Friend Request

by Laura Marshall

  ‘That was you… at the top of the drive, with Tim.’

  ‘You saw me?’ She’s taken aback.

  ‘Yes. Well, I saw Tim with somebody. I couldn’t see who it was.’

  ‘You thought…?’ Her eyes glitter.

  Had I ever really believed that Maria wasn’t dead?

  ‘You know that love, don’t you, of a mother for her child?’ Bridget says.

  ‘Yes… please, Henry, where is he? Is he here?’

  She shakes her head, but I can’t tell if she means he’s not here, or that she won’t tell me.

  ‘My baby, my beautiful girl. When she was first born, she would only sleep on my chest, day or night. And even though I was demented with exhaustion, I didn’t put her down. I held her, because that was what she needed me to do. I was amazed that I had grown her inside me, flesh of my flesh. And although of course she began to walk and talk, and eventually to have a life I knew little about, a part of her was still inside me. It still is. Is it any wonder I wanted to bring Maria back, to make you face what you have done?’

  ‘No. I understand, I do. But I’m a mother too now, please —’

  ‘How did it feel, when you realised I’d taken your son?’ She interrupts me, won’t give me a chance to allow any sympathy to creep in. ‘Did you feel as if every drop of blood had drained out of your body? Did you feel you’d do anything – anything at all – if only he could be safe? That was what I wanted, Louise. I wanted you to feel a tiny fraction of what I have had to live with every day since 1989. People compare losing a person to losing a limb sometimes… “Oh, it was like losing my right arm”, they say. It’s nothing like that. You can learn to cope without an arm, without a leg. You never learn to cope with losing a child. You never get used to it. It never gets easier.’ The words gush from her like waste from a sewage pipe.

  ‘I hope my little messages have made you look over your shoulder everywhere you’ve been these past few weeks. I hope you’ve been coming to in the night with a start, jumping at every little noise; waking a little more scared each morning, a lumpen, heavy feeling inside; wondering if it’s all worth it, if you can live the rest of your life like this.’ Bridget is holding tightly on to the desk behind her, the skin on her hands stretched tight over the bones, her face flushed.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ It’s all I can manage. ‘Please, where is he?’

  ‘Sorry’s no good to me. I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to suffer, like I’ve suffered. I’ve been imagining it, every time I sent a message. Conjuring up the fear on your face, the dread in the pit of your stomach. Even following you wasn’t enough, although I enjoyed the way you ran from me in that tunnel in South Kensington. I wanted you to feel what I feel, but I wanted to see it too, to see your pain with my own eyes.’

  We stare at each other, eyes locked. She ought to be triumphant – this was what she wanted, after all. But all I can see is despair and terrible, endless pain.

  ‘But why now?’ I whisper.

  ‘I didn’t want to get in trouble with the police. Stalking, kidnapping, the police don’t look too kindly on that. But it doesn’t matter to me any more, not since the last time I saw the doctor. She looked so kind and concerned, was so terribly sorry to tell me, couldn’t say for sure how long I had. But all I could think was: yes; now I can make Louise Williams and Sophie Hannigan pay for what they have done.’

  Bridget is dying. My brain tries to process this, make sense of it, but the mention of Sophie’s name has made the temperature in the room drop a few degrees. I take a step back, grasp the doorframe.

  ‘You were so careless, Louise. Did no one ever tell you to be careful about what you put online? Photos of your little boy in his school uniform? Casual mentions of your local high street? Pictures of your house? You even moan on Facebook about having to put him in after-school club, so I knew you wouldn’t be there at three o’clock today with all the proper mothers.’ The knife twists, biting a little further into me.

  ‘As for that internet dating site – God, you were easy to fool. All I did was paste in a photo from a catalogue. I didn’t even take much trouble over the message. You must have been really desperate. And you waited so long! Half an hour! I had to order a second drink in that restaurant opposite the bar.’ She laughs unpleasantly. ‘I knew exactly where Henry would be and when. You should have taken better care of him. He didn’t even have any idea that he shouldn’t go off with someone he doesn’t know. He was perfectly willing to accept that I was his grandma, chatting to me about his day, accepting sweets from me, telling me what he wanted on his toast.’

  His toast. The kitchen. He must be in the kitchen. I tear myself away from the force field of pain and rage that surrounds Bridget, and run down the corridor. The door sticks for a second and then opens with a squeak.

  ‘Oh thank God, thank God.’ Henry is sitting on a high stool at the breakfast bar, a glass of apple juice in front of him, eating a slice of toast and jam.

  ‘Hello, Mummy,’ he says casually.

  I run to him and pick him up, squeezing him to me, burying my face in his hair, his neck. Underneath the odour that school has added, of pencils and dusty floors and other children’s sticky fingers, he still has his essential smell, the one I’ve been inhaling like a glue-sniffer since the day he was born.

  ‘Hey,’ he says crossly, wriggling out of my embrace. ‘My toast.’

  ‘Time to go,’ I say breathlessly, trying to keep my voice light and casual. ‘You can bring your toast.’

  ‘I want to play with the trains again. My grandma said I could.’

  ‘There’s no time. Daddy’s waiting in the car.’ I tug on his hand. ‘Come on, Henry.’

  There’s a noise in the hallway, the creak of the front door, footsteps on the laminate. Sam, I think with a rush of warmth, pulling Henry into the hallway.

  ‘Mum?’ calls a voice.

  Oh God, it’s Tim. Thoughts tumble through my brain. Is this how it ends? Is this the last thing Sophie saw? Tim bearing down on her, avenging the death of his beloved sister? I can’t imagine that Bridget has the strength to have killed Sophie, so it must have been Tim. I want to tell Henry to go, to dodge Tim and run as fast as he can, but I know he won’t understand what I’m asking him to do. It’s clear he has not been frightened and has no understanding at all that we are in danger.

  ‘Louise. What are you doing here?’ There is panic in his voice. He stands in the corridor, filling the width of the hall, blocking our only escape route. I grasp Henry’s hand a little tighter, my own slippery with sweat.

  ‘I invited her,’ says Bridget, stepping forward into the doorway of the bedroom. Tim doesn’t move from the hall. I am caught between the two of them, like the king in a game of chess that is nearing checkmate, enemy pieces closing in from every side.

  Tim takes a step closer. ‘What has she told you, Louise?’

  I pull Henry closer to me, feel his warm body pressing into my legs. He looks up at me, eyes round and trusting.

  ‘Mum, what have you done?’ says Tim, his voice urgent. ‘What’s Louise doing here?’

  I try to will my legs to move, to run, to at least try and escape, but they won’t obey my brain’s command. It’s like one of those nightmares where you’re stuck in thick mud, being chased by a monster you have no hope of escaping.

  ‘I told you,’ Bridget says. ‘I invited her.’

  ‘I’ve just come from the police station. They told me about the Facebook page. It was you, wasn’t it?’ he says to Bridget. I look from one to the other in confusion. If Tim killed Sophie, how can he not have known about the Facebook page?

  Bridget shrugs defiantly.

  ‘They’ll find out,’ he says. ‘They can trace these things. They’ll know within hours that it was you.’

  ‘Do you think I care about that?’ she says, her voice cracking. ‘I’m dying. Somebody had to bring them to account, those girls who drove Maria over that cliff.’

  Tim’s face c
rumbles and he moves a step closer.

  ‘We don’t know what happened, Mum. You have to let it go.’

  ‘Let it go? How can I let it go? It won’t let me go. There’s something else too, something I need to know. He was going to tell me at the reunion.’

  ‘What? Who was?’ Tim runs a hand through his hair so that it stands up on end. Henry shifts even closer in to me and I put my arms tightly around him, stroke his hair. It’s OK, I will silently, not daring to speak or move.

  ‘Nathan Drinkwater.’ Bridget spits the words.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Tim says, confused.

  ‘He sent me a friend request on Facebook. Well, he sent Maria a friend request. He said he knew I wasn’t really Maria, but that he knew something about what really happened the night she disappeared. He said he had something of hers to show me that would prove it. He was going to meet me at the reunion, but then you were there and you wouldn’t let me go in.’

  ‘But, Mum, this is crazy. Nathan Drinkwater is dead. He died years ago.’

  ‘What?’ Her rage abates, and for the first time today, Bridget looks vulnerable, lost. ‘He can’t be.’

  ‘He is. I looked him up, after Louise asked me about him when I saw her in Norwich. He died in a car crash in London. It was in the news, because he’d become famous in a very minor way, he wrote a couple of books, had a bit of success with them.’

  ‘Then who…’

  She looks at Tim, then at me, her face ashen.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘But it wasn’t Nathan.’

  Tim seems to wilt slightly, resting his back against the wall and rubbing his eyes. It feels like a chance and with the lethargy of a few moments before lifting suddenly, I am galvanised into action. I pick Henry up in one smooth movement and run down the hall with him and out of the front door, leaving it swinging behind us. Along the path, out of the gate. When I reach the comparative safety of the pavement I put Henry down and look behind me, still moving, dragging Henry by the hand, to see if Tim is in pursuit. Thump. I run straight into Sam’s chest. I clutch him, my whole body shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Daddy!’ Henry says, all smiles, toast and trains forgotten.

  Sam picks him up and holds him tight. Henry’s legs and arms close around him like a vice.

  ‘Thank God,’ Sam says into his neck. ‘I was just coming in, I couldn’t stand it any longer,’ he continues to me over Henry’s shoulder.

  ‘We need to go,’ I say, half-running towards the car.

  ‘What’s going on? Who was in there? It wasn’t…’ he trails off.

  ‘No. Bridget – Maria’s mum. I’ll explain in the car.’

  ‘Bridget?’ He’s standing still on the pavement and I tug on his arm.

  ‘Come on.’

  With fumbling fingers I strap Henry into the back of Sam’s car and climb into the passenger seat. I close my eyes for a second, adrenaline still coursing through me, but Sam’s voice jolts me out of the moment.

  ‘Louise! Is Henry all right? Did she hurt him?’

  ‘No. He seems fine, he was perfectly happy when I got to him.’

  ‘Thank God. He must be exhausted. Let’s just get him home, and we can figure out what to do about Bridget in the morning.’

  I rest my head back against the seat, my heart rate finally slowing. Now that Henry is safe, everything has lost its urgency. We head towards the main road out of Sharne Bay, Henry already fast asleep in the back. I stare out of the window into the darkness as it begins to rain, my thoughts broken only by the rhythmic sound of the windscreen wipers swishing gently back and forth.

  As we swing onto the A11, the rain still beating a steady tattoo on the windscreen, I start to doze off, my head at an awkward angle against the window. I’m just slipping into that delicious state of total relaxation where you know you’re going to fall asleep but you’re still conscious, when Sam’s voice jolts me awake.

  ‘I can’t believe it was Bridget. What did she say?’ He sounds anxious.

  ‘She blames me for Maria’s death. Sophie too, but mostly me. The messages were about frightening us, punishing us for how we treated Maria.’

  ‘But how does she know —’

  ‘About the Ecstasy? She doesn’t. She thinks Maria killed herself. That’s why she blames me. Because of how I treated her. It was never about the Ecstasy.’

  ‘So she’s got no idea what really happened? She put you through all this, frightening you nearly to death, taking our child, just to get you back for a bit of schoolgirl bullying?’ I can sense his anger rising, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  ‘She lost her child, Sam,’ I snap. ‘Neither of us can begin to understand what she’s been through.’ I try to think of Bridget as she was the first time I saw her – smiling, so hopeful with her tea and biscuits, but I can only see her as she was today: hollow cheekbones, suffering etched into her face as if someone had carved lines into it with a Stanley knife.

  ‘I know, I know. Sorry. It’s just the worry of this afternoon, Henry going missing like that. I thought we’d lost him, Louise.’ I reach out and put my hand on his knee and he covers it with his own. In the back, Henry stirs and whimpers. I turn round, removing my hand from beneath Sam’s, and reach back to stroke Henry’s leg.

  ‘It’s OK, Henry, go back to sleep.’

  I look out into the darkness, thinking aloud.

  ‘The thing is, Bridget can’t have killed Sophie. She wasn’t even there for a start, and she wouldn’t have had the strength anyway. Sophie was strangled.’

  ‘It must have been Tim, then,’ says Sam.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘He was there in the bungalow just now. He’d only just found out about the Facebook page himself. He’d been at the police station, they’d told him. He didn’t know, Sam. He didn’t know anything about it. And why would he have had Maria’s necklace anyway?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about the necklace, but as for not knowing about the Facebook page, that’s what he would have said, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t think he was lying.’

  ‘Well, then… maybe it had something to do with Nathan Drinkwater,’ Sam says, swerving out to overtake a lorry.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nathan Drinkwater. You told me at the reunion that Maria was Facebook friends with him too, remember? He was that boy who was totally obsessed with Maria, wasn’t he? Before she moved to Sharne Bay? I remember Matt Lewis’s cousin telling us about it at the time. Maybe it’s got something to do with him.’

  ‘But he’s…’ I trail off, unwilling to finish that sentence, my mind racing. When I told Sam at the reunion about Nathan Drinkwater being on Maria’s friend list, Sam said he’d never heard of him. How can he be bringing Nathan up now if he doesn’t know who Nathan is? I repeat it in my head again, trying to convince myself. Sam doesn’t know who Nathan Drinkwater is. Does he?

  I close my eyes again but the relaxed feeling has gone. My mind claws around, trying to fit the pieces together, but they don’t seem to belong in the same jigsaw. Bridget’s reason for sending the Facebook messages is clear: she wanted me to feel at least a fraction of her unendurable pain. She’s been nurturing that pain for all these years, allowing it to grow, to curl its tendrils around all the other thoughts in her brain, choking them so that they withered and died, leaving only itself.

  But Bridget didn’t kill Sophie, and I don’t think Tim did either. They weren’t there that night, I saw them leaving, despite the lure that was drawing Bridget: the promise of information about her dead daughter, and something else – a tangible piece of evidence. A necklace?

  I think of Sophie at the reunion, laughing with the boys, telling them she knows all and sees all. And then later, in her panic about the Facebook messages, she told me there had been ‘all sorts’ going on at the leavers’ party. What did she know? What did she see?

  I had assumed that the Nathan on the Facebook page was the real Nathan, that Bridget had tracked him down as she had done
Sophie and me. But Bridget said Nathan had contacted her, not the other way around. And Nathan Drinkwater is dead. Anyone can be anyone on Facebook. It’s easy to hide behind a faceless page on the internet. A broken, dying mother can pose as her dead daughter to wreak revenge on the girls she blames for ruining her daughter’s life. But somebody was playing Bridget at her own game. Somebody else was posing as the boy who forced the Westons from their home, made them abandon their whole life to start again in a small town in Norfolk. Someone who knew that Nathan Drinkwater was the one person that whoever was posing as Maria wouldn’t be able to resist replying to.

  We drive on in silence, broken only by occasional shifting and muttering from Henry on the back seat. I daren’t look at Sam lest my face betrays what I am thinking, so I turn to look out of the window. I try to look beyond my reflection, out into the darkness, but I can’t ignore my face, looking back at me in shadow, eyes wide. I can’t believe Sam can’t hear my heart pounding.