Sworn Secret (36 page)

Lizzie glanced briefly at Kate and then looked at the floor. ‘Fine,’ she said, in a voice that told them she was anything but.

Rachel put down her tea and stood. She went to Lizzie and hugged her tightly. Kate saw Lizzie hug her back, and was reminded once again how close they’d all been before Anna died.

‘So are you two talking again?’ asked Lizzie.

‘Lizzie . . .’ Kate said sternly.

‘It’s a good thing,’ Lizzie said to Rachel. ‘I’ve missed you.’

‘I’ve missed you too, angel.’ Rachel gave her another hug. Kate glanced uncomfortably at Rebecca, who sat like a statue on the sofa.

Jon came in and mumbled a hello to Rachel. He kissed her awkwardly on the cheek and then shuffled past her and stood, silent, by the coffee table.

‘So what’s going on?’ said Lizzie.

The adults exchanged looks.

‘Rebecca needs to talk to us, Lizzie,’ said Kate. ‘I don’t think you should be here.’

‘Why not?’ Lizzie crossed her arms. ‘If it’s something to do with my sister then I want to hear it. I’ve had just about enough of being kept in the dark.’

‘But Lizzie, it might—’

‘I think Lizzie should stay,’ Jon interrupted. ‘She’s right; there’ve been enough secrets.’

‘Rachel?’ Kate asked.

‘I think it’ll be fine,’ Rachel said. ‘She’s nearly the same age as Bec, after all.’

Rebecca looked quickly up and then back down at her hands.

‘So, Rebecca and I talked last night,’ said Rachel, as soon as they had all sat down. ‘She’s upset. Really upset. I know you said she was, Kate, and you were right. I didn’t realize quite how Anna’s death had affected her, and she finds it very difficult to talk about what happened.’

Rachel reached out and took Rebecca’s hand in hers.

‘Rebecca?’ Rachel said gently.

Rebecca looked at her mother, who smiled and gave an encouraging nod. They waited. Kate cast a glance at Jon, who was staring at the plate of digestives.

‘Rebecca said it was Anna who made her film them,’ said Rachel.

‘No.’ Kate shook her head against the implication of those words. ‘That’s crazy. Why would she want—’

‘I think you should try to listen, Kate,’ Rachel said. ‘You wanted to hear what Rebecca has to say, but if you don’t want to, if it’s too hard, then maybe we should leave.’

‘Of course I want to hear what she has to say, but not if it’s just a load of lies.’

‘You always say I’m lying,’ said Rebecca. Her words were so quiet she was scarcely heard, but nonetheless the room stilled. Rebecca stared right at Kate. ‘And I’m not lying to you. It was Anna that made me film them.’

The sincerity in Rebecca’s voice stabbed at Kate, and she wondered if she really did want to know the secrets that lurked in the girl’s Pandora’s box.

‘At first I said no, but she went on and on about it. She even said I couldn’t be a proper friend if I didn’t.’ Rebecca was blinking back tears, tipping her head back as if trying to stop them rolling down her face. They fell anyway. Rachel stroked her knee and took a tissue from her bag, which she passed to Rebecca who took it but didn’t use it. ‘So we bunked off school and went to her gran’s house and she told me to hide in this bush thing and then said to wait, and that I needed to be completely quiet and she would be back soon, with him. She was meeting him in his car by the park. I was worried someone would come out of the house, but she said nobody ever did because her grandad was ill and her gran never came up there. She opened this small window and told me where to point the phone and then she said to film them, but not until they were actually doing it. She didn’t need the bit with clothes on. That wasn’t any use, she said.’

Kate blinked hard and stared at the ceiling above them. She found a crack and followed its meandering line from one side of the room to the other.

‘Why was it no use, Rebecca?’ Jon sounded so cool.

There was a long pause.

‘Rebecca,’ said Rachel, as composed as Jon. ‘You need to tell Kate and Jon what you told me.’

‘Can you remember why she wanted you to film her and Dr Howe?’

The softness of the two adult voices made Kate nauseous and she gripped the seat cushion hard.

‘For Mrs Howe.’

‘What?’ Kate’s voice burst out. ‘That woman was involved? How? How was she involved?’

‘She was sort of involved, I mean . . . not with the film . . . it was Anna. She wanted Mrs Howe to . . . um, know . . . she thought she could make him leave her if Mrs Howe saw them, you know, doing it.’ Rebecca closed her eyes and shook her head as if she couldn’t make sense of herself.

‘Kate,’ said Jon. ‘You need to keep calm; you’re flustering her, and we need to hear what she has to say.’ He turned back to Rebecca. ‘It’s OK, Rebecca, nobody here is angry with you in any way, but I need to get this straight. Anna wanted proof of the relationship to blackmail Stephen Howe into leaving his wife.’

Rebecca thought for a moment or two before nodding her head. ‘Waiting for them was horrible. She was ages. Way more than an hour, and it was really uncomfortable. There were sticks scratching me and insects everywhere, and all I could do was think about what she had told me to do. It made me sick. I was actually sick into my mouth. I nearly left then, but just as I was trying to get out of the bushes without getting even more scratched, I heard them. So I kept quiet while they went into the shed.’

Kate glanced at Lizzie and saw her horror. ‘Lizzie,’ she said. ‘Would you like to leave? We could leave Dad to talk to Rebecca and I’ll come and keep you company upstairs.’

Lizzie pursed her lips and shook her head.

‘Go on, Rebecca,’ said Jon.

‘Well, I did what she told me. I watched them through the crack in the window until they started, you know, doing it, and when they did, I pressed record and stuck my phone through the gap. I looked through the window and tried to make sure that the phone was pointing in the right place. Anna said she would move about so that the film would get them in different positions and that’s what she did, because I saw her looking at the phone and then making him change what he was doing.’

Rebecca’s nerves seemed to have lessened and she now spoke freely and methodically, recalling each piece of information without cadence, as if badly reciting a poem.

‘I thought he’d see me, and while I was holding the phone I couldn’t stop shaking, because I suddenly thought about what would happen if he did. Dr Howe doesn’t like me at all – I’m always in trouble – and I thought filming him like that with Anna would really make him hate me, and I’d definitely get excluded from school, and all I could think about was how I’d tell my dad,’ she looked at Rachel, ‘because he gets really cross about me getting into trouble at school.’ She looked back at her hands. ‘Anyway, I had to make sure I didn’t shake too much and jiggle the phone. I was sure afterwards I hadn’t done it right, and I’d recorded the wrong place, like the wall or something, but when we looked at it, it was fine. She was really happy.’

Rebecca was quiet for a while. Everyone else was silent too; Kate couldn’t even hear breathing.

Rebecca took a sudden long, deep breath in. ‘Then we set up an email account and wrote an email with the film attached that said if he didn’t leave his wife then she would post it on the internet.’

‘On the internet?’ asked Jon.

‘YouTube,’ said Rebecca. ‘Even though I told her YouTube wouldn’t let it on because they don’t allow full-on sex. But she said it didn’t matter because he’d leave his wife anyway just at the thought, and if he didn’t, and YouTube wouldn’t take it, then there was always RedTube, which does porn and stuff, or we could fix a viral email, which would be worse anyway because it would go global in a day.’

Though Kate didn’t really know what Rebecca was talking about, and from the look on Jon’s face he didn’t either, she got the general gist and her stomach turned over.

‘Anna thought it was funny. She was laughing when we attached the film, so much she was crying. She was like, “
Oh my God
, he is going to totally flip when he sees this.” She was sure he’d leave Mrs Howe, and then I asked her if she really did love him, and she sort of went quiet and then nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, I really, really, do.” And she was laughing and saying, “Oh my God, I love him!” And then she was about to send the email and I said “Are you sure”, and she sort of raised her eyebrows and giggled and then pressed send.’ Rebecca paused. ‘The look on her face was like, “Shit, what have we done”, and then she just started laughing like she was never going to stop, and it was really weird because I felt sick and really scared but I started laughing too, but maybe that was because I was so nervous and stuff.’

Rebecca was picking at her tights. She’d made a small hole in them, which she hooked her finger through, then pulled and pulled to make the hole bigger until most of her knee began to show through. Rachel reached over and stilled her hand.

‘She said we had to sit and wait for a reply. But I said that it was the weekend, and maybe he wouldn’t get his emails because it was his school email address. She said we should text him and tell him to look at it. Then she just grabbed my phone which was right by the computer, and, well, she texted him.’

Rebecca took a shattered breath.

‘How did she know his number?’ Lizzie’s voice was flat and controlled.

Rebecca looked at her and shrugged. ‘She just did. She knew it off by heart. Anyway, my phone rang about ten minutes later. It wasn’t a mobile number, it was a landline, a number I didn’t recognize, but I answered it anyway, you know, without really thinking, and it was Mrs Howe. She didn’t ask for Anna, she just started shouting at me. She said I was a bitch and she swore and said she would kill me when she got her hands on me. She actually said that. That she would kill me. I tried to say I wasn’t Anna, but I couldn’t get any words in because she was screaming so much. I looked at Anna and she was trying to ask me who it was and then she just snatched the phone from me and she started shouting back. She told Mrs Howe that she was a cow and that Dr Howe was going to leave her because he said she was no good at sex,’ she paused and shook her head, ‘well, loads of other stuff like that.’

Kate wished Lizzie wasn’t there. She wished she didn’t have to hear about Anna this way. She wished she could remember her, untarnished; she wished that for all of them.

‘When she put the phone down I was really scared. I told her we shouldn’t have done the film and that it was a stupid idea, but she said I had to realize this was real life and this sort of thing happened all the time. She said she wasn’t scared, and she meant it. Nothing scared her.
Ever
.’ The admiration in Rebecca’s voice rang clear as a bell.

Kate closed her eyes. Nothing ever used to scare her, either. Not when she was young. Not until she realized how much there was to be scared of.

‘What happened then, Rebecca?’ coaxed Jon.

‘Dr Howe called Anna’s phone.’

She stopped speaking and pulled more at the hole in her tights. Rachel took hold of her hand.

‘He basically told her it was over.’

‘What did Anna say?’

‘Oh my God! Crazy things. And all this mad swearing and shouting and stuff. It was the headmaster! And when she put the phone down she was like, “Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.” She said he was lying, there was no way he could love Mrs Howe more than her and that she’d show him that, make him realize what he wanted. She said she knew he loved her. So anyway, then Mum comes up and asks if we’re coming down for supper.’ Rebecca looked at Rachel and a weak smile flashed across her face. Rachel stroked her hand against Rebecca’s and smiled back.

‘Keep going. You’re doing fine,’ she said.

‘Anna told Mum she wasn’t feeling well. Mum asked if she wanted to go home, but she said she probably just needed a lie-down. Then Mum went downstairs.’ Rebecca coughed and shifted position on the sofa. ‘Anna started saying the best way to get Dr Howe back was to make him jealous. She said that he was always going on about how jealous he was when he saw her with other boys. Most of all with Haydn. That’s why she used to hang out with Haydn, because Dr Howe would get annoyed and stuff and then be major desperate to, well, you know.’

Kate glanced at Lizzie, who was staring at her knotting fingers.

‘She said she loved doing it with him afterwards.’ Rebecca looked up at Rachel briefly, but Rachel didn’t make eye contact. ‘So she rang Haydn and told him to meet her. She laughed and said it was like asking a kid if he wanted chocolate. He jumped at it. She said she would call Dr Howe later and tell him she didn’t love him any more and had decided to start with Haydn, and that would make him come begging on his knees. Then I went for supper and she stayed in bed. When I came up she was all dressed and ready. She told me to put pillows under my bed and we’d sneak out. She told me it would be fun, we were going up to the gym block roof to drink and she said I’d enjoy seeing Dr Howe’s face when he found her and Haydn together. She said she might even do stuff with Haydn to really wind Dr Howe up. I said I didn’t want to go. All I could hear was Mrs Howe shouting. I . . . I was scared . . . of what she’d said to me. I asked her again and again not to go. I even said I’d tell my mum, which made her sulky with me. She said if I told anyone she’d hate me for ever. So I promised I wouldn’t. “Swear it, Bec,” she said, “swear you won’t tell.” So I swore. Then she asked me again if I’d go too. She said it would be much better with me there. But I said I didn’t want to. I felt really guilty; I knew she thought I was being a rubbish friend.’ Rebecca’s voice cracked.

Hearing Rebecca talk was difficult. Watching her struggle, fidgeting, her foot tapping fretfully against the base of the sofa, the obvious pain she was feeling as she remembered the conversations she had with Anna that night. Through Rebecca’s recollection Kate saw an Anna she didn’t recognize, playing a game she should never have played, and she wondered with every syllable what she could have done as a mother to stop it.

‘I got into bed and read and Mum came in to check on Anna. Anna pretended she was asleep. Then Mum went downstairs and turned the telly on and a bit after that Anna got up. I didn’t say anything, and she didn’t either. Then she opened the door and went out.’ Rebecca looked up at Kate, and then at her mother. ‘I should have stopped her, shouldn’t I?’ Tears began to stream down her cheeks. ‘If I’d stopped her then she’d still be here.’ She looked up at the ceiling and put the flats of her hands against her face.