Between the Lies

by Cathy MacPhail

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  COPYRIGHT

  For Katie and Danny, with love and thanks

  A special thank you to Vassilios for his help and advice

  How long have I been here? I’ve lost track of time.

  Nobody’s coming. Nobody knows where I am.

  Why was I so stupid? Please… somebody help me.

  I’ve been screaming so loud my throat hurts and still nobody hears me. I’m afraid to scream now. Because it’s even darker, and what if… what if the person who comes is that person.

  I’m trying not to panic.

  But what if nobody ever finds me?

  Can’t think like that or I’ll go mad.

  No, I will be saved. Hold onto that thought.

  Someone will find me.

  Someone has to.

  ONE

  And that was how it all began, with Judith being reported missing. Our school, St Thomas High, was buzzing with the news on the Monday. Groups gathering in the corridors, girls gossiping in the toilets, everyone sharing everything online. The same photo peered out of everyone’s posts: Jude, with her long hair draped over her shoulders, her big eyes wide, her mouth open as if she was just about to catch a fish. Bet she would hate that photo, I thought. Jude Tremayne was vain. Always liked to look her best. And that definitely wasn’t her best shot.

  Everyone was speculating about why she had gone.

  “I heard she had a fight with her parents.”

  “She was always fighting with them,” Andrea, her so‑called ‘bestezt’ friend, admitted through tears. “They’re a weird couple. All they ever want to do is trek through the wild. And camp. They were always dragging Jude off somewhere she didn’t want to go.”

  “Maybe that’s why she ran away. Maybe she hitched a lift to Benidorm.”

  Everyone laughed. Even Andrea. Though she tried to look guilty about it.

  The chat went from drama to comedy as quickly as that, then back to drama.

  “Maybe she didn’t hitch a lift. She might have been snatched. There’s a lot of creepy people about. If she walked along the waterfront at the port, no one could see from the street. Anybody could have got her.” I thought I heard a little bit of hope in Tracey Mullan’s voice. Tracey was another so-called best friend of Jude’s. She had a pale voice to match her pale face and hair. I always thought she looked as if the colour had been drained out of her.

  “She’s only been gone a couple of days. They’ll probably find her holed up with her auntie in Glasgow, watching all the attention she’s getting on the news.”

  Andrea tried to stifle a giggle. I could tell she didn’t want anyone to think she saw the funny side of this. “That’s a terrible thing to say, as if she would do anything like that.”

  “Jude’s not a cruel person,” Big Belinda Brown agreed. She always agreed with Andrea. She shook her head. “No, I’m with Tracey. I think she’s been snatched.” She said it as if it was the worst possible scenario, but definitely the one she’d enjoy the most.

  “No,” Andrea said. “She’ll come back.”

  We all knew if Jude didn’t come back it would only get worse (or better, depending on your point of view).

  I didn’t take part in the conversation, only listened, standing apart from the rest in the corridor outside the toilets. I was always apart from the rest; nobody wanted Abbie Knox to be part of their group. Jude was no particular friend of mine, after all. I had no particular friends in this school. My dad and I only moved here a few months ago when he got a job at Greenock. Before that, we lived in Glasgow. Mind you, I hadn’t had many friends at my Glasgow school either. No-mates-Abbie. That was me.

  But I listened with interest.

  ***

  Jude didn’t come back. According to the news, she was spotted everywhere.

  That week it was all we talked about.

  “Would she really run away because of a fight with her parents?” I asked some of the girls in class.

  “She’s a drama queen,” I was told. “Judith Tremayne would turn burnt toast into a drama.”

  “She was always looking for attention,” someone else said.

  “Well, maybe she’s doing it to get her parents’ attention. Maybe she feels they’ve been neglecting her.”

  I looked at the girl who said that. Frances Delaney. Older than me by a couple of years, she was one of those girls that other girls seem to flock around, follow, copy. They all wanted to be like her.

  She came in one day with a designer bag hung on her elbow, and the next day almost every girl was carrying a designer bag around. Frances had fair hair that always looked tousled. She’d pin it up on top of her head, but strands of it would hang untidily on her shoulders. You could sit for hours aiming to get your hair like Frances’s, but you’d still never manage it. I know; I’ve tried. Yes, even me, Abbie Knox, the outsider. The day I came in with my black hair tousled, thinking I looked exactly like a black-haired double of Frances, someone told me I had a bed head, and should get out my brush and fix it. Never did that again.

  Frances always wore high heels. You heard her coming before you saw her, clattering along the corridors or up the winding steel stairs to the top floor. Other girls tried to copy that too. But have you ever tried to walk in high heels? Everyone either toppled over, or tripped up. It was comical to watch. And they got told not to wear high heels to school. But Frances seemed to walk in her heels with ease and somehow avoided being told off.

  Frances waved her hands around as she talked about Jude. Her long fingers and almond-shaped nails fascinated me. “She wants her mum and dad to miss her, so when she comes back they’ll welcome her with open arms and apologise, even though they haven’t done anything wrong.” She held out her arms as if she was welcoming a child: “Oh darlink, come to Mamma.” Her accent became foreign. “I vill never take you camping again!” And she clutched an imaginary Jude to her bosom.

  “I thought you liked her, Frances,” I said.

  She looked surprised. “I do, actually. She’s harmless. She can be a bit silly, though, and easily led.”

  Someone called out, “Put it this way, she’s not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.”

  Everyone laughed.

  Frances went on. “You can like someone and still see their faults. I like everybody. Don’t I, girls?”

  And all her coven of friends laughed and agreed with her.

  Actually, the truth was that everybody liked Frances. I�
��d never heard anyone say a bad word about her.

  “Bet she doesn’t like me,” I said in a whisper, but it turned out the boy standing beside me, Robbie Grant, was close enough to hear.

  “Does anybody?”

  “Thanks for that, Robbie.” Robbie never failed to get my back up. We should have got along: we were both loners, always in some kind of trouble.

  He shrugged. “You’ve never fallen under the Frances spell, or hung on her every word, like they do.”

  He nodded across to where Frances seemed to be leading her friends down the corridor like the Queen Mary sailing off followed by a flotilla of small boats.

  Maybe Robbie was right. I had never been interested in following anyone. Nor did I want to be a leader. I just wanted to be me. A loner. That was my problem. I didn’t even have a best friend. But I did like watching things from a distance: the observer, watching and listening. And Judith’s disappearance was the most interesting thing that had happened in yonks.

  TWO

  After almost a week, she hadn’t come back.

  Her parents were on the news every night pleading for her return. I watched her tearful mother, holding a handkerchief to her face, her hand held by a comforting policewoman. Not by her husband, Jude’s dad. Was that because she blamed him for Judith running away? That’s what I mean about observing. I wondered how many other people had noticed that.

  Not many at St Thomas High anyway. And I could see their sympathy turn away from Jude.

  “How could she do this to her mum and dad?”

  “Did you see them on tv last night? They looked devastated.”

  “She’d better come back.”

  A police news conference with the Tremaynes was shown on every screen in our school. There’s a big screen in the atrium where the school cafe is. We have all our breaks there. And there are screens in the break-out zones on each of the three floors of the school, plus some in hallways too, like where you come in the front doors. At St Thomas High, we have our own television studio to broadcast from, which goes online by linking to the school website and it can even stream BBC news. It’s run by the older kids, though Robbie, in my year, helps there too, because he’s an I.T. clever clogs.

  So the news was everywhere, and attitudes were changing about Jude. You could tell by the comments online.

  Only Andrea stuck up for her.

  There were tears emojis in every one of Andrea’s posts. Made me laugh really. Suddenly Jude was her ‘bestezt’ friend again, when only weeks ago she had drummed her out of their gang. I had been the one who found Jude in the toilets, crying harder than any emoji. I’d wanted to do a quick about-turn when I saw her, but, for some reason I will never fathom, she began to pour her heart out to me.

  Of course I told her she was making a complete fool of herself, crying over Andrea Glass. I certainly wouldn’t cry over losing somebody like that.

  “But you’ve not got any friends to lose anyway,” Jude said. That made me laugh. There am I trying to comfort her and she insults me.

  “Even if I did, nothing and nobody would make me crack up like you, I would never let anybody get to me like that. It makes you look like a real wimp. And for a boring loser like Andrea? Grow a backbone, Jude, I’d never let anyone break me like that.”

  I was only trying to make her feel better, build up her self-esteem, but it made her cry even harder. I realised then that I wasn’t a natural comforter, and I made a quick getaway. I suppose, looking back, she was being a bit of a drama queen.

  So Andrea’s tears emojis looked pretty flakey to me, knowing how upset she’d made Jude back then. And they weren’t making people sad for Jude now. I could tell, if Jude didn’t come back soon, everybody would turn against her.

  ***

  I was in English when I got the message. Felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. Mr Madden, our English teacher, threw me one of his threatening looks, warning me not to check it. With a lot of teachers I would just ignore that look, take out my phone and read the message anyway. Half the class would do the same; a lot of them sit on their phones in lessons. But nobody did that with Mr Madden. I wasn’t really that interested anyway. I knew who it would be. My dad. Probably to tell me he’d be late in, working late or at another union meeting. Who else would message me? It certainly wouldn’t be a friend. Ha! I say ‘friend’ in the loosest possible way.

  Even when my phone buzzed again, with a ‘Hey, you’ve got a message, pal, are you going to look at me or what?’ sound – scolding me – I was still in no real hurry.

  I only took it out of my pocket as I left the classroom. I read the message and stopped dead in the corridor.

  It was from Judith Tremayne.

  THREE

  I’m not a screamy kind of girl, or a drama queen. Not my style. So, for a moment, I did nothing. Just stood there, thinking. I knew, later, they would all ask me what was going through my head. They would ask why Judith Tremayne would be messaging me.

  I walked into the toilets. It was break and there were girls fixing their hair, washing their hands, gossiping. Tracey Mullan turned to look at me. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Did I look pale? I wondered. Or paler. (My natural skin tone is peely-wally.) I held out the phone. “I’ve had a message.” I took a deep breath. “From Jude.”

  “What!” Tracey yelled the word out, and snatched the phone from me. She stared into the screen with most of the girls crowding in behind her to see too. “It says: I want to come home!” Tracey shouted out, as if no one else could read.

  Andrea Glass came flying out of one of the cubicles. I hadn’t even realised anyone was in there. She grabbed the phone from Tracey. She read the message, then she glared at me. “How come Jude’s messaging you? You were no special friend of hers. You’re no special friend of anybody’s!” She turned to the others for support. “I mean, everyone knows Jude was my best friend.”

  “You dumped her, Andrea,” I reminded her. Everyone knew about their big argument.

  She took a step toward me. Her dark curly hair seemed to quiver with her anger. I thought she was ready to jump me.

  It was Tracey who stepped in. “Does it really matter who she got in touch with, Andrea? At least we know she’s alive.”

  But Andrea had asked a very good question. Why would Jude choose me? I knew they would all be wondering that.

  Then everything happened fast. I was almost frogmarched to the head’s office, where Mr Barr immediately contacted the police. “Have you tried calling her back, Abbie?” he asked while we waited.

  I always find it hard not to stare at Mr Barr. His head looks as if it’s melted into his neck in folds. All he needs is a wick on top to look like a candle.

  “Yes, sir, but her phone seems to be turned off or out of range: the message I sent says

  It made sense really that my message couldn’t be delivered. I knew just about everyone in the school had been calling Jude’s number on a regular basis, longing to be the one whose call would be answered. The phone was either dead, or just rang out.

  “And why would Jude text you?” The question I was dreading. So I asked a question of my own.

  “She wants to come home… So what’s stopping her? Does it mean she’s in danger or something?”

  “Not necessarily,” Mr Barr said, trying to comfort me, as if I needed comforting. I wasn’t worried about Jude. Couldn’t tell him that, of course. “Jude could be worried about coming back, facing the music. She might think she’s in some kind of trouble. Wants to come back, but is afraid of what she might face when she does.”

  When the police arrived an hour later, they said the same thing. They also wanted me to try again to reply.

  “Tell her everyone wants her home. She’s not in any trouble.”

  So I typed that into my phone and sent it. Then I held it out to the policeman. “It can’t deliver it. The message hasn’t arrived.”

  ***

  As I walked back to class, everyone wanted to know if I’d
heard any more from Jude. I told them I’d sent her the reply telling her everyone wants her home. Got to the point I was fed up repeating it. I looked up at the big screen in the upper corridor and an idea came to me. If I could send a message round the whole school I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself. So I didn’t go to class. I made my way to the television studio on the second floor. It’s just a classroom that’s been set up with cameras and sound equipment, but we give it the grand name of ‘the studio’. I remember Andrea being pissed off because Robbie was allowed to work there but not her. “I’m better at I.T. than you are, ask anybody.”

  And his answer had made me smile. “You’re the apprentice, hen. I’m the master.”

  I knocked on the door and to my surprise it was Robbie himself who opened it. I hadn’t expected him to be there during class time.

  “What are you doing here?” We both asked it at once.

  “I’m a trainee cameraman,” he said smugly.

  “Hope they’ve got the cameras chained to the wall then.”

  “And to what do we owe the honour of a visit from you.”

  I pushed past him. “I want to speak to someone in charge.”

  Fifth years were in charge of the studio and one of them suddenly appeared from behind a large monitor. I’d seen him around the school but didn’t know his name. I told him what I wanted.

  Robbie sniggered behind him when he heard me. “She wants to broadcast to the school. Ha!”

  But he shut up quick when the fifth year, who introduced himself as Angus Watt, didn’t laugh. “That’s a good idea, Abbie,” he said. “This is ok with Mr Barr?”

  “Oh yeah,” I lied.

  He nodded towards a stool. “Sit down. If you’re ready we can do it now, and play it on a loop.”

  “On a loop?” I asked.

  “Just means we play it over and over.”

  “Oh flip, her face on a big screen? It’s not Halloween already, is it?”