Friend Request(85)

The bungalow is double-fronted, and there is a doorway either side of me. I take a few steps further in, my ears straining for any sound in the silence. Cautiously I peer into the room on the left. It’s the living room. By the light of the streetlamp outside I can see an old-fashioned green three-piece suite clustered around a glass-topped coffee table. A pine sideboard holds dusty trophies and china ornaments, and on the top shelf, sitting alone, I can just make out a photograph in a silver frame, elaborately curlicued. It’s the face I’ve been looking at onscreen for the last few weeks: Maria’s school photo. I step back and turn to look into the room on the opposite side of the hallway. It’s also dark and empty, and looks like a spare bedroom, a double bed with a peach frilled eiderdown the only furniture.

Back in the hallway, my mind is screaming at me to run in, shouting Henry’s name, but I need to take this carefully. I clutch the doorframe of the spare bedroom, trying to calm my breathing. The door straight ahead of me at the end of the corridor is closed. There are two doors identical to the ones I have just looked through a couple of metres further down the corridor. Both are tightly closed. I take a step, and another. Two more and I am standing next to the doors. I look from one to the other, and then reach out a cautious hand to the one on my left. Slowly, slowly I push down the brass handle. The door swings soundlessly open to reveal a bathroom, clean but old-fashioned with an avocado suite. Sick with fear, I take a step towards the bath and peer in. It’s empty. I let out a stifled sob of relief mingled with terror. I pull the bathroom door to and turn to the door on my right, which I guess must be another bedroom. I put my hand on the handle, trying to stifle the panic that surges upwards in me, a silent scream that I must not let out. As I push the door open, light spills through the gap, more and more of it until I can see the source, a standard lamp next to a desk.

A woman sits with her back to me at the desk, looking at a computer screen. Her long wispy grey-streaked hair hangs down over the back of her chair. She keeps her back to me, and I look frantically around the room, trying to take everything in before she turns round. There’s a brand-new-looking wooden train set on the floor, the track set up in a complicated arrangement that with a lurch of fear I recognise as one of Henry’s favourite layouts. On the wall in front of her, to the left of the computer, is a photo of me, the one from my Facebook page. Next to it is a photocopy of the article from the Sharne Bay Journal about me winning that design award, and a printout of Rosemary’s testimonial from the homepage of my website. To the right there are photos of Sophie – lots of them. She poses and pouts from the wall, blowing me a kiss. There’s even a cutting from the same paper featuring Sophie, immaculate even after a 10K run in pink fairy wings. On the screen in front of the woman, Maria’s Facebook page is open.

‘Maria?’ I whisper. The woman pushes her chair back, stands up, turns around. I’m looking into Maria’s hazel eyes, clear and cool. But the face is lined, her hands gnarled and loose-skinned. My brain struggles to make sense of what I am seeing. Of course Maria would be over forty now, I wasn’t expecting a sixteen-year-old. But this woman is at least sixty-five. It’s not Maria. It’s her mother. It’s Bridget.

Chapter 36

2016
I am frozen in the doorway. Bridget. Of course it’s Bridget. Images flash through my mind: Bridget, hovering outside Maria’s door with tea and biscuits, and hope in her eyes; Bridget in the rain and the dark, being helped to the school office, fear and rage etched into her features in equal measure; Bridget carefully choosing a birthday gift for Esther every year, the pretence that it is from Maria a sticking plaster over her shattered heart.

Why didn’t I see this before? But then, how could I see it? I could never, if I lived for a million years, come anywhere close to the pain, the unendurable anguish that Bridget has suffered. I can see though how such a pain could grow over many years, fed only by dark thoughts and time, acres of unused time. Bridget has been tending her pain, sheltering it, protecting it, until the time came to use it. And now she is turning it outwards onto me.

‘You look surprised, Louise. You were expecting someone else.’ It’s not a question.

‘Where’s Henry?’

‘Did you really think Maria might still be alive? How on earth could that be?’

My mouth is completely dry and I am struggling to swallow.

‘Where’s Henry? Please…’

‘No, she’s not alive, Louise. She’s not alive because you killed her.’

I try to force my mind to catch up with what I’m hearing, but it’s dragging its heels, not wanting to acknowledge what is happening. How could Bridget possibly know? Who could have told her about the spiked drink?

‘No…’ I begin, my voice croaky.

‘Yes, you did. Oh, you can say it was an accident, explain it any way you like. But a mother knows the truth. She didn’t wander over the cliff by accident. She was smart. Even if she’d been drinking, there’s no way she would have fallen by mistake. I’m the only one who knows what state of mind she was in at that time. I heard her, night after night, crying in her room when she thought I couldn’t hear. One night it was very bad. I never got out of her exactly what had happened – all she would say was that it was happening again, like in London. And you were at the heart of it, Louise. Sophie Hannigan too – I could tell what sort of girl she was just by looking at her. But it was you that really hurt her. Do you remember the night she brought you home?’