Three Little Lies Page 4

  ‘So, have you moved from far?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said, looking out of the window again.

  ‘Oh, right. Well…’ I sensed I was fighting a losing battle here, and was about to leave when she spoke again, and this time she sounded warmer.

  ‘What a creep.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, confused.

  ‘That boy who was in here, before you came in.’

  ‘Leo Smith?’ He’d never struck me that way. There were boys in our year you knew to avoid, boys with wandering hands and worse, but he wasn’t one of them. Sarah Penfold had got completely pissed at a party and woken naked in a strange bed to find David Weekes with his hands all over her. She’d managed to push him off and get out, but who knew if the next girl would be so lucky.

  ‘If that’s his name,’ the girl said, shrugging.

  ‘Why, what did he do?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, closing herself back up. ‘Are you doing anything?’

  ‘What, now?’ I was struggling to keep up with the constant changes of pace.

  ‘Yes, of course now. I wasn’t asking you out.’

  I reddened. ‘I know, I…’

  ‘Oh my God, you’re easy to wind up!’

  The blush on my cheeks deepened even further.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ she said, relenting. ‘Let’s go outside. You can tell me which other creeps to look out for.’

  As we walked out on to the playground, the curious stares of my classmates were hotter on my back than the warm September sunshine. I felt briefly guilty about Karina – partly because I could already feel my allegiance to her shifting and attaching itself to this strange, alluring girl, and partly because she was going to be so annoyed that I had been the first one to break into the world of the corner house, even if I’d only made a very slight inroad so far. I shook it off, though, as we sat down on a bench, shoving any thoughts of Karina far, far to the back of my mind, and turning to bask in the sun.

  Ellen

  September 2017

  The woman on the other end of the phone is calm with a soothing Yorkshire accent. She takes some details and tells me they will send an officer out to see me within the next hour or so. While I wait, I go through Sasha’s things again, trying to work out whether anything is missing. I don’t even know what she was wearing yesterday morning. I was still asleep when she left. Her coat isn’t here, certainly, but that doesn’t tell me anything.

  I call Sasha again, hoping against hope that this will be the time she picks up, but voicemail kicks in once more as she smilingly invites me to leave a message. I’ve already left several, pleading with her to call me, let me know she’s OK, but I leave another anyway.

  ‘Sash, it’s me again. I’m so worried about you. If… if I’ve done anything to upset you, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Please come back. I’ve called the police; they’re sending someone out to see me. I don’t know if you’ll get this but, if you do, well… I’m going to find you.’

  I’m still in her room when the buzzer goes. I hurry into the hall and a woman’s voice announces herself as PC Bryant. I buzz her up and stand at the open front door of the flat. I hear footsteps coming up the communal stairs, and then she’s here, rounding the corner at the top of the stairwell, walking down the corridor towards me. I try to stretch my face into a facsimile of a smile, although I’ve never felt less like smiling in my life.

  ‘You must be Ellen,’ she says, holding out her hand. ‘I’m PC Bryant.’ She’s a bit older than me, mid-thirties, maybe, small and bird-like with short, dyed red hair and no make-up.

  ‘Come in,’ I say, leading her through the small hall into the lounge. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘Yes, that would be great. You look like you could use one yourself.’ She smiles, and I realise how I must look in yesterday’s clothes, make-up smudged under my red-rimmed eyes, hair matted at the back from a night of tossing and turning.

  In the kitchen I splash water from the tap on to my face and rake my fingers through my hair, trying to make myself look vaguely presentable. In some sort of weird effort to look efficient and together, I put the mugs on a tray instead of carrying them in my hands. I’ve put them too close together and they clink against each other as I come back into the lounge, tea slopping out as I place the tray on the coffee table and sit down.

  ‘I know you must be very worried,’ Bryant says, reaching out for her cup. ‘But if it helps at all, the vast majority of missing persons turn up safe and well within a day or two. It’s very likely your friend Sasha will too.’

  I take a sip of my tea although it’s still too hot. It doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t care what happens to other missing persons. We are not talking about other missing persons; we’re talking about my best friend.

  ‘Is this her?’ Bryant indicates a photo of Sasha on a side table. It was taken at the wedding of our friends Kate and Jonny in the summer, the first of our group to get married. It’s a close-up of her face, looking away from the camera, laughing at something someone has said. I remember, though, how she wasn’t laughing later, drunk and maudlin, refusing to let me go to bed, making me stay up for hours while she bemoaned Jackson’s possessiveness, droning on and on about how he wasn’t the man for her until I felt like shaking her. She was trying to paint herself as some sort of tragic heroine in her own life story, hinting at lost loves, ones who got away, but I was exhausted and drunk, and for once I couldn’t be bothered to play her games, to pander to her need for attention. I don’t know why she bothered putting on this show for me – I’d been there for all the various boyfriends she’d had over the years, and I was sure she hadn’t cared that deeply for any of them.

  ‘Yes,’ I say to Bryant. ‘Would you like to take it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  I slide it out of the frame and pass it to her.

  ‘It’s great to have this,’ Bryant says, ‘but can you describe Sasha in your own words?’

  ‘She’s —’ I break off. I was going to say she’s beautiful, because that is the first thing that strikes you when you look at her. She’s not just pretty, or attractive. She is properly beautiful, like a movie star. That’s not what they want, though. ‘She’s five foot eight, slim, long blonde hair, blue eyes.’ I take a deep breath, trying to dispel the sick, panicky feeling describing her in the language of a TV news report is giving me. ‘She has a faint scar on her right cheek, although you can only see it if she’s not wearing any make-up. I don’t know what she was wearing yesterday. She must have had her coat on, though. It’s red – full-length, wool. And her black ankle boots are missing.’

  ‘OK, that’s great. I know you’ve been through this already on the phone, but can you tell me when you last saw Sasha?’

  ‘The day before yesterday, when I went to bed. She was here yesterday morning, though, but she left for work before I got up. Her boyfriend Jackson came over around six last night. He’d been to meet her from work but she’d left at lunchtime. She didn’t come home last night. I can’t get her on the phone. Jackson’s rung around all the hospitals and she’s not in any of them, and I’ve called all the friends I can think of. No one’s heard from her.’

  ‘Was it unexpected, that she left work at lunchtime?’

  ‘Yes, she was supposed to be there all day, as far as I know. Jackson certainly thought so. He… wasn’t very happy.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Bryant asks in a neutral tone, although her ears have pricked up, a cat sensing its prey.

  ‘He didn’t say so, but…’ I hesitate, not wanting to drop Jackson in it – he’s got nothing to do with this. I mustn’t start lying to the police, though, not now. ‘He suspected she’d left work early to meet someone else. She hadn’t, though. I’d know.’

  ‘We don’t always know everything about our friends, even those we’re closest to.’

  ‘I would,’ I insist. ‘She’s my best friend, my oldest friend. We tell each other everything.’

  ‘OK,’ B
ryant says with infuriating calmness. ‘How did she seem, on Thursday evening? Was she her usual self?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, because what else can I say? I can’t say that she didn’t have a usual self, that she was mercurial: charming one minute and a bitchy nightmare the next. Some people couldn’t cope. She ripped through friendships like wildfire, leaving her victims scorched and exhausted in her wake; relieved, perhaps, but their lives a little duller for her absence. Not me, though. I would never desert her. She needs me, I suppose, although our other friends would probably be surprised to hear that, would think it the other way around. She’s not as tough as she seems, though. Not underneath it all.

  ‘And recently, before that, how has she been? Has anything happened to upset her? Any rows with anyone?’

  I think of the way she swept in last Friday. Was it only my choice of music that annoyed her? She hadn’t come out of her room all night, and ever since I had sensed a coolness about her, an air of distraction.

  ‘No,’ I say. Whatever it was about her was so intangible, I couldn’t hope to explain it to a police officer. ‘She rowed with her boyfriend, but that’s not just a recent thing.’

  ‘Did it ever become violent?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh no, nothing like that. Will you be speaking to him?’ I feel a slight sense of unease at dragging Jackson into this, then chide myself. He’ll want to help – he’s as worried as I am.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she says. ‘Have you looked in her room? Is there anything missing? A suitcase? Clothes?’

  ‘I’ve been right through her stuff looking for…’ I tail off, unsure if this is the time to bring up Daniel, or even whether I’m going to mention him at all. ‘I don’t think anything’s missing. Her suitcase is definitely there, and her passport.’

  ‘Is it OK if I come and have a look at her room?’

  She follows me down the hall to Sasha’s room and looks around in thinly disguised horror at the clothes-strewn floor, the layer of dust on the surfaces, the discarded cups on the bedside table.

  ‘Is it… usual for her room to be so untidy?’ she asks, deliberately neutral.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, kneeling down to look under the bed. ‘I clean the rest of the flat but she goes mad if I try to tidy up in here. This is how she likes it.’ I push aside a pair of boots that appear to be growing mould, and can make out the shiny pink of her case. ‘Her suitcase is under there,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘I’m pretty sure nothing is missing from the room, although it’s kind of hard to tell.’

  ‘OK,’ says Bryant, scanning the room. ‘Would you say Sasha was depressed at all? Suicidal?’

  ‘No!’ The vehemence of my tone shocks us both. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout. No, she’s not that type of person.’

  ‘Anyone can suffer from depression. It’s not always easy to spot the signs.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But she’s never suffered from mental health problems. She’s not depressed.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she says. ‘So you wouldn’t describe her as vulnerable in any way?’

  ‘No,’ I say quickly, although she is, just not in the way Bryant means. She is strong, resilient. Titanium. I don’t know what has happened to her but the one thing I know for sure is she hasn’t chucked herself off a bridge. That would be losing, and Sasha always has to be the winner.

  ‘Now, I have to ask this: has Sasha ever been in trouble with the police, or been arrested?’

  ‘No.’ Her only contact with the police was the same as mine: eleven years ago, huddled around the Monktons’ kitchen table, festive merriment replaced by a thudding headache and a feeling of sick dread.

  ‘Has she ever been the victim of any crime?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And would you say it’s completely out of character for her to disappear like this? Without telling anyone?’

  ‘Yes, totally,’ I say without hesitation, but then something flits across my brain and it must be mirrored in my face because her eyes light up.

  ‘She’s never done this before?’ she asks.

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Yes?’ She looks at me steadily.

  ‘It was years ago, when we were much younger. It’s got nothing to do with this.’

  She gives me a look that says she’ll be the judge of that. ‘Even so,’ she says, ‘it might help. If she’s done something like this before, it might give you, or us, a better idea of where to look this time.’

  I look around her bedroom, her possessions as familiar to me as my own, and the fear of losing her pierces me so fiercely I lose my breath.

  ‘It was in 2006.’ The words come out in a rush now that I’ve decided to tell. ‘We were seventeen – the summer after lower sixth. We’d been talking about maybe going travelling around Europe together, but we hadn’t booked anything, and we needed to earn some money first. I did, anyway.’

  ‘She already had money?’ asks Bryant.

  ‘She always seemed to, yeah. I had a Saturday job in the Body Shop, but she never worked. I think Olivia and Tony were quite generous.’

  ‘Olivia and Tony?’

  ‘Her godparents. She came to live with them when she was sixteen.’

  ‘So what happened that summer?’

  ‘Like I said, we’d talked about going away. I’d managed to get some extra hours at the Body Shop and I thought I’d be able to afford to go away for the last few weeks of the holidays, before we went back to school. I popped over to her house to talk to her about it – they only lived down the road – and, well, she wasn’t there.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Olivia was the only one in, and she said Sasha was out, she wasn’t sure where. So I called her, but the phone was off…’ I am uncomfortably aware of the parallels between this story and the one I’ve just told her.

  ‘Go on,’ says Bryant.

  ‘Olivia said she’d ask Sasha to call me when she got back, but I decided to wait there for her.’ Olivia had been guarded, as if she was upset or there was something she wasn’t telling me.

  ‘With her godmother? Even though Sasha was out?’ says Bryant.

  ‘Yes. We were… close. I was sort of closer then to Olivia and Tony than I was to my own parents.’ Tears are pricking at my eyes and I know my voice is about to break. Although Olivia had seemed distracted, I remember it as a happy afternoon. We had sat at the battered oak table drinking Earl Grey tea and talking about my future. Things had gone a bit wrong for me academically that past year. I’d been caught up in the drama and excitement of life as it was lived at the Monktons’, and it had shown in my end of year exam results. But no matter what, I still can’t regret those years where I spent more time there than I did at home. Can’t regret those evenings around the table when Tony would slip me an illicit glass of wine and I would join in noisy discussions about politics, books, art. If it hadn’t been for the Monktons, there’s no way I would have taken the path that led me to my dream job, poorly paid and insecure as it is. I probably wouldn’t have even gone to university. I would have taken my mum’s advice, counted myself lucky to be earning, ended up working full-time in the Body Shop, resenting the university students who swanned in and worked for a few weeks in the holidays, looking down their noses at the full-time staff, pitying them for their little lives. That’s what I would have had without Olivia and Tony – a little life.

  ‘What happened?’ asks Bryant, dragging me back to the cold reality of Sasha’s empty bedroom.

  ‘She didn’t come back. I went over to the Monktons’ around three o’clock in the afternoon. I sat there with Olivia till about six, but Sasha still wasn’t home, so I left. I’d told my mum I’d be back for dinner.’ I remember that, because we’d had a row about it, me and Mum. She’d accused me of spending more time at the Monktons’ than I did at home. I flinch inwardly now as I think of how I asked her why she even cared. Tony and Olivia had never said a bad word about my mum and dad, but I knew how suburban, how comically lower middle class they thought people li
ke them were. It wasn’t about money – they never seemed to have much themselves, to the point where it was a source of pride for them; no, it was subtler than that, a sort of intellectual, artistic snobbery, I suppose, although I never saw it as that. I just thought they were right, and said as little about my home life as possible in case I gave myself away.

  ‘Olivia called me about ten o’clock that night,’ I go on. ‘She was worried. Sasha still hadn’t come back, and she hadn’t called, either. Her phone was switched off, and none of the friends Olivia had called knew where she was either.’

  ‘Did she call the police?’ asks Bryant.

  ‘No, she…’ I remember being surprised at the time that she didn’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t want to tell Bryant that. ‘I think she thought Sasha had gone out and lost track of time, or something.’ It sounds lame even to my ears.