Outside the police station, I walk steadily at a medium pace, in case Reynolds is watching me from an upstairs window. My car is parked in a nearby multi-storey, but I continue walking past the entrance, the rhythm of feet hitting pavement soothing me. Cars zoom past me with hypnotic regularity, a backdrop to my racing thoughts.
How have I ended up here, lying to the police again? I remember the other detective, a kind man. I never knew exactly how much Maria’s mum Bridget had told him about me, but I don’t think he ever suspected any foul play. Esther’s testimony that Maria had been drinking was enough for him to conclude that a tragic accident was the most likely explanation. The rain that had begun to fall as we left the hall that night had continued all night, a relentless downpour that would have washed away any hope of physical evidence. Only Sophie, Sam, Matt and I knew exactly how tragic, and how far you would have to stretch the word accident, to make the official verdict anywhere close to accurate. At least, I think we were the only ones who knew.
Even though I have left the police station far behind, I still have the feeling that someone is watching me. I can feel the heat on my back, like the glare of the sun, ostensibly benign but with the potential to burn, to scald. I walk faster, hyper-alert, trying to look like someone in an ordinary hurry, perhaps with a train to catch, or late for an appointment. When I reach Norwich town centre, I duck behind a crowd of tourists and swerve into Marks & Spencer, its familiarity a soothing balm. How do they make all their shops smell the same? In the food hall, standing in front of the sandwich counter staring unseeingly at the tuna sweetcorn and chicken salad, I slowly become aware that someone is watching me. I try to keep my eyes on the sandwiches, but cannot stop the heat that rises to my cheeks. There’s a harassed woman with two small children whinging for treats to my right, and next to her a greying man in a tired suit looking miserably at the low-fat section. My eyes slide beyond him and land on Tim Weston. He smiles and gives a half-wave, coming around behind the businessman and the woman with the children.
‘Louise, hi. What are you doing here?’
‘Buying a sandwich?’ I give a breathless laugh, trying to conceal my discomfort. Has Tim been following me?
‘Right. You came all the way to Norwich for a sandwich? They do have Marks & Spencers in London you know.’ His tone is light but there’s an accusation behind his words.
I give in. ‘I’ve just been at the police station actually. Talking to them about Sophie Hannigan.’ There’s no point trying to avoid the subject.
‘Oh God, yes of course, I heard.’ His face falls. ‘It’s so awful. Do you… know any more about what happened to her?’
‘No, not really. They just wanted to talk to me, as someone that was there, you know. Someone that spoke to her at the reunion.’ Why am I trying to justify myself to him?
‘Right, right. It’s just such a horrific thing to have happened.’
We stand there awkwardly for a moment.
‘Which one are you getting?’ he asks eventually.
I look down at the sandwich in either hand, shove one of them blindly back into the fridge, and we walk to the tills together. We pay for our sandwiches in silence, and walk out of the shop together and along the pedestrianised street.
‘Which way are you going?’ he says.
‘Back to my car. It’s parked near the police station.’ I wave my hand in the general direction of Bethel Street.
‘I’ll walk with you, if that’s OK?’
It’s not OK, really. There’s so much that’s unspoken between us, not just on my side but on his too. I am uncomfortably conscious of how little I know him, and how I don’t want him to know too much about me. We stand on the pavement waiting to cross a one-way street. Unfamiliar with the roads, I am looking the wrong way and as I step out, a car rockets towards me. My brain is moving slower than the car and as I hover in the road, I feel Tim’s fingers close on the top of my arm and haul me back to safety.
‘Sorry,’ he says, seeing me rubbing my arm. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No, it’s fine.’ I give a shaky laugh. ‘I think I’d be worse off if you hadn’t grabbed me.’
‘They’re nutters, some of the drivers round here. Think they’re at Brands Hatch.’
We cross carefully, and continue on our way in silence. I can’t help thinking of the figure at the top of the school drive.
‘So, you decided against going to the reunion then?’ I ask eventually. I see Tim in my mind’s eye, waving his arms and shouting, and then leaving with his arm around the small figure in black. Tim’s face closes down.
‘Yeah, I realised it would be a really bad idea. I’ve got my own life now. Best left well alone.’
Then what was he doing at the top of the drive? And who was he with?
‘All that Facebook stuff,’ he goes on. ‘People from the past contacting you… it’s so easy to get sucked in, but what does it all mean, really? You’re better off focussing on your actual life, the one you’re living. Our family was never the same, after what happened… to Maria.’
‘Mmm.’ I don’t trust myself to speak, certain my voice will betray me.
‘I felt like I’d be dragging it all up again for no reason, if I went. So you’ve… have you got no idea what happened to Sophie?’
‘No, none at all.’
‘I heard she brought some bloke to the reunion? Someone she hardly knew?’
‘Yes, she was with a man. I’m not sure how well she knew him.’ There’s something about his interest in the details that makes me reluctant to share more than I have to with Tim.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was gossiping, or making light of it,’ he says as we walk, having clearly picked up my signals. ‘I didn’t realise you and Sophie were still close.’
‘We’re not. I mean, we weren’t. I hadn’t really seen her since school.’
‘Oh, OK. It’s ironic, I didn’t go to the reunion because I didn’t want to drag up the past, and then this happens and I feel like the past has given me a big old slap in the face anyway.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I say. However this situation is resolved, I cannot see how I am ever going to feel any differently to the way I do now. I’ve spent a lifetime with this weight on my shoulders. It has shifted and turned, been heavier at certain times than at others, but it has never lifted completely and I can’t see how it ever will.
‘I know what Mum thinks,’ Tim says, ‘but I’ve never believed that Maria killed herself. She was stronger than that, you know? Even when she had all that trouble at her old school in London, I never thought for a moment that she’d give up.’
For a heart-stopping moment I think he means that he suspects someone else had a hand in her death, but he continues speaking. ‘I’m sure the police were right. She must have drunk more than she was used to, and got confused about where she was, or maybe she went to the cliffs to get away from everyone for some reason, to be alone. And then she must have stumbled or… I don’t know. I thought I’d been able to stop turning it over and over in my mind, but this thing with Sophie, it’s got it all churned up again.’
‘What did happen, in London?’ I’ve still never got to the bottom of this. Maybe it’s time I did.
‘Did she never tell you?’
‘No, not really.’ She had tried, but I hadn’t let her. I knew if I let her get too close I’d never be able to pull back if I needed to.
‘There was this boy in her year who she was friendly with. But then he started to want more, told her he was in love with her. She told him she wasn’t interested, just wanted to be friends. But she felt a bit uncomfortable around him after that and pulled back, started spending less time with him. That’s when it started.’
‘When what started, exactly?’
‘Notes in her bag at first, things like that: “Why won’t you see me any more?”; “I know we’re meant to be together”. Then he started waiting outside our house in the mornings before school, wanting to walk with her, and then when she wouldn’t he’d walk a few metres behind us all the way.’
‘Did you tell anyone? Your parents?’
‘Not at first. I mean, we used to laugh about it when it began. Also, I don’t know, teenagers didn’t tell their parents things in the eighties, did they? Not like they seem to now. The idea was that we got on with things ourselves. I hope my daughter’s not like that when she’s older.’
I know exactly what he means. Henry’s still so little that he tells me everything that happens to him, his life an open book, but even Polly’s daughters are much franker with her than I was with my parents. When I was a teenager, even before Maria disappeared, the life I had with my parents was completely separate from the rest of my existence – my real life, as I thought of it. When Polly asks her daughters how their day has been, she gets it all – the rivalries, the disagreements, the small kindnesses. She knows them. What my parents knew, and still know, is a highly edited version of me, a composite of who I was as a child and what I chose to show them of the person I was becoming.
‘Then when he wasn’t getting anywhere with that,’ Tim goes on, ‘he ramped it up. A couple of times she saw him outside our house late at night, looking up at her window. She didn’t tell Mum and Dad about that, in case they thought she was encouraging it. And then the rumours started.’
This was what Maria had hinted at to me, but I hadn’t wanted to hear it. I am overcome, as I have been so often recently, with an impotent sense of longing to go back and change the past. Change my behaviour, at least. I am a decent person now. I pay my taxes and go to the dentist. I recycle. I care about my friends, and about the world in general. But how do I reconcile that with the things I did when I was sixteen? I’m that person too, aren’t I?
‘What sort of rumours?’
Tim’s face closes up a little. ‘Horrible stuff. Sexual. But not only that she’d slept with such and such a boy, or whatever. He said she’d slept with girls too. I know that seems to be all the rage with teenage girls nowadays, but back then being called a lesbian was akin to being called a baby-murderer. Girls started to avoid her, even ones that had previously been her friends. Boys that had never even noticed her started sniffing around. And then a rumour went round that she’d slept with three boys at once. One —’ he stops to control the tremor in his voice, biting his lower lip, and then spits out the rest of the sentence ‘— one in each hole.’
‘But why did people believe him? If they knew her?’
‘If you get enough people talking about something it gathers its own momentum. And the idea that there’s no smoke without fire is a powerful one. Think about famous men who’ve been accused of sexual assault. Even if they are completely exonerated, if the case is thrown out due to lack of evidence; even if the woman withdraws her statement. What’s the first thing you think every time you see them on TV or hear them on the radio? “I wonder if he did it”. That’s what you think, every time.’
‘So your parents decided to move? You told them in the end?’ I remember that first day in the lunch hall; Maria explaining the cause for the move as ‘a bit of trouble’ at her old school; she was so determined not to carry it with her.
‘Not exactly. He did that for her. He wrote them an anonymous letter signed by a “concerned well-wisher”. Telling them about the rumours, these… things that were being said about her. Can you imagine hearing those things about your own daughter?’
I can’t imagine it, can’t imagine the pain and horror and sorrow of it. I think of Polly at her kitchen table, her voice dripping with barely concealed hatred for her daughter’s persecutor. And of Bridget at the end of the leavers’ party when she realised Maria was missing, her unflinching stare accusing me of an unknown crime.
‘What was the boy’s name? Do you remember?’
‘Remember it? Of course. His name was Nathan Drinkwater.’
I stop dead on the pavement and a mother with a double buggy bangs into the back of my legs, tutting as she manoeuvres round me.
‘Nathan Drinkwater? Are you sure?’ Maria’s only other Facebook friend, apart from me and Sophie.
‘I’m hardly likely to forget it, am I? What’s the matter?’
‘Did anyone else know his name? Anyone from Sharne Bay?’
‘Loads of people knew. Matt Lewis’s cousin knew someone who went to our old school. I was fuming at the time when he told everyone. We came all that way to escape what had happened, but we couldn’t. It followed us to Norfolk. I think it would have followed us anywhere.’
‘What happened to Nathan? Did Maria ever hear from him after you moved?’
‘No. I actually heard that he had died a few years ago, from a friend of a friend of someone who knew him. I don’t know if it’s true though.’
Is Nathan Drinkwater dead? If not, he doesn’t sound like the type to give up due to mere lack of proximity. Could it really be him on Maria’s friends list on Facebook? I wonder whether Maria continued to hear from Nathan after they moved, but told no one. And more than that, I wonder if he really is dead. And, if not, where is he now?