The Things We Do to Our Friends(79)

“I want to. I just…can’t, not at the moment.”

She snorted, and still she didn’t look over at me. “Fine. I don’t know what I expected. You never opened up, not really to any of them. I think it was why they all liked you so much. Then again, you probably knew that. Mysterious Clare. But I knew it was just because you didn’t want to say the wrong thing, embarrass yourself. Because you’re weird.”

There wasn’t much else to say. She was right, and we sat in silence until we arrived at a town I didn’t know. Imogen shooed me out of the car and we started walking through the high street, a few women greeting me as I passed. At first, I felt nervous that these women might have been our clients, ones I’d forgotten. Of course, that wasn’t the case. They were just friendly because it was all softer out of the city.

“Where are you living now?” I asked her as we trudged along in the wind. It was a miserable day out, but I didn’t want to complain in case she refused to talk to me.

“I think it’s better if you don’t know that,” she clucked. “I’m glad to be out of there in some ways, even though that flat was fantastic, wasn’t it? By the end, though, everything was awful, waiting on the two of them.”

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

She turned and faced me, and her hair was knotty from the wind, her nose and cheeks shot with red. I hadn’t had a proper conversation with her, like this, for so long. Dark hair, dark eyes. She was pretty when she wasn’t frowning so much, or looking haughty about something or other.

“You’ll see,” she said.

We carried on, and we reached the beach. The houses were a mix of faded pastels with views of frothy waves. We were virtually the only people there on that cold afternoon. The sand licked by the tides, so the shore looked gritty and black.

There he was, standing close to the water.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked, but I was glad to see him.

“I invited him,” she said.

Samuel nodded his head at us awkwardly. “Clare. Imogen,” he said quite formally. No raffish smile. It was unlike Samuel to look so disheveled and to be wearing creased clothes, and his face was a bit green. He had a coffee cup in one hand.

The three of us stood in a rough triangle on the beach. A splintery gale whipped up around us.

“I invited him because there are bits I know and bits he knows,” she said.

It made sense. She regarded Samuel with a complete lack of interest, and I knew in an instant that her crush on him, that girlish, blushing, tongue-tied crush that we’d all known about and ignored, had well and truly gone, in an explosive bang perhaps, or maybe it had just faded away. There was nothing there at all anymore; it was hard to believe they even knew each other.

“I’ll start,” she said.

Samuel nodded.

“I was never fully into it,” Imogen said carefully, watching the sea as if she was telling the waves her story instead of reciting it to me.

I had known that. I’d always felt Imogen had other reasons for hanging around.

“You were involved from the beginning,” I said.

“Yes, because Tabitha wanted it all so much. She was obsessed from the outset; you should have heard her. Then Ava went along with everything, of course. Anyway, in the end, it wasn’t Tabitha’s decision; it was mine. I moved out of that flat, which was a shame, it was a very nice flat.”

I wished we could move away from discussing the flat.

“What made you move out?” I asked.

“Well, firstly, I didn’t like what happened with that man, what he did to you, and how we couldn’t report it—”

Samuel jumped in. “Me neither, Clare. I was nothing to do with the planning there. You know that Ava and Tabitha kept that entirely to themselves. They must have known.”

Imogen rolled her eyes and continued. “I was unhappy for ages, before Christmas. But that wasn’t why I left. Or why he left.”

She was so dismissive of Samuel and it was so odd to see her behave so coldly toward him.

“Why then? Was it the video?” I asked.

She looked at me, confused. “What video?”

I looked to Samuel.

“I don’t know what video you mean,” he said, and I believed him.

They both waited for me to explain more but I knew enough. Neither of them had seen or been involved, I was sure of it.

That was something, at least.

It hit me that they had their own things going on with Tabitha, in general, and I needed to ask outright.

“Why did you leave? Why did they let you leave?” I just wanted clarity—for them to tell me what was going on.

They looked at each other for a split second.

“I’ll show you,” Imogen said.





66


Heavy footsteps on wet sand as we turned a corner and looked out. The coastline became rockier, and then there was a house, like a box on a hill, teetering. The reflections from the sea moved on the glass.

I realized where we were. We must have approached this place from a different way last time, because I hadn’t recognized it at all.

The Landores’ house.

“And that is why I left,” she said.

“Because of the Landores?” I asked. I had barely given them a thought since the ceilidh.