Follow Me Down (24 page)

I told her to go to hell and stormed out, out of the house and down Sam’s driveway. I didn’t care that she had the phone – it had nothing on it – so she could have it, I just wanted it to stop. I wanted to know when it would stop.

So I walked and walked, drunk and directionless, my cheeks burning despite the chill. I don’t know how I didn’t slip in the snow, especially in heels, but I passed the pub in the village as DS Bone ambled out with a friend.

‘You!’ I pointed at him, shaking with rage. ‘I need to report a crime.’

He and his friend stopped and looked at one another, then DS Bone turned to me, clearly trying not to smile. ‘Hey, Buffy.’

‘My cellphone has been stolen!’

‘Your phone?’ He grabbed his friend’s arm. ‘Does the Commissioner know?’

‘Don’t make fun of me, Bones,’ I said, and we blinked at each other.

I didn’t mean to say it, I was trying to say DS Bone, but it came out as Bones.

I thought he’d be pissed off, but he seemed amused. ‘
Bones
? I didn’t peg you as a
Star Trek
fan, Adamma.’

‘
Star Trek
? Ew. No!’ I stared at him, horrified. ‘Bones, like the television show,’ I lied, trying to come up with an explanation other than,
I’m too pissed to speak properly
. ‘You know, because you’re, like, a cop.’

‘That is true.’ He nodded. ‘I am like a cop.’

‘Exactly!’ I pointed at him again. ‘And a crime has occurred!’

‘OK,’ he laughed, shaking his head. ‘It’s freezing. Let’s get you home.’

‘Via the police station?’

‘Yes. Yes,’ he said, waving goodbye to his friend, who walked away chuckling, saying that he’d see him on Sunday.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked as we continued down the road.

‘I was having a drink with Bomber.’

‘Bomber? That isn’t a name. Why is he called Bomber?’

He stopped and looked at me, gaze narrowing at my knee-length dress and heels. ‘How do you not have hypothermia?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The snow.’ He waved his arms around. ‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘I am not drink.’ I stared at him, then corrected myself. ‘Drunk.’

‘You’re, like, totally drink, Adamma. And in front of a policeman.’ He tutted and shook his head. ‘But I will let the fact that you’re only sixteen go because you actually sound like a teenager for once instead of a Crofton clone.’

He carried on walking and I followed him until he stopped in front of his car.

‘Oh God.’ I stopped and stared at it. I’d forgotten about his car. Even glittering with frost, it was still the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.

‘What?’

‘What possessed you to buy this thing?’

‘Poverty.’

‘Do you know it’s green?’ I asked as he walked around to the driver’s side.

He stroked the roof before he opened the door. ‘It’s the
Green Hornet
.’

‘What’s a green hornet?’

He looked appalled. ‘Do they teach you nothing at that school?’

I glared back. ‘I can name each of the bones in your hand.’

‘That’s useful.’

‘You know what else is useful: knowing that this car is Kermit green.’

He pointed at me over the roof. ‘Don’t even. It’s the
Green Hornet
.’

‘Don’t listen to him, Kermy,’ I whispered, stroking the roof.

‘Get in the car, Adamma.’

When I did, I frowned. ‘Ew. It smells like a bus.’

‘What do buses smell like?’

‘McDonald’s and defeat.’

‘Sounds about right,’ he mumbled, starting the engine.

He waited for me to put on my seat belt, but I couldn’t. ‘It’s broken,’ I told him, with a huff, tugging at it. ‘Your seat belt is broken.’

‘You can name all the bones in my bloody hand,’ he muttered, taking it from me and clicking it in. ‘But you can’t put on your bloody seat belt.’

‘Whatever,’ I said, rolling my eyes. I could see my breath and stopped to wonder why I couldn’t feel the cold before realising that my hangover was going to be epic. ‘So, about my phone,’ I went on, as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘I know exactly who took it. Scarlett Chiltern. She lives in Langfield House, if you’d like to arrest her.’

‘Your friend Scarlett? The one you called me about last year? The who ran away?’

I wish he didn’t have to remember
everything
. ‘She isn’t my friend.’

He nodded. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Whose name?’

‘The boy you’re fighting over.’

I crossed my arms, furious. ‘Of course we have to be fighting over a boy.’

‘Look how drink you are. Only love makes you drink like that.’

‘I am not drink!’ I slapped the dashboard. ‘Dammit!
Drunk
!’

‘Of course not.’

‘And if I am, it’s because Scarlett has driven me to it with her batshitness.’ I jabbed at my temple with my finger. ‘Bones, you don’t even know. One minute she’s screaming at me, the next she’s crying her eyes out. I can’t keep up.’

‘I know, right? Overemotional teenage girls are, like, totes annoying.’

My gaze narrowed. ‘I fear that you’re not taking me seriously, Bones.’

He winked at me, then pulled into the long tree-lined road that leads to Crofton. I pointed towards Burnham and when he pulled up outside, he tilted his head at me. ‘Do you need help with your seat belt again, Adamma?’

I pressed the button so hard, I broke my nail and he laughed.

‘Do you need a plaster?’ he asked as I inspected it.

I scowled at him. ‘I know what you think of me.’

‘You do?’

‘Yes. I know everything,’ I reminded him, crossing my arms. ‘You think I’m another bratty Crofton kid who doesn’t give a shit about anyone but herself.’

‘Oh yeah?’ He nodded. ‘How’s your friend?’

I sobered a little at the thought of Orla, the memory of what happened to her fading a little each day. I hoped it was fading for her too, but then I remembered how I’d pestered her to tears to go to the party with me and realised that it wasn’t.

‘Have you heard anything?’ I asked, but I knew full well he hadn’t. When he shook his head, something in me relaxed and it felt like a betrayal, but as much as I wanted the asshole caught, at least it meant that it hadn’t happened to anyone else.

‘She’s doing better,’ I told him with a sigh. ‘Your wife was great with her, but she wouldn’t speak to the counsellor at Crofton, in the end, because she was scared her parents would find out, but I got her to talk to one of my mother’s friends.’

‘Is she a psychotherapist?’

‘Yeah. She comes up from London and they meet every two weeks at a café in Marlborough. You know the one by the town hall?’

He nodded. ‘Did you tell your parents why she needed to see a counsellor?’

‘They didn’t ask.’

‘Must be a bit spendy, though.’

I shrugged. ‘My father says it’s only money.’

He turned his head to look at me with a smile. ‘See? You’re such a brat.’

Before I could smile back, there was a knock on the window and we jumped. I won’t say that Bones jumped like a girl, but it was a bit girlish. He wound down his window to find Mrs Delaney arching an eyebrow at him and I cursed myself. The vodka had made me stupid and I had forgotten to tell him to drop me around the back so that I could sneak back into Burnham.

‘And you are?’

He couldn’t get his ID out of his pocket quick enough. ‘DS Bone.’

The eyebrow was aimed at me then. ‘Care to explain, Miss Okomma?’

‘Scarlett Chiltern stole my phone,’ I blurted out, hands balled into fists.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Get inside. Now.’

11 DAYS AFTER

MAY

Doubt is like rust, once it takes root, it grows, gathering speed until it infects everything it touches. You can file it away, cover it up, but it never goes away, not really. It’s still there, still looking for a way out from under all those layers of paint. It makes you hear things differently, remember things differently, and I let it in yesterday, at Scarlett’s funeral. I doubted him and I shouldn’t have and now he’s doubting me because I must have texted him a dozen times to apologise, but he hasn’t replied.

My instinct was to call Bones. Orla made me promise that I wouldn’t tell him about Sam, so I just said that she’d remembered who did it and when he pressed me for a name, I told him to forget about the man in the forest. He wasn’t pissed off, but he didn’t sound surprised, either, and it made me feel like a fool. I thought I was being so brave – so
helpful
– the afternoon I charged into the pub to tell him about Orla. I actually thought I was doing the right thing, that he should know about the man in the car, but now I feel like a silly schoolgirl, yapping at him and wasting his time while he tried to do his job. So I stopped there, closing my notebook on what I’d been scribbling since I’d got back to my room. I’m sure he would have listened, but I’ve already done enough and I’m not saying another word until I know something for sure and right now I have nothing.

There may be no man in a car trawling Savernake Forest for Crofton girls, but everyone still thinks that there’s someone there. That’s what I hear whispered at school – in the showers or in the queue for the salad bar in the dining hall – that there’s someone in the forest, some mad man who strangled Scarlett. And I get that, I get that everyone wants this to be a passing evil. No one wants to think that they know the guy, that they might have sat next to him at Mass on a Sunday or that they wave at him when they see him in the village.

I do, too, but my mind keeps circling back to him and that’s another thing I wanted to tell Bones, but didn’t, that if it was his car someone saw driving through the forest the afternoon Scarlett was murdered, it’s because he was meeting me. But then I think about the call he got, a few minutes after I heard The Old Dear chug by.
It’s a coincidence
, I keep telling myself. But then another voice says,
What if it isn’t?

And what if it isn’t?

Dominic wasn’t in class this morning and I wasn’t surprised, but I still felt sick every time I looked at his empty desk. It wasn’t the only one, there were three others including Scarlett’s, which sat like a hole in the middle of the classroom. I couldn’t stop staring at it so when Mr Lucas walked in, my heart jumped up in my chest as though it had been sound asleep. I held my breath as I waited for him to look at me, but he didn’t. He didn’t look at anyone, just told us to open
District and Circle
and turn to ‘The Blackbird of Glanmore’.

I thought that would be it, but he stopped me after class.

‘Miss Okomma, a word, please,’ he said as I passed his desk.

‘Yes, Sir,’ I breathed, my heart banging and banging.

I stopped and turned to face him, watching as he closed his books and slid them into his bag. ‘Do you want me to close the door?’

‘No.’ He picked up his bag. ‘Walk with me.’

‘Yes, Sir.’

It was a struggle to keep up with him as he strode out of the classroom towards the stairs. The corridor was chaos as usual. Girls called out to one another as they ran down the wobbly wooden staircase to their next class, making it creak crankily, and when a guy crept up behind a girl, then grabbed her, making her shriek, I almost jumped clean out of my skin.

I followed Mr Lucas down the stairs and across the foyer, and when we stepped out into the sunshine, he led me around the fountain towards the path to Sadon Hall.

‘I wanted to speak to you about yesterday,’ he said tightly when we were far enough away from the cluttered courtyard, his chin in the air.

Panic burned through me like a fever. ‘Oh God. I’m so sorry. I know it wasn’t you. I can’t believe I said that. I’m
mortified
. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry,’ I said all at once and I said it in such a rush that I don’t know if he could even understand what I was saying, but I thought that if I said sorry in as many different ways as I could, I’d find the right one.

He waited for me to catch my breath. ‘I thought about it a lot last night. I was very angry. I didn’t know if I could see you today. I almost called Headmaster Ballard to ask him to take me off the Baccalaureate so I wouldn’t have to teach you any more.’

‘But—’

‘May I finish?’ he said tartly, stopping at the top of the path to Sadon Hall.

I stopped, too. ‘Sorry.’ I pressed my lips together.

‘I was so angry, but I told myself to wait until I’d calmed down because this isn’t like you, Miss Okomma. I know it isn’t, which is why I was so astonished by your behaviour. But grief is a vicious thing.’ He stopped, and when he went on, his voice sounded smaller. ‘It sends people mad. And what happened to Scarlett was tragic. Utterly
tragic
.’ He shook his head. ‘But I haven’t helped matters because I wasn’t completely honest with you about my friend Charlotte.’ He lifted his chin and I thought he was going to look at me, but he didn’t. ‘She wasn’t my friend, Miss Okomma, she was my girlfriend, and I should have walked her home that evening, but I was drunk and selfish and stupid.’

His chin trembled and I wanted to touch it with my finger. ‘You weren’t to know.’

‘Maybe not, but I still should have walked her home, Miss Okomma.’ He pushed his shoulders back. ‘She was murdered that night, Miss Okomma. I didn’t tell you that because you were so upset about your friend and I didn’t want to alarm you.’

I felt the edges of my heart weaken.

‘I’m so sorry—’ I started to say, but he wouldn’t let me finish.

‘I wasn’t thinking clearly that evening with Chloe, I hope you understand why now. But I’m not sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll never understand why it’s better to leave a seventeen-year-old girl to stumble home on her own than be seen giving her a lift. Even so, I should have told you, I shouldn’t have let you think that there was a madman trawling the forest for teenage girls, so I am as much to blame here. As ashamed as I am to admit it, you’re right, I lied to protect my reputation – and my job here at Crofton – and for that I am very sorry.’

‘It’s OK. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Adamma, please,’ he said with an impatient sigh. ‘You do realise that this is part of the problem, don’t you? You don’t listen.’

My shoulders fell. ‘My father tells me that all the time.’

‘He’s quite right,’ he said, arching an eyebrow at me with a small smile, and my shoulders relaxed. ‘I would never want you to change, Adamma. You’re bright and funny and fearless and that’s what makes you so special, but you have to learn to think before you speak. You complain that Scarlett was impatient, but you can be as well, which is probably why you hated it so much. What is it they say? The things we don’t like in other people are the things we really don’t like in ourselves?’ He frowned at me. ‘So I do believe that you’re sorry, Adamma, but sometimes you say things that you can’t take back, no matter how many times you say sorry.’ I went to say something, but he held up a hand. ‘I’m leaving, Adamma.’

‘No,’ I interrupted with a sudden sob. ‘Don’t leave because of me.’

‘I’m not leaving because of you. It’s a better job at a better school.’

‘But everyone loves you.’

‘I think that may be the problem,’ he admitted. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted, to be the teacher everyone thought was cool, but look where it’s got me? Our conversation yesterday reminded me that there’s nothing here for me any more, Miss Okomma. It’s time to go.’

He took out a small notebook from the breast pocket of his blazer and scribbled something down and that was it, I knew. There was nothing more I could say. I’d already said too much. ‘You’re going to be late for philosophy. Take this to Mr Crane.’

He handed me the note and as I watched him walk down the path to Sadon Hall and close the door behind him, all I could think was,
What have I done?

I didn’t go to philosophy, so when Mrs Delaney found me in bed, my duvet over me, I thought she was going to tell me off, but she sat down and tugged it back. I waited for her to ask me if I was OK, if I was feeling unwell. Instead she tucked my hair behind my ear with a sigh.

‘Can I get you a cup of tea, Adamma?’

‘No thank you,’ I mumbled, a little petulantly.

‘Are your parents still staying at the Castle and Ball?’ I nodded. ‘It has a lovely restaurant. Why don’t you have supper with them there this evening?’

‘Thank you, Miss.’ I sat up and hugged her so tightly she chuckled.

She rubbed my back with her hand. ‘You can even drive there. Someone from the Mercedes garage is on his way with your car.’

‘Really?’

‘They’ll be here any minute.’

‘Thanks, Miss,’ I said, kicking back the duvet and clambering out of bed.

She tutted, brushing at the sheet with her hand. ‘You could have taken your shoes off, Miss Okomma.’ She stood up and blinked at me. ‘Oh dear. Sit down.’

‘What?’

She nodded at the chair by my desk. ‘Tuck your shirt in,’ she said, when I sat down, then went over to the chest of drawers and picked up a hairbrush. When she came back, she tugged my hair out of its ponytail. I yelped as she began brushing it furiously and looked helplessly at my tub of grease, but before I could ask her to use some, she was done.

‘Thanks, Miss,’ I muttered, fingers fluttering over my stinging hairline.

She took me by the shoulders and turned me towards the door. ‘Don’t run,’ she said as I bent down to grab my bag.

It must have been lunchtime, because the Green was a mess of sixth formers sprawling like sleepy cats in the sun. As soon as I got to the hill that led down to the car park, I saw my pretty silver car and it was such a relief because it meant that I had somewhere to sit that wasn’t the Green or the dining hall, with everyone whispering around me.

I thought it was going to be relatively painless, that I’d sign something then I could sit in my car listening to Asa until I’d calmed down enough to head back into the breach, but when the guy handed me back the keys, he shook his head.

‘You might want to tell the police that this wasn’t a break in.’

I frowned at him. ‘It wasn’t?’

‘Not unless a brick just happened to fall through the windscreen.’

‘A brick?’

‘Yeah. We found it while we were valeting. We found this too.’ He reached into the breast pocket of his grubby blue overalls and held out a piece of carefully folded newspaper. When I saw what it was, my heart ached as though a song I hadn’t heard for years had just come on to the radio: it was a paper ship.

‘What’s that?’ I heard someone say and turned to find Bones behind me.

‘Nothing,’ I said, snatching it and taking the clipboard from the guy and signing where he told me to. ‘What are you doing here, Bones?’

‘I came to check on you after yesterday.’

‘I’m fine,’ I told him, thanking the guy as he handed back my keys.

I put the paper ship in my bag before Bones saw it and as I did, I stopped and stared at the contents – candy wrappers, tissues bruised with half-crescents of lipstick, a pear, its skin punctured by the teeth of my comb, a lidless blue biro that had left a knot of scribbles on the leather – and I didn’t recognise it. It made me think of her, of the receipts stuck with gum to her notebooks. Then I thought of her room: the clothes in her laundry hamper that would never be washed, her dressing table with its cluster of perfume bottles. Her house must be so quiet. I guess it always will be. There will be no more slammed doors, no more running down the stairs. She’ll never have another birthday; her father will never make another red velvet cake, will never have to make her chicken for Christmas dinner because she hates turkey.

I hadn’t thought about it before then. I don’t know why. Maybe I was in shock or maybe it was because I was with Orla so I didn’t go to the cemetery to see her coffin being lowered into the ground, but until then it felt like she was just
gone
.

I knew then, when I felt that unreachable ache in my chest, that I didn’t hate her. I might have said it, I might have thrown it at her when I was too angry to say anything else, but I didn’t mean it. Even when she was screaming at me, even when I was delirious with anger, I always thought that someday it would pass and we’d be friends again. I’d have flashes of us, ten years from now, bumping into each other at an airport. We’d hug and laugh about how silly we were.
All of that for a boy
, she’d say, her blue eyes bright. And I’d lie and say,
I know! What was his name again?
But I’m never going to see her again. She’ll never forgive me. I will always be the girl who broke her heart. The shame is in my blood now, my marrow. It will never go away. And for what?

All of that for a boy
.

I could feel Bones staring at me and shook my head. ‘I’m fine.’

‘That’s two fines.’

I wiped a tear away with the cuff of my shirt, and I hate that he makes me feel like that, like a snotty kid. ‘Because it is.’

‘It will be. It doesn’t feel like it now, but it will.’

‘I have to go.’

I wonder if he knew that I didn’t believe him, because he called out my name, but I didn’t stop, not until I got to the courtyard, when I had to stand by the fountain and take a breath. I stared at it for a few moments, watching the water bubble out the spout and down each of the moss-mottled tiers, like plates on a cake stand, to settle in the basin that was lined with pennies that sparkled in the sun. I stuck my hand out, letting the cold water trip off my fingers and when I saw a small green leaf floating in one of the tiers, I remembered Scarlett’s ship and opened my bag.

I shook the water off my hand before I unfolded it, my breath catching in my throat as I peeled back each layer of newspaper to find two words written in red pen: