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 in 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.
‘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.