by Perks, Heidi
Grace imagined her mum sitting in her square box of a front room, looking out on to a cul-de-sac of retirement houses exactly like hers, waiting for something to happen that would ping her out of her chair, like the arrival of the postman or a neighbour mowing their lawn.
It saddens Grace to think that her mum’s life has come to this, and yet she has point-blank refused to move back to Clearwater.
‘What are you worried about?’ she had asked her mum again.
She imagined all the things Catherine might say and settled on it being her usual vague, ‘You know there’s something unsafe about that town.’ But in the end her mum’s voice, so quiet it was barely audible, had only uttered the words, ‘I’m worried about you, Gracie.’
Grace had pulled back in shock and pressed the phone closer to her ear. She could hear her mum’s breathing so clearly she could imagine the warm air on her neck.
Grace had wanted to ask what she meant, but her mum was saying, ‘You should never go back there, Gracie.’
In the end, Grace had cut the call short. There was something eerie about her mum’s words and she really didn’t want to think about what they meant.
Taking another sip of her now-cold tea, she drains the cup and takes it through to the kitchen. Since coming back from Sally’s she cannot get her head around the idea of breaking into the woman’s house, and yet at the same time she’s consumed by her need to know why Anna has been seeing a therapist.
She picks up her mobile and dials Ben’s number again. When he doesn’t respond she sends him a text: Have you heard any more from Anna?
As she waits for his reply Grace is unable to find anything to occupy her mind and so eventually she grabs her car keys and takes the lift down to the underground car park.
Grace knows that Ben is at home because there is movement at his bedroom window. She can’t see him clearly but notices a shadow as it passes through the light. It has been twenty minutes since she sent him a text and she still hasn’t received a reply.
Climbing out of the car she paces up the driveway. There is no longer movement in the window above, but as she approaches the front door she sees him descending the stairs through the glazed glass.
Grace presses her finger against the doorbell. When there is no answer she stabs it again. It is definitely working, she can hear its ring shrilling inside the house. Eventually he opens the door, keeps it slightly ajar and says, ‘What is it, Grace?’
She sidesteps to see him better. ‘You know what it is. I want to talk to you about Anna.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’ He begins to close the door.
‘Yes there is.’ She holds her hand on it, pushing against him until the door eases back and exposes the hallway beyond and a figure behind him, standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
‘Anna?’ Grace gasps as she tries to take a step forward but Ben’s hand is still on the door and there is only so far she can get. ‘What are you doing here? Are you okay?’
Grace tries to take in what she is seeing. Her friend is alive but her face is streaked with tears and smudges of black mascara. If it is possible she looks thinner than she did five days ago, more gaunt, and she is wrapped in a thick wool cardigan that she clutches around her body. Her eyes look haunted as they stare back at Grace.
Anna takes a step back and Grace pushes against the door, but Ben is pushing back equally hard. She has been hurt, Grace thinks. Is it Ben?
‘I’m here, Anna.’ Grace holds out a hand to reach out for her, willing her friend to come to her, but she seems too scared to move. ‘God, what’s happened to you?’ She pushes back again but Ben is too strong for her. ‘Anna?’ she persists.
Anna shakes her head and opens her mouth, and Grace nods to encourage her, but when she finally speaks, she says, in a voice that doesn’t sound hurt or scared, but firm, ‘Just go, Grace,’ and Ben slams the door shut.
December – One week earlier
Anna
I wonder how Sally can listen and not pass judgement. How she manages to look sympathetic of the fact I have lived with this dreadful secret for so many years, rather than appalled that I never told anyone what happened.
‘Heather’s body was found a week later,’ I say. ‘It was washed up by the jetty. No one ever questioned us again after that. I guess there was no reason to believe I was with her.
‘It has never left me,’ I go on. ‘It’s always been there in the back of my head, that what I did was wrong. Because it isn’t just the fact I lied. If I had called for help at the time then I might have saved her. That’s what is unbearable. That Heather might still be alive if I’d done the right thing.’
‘Why didn’t you?’ she asks me. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police what had happened?’
I turn away and consider how to answer, but before I do I say, ‘Grace coming back has opened this wound up again. I guess I learned to live with my guilt somehow. At times I’ve been able to convince myself there was nothing I could have done anyway. And as the years passed, I just got on with my life and focused on the important things – Ethan and Ben. And Zadie …’ I pause. ‘Oh God, you see, this is what I can’t cope with: that it could all be taken away from me.’
‘Why do you think that might happen?’ Sally asks me.
‘Ben might leave me. Or he’ll stop me from seeing Ethan. I don’t know, at the least, if the police ever found out I’d never be able to adopt.’
‘Grace is the only one who knows?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘And you’re worried she might tell someone?’
‘The day Grace turned up four months ago I’d just got back from clearing out my dad’s house,’ I tell Sally. ‘To find her on my doorstep was what I needed in that moment. I was thrilled to see her. She told me she was just over here visiting, not that she’d moved back. I didn’t know I would see her again, but a week later I walked Ethan to school and there she was, standing in the playground, telling me Matilda was in the same class. I knew in that moment,’ I say, ‘that the life I’d so carefully protected was about to crumble around me.’
‘Anna, what are you actually saying?’ Sally asks.
‘You asked me why I didn’t tell anyone. I need to tell you what happened when I got back to my dad’s house that night.’
I stood on the edge of the cliffs, shaking with fear as I leaned over as far as my body would allow. It was too dark to see much. The small flashlight I’d brought barely reached a few metres below and even though I swept it back and forth across the cliff face there was no sign of Heather.
I got down on to my knees on the soil, tears of panic filling my eyes. My heart was racing so fast I thought it would burst out of me as I called Heather’s name over and over, but in return the night was silent.
I had no idea how long I’d been on the ground when I eventually scrambled to my feet and stumbled backwards. It could have been two minutes. It could have been half an hour. Time had slipped from reality like the whole evening was fast doing.
I turned and ran, back through the trees, down the cliffs, until I was on the coastal path. I passed phone boxes, where I could have made an emergency call, and yet I kept running because I just needed to be back in the safety of my own house. All the time my mind spun with images of Heather: standing on the cliff edge one minute; gone the next.
Soon I was at the end of an alleyway, a cut-through that was only around the corner from my house. I didn’t even know how I’d got there, my run had been a daze, thoughts of anyone lurking in the shadows hadn’t entered my head like they usually did.
When I reached my front door, I let myself in and raced up the stairs, praying Grace would be in my bedroom. I was so relieved to find her there. She looked the picture of innocence in her Forever Friends pyjama top. How I wished I’d listened to her.
Falling to my knees on the end of her mattress I shook Grace awake.
‘What’s happened?’ She woke, startled.
‘It’s Heather,’ I splutte
red. ‘She’s fallen off the cliff.’
‘Oh my God.’ Grace pulled me in and held me as I sobbed and told her how Heather went too close to the edge, how I started walking away because I knew I shouldn’t be there, and how she fell.
‘And that’s all that happened?’ she asked me.
‘Of course,’ I said, startled by her question, though my mind had filled with the argument Heather and I’d had only moments before. ‘I need to call the police,’ I cried. ‘And an ambulance. But oh God, my dad’s going to kill me.’
‘Shhh,’ she whispered into my ear, still rocking me.
My hands were cold and shaking violently as she took them in her own.
‘I’m going to be in so much trouble,’ I said.
How desperately I wanted Grace to tell me I wasn’t going to be, that when she eventually did I felt myself slump deeper into her arms. ‘You won’t be in trouble,’ she told me, ‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you.’ How could she be so certain? And yet she told me this over and over until I almost believed her.
‘You don’t tell the police anything,’ my best friend said. ‘You were here all night. We both were. You were never on those cliffs.’
I pulled away then, and looked up at her calm face. ‘What? I can’t … you mean …?’ The words weren’t coming out. She meant I should do nothing? I shouldn’t make a call? ‘But she might need help,’ I eventually said. ‘We can’t leave her.’
‘You can’t, you mean,’ Grace said, oh so quickly, before she moved on, making me wonder if I had actually heard her right. But I knew I had. A definite yet quick reminder that it wasn’t ‘we’ who had got into this mess, just ‘me’.
Only now ‘we’ were getting out of it together.
‘Anna, if Heather fell over the cliff she’d have no chance of surviving. And if you tell them what happened this could become a murder inquiry.’ The thought turned me to ice. ‘We can’t help her now. We just need to think of you,’ she kept telling me, and eventually my fourteen-year-old panicked self let Grace convince me this was the best thing to do.
Sally’s face is creased into what could be sympathy or disgust, I have no idea any more.
‘Grace always kept to her word,’ I say. ‘That night she promised me she would lie for me and she did. After that, we went back to being the best friends we’d always been before, only now our relationship was more one-sided than ever. Now she had something to hold over me.’
‘You think that’s why she did it?’ Sally asks.
‘I didn’t know at first, but later I’d wonder why she was being so kind to me when I’d chosen Heather over her that night. Grace always hated me being friends with anyone else, it was always just supposed to be her and me, “sisters”,’ I say. ‘I knew the moment I chose Heather over her she would have been furious, so how did she manage to forgive me so easily that night?
‘The fact is she didn’t,’ I continue. ‘She wasn’t forgiving me by being there for me, she was taking care of it by making sure I would never leave her again.’
‘And then Grace went away? To Australia, for many years?’ Sally says.
‘I know, and over time I realised just how oppressive our friendship had been. It took having that space to understand how I couldn’t think for myself, couldn’t breathe when she was around me. But now she’s back again …’ I turn away and look out of the window. There is a clear, bright blue sky outside.
‘I’ve tried to keep her at bay, but she wants more from me and she isn’t happy about my friendship with Nancy and the others.’
I turn back to Sally, thinking of the last conversation I’d had with Grace two days ago. Do you think of Heather, Anna? she had asked me. Do you ever think about that night like I do? About what actually happened?
‘No one knows Grace like I do,’ I tell Sally. ‘No one has a clue what she is capable of.’
The truth is that if Grace wants it to happen, then there is every chance a murder inquiry might open up.
PART TWO
Someone’s friend who has twins in Year 1 lives on the same road as Anna, and had seen her walking into her house. The information hit WhatsApp within minutes.
A tsunami of questions followed. What did Anna look like upon her return? Was she accompanied by anyone else? So she’d just waltzed back into her house like nothing had happened?
She looked pale and tired, apparently. And she was alone, but her husband was at the door before she even started up the driveway, as if he were expecting her.
But what was even more strange was that half an hour later a woman had turned up at the house, and when they wouldn’t let her in she started shouting through the letterbox that she was the ONLY ONE looking for her, the ONLY ONE who cared. They emphasised it in capitals on the message, just to make the point as the woman had done in person.
‘What did she look like?’ someone asked.
‘Auburn hair. Black BMW.’
‘Sounds like Grace,’ someone else suggested, yet it also didn’t sound anything like her from what they’d seen before. Why on earth would she be shouting through the letterbox?
‘And they didn’t answer the door to her?’ came another message.
‘No. She just snapped at Anna’s elderly neighbour and then stormed off,’ came the reply.
Well, this was odd behaviour. And so unlike the Grace they knew. They couldn’t imagine her raising her voice, getting angry, when she had been so placid and patient in the school playground.
But regardless, they all agreed that it made the anticipation of pick-up even more appealing than it had been at the end of the previous week.
Chapter Fourteen
Anna
It has gone quiet now that Grace has stopped yelling through the letterbox. My hands are still shaking, tapping against my thighs.
‘Is she still there?’ I ask Ben.
He glimpses through the frosted window. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t see her.’
I am waiting for the doorbell to ring again. I know how persistent Grace can be when she wants something, and over the last few days Ben has learned this too.
‘She won’t go away, Anna,’ he says to me. ‘At some point you’re going to have to face her.’ He cocks his head to one side as he looks at me. Ben has been generously patient with me since I came home this morning, but at some point he is going to want more answers than I’ve given him. ‘She’s going to be at school every day. You can’t avoid her.’
‘I know!’ I cry. God, how I know. The time before Grace first arrived at St Christopher’s feels like a distant memory now. Nancy is collecting Ethan for me today, but I will have to be back there soon. ‘I think she might have gone,’ I tell him. ‘Please can we just …’ I beckon to the kitchen.
Ben nods as he follows me through to the back and heads straight for the kettle, which he fills with water. Since I’ve been home we have briefly hugged, I have cried, and he has sent me to soak in the bath. This is the first time we have been in a room together with nothing but the pressure of needing to talk hanging in the air, so densely stifling it feels almost too heavy to breathe.
‘It’s good to be back,’ I say again. ‘I’ve missed you and Ethan so much.’
‘I’ve missed you, too.’ Ben’s back is to me as he opens cupboards and fishes out a teabag, and so I can’t see his face. His words are flat, though. ‘What kind of tea do you want?’ he asks.
‘Peppermint if we have it. I can’t wait to see Ethan.’
I will Ben to turn round. I just want to see his eyes, to know that there is love in them rather than the anger I’m fearing.
We have spoken a handful of times over the last four days. After I realised that my text to him at 4:13 a.m. on Thursday morning never went through. It was supposed to explain where I was going, that I didn’t want him to worry. But by the time I had managed to charge my phone and see the text still sat there, unsent, I knew it was too late for that.
I’d nearly thrown up at the sight of the red exclamation mark �
�� the message Not delivered displayed like it was actually quite funny. By then it was almost midday and I knew Ben must have been going out of his mind. What had he told Ethan? I’d called him straight away, at least put his mind at rest that I was alive.
‘Where the hell are you?’ he’d yelled down the line at me.
‘Ben, I’m sorry,’ I pleaded. ‘I’m so sorry. I sent a text, I promise you. I didn’t want you to worry.’ I was crying, though no tears were coming out, I was too filled with panic that whatever I told him might not be believed, that he might never forgive me.
‘What’s happened?’ he growled. ‘I’ve been going out of my bloody mind, Anna.’
He was angry, as well he should have been. I would have been the same, which made my apologies even more pathetic. I should have done more to make sure he knew I was all right, but I had fallen asleep, my phone had died; I’d told myself it didn’t matter as he’d have received the text and I’d call him as soon as I could.
I told him where I was and he laughed down the phone. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘There are things you don’t know, Ben, but you have to trust me right now,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll tell you all of it later.’ I gave him sketchy details then, told him I didn’t trust Grace, asked him not to talk to her. It all sounded so cloak and dagger, but at that point I was planning to be home by evening. I just had things I needed to find out, things that Grace had said to me on Wednesday night that made me think there was more to the night Heather died than I might ever have realised. And if they were true, then I really had no idea how far she might go.
But I didn’t want to get into any of this with Ben over the phone. It was too big, too important. And so I begged him to trust me until I came home later.
‘Grace has already been here,’ he told me, and I felt a shiver run down my spine. Of course she had, she would be right there in the middle of this, turning over every stone. ‘She seemed worried about you.’