Moth Girls (22 page)

Where had she gone?

Had she walked across to the newsagent’s thinking that Mandy might be there? She thought then of Mr Johnson, the newsagent who always made a fuss of Tina when she went into the shop. That day when they were browsing the magazines for ideas for posters he came out from the behind the counter and stood closely to Tina, asking her if she’d like a magazine free of charge.

‘No thank you, Mr Johnson,’ she’d said.

‘Call me Alfie,’ he’d said and Mandy could hardly keep from bursting into giggles.

Had Tina gone into the newsagent’s upset? Had Mr Johnson tried to comfort her? Was he a man who liked young girls? Mandy rested her head on her hands. Sometimes the world seemed full of shadowy people. You thought of them in one way but then they turned out to be something different. But Mr Johnson wasn’t like that! He was friendly, nice. He was
old
: forty or more. Wouldn’t he have just rung Tina’s mum if she’d asked him to?

She got off the high stool and walked out of the café. The Christmas lights flashed on and off along the street. It had started to rain so she put her collar up and walked swiftly on. Officer Farraday’s card sat heavy in her pocket. She didn’t know what she was going to do. There was Alison Pointer to think about. And Petra.

She came into Princess Street and saw a car double-parked outside the site of the old house. It made her slow down and brought back the morning that she went onto the site when Petra stepped out of a car and stood looking through the fence. This car had its hazard lights flashing on and off. When she got closer she saw that it was a minicab and a man had just got out of it and was paying the driver. He stepped onto the pavement just as she walked along. She paused to let him pass. He stopped and looked at her.

‘I’m sorry, my dear, do I know you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, not wanting to explain.

His lips moved as if he might say something else but instead he nodded and headed for the gate of the house next door to the building site.

It was the next-door neighbour who had shouted them out of the garden.

She hadn’t seen him for five years and that day she’d seen him twice.

On Monday Mandy couldn’t go to school. She wasn’t ill but she stayed in bed and tried to read. She went on Facebook and then sorted out her beads and looked on the internet at the prices of the tools that Lucy’s mother had to see if she could afford to buy them. She hopped from one thing to another. The whole weekend had been like that, not really settling down to anything.

She had some lunch and then found herself wandering out into the garden.

She went all the way down the back and to the bottom. It was cold, the sky gunmetal grey. The wind was irritable, rushing this way and that, making her hair fly across her face. She’d put her fleece on but still felt the chill of the air. There was a small shed there that was hardly ever used. Inside was an old kitchen table and chairs that her mum and dad had replaced. Instead of getting rid of them they’d put it there just in case someone in the family wanted it, but no one did. Mandy looked through the cloudy glass window and saw them stacked away, the chairs upended on the table the way they sometimes did in school so that the cleaner could sweep underneath. The place was draped with cobwebs. Like the house on Princess Street. Petra had described it as if she’d been in there but it had only been her father’s words. She had told them about the ghosts as if she herself had experienced it. Tina had believed her completely, her eyes wide open, her face a mixture of wonder and fear. Mandy had never believed it. People lived in old houses all the time. Her house was old. People had lived and died here. There were no ghosts.

She turned her back to the shed and looked up the garden towards her house. Just then she heard the sound of the neighbour’s back door opening. The fence was too high to see over so she didn’t feel she had to say hello. She was glad. How would she explain why she was standing out in her garden on a cold November afternoon?

She was trying to jog her memory. She was trying to recall the one time that she’d been in the garden of the house on Princess Street. That garden no longer existed so she was using her own garden to reconstruct that day. The three of them had gone in. Mandy had trailed along reluctantly, after Petra had given her one of her withering looks. As soon as they’d got through the side gate Mandy had decided that she would be the bravest of them and walked ahead. She’d gone straight into the overgrown grass and right up the middle, past the trees and the old swing. She went to the very bottom of the garden where there were a couple of old sheds and she’d stood there feeling gratified that Tina had followed her and not stayed with Petra.

She’d been standing then as she was now with her back to the shed, looking up the garden at the rear of the house. Petra, for all her bravado, had stayed by the building and seemed to be fiddling with the ivy that grew across the brickwork. For a few moments Mandy had felt good. Tina was there with her and they had ventured much further into the old property than Petra had.

Then the neighbour had seen them and shouted.

Now Mandy looked to the left where the fence of her garden was. It was high and solid. On that day over five years ago the garden fence where the neighbour was standing had been broken, and some of it lay flat on the ground. That’s why the sight of him had been such a shock. It was as if he suddenly materialised in the garden with them. They had run away like mad from him. That was all she remembered.

Her phone beeped. She took it out and saw the name ‘Jon Wallis’ on the screen.

Why not come round mine this evening and listen to some of my vinyls?

It was the third text he’d sent her since Friday, when they’d chatted on their way to school. He liked her, she knew. He was a nice person, easy to talk to, but he wasn’t Tommy Eliot and she couldn’t pretend otherwise. Even though she knew that nothing would happen between her and Tommy it didn’t mean that she could just switch off her emotions. They were still there, deep down, even though she was no longer upset by them. Underneath the text from Jon was one from Lucy that’d arrived late last night:

Mum’s running a Sat course on ‘Working with Silver’. She says we can go for free if we make the tea and tidy up afterwards. What do you think?

She’d already replied to it saying she would go. Lucy hadn’t given up trying to be friendly and Mandy had enjoyed having someone to sit with at lunchtimes. Her mum was really nice too and she loved learning about the jewellery making.

She thought about what answer to send to Jon. She had made excuses on the previous texts but it didn’t seem right to keep doing it. She remembered those weeks in the first half of term when she had been drawn along by Tommy. Had he intended her to think that he cared for her? She would never know. She composed a reply.

Sorry, Jon, I’m still too hung up on someone else to be good company.

She pressed ‘Send’ quickly so that she didn’t lose her confidence.

She stared up the garden.

There was another decision she still had to make. She pulled the card Officer Farraday had given her out of her pocket. Should she tell the police officer that she’d seen Petra? She’d thought about it all weekend. The previous evening it’d come more into focus because her mum had said that Alison Pointer had just been round and told her that there had been another sighting of Tina – this time in Greece. Her mother said Alison seemed less keen to actually go herself but was in touch with a Greek organisation who were liaising with the police on her behalf. Alison had seemed tired and out of sorts, her mum had told her, and she’d been wearing jeans and an old jumper. It made Mandy feel bad.

Why shouldn’t Alison know that Tina hadn’t stayed in the old house; that whatever happened to Tina happened to her
on her own
?

But Mandy was still concerned that if she told the police she’d seen and spoken to Petra they might not actually believe her. And even if they took her seriously would there be some kind of blame allotted to her because she’d waited so long to tell them? It was three weeks since she’d seen Petra. Why had she waited so long? Wasn’t it a kind of replay of that night in October when the girls went missing? She’d known they’d gone in the house but she’d waited five hours to tell anyone then as well. Wouldn’t this just confirm how secretive she was, how she was always taking time to think of her own skin before others? In fact, wasn’t that what she was doing right this minute standing in her garden?

But she had thought about other things too.

If Tina was really was dead, was there any point in ruining Petra’s new life?

Mandy stared up the garden at her own house and tried to picture exactly what the back of the old house had looked like. It was much bigger than hers and much older. The only detail she could remember was that the wall was thick with ivy. There had definitely been a door. Petra had said that she and Tina went into the kitchen and that was when Tina became afraid. They must have gone through that door.

Mandy imagined the scene: the back door wide open and two twelve-year-old trespassers standing there. One of them wanted to go further. The other was afraid. There was tugging and whispering. It would have been pitch-dark because the old man only lived in the front part of the house. There would have been no light spilling out of windows and the garden would have been thick with bushes and overgrown foliage.

At one point Tina had decided she didn’t want to go any further.

Mandy closed her eyes. It was hard to picture Tina at twelve years old but she held onto the image of a skinny girl whose hair was a bit bushy. She’d been wearing her mum’s hoodie which was far too big for her. She must have stepped away from Petra and stood by the door. Had she said she was going? Had she said goodbye? Had she tried to persuade Petra to go with her?

If Petra was telling the truth then Tina turned and came out of the back door. She would have been moving quickly because she was frightened. Had she dashed along the house and turned into the pathway to the side gate? There were no lights guiding her, just blackness. Had she traced her way back round the side of the house in the inky dark? Or had she, in her confusion, turned around and run into the back garden, straight through the foliage, the long grass and past the swing? Had she run down to the end of the garden where the two of them had gone that day a couple of weeks before?

Mandy pictured Tina standing at the wall, near the sheds, confused and frightened. Had she come to a full stop and known then that she’d gone the wrong way? Had she spun around?

A terrible feeling was taking hold of Mandy.

If Tina turned round, what she might have seen? She glanced to her left and saw her own garden fence, solid and uniform, each panel fixed to the next. On that night it would have been dark and the fence would have been broken.

She tried to picture it. Tina, confused and scared. Had she seen a man standing there? Where the fence should have been? Had it made her jump? The angry neighbour would have been staring at her, his big belly sticking out, his face full of fury that she was there after he’d shouted at her last time. ‘Sorry,’ she might have gasped, but maybe she didn’t get a chance to say any more as he took her by the arm and pulled her into his garden. Maybe he put his hand across her mouth to stop her shouting out. Or possibly he had to pick her up, her legs and arms wriggling, until he took her into his house and shut the door.

Mandy imagined the door banging and heard the key as it turned in the lock.

Then she opened her eyes as if from a bad dream. Her hands were screwed up into fists. She uncurled them and saw Officer Farraday’s card crumpled in one of them. There was a sound from her house: the front door slamming. It was her mum. She
would
tell her now. She would not wait hours or days or weeks. She wouldn’t keep this story to herself, even if it meant Petra’s new life would be exposed. Alison had a right to know what had happened to Tina, however terrible the truth was.

The back door swung open and her mum stood there.

‘What are you doing?’ she called down the garden, looking a bit upset.

Mandy walked towards her, taking a deep breath, knowing what she had to say. When she got up to the door she was shaken to find her mum crying, tears rolling down her face. It was as if
she knew
what Mandy was going to tell her.

‘What?’ she said, holding Officer Farraday’s card in her fingers.

Her mum pulled a tissue out and wiped her eyes.

‘I’ve just seen Alison in Princess Street. She’s in a terrible state. The police have found Tina.’