Pretty Twisted (22 page)

‘How dare they imply you might have had something to do with this?’ Mum said as we all got in the front of the van. ‘Asking for your alibi for the night that other girl disappeared, as though you were a suspect – that’s ridiculous!’

‘I am a suspect as far as they’re concerned. I’m surprised you don’t think so too.’

‘Do you seriously think your dad and I believe you’d hurt anyone? The police are clutching at straws because they’re under pressure, that’s all.’

‘It’s so unfair,’ I cried. ‘You mess up once and it gets held against you forever!’

It had happened last February. I never knew why Tom Copeland took against me so suddenly. He wasn’t in many of my classes and we never really spoke. One day, when I was coming out of the school library, he was there with his mates. He pushed me against a wall and said I’d better watch my step. Like an idiot, I kept quiet. Two weeks later, when I’d started to relax, Tom caught me round the back of the music block after school. He must have thought I’d be easy to rough up, but he didn’t know I’d been learning karate since I was little. When he laid into me, I fought back. But it wasn’t like it’d been in class, sparring with someone who’d been taught the best ways to defend and block – Tom didn’t know what had hit him. An adrenalin rush is a funny thing; it blows your mind. Everything’s happening so fast that you can’t stop.

I only realized I’d gone too far when teachers rushed in to break us up. I’ll never forget the moment I set eyes on Tom. It seemed there was blood everywhere, and it was all I could do not to throw up. Someone called the emergency services; an ambulance arrived to take Tom away and the police arrived to talk to me.

I was lucky. Tom’s mates swore I’d started it and if the police had taken their word I’d have been convicted of causing actual bodily harm. As it was, someone at school must have put in a good word for me, because it was decided that there wasn’t enough evidence. The police let me off with a caution, but the school suspended me until half-term.

Even now, I don’t feel good about what I did. It scared me that I could hurt someone – I’d never thought I was capable of that. Tom was a bully who deserved what he got, but school wasn’t the same after that and I soon ditched karate. Sometimes I had nightmares, though they’d become less frequent since starting college. I’d almost been able to kid myself it hadn’t happened.

‘No one’s holding anything against you,’ Mum said. She and Dad exchanged a look, one that said
not this again.

‘The police implied they were.’

‘People can be narrow-minded,’ Dad said. ‘They assume the Copeland lad was the victim because he ended up in hospital.’

‘The police have to bear everything in mind,’ Mum added. ‘Of course they’ll look to see if you’ve anything on record; they check everyone out.’

‘What if something has happened to Freya? What if they think I did it?’

‘Jonathan,’ Mum said softly, ‘far as we know, nothing has happened. And even if it does – they can’t pin anything on you. You’ve done nothing wrong.’

She put her arm around me. After a moment I did something I hadn’t in a while; I hugged her back. I didn’t believe her, but I was grateful she believed in me.

And when the police came round to the house later that afternoon, to grill me more on the Tom incident and to ask if I’d ever hit Freya, I was even more grateful. The way things were going, I was going to need all the support I could get.

Rosalind

Monday 27 October, 11.00 a.m.

It took me a long time to get to sleep on Sunday night, and when I did I had a nightmare. Jonathan and I ended up in prison, which for some reason looked like my school. He’d been done for withholding evidence and me for abduction. Our jailer was an enormous stuffed rabbit exactly like the one in Freya’s room, and I kept telling it we were innocent, but it just laughed and said, ‘Squee’. Then I tried to ring Abby, only I couldn’t remember her number, and then I realized I was naked.

When I woke up I told myself the dream was stupid, but it wouldn’t leave me, not even when I splashed my face with cold water.

Freya still hadn’t been found.

The day was dragging on endlessly. At least if I had school I’d be busy, but here, all I could do was wonder if keeping quiet made me a bad person. Jonathan had phoned me again yesterday evening, sounding even more rattled than before. Apparently the police had spoken to him a third time, at his house, about that fight at school he’d had a year ago.

There was only one useful thing I could think to do. I went to Kensington.

Gabe’s house looked the same as usual. I leaned against a lamp post on the other side of the road, staring ahead, hoping for some sign to tell me I was right. But no one went near a window or came out of the door.

Any normal person would have had the guts to ring the bell, but my imagination was conjuring up paranoid thoughts. Perhaps they’d fled the country, taking Freya with them. Or maybe one of them really was the Student Snatcher and they were out disposing of her body. Or perhaps she was trapped. For the first time I realized Freya wasn’t some perfect person looking down on me from a pedestal. If she was in that house, she’d be as out of her depth as Abby and I were.

But then I might be wrong. Freya and Hugh could well have got off that bus without exchanging a word.

My watch showed one o’clock. I’d been here an hour.

I reasoned with myself. Nothing could happen if I knocked on the door. They couldn’t eat me. Didn’t I owe it to Jonathan to do this?

I forced myself across the road and up the path to the door. The bell was still broken. Fright swelled inside me, but before I could run I’d done it, I’d knocked, and the noise seemed terribly loud.

For a few seconds it looked like no one was in. But then I heard footsteps coming down the stairs.

‘Well, look who it is. Cute Ros. You really can’t get enough of me, can you?’

It was Hugh. He leaned against the door frame, taking a drag on his cigarette. ‘Come to take the dog out? You can if you want, seeing as he likes you so much.’

Words stuck in my throat. He leaned forward and waved a hand in front of my face.

‘Hello? Planet Earth to Ros.’

It was stupid, but I hadn’t been expecting him to answer and it’d thrown me. ‘I . . . I came to ask a question. A couple, actually. When’s your birthday – and what’s your surname?’

He raised his eyebrows, and I blushed. ‘Why the sudden interest? If you’re planning on sending a card, you’re in for a wait.’

Knowing that I must sound crazy, I decided to get to the point.

‘You know that girl?’

‘What girl? I know lots of girls. Have to be more specific, sweetheart.’

‘The girl I was following?’

‘Stalking, you mean. Go on, say it. We both know that’s what you were doing.’

I felt myself blush deeper. ‘OK. Fine. I was stalking her. Is she here?’

Hugh exhaled, blowing smoke at me. ‘What makes you think that?’

‘You liked her. You said she was pretty. You were on the bus with her.’

‘You think I take every pretty girl I meet on public transport home with me? Ah, Ros, you’re very sweet, but you really haven’t a clue.’

‘So is she here?’

He pretended to consider the question. ‘Well . . . Brian and Graham and I might have her hidden in a cupboard somewhere, or chained up to the banisters, ready to do unspeakable things to. Difficult to say.’ He grinned, and I backed away a few steps. ‘If you really want to know . . . why don’t you come in and have a look?’

I shivered.

‘You’re very welcome. We like it when girls come in the house. We like it even more when they don’t leave . . .’

I was down the path and along the street in seconds.

Jonathan

12.00 p.m.

I hung around the house with my parents, waiting for news that never came. We didn’t speak much. There was nothing to say.

Freya’s parents, Moira and Owen, came over in the afternoon. Owen had always been a bit pale, but it disturbed me to see Moira looking the same. She’s one of those imposing, scarily together mothers. Now everything seemed to be sapped out of her. She asked if I knew anything, over and over again. We switched on the news channel. There’d been just one development: Clark’s emails had been traced to an Internet cafe in south-west London. I guessed the police had done this via the IP address; those were easy to obtain and I knew that you could enter them into databases which revealed where the email had been sent from. It looked as if Freya had been going to see Clark the night she vanished, like Ros and I thought. But loads of guys fitting the waitress’s description must’ve used that place; the police wouldn’t be able to find him with that information.

It’s surreal, seeing someone you know on the news. I’d always thought of news as something that happened to other people. On one hand the report was so impersonal, but on the other it meant so much. There were a few seconds of Moira and Owen giving the usual spiel you hear from frantic parents, the kind no one listens to because it’s too depressing. The newsreader can say Freya’s a friendly, bubbly girl, popular with her peers and a very talented musician, but those are just words. They don’t bring to life the complexities and contradictions that make Freya who she is, that make people care. The words were as useless as I felt.

The police had me in again late afternoon – the fourth time I’d seen them in three days. I sat at the table across from Shaw and Turner, wondering what they wanted this time.

‘So, Jonathan,’ Shaw said, ‘we’d like you to talk us through what you did on those two days when you were trying to determine whether Freya was missing.’

‘I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘I went to her house, checked her email, phoned a few people.’

‘Where did you stay that night?’

I hesitated. ‘Is this important?’

Shaw just raised an eyebrow.

‘I stayed at a friend’s,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘And who is this friend, Jonathan?’

‘Just a friend! She has nothing to do with this.’

‘We think she does,’ Turner said. ‘She was with you when you went into Freya’s house, wasn’t she?’

I stared at them, feeling my heart beginning to beat more quickly. Fingerprints – I’d forgotten Ros’s would have been all over Freya’s stuff. There was no way I could lie my way out of this.

Slowly I said, ‘If I tell you her name, will you promise not to involve her in this? All she was doing was giving me a hand – she’s never even met Freya.’

The police just looked at me. Sorry Ros, I thought as I told them her name. Turner noted it down, then asked her age. I considered lying, but knew there was no point. When I said, ‘Fourteen,’ Shaw and Turner exchanged glances.

The next fifteen minutes were awful. The police wanted to know everything. Where had I met her? Why had I got her to help me? What had happened when I’d stayed at her house? They were particularly interested in that last question. The worst bit was when Shaw said, almost casually, ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Jonathan, but it’s illegal for a sixteen-year-old to engage in a sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old, even if it’s consensual. Just something to bear in mind.’

I felt upset and humiliated – why couldn’t Ros and I just be friends without everyone leaping to the wrong conclusion? Mum and Dad snapped that this questioning was out of order, but Shaw and Turner remained composed. They asked me some other questions – the same as yesterday, about the Tom incident, the missing girls, where I’d been the night Freya vanished. When I was finally allowed to go I wondered if they were going to have me in here again tomorrow, going over the same old stuff. Sooner or later I’d slip up and say something stupid – was that what they wanted?

When I called Ros that evening, I learned that the police had spoken to her too.

‘It was horrible,’ she said. ‘They asked me all these things about you staying over and whether we’d done anything, again and again. Dad was furious.’

I felt terrible – Ros sounded so despondent. The police were really being thorough – but then I guessed they had to be. At the moment I was their only lead – and the pressure was on . . .

Rosalind

Tuesday 28 October, 9.30 a.m.

After another sleepless night I checked the news sites. Nothing had changed. I wondered if Jonathan would be called to the police station today. Though he hadn’t said as much, I could tell he was dead scared, and now I knew what it felt like to be questioned I didn’t blame him. It hurt so much to see him upset – especially now I felt it was my fault.

There was a knock at my door. Quickly I minimized the Internet window and tried to look normal. It was Abby.

‘Men are SO rubbish,’ she said, sitting on my bed. Without waiting for me to speak, she launched into her story. ‘So, Claudia and I went to see Gabe and Brian. Brian said he’d made me some new jewellery so we went to his room. They were these beautiful earrings shaped like spiders’ webs. We made out a little – no big deal, you know – only then he said he wanted to go all the way . . .’

‘You didn’t, did you?’