Follow Me Down (27 page)

12 DAYS AFTER

MAY

I wouldn’t tell Bones a thing until he drove me to her house, which he did under duress, scowling and threatening to arrest me all the way.

‘They’re not here, you know?’ he muttered as he pulled into her long driveway. ‘They’ve gone to stay at their house in France.’

‘I know,’ I muttered back, undoing my seat belt as soon as he pulled up outside her front door, but when I opened the car door, he reached over and closed it.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘I need to check something in her room.’

‘Like fuck,’ he huffed, reaching over and grabbing the handle of the door as I tried to open it again. ‘I’m not letting you traipse through her house.’

‘If you want to know what happened to her then you have to let me in.’

‘I don’t
have
to do anything.’ He stared at me and I stared back until he sat back in his seat and sighed. ‘Look, Adamma. I know that you’ve just lost your friend in the most horrific, most public way possible and that you want to help. So I’m trying to be patient and you know how much I hate that,’ his gaze narrowed, ‘but I’m investigating a murder here. If you know something then you
have
to tell me.’

My shoulders fell. ‘I will, Bones. I swear. When I’m sure.’

He stared at me again, but I didn’t flinch. I don’t know why. I should have told him – I should have told him everything – but some part of me still couldn’t believe it. Still held on with both hands. I had to be sure.

‘I get that you’re trying to be a good friend, Adamma—’

‘A good friend?’ I interrupted with a bitter laugh, then turned my face away and looked out the window at her front door that opens with a long creak, like something from a horror movie. I brought my hand to my mouth and bit my knuckle to stop the tears I could feel pooling in my eyes. ‘It’s too late for that.’

I don’t know how it came to this, when being friends became so hard. When I was a kid, making friends was easy. On my first day of school, I shared my crayons with Mbeke and that was it, we were best friends. Now it’s so complicated. We say things we don’t mean, don’t say things we do. The words hurt, draw blood.

I thought of him then and asked myself how I had got it so wrong. But I knew, I just didn’t want to admit it. She wasn’t the only one who wanted the big love, was she? Something to fight for. That’s why I was so drawn to her, to her stories about Paris and her parents’ second-hand brass bed. I used to think she was restless, but I am too. I’m always moving. ‘You make me want to jump,’ I told him once, my hands fisted in his shirt. ‘You make me want to stand still,’ he said, kissing me again. That’s why I did it, why I chose him. I shouldn’t have, I know that now, and that’s something I have to live with, but it was all I’d ever wanted, you know. I’ve read poems that are so beautiful it hurts, somewhere in my bones, and I wanted that, for someone to love me like that. I’m sorry if that doesn’t sound enough. Right now it doesn’t feel like enough, either. I can’t fix that, but I can fix this.

I can pick her this time.

‘Why are you trying to protect him, Adamma?’ Bones asked with a softness I didn’t think him capable of. ‘He isn’t who you think he is.’

I swept the tears from under my eyes with my fingers, then wiped them on my skirt. ‘Bones, don’t.’

‘You’ve worked it out, haven’t you – that’s why you were in the chemist – that she was pregnant, that she called him that afternoon, the afternoon she went missing, and asked him to meet her in Savernake Forest and when she told him, he strangled her.’

I got a mental image: him with his hands around her neck and her eyes, wide and blue as she looked up at him, and the shock of it knocked something in me loose.

‘Stop it.’

‘She told him she was pregnant and he strangled her and left her there.’

‘Stop it.’ I covered my face with my hands, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was that photograph, the one in the police station, Scarlett with her red, red lips, lying pale but perfect on the forest floor, like Ophelia, a crown of green leaves in her hair.

‘And before you think that he just lost his mind, that they had an argument and he snapped, remember that he went back, Adamma. He went back and put lipstick on her.’

I flew out of the car then, leaving the door open as I ran around the side of the house towards the back door. The doormat was already flipped over, the spare key in my hand by the time Bones got to me and he tried to grab my arm, but I pulled away. As soon as I got the door open, I was gone, through the mud room – with its lined-up wellies and wax jackets – into the kitchen, past the shopping list by the fridge and the bowl of browning bananas, into the hall. He called my name, but I was already running up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and he caught up with me as I was about to go into Scarlett’s room. He put his arm around my waist and pulled me back. I roared at him not to, but when I saw it, saw her unmade bed and her school skirt in a puddle on the floor, I was glad. I don’t think I could have gone in there.

When he saw it, I watched his eyes go wide. ‘Did Forensics do this?’

I shook my head.

‘No wonder Hanlon couldn’t find anything in here.’

I didn’t know how we were going to find anything, either. When I looked at all the drawers and dusty corners I realised how many places Scarlett had to hide stuff.

It made me think of last October when she had been in New York, auditioning for that play, and Olivia and I had torn her room apart looking for some clue as to where she was. We’d found a bottle of vodka in one of her riding boots and a pack of cigarettes in her sock drawer, but other than that, there was nothing. Olivia had given up and gone downstairs to check her school bag – which Scarlett had dropped on the kitchen table when she came in from school – telling me to check the bookcase.

I couldn’t find a thing and was about to admit defeat, but as I walked across her bedroom to check her hamper, hoping to find a receipt, a note, anything, in the pocket in a pair of jeans, I walked over her rug. The floorboard beneath it creaked, as it always did, but that day I stopped. I don’t know why, but I did and I tugged back the rug to find one floorboard slightly higher than the others.

After failing to lift it with my fingers and breaking several nails, I had grabbed a pair of scissors from her desk and prised it open to find a red leather diary. The shock of it made me let go of the floorboard and it dropped back into place with a puff of dust. When I’d recovered, I lifted it again, reaching for the diary, my hands shaking. I didn’t know what to do with it for a moment, but then I thought of Olivia in the kitchen, tearing through Scarlett’s school bag, while her father checked his phone again, and I flicked to the last page and there it was, scribbled in her scruffy handwriting:

Hamlet audition, Signature Theatre, 480 West 42nd St

I never told anyone I’d found the diary, not even Scarlett, as though I’d accidentally walked in on her while she was getting dressed and I didn’t want to embarrass her by letting her know I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. I just called the Bowrey Hotel and she answered on the second ring, laughing when she realised it was me.

It started before then, but that day, when she laughed and said ‘Busted!’, was the first time I didn’t dismiss it, when I let myself question if we were really friends. I felt a sharp pain in my chest as I remembered it, but then I felt another deeper – louder – one when I looked across the room and saw the frame I’d given her for her birthday propped up on her desk. I guess Bones saw it too, because when he edged into the room, gingerly stepping over the piles of clothes cluttering the floor, he stopped and looked at the strip of passport photos she and I had taken our first exeat weekend in London that were stuck to the frame.

I don’t know how she knew the frame was from me, but there we were, grinning and blowing kisses. I wonder if Bones read the print –
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for
– because his cheeks were pink when he looked at me again.

‘Rug.’ I stopped to wipe away a tear with the cuff of my shirt, then pointed at the floor. He nodded and walked over to it, pulling it back. He knew immediately what I was trying to tell him and I held my breath as he struggled to ease the loose floorboard up, the skin between his blond eyebrows pinched. But then he did it and when he muttered ‘shit’ I knew he’d found it.

He pulled the diary out first. Then, at last, a cellphone exactly like mine.

I was right.

Something in me unravelled then, tears spilling down my cheeks as I watched him switch it on. The screen lit up and he walked over to me, his head dipped as he waited for the menu to load. Once it had, he checked her text messages and stared at the screen.

‘What does it say?’ I breathed.

He showed me the screen. It was a message from Scarlett to him.

Meet me in Savernake Forest in ten minutes or I’m going to tell.

2 DAYS BEFORE

MAY

Today was one of those perfect May days. The sun finally found the will to punch through the clouds and, as soon as it did, everything was brighter: the air warm with the promise of summer, of heat and watermelon and long, long nights.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to going to class on a Saturday, but today was especially excruciating. As soon as our last one ended, we all ran outside. Even Mr Crane had put his book into his bag before the bell rang, and he didn’t tell us not to run when it did. As we spilled out into the courtyard, I could hear the day kids tearing out of the car park, the tops of their cars down.

The rest of us ran for the Green, squealing as we peeled off our cardigans. Even Orla took hers off – it’s such a little thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her bare arms. It made something in me settle because it’s something else she’s doing now that means she’s getting better. She still hasn’t cut her hair, but she does tuck it behind her ears sometimes. It’s not much, I suppose, but it’s something, because I look at her sometimes and I’m sure I can see the beginning of a spark in her eyes.

We were only sitting on the grass for a few minutes when I got a text from him. He hadn’t sent me a message on my phone since he had given me the disposable one, so he must have been desperate to see me and it felt like it did when we first met; Orla rolling her eyes when I told her that I had to go. She’s so used to my emergency
Disraeli
meetings and forgotten swimming practices that she didn’t say anything. I never thought I was that girl – the girl who leaves her friend to be with a boy – but when I had to stop myself running to Savernake Forest, I realised that I was. As soon as I saw him waiting by our tree, a tartan blanket in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, the guilt was forgotten, and I ran at him and kissed him until he was breathless.

Perhaps I’m being sentimental, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the forest look so pretty. Every day it changes; it gets a little brighter, a little fuller. I could feel something stirring around us as we walked under the trees. They felt closer, the gaps between their branches disappearing as clouds of yellow-green leaves filled them, blocking the sky. It made me think of my garden in Lagos, of how it’s almost
obscenely
green with neat, neat lawns and spiky palms. Savernake Forest is the opposite: its edges are softer, the grass patchy in places and the trees crooked, their cinnamon bark trunks splitting. This afternoon it looked like a watercolour, washed out and hazy, as the birds sung idly.

‘It won’t be long until all of this is covered in bluebells,’ he told me, waving his hand over the forest floor as we looked for a spot to sit down.

‘I can’t wait to see it.’

‘I want a photo of you in it,’ he breathed, his cheeks a little pinker, and when he kissed me again, I thought my heart was going to split open.

We got tipsy on red wine and fell asleep on the tartan blanket. I woke up before him, stretching blissfully, like a cat. I don’t know how long I watched him sleep – watched his eyelids flutter and the shadows of the leaves move across his face – but the sky was pink when he eventually woke up and checked his watch. He told me to leave first and I did, walking back to Crofton, dazed from too much sun – and him – smiling to myself as I picked a leaf out of my hair.

I heard The Old Dear before I saw it, wheezing off the road and turning into the forest. My heart stopped and I glanced over my shoulder, hoping that he wasn’t in his car. I pulled my cellphone out of the pocket of my blazer and fired off a text, telling him to stay where he was just as The Old Dear pulled up next to me. For an awful moment, I thought it was going to be her, but it was her father who wound down the window with a grin.

‘
Kedu
, Adamma.’

‘
Kedu ka i mere
, Tom?’

‘I haven’t said that in a while!’ he said, and I smiled.

Whatever I feel for her, her father really is the sweetest man. He’s always made an effort to speak Igbo with me or to look up Nigerian recipes on the Internet. He once made
nkwobi
and it was so good, even my father was impressed.

‘What are you doing here?’

I thumbed over my shoulder. ‘I just went for a walk.’

‘Perfect day, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. It’s lovely.’

‘I’m setting up for Scarlett and Olivia’s party.’ He nodded at the pile of boxes in the back seat, bunting and streamers spilling out of them. There was a tangle of fairy lights in one of them that looked beyond unravelling. ‘Are you coming?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to.’

‘Why not?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘I don’t know what happened between you and Scarlett, but I can tell you this: it isn’t worth it, Adamma.’ I looked down at my feet and shrugged, but he pushed on. ‘Just put it behind you and come.’

‘I don’t think she’d want me there.’

‘She went to your seventeenth, didn’t she?’

‘I guess.’

‘There you go. Besides, it’s Scarlett.’ He winked. ‘Buy her a present and she’ll forgive you anything!’

I chuckled.

‘See you tonight, then!’ he said, waving at me again as he chugged off.

As I watched The Old Dear shudder up the road away from me, I thought about my birthday party, about how she had waited for me outside the washroom –
Why can’t I forget?
– and for the first time in a long time, I thought of her, not him.

So I went to her party. She crashed mine, it was only fair, right?

It was held under a tangle of trees near the gates. By the time I got there it was dark, so I expected to slip in unnoticed, but as I approached – following the sound of music from the road – the trees parted to reveal a room of light. I don’t know how her father did it, but it was stunning. Strings of light bulbs and Chinese lanterns were threaded between the trees, bright balls of light against the black, black sky.

As I got closer, I could see other things hanging from the branches – some low enough to touch – jam jars of tea lights and milk bottles filled with sunflowers, peonies and ginger-coloured tulips. Through the middle, over the heads of everyone dancing beneath it, was a washing line with photographs of Scarlett and Olivia pegged to it. I recognised some of them – Scarlett in her yellow wellington boots, Scarlett at her drum kit, Scarlett doing a star jump in front of the Eiffel Tower – and I lingered on one of a tiny Scarlett in her bridesmaid’s dress, obviously taken before Dominic pushed her in the pool. She looked adorable, all blue eyes and liquorice-coloured ringlets, and I found myself smiling.

I don’t remember the last time the thought of her made me smile.

I saw her then, standing next to Olivia by one of the tables, a glass urn of lemonade between them. Olivia saw me first, flicking a filthy look in my direction, before turning back to Scarlett, who seemed amused. She raised her glass – like she had at my party – and I smiled this time, feeling the burn of something familiar in my chest. I don’t know what it was, but as I watched her laugh, I smiled again and it felt a little like something repairing itself.

I could have stayed, I suppose, and got drunk on the spiked lemonade, but she looked so happy and I was tired of being the reason she wasn’t. I didn’t want to bicker, didn’t want to pretend not to care when she called me a name. So I added my present to the pile and left. But as I was making my way back to the road, I saw Dominic coming towards me, a champagne bottle in his hand. He was sucking a blackcurrant lollipop. I could smell it when he took it out of his mouth with a
POP
.

‘You look positively ambrosial this evening, Miss Okomma,’ he told me with a wicked smile. He looked just like he did my first day at Crofton, all eyelashes and cheekbones and that pink, pink mouth.

But I feigned indifference. ‘Ambrosial?’

‘It’s a word.’ He pointed the lollipop at me with an impish grin. ‘What are you doing here? You’ve got more front than Brighton.’ I must have looked confused, because he explained it: ‘Brighton? Seafront?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Never mind.’

I countered with an arched eyebrow. ‘I could say the same to you, Mr Sim.’

‘True.’

When he tried to put the lollipop back in his mouth and missed, I giggled. ‘How long has Drunk Dominic been here?’

‘Not long. Not long,’ he said, swaying a little. ‘But he isn’t having any fun.’

‘Even with a lollipop?’

‘Even with a lollipop.’ He took it out and I saw that his tongue was purple.

Molly walked past us then. ‘Hello,
Dominic
. Hello,
Adamma
,’ she said with a rabid smile, before continuing on towards the party, a bottle in each hand.

I sighed and rolled my eyes. ‘Aren’t you sick of it?’

‘Of what?’

‘Of people talking about us?’

‘People are always talking about me.’

‘Yeah, but,’ I lifted my chin to look at him, ‘this is different.’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is. You don’t need to put up with it. You could tell everyone the truth.’

‘True, but honesty is overrated, Miss Okomma.’ He shrugged, then grinned. ‘Besides, she fucking
hates
it. I love that she hates it. It’s just another of our games.’

‘I suppose.’

He put the lollipop back in his mouth, then leaned a little closer, close enough for me to smell the blackcurrant on his breath. ‘Do you think she’ll ever forgive you?’

‘Jesus, Dominic.’ I stepped back, my cheeks stinging as though he’d reached across and slapped me. The guilt was sudden and cloying. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘I was just thinking.’

‘Well don’t,’ I snapped, crossing my arms.

‘But seriously, do you think she ever will?’

‘I don’t know,’ I snapped again, the guilt deepening as I remembered my party, her hanging off me, loose limbed and groggy. I turned to look back at the party, at her dancing – arms in the air, her fingers almost touching the string of Chinese lanterns over her head – and when I looked back at him, I shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again, more softly.

‘You’re gonna have to be the one, you know,’ he said, holding the champagne bottle to his chest. ‘She’s not as brave as you. You have to make the first move.’

‘I know,’ I admitted, thinking of my present. I hadn’t attached a card because I wanted her to keep it and perhaps that was cruel, letting her get excited, letting her look at it every day and not know it was from me. But I guess some part of me still wanted to be there in her big, untidy room, with its piles of orange peel and dirty plates, even if she didn’t know I was.

‘She’ll forgive you. I know she will,’ he said and I don’t know if he really believed that, but I didn’t realise until that moment that I wanted her to.

I pressed a finger to the medal around my neck and nodded. ‘I hope so.’