Friend Request(62)

I had half-expected, and dreaded, ranting and raving but this hard, cold fury is worse. I thought Polly was in my corner, but of course she’s not. She has children, and children trump everything, like a royal flush in poker.

‘I think you’d better go actually. I need to focus on Phoebe today; I don’t have any headspace for you… for this. I can’t deal with it right now. I’ll give you a call.’

I’ve known all my life that I couldn’t tell anyone about what I did to Maria, but this thing with Sophie has thrown everything up in the air. I thought it made things different, but it doesn’t, of course it doesn’t.

As I drive away from Polly’s house, I start to cry silently, and find that I can’t stop. Henry is prattling away in the back about what he had for dinner and how Phoebe read to him before she went out. Thank God I didn’t let him sit in the front as he had wanted to. I keep wiping the tears away with my hand, but more come. As I sit at the traffic lights, an old woman with a wheeled shopping trolley looks at me curiously.

I try to force my mind to concentrate on something else. I need to be not crying by the time we get home; I don’t want Henry to see me like this. Naomi Strawe. I know there was no one of that name in my year at school. Strawe is an unusual name, one I’m sure I’ve never heard, although as Mr Jenkins said it could be her married name. I don’t remember a Naomi though. I think of him spelling out the name, with his emphasis on the ‘WE’ at the end. The first two letter of Weston. With a churning sensation, fear beginning to shift within me, I whisper the letters out loud, jumbling them around in my head, the realisation gradually dawning. Naomi Strawe is an anagram of Maria Weston.

Someone followed me through the tunnel at South Kensington. Someone was watching me as I sat alone in that bar, waiting for a date who was never going to show. Was that someone there last night at the reunion, unseen, hovering at the edges, waiting for who knows what? I’ve been running on pure adrenaline since the initial, numbing shock of the discovery of Sophie’s body, but that’s wearing off now, and the implications are crowding in on me. I can’t ignore the possibility any longer that Maria is still alive. Or if she’s not, then whoever killed Sophie knows what happened to her; knows what I did. And Polly’s reaction has hammered home another truth to me: I glance in the mirror at Henry’s face, with its impossibly smooth skin, rounded, still babyish cheeks and long eyelashes fringing deep chocolate-brown eyes. Before today, even though I had let my other friendships slide, I wasn’t alone, because I had Polly. But now, it’s just Henry and me. We are completely alone, and we are in danger.

Chapter 25

2016
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.