Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

  Naomi twisted round to the three of them in the back. ‘Don’t fib, Izzy. Your bedtime is eight o’clock every night.’

  ‘It said ten o’clock when you told me to turn my iPad off last night.’

  ‘iPads in bed? You know I never allow that,’ Naomi tutted, sounding angry now.

  ‘But you did!’ Izzy insisted.

  ‘Sometimes it’s okay,’ Sophie said, trying to defuse Naomi’s embarrassment.

  There was a lull in the chatter.

  ‘I’ve had a tough few weeks, that’s all,’ Naomi muttered, staring out into the black night.

  And Sophie lamented the disappearance of her friend’s kind, spirited disposition. It scared her that she wasn’t the same.

  ‘Bye, girls,’ Sophie said as the girls, and Dylan, clambered out of the car.

  Naomi didn’t immediately follow her daughters. Her shoulders rounded and her head fell into her hands. ‘What are we going to do?’ she moaned.

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ Sophie whispered, stroking her back.

  She could feel Naomi’s ribs heaving with quiet sobs. ‘I can’t live with this inside me, I can’t do it. I don’t know how to live with it, Sophie,’ she repeated over and over as Sophie continued soothing her, but Sophie was feeling increasingly unnerved.

  ‘It’ll get easier,’ she lied, remembering this had been what others had said to her after Deda had died. Cold air ran up her spine. It wasn’t true. It didn’t get easier, it just changed into a feeling that was lower-level, that was just about bearable, that you could just about live through. There was nothing easy about it. Naomi would have to adjust, to toughen up.

  ‘Dylan, honey! Back in the car please,’ Sophie called out of her window, and Naomi’s ribs jumped under her hand. ‘You’d better get them to bed and try to act as normal as possible.’

  ‘I want to tell Charlie,’ she whimpered.

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I keep thinking of that mother. I went to the library to see if there was any more information about the family, but I was too paranoid to do the research in case someone was watching me.’ She looked around her furtively. ‘I had to leave.’

  ‘Nobody’s watching you, Naomi,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Do you think the mum’s still alive?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘We can’t bring him back for her, Naomi.’

  ‘Have there been any more appeals in the papers?’

  ‘None. And if you keep quiet, and if they don’t find any new evidence, we’ll be safe,’ Sophie reminded her.

  ‘I want to find out if his mother is okay. What if I went to see her?’

  ‘Are you fucking serious?’ Sophie hissed.

  ‘I could pretend to be someone else.’

  ‘No! No way, Naomi. That’s insane. There’d be no point.’

  ‘But I want to feel better,’ she cried, groaning.

  ‘Have you forgotten that you could end up in prison for fourteen years?’

  A strangled noise came from deep within Naomi, and she opened the door as if she was going to be sick into the driveway. The girls distracted her.

  ‘Are you okay, Mummy?’

  Naomi rallied herself for long enough to get out of the car. ‘Of course I am! Come on, then. Say thank you to Sophie and let’s get you into bed.’

  But Sophie knew that trouble was brewing. Naomi was unstable, which left them both vulnerable. Deep inside Sophie there was a disturbance, a rumbling of unease that Naomi’s hysteria poked at. Sophie began to regret telling Naomi. Sharing it might have brought them closer, as Deda had predicted, but Sophie hadn’t thought through Naomi’s reaction. She had assumed that Naomi would be rational and sensible, self-preserving. The hope that it could remain as their dirty little secret – shared and halved, harbouring it together, hurting together – had been optimistic. Thrown, Sophie would have to think again, and find a way to stamp out Naomi’s attack of conscience.

  It had been a mistake to hold back the rest of the newspaper cuttings. It was time for her to read them. Once Naomi knew who he was, she would quit her brooding. She might even be pleased.

  Chapter Twenty

  Hidden behind sunglasses, which shielded my eyes, bloodshot and bone-dry, I walked out of the car park and through the quiet residential streets of Exeter.

  My mobile was directing me, with its blue line and its nine-minute prediction, to Ilene Parker’s address, which had been so simple to find in the UK phone directory online.

  I had not set foot in this town since the day I had packed up my room, stripped my bed and vowed never to come back.

  Yet here I was, walking over a zebra crossing that had not existed when I had lived here. Nothing had existed, perhaps. We had been practising at life. We had fumbled through three years, hurtling towards a cataclysmic denouement; experiencing an ending to our youth, to our naivety, while covering our hands over our faces, peering through our fingers, too scared to view it properly.

  On the eighth Google Maps minute, I arrived at the long, wide, speed-bumped avenue where she lived, thinking about how easy it had been to walk here, how easy it had been to find the address, how easy it had been to lie to Charlie. He believed that I was at a private wine-tasting function in Devon, and that I would be staying overnight. I had spun the same lie to Sophie, who had called me to suggest I meet her at her grandfather’s cottage later. She had sounded cryptic, implying she had something to show me.

  As I walked along the pavement, clocking the numbers on the doors of four bungalows in a row, I came within sight of the fifth bungalow, No. 9. It had a white door. All the bungalows had white doors. Her neighbour’s house, to the left, had a front garden that was stuffed with roses of every colour imaginable. To the right, her other neighbours had squished a caravan onto their drive and covered it with a white tent. On the opposite side of the road there was a row of pretty flint terraced houses.

  It was strange to see such normality, such a prosaic setting for such a monstrous situation.

  I removed my sunglasses and approached her red-brick home and pressed the white doorbell.

  In a strangely detached moment, I thought of a friend’s account of her excruciating experience as a researcher, doorstepping potential contributors for a Channel 4 documentary she had been working on about the elderly victims of a Nigerian telephone fraud gang. Considering the nature of the crime, the only way of gaining the victims’ trust had been to knock on their doors and approach them directly, with a young, innocent smile and an official badge. Her friend had described how grubby she had felt, almost as grubby as the Nigerian gang, by exploiting these frail, vulnerable people once again.

  Trying to imagine myself in my friend’s shoes, as a professional with a job to do,

  I went over what I had prepared to say. It would be another lie. A lie to cover a bigger lie.

  I wiped my sticky hands down my trousers and straightened the pendant around my neck. It shocked me that I was really here, that I was going to do this without Sophie’s knowledge. I would play a part, method-act my way out of my head and into her home, and I might survive it without breaking down, without giving myself away.

  There were no guarantees she would be in, nor could I assume that she would talk to me for more than two minutes before closing the door in my face.

  Blowing out puffs of air to allow my voice to hold steady, I pressed her doorbell. A long tune, like a pop song verse, rang out from behind the door. There was no response. I pressed it again.

  There were potted hyacinths sitting either side of the doorstep, and three macramé hanging pots filled with wild strawberry leaves. A pair of large black trainers was positioned neatly in front of one plant pot. The size suggested they might belong to a man, but I had found no record of a husband in the directory. Through the frosted glass panel I could see a heart-shaped ornament hanging there. Already it was clear that the occupant of this house was neat and house-proud.

  I would ring th
e doorbell once more.

  But before my fingertip touched the white button, the locks were being rattled from the inside. The unlocking took a while, suggesting she was extremely concerned about unwanted visitors, and I realised that I was one of them. My stomach crunched with nerves.

  Seconds before she was revealed, I almost ran, but once I caught a glimpse of her face, I was transfixed.

  She had a ratty grey-blonde fringe, long over her narrow forehead, and her skin was orange and deeply creased into jagged tributaries that split in multiple directions across her facial bones, too many to identify any frown or laugh lines. And then there were her eyes, slits of milky blue, menacing and cold.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, impolitely, flashing a quick, sharp smile.

  She was a small, slight woman, but her voice, her face, her presence before me was larger and more vivid than anyone I had ever met. I couldn’t believe I was standing in front of her. I paused, fearing, illogically, that she would recognise me. The power of my connection to her son was so great, it amazed me that she would not know who I was. I had the sense that I’d pulled a mask off my face.

  A macabre fascination had drawn me to this woman’s door. I should not be here, under false pretences, to meet this grieving mother, from whom I had already taken so much. I should not want to seek out evidence, to hear live testimony that she had loved her son as I loved Diana and Izzy, that she had felt his loss as keenly as I would, that she could not rest until her killer was brought to justice. I wasn’t sure I was capable of bearing witness to that kind of pain while knowing I was responsible for it. But here I was. I knew I deserved to see it. I was magnetised by the idea of putting myself through it.

  ‘Hello, sorry to disturb you, but I’m thinking of renting that house over there, and I just wanted to ask you about the area,’ I said, pointing to the letting sign across the road.

  With an irritated sigh, she said, ‘It’s a dump. Does that help?’

  Taken aback, I stuttered, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, really?’

  Ilene Parker pressed her cheek into the door frame, glancing over my head as though someone might jump out at her. ‘That bastard refuses to move his rotten old caravan and that cow the other side of me snips at those bloody roses all day when she knows they play havoc with my hay fever. There’s no community spirit here, love.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘I really value community.’

  She cackled, but it turned into a chesty cough and her eyes wept. ‘I’m sure you do,’ she spluttered, looking me up and down with a sneer.

  Her rude manner threw me. I found her repellent, as though she had crawled all over me, licking me with a foul tongue. I had expected to feel even sorrier than before for what had happened to her son, but I did not.

  ‘You get the measure of your neighbours when something bad happens,’ I continued, seeing an in, trying to fight my urge to run. While standing in her presence, I scrabbled to find sympathy, contemplating how her grief might have changed her, but I found nothing generous inside me.

  Her lips puckered into a hard pout. She let go of the door frame and crossed her arms over her chest, but her voice softened. ‘There was a time when this community bent over backwards for each other, but it’s gone. All gone. It’s the way of the world now.’

  I wanted to cry. A fellow human being, in that world she talked so cynically about, had left her son to die by the roadside to be eaten by creatures and bloat and stiffen until he was found by the police. Twenty years later, they still hadn’t confessed. We had not confessed. I could not blame her for being bitter.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, before I could stop myself.

  I wasn’t sure I had been heard, but she laughed at me again. ‘It’s not your fault, love.’

  Her words smothered me. Blobs of white formed across my eyeballs and my head lost its weight.

  ‘I’m so sorry, but I’m feeling a little faint,’ I said, hanging over my knees. The blood rushed into my face. I stood up, mortified.

  She stared down at me and a fleeting frown passed across her features. I felt a rush of regret. I had made a terrible mistake in coming here.

  ‘Would you like to come in for a glass of water?’ she asked, with a stick-on smile.

  ‘No, no, it’s okay. I didn’t mean to bother you,’ I said.

  ‘Come on, we’re going to be neighbours, aren’t we?’

  I wasn’t sure her kindness was sincere, but I had a decision to make in a split second. I had come all this way to know more about her, and I was being invited into her home. Fleeing, suddenly, might seem suspicious.

  ‘That’s very kind. Thank you.’

  ‘Come on in.’

  Her home smelt of stale biscuits and dirty bedclothes.

  We walked through to the kitchen at the back of the house. On the way, she closed a door to a bedroom on the right. I thought I heard someone moving in the bed, and I thought of the black trainers on the doorstep.

  ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ I said, walking very slowly past the other open door, to the left, which revealed a small sitting room. The three walls that I could see were white and bare. The sills and coffee table were clear of frames or ornaments, except for a crystal glass fairy that sat on a corner table and refracted rainbows across the room. It was oddly pretty in such a soulless room. I shivered, imagining its glassy eyes watching me, all-seeing, all-knowing.

  We had to walk through a bamboo curtain, painted with a sunset pattern, to get through to the kitchen. One of the beaded strands got caught on my bracelet and I felt caught like a fly in a web as I untangled it.

  My eyes darted around the purple kitchen trying to find evidence of her late son’s life. One of two magnets on the fridge door was in the shape of a flip-flop, pinning up a shopping list; the other was a clay disc depicting white stone houses on a hillside, holding up an NHS referral letter. Two crayon drawings were Blu-Tacked to one of the kitchen cabinets, both signed by a child called Molly in Year One. Still I could not find a photograph of Jason Parker.

  The water made a loud splattering sound in the metal sink. ‘What did you say your name was again?’ she asked, handing me the filled glass.

  ‘I didn’t. But it’s Gaby,’ I replied, smiling, having thought of the false name this morning. I had planned this intrusion carefully. I had tied my dirty hair into a bun to hide its memorable curls. I had worn black, nondescript clothes. I had even taken off my wedding ring and swapped my expensive handbag for a cloth holdall. My car, with its identifying number plate, was parked anonymously in the car park a few streets away.

  ‘I’m Ilene,’ she said, jamming her fingers into her jeans pockets, spreading her elbows wide, making her thin frame bigger. ‘What estate agent did you say you were using?’

  ‘Bellows and Turner,’ I replied. It was an online agency, with which I had registered my fake details. The pads of my fingers began rolling up and down the glass.

  ‘Rip-off merchants,’ she said.

  ‘Bellows and Turner?’

  ‘Estate agents, the lot of them.’

  ‘That’s why I wanted to ask around a bit.’

  ‘What did you want to know?’

  ‘A few things I was worried about. Like the traffic. Is it bad in rush hour? I’ve heard it can be a bit of a cut-through.’

  Her eyes passed over me from head to toe. ‘Not since the speed bumps.’

  ‘And there haven’t been any town planning notices for high-rise tower blocks or nuclear power stations at the end of the street?’ I laughed, remembering that a prospective buyer of our flat in Richmond had asked us this.

  Ilene did not laugh. She answered me earnestly, as though it had been a serious question, as though a catastrophe like that would not be a surprise to her. ‘Not that I know of. You’ll only be renting, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. We won’t be here long. I’m looking to buy in one of the villages.’

  ‘Where do you live now?’

  ‘London.’

  Her e
yes narrowed, barely open enough to see her iris. ‘I thought I’d be here three years, tops, and I’m still here twenty-three years later.’

  The mouthful of water lay like a lake sloshing over my tongue. Twenty-three years ago Jason Parker would have started his degree course.

  ‘What brought you here?’ I asked, gulping my water down, ploughing on.

  She hesitated. ‘Work,’ she replied, picking at her earlobe, where four empty piercings gaped. She was lying.

  ‘Do you get many noisy students crammed into these houses?’

  Her hand fell from her ear and she glared at me. ‘The students give the place some bloody life.’

  ‘I have a thirteen-year-old son,’ I said quickly. ‘I’d quite like him to go to the university one day.’

  A twitch of a smile came to her lips. I waited, quietly.

  I wanted her to talk about Jason. I wanted her to tell me he had died, and how. I wanted her to tell me how she had coped when the police had discovered his body, two weeks after he had been reported missing. I wanted her to express her feelings about the hit-and-run driver. I wanted her to detail her experiences of waiting, day in, day out, for a witness to come forward after her appeals. I wanted to know how she remained sane in the face of never knowing.

  But it had been more than curiosity and concern and self-flagellation that had brought me to her door: it had been my soul on its knees, forehead on floor, arms outstretched to her feet, begging her soul for mercy, desperate for her touch, for a blessing from her higher self. I had come here to lay the groundwork for my confession, to spot potential for forgiveness, to seek out an avenue for my own redemption. It had been wholly selfish and cowardly in spirit. It would be worth very little to her and very much to me.

  Time was running out. She would not let me stand here drinking water all day.

  Into the silence came the rattle of bamboo, and in slid a man of about thirty, wearing tracksuit bottoms and a vest. His muscles were pale and his shoulders rounded, like he had been scooped out from hips to chin. A line from the pillow worked its way down one of his cheeks like a scar.