Moth Girls (3 page)

She frowned at the papers in her hand. He looked worried.

‘You want me to tell Miss Pearce I won’t do it? I don’t want to upset you,’ he said, reaching across and touching her hand.

‘Don’t be silly. I’ve got a free period after English. I’ll look these over and give them back to you at lunch.’

‘Thanks.’

The common room door opened and Toni and Leanne came in. They walked straight over to Tommy and Mandy and began talking breathlessly about a party that was happening on Saturday.

‘Zoe, in business studies? Her mum and dad are away at the weekend but her older brother is there and he says he’ll make sure the party doesn’t get out of hand. We’ve been invited and you guys as well,’ Toni said, looking from Tommy to Mandy and back again.

Tommy immediately started to talk about the party. Toni and Leanne pulled up chairs. Mandy folded the papers he’d given her and slid them into her bag. She slipped away while they were all talking.

‘Wait,’ he called.

She turned round and saw him walk towards her. Leanne and Toni looked a bit miffed.

‘The thing is … I might not have explained it all that well but this talk I’m going to give is meant to be a sort of final goodbye to the girls? And that will mean that you can surely put it all in the past? What with the demolition and this. It’ll all be gone for you. You can get on with your life.’

He was looking right into her eyes. She softened. He had it all worked out.

‘Course,’ she said. ‘I’ll look at the stuff and get back to you.’

‘You will come to this party on Saturday? It’ll be fun.’

‘Probably,’ she said.

Walking away, along the corridor, she thought about what he’d said about her getting on with her life.
You can surely put it in the past
. ‘The past’; as if it were a box of some sort in which she could lock away troublesome things. He wasn’t to know how often people had said this to her. It wasn’t his fault that he was just echoing words that she’d heard for years.

Everyone
wanted her to move on. Maybe one day she would.

After art, Mandy found a quiet carrel in the library and sat down. There were other students about, some with headphones on, most of them focused on writing or reading. She pulled out the printouts that Tommy had given her. She flicked through. They were in date order: the top one was the oldest, from a few days after Petra and Tina had gone missing. ‘Mystery of Missing Girls Deepens.’

The text was simple and straightforward and summed up the facts of the story.

In the middle of the article were school photographs of Petra and Tina: small rectangular pictures of two smiling girls, taken a few weeks before they went missing. The photographer had come into school in the early weeks of term. Mandy looked at Petra’s photograph. Her hair was long and parted in the middle. It hung smoothly down each side of her face. She had a half smile. She looked demure, shy even. How different to the photos of her dressed up in her girl-band outfit. The Red Roses pictures were posed and showed a made-up face with white teeth. Then Petra looked pouty and grown-up. In real life Petra didn’t smile a lot. She seemed to spend a lot of time chewing at the side of her lip.

Mandy focused on the picture of Tina. Tina always looked the same. She had curly hair which she held back in hairslides or hairbands. Her smile was wide, showing dimples on each cheek. Her eyes were bright, as if someone were holding a gift for her that she was just about to open. Her Red Roses pictures were exactly the same. Tina was Tina but Petra had different faces that she showed to different people.

Mandy carried on reading the article.

Mandy remembered this story. In the days after the girls went missing there were constant reminders for people to check their outbuildings, sheds, empty flats, holiday homes. Mandy had been baffled by this. She had seen the two girls go into the house. She had told the police this. Why would the police think that they had come out of it again and run away? Mandy remembered Tina had been wearing an old hoodie, the sleeves too long; it looked as though it belonged to her mother. Petra had on a light jacket and was shivering as she stood on the street.

Why would Petra and Tina have gone into the house, come back out again and then, on a moment’s whim, decided to run away to the country? How could they have been hiding, unnoticed, in some flat or cottage or caravan? Something inside her had told her firmly that this wasn’t what had happened. Five years later it sounded just as preposterous.

The next article Tommy had printed off was from a few days later. This was when the police had a new theory. Mandy remembered the excitement of her mother and father when this news had spread. It seemed like a possible answer.

Mandy sat back. She pulled at the chain around her neck. There was a piece of amber on it that her mother had given her from an old brooch that she’d found in a collectibles market. Mandy had made it into a pendant. It felt slippery under her fingers and she pulled it up and pressed it to her lips.

The police’s theory had had a real ring of the truth about it. Mandy had thought about it for hours, days, weeks afterwards. She had left Petra and Tina on the street minutes before they crept into the side gate of the house. What if they had stumbled upon someone killing Mr Merchant? Might that person (or more than one person) have panicked and taken them away somewhere? Could they be holding them until they decided what to do with them?

In the next few days there was speculation on the television news. There were press appeals. The police made several re-enactments of what they thought had happened. They had three twelve-year-old girls walk along Princess Street and then one of them walk off while the other two headed towards the house. It was dark though, and most people were at home and not in the street, so Mandy couldn’t see how anyone would remember anything. The police were adamant that it had ‘yielded fresh clues and new information’.

Now Mandy looked at the article again. She flicked through a couple of the others behind it. She began to feel a bit irked. It was on her mind too much. Why had Tommy downloaded all this stuff? How was it relevant to a talk at a memorial service? The facts were simple. Two girls had disappeared. There was no explanation. What else did Tommy need to know in order to give a talk to the sixth form? Then she remembered he was also writing something on it for the school website. She sighed.

When she left Tommy in the common room he was being monopolised by Toni and Leanne. She wondered if he had sat near them in sociology. She pictured them perching either side of him protectively. She wished, not for the first time, that she had chosen sociology as one of her subjects.

She turned crossly to the back pages. Tommy had included a longer, more serious piece, perhaps from a Sunday supplement. The date at the top was June 2011, eight months afterwards. Most of the newspapers had stopped reporting the story by then, though there was one that had lurid headlines every couple of weeks or so. She remembered some of the headlines: ‘Moth Girls Abducted from House’; ‘Girls Drawn to the House’; ‘Moth Girls Besotted by Gloomy House’; ‘Mystery House Holds Its Grisly Secrets’.

The Moth Girls.

She hadn’t thought of that phrase for years.

It gave her an unpleasant feeling. She hadn’t liked it at the time. She didn’t like moths. They made her shiver. They came into her room on a summer night and were sucked towards the light, sometimes throwing themselves against lampshades, making scuttling noises with their wings. They were dark and hairy-looking, and sat on walls in high-up places where they couldn’t be shooed away. They only seemed to come out when it was dark, stealthy and foreboding.

The press called Petra and Tina ‘Moth Girls’ because they had been attracted to the house. They were drawn to it. Though Mandy hated the phrase she couldn’t dispute the truth of it. Right from the moment that she’d started to hang out with the girls, Petra had talked and talked about going into the house in Princess Street. Tina never said much about it but she usually did whatever Petra wanted her to do.

Her eye skimmed over the Sunday supplement article but she didn’t take any of it in. She was upset. She was also a little bit angry. Why was she even reading this stuff? She packed it all away in her bag and got up and walked out of the library.

She headed for the lunch rooms and when she got there she looked around for Tommy. He was in the far corner at a table with Toni and Leanne. Zoe was there as well with some boys Mandy didn’t know. She saw, from across the room, that Tommy was sitting smack in the middle of the group and he was talking about something. The other students were staring at him, hanging on his every word. The sight of it gave her a twinge in her chest. Tommy was popular. He was easy to get on with. That’s why everyone else liked him. People like Tommy had to be shared around.

He noticed her standing there and got up and walked towards her. The others looked round. Their faces did not have the same welcoming look. Mandy stood where she was. She had no intention of encroaching on their gathering.

‘Hi,’ she said, pulling the papers out of her bag. ‘I’ve looked at these. They all seem pretty accurate.’

She handed them to him.

‘I’ll show you my speech when I’ve written it.’

‘No need.’

He was bristling, like a puppy. He was pleased with his task and wanted to do it well.

‘Zoe was just telling us about the party. You’re coming, right?’

‘I don’t know, maybe.’

He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her elbow.

‘It wouldn’t be the same if you weren’t there.’

She felt her knees soften. His fingers on her arm were warm and she longed to place her hand on top of them.

‘I’ll probably be able to come,’ she said.

‘Great. Thanks for looking at these,’ he said and walked away.