Friend Request Page 27

  Sam’s face is closed as he comes back into the hallway, but I know how painfully aware he is of the price he has paid, not getting to do this every night. But then, it’s a price I have had to pay too, because I don’t get to do it either every other weekend plus the weeknight when he is with Sam. I hand Sam his coat and as I do so, my hand brushes his and I feel a jolt of electricity that tingles throughout my body. The moment hangs between us, hot and threatening. I can tell he’s about to say something that he won’t be able to take back, and although part of me wants to hear it, I know that if I do, all the work I’ve done in the past two years will be wasted. I snatch my hand back and the jacket falls to the floor. He stoops to pick it up and as he does, I slip past him and open the door, letting the cold air stream in.

  ‘So, it was good to see you.’ I lean forward and kiss him briskly on the cheek, leaving him with nowhere to go in terms of trying to kiss me. If he is bewildered at the sudden change of pace he hides it well.

  ‘Take care, Louise. And let me know if… you know.’

  ‘Yes, I will. Good night.’

  I practically push him out of the door, closing it firmly behind him. Back in the kitchen, I lean against the worktop, hugging myself tightly because there is no one else to do it for me. I’m the only one who can take care of me, and I vow to do it better in the future. As the wind rattles the French windows, I stare out through the glass, but I can see nothing except my own reflection.

  Chapter 33

  2016

  My flat doesn’t feel the same any more. It used to be a safe haven, my refuge from the world. I don’t feel safe here now though. I used to be thankful for Marnie, my upstairs neighbour, a woman in her fifties who seems to do nothing but go to her unspecified work, come home and go to bed. She’s only a few metres above my head, but I hear practically nothing from her. When Henry was a baby and I paced the floor with him as he screamed, night after night, squirming in my arms, I thought she might come down and complain, but nothing. Now I would find it reassuring to hear footsteps creaking overhead, the sound of dinner being cooked, television being watched, friends coming over for a drink. But Marnie remains resolutely silent.

  I can’t stop turning last night’s encounter with Sam over and over in my mind. I know I didn’t imagine that moment between us at the door, and most of me is thankful that I didn’t give in to it. But there is a tiny part of me that wishes I had allowed myself the relief of sinking back into him, of being held by him, soothed by the comforting familiarity of his touch. I give myself a shake, forcing myself to remember how things really were between us, especially at the end. I did the right thing. I can’t put myself back two years.

  Esther has called a couple of times today but I ignored it and she hasn’t left a message. I’ve also had a call from DI Reynolds. I didn’t answer that one either, but she left a voicemail asking me to ring her at my earliest convenience. If I don’t call her back soon she’s going to turn up here, armed with her questions and her indefatigable thoroughness. I know it’s inevitable that I will have to speak to her again, but I’m trying to put it off as long as I can.

  I’m scrolling unseeing through my emails at the kitchen table when the doorbell rings. I consider for a few seconds simply not answering it, but when it rings again, I walk slowly down the hallway, feeling almost resigned to whatever waits on the other side.

  ‘Oh,’ says Esther, looking down at my attire. Despite my best intentions, I’m back in the stained tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, pulling the cord on the tracksuit bottoms tighter to stop them falling down. I’m relieved not to be facing Reynolds, but on the other hand I feel a vague unease. ‘What are you doing here? How did you even know where I live?’

  ‘Serena Cooke?’

  Of course. My alter ego; the one who wanted to make a will.

  ‘I figured you’d given your real address. It’s too hard to think of a fake one on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘Right.’ We stand there for a moment, each unsure of the other’s next move. ‘Do you… want to come in?’

  The kitchen is still a mess, but this time I can’t be bothered to apologise, let alone tidy up.

  ‘Tea?’ I ask, moving some old newspapers off one of the chairs.

  ‘Yes, please.’ Esther hangs her coat and bag neatly from the back of the chair before sitting down. There’s an awkward silence while we wait for the kettle to boil. Once we are both seated, mugs in hand, I wait for her to tell me why she’s here.

  ‘So I spoke to the police again,’ she begins. ‘Have you, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So did they show you?’

  ‘Show me what?’ Oh God. I know what is coming.

  ‘The necklace. Maria’s necklace.’

  My mind scrabbles around for the next lie, vacillating between telling her the police didn’t show me, or saying they did but I hadn’t realised it was Maria’s, but somewhere in between the two the elastic band inside me snaps and my face crumples into hot tears.

  Esther puts out a hand and touches my arm gently. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Is it… the messages? Have you had any more?’

  I get up from the table and take a piece of kitchen roll from the side to blow my nose.

  ‘Don’t be nice to me. Don’t feel sorry for me. It’s all my fault. Did you tell them… the police? That you thought it was Maria’s necklace?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, her face puzzled. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘No. I didn’t want them to connect me and Sophie to what happened to Maria.’

  ‘But… surely they already knew you were all connected when you told them about the Facebook page?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them about that either.’ My face flushes with hot shame, my blood running thick with all the things Esther doesn’t know. ‘Did… did you?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she says, bewildered.

  So it’s over. Reynolds knows. Tim will be getting a call soon, no doubt, and it won’t be long before they come knocking on my door. With a heaving swell inside, I realise this is where it all starts to unravel.

  ‘Well, I assumed you’d already told them,’ she goes on. ‘And didn’t they find the messages from Maria anyway? On Sophie’s computer?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. If the police weren’t looking for them, they would just seem like innocuous messages from a friend. As far as they’re concerned, Maria’s just another of Sophie’s many Facebook friends. There was no reason for them to be suspicious, unless somebody told them about Maria.’

  And now somebody has, and the police will be joining the dots, forming a chain that leads them back to a summer’s night in 1989.

  ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the police about the friend request and the messages from Maria though?’ Esther says.

  ‘I didn’t want them to connect me and Sophie to what happened to Maria in 1989,’ I repeat.

  ‘But why on earth not?’ Esther looks utterly bemused.

  It doesn’t matter now. The police are going to find Maria, or whoever is sending those messages, and they’re going to find out what I did. It’s all going to come out. There’s no point pretending any more. There’s even a kind of relief in it. Even so, I bury my face in my hands so I don’t have to see her face when I tell her.

  ‘What happened to Maria, whatever it was, it was my fault.’ The words are muffled, but they are out there.

  ‘Louise, it wasn’t. I know you treated her badly at school, but we all do things we regret when we’re younger. Things that maybe even horrify us when we look back as adults.’ I can hear in her voice what it is costing her to say this, can hear the years of pain and isolation she suffered at school and the scars they have left.

  ‘You don’t understand. There’s something you don’t know.’ I take my hands away and force myself to meet her eye. ‘Do you remember at the leavers’ party, you couldn’t find Maria, and you came to ask me if I’d seen her? You
said she’d said she wasn’t feeling well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know why she felt unwell. Me and Sophie had… we did something…’ I clench my fists, take a shaky breath. Esther waits, says nothing. ‘We spiked her drink with Ecstasy.’

  Esther inhales sharply. I watch her face closely. She doesn’t speak straight away, but puts a hand to her mouth and turns to look out of the French windows into the courtyard. She is miles and years away, turning events over in her mind, reconfiguring them to fit this horrifying new information.

  ‘But what happened to her then?’ she asks, turning back to me.

  ‘I don’t know. I never saw her again, I swear.’

  Esther is silent again, and I hold my breath, awaiting my fate. I realise that, aside from the implications for me and Henry of the police finding out about what I did, I am dreading losing Esther when I was beginning to feel that I had found her again.

  ‘So the Facebook thing… is that what it’s about, do you think?’ she says eventually. ‘Does whoever’s doing it know?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’ve never mentioned it.’ Part of what is so frightening about the messages is that whoever it is never says anything specific. They offer only veiled threats, standing in the shadows.

  ‘The Facebook page…’ she stops. ‘It couldn’t be her, could it? Where would she have been all this time? Even on my birthday, when I get the presents, I’ve never really believed they could be from her. But the necklace…’

  ‘I’ve considered every possibility, believe me. But Esther… what we did… can you…’ Can you forgive me, is what I want to ask her, but I can’t say it, I’m too frightened of the answer, and too ashamed of how selfish I am to need her forgiveness so desperately.

  She looks down at her mug, picking at a small chip in the handle with her fingernail. ‘You must have gone through hell when she disappeared. I can’t imagine what that’s done to you.’

  ‘Honestly, Esther, when I look back I am utterly appalled at what I did, at who I was. Yes, I was insecure, yes, I was worried about losing my precarious place in the social pecking order, but everyone had to exist in that hierarchy, didn’t they? But not everyone did what I did. Not everyone was so… weak. I look at my son, and if anyone ever treated him the way I treated Maria, I would want to rip them apart with my bare hands. I am a different person now. I really hope… well, I just hope you can see that.’ I sit back down opposite her at the table, hardly daring to breathe.

  ‘I think…’ She stops and looks out of the window again. ‘I think you’ve probably paid for what you did.’ She looks back at me. ‘I can see you’re different now, Louise. I do see that.’

  The tension that holds me in its thrall subsides a little and tears prick my eyes. I’ve told three people now, and two of them have considered me worthy at least of understanding, if not forgiveness.

  ‘That’s what —’ I stop. That’s what Pete said, I was going to say, but for reasons I can’t articulate, I don’t want her to know I’ve seen him. Something like shame fills me when I think about what I said to him, so I’m trying to keep it shut away. Then a strange thing happens, as if the thought of him has conjured Pete into the room.

  ‘Oh, by the way, guess who I saw on the way here, at Victoria station?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That man Sophie brought to the reunion. Pete, is it? And here’s the weird bit. He was with a woman, and not only that, they had a child with them, a baby. He was pushing the buggy. I wonder if Sophie knew he was married? I wouldn’t be surprised.’ Esther may have forgiven me, but Sophie still gets her scorn even in death.

  ‘Oh my God. He told me was divorced at the reunion.’ Has Pete been lying to me? If so, what else has he been lying about?

  ‘I know! Do you think I ought to tell the police? Although presumably they’re already interviewing him so they must know he’s married. I wonder how he’s got that past his wife, being interviewed by the police and stuff.’

  My mouth goes into autopilot and I express surprise and other appropriate responses to this news, keeping it light and gossipy. Inside I am reeling. Is Pete really married? He didn’t seem like the cheating type. But then, what do I know?

  At the door, I lean in to give Esther a goodbye hug, but something in her bearing – a barely noticeable hesitation, a momentary stiffening – makes me pull back. She wants to understand, but I don’t know if she will ever get past this, if we can ever be friends.

  When she has gone, I sweep through the house like a tornado, finding a place for everything that’s lying around: dusting, hoovering, mopping the floors, changing the beds. When I’ve finished I get in the shower and stand under the jets for a long time, letting them rain down on me, warming me and washing away the grime that has accumulated since I left Pete in the park. I had thought we were getting closer but it strikes me now how little I really know about him. He could be anybody. Something he said to me at the reunion has been nagging at the edges of my mind, and now I remember what it is. He said he would never go to a reunion, described himself as a loner at school. I think about Maria in her childhood bedroom in London, peering out from behind a crack in the curtains. Nathan Drinkwater leans against a lamp post, staring up at her window, expressionless, just watching. I’ve imagined this scene before, but this time Nathan’s face looks different. This time it looks familiar.

  Chapter 34

  She supposes there was always a darkness in him, a darkness she chose to ignore. Perhaps there was something in her that sought it out, deadly but unthinking, like a heat-seeking missile.

  The first time, the things he did to her appalled her, scared her even, but even then there was a part of her that responded in kind: here he is. She kept the marks hidden under her clothes where no one else could see. He praised her, made her feel special, said that there had been a girl at university who thought he’d gone too far, who didn’t enjoy the games like she did.

  But then later, they didn’t really feel like games any more. At first, she had enjoyed the thrill of letting him be in control, the delicious shudder of something that was close to fear. She was never really frightened though. But as time went on she could see something in his eyes, something different. It was like he wasn’t there with her. He was somewhere else, with someone else. Someone he didn’t care about hurting.

  She had always sensed that there was something from the past that he wasn’t telling her. Something darker even than the games he liked to play, when he gripped her wrists, put his hands over her mouth, around her neck even. Blurring the lines until she couldn’t tell whether she was consenting or not: gasping for air, dizzy, bruised. Broken.

  Perhaps it’s simply not possible to truly know another person. When it comes down to it, we’re all alone. Sometimes we don’t even know ourselves.

  Chapter 35

  2016

  I am determined to collect Henry on time today, but as so often recently, time slips away from me somehow, my mind full of the encounter with Esther earlier today. As I come panting round the corner, I can see I’m one of the last to turn up at the school gates for after-school club pickup. There are only a few children left standing by Mrs Hopkins and the new teaching assistant, Miss Jones. Most of them get collected at three o’clock by a parent (a mum mostly) or a grandparent (again, usually female). After-school club is for the unfortunates like Henry with two working parents and no helpful family members to take them home for cuddles and hot chocolate. The sky is clear with a sprinkling of stars already visible, and there’s a smell of wood smoke in the air. I’m looking forward to scuffing through the russet leaves with Henry on the way home, and it’s not until I’m fairly close that I realise that none of the children at the gate is Henry. Mrs Hopkins looks at me blankly. A tremor runs through me.

  ‘Where’s Henry?’ My voice is spiky with fear.

  ‘He was picked up at three…’ She turns to Miss Jones. ‘Wasn’t he?’

  Miss Jones looks concerned, but not overly so. She think
s it’s a misunderstanding, something easy to sort out.

  ‘Yes, his grandma picked him up.’

  For a blissful half-second I think it’s OK. My mum has come for an unexpected visit and decided to surprise him. She knows I hate the fact that he has to go to after-school club most days. But very quickly I realise it’s not OK, not at all. Quite apart from the fact that she never voluntarily looks after him, Mum would never have done that without letting me know.

  ‘His grandma?’ My voice sounds unfamiliar, high and wobbly. Could Sam’s mum possibly have decided it was time to get to know her grandson?