Friend Request(89)

I look out into the darkness, thinking aloud.

‘The thing is, Bridget can’t have killed Sophie. She wasn’t even there for a start, and she wouldn’t have had the strength anyway. Sophie was strangled.’

‘It must have been Tim, then,’ says Sam.

‘No,’ I say. ‘He was there in the bungalow just now. He’d only just found out about the Facebook page himself. He’d been at the police station, they’d told him. He didn’t know, Sam. He didn’t know anything about it. And why would he have had Maria’s necklace anyway?’

‘Well, I don’t know about the necklace, but as for not knowing about the Facebook page, that’s what he would have said, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think he was lying.’

‘Well, then… maybe it had something to do with Nathan Drinkwater,’ Sam says, swerving out to overtake a lorry.

‘What?’

‘Nathan Drinkwater. You told me at the reunion that Maria was Facebook friends with him too, remember? He was that boy who was totally obsessed with Maria, wasn’t he? Before she moved to Sharne Bay? I remember Matt Lewis’s cousin telling us about it at the time. Maybe it’s got something to do with him.’

‘But he’s…’ I trail off, unwilling to finish that sentence, my mind racing. When I told Sam at the reunion about Nathan Drinkwater being on Maria’s friend list, Sam said he’d never heard of him. How can he be bringing Nathan up now if he doesn’t know who Nathan is? I repeat it in my head again, trying to convince myself. Sam doesn’t know who Nathan Drinkwater is. Does he?

I close my eyes again but the relaxed feeling has gone. My mind claws around, trying to fit the pieces together, but they don’t seem to belong in the same jigsaw. Bridget’s reason for sending the Facebook messages is clear: she wanted me to feel at least a fraction of her unendurable pain. She’s been nurturing that pain for all these years, allowing it to grow, to curl its tendrils around all the other thoughts in her brain, choking them so that they withered and died, leaving only itself.

But Bridget didn’t kill Sophie, and I don’t think Tim did either. They weren’t there that night, I saw them leaving, despite the lure that was drawing Bridget: the promise of information about her dead daughter, and something else – a tangible piece of evidence. A necklace?

I think of Sophie at the reunion, laughing with the boys, telling them she knows all and sees all. And then later, in her panic about the Facebook messages, she told me there had been ‘all sorts’ going on at the leavers’ party. What did she know? What did she see?

I had assumed that the Nathan on the Facebook page was the real Nathan, that Bridget had tracked him down as she had done Sophie and me. But Bridget said Nathan had contacted her, not the other way around. And Nathan Drinkwater is dead. Anyone can be anyone on Facebook. It’s easy to hide behind a faceless page on the internet. A broken, dying mother can pose as her dead daughter to wreak revenge on the girls she blames for ruining her daughter’s life. But somebody was playing Bridget at her own game. Somebody else was posing as the boy who forced the Westons from their home, made them abandon their whole life to start again in a small town in Norfolk. Someone who knew that Nathan Drinkwater was the one person that whoever was posing as Maria wouldn’t be able to resist replying to.

We drive on in silence, broken only by occasional shifting and muttering from Henry on the back seat. I daren’t look at Sam lest my face betrays what I am thinking, so I turn to look out of the window. I try to look beyond my reflection, out into the darkness, but I can’t ignore my face, looking back at me in shadow, eyes wide. I can’t believe Sam can’t hear my heart pounding.

I should know better than anyone that things aren’t always what they seem. It’s like when someone tells a story about something that happened when you were there, and it’s not at all how you remember it. It might be they’re telling it a certain way for effect, to make people laugh, or to impress someone. But sometimes that’s simply how they remember it. For them, it’s the truth. That’s when it becomes hard for you to know whether what you remember is the truth, or whether it’s just your version of it.

I realise I’ve been trying to hold on to the idea of Sam as a decent person because he’s Henry’s father, but Sam has lied to me before, and lied well. Even after I found that text from Catherine on his phone he continued to lie, until it just wasn’t possible any more and he left me to be with her. All the lies, the betrayals, the many ways in which he hurt me crowd in on me, stifling me. The times he held me down and it became more than a game, the times he put his hands to my throat playing out a fantasy that wasn’t mine.

I wrap my arms around myself, although it’s warm in the car. I’ve spent so long sitting in darkness, lying not only to others but to myself too. But the door is open now. Just a crack, but it’s open. And the light is streaming in.

Chapter 37

2016
As Sam parks outside my flat, reversing into the tiniest of spaces, all I can think of is getting away from him. My mind is veering from one thing to another and I can’t think about what to do next, what I’m going to do about this strange new reality that I find myself facing. I concentrate on getting Henry into bed, on how that is going to feel, that moment when I lock the door behind me and we’re safe, and I can think.