So then she started on the ‘Elizas’. There were five of them. There was also an ‘Elisa’ and one ‘Elize’. She managed to track all of them down on Facebook, even the married ones who’d changed their names. Naomi sent them all the same message:
Hello, I’m a family friend of the Palmstroms from Sweden.
One of their relatives has passed away and I need to get in contact with them about a bequest.
Thanks in advance.
Naomi stares at the screen. There are three responses so far.
Eliza Klein
Don’t know who you’re talking about, sorry.
Elize Phipps-Jones
Don’t know the Palmstroms.
Eliza Belbin
Good luck with that.
Two of the others have gone offline having seen the message. She doesn’t read into it; Naomi never checks new messages these days. She knew it was a long shot.
Sat at the desk now, she closes the windows and goes to the settings page. Thinking about what Felix had said, she clicks on the privacy section and sees that her profile is nowhere near as secure as it could be. She thinks of her Instagram, she shares every day of Prue’s life on there and Felix is right, there’s no telling who is looking at that. She goes to the ‘Delete Facebook’ tab and has a look at what’s involved. As she’s reading about how hard it is to leave, a message window pops up on the bottom right of the screen:
Eliza Orsdall
STOP IT. I’m showing this one to the police.
Eliza Orsdall has blocked you.
TWENTY-NINE
Five minutes from Reading station, flakes of pastry from a sausage roll tumble on to the Burberry mac barely covering her bump. Naomi looks out at the river, standing in a courtyard in the centre of an almost circular, new office building. The national headquarters of Thames Water. The Associate Director of Internal Communications at Thames Water is Miss Eliza Orsdall. She’d got this information from LinkedIn as she has been blocked from Facebook. A complaint of harassment has been made against her and she has to make her case to them. The Facebook customer services person she spoke to couldn’t reveal anything about why the complaint had been made. So here she is.
With the biennale just over a week away she has to be back at work tomorrow so she didn’t have much time to think about what she was doing. Eliza was her only avenue to explore and it was today or never.
Her reaction on Facebook gave Naomi hope. She knew that Eliza Orsdall couldn’t have any sort of problem with her so it must have been the name Palmstrom.
She’s starving, her diet has gone to shit in the last few weeks. All the advice says that this is the period of her pregnancy she should be eating better. Leafy greens, oily fish and red meat. She bites into a Danish pastry. Tomorrow will have to be the day for mackerel on a bed of kale. It’s one thirty-eight and there’s been a steady stream of office workers coming out of the building and heading round the corner to the high street for their lunches. There’s a train at two forty that would get her back to her parents’ house in time for Prue’s bathtime.
There she is. Eliza Orsdall. Naomi can see what Felix saw in her. Very petite, five three at most, curvy figure and she still has beautiful wavy dark hair. The sort of woman that Naomi always assumed all men would prefer to her. Someone pocket-sized, soft and overtly feminine. She looks down at her phone as she walks. For someone who has problems with Facebook, she’s absolutely loving whatever it is that she’s looking at, smiling broadly. She gets closer, her skirt suit a little stretched over her legs, and passes Naomi without noticing she’s being stared at. She walks down the steps towards the river.
‘Eliza?’ Naomi calls out. The woman turns around and looks up at Naomi who, with her designer coat, sleek hair and make-up, suddenly feels that she should have worn something less corporate to have a casual chat with a stranger who’s threatened her with going to the police if she contacts her. Naomi trots down the stairs to meet her. ‘My name’s Naomi Fallon. Is there any chance we could have a chat?’
‘What about?’ The woman is suspicious. Up close, she’s not as striking as Naomi had first thought, her features a little small for her face.
‘I wanted to ask you if you knew Lex Palmstrom.’
Eliza’s face blanches. She shakes her head and walks away from the railings that overlook the river, past Naomi and up the pavement in the direction of the town, almost shifting into a jog. ‘Wait, Eliza!’ Naomi follows her, going as fast as she can with her bump. The distance between the two women widens. ‘Eliza, please slow down, I’m pregnant.’ The woman doesn’t slow. Naomi’s scared. In all of this she still hoped that everything she’d thought about Sean was exactly what everyone kept dismissing it as: paranoia. But this is the reaction of someone who is scared, very, very scared. There’s a busy four-lane road between them and the high street and Naomi sees that Eliza has nowhere to go. She begins to walk up to the right and away from Naomi when she realises it’s a dead end. When she returns to the junction, Naomi stands there waiting for her.
‘Look at the size of me. I really can’t be running around Reading town centre. I’ve come a long way to speak to you.’ The green man flashes up on the opposite side of the road. ‘Let me buy you a coffee, or lunch if you’ve got time.’
‘Who are you? Police?’
‘He’s been trying to contact me. Persistently. Lex Palmstrom. If you’ve got ten minutes …’ Naomi puts her hand on her bump. The crossing beeps at them. Eliza closes her eyes for a moment then nods her head in the direction of the high street, turns and walks across the road.
Eliza sits in a high-sided chair in a chain coffee shop, legs wrapped around each other. ‘I’m sorry about the Facebook thing,’ she says, gnawing at her thumbnail, not looking at Naomi. ‘That was you, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’
‘He set up fake profiles, for years. He’d pretend he was an old friend and then would send me these pictures.’
‘Pictures of what? Do you mind me asking?’
Eliza picks up her coffee, eyes restless as if she’s already had too much caffeine. Naomi bought a doughnut. It stands on the table between them. If Eliza doesn’t touch it within the next minute, Naomi’s having all of it.
‘How did you find me?’
‘A friend of mine, Felix Brandt?’
Eliza shakes her head, telling Naomi she has no idea who Felix is.
‘He said you were friends with a girl that people knew as “Swedish”?’ Naomi continues. Eliza looks down at her lap. ‘He thought her surname might have been Palmstrom. I just—’
‘Her name was Karin.’ Eliza pulls a column of hair down over her face, as though she’s trying to draw the curtains and block Naomi out.
‘And was— Did Felix remember right? Was she Palmstrom?’
‘She was Lex’s sister.’
‘Was. She’s dead?’ Naomi asks, but it’s more of a statement than a question. Eliza nods, eyes raw with the memory. She picks up her coffee and drinks. It’s too hot. She swears and puts the cup back down, so some of the coffee splashes on to the table.
‘How did she—’
‘Suicide.’
‘When?’
‘2001. She was my best friend at school. Well, I liked her. I’m not sure she ever liked me as much. She was tall, beautiful, like a supermodel. She didn’t follow all the stupid shit everyone at school was into. She went to gigs, into bands no one else had heard of, she liked Manga cartoons.’
‘Do you know why she, um, took her life?’ Naomi can tell that the woman is on a knife-edge but she needs to know more.
‘Do you know what it’s like having your best friend top themselves?’ Naomi shakes her head. She tears the doughnut in two, jam spurting on her fingers, and offers one half to Eliza who can’t help smiling. ‘I’m doing Body Coach, I can’t.’
‘Extenuating circumstances,’ Naomi says. Eliza accepts the proffered half and takes a bite of it before putting it back down on the plate.
‘Kar
in and her brother were in foster care. I never knew what happened to their parents. She never talked about it. By the time I’d got to know her in year nine, they had been with the same foster family for a while, but I got the impression they’d moved around a lot in the past. Anyway, she went off the rails when we were in year eleven.’ Eliza dips a finger into her coffee to test if it’s cold enough to drink.
‘Was there some reason?’ Naomi asks, knowing there’s more Eliza wants to say.
‘Something happened at this party.’
‘Whose party was it, someone from your school?’
‘No, someone from Ipswich School, it’s the expensive private school in the area.’ Naomi decides not to tell Eliza that she’s already heard a thousand stories about the escapades of Charlie and Felix in their days at the ‘swich’. ‘Karin got really drunk. She disappeared for a while and then she turned up passed out on a sofa. I got us a cab and we stayed at my house. A few weeks later, at school, a rumour got out that she’d slept with some Ipswich guy and everyone was asking her why she’d kept it quiet. The whole school became obsessed with it. It got really out of hand.’
‘You were in year eleven; weren’t there quite a few people having sex at parties? How did it become such a big deal?’
‘These girls, Lilly Sherman and Namah Patterson, the queen bees in our year, they hated Karin because all the boys liked her. They turned it into a major scandal at school. Karin didn’t go to parties. People thought it was because she thought she was too cool to do what everyone else did at weekends, but that wasn’t really true. She was really good at netball and just didn’t get drinking. She didn’t like losing control. But everyone thought it was like some aloof persona she was putting on. So getting drunk at a party and sleeping with some random guy from the posh school was like catnip for those girls.’ Naomi’s breathing deepens. Some random guy from the posh school, a boy from the ‘swich’. Felix and her husband went to parties with the woman sitting opposite her, with Karin. Her husband’s a boy from the ‘swich’. ‘Also, she kept it a secret, that was probably the worst thing. You know what girls are like at that age, they feed on people’s insecurities.’
‘Their shame.’
‘Then everyone started saying that she’d got pregnant. People at school were calling her mummy. Someone put a baby sleepsuit in her locker. It sounds bad but no one actually thought it was true.’
‘But it was,’ Naomi says, seeing where this story is going. She scratches the cuticle of her thumbnail.
‘No one knew. I didn’t know. It was only when she stopped coming to school that I got worried about her. Course, that, her not coming in, that got the rumour mill going again and the word went round, who knows who started it, but people started saying she’d got an abortion. When her foster parents made her go back to school it was all anyone was talking about. People shouting at her in the corridor, calling her names, “the abortionist”, “babykiller”. It was awful. She stopped coming to school entirely. Left home. People would see her around town in a state. Must have been drink, drugs too maybe. Once it was clear she was in trouble, our whole year closed ranks and no one would talk about the bullying. That’s what she hated me for the most. She thought I should have been on her side. But standing up to girls like that, I would’ve been dragged into it and they would have destroyed me. I should have told someone, her social worker or one of the teachers. Anyway, then she, she …’ She tails off, wipes the beginnings of tears out of her eyes and looks down at the ground for almost a minute. When she looks up Naomi offers the doughnut again, Eliza laughs and waves her refusal.
‘Girls were the same at my school,’ Naomi says; ‘there’s no way I would have put my head above the parapet like that.’
‘Sorry,’ Eliza says, trying to regain her composure.
‘It’s a long time ago,’ Naomi says, half to Eliza and half to herself. Her hand rests on the top of her bump and slides down to cradle around her belly button. Eliza looks at Naomi’s hand stroking her pregnant belly.
‘What’s he doing? Lex? What’s he done to you?’ Her voice is panicked.
‘Oh, nothing, nothing really, just some weird messages.’
‘He’s sick,’ Eliza says.
Naomi bites her bottom lip, smiles, awkward. ‘What do you mean, sick?’
‘When everything was going on with Karin he kept asking me what had happened. He had no idea. I should have told him but I was her only close friend so if he started going round talking to people about it everyone would have known it was me who told him. After she died, he would find me in town. He said he needed me to help him make sense of it. He said it was driving him mad, trying to work out what had happened, why it had happened. He was in awe of Karin.’
‘Was he younger?’
‘About two years younger, yeah. It was sad. Really sad. He was obsessed with finding out what happened. “The not knowing,” he said, he said it was like God was torturing him, but he wasn’t religious, I don’t think. He was in a lot of pain. He started acting up to his foster parents; I think he blamed them for her death, thought they should have protected her. They sent him back into care. He actually crashed on the sofa at my parents’ house for a couple of nights. It was a horrible time. He disappeared for a while after that.’
‘So he never found out why, what happened at the party?’ Eliza looks away at the door, turns her phone over in her hand and shakes her head. Her body couldn’t be more folded in on itself in the chair and Naomi spots fear in the slices of light reflected in her eyes.
‘I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes.’ She stands up and picks up her bag.
‘What were the pictures he sent you?’
‘Don’t let him into your life. Don’t let him know anything about you.’
‘Did he do something to you?’
Eliza looks down determinedly, her hand grips at her skirt. ‘I have to go.’
‘I’ll walk with you.’ Naomi stands up to go.
‘No,’ she says, loud enough that people on other tables look up at them, this tall pregnant woman harassing her petite counterpart.
‘I can’t get involved, I can’t. I’m sorry but I can’t.’ She makes to go, Naomi grabs her arm and she turns round, fury in her eyes.
‘Take this.’ Naomi hands her a card. ‘It’s got my number and email, please. I was scared before but now, with what you’ve told me, I’m terrified, OK?’
‘I have to go,’ Eliza says through gritted teeth.
‘Who was he?’
‘What?’
‘The boy she slept with.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Please,’ Naomi says, still holding on to the sleeve of Eliza’s coat.
‘No one knew who it was.’
‘What was the rumour?’
‘Let me go.’ Naomi releases Eliza and she almost falls away towards the door. She storms out of the café. Naomi’s mind is on fire and saliva collects at the back of her throat as if she could throw up at any moment.
‘Shit,’ she says to herself. A mother on another table, feeding biscotti to a little girl the same age as Prue, looks up at her, full of righteous disdain. Naomi wants to tell her to fuck off but instead she bolts out of the café and begins jogging back towards the offices of Thames Water. She sees Eliza ahead, her little legs striding towards the crossing. Naomi tries to turn her jog into a sprint, but she can’t. The bump, the extra weight, slows her down, her back and ankles burning. A mass of office workers begin crossing the road towards the river and Naomi sees Eliza run to catch up and join them. Naomi speed-walks down but as she gets to the crossing it’s too late. The cars zoom past, blocking her way.
‘Eliza,’ she calls across the traffic. She tries again, louder this time, ‘Eliza, wait, please.’ Eliza stops dead in her tracks on the other side of the road and, shaking her head like she’s furious with herself, turns round to face Naomi.
‘It was my husband,’ Naomi calls across the road. Eliza shakes her head, she can’t hear. Ther
e’s a gap in the cars and Naomi begins to cross when a sports car flies round the corner, forcing her back on to the pavement. ‘The boy Karin slept with at the party,’ Naomi shouts. Eliza’s chin rises up, she can hear. ‘I think it was my husband.’
Eliza’s face falls and she looks so sad. Naomi tries to find a way to cross the road but the passing cars are unrelenting. Eliza mouths something, it could be ‘I’m sorry’, then she turns and runs back to her office, as fast as her tight-fitting skirt will allow.
THIRTY
22 February 2001
MSN Messenger – Chazinho
KARINP83 says:
Hey
How’s u?
I wz so WASTED @ Doug’s party!!!!
25 February 2001
KARINP83 says:
How’s ur week been?
Ur playing us at football next week? I might come watch
What u think?
1 March 2001
KARINP83 says:
U blanked me at the football. Not OK.
What we did at the party. Iv never done that b4. I’m not that type of gurl.
You cnt just ignore me.
Don’t panic I dont want to be your gf
12 March 2001
KARINP83 says:
did u tell people? every1 at school is saying I had sex with someone at Dougy Mason’s house
Happy Ever After Page 24