First One Missing (28 page)

He dodged out of the gate unnoticed while a bunch of sixth-formers were pushing their way back in from their lunch break and set off up the hill. He still couldn’t process the idea that Jemima Reid was behind the poisonous texts. True, he’d always thought she was weird, but weird in a normal sort of way, not in a full-blown psycho way. He remembered how she always stared at him across the room and he’d thought she might quite fancy him and though it had annoyed him, it had also been pleasing in a way. And now it turned out that all that time she’d been sending him those nasty, threatening messages, trying to make him feel guilty.

His stomach twisted itself into knots, forming a hard painful mass as he walked further up the hill, growing more and more angry.

He would go and confront her. He knew she went to the private school up by the Heath. He’d go there and wait for her to leave and have it out with her. What gave her the right to make him feel worse than he already did?

Reaching the gates of her school, on the outer edges of the Heath, he stood on the opposite side of the road and waited for the school day to end, realizing too late that a) he was going to have to wait a long time and b) chances were she would be picked up by a parent and he wouldn’t get to talk to her anyway. Frustration and the painful knot in his stomach made him feel suddenly like he was either going to burst into tears or scream out loud, right here on his own in the street. He thought about going home, but then had a mental image of Jemima sitting in her bedroom – he pictured it with posters of Justin Bieber and One Direction on the wall – typing out all those sick messages, and he knew he couldn’t leave without finding out why she’d done it.

A group of kids came along, tipping the remains of their lunch into their open mouths from brown-paper bags. Stuffing his blazer into his backpack, Rory marched across the road and slipped through the school gates alongside them. He had no plan in mind, he just knew he had to confront Jemima Reid and he had to do it there and then before his nerve failed.

Once inside, he headed for the school office where a woman in a bright-red dress and those canvas shoes that lace right up your legs eyed him suspiciously.

‘Jemima is in class,’ she said. ‘What did you want with her?’

Rory recognized the protectiveness similar to that of the teachers at his own school who’d had four years of practice of shielding him from pushy reporters pretending to be uncles and cousins. ‘I’m Rory Purvis,’ he said, for the first time ever using his unwanted celebrity to press home an advantage. The woman’s eyes, which were outlined in black so that the blue irises kind of sprung out at you in an alarming way, widened and Rory could see she knew his name.

‘Look, I just need to have a few words with Jemima. There’ve been some, well, developments and I need to talk them over with her. We’ve become quite … well, close.’

He forced himself to keep looking her in the eye.

The woman stared at him, deliberating.

‘OK. It’s a bit irregular, mind. I mean, imagine if we let all our students come out of classes every time one of their friends had something they wanted to talk over. But as there are special circumstances, I’ll have a word with the Head.’

She disappeared through a doorway, from where Rory could hear the sound of murmuring voices, and then the woman with the red dress reappeared, accompanied by an older woman who held out her hand.

‘Rory, isn’t it? I understand you’re here to see Jemima. While I wouldn’t wish to encourage you to make a habit of this, on this one occasion I will make an exception. I have tried to contact Jemima’s mum to get her approval, but she isn’t responding, so I’m just going to have to trust that you are who you say you are and that this really is urgent.’

As if they hadn’t just been on Google Images in the Head’s office, checking him out!

‘Sureya here will fetch Jemima and the two of you can go into my office and have a chat.’

Too late, Rory saw that his idea of taking Jemima Reid outside for a bollocking had never been realistic. Schools were more like prisons than prisons were, in his opinion. He had a vision of Jemima being called out of class and being told who was waiting for her and throwing a hissy fit, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

Installed in the Head’s office, he fidgeted with his bag, wishing he’d never come. The righteous anger that had propelled him here had all but fizzled out and he was left with a prickling feeling of apprehension. He looked around the room. There was an abstract painting on the opposite wall that looked like someone had inhaled a load of paints through their nose and then sneezed them out over a canvas. Through the window, he could see a green lawn sloping away towards a red-brick building with brightly coloured ceramics on the window sills that looked like it could be an art block. It was a world away from the concrete and tarmac of his own school.

Finally the door opened and the Head walked in followed by Jemima, her round face betraying no emotion at all.

‘You two know each other, don’t you?’

The Head looked as if she’d love to be invited to stay, but eventually she said, ‘Well, I have plenty of admin to be getting on with,’ and backed out to the secretary’s office, leaving the two of them standing in silence.

‘I know you’ve been sending me texts.’

Jemima, who was leaning against the wall with the abstract painting, staring at the floor, with the cuffs of her long-sleeved T-shirt pulled over her hands, glanced up and caught his eye and then looked down again.

‘Oi! I said, I know it’s you who’s been sending me those nasty texts. Not cool. I want to know why. What have I ever done to you?
Well?
’

Jemima kept her eyes trained on the ground.

He got out his phone and called up the last message. The ‘murderer’ one. Then he crossed the room and thrust the screen under her nose. ‘Read that. Go on, read it. How do you think that makes me feel? Was it your idea of a joke? Did you think it was funny? Is that it?’

‘No.’

The sound was so quiet, it might almost have not been a word at all but a cough or the scrape of a chair leg.

‘Well, what then? Why are you trying to make me think it’s my fault? If it’s my fault Megan died, it’s just as much your fault that Tilly died.’

‘No!’

Again that odd sound. Rory looked again. Jemima’s face was scrunched up and she looked as if she was about to cry – or else give birth or something painful like that.

Then he understood. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what it’s all about. You feel guilty yourself and you’re just trying to make me feel the same so you don’t have to face it. What a shitty thing to do.’

Jemima covered her face with her hands and tried to say something.

‘What?’ Rory was angry. He didn’t have the patience for this. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.’

‘I said I’m sorry!’

Now she was crying for real. You’d have thought, after the last four years, that Rory would be used to the sight of female tears, but he found himself growing horrified all over again.

‘Don’t you ever think about it?’ She was gazing at him wild-eyed, her cheeks bright red, her curly hair all mussed up.

‘About what?’

‘What more you could have done? We’re the older ones, right? We should have been able to do something.’

‘That’s just dumb.’ Rory didn’t want to listen to any more of it. There was that familiar tight feeling in his chest and a noise in his head like an engine starting up.

‘No, it’s not. They blame us, you know. Our parents. They think it’s our fault.’

‘It’s not true. You’re talking shit.’

But now he could see his mum’s face in his head, the way it sagged when she thought no one was watching, as if pulled down by hundreds of tiny weights.

‘It is. You know it is. That’s what’s turned your mum into a nutter.’

And instantly, Rory could see that it was so. His mum had been nuts ever since Megan died. She went to work and had meetings and did whatever it was she did in her job. She chatted with her Megan’s Angels group. She sat on the sofa next to Simon with her feet in his lap. But underneath it all there was something broken.

‘I didn’t … She wasn’t …’

But the noise in his head was louder and the tightness was like wire cutting into him and now he was crying too. He wiped his hand across his eyes.

‘Oh my God! You’re literally crying!’ Jemima was staring at him open-mouthed.

Shame flooded through him, but he couldn’t stop. ‘I should have stayed with her. I shouldn’t have been playing football.’

The words came out without him even being aware of what he was saying. He’d never even allowed himself to think this stuff before, let alone say it out loud. He was shocked but at the same time he felt strangely lighter.

‘Yeah, well, Tilly only went to the shop on her own because I refused to go with her, and then she just nagged and nagged until Mum gave in and let her go.’

‘It’s not a bloody competition, you know. A who-can-feel-the-most-guilty competition.’

They glared at each other for a moment and then, to his surprise, Rory found himself smiling.

‘We’re both fucking nutjobs. Do you know that?’

Jemima tried to scowl, but he could see that something had given way inside her.

‘Yeah, whatever. I am sorry though. About the texts.’

Thinking about the encounter as he started on the long walk home, Rory felt hot with embarrassment. He couldn’t now believe he’d cried. And yet something about the exchange had also left him strangely buoyant. For years his mother and various nut-doctors had been telling him it wasn’t his fault, but it had taken that weird thirteen-year-old kid to get him to admit that he’d ever thought it was.

He decided to take a walk across the Heath. Usually he avoided going anywhere near it but today something had changed. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t need to feel guilty. And why shouldn’t he go anywhere he bloody well wanted to. It being a dry, early summer day, the Heath was crowded with dog walkers and joggers and groups of Japanese tourists filming the trees on their iPads. As he followed the footpath between two of the bathing ponds, he took out his phone again and scrolled through the text messages Jemima had sent him. His phone was an old one that had belonged to Simon. He’d had an iPhone once but he’d left it on the bus and his mum had refused to fork out for a replacement so he was stuck with the most embarrassing phone in the northern hemisphere. On an impulse, he clicked the phone shut and then hurled it into the brown waters of the mixed pond, at the far end of which he could see a mass of sunbathers crowded on to the wooden jetty. For a second he felt euphoric, but by the time it hit the surface he was already regretting his spontaneity.

For a moment he stood gazing out at the water, frozen in an agony of regret.
His phone!
Then he shrugged and moved on. Sometimes shit things just happened. And there wasn’t a bloody thing you could do to change them.

34

The girl had long thin arms that she wrapped around herself and bulging eyes that looked several sizes too big for her gaunt face. She was softly spoken and her accent, when loud enough to be heard, was boarding-school posh. Her long brown hair was messily hooked behind her ears and feathered with split ends. Leanne wanted to whisk her off for a haircut and a decent meal. What happens to people in their lives, she thought, to send them so off-kilter?

‘I just need to know I’m safe, that’s all. I want to help, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t go to prison, I just can’t.’

The girl was scratching her arms with her bitten, jagged nails and Leanne tried not to look at the pink welts rising up on the unnaturally pale skin. She tried to guess. Heroin? Maybe with a bit of methamphetamine, judging by the state of her teeth. She glanced down at her notebook. So far all she knew for sure was that the girl’s name was Lucy and she was twenty-two years old, though she looked thirty-two. She’d been caught shoplifting in a department store and had told the arresting officer she had information about the Poppy Glover case, about the day she went missing. But since she’d been brought in to see Leanne, she’d been refusing to give them anything more until she had assurances that all charges against her would be dropped.

‘There’s a killer out there who is preying on young vulnerable children. If you have any information at all that could help us stop him, I suggest you share it now before he chooses a new victim.’

It was the same line she’d used on Sally Freeland the day before but she could tell it wasn’t going to work on Lucy.

‘I get you. I really do. I just really need to think about myself and what’s best for me. I hope you understand.’

‘Do you think the parents of Poppy Glover would understand?’

Leanne had pretty well-developed antennae for when someone genuinely was sitting on useful evidence and when they were simply making things up to save their own skin, but with Lucy she couldn’t tell. Junkies were inveterate liars. But still, there was something about this girl’s body language, the way she kept darting a look at Leanne, then turning her eyes quickly away, that made her think maybe she was telling the truth. In Leanne’s experience, if people were lying, they tended either to look away the whole time or to fix you with intense eye contact as if daring you to disbelieve them.

A knock on the door of the interview room startled her. Ruby was standing there with a computer printout. A quick analysis had revealed Leanne’s companion to be Lucy Cromarty, originally from Richmond-upon-Thames, an upmarket area of south-west London, but for the last two years of no fixed abode. In and out of police custody for petty theft and drugs offences. One short stay in prison with the threat of an automatic longer custodial sentence should she reoffend. Periodic attempts at rehab, including several top-end private clinics, but fewer recently. Family grown weary of throwing money at the problem without seeing any lasting results, Leanne supposed. The printout made depressing reading, but there was no obvious connection between this girl and any of the Kenwood families. Leanne went back to the table and sat down heavily.