Bet Your Life (25 page)

And I knew what that was like too. Oh, the irony. Unaware of all we had in common, she went on, “I’m a working-class girl with a nose stud and three tattoos. Guy is like my polar opposite.”

“Didn’t your mother go mad when you got your nose pierced? Not to mention the tattoos?” I was curious. Mrs. Mancini looked like the type to disapprove just as much as Guy’s mother might.

“It was worth it,” she said dismissively. “I really thought about it before I had any of them done and I paid for them with my own money. Anyway, she didn’t know until afterward so there wasn’t a lot she could do.”

“I thought you had to be over eighteen.”

“Well, technically.” Lily looked amused. “I have fake ID. And money can buy you anything in this town. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

Anything except happiness
. “Go on. You kept turning Seb down, because of Guy.”

“And because I didn’t like him. He’s always been smug. Just because he’s good-looking he thinks the world owes him whatever he likes.” Lily shook her head. “I should never have said yes.”

“Why did you?”

“I told you. Stupid. He bought tickets to a gig I really wanted to go to in Plymouth. He said Guy wouldn’t find out because he was back at school, and anyway Guy didn’t really have a claim on me when I’d turned him down too. I said I’d go as long as he was clear it wasn’t a date.”

“It seems fair enough so far,” I said. “Not stupid at all.”

Lily sighed. “Well, stupidly or not, I went to the gig with Seb. I didn’t think it would do any harm. And then I went to a house party in Plymouth after the gig because Seb was driving us back and he wanted to go, so I really didn’t have much of a choice. It was a good party. At first.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not totally sure. I think he spiked my drink. I don’t usually have very much and I only remember having a few sips of beer that night. I passed out. I woke up there the next morning, with him.” She was shivering. “We were in bed. I was wearing my pants and a T-shirt that didn’t belong to me. Nothing else. I asked him what had happened and he said I’d been sick on my outfit so someone had lent me the clothes. The people who had the party let us stay over and Seb had stayed in the room with me in case I became ill, he said. I was mortified.” She put a hand over her eyes.

“It happens all the time,” I said.

“Not to me. I couldn’t believe I’d got into that sort of state. And I wasn’t thinking straight—I was really worried about my parents and what they would say about me staying out all night. I had about twenty messages on my phone from them. I just found my jeans and coat and asked him to drive me home. I never even thought to look for the rest of my stuff to see if he’d been telling the truth about me being sick. I didn’t make a note of the address—I’ve no idea where it was, even. I didn’t see anyone else that morning, or speak to anyone else who’d been at the party who could tell me what happened. They weren’t people I knew. They were friends of Seb’s. I don’t think they’d have been very helpful anyway.”

“But you were upset.”

“I kept asking him what happened and he kept saying,
Nothing, nothing
, but he was smirking all the time, and sending messages on his phone. Now I know he was sending pictures of me to all his friends. No wonder he was laughing.”

“Do you think … Do you know…” I couldn’t think how to ask, but she knew what I was implying.

“Did he do anything else apart from take pictures? No. I don’t think so. But I don’t know.” Her eyes welled up again. “I asked him, when I found out what he’d done. He just laughed at me.”

“How did you find out?”

“Guy told me.” She saw the look of shock on my face. “Not to upset me. He thought I should know what had happened, since everyone else did. He couldn’t stand that people were talking about it behind my back.”

On the surface, Guy was all rich-boy charm, but dig down deep enough and you found a moral center that was as hard as rock.

“I’d already noticed there was something going on. People were laughing at me. Making comments about posing for pictures and getting drunk at parties, and even the color of my underwear, which was pale green.” She looked exasperated. “That was the stupidest thing. Asking me if I liked mint ice cream, or if I’d ever been to Greenland, and then sniggering.”

“What did you do when you found out? Did you talk to Seb?”

“Tried to. All he would say was that nothing had happened and he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said the pictures that were doing the rounds hadn’t come from him and it must have been someone else, another time.” She laughed bitterly. “Because I’m the kind of girl who goes out and gets drunk and strips off in front of near-strangers every Friday night.”

“Obviously not.”

“That’s what people think of me.”

I felt terrible for her. “Did you go to the police?”

“After a couple of weeks. I shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Who did you speak to?” I knew the answer before she said it.

“Inspector Henderson. I went right to the top.”

“I bet he wasn’t interested.”

“He took a statement. Then he told me I had to take responsibility for my own behavior. He said I’d put myself at risk by going to a party with people I didn’t know. He said I should have looked after my drink to make sure it wasn’t spiked, if that was really what had happened. I said Seb wasn’t a stranger. Inspector Henderson said I’d chosen to be there with him. I’d agreed to go out with him, and to go to the party. He basically called me a liar. He said I’d got drunk and done things I regretted, and now I was looking for someone else to blame so I didn’t get in trouble.” She sounded bitter, unsurprisingly. “He told me no jury would ever take me seriously, especially when I don’t know where it happened or even what happened. The pictures on their own aren’t proof of anything because I might have agreed to pose for them.”

“But you wouldn’t have.”

“I know. He didn’t believe me. He said no one else would believe me.” She sniffed, holding back tears again. “It was so humiliating. He said he’d talk to Seb and scare him a bit so he stopped circulating the images. He said he’d have a word with Seb’s parents too, just to encourage them to keep a closer eye on him. He told me to tell him or a teacher if I was being bullied about it. You could see him trying to work out whether he’d get the blame if I tried to kill myself. All he was interested in was covering it up and covering his ass.”

“Dan doesn’t do blame,” I said, thinking about what Beth had told me. “Did you ring Seb’s mobile? About a month ago?”

She nodded.

“Did you say you’d never forgive him for what he’d done?”

“Something like that. Why?”

“It was his sister who answered. That’s why I started trying to find out what happened to him and why. She needs to know what he did.”

“She doesn’t need to know about me.” Lily’s eyes were lifeless, as if telling the story had killed her spirit all over again.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I fiddled with the phone, turning it end over end. “Lily, what did you do to Seb?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the person who’s suffered most from Seb’s behavior. And you were in the library yesterday, talking to Amanda and Ruth. You said Seb was fine when you left him. What did you do?”

“Just talked to him.”

“I don’t believe you. When I saw him he was almost naked, and he’d been tied up, and beaten up, and he had a fractured skull. Guy beat him up.”

“Not that badly.”

“And you did what, Lily? Stripped him? Tied him up? Did you take pictures of him?”

Her face was red. “We just wanted to show him what it was like.”

“We?”

“Me and Amanda and Ruth. It was Ruth’s idea. I persuaded him to meet me. Ruth had pepper spray—you know, for muggers. She sprayed him in the face and he was too busy screaming about his eyes to care that we were getting him into a car and driving him to Ruth’s house and taking off his clothes and tying him up.”

“But he wouldn’t mind being photographed naked.”

“He did when he had to hold a sign saying what he’d done to us. He was pretty angry.” She rubbed at a scuffmark on the table, avoiding my eyes. “We wanted him to apologize to us, and he did, eventually. But it took a while.”

“What were you going to do with the pictures you took?”

“Keep them. Use them if he told the police what we’d done. If you put stuff like that on the Internet it lives forever. He’d never get rid of all of it. So it was our insurance policy.”

“What did you do with him afterward?”

“I let him go. He walked away. I didn’t see him again.”

I shook my head. “No. Sorry. That’s not what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

I took the paper out of my pocket and flattened it out on the table. “I found this on Fore Street on Monday, in the doorway of Fine Feathers. It’s a page from your order pad. Look.” The Mario’s logo at the top was unmistakable.

“You don’t know it’s mine.”

“I can compare it to this.” I held up the docket she’d given me for my coffee. “That’s your writing. The sevens are really distinctive. I don’t know anyone else who does them like that.”

Her face was flushed again. “OK. So what?”

“So that number is on Seb’s phone. No contact details. I rang it just now and it’s out of service. Who does it belong to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come off it.”

“I don’t!”

“Then why did you write it down?”

She crumpled. “I called it. From the phone box near Fine Feathers. I must have dropped the piece of paper afterward.” She bit her lip. “Basically, we dumped Seb in St. Laurence Square. I took his phone and told him he had to pick one person who would come and get him—if he could think of one person who genuinely cared about him. He gave me that number. I dropped his phone in a drain, out of reach. I said I’d call the number but if they didn’t come, he’d have to stay there until someone found him. I wanted to show him that he’d hurt too many people to have any real friends he could count on.”

“What happened when you rang the number?”

“A guy answered. He didn’t say much. There was music in the background, really loud. I just said where Seb was and that he needed help and I hung up.”

“Did you recognize the voice?”

Lily shook her head.

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

“He sounded really irritated when he answered, which seemed weird to me. I was ringing from a phone booth so he didn’t know who it was. If you didn’t want to answer your phone, wouldn’t you just let it ring?”

“Absolutely. Let it go to voicemail.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“You say you didn’t recognize him, but did it remind you of anyone?”

“Oh. No. I mean, it just sounded like a rich boy to me. One of Seb’s friends.” She gave me a one-shouldered shrug. “Maybe I just thought that because I was expecting it to be one of them. It could have been Eddie Gray or Harry Knowles. It could have been any of them.”

I knew what she meant. There was a generic quality to the way they spoke. The cadences were all the same, and the vowel sounds.

“After you called him, what happened?”

“I went home.”

“How was Seb when you left him? What sort of injuries did he have?”

“His eyes were really inflamed. His face was bruised where Guy had hit him.” She thought for a second. “The rope had rubbed his wrists, and he’d bruised himself trying to get free. And he wasn’t wearing many clothes. But he was conscious and talking.”

“He could have died of hypothermia,” I pointed out. “You were taking a big risk, leaving him there.”

“Not really. We picked a public place, even if it’s not busy. And the cops patrol a lot on Halloween. We actually took a big risk putting him somewhere so obvious.” She looked up. “Oh no.”

I twisted round in my seat to see Claudia and Immy striding toward us. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Lily said. She jumped up. “I should get back to work.”

“What are you doing?” Claudia had reached our table. She put out a hand, shoving Lily back so she overbalanced and sat down again. Claudia sat beside her, and Immy slid into the booth beside me. Cozy, except that it wasn’t. Both the new arrivals looked furious.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Claudia ignored me. She got very close to Lily and repeated, “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“We talked about this. You don’t tell anyone anything about the other night.”

“Look, shut up,” Lily said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. It was just because of Guy. He—”

“Why am I not surprised? Boys before friends. This always happens,” Immy said.

“You’d know. You’ve always put boys first.” Lily glared at her.

“And since when were you two friends with Lily?” I asked.

“What do you know about anything? You’ve only been in Port Sentinel for about two minutes,” Immy sneered.

“I’ve literally never seen you speak to Lily.” I looked across the table. “Am I wrong?”

Lily shook her head. “Look, just forget about it. You too, Claudia.”

“I want to know what you’ve told her, Lily.”

“She hasn’t told me half as much as you just did,” I said, and watched Claudia get the picture, pixel by pixel. Download speed: slow.

“You didn’t know.”

“Not until you charged in here shouting at Lily. All I knew was that Amanda and Ruth and Lily had a crisis meeting in the library about Seb. And then you turned up and stopped me from hearing what it was about. I was a bit surprised to see you in a library. I really should have guessed you were involved.”

Immy gave me a level-five hate-stare. “You still don’t know anything about what we did.”

“I can guess,” I said slowly. “There are messages from you on Seb’s phone. You persuaded him to go with you to the fireworks. You were the bait, weren’t you?”

“You’ve got his phone.” Immy looked across the table at Claudia. “You read the messages.”

“I thought they were needy and desperate, but now I get it. You had to make sure he met you so the others could trap him.”

“Me wanting to go out with him isn’t proof of anything.”

“No, but you and Claudia hanging around in a dark alley two minutes from where Seb was dumped looks a bit suspicious from where I’m sitting.”