Bet Your Life (24 page)

And then Seb had replied,
Good choice, mate. Cash is fine
. So what had Seb won? And what was the choice the other person had to make?

I put the questions on hold, and the texts, as the phone flashed up another warning. I had only two percent of battery remaining, apparently. Not nearly enough. Hurrying, as if that would make a difference, I opened the photographs and found two folders. I ran through the first folder of images in thumbnail form, squinting to try to make sense of the pictures. Parties, random girls, approximately one million selfies. Nothing surprising there. The second folder only had seventy images in it and was called
Fun and Games
. I started to scroll but stopped almost immediately, my attention caught. I sacrificed some battery life to open a picture that turned out to be Seb kissing Amanda—
Amanda!
—on a sofa. The body language was weird. She had her hands in her lap and was turned away from him, as if he had grabbed her head and pulled it round to kiss her. Her eyes were half closed and it was hard to tell if she was enjoying it or not. Two of Seb’s friends, Phil and Raj, were standing behind the sofa. Raj was cheering and Phil was sticking his fingers down his throat.

Oh, Amanda. And oh, Seb, too, because if he needed to be able to boast he could pull anyone, any time, he was more insecure than he looked.

I went back to the thumbnails, looking for the banner. I found it almost immediately and opened the image to see Seb all over Julie Drake. Julie, who walked with crutches because she had lost a leg in a car accident when she was twelve. Julie, who was stunningly pretty and used crutches instead of a prosthetic limb because the amputation had been so high up her thigh. She said she didn’t mind. She could move faster on crutches. In the picture a couple of boys I didn’t know were crouching down, pointing at the gap where her leg should have been, laughing. She obviously had no idea.

I went back to the thumbnails, dreading what I would find next. It was Claudia in a field, at night, with Seb. Her eyes were closed, so she couldn’t see the bale of hay Raj and Phil were placing behind her. But she’d have opened them sometime, and she was too clever not to know that the hay was fodder, for her. I felt sorry I’d ever told her to trot back to her stable, once upon a time.

Immy was in a few pictures, generally as the victim of a practical joke. Ruth was there too, blushing in a sadly unbecoming way as Seb stroked her face and murmured something into her ear. Phil and Raj were back, along with a guy called Eddie Gray, and all of them were standing behind Ruth, laughing hysterically. There were more jokes, more victims: not just girls, either. Where one of his friends had passed out drunk, there Seb would be, armed with a roll of cling film to wrap around them or a permanent marker to scribble on them. Humiliation was the aim.

I was really pushing my luck with the battery. I paused on a series of ten or twelve pictures that were too hard to make out in thumbnails: they were very dark and indistinct. Knowing it was my last chance, I opened one, just to see what was going on.

“Seb, you are a turd.” I really meant it. The lighting in the picture was terrible but I could see a girl lying on her back on a rumpled bed, one arm over her face. She was topless. I was also fairly sure she was unconscious. And I knew exactly who she was, because of the stars tattooed on the inside of her wrist: Lily.

I scanned through two more of the collection before I stopped. I couldn’t go on. The images were a grotesque invasion of privacy. She had been wearing knickers but nothing else apart from her jewelry, and she seemed totally out of it. He hadn’t shown her face in any of the images I saw, but I had recognized her straight away; anyone who knew her would. Her tattoos were so distinctive.

The last three pictures were different, but I could see they were of someone lying on white sheets, in daylight. The person looked very naked in the thumbnail image and I hesitated to open them, but curiosity won out.

“Good grief.”

I’d been right about the person being naked. I hadn’t even come close to imagining who it would be. This time there were no tricks: she knew the pictures were being taken and she was posing for them. There was no mistaking her, or Seb, in the picture he’d taken of the two of them kissing. And he was pretty obviously naked too, so it didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on.

I still couldn’t believe it.

Stephanie Dawson.

Seb’s stepmother.

Suddenly her reluctance to let Dan investigate Seb’s private life made perfect sense. Of course she wanted everyone to think it had been a car accident. Of course she was determined to get hold of Seb’s phone, if she knew it had incriminating evidence of what she’d done. Betrayals didn’t get much bigger than cheating on your husband with his son, even if you’d only met the son when he was sixteen and a massive flirt.

Two things occurred to me, more or less simultaneously.

One: Beth must never find out what her mother and her brother had done.

Two: Stephanie Dawson had the perfect motive to harm her stepson. Maybe the fact that she’d slept with Seb wasn’t all she was covering up.

In which case the Dawson family’s problems were about to get a whole lot more complicated.

The phone’s screen kept going dark. I thought fast about what I needed before it died. There was no point in trying to forward anything to my own phone; that would kill it straight away. I shrank from copying any of the pictures. I didn’t want them on my phone, especially the ones of Lily. I didn’t want them to exist in the first place. I also didn’t want a souvenir of the Mrs. Dawson pictures. I was pretty sure they were burned on my brain for all time anyway. In the end I settled for going back to get the number for the mysterious text message without a contact. I could call it, I thought. If nothing else, I might recognize the voice of whoever answered it.

The phone whirred and died more or less as soon as I got back to the right screen, and I had only had time to glance at the number. The prefix was the same as my own, which was useful. I thought I’d got the rest, but I needed to write it down or I’d forget it.

“… seven, four…” I was scrabbling in my pocket for my own phone, but found a pencil first. “Double-three, five, one.”

I pulled a handful of receipts and rubbish out of the other pocket and stared at it for a second, wondering where I’d got it. The doorway of Fine Feathers, when I was there with Ella. I didn’t know whether to be glad I hadn’t thrown them away or disgusted.
Get on with it, Jess.

“Double-three, five…”

I separated out a sheet of thin, almost translucent paper. It was blank on one side, but there was something written on the other. Automatically I turned it over to check what it was before I wrote on it, in case it was something important.

“Seven … four…”

I stopped. I stopped everything. I might even have stopped breathing. I definitely stopped repeating the number, because I didn’t have to any more.

Someone had already written it down on the sheet of paper I held in my hand.

17

On such a cold day, Mario’s was doing a brisk trade. The warm, steamy air made my face tingle as I came through the door. I had to wait for a table, and while I stood in the queue I watched Lily writing down an order. She had her back to me, her head bent over her notepad as she scrawled, and even from the door I could make out the word that scrolled across her neck. There was just no doubt that she was the person in the pictures. And there was no doubt that I had come to the right place.

The turnover in tables was high and it didn’t take long before I had my own, a booth near the back of the café that suited me perfectly. I sat facing the back of the room, keeping a low profile. I really didn’t want to see anyone I knew. Except one person.

“Can I get you anything?”

Lily was standing beside the table with her pen poised to take my order, her expression as blankly pleasant as if we’d never met. I knew she recognized me.

“I’d just like a word with you, if you have a second.”

“I’m working.”

“I know. I won’t take long.”

She frowned. “What do you want?”

“I think you know.”

“Sorry. Drawing a blank.”

“I’ve got Seb Dawson’s phone,” I said quietly, and watched her expression change to the guarded, guilty look that told me I was right.

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“Pictures.”

Her response came immediately. “I’m not going to talk to you about it. Why should I?”

“Because of Guy.” I saw it hit home. “He’s in a lot of trouble for something he didn’t do.”

“I know.”

“And you know why he’s not saying anything to the police, don’t you? He’s trying to protect you.”

She looked stubborn. “I can’t help.”

“Look, I don’t think you did hurt Seb—at least, not enough to put him in hospital. But I know you did something last Saturday night and you’re scared of being found out. I heard you talking to Ruth and Amanda in the library yesterday.”

“Then you know everything and you don’t need my help.”

“I got interrupted,” I admitted. “I didn’t hear your whole conversation. Enough to know you did something to Seb. Enough to make a connection between the pictures on this phone and you wanting to get revenge on him.”

“Revenge is a hard word. We wanted—I mean,
I
wanted him to admit he’d been wrong.”

“And it didn’t work out the way you’d expected?”

“You could say that.”

I dropped my voice even further. “You know, if Seb dies and Inspector Henderson actually bothers to investigate it, he’ll start with Seb’s enemies. There are a lot of you. Getting your story in first seems like a good idea.” I saw her wavering. “I know you said you couldn’t help, but Guy doesn’t deserve to take the fall for what happened. He’d do anything for you. Can’t you tell the truth for him?”

“He doesn’t want me to.”

“Oh, OK, then,” I said, irritated. “Let him rot.”

She bit her lip, then looked round at the counter, where the manager was talking to another waitress. “I’ll have to ask Mum.”

“I’ll wait,” I said.

“She’ll get cross if you don’t order something.”

“All right. Black coffee.”

Lily nodded and headed for the coffee machine. Her mother came and stood beside her, cleaning the counter. Lily spoke to her, leaning in so she could murmur in her ear. Her mother listened, then looked over at me. Lily was still talking. I tried to look pleasant and unthreatening and it must have worked because in the end she nodded.

Lily came back with my coffee and dumped it on the table, sliding into the seat opposite me. She looked sulky, and on edge.

“What did you tell her?” I asked.

“Homework.”

“How long have we got?”

“For homework, you’ve got as long as you like. Try to look as if we’re talking about maths, or something.” She put a hand up to her hair, then toyed with one of her many earrings. She was looking everywhere except at me.

“So you said you had Seb’s phone.”

“That’s right.”

“You said you saw the pictures.”

“Just a couple of them. I take it they’re the ones Seb sent to Guy.”

She looked surprised. “How did you know about that?”

“I heard about it. I didn’t know it was you in the pictures until I saw them, but I knew Guy had a crush on a girl and Seb persuaded her to go out with him, deliberately, to annoy him.”

“I didn’t go out with him. It wasn’t even a date.”

“But you ended up in bed with him.”

“I made a mistake. And
he
made me into a joke. Do you know what he said to Guy? He said he didn’t know what his problem was. He said he hadn’t had any problems getting me to go out with him. He said I was easy.”

“Not very nice.”

“No, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t true, either. At least Guy knows that.” She corrected herself. “I think Guy knows that.”

“The pictures…” I almost didn’t want to bring them up. “You can’t see your face in the ones I saw. Your arm is over your face. It looks as if you’re asleep, actually. Or passed out.” Her face twisted as she struggled not to cry. “Was that what happened?”

A nod. She put her hand over her eyes. “I can’t cry here. Is Mum looking?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” I said quickly. “Don’t worry.”

“OK. OK.” She wiped her cheeks. “Do you really need me to give you the details?”

“Not many.” I felt like the worst person in the world. “But I’d like to know how he got away with it.”

“Oh…” She swallowed. “That was my fault. I was so stupid.” She closed her eyes for a second, gathering her strength. “It was about six weeks ago. Just after the start of term. I bumped into Seb in school. I mean, literally—I went round a corner and he was there. He made a big deal out of how I’d knocked into him. Then he said he’d accept my apology if I’d go to a party with him.”

“And you said yes.”

“No. I said no. I didn’t like him. Never have. But then he went to work on me. He kept leaving notes in my locker, and staring at me in class, and texting me. He walked me home or to work a few times, even though I told him not to. There wasn’t much I could do about him walking beside me. I wasn’t keen, at all, but he didn’t really listen.”

“I know the thing,” I said dryly. “Go on.”

“He said I’d misjudged him and I wasn’t being fair. He asked me to give him a chance. I said his sort of parties weren’t my kind of thing and he said they weren’t his kind of thing, either, and me being there would make it bearable.” She looked up at the ceiling, trying to stop the tears that filled her eyes from falling. “I told him it was too awkward because of Guy.”

“Because Guy wanted to go out with you?”

She nodded. “I’d turned him down. A lot.”

“He seems like a really sweet person.” I said it diffidently, though. On paper, Ryan was perfect too. But to me, he was about as exciting as paper. I wasn’t going to judge Lily just because she didn’t want to go out with Guy.

“Our backgrounds are too different. We don’t like any of the same things.” She listed the issues dully, as if she’d thought about them too many times. “His mother would freak if I turned up and said I was his girlfriend.”