by S J Bolton
What had really convinced them though, was the discovery that Talitha’s father had actively taken steps to prolong Megan’s incarceration. He’d instructed a team from one of his firm’s subsidiaries to offer services to the family of Megan’s victims. They’d argued at her trial for the maximum sentence, had opposed every attempt at appeal, every application for early parole. Had it not been for the interference of Talitha’s father, Megan might have been released years ago.
Megan had no idea, of course, how terribly she’d been betrayed.
And now, Daniel wasn’t buying Talitha’s denial. She’d taken over her father’s firm; she was its senior partner and nothing would be happening without her knowledge and agreement.
‘And even Dad had nothing to do with her accident,’ Talitha said. ‘It was a prison brawl, nothing more.’
Daniel turned to look at Talitha.
‘You told us it was something and nothing, a bang on the head, soon mended. It was more than that. I saw her scar. What else have you been keeping from us?’
Talitha’s jaw clenched tight. ‘I didn’t know about her memory loss.’
‘But you knew she’d been hurt?’
‘There was an appeal shortly afterwards, for early release on compassionate grounds. It was rejected, thanks to Dad.’
‘Nothing to do with you?’ he repeated.
‘No.’
Talitha wouldn’t look at him. As kids, they’d joked about Talitha’s Sicilian family and their possible connections to organised crime. They’d enjoyed the dark glamour of the idea, and Talitha had never denied it. They’d never actually taken it seriously though.
Arranging an accident in prison? It happened all the time, he knew that. But the thought that Talitha might have been behind Megan’s head injury was something entirely new to grapple with. He didn’t want to know, he realised.
‘If she ever finds out . . .’ He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t need to.
‘No reason why she should.’
‘She wants to meet up.’
Talitha’s voice had hardened. ‘I hope you told her it wasn’t a good idea.’
‘I said we weren’t in touch any more, that I don’t see any of you from one year to the next. I’m not so sure she’ll give up easily though.’
Talitha stood up, brushed down her coat and moved towards the steps. ‘See her one more time,’ she said. ‘You can tell her about the money, as long as the others agree. We’ll give her the cash if she promises to leave Oxford and never come back. Maybe there’s a way of paying an annuity, so the cash gets cut off if she starts making trouble. Xav will know. I’ll call him tonight.’
At that very moment, Talitha’s phone began to ring. She glanced at the screen and Daniel saw it too. Unknown Caller, via Facetime.
‘I’m expecting this,’ she said. I won’t be a sec.’
She pressed the receive button and held the phone up so she could see the screen. Daniel could see it too, although he shifted sideways so that he wouldn’t be seen himself. A face appeared in front of them. Megan.
‘Tal,’ she said. ‘Good to see you. You cut your hair.’
‘How did you get my number?’ Tal asked.
‘Dan gave it to me.’
He had to give Talitha credit; she didn’t allow her eyes to so much as flicker in his direction.
‘Are you actually on School Field?’ he heard Megan say. ‘I’m sure I recognise that pavilion.’
Tal frowned. ‘I’m at my stepson’s school,’ she said. ‘St Joseph’s in Summertown. It does look a bit similar. I don’t think I’ve set foot on School Field for years.’
Fair play to Tal, she was a great liar.
Megan said, ‘Do you remember the madrigals on the river? That time Xav and Felix were punting and Xav lost his pole?’
Daniel remembered, even if Talitha didn’t. A school tradition, towards the end of Trinity term, when the school choir sang madrigals from half a dozen punts. He and the girls had been watching from the bank. Xav had lost concentration, almost fallen in, and his pole had gone. They’d pissed themselves laughing.
‘Long time ago,’ Talitha said. ‘What can I do for you, Megan?’
Megan didn’t reply, and Daniel wasn’t surprised. Even he was taken aback by the coldness of Talitha’s tone.
‘You can get the old gang together,’ Megan said after a moment, and this time her tone matched Tal’s. ‘This weekend works for me.’
Tal’s eyes flickered up to Daniel.
‘Someone with you?’ Megan asked.
‘A groundsman. I thought he might want to speak to me. I’m going to have to go, Megan, I need to get my stepson and a couple of his friends home.’
‘Shall we say Saturday? I can be at your lovely house by one. The forecast is good. We might even be able to eat outside.’
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘No, you’re probably right. It’s still a bit chilly. Can I leave you to get in touch with the others? I’d ask Dan, but you know what he’s like. Tell him you want to go to a brewery and he’d struggle to programme the satnav, never mind organise the piss-up.’
‘Megan, I’ll have to let you know,’ Talitha said. ‘The others, I mean, I hardly see them any more. It’s quite short notice. And Amber – well, you don’t just call up people like that and order them round for lunch. I think—’
Megan’s voice cut through Talitha’s protests. ‘You know what, Tal, I don’t call twenty years short notice at all. I’d say they’ve had more than enough time. One o’clock. I’ll see you there. Say good night to Dan for me.’
The reflected light vanished from Tal’s face. Megan had gone.
Tal glared at Daniel. ‘You gave her my number?’
The fear was back; the Megan who’d returned to them was not someone he knew. ‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how she managed that.’
Talitha gave a scared look around, as though even now Megan might appear from behind the dark trees. ‘She knew you were here – did you tell her we were meeting up?’
‘She recognised School Field, Tal. It was obvious you were lying.’
A shudder. It unnerved him to see Talitha so rattled. ‘She was – different.’
‘I know, I heard. She wasn’t like that with me at all. She was meek as a mouse.’
Talitha tucked her phone away. ‘Well, it’s not happening. Mark will have a fit if I bring her into the house. And there’s no way the others are going to play ball.’ She almost ran down the pavilion steps.
‘You’re going to have to deal with it, Dan,’ she called back. ‘Clear it with Xav and the others about the trust fund and then have one last meeting with her. Tell her about the money but make it clear she goes a long way away.’
Daniel had to admire the way Talitha thought every problem could be fixed with money and a firm hand.
‘It’s not going to be that simple,’ he said as he caught up with her.
‘Dan, she doesn’t remember. We can’t change what happened. She paid the price for what we did, and now we have a chance to pay her back. But we can’t be friends again.’
Talitha strode on as though trying to leave him behind, and they reached the first of the white bridges. She stopped at the apex and looked down into the dark waters of the Cherwell. They’d spent so much time on this circle of water in the old days, punting, paddle-boating, picnicking.
Joining her, he said, ‘We can’t risk it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We can’t assume she’s telling the truth when she says she doesn’t remember.’
Talitha’s face fell slack. ‘Why would she lie?’
He wasn’t sure. He had his suspicions, but speculation wouldn’t help. They needed to deal with facts, right now, not guesswork. Talitha of all people would appreciate that.
�
�She’s ill,’ he said. ‘A virus she caught in prison has jeopardised her kidneys. She needs a transplant.’
Talitha gave a small and rather cruel laugh. ‘She’s got no chance.’
‘She knows that. She needs a private donor; someone whose body is compatible.’
‘And again, she’s got—’
‘GCSE biology, Tal. We all did it. Remember that time we all found out our blood groups?’
Talitha was sharp as knives. She got it. ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said.
‘Megan and I have the same blood group,’ he told her, because maybe he needed to hear it said. ‘We even joked about it. If we ever needed a donor, we had each other.’
Even in the moonlight, Talitha had visibly gone pale. ‘You think she remembers?’
‘I’m sure she does. Those favours we all agreed to? I think she’s about to call mine in.’
18
Daniel had been lying when he’d told Megan that he didn’t see much of the old gang. There had been a time, shortly after graduation, when the five of them had tried to go their separate ways, but in his early twenties, Daniel’s mental health problems had kicked off. He lost interest in socialising, had trouble sleeping, even more getting out of bed in the morning. He rattled with the combination of uppers and downers he took daily and was on the point of quitting his job. His therapist, a lay Franciscan and the reason he eventually joined the order, told him he had unresolved issues dating back to his school days (well, no shit, Sherlock) and that sharing his feelings with others would help.
Amber had been the most welcoming, the others more reticent, but not one had refused to meet up, and since that first reunion, they’d all, gradually, coalesced around Oxford again. Tal had never really left, of course, and Felix’s company was a mere fifteen miles away, but both Xav and Amber, with every reason to base themselves in London, chose to move out and commute.
They never talked about Megan, or what they’d done, although Dan was sure that summer was always on their minds, floating beneath the surface like some toxic weed. It helped, on some level he could never fully understand, to be around people who were as guilty as he.
He wondered now if they’d been waiting for exactly this: for Megan’s return.
And so they met the following night, in The Perch at Binsey because it was rarely busy in the early evening, to make sure everyone was up to date with events and to start to form a plan, if they could. Daniel arrived first, by bike, followed by Felix in his Aston Martin.
When, sometime in the lower sixth, Felix had admitted his fondness for assigning elements from the periodic table to people he knew, and not necessarily to a pleased response (copper wasn’t too bad, but iodine – fuck’s sake!), the others, especially the two chemists, had wanted to know which Felix had given to himself. Preening, Felix had told them caesium, a silvery-gold alkali metal that was super-reactive, exploding on contact with water and burning rapidly. Caesium, he explained, was too hot to handle.
‘Nah,’ Megan had snapped back. ‘You’re fluorine, Felix. You kick off left, right and centre but you can’t do a thing by yourself. You latch onto other people and you don’t let anyone see the real you.’ Xav had laughed like a drain and for a few months after, the two of them had re-christened their friend Fluorix.
The driver window of the Aston Martin rolled down. ‘I’ll be five, mate,’ Felix called over. ‘Get me a pint. And a bottle of white for the girls.’
Talitha and Xav arrived together a few minutes after Felix. Amber pitched up last, in her own car, not the one issued by the government, and came into the pub wearing sunglasses and a hat over hair that was still a very distinctive strawberry blonde. She refused the wine Felix was on the point of pouring and asked for mineral water instead.
‘I can’t be stopped for drink-driving.’ She checked her phone and switched it off.
‘Could be the least of your worries,’ Talitha muttered.
Amber had been one of the first parliamentarians to embrace social media, and had built up a massive following, even among people who’d never dream of voting for her party. In a 280-character tweet, Amber could display an insight and a wit that was rarely apparent in her conversation. The others had speculated, a bit meanly, that she might have an intern handle her social media accounts. Xav had stamped out the idea.
‘She’s actually very funny,’ he’d said. ‘She just doesn’t play to the gallery.’
It seemed odd, for someone who made no secret of wanting to be prime minister, but the others had taken his word for it.
‘Dan, how sure are you?’ Talitha asked, when the two of them had filled the others in with their two conversations with Megan. ‘That she’s only pretending to have lost her memory, I mean?’
‘Eighty per cent.’ The last twenty-four hours, Daniel had thought about little else. ‘I think she was testing me, seeing if I would come clean. I didn’t. I failed. When she spoke to Tal less than a couple of hours later, she was different.’
‘She was pissed off,’ Talitha added.
Xav said, ‘You’d have been on edge, not thinking properly. Maybe you saw things that weren’t really there.’
‘And the accident was real?’ Felix asked Talitha. ‘She definitely had a bad head injury?’
‘I’ve seen the medical reports,’ Talitha replied. ‘You can’t fake those. No mention of amnesia though.’
‘It could be true,’ Xav said. ‘We could be worrying unnecessarily.’
No one spoke.
‘If she really has lost her memory, we’re home and dry,’ Felix said. ‘We don’t even have to release the trust fund. I can certainly use that cash.’
‘We still would, though, wouldn’t we?’ Amber said. ‘We’d still give it to her. It’s the least we can do.’
Xav lowered his voice. ‘Did she actually ask you to donate an organ?’
‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘But she used the word favour. And she looked me right in the eye when she did so.’
‘It’s a common enough word,’ Xav said.
‘She was toying with me.’
Amber looked up. ‘She can’t ask that, Dan. She can’t.’
‘She can ask anything she likes,’ Felix said. ‘She has us by the short and curlies.’
The music stopped at that moment. Over the silence, they could hear the barman pulling glasses from a dishwasher. They sat, without speaking, until the music began again.
‘So, what do we do?’ Amber asked.
‘Easy,’ Felix said. ‘Dan gives her a kidney. No big deal – people do it all the time.’
Felix and Daniel made eye contact across the table; the challenge in his eyes said, ‘Come on then, argue.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ Talitha said, and Daniel had never felt so grateful for his oldest friend’s resolve. ‘If she’s prepared to take pieces of Dan’s body, what the hell will she want from the rest of us?’
Xav shuddered. For a moment he looked about to get to his feet. ‘I’m all ears for the alternative plan, Tal,’ he said.
Tal pulled her huge leather bag onto the table and reached inside. ‘These are known as burner phones.’ She placed a mobile phone in front of each of them. ‘They work on different numbers to our regular phones and, this is the important bit, the numbers aren’t traceable.’
‘Why is mine green?’ Felix asked, as Daniel noticed they had all been given coloured cases. His was dark blue.
‘I’ve programmed all our numbers into each of them, so I had to be able to tell them apart,’ Talitha answered. ‘You’ll also be able to distinguish them more easily from your personal phones. There’s quite a lot of credit on each, but not unlimited, so don’t use them for anything other than calling each other about this particular issue.’ She looked around the group. ‘Is that clear?’
Felix’s face was a frown line away from a sneer. ‘Is this really necessary?’
Talitha said, ‘Of the two of us, Felix, who knows most about criminal behaviour and how the police monitor it?’
Daniel was pleased to see Felix hold up both hands in submission. He always enjoyed Tal’s small victories over their mouthy mate.
Amber slipped hers into her bag. ‘It’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘I can never be sure my phone conversations aren’t monitored as a matter of routine.’
Talitha was on a roll.
‘If Megan starts making accusations, we can expect any police investigation to include confiscating all our tech,’ she said. ‘A sudden flurry of text messages and calls between us will look suspicious. Even when we use the burner phones, we shouldn’t say anything incriminating.’
Lips pursed, Felix put the green phone in his jacket pocket. After a moment, Dan and Xav followed.
‘We also need to be very careful where and when we meet,’ Talitha went on. ‘A sudden pattern of meeting up more than usual will look suspicious.’ She looked around the bar. ‘We don’t come here again for another couple of months at least. Each time we meet, it’s somewhere different, where we’re not known, and where anything accidentally overheard won’t create suspicion. Are we clear on that?’
No one argued.
‘And we keep conversations to a minimum,’ Talitha said. ‘I know its uppermost in all of our minds right now, but we only talk when we have something to say. The rest of the time, we carry on exactly as normal.’
‘Anything else?’ Felix wasn’t quite able to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
‘Yes,’ Talitha said. ‘We need to find the proof. That’s the alternative plan, Xav. We find the proof and we destroy it.’
The proof, something none of them had spoken of for years, that they might even have been trying to forget existed. Twenty years ago, in Talitha’s pool house, they’d looked disaster in the face and been thrown a lifeline. They’d leapt for it, eagerly, shamelessly, and had been swinging ever since, unable to reach solid ground. And now, they had to think about the proof that, with its razor-sharp edges, was more than capable of cutting the lifeline clean through.