He doesn’t open his eyes, but his lips move.
‘Alive,’ he whispers.
‘I know you are, I promise I’ll come back.’
He tries to say something else. His lips struggle to part, and words I can’t quite translate escape them. I have to hurry; he’s running out of time.
I stand up and stare at my phone on the table just behind Cat, I’ll have to pass her to reach it.
Her lifeless body is still slowly swinging, and the sound is even worse than the sight.
Creak and squeak. Creak and squeak. Creak and squeak.
I take a step towards her, my eyes darting from her face to my phone.
Richard groans, he must be in tremendous pain.
I take another step, almost close enough to reach my mobile now. I can see that the school tie around her neck is definitely the same as the ones we wore at St Hilary’s.
Creak and squeak. Creak and squeak. Creak and squeak.
Richard moans again.
‘Get. Out.’
He whispers the words, but I hear them loud and clear, because the sound of swinging has stopped.
When I look up, I see that Cat’s bloodshot eyes are wide open. She has pulled the chair towards her with her feet and is now balancing on it, standing on tiptoes. She starts to loosen the tie-shaped noose from around her neck. I have a mental flashback of us as schoolgirls, and remember all the sailing knots she once demonstrated using her shoelaces. My mind races, trying to process what my eyes are seeing, and reaches the conclusion that this is all some sort of sick trick. But why would she pretend to hang herself? And why would she attack her own husband?
Unless she knew about our affair?
I stand perfectly still as though frozen in fear, while Cat continues to loosen the knot. She stares at me the entire time with a look of pure hatred on her face.
Him
Thursday 01:15
Priya’s eyes stare at the phone then back at me.
‘Why do you have the cameraman’s mobile?’ I ask, hoping she has an answer and that I can believe it.
‘I didn’t know the phone was his. It was on the ground next to the broken glass, outside the back door.’
So she does have an answer, but I don’t believe her. Not anymore.
She looks scared again and I wonder whether I do too. If Priya is somehow involved in all this, then the smartest thing I could do now is play along. Hopefully she will lead me to Anna.
‘Richard must have been here,’ I say. ‘Someone smashed the glass in the back door to break in, and I’m sure he’s involved in this somehow. That’s the only explanation. I knew he was no good and I should have trusted my instincts—’
‘We don’t know anything yet.’
Her interrupting me is a first.
‘Why else would his phone be here?’
‘We need to stay calm and stop jumping to conclusions, Jack.’
‘Jack’, not ‘sir’ or ‘boss’ again, I notice. But then another thought pushes that one aside. Something she said earlier.
‘The fifth girl in the photo, you said she was married – who to?’ I ask.
Priya puts Richard’s phone back in her pocket, then takes out her notepad, flicking through several pages.
‘What was the cameraman’s surname?’ she asks, still turning them.
I doubt she has forgotten; she never forgets anything.
‘Jones. Richard Jones,’ I reply, trying to hide the mistrust from my tone.
Priya stops turning the pages and stares at what is written on them.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispers. Then she says something that instantly shifts all my suspicion from her to him.
‘It is him. The fifth girl is married to Anna’s cameraman, Richard Jones.’
Her
Thursday 01:20
Cat Jones’ eyes stay fixed on mine as she pulls the tie-shaped noose up and over her head before dropping it to the floor. She rubs the angry-looking red marks on her neck with one hand, while using the other to slowly remove the friendship bracelet that was tied around her tongue. She stares down at it, before looking at me again. I snatch my phone from the dressing table behind her, and start stepping backwards towards the door. With her white dress, it’s like watching a ghost come back to life.
My survival instinct finally exceeds my fear and I run.
I don’t look back as I race out of the room, along the creaking hall, and down the stairs. I trip and fall before I reach the bottom, twisting my ankle and landing in a crumpled heap on the floor. I stare at the phone still in my hand. I turn it on and feel a surge of hope when it comes to life. There is enough battery to make a call now… but no signal.
‘Anna.’
I hear Cat say my name, in a strangled, haunting voice. It’s animal-like.
I pick myself up and hobble to the front door, but my hands are shaking too much to open it. I can hear someone behind me. I don’t want to look, but I can’t stop myself from glancing over my shoulder. Cat is standing at the top of the staircase. Her head is tilted to one side at a strange angle, as though her neck might be broken. She starts to walk down the stairs, taking slow but determined steps, her unblinking eyes never leaving mine.
I turn back to the front door and yank the handle, almost falling backwards as it flies open. I find my balance and run as fast as I can, out of the house and into the woods. Branches scratch my face, twigs shaped like bony hands claw at my body, while sticks on the ground constantly trip me up. It’s uneven and boggy. I try to ignore the pain in my ankle, but it isn’t long before I fall again. I land hard, slamming into an old tree stump. The impact winds me and I drop my phone.
When Catherine Kelly never came back to school, rumours of her suicide started to circulate. They were started, of course, by Rachel. I think she worried I might tell someone the truth about what had happened, so there were some rumours about me too. I wish I had told someone. But before I could, Rachel slipped a naked photo of me inside my locker as a warning. I recognised her writing, scribbled in black felt-tip pen on the back of the picture, along with the date it was taken, my sixteenth birthday:
If you don’t want the whole village including your mother to see copies of this, I suggest you keep quiet.
So I did.
But it wasn’t enough.
I came home one day to find Mum crying in the conservatory. Kit Kat was missing. Despite buying the kitten for me, she loved it just as much as I did, and I had never seen her so upset. Not even when my dad disappeared. We did all the things other people did when their cats went missing in Blackdown. It happened so often that I’d never quite understood all those homemade posters people put up around the village – every telephone pole in the high street seemed to be permanently covered in them – but, as with so many things in life, it is different when it happens to you.
We searched the streets and the woods, asked neighbours if they had seen Kit Kat, and put up our own ‘Missing’ posters all around town.
Then a parcel arrived with my name on.
Inside, I found a black felt hat, with a grey fur trim.
I knew that Zoe had made it, I recognised the messy stitching. And the fur.
I only just made it to the bathroom in time before throwing up.
My mother didn’t understand, thank God. She thought I was ill and let me stay home from school. As soon as she left, I got dressed and took the shortcut through the woods to Zoe’s house. When nobody answered the front door, I walked around the back, but there was nobody home. I had a crazy idea to break in, but didn’t know how. There was an old shed, right at the very end of the garden, and I thought there might be tools inside that I could use.