The Girls (24 page)

‘God. No. I mean … No. They’re just children. They’re just—’

‘Children,’ she cut in. ‘Yes, that’s true. But children are hard to define sometimes, aren’t they?’ She gazed at Clare coolly. ‘My niece goes from playing Barbie dolls with her little sister to screaming at her mum cos she won’t let her wear a push-up bra.’ She blinked and paused, as though she thought Clare was about to laugh and say:
Oh yes, so true, how naïve of me!

‘Well. Of course. It’s a difficult age. Neither one thing nor another. But no, they’re all just friends.’

‘Ah, now, that’s interesting.’ The WPC flipped through her notepad again. ‘Because one of the Howes girls – the little one …?’

‘Willow.’

‘Willow. Yes. She told me – and obviously she is very young and who knows how much truth you can get out of a child that age – but she told me that Grace and Dylan Maxwell-Reid were going out together.’

Clare sighed. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake. I mean, yes, I’ve seen them hanging out together. It does look like they’re quite close. But they’re thirteen! It’s not like they going for candlelit dinners together, you know. It’s just, you know, innocent, childish—’

‘Willow tells me that they’re in love. That it’s serious.’

Clare laughed, a loud bark of a laugh that didn’t quite sound like it had come from her.

The WPC laughed too. Put a lid back on her pen. ‘Kids,’ she said.

‘Have you got children?’ asked Clare.

‘What. Me? God, no. Not yet. Plenty of time for that.’

Clare nodded. The WPC looked about thirty. Barely younger than her.

‘So, we’re still waiting on the full medical report on Grace. And I hear there’s a forensic nurse on her way over right now. So, depending on all the test results, and, well, I’ll keep asking around, fill in the blanks, we should have a much clearer idea of what happened. You know. The big picture.’ She put her notepad into her little leather shoulder bag, hooked it over her shoulder, smiled. ‘What do you think happened, Ms Wild?’ She asked this in a friendly, talking-off-therecord tone.

Clare smiled weakly, unable to find the energy even to lift her head. ‘I don’t know. I should know. But I don’t. I’m so sorry.’

The WPC looked down at Clare and smiled sympathetically.

‘We’ll get there. Don’t you worry. A thirteen-yearold in a garden full of people in central London? We’ll get there.’

After she left the room, Clare put her face inside her hands and cried.

Twenty-four

Her mum was crying when Pip returned to the waiting room. She was trying to act like she wasn’t. She was trying to force a smile but it was really tragic. ‘Pip,’ she said, reaching for her hands. ‘Listen. This is really, really important. Really important. The police have just been and they will probably want to talk to you at some point too. So we really need to talk about what happened out there on Saturday night. We really need to work out the details. Because Mr Darko told me yesterday that the coma isn’t actually a head trauma. That the injuries to her face are superficial. That apparently …’ She paused, smiling shakily. ‘… someone gave her an overdose of drugs.’

Pip straightened. Felt her blood fill with adrenaline. She still hadn’t told anyone about Grace’s top being up, about her shorts being down. She’d covered her sister up before anyone had come up the hill. She’d been too embarrassed to say anything. And then scared that she might get into trouble if she did.

‘So what’s happening,’ her mum continued, massaging Pip’s hands with hers, ‘is that the police are sending a special nurse, quite soon, and she is going to examine Grace for any signs of anything bad having happened to her. And then we’ll have a better idea about things. But in the meantime, baby, I need you to really, really try and remember anything, everything from Saturday night. Hm?’ She smiled a watery smile at Pip and squeezed her hands.

Pip nodded and forced the words through the block inside her throat. ‘When I found her,’ she whispered, ‘her top was up.’

Her mum stopped massaging her hands and looked at her sharply. ‘Up?’

‘Yes. Like, you know …’ She pulled at the hem of her own top and raised it slightly. ‘But higher.’

‘Could you see her bra?’

She nodded. Gulped. ‘It was up, too.’

‘Could you see her breasts?’ her mother asked breathlessly.

‘Yes. Her bra was kind of … It was like’ – she put her hands behind her back to demonstrate – ‘
twisted
. You know. Like it hadn’t been undone. Just sort of
pulled
. And her shorts, too. They were, like,
down
.’

Her mother made a pained noise under her breath.

‘Not all the way down,’ she continued. ‘Just, you know, to here.’ She pointed to a spot on her upper thigh.

‘Pants?’

Pip nodded. Cast her eyes down.

‘Pip,’ said her mother, ‘baby. Why didn’t you say so? Before?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I tidied her all up when I found her. I didn’t want other people coming from the garden and seeing her like that. I thought she’d be really cross. And then when everyone came and then the police came and nobody asked, and then when we found out she was in a coma …’ She shrugged. ‘I thought maybe it didn’t matter. I thought maybe it wasn’t important.’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I am really sorry.’

‘No,’ said her mother, opening up her arms. ‘No. Please, baby. Don’t be sorry. You didn’t know. How could you know? It was my job to know and I failed.’

Pip let her mum hug her, holding her breath against the sour smell of her. Then Clare released her and held her at arms’ length. ‘Was there anything else, though? Anything I missed? You need to tell me, Pip. Tell me every last thing.’

Pip thought back through the day. Then she thought back through the preceding days and weeks. She thought of all the moments over the past six months when things hadn’t felt quite right and she looked at her mother and didn’t know where to start. Then one memory came to the fore. The wild-eyed boy on the hill; the way he’d looked at her.

‘Someone needs to talk to Max,’ she said.

‘Max?’

‘Yes. You know, the boy with red hair. The one who’s always playing football. He was there.’

‘Where?’

‘On the hill. When I was looking for Grace. He came down the hill and he looked really weird.’

‘How old is he, this Max?’

‘Nine,’ said Pip.

‘Too young to have had anything to do with it then?’

‘Yes. But he might have seen someone. He might have seen something happening. And someone needs to talk to Rhea. The old lady. Fergus’s owner. She lives in the flats at the top of the hill; her balcony overlooks the place where I found Grace. And Gordon. Willow’s granddad. He was out there, when I was in the playground with Tyler and Willow and Fern. He was wandering about in the garden. He might have seen something. And Dylan. They really, really need to talk to Dylan. He was with her nearly all day and night.’ Memories and fragments of memories spun round her head, and then came another, suddenly, hard and fast.

‘Leo,’ she said. ‘They have to talk to Leo. I think …’ She felt her whole body fill with ice as she talked, with the frozen enormity of what she was saying. ‘I think Leo had something to do with it.’

‘What?’

‘He was out there. Remember? Before it happened. And …’ She was sure now. So sure. ‘There’s something not right about him.’

Her mother stared at her with her jaw left open. ‘Leo?’ she said. ‘
Our
Leo?’

‘He’s not
our Leo
.’ Pip tutted. ‘And that’s exactly what I mean. Everyone thinks he’s so great.
He
thinks he’s so great. Grace thinks he’s so great. But he’s not. He’s weird. Do you know …’ She was gabbling. ‘… once, ages ago, like the first or second time I went to their house, I walked past Willow’s bedroom and Leo was in there, on Willow’s bed. Holding Tyler in his arms. Holding hands with her.’ She left a pause for her words to sink in. ‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘That seriously happened.’

Clare rested a hand on her thigh, pushing a lock of hair from her face with her other hand. ‘Pip,’ she said, ‘there were dozens of people in the garden on Saturday night and if it turns out that there
was
some kind of sexual assault on Grace then the police will be launching a full-blown investigation and if that’s the case then you really, really can’t go around casting aspersions on our neighbours. Leo is a good, good man …’

‘But what about Phoebe?’ she cried. ‘Phoebe Rednough. Leo was her
boyfriend
when she died.
Of a drug overdose
. In the same garden. In virtually the same exact place! Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see? History repeating itself? Can’t you see?’

‘Who is Phoebe Rednough?’

‘She was Tyler’s mum’s sister. You know, the one who was found dead in the garden when she was fifteen.’

Clare nodded, thinking of the bench in the garden with the girl’s name on it and then suddenly remembering something her mother had said the first time she’d come to see them in their new flat, something about a girl dying in a communal garden years earlier. Could it have been their garden she was remembering?

As she thought this the door opened and a nurse appeared with another woman, middle-aged, slightly overweight, wearing a cotton jacket over a blue tunic. The nurse pointed out Clare to the other woman and then left the room. ‘Hello,’ the woman said, ‘Mrs Wild? My name’s Jo Mackie. I’m a forensic nurse examiner. I think your daughter’s consultant told you to expect me?’

Clare sat up straight and nodded. ‘I wasn’t expecting you so early.’

‘Pure luck,’ she said in a gentle Scots accent. ‘Good timing. I was just over Islington way. And, obviously, it’s been a while now since the incident?’

‘Thirty-six hours,’ said Clare.

‘Yes. Quite a while. So there’s no time to waste.’ She looked at Pip and smiled. ‘Is that your sister in there?’ she asked pleasantly.

Pip nodded.

‘Well, I’ve spoken to Mr Darko and he says she’s stable enough for us to start straight away. So.’ She gestured at Clare to get to her feet. ‘Shall we go?’

Pip got to her feet too and Jo Mackie smiled and said, ‘I think just Mum, for now. OK?’

Pip sat down again. She didn’t know what a forensic nurse examiner was exactly, but she knew what forensics were and she knew what a nurse was and she knew what an examination was and she could take an educated guess.

She thought again of the bunched-up top, the yanked-down shorts and she thought of Leo on Willow’s bed looking up at her with those darkly hooded eyes and she prayed to herself:
Please, Jo Mackie, don’t find anything on my sister. Please. Jo Mackie, find nothing at all
.

Twenty-five

The doorbell rang again about two hours after the police constables had left. Since their visit Adele hadn’t been able to concentrate on the girls’ lesson at all. She’d set them a reading objective, left them all curled up in various spots around the flat reading their set pieces while she sat at the kitchen table staring through the window at the gardens beyond. Gordon was out there with his physiotherapist. She could just see them in the distance. There were other people too, sitting in the sun, making the most of another glorious summer’s day. It felt as though summer was happening now only to other people, no longer anything to do with her. She got heavily to her feet and went to the hall to answer the door.

‘Hello again!’ It was PC Michaelides, alone this time. ‘Sorry to bother you again, Mrs Howes, but I’ve just had a call from WPC Cross; she’s been up at the hospital talking to Mrs Wild, and there’s been a further development. Regarding Grace. I wonder if I could just have a short word with you about it. Won’t take more than five minutes.’

‘She is OK, isn’t she?’

‘Well, no change as far as we know.’ He wiped his feet on the doormat, despite days of dry, sunny weather, and followed Adele into the kitchen.

He turned down her offer of a hot drink, said he’d had enough tea and coffee this morning to wire himself up to the National Grid. Then, once they were both seated at the table, he ran his finger absentmindedly over the etched-in grooves of the wooden surface and said, ‘They’ve had the test results back, for Grace. The MRI and the bloods and apparently there is no evidence of any kind of head trauma or injury commensurate with her current condition. But …’ He looked up at her with his chocolate eyes and said, ‘They found drugs in her system. And alcohol.’

‘What!’

‘Well, yes. Quite a surprise. I mean, obviously. She’s very young. Although, according to your daughter earlier, maybe mature for her age?’

She nodded, then shook her head. ‘What sort of drugs …?’

‘Er, sleeping pills. Apparently. Prescription ones. Heavy-duty.’

She shook her head before he’d even asked her the question. ‘We don’t have anything like that. Not in our house. I’m anti-all those kind of non-essential drugs. You know, the painkillers and muscle relaxants and decongestants, that kind of thing. I treat those sorts of smaller problems homeopathically. Or naturally.’

‘Herbs and stuff, you mean?’

‘Yes. Sort of. If anyone has trouble sleeping in this family it’s camomile and essential oils and half an hour of meditation before bed.’ She laughed, overloud, over-insistent.

‘I see.’ He smiled. ‘So they’re unlikely to have originated from here then?’

‘Highly,’ she said. ‘Definitely, in fact.’

‘Great,’ he said. ‘But maybe you could ask them to think about who else might have had access to that type of thing. Older teenagers, maybe? And the alcohol. Did they see anyone giving Grace a drink? That kind of thing.’

‘I did see something,’ Adele said, a memory suddenly opening up in her consciousness. ‘When I was face-painting. Around two p.m. I saw Grace and Dylan leave the garden together. They looked like they were up to something. She had a shoulder bag with her and they were looking inside it and at the time I thought they were going to the shops to get sweets or something. It’s possible they were going to get alcohol, I suppose. Or something worse?’

PC Michaelides rippled his fingertips over the tabletop as though it was a piano keyboard and then jumped nimbly to his feet. ‘Right, well, that’ll do for now. I’ve got some more calls to make and we’ll be back later to speak to your husband and to your daughters, and in the—’ He stopped and looked up as a cacophony of sound came from the direction of the terrace and Gordon and his physiotherapist appeared in the kitchen doorway.