Friend Request(64)

‘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.’