Kisses and Lies (14 page)

I close my eyes and try to think what I would do. Where would I put photos I’d taken? Probably close to the camera, because why move them somewhere else? And if they were just casual photos of friends hanging out, they’d be in view. Or some of them would be pinned up on the corkboard. But they’re not, which suggests that Dan didn’t want them on public display.

So, by this logic, they would be hidden somewhere near the camera. I open my eyes again, looking straight at the shelf where the camera was resting. There are a couple of hardback books leaning next to where it was, held in place by the MP3 player. One’s called Schott’s Original Miscellany, and the other one’s called White Wings Over Vienna.

Schott’s Original Miscellany I’ve heard of: it’s a collection of weird facts, the kind of thing boys like. White Wings Over Vienna, though, doesn’t sound anything like a book a seventeen-year-old boy would read. Also, it doesn’t sound anything like the titles of the other books in Dan’s room: it’s not a graphic novel, or a nonfiction tome on graffiti or street logos. I kneel up and pull it off the shelf, curious about its contents.

And as I do, the book tips toward me and flutters open, and something falls out onto the bed.

It’s a Polaroid photograph.

I sit back down on the bed, opening the book, and immediately realize why the title was so incongruous. Dan must have picked it out simply because it was the right size, and fairly solid, not because he was remotely interested in the subject. Though you can’t tell until you open it, the central part of the pages have been cut out with a razor, leaving a large section inside, large enough to conceal whatever you don’t want people to find. Drugs, maybe. Or money. But in this case, it’s a stack of Polaroids.

Of half-naked girls.

I don’t know what I was expecting to find, but this has really shocked me. I dump the photos out onto the bed and turn them over gingerly, embarrassed and feeling a bit dirty to be even looking at them. It’s not just that the girls aren’t wearing much in the way of clothing. That would still be embarrassing, but not as bad as this. They’re actually posing like the girls on the covers of men’s magazines, their fingers in their mouths, their bottoms sticking out, their hands squeezing their breasts. Eww. This is so wrong. I shouldn’t be looking at these. I reach one particularly salacious photo—of a girl lying on her back, hooking one finger in her G-string and pulling it down, pouting at the camera—and actually feel myself blushing before I realize that it’s Plum.

God. I look at it more closely. Plum has practically no breasts at all—they look like two flattened fried eggs. No wonder she was jealous of mine when they popped out earlier this year. She must wear a Wonderbra every day.

Then I feel creepy for poring this closely over a photo of a practically naked Plum. I flick back through the Polaroids to see if I recognize anyone else. There’s Sophia, the countess who goes to St. Tabby’s and hangs out with Plum’s set, lying on her tummy, pushing back her hair with a fleshy white arm, looking awkward, as if she wants to be anywhere but on a bed with a camera in her face. I think another face is familiar, a girl I saw out with them that night at Coco Rouge, a skinny blonde with a big gummy smile who’s as happy to be posing as Sophia is uncomfortable. And—oh my God—I think that’s Nadia, though her back is toward the camera and you can’t see her face. But those slender pale brown arms hung with gold bangles, lifting that mass of blue-black hair off the nape of her neck  .  .  . it does look like Nadia.

She’s standing in a bathroom, completely naked. No wonder she wouldn’t show her face. A few other girls have done that too—hidden their faces in pillows, or turned so Dan couldn’t get their face on camera.

But, as I reach the end of the stack, I see one particular girl who I’m sure wishes she’d turned her face away from the lens.

It’s Lucy.

I goggle at the Polaroids—there are three of them, in a sort of rough sequence. Lucy’s incredibly pretty face, with its round blue eyes and upturned nose, is unmistakable. She’s in her underwear, like most of Dan’s other photographic subjects, and it looks to me from the background as if she’s lying on Dan’s bed. Her legs are up in the air, propped against the wall in a pinup girl pose, and she has a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. She’s tilting her head back to let her long blond hair trail over the pillows in a messy, sexy tangle. She looks very attractive, but also very self-conscious, as if she’s practiced lying like this in front of a mirror to get it exactly right.

There’s absolutely no innocent explanation for these photos. Lucy, by all accounts, has been going out with Callum for a long time, and these look comparatively recent: Lucy’s hair, her makeup, even the sophistication of her pose, all indicate that these couldn’t have been taken a few years ago, say, before she and Callum got together.

I understand now why Lucy was so passionate on the issue of Dan’s character versus Callum’s. Whatever the circumstances under which these photos were taken, she must have asked for them back, and Dan must have refused.

And I think I understand the answer to my earlier question—why Dan had a Polaroid camera as well as a digital one. I bet he managed to convince a lot of them to pose for a Polaroid, rather than a digital camera or a mobile phone, because it makes only one picture. You can’t post a Polaroid on a Web site, or send it to everyone with a click of a button.

You just make the girl feel she’s really special, and you kiss her and give her something to drink, and you gradually coax her into taking some clothes off, and you bring out the camera, and you say it’s just for the two of you to giggle over, because she looks so pretty and you want to have her with you looking just like this even when she’s not around.  .  .  .

I shiver.

Could this have been me? Could I have been talked into taking my clothes off and posing for Dan, just like all these other girls?

And how many boys did he show these trophies to?

Five minutes later, I’m crossing the drawbridge once again, but this time on my own. I have to get out of Castle Airlie. It feels like a rat trap at the moment, with me as the rat, scurrying down corridors, jumping at my own shadow, not feeling safe anywhere.

I don’t mean unsafe in the sense that anyone’s going to step round a corner and swing a broadsword at my head—though there are plenty of swords hanging decoratively on the walls, and Callum certainly looks strong enough and angry enough to wield one in my direction. No, I mean that I’ve had quite enough shocks for one day. This morning, I fainted. It’s barely lunchtime, and already I’ve learned, thanks to Lucy and then my very unpleasant discoveries in Dan’s room, that Dan was probably just looking at me as another notch on his belt, another trophy to collect.

Ugh, those Polaroids. I shiver at the thought of them. I shiver at the thought of myself, giggly on a couple of glasses of champagne, agreeing to do some sexy poses for Dan’s collection. It’s all too easy to say you’d never do something; although I’d like to think that I’d be strong enough to resist, my brief experience with Dan and then Jase has showed me that a sexy boy can make your head spin in a way that makes you feel drunk even though you’re stone-cold sober. What if I were drunk, and Dan asked me to do something I knew I didn’t want to, but wanting to please him won over my resistance, because I was afraid to lose him? Maybe that was what happened to those girls.

Though I have to say that some of them looked more than happy to be posing for the camera. Plum in particular was definitely giving it her all.

Without consciously deciding where my feet should take me, I’m finding myself following the drive that winds past the castle. Turn right, and it leads to a walled area which must be where they park the cars; turn left, and it’s a long expanse of macadam with no end in sight, lost in a thick stand of trees beyond the marshy grass that grows profusely around the castle. Unsurprisingly, I turn left, every instinct telling me to take the direction that leads out of here, away from Castle Airlie and any more nasty secrets it may contain.

I wish I could just keep walking. If I had my wallet on me, I almost think I would. What a temptation that would be—just keep walking till I hit the road, stop a car, ask the way to the station, wait for the next train back to Glasgow and then to London. Never look back. Leave the mystery of who killed Dan for someone else to solve. I know it wasn’t my fault, and isn’t that all that matters? And now I’ve seen what Dan was capable of, my zeal to solve the puzzle of his death has abated a little, I must admit.  .  .  .

I’ve been walking very briskly, needing some physical exercise to clear out the skin-creeping sensations that have been itching at me ever since I found those Polaroids, and I’ve already reached the woodland I saw from the castle. The drive cuts straight through it, but it’s much colder here, the thick growth of trees blocking out the weak autumn sun. I tilt my head back and see that the trees on either side of the drive have started to grow together, meeting high above, forming a sort of canopy that shuts out the pale silvery sky. Damp wraps round my shoulders, and any light that filters through the leaves is dark green and heavily shadowed.

Perfect. I step off the drive and onto the mulch that lines the floor of the grove of trees. It’s covered with damp leaves, and I squat down and brush them away until I’ve cleared a decent-sized patch of ground—moist, fertile dark mud. Then I extract the Polaroids from my pocket, together with Dan’s lighter, which was the other thing I took from his room, and, one by one, careful to hold them as long as I can over the patch I’ve cleared, I set fire to them and watch them curl, blacken, and burn away to shreds.

It smells horrible. This was another reason I had to come outside: I didn’t want to be doing this in the bathroom and have people wondering why there was a nasty acrid smell, not to mention black smoke, oozing out from under the door.

I work my way through the stack of photos. But I leave the ones of Plum and Lucy for last. I hesitate when I reach them, debating whether I should burn them at all: wouldn’t Taylor say that I should keep them? The ones of Lucy could be evidence, after all, if it was Lucy who killed Dan, part of her motive for hating him enough to want him dead. And I suppose the same could be said of Plum. Besides, what about keeping the ones of Plum in case she ever tries anything on with me again, just as she kept that video clip of Nadia? Maybe it’s weak and stupid of me to want to burn them. But there’s a vulnerability about her in these photos, no matter how much she’s doing her porno poses, that embarrasses me and makes me want to get rid of them. No one should have photos like this of themselves in their enemy’s hands. Not even Plum.

I decide to compromise. I’ll burn all but one Polaroid of each of the girls. And if it turns out that neither Plum nor Lucy had anything to do with Dan’s death, I’ll burn those, too. But the risk that I might need one of these photos for evidence is too steep for me to run. It isn’t only about me, after all: it’s about catching a murderer. Even if the victim’s turned out to be some sort of serial semi-porno photographer, that still wouldn’t be justification for killing him.

I shove two of the photos into my back jeans pocket, buttoning down the flap for safety. Then I take one from the remaining small pile, hold it up, and set fire to the corner. It crumples slowly, plastic melting onto itself, the images of Plum pulling down her knickers and Lucy with her legs in the air forever faded and dissolved. And I feel so much better when it’s a tiny crumpled piece of black gunk dropping to the forest floor that I know I made the right decision. I pick up the next one and hold the lighter to it eagerly—and then the next, and the next. When they’re all gone, I feel almost as weightless as a bird in flight. And I know that when I’ve burned the last two, the release will be even bigger.

I wish I could do it right now.

I push the leaves back over the spot and mess them around a bit, so you couldn’t tell they’d ever been disturbed. Then I stand up and look around me. I take a long, deep breath, thinking about chemistry class and the process of photosynthesis: trees making oxygen, cleaning out pollution, creating fresh forest air. I feel that I’m freshening my lungs, purifying myself of everything I just saw, making myself clean again.

And then, from nowhere, Jase’s smile pops into my head, and I sigh.

He hasn’t been in touch with me since our day at the lake. Not even a text asking if I’m okay, or thanking me for not telling my grandmother about what his loony father did.

So is that it? Is whatever was starting with Jase over before it really began?

I feel tears pricking my eyes, and I blink them back. At least this “relationship,” for lack of a better phrase, had a better ending. At least nobody died.

I think about going back to Wakefield Hall after this, and what I’ll say if I see him again. And then I jump right back to the present, because how can I think about going back when I still have so much to do here? And a tight time schedule, too? Well, one thing’s for sure: I won’t be asking to stay on longer. Thank God I’ll be leaving before Callum’s birthday, at least.

I realize how awful it must be for Callum: the normal excitement he would feel at being eighteen all destroyed, the excitement at every birthday ruined, because every single birthday from now on will also be a terrible reminder of his dead twin. No wonder he can’t bear to look at me, the girl he thinks killed his brother, or at least had something to do with the mystery of his death. I’d probably feel exactly the same.

I clear my throat, and the sound is such a shock in the quiet of the woods that it startles me, even though it’s a noise I’ve made myself. I shiver, and it’s a purely primitive reflex, the fear of being alone in the woods, even though I’m not exactly lost—I’m just a few paces away from the drive. A car could come along at any minute.