Dead Popular

by Sue Wallman

  We were joined by a female police officer who told me to call her Joanna, and there was a discussion about whether we wanted a solicitor present. Elsie Gran said we should just get on with it. Miss Sneller and Calding left, and Joanna said I needed to start at the beginning. She switched on her recording device and asked me how I’d planned the party, and when I told them Steve had booked the rental property for me, Elsie Gran raised her eyes and said, “God help us.”

  I answered questions about the party, in a steady voice for the first few minutes, and then tearfully, about how much I thought Clemmie had drunk, what time I thought she’d arrived, who she’d spoken to, her argument with Veronica and what I knew about her association with Kipper.

  “Did Clemmie have any enemies?” asked Joanna in the same relaxed way she’d asked all the other questions.

  I reached for tissues from Elsie Gran and blew my nose. Other girls would probably give my name if they were asked the same question, so I said, “The two of us didn’t get on but I wouldn’t say we were enemies.”

  “Why didn’t you get on?” asked Joanna.

  “We were very different sorts of people,” I replied.

  At breakfast we’d heard via the Ghost that Kipper had been arrested and held overnight. Some people thought Clemmie might have decided to walk back to Pankhurst, stopped to take a selfie at the gap in the bushes and trees, and slipped. Paige said she must have been the last person to see Clemmie alive. She hadn’t seen her go because she’d been with Rob, but she’d heard Clemmie arguing again with Veronica in the distance. She couldn’t hear what it was about, but Veronica had been shouting.

  It was horrible to think most of us had probably heard Clemmie’s scream as she fell, but had mistaken it for a paddler going into the freezing water, somebody’s dress getting soaked, or the general drunken end-of-party mayhem. It was some time before Flo and a boy had walked back towards the cliffs to be in the shadows together and discovered her body. That’s when the really hysterical screaming had begun.

  Joanna asked me to tell her what had happened when Meribel, Lo and I had reached the bottom of the steps, and I told her we’d run to where we saw everyone standing. People were crying, and some were being sick.

  “Clemmie’s body was sprawled across the rocks. On her front.” I took a couple of deep breaths before continuing. “Her dress was all rucked up, and there was blood.” My voice cracked and I couldn’t speak for a moment because of my shuddery crying. “There was so much blood,” I wept. “Her lower body was red. Her arms were like this.” I tried to show the improbable angles with my own limbs, and Joanna described them for the recording. I put my head in my hands. “We knew we couldn’t do anything. We knew she was dead.”

  “Did you see anyone move Clemmie’s body?” asked Joanna.

  “No,” I said. I unpeeled my hands to look at her. She would have understood if she’d been there. Nobody wanted to touch the body. It had been horrifying.

  Elsie Gran told Joanna to give me a moment, and I sobbed against her as she held me gently. I thought of the photo I’d deleted from my phone after the groyne walk on the first evening of term. It had been of me and Elsie Gran when I was around four. We were sitting on the wall outside her house in the sunshine. She had her arm round me and I was leaning against her, looking up at her and grinning happily, unaware that my face was so odd-looking. She’d always had my back.

  Joanna asked if I was ready to continue, and I described how Mount Norton staff had come sprinting along the beach, and had told us to leave and go back to our boarding houses, but we’d been reluctant. We wanted to wait until we saw the police and paramedics. I listed all the staff who were there, including Miss Sneller and the Furball, who were fully dressed, and Calding, who had a navy puffa jacket over her pyjamas.

  “It was a bit chaotic,” I said. Calding had been hopeless. She had had to be comforted by the Furball. The Ghost had come puffing along the beach from her home, and it had been her who’d rounded up the Pankhurst girls and marched us back.

  I had asked Lo and Meribel to sleep in my bed with me because I hadn’t wanted to be alone, and we had slept badly, waking up periodically for one of us to say I can’t believe Clemmie’s dead. Our biggest emotion was disbelief, and however much we’d disliked her, we hadn’t wished her dead.

  Everybody had been at breakfast, including the Davison girls. There was comfort in being with other people, and we had wanted to know what had happened overnight. Calding, solemn and trembling, had made the announcement that Clemmie had died, but there can’t have been anybody who didn’t already know the news. As girls cried around me, I had cried too, not just because Clemmie was dead; it was hard to have so many accusing eyes upon me too, as if it was my fault for having the party.

  What we hadn’t known until Calding had announced it was that Veronica and Monro were missing. I hadn’t thought to look for Veronica among the huddle of sixth-formers drinking tea and talking in low voices. I’d walked across the car park in a daze last night, and hadn’t noticed Monro’s car had gone. As soon as Calding told us, I’d thought of Veronica’s suitcase, and Monro’s nervous behaviour and how now I thought about it, he hadn’t been drinking alcohol. He’d even hesitated a moment when I’d first told him the date of the party. It had been planned. His betrayal thudded in my stomach.

  When Elsie Gran tapped my knee, I knew I’d lost concentration, and hadn’t replied to Joanna’s latest question. She asked it again: did I know if Monro and Veronica were going to run away that evening? I replied with an emphatic no.

  At the end of the interview, the Ghost knocked on the door, and said she had my parents on the phone. I’d been trying to reach them since early in the morning. She handed me the cordless office phone, and said I could take it in the office for privacy.

  I stood by the office window looking down the empty road before I said hello. You could see all the way to the end in the direction we walked to and from school.

  “Hello, Kate,” came the deep voice of my father. “Having a tricky time, hmm?” He asked me what he needed to do to fix the situation.

  “There isn’t anything,” I said. I told him about finding Clemmie dead on the rocks, about the shock of it, the blood, how her body had basically broken in a thousand places. He made hmmming noises, and said it sounded as if I needed some rest, and a week’s suspension should help with that. He didn’t ask anything about the party, and that was fine by me. I wondered what he’d say if I told him about Bernard. I’d done my best to block out that part of the party, but now I had to lean against the window because I was worried my knees might give way with the what ifs. I couldn’t imagine putting what had happened into words.

  By the time my father handed me over to my mother I was quiet-crying, and she didn’t like it when I cried. She asked if they should be looking for another school for me, talking over my tears. If it had been any other week, she’d have suggested I fly over and be with them, but the new clinic was taking all their time, and it was stressful. I was better off with Elsie Gran. And crying wasn’t going to help anybody.

  I’d hardly ever seen her cry herself. I once said that to Elsie Gran while she was weeping at a police drama on TV, and she said my mother had had so much plastic surgery her tear ducts had probably been removed.

  When the call was over, I was given half an hour to pack a bag. I thought of Sasha doing the same thing last term. She’d been asked to leave during the school day. The things she hadn’t managed to pack were sent on afterwards.

  As it was a Sunday, I got the chance to say goodbye to Meribel and Lo. They came into my room, and sat on my bed, and told me it wasn’t my fault Clemmie died. I hadn’t been responsible for her. They said they’d message me if Elsie Gran didn’t take my phone away, and I assured them that was unlikely.

  I walked down the two flights of stairs like a disgraced celebrity. Girls came out of their rooms to stare or say goodbye. Zeta stood on the first floor landing clutching her hamster cushion to her sto
mach. “You’ll be OK,” she whispered as I went by. Knowing Zeta felt sorry for me made me feel one hundred times worse.

  Elsie Gran drove by the sea. The police were still there. The car park and coastal path were cordoned off. A small group of locals were hanging around trying to see what was going on, and there was a lone reporter and camera person. For once, Elsie Gran didn’t put on an audiobook thriller and we went home in silence.

  A couple of hours later, Bel and Lo messaged to say Kipper had been released without charge. Someone had overheard the Ghost tell Squirrel there was insufficient evidence.

  For the rest of the day and the next, I lay on my bed in my room with the windows that needed fixing, and the once-white, scruffy walls that were stained where I’d accidentally sprayed it with Diet Coke a few summers ago when Josie, my only friend in the area, came over. She was Maria-from-next-door’s granddaughter, and was probably the only person in the world apart from Maria and me who properly understood Elsie Gran, which meant I never had to explain away her eccentricities.

  I’d been given a hastily put together folder of work to do while I was suspended, but I was in no rush to tackle it yet. I sketched hands in an old notebook, thought constantly of Clemmie stepping back into nothing and the terror she must have felt as she fell, and messaged back and forth with Meribel and Lo. They told me Clemmie’s parents had arrived at Pankhurst, and Veronica’s had been spotted going into Davison. There were police and other officials coming and going.

  When Elsie Gran came back from the allotment with runner beans and odd-shaped potatoes, I said I wanted to paint my bedroom. Until now I’d quite liked its scruffiness. It was a nice contrast to my bedroom in Dubai, which was more like a hotel room. After assuring her I wasn’t expecting her to pay for it, she drove me to the DIY store where I chose pineapple-yellow paint, a roller, paint tray, brushes and masking tape.

  As my room became brighter, I went over and over the same two thoughts.

  First: it was hard to imagine that Clemmie had drunkenly taken a selfie and slipped, but it was even harder to imagine the alternative, which was that someone had pushed her. The people with the opportunity to do it were anyone going down to the beach, and those who’d already left the party: Kipper, Bernard, Monro and Veronica.

  Second: why had Monro and Veronica run away together? Was their disappearance really linked to Clemmie’s death? If the two of them had been planning to run away for some time, had they also been planning to attack Clemmie?

  I sat on the top of the stepladder holding the paint tray in my lap and thought about the kiss I’d shared with Monro before the party started. He’d known then he’d be leaving later with Veronica. Had any part of him wanted to tell me, or was he just keeping himself occupied until he left? If I closed my eyes, I could conjure up the feeling of swelling pleasure … until it was tainted by a sense of dread and panic, and I remembered Bernard’s grunting face. I opened my eyes and stood up again to keep painting. I did that section twice. It had to be thorough.

  I slept on a mattress in Elsie Gran’s cluttered study that night because I hadn’t finished painting. It was the room my father had slept in when he was little. My father studied hard. He went to medical school. He became a plastic surgeon, initially what Elsie Gran called the right sort. He helped patients with disfigurements as a result of birth defects, accidents or disease. He crossed into different territory when he met my mother, an actress in a popular Brazilian soap opera. By the time she’d been given the part, she’d already had quite a few surgeries.

  I once tried to tell Elsie Gran my mother had made certain decisions about her looks because she’d been born poor and wanted to make money, but Elsie Gran said that was absolutely no excuse. She never had a good word to say about her.

  Thinking about my father made me want to search out the family photo albums in the untidy cupboard in the corner. There weren’t many of them. Elsie Gran stopped putting photos in albums when her camera broke several years ago, and she didn’t bother printing any from her phone. I hardly ever looked through them. The photo I’d had on my phone had been loose on her desk. There were a few small blurry photos of family get-togethers when Elsie Gran was a child, black and white photos of her as an art student and peace activist in the Sixties, lots of my father when he was a solemn toddler through to a straggly haired hippy kid, and then a teenager with unruly hair, holding a hand up to say he didn’t want to be photographed.

  The reason his hair was like that was because of his ears. He hated how they stuck out, and as soon as he could afford to do it, he had them pinned, then his hair cut short.

  In the photos of me as a toddler, I had the same dark, serious eyes and similar ears, which looked like pull-here-to-open tabs. I closed the album and put it down the side of my bed, but my head still played the conversation I overheard my parents having as they looked at pictures of me taken on my sixth birthday. My ears needed pinning and my nose needed straightening. My droopy eyelid was getting worse, and there was something not quite right about my chin.

  I wasn’t nice to look at.

  My ears were fixed when I was six and a half. When I was thirteen, I had a nose job, chin implant and an eyelid lift, carried out by a top plastic surgeon in the States, a friend of my father’s. Elsie Gran said it should have been against the law to have it done so young, but it wasn’t. Not for someone who had connections and could travel. And at that age I wanted it done so badly.

  I wanted to be perfect.

  CHAPTER 21

  It took me a full two days to paint my bedroom. I kept stopping to hear the latest from Bel and Lo, either by message or FaceTime. Clemmie’s laptop and other electronic devices had been taken away by the police. Monro and Veronica were still missing, though everyone said they’d be found any moment. All it would take was for Monro’s car number plate to go through the right CCTV cameras.

  Meribel said she’d reported walking in on Bernard assaulting me, and Miss Sneller said she’d look into it, and hadn’t Bernard and I been a couple at one point? She was sure somebody had told her that.

  I shook my head at this, but let them continue.

  Lo said Bernard was telling people he’d left the party early because of a row with me over the fireworks. He’d been heard saying Monro and Veronica leaving the beach house fitted with the time Clemmie had been thought to wander off, and everyone knew Monro had difficulty controlling himself. It was well-known Monro was very protective of Veronica, and there was bad feeling between Clemmie and Veronica.

  I sucked in my breath angrily. “That’s—” I began, but the two of them had something else to say.

  “Guess what?” said Meribel. She turned to Lo. They were back from school, sitting side by side on Lo’s bed, with Meribel’s pale grey cashmere wrap round both of them. It gave me a pang of missing out.

  “We’ve found out why there was bad feeling between them,” said Lo.

  Beside her, Meribel nodded vigorously, desperate to tell me.

  “Hugo eventually told a girl in my chemistry class, who told me,” said Meribel. “Clemmie’s dad has a gambling problem and he lost all their money. Veronica’s parents lent him more to help them, but he gambled that too. Apparently Clemmie’s dad’s recently filed for bankruptcy and that’s why she went mad about RapBros.”

  “RapBros didn’t go bankrupt because of gambling though,” I said.

  “But they still went bankrupt,” said Meribel. “I feel bad now.”

  “She hadn’t even told Paige,” said Lo.

  Meribel pulled her portion of the wrap further up her shoulder. “Rumour is that Clemmie was going to have to leave Mount Norton if she didn’t get a scholarship.”

  They were focused on me now, as I realized the significance of what Meribel had just said. The exam paper that was found under Sasha’s mattress was a scholarship paper. There were different types of scholarship at Mount Norton, worth varying percentages of the fees. Some were annual scholarships; others lasted from the first to the en
d of the fifth form. Sasha usually sat annual scholarships to top up her sports scholarship. Nobody would have thought for a minute Clemmie would be sitting for an annual scholarship.

  “Do you think there’s any chance Clemmie slipped out at some point, while you were working on your assignment together?” asked Lo.

  Say it. Tell them.

  “The two of us were saying Clemmie might have tampered with her own light switch so her parents could sue the school and get money for fees,” said Meribel.

  “What d’you think of our theory?” asked Lo.

  I stopped chewing my bottom lip. “It’s quite extreme. I’m not sure Clemmie knew enough about electricity.”

  “We’re keeping that one to ourselves for now,” said Lo. She gave Meribel a look to confirm what she was saying. “Nobody wants to hear anything bad about her right now.”

  The dinner bell rang and Meribel said, “We’d better go.”

  Lo was already off the bed, out of shot, but then her head came into view again. “I forgot to tell you the strangest thing that happened today.” They were talking to me as they went down the stairs with Meribel’s phone. “We went to Davison,” continued Lo, “and on Veronica’s collage there was a printout about a hospital in America. Like, who would put that up there after what’s happened? When Clemmie’s dead and Veronica’s run away?”

  “A hospital in America,” I said slowly.

  “Yeah, a fancy one in Florida with a name like … like a theme park or something.” Lo shrugged. “We have to say goodbye now. Speak to you tomorrow. Love you!”

  The two of them blew kisses and were gone.

  That artwork… The things we keep hidden.

  Amber Park Hospital, Florida, was where I’d had my plastic surgery. How had anybody found that out? Who had Clemmie told about my plastic surgery, and why did they think now was a good time to unnerve me?

  After painting my bedroom, it took me another day to rearrange my furniture, reposition my posters, and hang up a mirror that Elsie Gran had found in a skip down the road when some neighbours had their extension built. I stared into the mirror, at my ears, eyes, chin and nose, and at my skin, with its peculiar tint from the light bouncing off the Pineapple Yellow walls. I took the mirror down and placed it in the gap between the wall and my chest of drawers.