“So that one could be me?” Rupesh says. “I only found out by accident one day. He never talked about it.”
“I’ve got no idea if we’re on the right track or not,” I say. “They’re so vague.”
“He’s playing head games,” Jen says. “This is stupid. All that stuff about us getting to know each other. He’s hoping we’ll confess all our secrets while trying to work out these real meanings.”
“Why would he do that?” Steve says. “Do we have that many secrets?”
“To get us to turn on each other. Or make us vulnerable, I don’t know.” Jen is breathing quickly and looks pale.
“Strain could be trains,” I say.
Something shifts in Steve’s manner, his hand rises to touch his forehead. A soft little creak sounds from deep in his throat.
“This might—no, this one has to be mine,” Steve says. His face hardens, battling with something in his head.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s nothing,” Steve says, staring at the far wall. No, through the far wall. Is it Obi perhaps? “Just something that… Something happened between me and him up at the train tracks, really late on that summer.”
“What?” I say.
“I never told anyone because… I felt so guilty. We’d been arguing about Strachan a lot. He’d been spending all this time with him and I was getting annoyed about it, and—”
“It’s Strachan,” Jen says. We look at her. “Trashcan. I think it’s Strachan.”
“Strachan. Of course,” Rupesh says. “Well, that could be me too.”
“You again?” Steve says.
One side of Rupesh’s mouth turns up just slightly. “Well, it was me that threw that brick through his windscreen.”
“Fuck off,” I say.
He shrugs, no big deal. Although to me it is. At the time it had been so shocking. Not to mention painful, being parted from Steve prematurely in the aftermath. And I’ve always assumed it was Will, and a large part of what made him a loose cannon in my head was this incident.
“I wanted to do something to make up for falling asleep the night you all left that note about his dog, do you remember?”
“You fell asleep?” Steve says.
“I was trying to make it up to you. And in my drunken mind I thought it couldn’t be any worse than the hoops you’d make me jump through to get even. Then when the police started sniffing around I didn’t take the credit. Bloody stupid really.” He shakes his head. “Will was the only one I ever told about that.”
“Well, it might be me too,” I say. “I don’t know if you all knew about my mum and Mr. Strachan—that I caught them having an affair?” I look to Jen.
“Well, actually, Please might be me, too,” Rupesh says. “Could be asleep, as in the night of the note again. Will definitely knew that.”
“I don’t think that’s you,” Jen says.
The door opens and PC Clarke and PC Massey enter and begin apologising. They’ve been to the house in Sparkbrook and no one was answering.
“So what’s the plan?” Steve says.
“Well, I think for now you need to be vigilant,” PC Clarke says.
“We did that,” Steve says, “and now this has happened. Have you gone in his house?”
“We need a warrant for that, which can take time. And we need the rest of your statements—”
“Are you taking us seriously?”
“Yes, we are,” PC Massey says. She glances over at Jen. “But there are complicating circumstances.”
“So do we just leave?” I say.
“The idea some of you mentioned was good,” PC Massey says. “Getting a hotel tonight together to look out for one another. We’ll be in shortly to do the rest of these interviews, but we ask you please to just bear with us on this.”
When they are gone Jen sighs and stares up at the ceiling.
“This is ludicrous,” Steve says.
“I’m sorry,” Jen says. “It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault?” Steve says.
“I got into a muddle in my interview,” she says, and now her face is like a wet flannel being wrung. “I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry.” She begins to cry. Rupesh gets up and sits by her, tries to put his arm around her. She won’t have it and pulls away from him. He holds up both hands and goes back to his seat on the opposite side of the room to give her space.
“We said we were going to tell them everything, okay,” she says, “so I did. I told them that I drew the smiley face in my shower.”
Silence. No, not quite. I can hear the hum of the heating system in the walls. An emotional sinkhole opens and down, down, down we fall.
“Why would you do that?” Steve says.
“I made it up. But please listen. I was convinced it was him, okay? Asleep, that’s a clue about me. I fell asleep on his lap by accident this one time. I woke up later, like hours later, and he was still staring at me. And he had this erection, and it really disturbed me. Like what had he done while I slept? I never forgot that, and it’s been in my head this whole time. And when you two found out about Will being dead, I thought you were all going to give up. That’s how it felt. But I knew it was him, I knew it and I was right, but I was worried we would walk away. So I wanted to just keep you all…”
She trails off. Rupesh has cupped his mouth with both hands. Steve is biting his top lip.
“I didn’t do the first one. The first one was probably Will, I don’t know. But Adeline, I’m sorry I put that first letter in your parents’ post box, too. I drove it over before you picked me up.”
None of us can speak. I can’t unpick what this means. How much of our decision-making has been tied into those messages? We’d perceived them as direct threats. And where did this leave us? If she set up those faces, why not all of it?
“I told the police this, and they understood,” Jen says. “But then they asked me if I thought anyone else in the group might be responsible for what happened to Adeline’s mum. And I panicked because I thought they were trying to imply it was me, but it wasn’t, Adeline, I promise. So I said you, Rupesh. I said you because I left a smiley-face note in your tea jar the day I told you about the one in the shower. And when I stayed at yours last night I’d just assumed you’d not found it, but then when I looked this morning, before the others arrived, it wasn’t there. And I didn’t know what that meant, because why wouldn’t you tell us you found it? Why would you have kept that hidden?”
“Oh, Jen,” Rupesh says. “You’ve just told us you set up half of the stuff we’ve been basing this whole thing on and you’re suggesting I’m in some way involved? We were together last night.”
“I don’t know? I was asleep last night. I heard you get up. You live around the corner from Adeline. It all made sense this morning. I just, I couldn’t lie to them.”
I look at Rupesh, sitting with his hand still on his face, head shaking. Why hasn’t he told us about that note? The Nessie figurine, the cabin up in Scotland, not to mention that cold medical utilitarianism he’d shown about Mum: these could be questions that need answers now. And what of all the odd hostility he’d barely been able to contain around Steve and our past at his house that first morning after The George?
But what to make of Jen? Why let her derail us from the obvious? God, she left all those smiley faces, and now I’m supposed to believe she didn’t leave the one about Mum? The police had the notes now, we couldn’t even compare the handwriting. They could, of course, but without being sure it was Jen I didn’t want to distract them unnecessarily—nor implicate Jen as a plausible suspect by throwing my own doubts about her into proceedings.
“Jen,” Rupesh says, his voice calm but firm, “I didn’t tell anyone about what I’d found because I suspected it was you, and I didn’t want to embarrass you. I could see from the way you were acting and I was worried. I had a suspicion you’d done the others too, but I always believed you were being genuine about everything else. That’s why I went with this lo
t and broke into that bloody house, for God’s sake.”
“I did not do the first face,” she says, outraged.
“I was worried you were out of control and I wanted to be certain before saying anything. And I watched your reaction every time we met up, the way you expected me to tell you all I’d found something. Then your disappointment when I didn’t. I’m sorry, Jen.”
Steve turns to me. “This is insane. Anything you’re holding back, Adeline? Did you happen to kill anyone and not mention it?”
“No,” I say.
“Well, that’s something. Fuck, guys, fuck.”
“I’m sorry, I thought it was the right thing to do,” Jen says.
“No wonder they’re not beating down his door,” Steve says.
Jen’s tone shifts abruptly. “At least I did something. I didn’t just sit back like you two and watch all this like it’s another film you can pick apart.”
She’s talking to me and I am gobsmacked. Where has this come from? I don’t know how to react, and immediately Jen is withdrawing into herself at her outburst. “Sorry,” she mutters, and closes her eyes.
We sit in silence until PC Massey comes in and asks to speak to the next person. I am grateful for the break, but before I follow the PC we all agreed that now would be a good time to leave, sort out our respective affairs, then meet back at the hotel.
My interview with PC Massey is short. She asks me if I think Jen might have attacked Mum, and I tell her no. She asks if I think it is anyone else, I say no. But then I tell her I haven’t a clue what the hell is going on any more and that I am desperate for it to be over. On this latter part she agrees with me.
I drive to the hospital to collect Dad and take him to the hotel, telling him the same thing Jen is going to tell her parents: that an unstable friend has made a number of non-specific threats online, and that, while it is probably nothing, we need to be careful until the police find him. Dad nods knowingly—that’s the problem with all this Facespace, he tells me, the mistake deliberate to highlight how proud he is to be an old fuddy-duddy. “Some of these people you’re never meant to see again. You’re supposed to leave them behind.”
He’s compliant enough, and the hotel is closer to the hospital than home. When he asks me if any of it might be related to what happened to Mum I can’t lie.
From the hotel Rupesh, Steve and I head out to Elm Close to pick up belongings together, while Jen agrees to wait with Dad. Her parents weren’t concerned enough by her story to leave the house, and with her sister present they feel they have safety in numbers. More than likely they suspect the whole thing is part of whatever breakdown she is having, which is why they want her home that night, which she has agreed to.
I’m only a little alarmed about leaving Dad with her, although what could really happen to him in such a public place?
It’s nearly 9.30 p.m. when Rupesh, Steve and I come back through the doors of the Premier Inn.
Steve’s part of the furniture here now. “Do you ever have a night off?” he says to the teenage receptionist with gaping tunnels through his earlobes. The kid smiles and forces a laugh.
We find Jen in the hotel bar.
“Where’s Dad?” I say.
“He went to bed,” Jen says. “He’d had enough by the time I got in this.”
There is already a bottle of red on the table. And why not? We all deserve a drink after the night we’ve had. Everyone looks knackered, Rupesh particularly, the dark marks beneath his eyes like warpaint. Like he hasn’t slept for days really. I resist initially, my head still in recovery from the night before. Then when Steve gets in another bottle, I have just one glass to help me sleep. To rest my mind. And this wine is actually nice, so I have another. And before we all part company, there is a little laughter between us, not much, but enough to remind us we are more or less on the same side still.
Jen’s parents arrive to collect her. She still looks shell-shocked. Steve, who has barely been able to look at her all night, gets up and hugs her before she can leave.
“We’ll come out of all this stronger,” he says. She smiles at this. It’s a nice touch.
We head to bed. Rupesh leaves Steve and me in the lift on the first floor. He looks utterly defeated, perhaps finally having let go of the hope that he and Jen might still have something in the future despite her problems. Seems unlikely now.
Steve and I have only booked one room. I know it will be trouble, but can’t resist having another mini-bottle of red before the tentative kissing starts. It’s been a long day.
The sound of banging on the door wakes me for the second day in a row. I squint from the light coming through the curtains. Fuck, another hangover—I might even have to throw up again. This poisonous drinking needs to stop, it hasn’t been this bad since sixth-form college.
“Steve,” Jen says through the door, her voice high and agitated.
Steve jumps out the bed, groaning, and goes to the door.
“Is Adeline with you?” she says, barging inside. I sit up, holding the quilt to my chest. My head feels like it’s been stuffed full of rocks and holding it up is an effort.
“I’m here,” I say. “It’s okay.”
“Rupesh isn’t answering his door,” she says.
Why the hell is she here at the hotel this early?
“What’s the time?” Steve says. “He said he was going to go into work?”
“I know. It’s nine,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep, and… I wanted to talk to him again before. I feel so terrible about it all. Steve, what if it’s Will?”
“It won’t be Will,” he says. “There’ll be an explanation.”
He gets dressed, and he and Jen leave me in Steve’s room, alone. I stand up and struggle into my clothes. It’s not quite as bad as the day before, though once more I can’t bring to mind the exact chain of events that had led me to drink this much. Had we slept together again?
I find Steve, Jen and the teenager from the front desk at Rupesh’s door. Steve’s clearly spun some sort of fiction to get access to the room because the kid is asking, “Can you die from a diabetic coma?” while he inserts the key card into the slot below the handle.
The door opens and the three of them step inside. I follow, trying to resist reaching out to the walls to prop myself up so I don’t appear like a complete wreck.
I should have checked on Dad. Once this is over I need to find out if he is okay. He’s in the hotel but how had we left it last night? Did I take him to his room?
Jen, Steve and I are lined up, looking down at the bed. Steve turns to the teenager and says, “Phew, thank God for that. Looks like he’s gone out after all.” I can hear it in his voice: he’s lying again.
Letting out a deep sigh, the kid says, “Close call.”
“You didn’t see an Asian man leave earlier?” Jen asks.
“I didn’t, but I don’t see everyone come and go, like I said to the gentleman. He could have gone out through the fire door. It brings you out onto the car park.”
“Do you have cameras here?” Jen says.
“I don’t know if the one on the car park still works.” Then, the kid adds, “Is that a tip on the bed?”
I stand beside Jen. On the immaculately made bed an envelope is propped between the two pillows. It’s not a tip. This envelope has been addressed to us.
Steve, 1998
It was going to be a wonderful day. The sun was out, the air was fragrant with cut grass and barbeque smells, and if all went as it should, he might not have to listen to Rupesh’s endless negativity for the rest of the summer holiday—all of a month still despite having lost the last week to Jen’s family’s holiday in Portugal. Providing Will didn’t mess everything up, that was.
Steve strolled down Blythe Lane, passing the mansion on the way to the river that he often fantasised about one day buying and dividing up into a little commune for the gang—fat chance of that now his dad had decided to make the move back to London despite his work in the garden.
This was probably the route Jen took for her round, the one Rupesh actually won. There was no way Rupesh could have won without her help. As if they thought he wouldn’t know. They were the worst liars ever.
Never mind, it almost helped him now. It had changed the moral spirit of the game, set the precedent for him to influence the outcome. Game rules should be obeyed, of course, but when someone else was cheating you were surely allowed to take action to make things fair again.
In Steve’s hand were his clues, four gold envelopes he’d found in Mum’s box of stuff under Dad’s bed, behind the porno mags. He often rummaged through the box, reading through her old travel brochures and notebooks. It wasn’t so much that he missed her—those emotions had dried up years ago along with a clear picture of how she looked—it was more he felt these objects held the past within them in some important way, and that by touching them he was connected to all the past versions of himself. That was important to Steve, because without evidence of his own past self he would be stranded on an island of the present, forever doubting himself the way people demanded he did.
The thing was, he’d told his parents that moving away from London would cause them to split up. And although it was never admitted out loud, that is what had happened, wasn’t it? They could pretend Mum was working abroad, and that their occasional phone calls and even less occasional meetings were the functions of a normal, if a little modern, family. But she lived in America now. Lived with another man who was obviously not just her friend from university.
And he’d been right about all the other things too: that he’d die inside a boarding school, that Dad would claim he’d be around for the holidays but never would be, that when Obi died no one would even notice. Yet every time he’d given his opinion, they’d told him that they appreciated his input, but that he didn’t have the life experience to have a good opinion.
“Your brain hasn’t developed fully yet,” Dad said, “you’re capable of opinions but not good opinions. That takes time.”
The Killer You Know Page 28