Friend Request(81)

‘Tea?’ I ask, moving some old newspapers off one of the chairs.

‘Yes, please.’ Esther hangs her coat and bag neatly from the back of the chair before sitting down. There’s an awkward silence while we wait for the kettle to boil. Once we are both seated, mugs in hand, I wait for her to tell me why she’s here.

‘So I spoke to the police again,’ she begins. ‘Have you, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘So did they show you?’

‘Show me what?’ Oh God. I know what is coming.

‘The necklace. Maria’s necklace.’

My mind scrabbles around for the next lie, vacillating between telling her the police didn’t show me, or saying they did but I hadn’t realised it was Maria’s, but somewhere in between the two the elastic band inside me snaps and my face crumples into hot tears.

Esther puts out a hand and touches my arm gently. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. Is it… the messages? Have you had any more?’

I get up from the table and take a piece of kitchen roll from the side to blow my nose.

‘Don’t be nice to me. Don’t feel sorry for me. It’s all my fault. Did you tell them… the police? That you thought it was Maria’s necklace?’

‘Yes,’ she says, her face puzzled. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘No. I didn’t want them to connect me and Sophie to what happened to Maria.’

‘But… surely they already knew you were all connected when you told them about the Facebook page?’

‘I didn’t tell them about that either.’ My face flushes with hot shame, my blood running thick with all the things Esther doesn’t know. ‘Did… did you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she says, bewildered.

So it’s over. Reynolds knows. Tim will be getting a call soon, no doubt, and it won’t be long before they come knocking on my door. With a heaving swell inside, I realise this is where it all starts to unravel.

‘Well, I assumed you’d already told them,’ she goes on. ‘And didn’t they find the messages from Maria anyway? On Sophie’s computer?’

‘Not as far as I know. If the police weren’t looking for them, they would just seem like innocuous messages from a friend. As far as they’re concerned, Maria’s just another of Sophie’s many Facebook friends. There was no reason for them to be suspicious, unless somebody told them about Maria.’

And now somebody has, and the police will be joining the dots, forming a chain that leads them back to a summer’s night in 1989.

‘I don’t understand why you didn’t tell the police about the friend request and the messages from Maria though?’ Esther says.

‘I didn’t want them to connect me and Sophie to what happened to Maria in 1989,’ I repeat.

‘But why on earth not?’ Esther looks utterly bemused.

It doesn’t matter now. The police are going to find Maria, or whoever is sending those messages, and they’re going to find out what I did. It’s all going to come out. There’s no point pretending any more. There’s even a kind of relief in it. Even so, I bury my face in my hands so I don’t have to see her face when I tell her.

‘What happened to Maria, whatever it was, it was my fault.’ The words are muffled, but they are out there.

‘Louise, it wasn’t. I know you treated her badly at school, but we all do things we regret when we’re younger. Things that maybe even horrify us when we look back as adults.’ I can hear in her voice what it is costing her to say this, can hear the years of pain and isolation she suffered at school and the scars they have left.

‘You don’t understand. There’s something you don’t know.’ I take my hands away and force myself to meet her eye. ‘Do you remember at the leavers’ party, you couldn’t find Maria, and you came to ask me if I’d seen her? You said she’d said she wasn’t feeling well?’

‘Yes.’

‘I know why she felt unwell. Me and Sophie had… we did something…’ I clench my fists, take a shaky breath. Esther waits, says nothing. ‘We spiked her drink with Ecstasy.’

Esther inhales sharply. I watch her face closely. She doesn’t speak straight away, but puts a hand to her mouth and turns to look out of the French windows into the courtyard. She is miles and years away, turning events over in her mind, reconfiguring them to fit this horrifying new information.

‘But what happened to her then?’ she asks, turning back to me.

‘I don’t know. I never saw her again, I swear.’

Esther is silent again, and I hold my breath, awaiting my fate. I realise that, aside from the implications for me and Henry of the police finding out about what I did, I am dreading losing Esther when I was beginning to feel that I had found her again.

‘So the Facebook thing… is that what it’s about, do you think?’ she says eventually. ‘Does whoever’s doing it know?’

‘I don’t know. They’ve never mentioned it.’ Part of what is so frightening about the messages is that whoever it is never says anything specific. They offer only veiled threats, standing in the shadows.

‘The Facebook page…’ she stops. ‘It couldn’t be her, could it? Where would she have been all this time? Even on my birthday, when I get the presents, I’ve never really believed they could be from her. But the necklace…’