Say You're Sorry (23 page)

At that moment a Black Lexus pulls into the driveway and a middle-aged man gets out, flipping the keys back and forth over his knuckles. Early-forties, tall and fine-featured, he looks like he’s just stepped off a movie set, dressed in sharply pressed khakis and a business shirt. His curly hair is tipped with blond.

He mounts the stairs two at a time. Smiles. Open as a sunny day.

“This looks like good timing. We weren’t expecting visitors.”

He shakes my hand. Emily unhooks the chain and opens the door. Mr. Martinez hands her his briefcase and coat.

“I’m sorry, I should have called ahead,” I explain. “I’m assisting the police in an investigation.”

“Is this about Natasha and Piper?”

“What makes you assume that?”

He looks at Emily. “What else would it be?”

“I was hoping to talk to Emily.”

“Oh, I see, well, Em’s been off school today. She had one of her dizzy spells this morning.” He puts an arm around her shoulders. “Are you feeling better, honey?”

She nods.

He continues, “She’s already given the police three statements.”

“Yes, but I’m looking at these things differently. It won’t take long.”

Mr. Martinez glances at Emily. “What do you think?”

She nods.

“Right, let’s get inside. It’s cold out here. Put the kettle on, Em?”

The lounge is a long narrow room with high ceilings and expensive furniture and paintings. The armchairs have the carved wooden legs of animals, as if they lead secret lives when everyone else is asleep.

Emily has gone to the kitchen. Phillip Martinez lights the gas fire and fluffs up cushions on the sofa. He has a smooth, almost feminine face with pale, barely existent eyebrows.

“This whole thing has been a terrible business—young girls running away. Not knowing what happened. It makes you wonder…”

“About what?” I ask.

“Excuse me?”

“What does it make you wonder about?”

“Their families.” He makes it sound so obvious. “If things at home had been fine, they wouldn’t have run away.”

“What if they were kidnapped?”

“Well, that changes everything.” He studies me for a moment. My left arm trembles.

“What stage?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your Parkinson’s—what stage?”

“One.”

“How long?”

“Eight years.”

“It’s slow—you’re lucky.”

“That’s how I try to look at it.”

“It’s not really my field.”

“Your field?”

“I’m a research scientist. I work at the Biomedical Sciences Department at the university. We do a lot of gene therapy research into things like diabetes, Alzheimer’s and muscular dystrophy. Parkinson’s is one area. Some of my colleagues are doing some important research. You should come and have a look. I could organize a tour.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s one of the reasons Emily is quite wary of strangers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We use animals in our testing. Chimps mainly. There were problems during construction of the lab. Protests. Fire-bombings. Threats.”

“Were you threatened?”

“My last car had acid poured over it and you should see some of the letters I received. I’ve taught Emily to be vigilant.”

“I hope I didn’t frighten her.”

“Oh, she’s fine. Highly strung. A bit like her mother.”

Emily reappears. She’s carrying a tray with a teapot and cups. Mr. Martinez takes it from her.

“I’m going to leave you two alone. I have emails to answer. I’ll just be upstairs.” He turns to Emily. “Honey, if you know something that could help, you tell him.”

Emily nods and listens to her father climbing the stairs, following his progress, picturing him moving steadily through the house. Higher. Further away. Satisfied, she smoothes her dress over her thighs and sits on the edge of the sofa, toying with one sleeve of her jumper. Cautious and tense, she has a defeated expectancy about her, as though at any moment she expects to be admonished.

I’ve read her statements. Emily’s story hasn’t changed. But I know from experience how perceptions alter over time. I start gently, asking her about Piper and Natasha; how they met, what they did together.

She chews the skin around her thumbnail and occasionally nods and shakes her head. She doesn’t want to talk to me and I don’t have the codes to unlock her defenses—the mysterious combination of trust and shared experience that causes a teenage girl to prattle non-stop to her friends, but stop immediately when an adult walks into the room. If I knew the numbers, I could talk to my own teenage daughter.

“Do you have secrets, Emily?”

“What do you mean?”

“You understand what secrets are?”

She nods nervously.

“We all have them. Secret hiding places, secret crushes, secret regrets. We have faces that we don’t show other people, only our friends.”

Emily is staring at me with the dull frowning air of an amnesiac.

I try again. “Why did you want to run away?”

She shrugs.

“You must have had a reason. I know Natasha had some problems at school—what about you?”

“No.”

“At home then?”

She hesitates and glances at the stairs, worried that her father might be listening.

“My mum had been sick. She had a breakdown.”

“Where is your mum now?”

“She lives in a hostel in London. She’s getting better.”

“That’s good.”

Emily tugs at the hem of her tartan skirt. She hasn’t touched her tea.

“Whose idea was it to run away?”

“Tash’s.”

“Where were you going to go?”

Her shoulders rise and fall.

“You must have imagined a new life.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t like this one?”

Again she looks at the stairs. “It was just talk at first. I didn’t think we’d actually do it—not for real. It was exciting… something different… but then…”

“Then what?”

“Tash got serious.”

“Why?”

“It was after the night Aiden Foster ran down Callum Loach. We made a sort of pact because things were so shitty at school and at home.”

“Why were things bad at home?”

Emily raises her eyes to the ceiling.

“Your parents were divorcing.”

She nods.

“Tash sort of lost interest in the idea but then she got into trouble at school and Miss Jacobson said she couldn’t come back after the holidays. Tash didn’t tell her folks. She was going to run away before they found out.”

“What happened on the night of the Bingham festival?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were with Piper and Natasha.”

“Only until ten o’clock.”

“What happened then?”

“I got a call saying that Mum was in hospital. I came straight home.”

“But you saw Piper later?”

“She woke me. I heard her knocking on the bedroom window. Straight away I knew something was wrong, but she wouldn’t tell me. She said they were running away in the morning. I said I couldn’t come—Mum was in hospital.”

“But you changed your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She shrugs.

“How were you going to live in London?”

“Tash had money. She said her uncle owed her. She used to work for him.”

“What did she do?”

“Filing in his office.”

“I thought she was a waitress.”

“That too.”

“Did she get on with her uncle?”

Emily reacts as though slapped, holding her cheek.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“That thing you just did?”

“What thing?”

“You reacted when I mentioned Tash and her uncle.”

Emily lets out an avian squawk, shaking her head. “I didn’t say anything! I didn’t! You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She calms down, sinking back into the sofa.

“Tell me about the accident.”

“We went to a party at this house in Abingdon. It was thrown by one of Aiden’s friends. He was Tash’s boyfriend: Aiden Foster. The party was full of university students and stuck-up girls who treated us like we were in pre-school.”

“Tell me about Aiden.”

“He was all right, I guess. Older. He had a car. Tash didn’t like taking the bus so she sort of used him. Aiden got wasted at the party and Tash started flirting with Callum Loach. He was a couple of years ahead of us, but went to a different school.

“Aiden got pissed off. He grabbed Callum and acted like a complete psycho and then laughed.”

“You saw this?”

“Piper told me later. I was inside.”

“What happened then?”

“Tash was sick. Callum offered to drive her home, but he came back for her phone, which was upstairs. Callum was getting back in the car when Aiden came around the corner in his Subaru and he just ran him down.” Emily bites down hard on her lip. “We thought he was dead. He flew into the air and over the car and landed on the road.”

“What happened to him?”

“He lost both his legs. He’s in a wheelchair.”

“And Aiden?”

“He went to jail.”

“Is he still in prison?”

Emily shrugs.

“Would your dad know?” I ask.

She stares at the ceiling. “I don’t want to ask him.”

O
n the morning after the party,

two police officers came to Tash’s house and took her to hospital where they tested her blood for alcohol and drugs. Then she went to Abingdon Police Station and made a statement.

Aiden Foster arrived at the station late that afternoon, along with his father and a big-shot barrister. He was charged with attempted murder and was granted bail the next day. They confiscated his car and told him not to approach any of the witnesses.

The police came to my house on the Sunday and asked me a lot of questions. I was a minor so I had a social worker with me during the interview. The only bits I left out were about the drugs. I was scared they might charge me for having puffed on a joint.

That night I heard Mum and Dad arguing downstairs, saying that I had “run off the rails” and “gone feral” and was going to finish up in prison or worse. The next morning I didn’t get woken for school. Mum didn’t knock on my door. I dressed in my school uniform and came downstairs, but she told me to go back and get changed. That’s when I noticed the suitcase in the corner of the kitchen.

Two men came to get me. Their van was so clean and shiny that clouds rolled across the sides and the roof. I thought I was going to the police station, but instead they took me to some sort of boarding house with gardens and high walls. Not in Oxford or in London. It was surrounded by fields and had the sea on one side.

Mum came with me that first day, but she didn’t stay.

“Please be a good girl and you’ll be home in no time,” she said.

I grabbed her arm and begged her not to leave.

“This is only because we love you,” she said.

Parents always say things like that—like “this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you,” but how can that be true?

That night I heard them lock my door. And every couple of hours someone came along the corridor and looked through a hatch. I couldn’t turn the lights off even if I wanted to. The next day I kicked off at one of the nurses and she threatened to handcuff me to the bed. I didn’t believe her, until she waved the cuffs in front of my face.

That day they gave me all these different tests, showing me pictures and shapes. Some of them were just images flashed onto a computer screen and I had to press either a red or green button depending on how the picture made me feel. I assumed the red was supposed to symbolize anger and green was calm. I tried to throw the results out by pressing red on the pictures of puppies and green on the pictures of riots.

My therapist was called Vernon and he asked me if I ever touched myself. I tried to think of what Tash would say. “Constantly. I use cucumbers, candlesticks, anything I can get my hands on.”

There were group sessions with other girls. Never boys. Some of them were anorexics or bulimics or were suicidal or into cutting themselves. The therapists were never specific in the group sessions. It was all about “feelings.”

“You want my feelings—I feel pissed off about being in here,” I told them. That lost me TV privileges for the evening. I told them I didn’t give a fuck about the TV, which lost me dessert privileges for a week. I lost a lot of privileges. I can’t even tell you what they were because I lost them before I had the privilege.