The Girls (32 page)

‘He’s on different medication. Maybe he won’t get ill again.’

‘Yeah. And maybe he will.’ Grace put her hand to her face, to her nose, stroking the tender contours with her fingers as she’d done almost obsessively since she’d woken up last night. Then she moved her hand to her hair and grimaced. ‘Fucking hell, I need to sort my hair out.’

‘You’ll be home soon. You can wash it then.’

‘I don’t want to go home.’ She plucked at the white sheets of her bed.

Pip looked at her questioningly.

‘I don’t ever want to go back to that place.’

‘Was it …?’ she began, cautiously. ‘Grace? Was it Leo?’

Her sister’s face broke up into a splintered mask of disbelief. ‘What?’

‘Was it Leo? Who hurt you?’

‘Oh my God. What? Seriously? What are you asking me?’

‘Leo! He’s weird. I’ve seen him, with Tyler, acting weird.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said again. ‘Are you crazy? Leo’s, like, the best person in that garden. He would never—’

‘So who did? Who did?’ Pip said, words tumbling now. ‘The others. They said they were in the playground when you got hurt. But they weren’t. And Max says he heard stuff, voices and stuff. And then he saw you. On the ground. And heard people running away. And your clothes, Grace, they were all pulled up. I had to cover you, because you were showing. You know.
Showing
.’

Grace’s face flushed. ‘That’s not true.’

‘It is true, Grace. Someone hurt you. Someone drugged you. Someone tried to take off your clothes. And I don’t believe that you don’t know who it was. I don’t believe you. And I don’t understand why you would lie.’

‘I am not lying. I don’t remember anything.’

‘Yes you do. How could someone have given you a drug overdose without you knowing? Someone must have given it to you. Someone must have.’

‘I really, really don’t remember. I promise you. If I remembered I’d tell you. But I don’t.’

Pip brought her face close to her sister’s. ‘What if it was me, Grace? What if that person who gave you those drugs did it to me next time? Because you didn’t tell?’

‘They wouldn’t,’ she said.

Pip felt a pinprick of triumph. ‘They?’

‘Whoever it was.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s not about you, Pip. It’s about me.’

‘So you think it was someone you know?’

Grace’s pale, bruised face lit with a small glow of remembrance. ‘I know who it might have been. I know who might have wanted to hurt me. But it’s not a man. It’s a girl.’

Thirty-three

5 July, 9.17 p.m.

Grace watches Leo heading away from them, with his dog, heading away from Catkin and her. And now they are on their own in the Rose Garden. And she feels a bit awkward. She doesn’t know Catkin that well. Finds her intimidating. She’s one of those girls with a chip of ice in her heart. One of those girls who make you feel as though everything you do is a bit silly. As though her way is the one true way. For a moment or two they don’t talk. It’s an uncomfortable silence and Grace wants to fill it, but all the things she can think of to say are pointless and dull.

‘I think’, she says after another moment, ‘I’ll go and wait for Dylan. By the gate. Say goodnight properly.’

She gets to her feet and Catkin nods, gives her a knowing look, and then speaks. ‘We all know,’ she says. ‘We all know what you did to him. It’s sick.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Tyler told us. About you and Dylan. In the lift. You’re thirteen. Do you know how sick that is?’

Grace feels a thick fog of shame crawling all over her. She can still taste him in her mouth.

But then she looks at Catkin, with her dreadlocked hair and dead eyes, thinks about all her secret longings and night-time worlds. She thinks of the novel Catkin has been writing for all her childhood and never finished. She thinks of her home-schooling, in a house full of girls. And she thinks:
She’s jealous
. Catkin is jealous because I’m younger than her but I’ve done more. Because she wants to know how it would be to stop a lift, to undo a fly, to do the thing that she had done, to have a boy say
I love you
in that desperate, strangled voice, as though you had unlocked the very essence of him and given him the key. She wants to know and she doesn’t and she can’t because she is trapped here in this garden. Trapped within all these staring eyes of windows. Trapped in this place that has not let her grow, has not given her the space to be something more than her parents’ daughter, her sisters’ sister. And she is scared. Because she knows all this. And here am I, thinks Grace – thirteen years old.
Thirteen years old
.

And Grace turns to Catkin then and looks into her dead eyes and says, ‘You’re just jealous. All of you. You’re freaks and you’re losers and you’re jealous.’

She walks away, leaving Catkin on the bench, staring at her darkly.

By the time she reaches the garden gate Grace has lost some of her bravado. Her hands are shaking. She can feel tears building in the back of her throat. She stands for a moment, her back against the wall of the alleyway, breathing heavily.

‘Grace?’

It’s Leo. He’s tying a knot in a dog-poo bag. He drops it in the dog-mess bin and walks towards her. ‘You OK? I thought you were going in?’

‘I am,’ she says. ‘I was just waiting for Dylan. Waiting to say goodnight.’

Leo looks up and around. ‘I really think you should go back. Your sister needs you,’ he says. ‘I can wait here for Dylan. Tell him you said goodnight.’

Grace shakes her head. ‘Thank you, but I’m happy waiting.’

Leo smiles, that smile of his that makes everything OK. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘don’t talk to any strangers.’

‘I won’t,’ she says. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, she needs to hold him. She needs to feel the warmth of him and the depth of him and the goodness of him all the way through her. She throws her arms around him and squeezes him, the way her dad used to squeeze her. Hard and proper. ‘Thank you,’ she says, her face burrowed into his shoulder.

He laughs a little uncomfortably. ‘What for?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, letting him go. And she really doesn’t. She laughs nervously and he laughs nervously and then the dog starts to pull at the lead and Leo says, ‘Don’t hang around here for too long. If he doesn’t come in the next few minutes, promise me you’ll go home.’

‘I promise,’ she says.

She watches Leo leaving again, moving towards the light of his house.

And then Grace waits in the dark for the tall boy who loves her and as the moments pass she wonders if she loves him back, and she wonders if any of this is what it’s supposed to feel like and if she’s done any of it in the right way and if the girls will ever talk to her again, and she wonders what Dylan is thinking right now and what Tyler is thinking right now, and she thinks of her mother, drunk in bed, and Pip, alone, in that small, dark flat that has never been her home and then of her real home, which is carbon-black and death-shrouded, and she thinks of her father in the wetsuit and Leo in the shadows and the smell of him and the feel of him, and then she hears the garden gate click open, click closed and she turns to look for Dylan but there’s nobody there and then she hears: ‘
Psst, Grace
.’ And she turns towards the voice although she’s sure it isn’t Dylan and there is a pain, sharp in her shoulder. She slaps at the pain, as though it was an insect. And then for a moment or two she reels around and around like a dying fly and there’s no one there and then there is the ground and the feel of her nose splitting in two like an axed log.

Then there is nothing but dreams.

Thirty-four

Adele awoke the following morning with a start. Leo stood over her bedside. To his right was Fern. To his left was Catkin. She looked at the time. Seven thirty-five. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The police just called. They want us to bring the girls into the station.’

‘What! Why?’

‘I don’t know. They just said something came up on the CCTV footage and they need to ask them some questions. You coming?’

‘What about Willow?’

‘Dad says we can leave her here with him.’

Adele pulled herself out of bed. She rubbed the sleep from her face with both her hands. She didn’t wash. She put on yesterday’s clothes. Then she headed down the hallway and knocked at Gordon’s bedroom door.

‘I’m not decent,’ he called out. ‘Please do not enter.’

‘Gordon, it’s me. I need a word.’

‘I am not wearing underwear.’

‘Do you have a dressing gown?’

‘Give me a moment.’

She heard him bumbling about and then clearing his throat. ‘Enter.’

He was sitting on the side of his bed, otherworldly bare legs dangling from a once-grand red silk gown, ripped in places, stained in others, barley-twist piping. ‘What can I do for you, Mrs H.?’

‘The police have called.’

‘I know.’

‘They want to see the girls.’

‘I know.’

‘Leo told me things last night. About Cecelia.’

‘Now, remind me. Which one was Cecelia?’

‘The one who didn’t die.’

‘Yes. Yes. Gorgeous little thing, she was.’

‘Leo went out with her.’

‘I know. And the other one.’ He ran his hands down his leg, massaging it as he went. ‘That was a long hot summer, if ever there was one. All sorts going on that summer.’

‘You said something before. About your boys. You said they had something to do with Phoebe’s death.’

‘Did I? Did I really? Doesn’t sound very likely, does it?’

‘Well no, exactly. Which is why I was wondering what you meant.’

‘I suppose I just meant that they were a terrible bunch of scoundrels, going around the garden, breaking young girls’ hearts. I suppose I just meant that if that poor girl killed herself, which, as you know, was never proved, then they all played their part in that.’ He looked at Adele curiously. ‘Old girl,’ he said, ‘you haven’t been going round all this time thinking your husband was a cold-blooded killer, have you?’

Adele shook her head. ‘God. No. Of course not. I suppose, with all that’s been going on, I just wanted to have a clear view of everything, that’s all. Especially if we’re talking to the police today.’

‘You know what wouldn’t surprise me, Mrs H.? Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it turned out to be the sister. She was a green-eyed devil when it came to Leo and Phoebe. She really was. I used to look at her sometimes, the way she watched them together. Like she wanted to kill someone. And maybe she did in the end. Maybe she did.’

‘There,’ said PC Michaelides, moving slightly so that everyone got a good view of the screen. ‘Look. See how Grace is standing there for a few minutes after your dad goes. And then see how she turns, like she’s heard something? And then comes around the corner, away from the camera. Well, look at this. Just here. A few minutes before. The gate opens, then closes, yet nobody comes in. We thought at first it was just the wind. But then look at this, just before Grace goes out of shot. Can you see that, just at the bottom of the screen? It looks like the top of someone’s head. Doesn’t it? And we’ve zoomed in on it, as much as we can. And it looks, as far as we’re all concerned, like a ponytail. So what we’re thinking is that someone came in through the gates and crawled on their hands and knees. Deliberately avoiding the camera. And that it was a female, with blond hair. So …’ PC Michaelides paused the video and smiled at the three girls. ‘You two were in the garden around this time. The question is: did either of you see a blonde female with a ponytail? Behaving strangely?’

Adele bit her lip, waited what felt like an eternity for one of her girls to reply.

‘Well,’ said Fern, sharing a glance with Catkin. ‘I mean. Tyler has a blond ponytail.’

Catkin nodded. ‘Yes. She does.’

‘Tyler Rednough?’

They nodded.

‘But according to your account of Saturday night, you and Tyler were together the whole time, between nine and ten p.m.?’

‘We were,’ Catkin replied, steely, but with a nervous gulp.

‘So it can’t have been Tyler crawling along the alleyway at nine thirty?’

The girls exchanged another look. ‘Maybe it was someone else?’ said Catkin.

‘Yes,’ said Fern, a terrible flush rising up her chest. ‘It must have been.’

Adele felt her pulse start to race. Everything began spinning around her head: the missing pills, the blond ponytail, the looks of consternation on her daughters’ faces. And something else. Something she’d barely noticed at the time, because she’d been drunk. Because she’d been so focused on Clare and the way she was flirting with her husband and the need to get her home and sober. And towards the end, when Pip came back and Clare was reaching her terrible crescendo of drunkenness and she was saying,
It’s been decided. Leo is going to be your new daddy. It’s been decided
, Adele remembered, now, seeing Tyler’s face just beyond the terrace and she remembered the expression – of sheer rage and disbelief. And now she knew. She knew what was inside that child as she heard those words. First Grace had taken Dylan from her. And now she was taking her fantasy father too. The broken child, daughter of a wife-beater and a negligent mother, she’d found her family out here, found her place in the world. And Grace had come and Grace had slowly dismantled it and how could a half-formed child such as Tyler cope with all of this?

She looked at Leo, chin upturned, trying, she could tell, to look as though it was all terribly interesting and nothing at all to do with him when so much of it was, whether directly or not. She said, ‘Leo, when you were in the alleyway with Grace, did anyone see her hug you? Did …’ She paused. ‘Did Tyler see her hug you?’

Everyone turned to her. Leo gave her a questioning look, almost as if he thought she was trying to catch him out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like I’ve said before, I wasn’t sober. I suppose she might have done.’

‘Is there a reason for you to ask, Mrs Howes?’ asked WPC Cross.

‘No,’ she said, ‘sorry. Nothing. I think I was … Nothing …’

And another memory. While she was clearing up the flat. A light in the bathroom. A noise. A few minutes after Leo came back with the dog. She’d thought it was him. Knocked on the door. ‘Is that you, Leo?’ No reply. She’d been busy tidying up, didn’t bother to go in and turn out the light, to check whether there was someone there or not.