It happens again on Monday morning, three days after my visit to Sophie’s flat and exactly one week since the original friend request. Outside it’s one of those sunny autumn days where you feel summer might not be over after all. Light streams through the French windows, warming the surface of the kitchen table where I am struggling to concentrate on work. I’m already late in delivering two proposals for potential new clients, and I’m falling behind on a project for Rosemary as well. I check Facebook constantly, dreading the moment. I’ve been praying that it was a one-off, an ill-judged joke by someone going to the reunion. With every day that passes, the tiny seed of hope that I’ll never hear from her again has been sprouting.
When I get the notification that there is a Facebook message from Maria Weston, I can hardly get my hands to work fast enough, my fingers scrabbling desperately over the keys in my haste to get to the message.
Run as fast as you like, Louise. You’ll never escape from me. Every wound leaves a scar. Just ask Esther Harcourt.
I sit for a moment or two, heart racing, reading the message over and over as if that will yield some further clue as to who is doing this, and why. Run as fast as you like. There was someone following me that night. I knew it.
Ask Esther Harcourt. I saw Esther once in town, after it happened. She averted her eyes as if my guilt might somehow rub off on her, as if she could catch my shame like it was a contagious airborne disease. She didn’t even know the whole truth – if she had, she would have done more than look away.
She was the only person that Maria talked to in those last months before the leavers’ party. There are spaces, huge gaps, in what I know about Maria. Esther might be able to fill them in. I’ve spent the weekend poring over every detail of my meeting with Sophie, and the thought of speaking to someone who genuinely cared about Maria is strangely comforting.
I type her name into the search box, but she’s not on Facebook. I quash the terrible teenage part of my brain that immediately concludes that she doesn’t have any friends. Many people are not on Facebook for a variety of excellent reasons. Once I have exhausted that avenue, I try simply googling her, which throws up a number of results. LinkedIn is the top one, and it’s her. She is a solicitor, and still living in Norfolk. Her profile picture reveals that she has aged well; in fact, she looks about a million times better than she ever did at school. The bottle tops have been replaced by a sleek pair of angular designer frames and what on the teenage Esther was an unruly mass of bushy mousy hair is now a thick, glossy, chestnut mane.
She is a partner in the wills and probate department at her firm, one of the big ones in Norwich. It seems she is a proper high-flier, speaks at conferences, writes papers, the kind that probably gets invited back to school to give inspirational talks. I thought when I won that interior design award recently, and was featured in the Sharne Bay Journal, that they might invite me back to speak, but I never heard anything.
Now I know where Esther works I could call or email her, but I cannot shake the memory of our eyes meeting all those years ago, and how she turned her face away. A mad idea occurs to me and I pick up the phone. Two minutes later Serena Cooke has an appointment with Ms Harcourt to make a will. They’d taken my details and tried to fob me off with someone else but I insisted. Normally I would have had to wait, but she has had a last-minute cancellation for tomorrow morning. She’ll probably recognise me straight away but at least she won’t have had any time to prepare, and can’t refuse to see me.
The next morning we’re up early. Henry always goes to the school’s breakfast club on a Tuesday anyway so I can work, but today I’m taking him a bit earlier than usual. He sits at the kitchen table in his pyjamas, spooning cereal into his mouth, bleary-eyed and red-cheeked, still carrying the warmth of his bed with him. I lean down to kiss him as I pass, mentally listing the things I need to remember like a mantra: book bag, lunch box, water bottle, reading book, school-trip letter, fabric samples, email Rosemary.
‘Mummy?’ Henry says, between spoonfuls.
‘Yes,’ I say, distracted and still swooping around gathering everything we both need for the day.
‘At school yesterday, Jasper and Dylan wouldn’t play with me.’
I sit down next to him, mental lists abandoned.
‘What do you mean?’ I say with a sinking heart.
‘I wanted to play trains in choosing time, but they wouldn’t play. I kept telling them, but they wanted to play outside.’
‘You can’t make your friends do what you want them to do, Henry. It sounds more like they wanted to play a different game, not that they wouldn’t play with you as such.’
‘No, Mummy. They didn’t want to play with me. I asked and asked. Dylan said all I want to do is play with the trains. He said I’m boring.’ He puts down his spoon and jumps onto my lap, wrapping his arms and legs around me, his hot face buried in my neck. My heart aches with love for him, and I try not to examine my feelings about Jasper and Dylan too closely. They are only four, after all.
‘Can’t I stay with you today?’ The words are muffled but there’s no mistaking the hope in them.
Guilt clamps around me like a vice. I’m not going to get much work done today. The fabric swatches and paint colours I was meant to be putting together for a client were going to have to wait anyway. I’m already late with them, what’s one more day? I could easily cancel the appointment with Esther, call Henry in sick, spend the day snuggled on the sofa watching Disney films. I’m not going to, because my need to find out what’s going on with the Facebook request is overriding everything else.
I unpeel Henry and manage to persuade him to get dressed by promising that I will play trains with him for a long time when we get home this afternoon.
‘A really long time?’ he asks beadily.
‘Ages and ages,’ I promise.
I drop him at breakfast club and drive east under a leaden sky. Once I leave the motorway behind, the A11 unwinds reluctantly before me. The landscape is dully familiar, despite the many years since I’ve been this way: vast skies, rippled with threatening cloud; flattened expanses of field after rolling field; the war memorial standing stark and alone as the traffic roars past, just before the mysterious-sounding Elveden Forest, conjuring images of Tolkien-esque creatures engaged in thrilling adventures but delivering only bike hire, rock climbing and other wholesome family activities. The wind is buffeting my car and a few miles past Elveden I pull over in a layby and sit for a moment, gripping the wheel, trying to calm my breathing. I check my phone, as I do every time I have a spare moment, but there is only an email from Rosemary asking for something I am meant to have done but haven’t.
When I arrive, I am buzzed in and asked to wait in an elegant room complete with polished wooden floors and immaculately upholstered antique furniture. It’s like an American movie’s idea of an English law firm. I perch on the edge of an embroidered chaise longue, shifting this way and that, crossing and un-crossing my legs.
I was hoping for a few moments to get my bearings, feel my way, but as soon as I am shown in by the elegantly groomed secretary, it’s obvious that the game is up. Esther raises her head with a welcoming smile in place but within a second it has faded and behind the tortoiseshell frames her eyes register shock. She waits until the secretary has gone before speaking, and when she does her tone is blunt and unfriendly.
‘You’re not Serena Cooke.’
‘No, obviously… I… I wasn’t sure if you’d see me.’
‘I assume you’re not here to make a will then?’
‘No.’
‘So why are you here?’
I’m still hovering by the door, having not been invited to sit. I tuck my hair excessively and needlessly behind my ears, a habit I’ve had since childhood. Something in the gesture must trigger a memory in Esther of our days running wild and mud-spattered in the woods near her house, because her face softens a tiny bit and she gestures to the padded leather chair in front of her desk. I sink gratefully into it.
‘I didn’t know where else to come.’
Esther raises an enquiring eyebrow.
‘Something’s happened.’
A second eyebrow joins the first. I steel myself.
‘I got a Facebook friend request. It was from Maria Weston.’
The sympathy that in spite of herself is Esther’s natural response to my obvious discomfort is replaced instantly by bewilderment, and something else I can’t identify. Is it fear?
‘From Maria? But that’s not possible.’ She’s not used to having her composure rattled, I can tell.
‘No, I know it’s not. But, well, it happened. I wondered… if you knew anything about it, or if you could throw any light?’
‘Why on earth should I know anything about it?’ she says, flushing. ‘I’m not in the habit of setting up Facebook pages for long-dead school friends. I’m not even on Facebook myself.’
‘No, of course not, I didn’t think you set it up. I’m just… well, I’m frightened. I think someone might have been in my flat, and I’m sure someone was following me the other day.’
‘What?’ Her forehead creases in concern. ‘Have you told the police?’
‘What can they do? I’ve got no proof. The other thing is… I got another message yesterday. From the same person. Can I show you?’
She shrugs as if to say I’m leaving her no choice, so I hand my phone over. She presses her lips together as she reads it, as if to keep the words she wants to say from flying out. She taps the screen and her expression softens. She breathes out, a long, slow breath and I know she’s looking at Maria’s photo.
‘What do you think it means, about asking you?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Maria and I both suffered at the hands of bullies. Whoever wrote this knows that.’
I start to protest, but she interrupts. ‘I know, I know, you never bullied me. You just dumped me the minute we arrived at secondary school and never spoke to me again. But I don’t think there’s any other word for what you and Sophie did to Maria, is there?’
I am hot with shame. I can’t bear to look her in the eye.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I say, looking at the floor. ‘I suppose I needed to talk to someone about it, and Sophie was no good, so I thought maybe you might be able to – help me, I guess.’
‘You talked to Sophie Hannigan about this? Are you still in touch with her?’ Esther manages to give the impression that if I answer in the affirmative I will sink even lower in her estimation.
‘God no, not at all, not since school. I tracked her down as well.’
‘On Facebook?’
‘Yes.’
‘Of course. I bet she’s on there all the time, isn’t she? “Look how gorgeous I am, look at my amazing life.” I can’t stand it. That’s why I’m not on there; it’s all so bloody fake, as if it’s actually designed to make you feel crap about your own life.’
I wonder how I am going to get past the barriers that Esther has been erecting since I walked into the room.
‘Look, I know I treated Maria badly.’
Esther snorts.
‘OK, worse than badly. When I think about it now I am so ashamed, it’s like I was a different person. I can’t believe that the me that I am now could ever have behaved as I did. Barely a day goes by that I don’t think of Maria. But I can’t change what I’ve done.’ My God, I wish I could. The worst of it is that Esther doesn’t even know what I have done, not really. ‘I can only control who I am now. What I don’t understand is why this is happening now. Is it something to do with the reunion maybe? Stirring things up in people’s minds?’
‘There’s a reunion?’
Esther’s mask slips and she has spoken before she’s had a chance to arrange her face into the expression she wants me to see. For a second I see on her face the emotions I experienced when I heard about the reunion myself: disappointment, shame, self-loathing. Unlike me she has a live audience, so has to recover quickly.
‘I wouldn’t go to that if you paid me. You’re not going, are you?’
‘I thought I might,’ I mumble. Why does it make me feel so ashamed? Why am I still so engaged with my teenage self, with my place in that long-ago universe?
‘Still tagging along, Louise? God, have you not moved on at all?’
‘Look, forget it,’ I say, eager to be away from her. ‘You obviously can’t help me. Or you don’t want to.’
Her face softens. ‘It’s not a question of not wanting to; I simply don’t know anything about this. I haven’t seen anyone from school since the day I walked out the door. Not deliberately anyway. Look, give me your number – if anything occurs to me, I’ll let you know.’
‘Thank you,’ I say quietly, scribbling it down on a Post-it note.
She looks down at her hands, which are balled into fists, and I get the impression that she is digging her nails into her palms.
‘It must have given you a terrible jolt, getting that request. Seeing her photo.’
‘Yes. Must have been taken not long before – you know.’
There doesn’t seem to be any more to say, so I leave with the firm intention of heading straight back home. However, without thinking, I find myself turning right at a crossroads and negotiating a hairpin bend, and before I know it the outskirts of Sharne Bay begin to roll out around me. Things haven’t changed much, although there’s a row of houses that I don’t remember, and the corner shop where we used to go for sweets has become a Tesco Metro. We’re closer to the sea on this side of town, and I roll my window down to let in a waft of salty air.
As I drive through a mixture of the painfully recognisable and the disorientatingly new, my mind replays the encounter with Esther. Something is nagging at me and as I automatically bear right to loop round and join the road where my old school is, I realise what it is: that brief second where fear crossed her face. Why should Esther be afraid? If someone is playing a sick joke on me as some kind of retribution, then Esther surely has nothing to worry about. She was the one person who was never anything but kind to Maria. And she can’t have anything to fear from Maria herself. Maria drowned more than twenty-five years ago.
Didn’t she?