me. The last thing I want is to add DI Reynolds to the list.

  Pete leaves the café and I watch as he crosses the road. He’s standing by the entry doors, starting to tap in the code, when a car pulls up behind him, stopping on the double yellow lines. I watch, my heart in my throat, as DI Reynolds and a tall man in a dark suit get out of the car. Reynolds says something and I see Pete turn, his face inscrutable. They have a short conversation, and then Pete gets into the car and is driven away.

  Chapter 26

  2016

  It’s been a couple of days since my encounter with Pete, but I’ve heard nothing from him, or the police. I have to go and see Rosemary Wright-Collins this morning. I’ve been putting her off for a while but I’ve run out of excuses. It’s going to be hard putting my professional hat on. Every time I try to get some work done, my mind grinds along in slow motion, imagination and creativity stifled by the constant whirring of my thoughts. My latest job for Rosemary is a flat in a Georgian townhouse in Islington (God only knows how much it cost) that needs redecorating throughout, having had the same owner for the last forty years.

  I ring the bell. Rosemary takes a while to come to the door, and when she does, whilst she’s impeccably dressed as ever, the epitome of sophisticated older womanhood, she’s not her usual effusive self.

  ‘Hello, Louise.’ She stands there in the doorway for a moment with an odd, guarded expression on her face, before pulling the door back. ‘Come in.’ Inside, the flat is stunning, high-ceilinged and airy, but crumbling and in desperate need of care and attention.

  ‘Wow, this is amazing, Rosemary. You must be so excited.’

  ‘Yes, yes I am.’ She doesn’t seem excited as she leads me through the hall into the front reception room, her heels clacking on the original tiled floor. She’s unwilling to meet my eye, standing by the enormous fireplace, rubbing at an imaginary speck of dirt on the mantelpiece with a manicured finger.

  ‘So, where do you want to start?’ I ask, trying to inject some enthusiasm into the proceedings.

  ‘Before we do, Louise, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

  Oh God. I’ve always thought she was loaded, but maybe there’s a cash flow problem. I really need her. Without her, my business would be in serious jeopardy.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes, everything’s fine. Sort of.’ I’ve never seen her like this: hesitant, unsure. It’s got to be a money problem. She turns to face me, clearly screwing up her courage.

  ‘I had a rather strange email this morning.’

  My stomach rises and flips, settling somewhere near the floor. Please God, no.

  ‘From someone called Maria Weston.’

  I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.

  ‘I know it’s not true,’ she goes on quickly. ‘I’m only telling you because I thought you ought to know.’

  ‘What did it say?’ I will myself to stay calm.

  ‘She said you’d done a job for her, and that you’d messed up and left her in the lurch, that you were unprofessional and unreliable. She strongly recommended that I look elsewhere.’

  ‘Right,’ I whisper.

  ‘I’m not going to, Louise. We’ve worked together for years, I know how good you are. I don’t know what this is about and, frankly, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to get mixed up in anything messy though, you know? I want to keep our relationship strictly professional.’

  ‘Of course, Rosemary. I think I kno
w who’s behind this,’ I lie. ‘I’m sure it won’t happen again.’

  We carry on with the consultation but things are very strained and I’m relieved when I get out of there. Maria is reaching out now; I can feel her icy presence slipping into every aspect of my life. I have a pressing need to talk to someone about all this, and the only person I can think of is Esther. Despite our chequered history, Esther has been kind to me and as I walk down the street away from Rosemary’s flat I call her.

  ‘Hello?’ I can tell she’s outside, the wind whistling at me remotely from wherever she is.

  ‘Hi. How are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Stunned. I can’t believe it.’ Why don’t we believe it when something like this happens? We see it on the news all the time. Why should we be so surprised when it happens to us?

  ‘I know, it’s awful. Look, Esther, can we meet? I’d like to talk to you, about… you know, all this.’

  ‘Really?’ She sounds doubtful. ‘Is there anything to say?’

  ‘There is for me. I just need to talk to someone. Please?’

  ‘Well, OK. I am in London today as it happens, I’m on my way to a meeting now, but I could meet you afterwards for a coffee – on the South Bank?’

  I turn into Angel tube, wondering as I always do why the escalator is moving a touch faster than the handrail. The platform is busy, and I stand with my back to the wall, breathing in the heat and the smell of dust and burnt rubber. I’ve always felt uneasy on tube platforms at what a small physical movement it would be to throw myself under the oncoming train. We think that the gulf between living and dying is huge, but on the tube platform I am always reminded that it’s only one little step. Today as I press my spine into the oversized tube map on the wall, looking around me nervously, I can’t stop thinking that on a busy day it’s also just one little push. A hand in the back and a brief, hard shove that no one would even notice.

  When I get to Embankment I push my way hurriedly through the crowds, desperate to escape the fumes and the crush, emerging into the cold, clear light. I scurry across the bridge, the Thames rolling beneath me, grey-green and dappled here and there by the shadows of fast-moving clouds. Platforms and trains, bridges and rivers – I’m so close, all the time, to death. To the possibility of death. Recent events have added a keenness to the blade but I’ve never been entirely free of it. It has been hovering for years, millimetres from my neck, on the verge of biting into my flesh.

  Esther’s already waiting for me outside the Festival Hall, her coat a scarlet stain against the monolithic building behind her. We hug tentatively.

  ‘Do you want to get a coffee, or shall we walk a bit?’ she says.

  ‘Let’s walk.’ This conversation will be easier if I don’t have to look her full in the face.

  We talk about Sophie first, and although she is of course aghast at what has happened, I can tell Esther is struggling to say the right things. What do you say when someone who made your life a misery half a lifetime ago dies? We move on to the police, who have interviewed Esther briefly already, but who are going to talk to her again in more detail soon. It wasn’t DI Reynolds she spoke to, but one of the underlings. Esther didn’t cross paths at all with Sophie at the reunion so she’s not high on Reynolds’ list. I’ve got to go to Norwich tomorrow for another interview with her, and the thought of it lurks inside me like indigestion.

  Esther and I walk in silence for a few moments, our tread punctuated by the trees that line the south side of the river, stark and leafless against the cold, grey-white sky.

  ‘After you left the reunion, Lorna Sixsmith told me that you and Sam Parker had been married.’ Esther turns to look at me, the wind whipping her hair around her face.

  ‘Yes, we were.’ I keep my eyes on the river, concentrating on the way the water is frothing around the edges, buffeting a discarded bottle onto the shingle. It still hurts, to think of us together. The pain is like a rope around my wrists: the more I try to wriggle free, the more it hurts.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know… I guess I thought you knew. I don’t talk about it much,’ I say, my voice clipped.

  ‘How did that happen?’ Esther, realising perhaps that her voice contains too much horrified fascination, qualifies her question. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t have predicted that. I know you liked him at school, but…’

  ‘You thought he was out of my league?’ I don’t mind. I always thought so myself.

  ‘Not exactly that. But how did you even end up together? Your parents moved away from Sharne Bay when you were at university, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t see Sam for a long time after that. We ran into each other in London years after I’d left university, when we were twenty-five, twenty-six.’ I can still feel the breathless excitement of it, standing at the bar in a pub in Clapham, turning around to ask my friend Lucy what she wanted and being confronted with those blue eyes, almost as close to me as they had been the night of the leavers’ party. I knew him straight away, of course, but it took him a second longer to catch on. When he did though he seemed genuinely happy to see me, pulling me into a hug and then setting me back from him, studying my face and laughing in surprise and delight.

  We spent the whole evening together, one of those magical nights that you don’t want to end. The warmth of the day still lingered in the air, and we sat knee to knee in the beer garden, drinking and swapping stories. Alone together in a crowd. Lucy and the others and his friends faded away until we found ourselves out on the street at closing time. When he bent to kiss me my insides turned to molten liquid, and I pulled him closer, my hands twisting and pulling his hair, his arms around me so tightly I could barely breathe. I grasped this second chance at happiness with him with both hands, and although it wasn’t always easy, I held on to it for fifteen years. Until one day, two years ago, I found a text message on his phone that shouldn’t have been there, and I felt it slipping through my fingers like grains of sand.

  ‘And you ended up married?’

  ‘Yes.’ It seems wrong to parcel up those fifteen years of my life into such a brief conversation, but I don’t have the words to explain it to Esther even if I wanted to: the breathless exhilaration of being with him; the thrill of the things he did to me; how he became everything to me, at least until Henry was born; the pain he put me through.

  ‘And your little boy… Sam is his father?’

  ‘Yes.’ The sort of father who swings him up in the air until he’s giddy with excitement, but doesn’t want to clear up the mess when he’s sick on the floor.

  ‘So, do you think it was that bloke Sophie was with?’ she asks, sensing that I don’t want to say any more. ‘That did it, I mean? You were talking to him, weren’t you?’

  ‘We chatted for a bit, that’s all,’ I say, careful not to sound too defensive. ‘He seemed nice. I can’t imagine him… doing that. But then I can’t imagine anyone doing it, but somebody did, didn’t they? It makes you realise, all these things you see on the news, in the papers – they’ve happened to ordinary people like us. They aren’t special, they were just going about their everyday lives until something turned them upside down.’

  ‘What about Matt Lewis?’ she says. ‘He always had a thing for Sophie, didn’t he?’

  For someone who wasn’t part of our crowd, Esther is certainly very well informed. ‘Well, yes, I think he did, but that hardly means he’s going to murder her twenty-seven years later, does it?’

  ‘I suppose. You don’t think…’ she hesitates. ‘The Facebook request, the birthday presents?’

  ‘I don’t know, Esther. That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve had some more messages from her.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  I outline the content of the messages briefly. ‘But Esther, are we actually saying that she could still be alive? Where could she have been?’

  Esther stops and leans against the railings, gazing over the river towards St Paul’s, r
esplendent in the sunlight. ‘I don’t know. They never found her body, did they? But why come back now? How, even?’

  ‘I don’t know. But what Tim said, talking about her in the present tense… I saw him, you know. Outside the reunion. He told me when I saw him in Sharne Bay that he was going to go on her behalf, but then he didn’t show up. Except… he did, sort of. I saw him outside, talking to someone.’

  ‘Tim was there?’ She looks at me questioningly.

  ‘Yes. Well, not actually at the reunion. I saw him at the top of the drive, when I was outside smoking.’

  ‘That’s weird. I wonder why he didn’t come in. I suppose maybe he changed his mind when it came to it? It’s a pretty weird thing for anyone to do, when you think about it. Go to a school reunion, I mean. If you really cared about any of those people they would still be friends, and if you don’t care about them, what on earth are you there for? Curiosity?’