Follow Me Down (11 page)

I was about to turn and run back to Crofton when I heard someone say, ‘Hey, Buffy the Conversation Slayer.’

‘This isn’t funny,’ I hissed, turning to face DS Bone as he ambled towards me.

‘Come on. Talk to me.’

He nodded at one of the picnic tables, but I didn’t move. ‘There’s no point.’ I crossed my arms and I suddenly felt flat, like the sail of a boat, sagging on a calm day.

‘Humour me.’

I shook my head. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

I didn’t realise I was crying until I saw him put his hand into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a Greggs napkin and held it out to me, but I couldn’t look at him as I took it, mortified that he was seeing me like this. I didn’t even cry at my grandfather’s funeral. Not in front of anyone, anyway.

‘I’m tired,’ I explained, turning away to wipe under my eyes.

He nodded at the picnic table again and I sat down this time.

‘I didn’t sleep much last night,’ I said, with another heave and a sob as I dabbed at my eyes again. But when he didn’t say anything, I felt the need to fill the silence. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, I just know I need to do something.’

He sat next to me, his legs spread. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened?’ He clasped his hands together and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his knees.

‘I don’t know much.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

I told him everything I knew between sobs. He listened and when I was done, he took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. The sun was setting – it must have been about 4.30 p.m. – and I felt a prickle of panic. I hoped Olivia had covered for me, otherwise Mrs Delaney would be ready to release the hounds.

‘So this happened to your
friend
?’ he said, finally.

I nodded, circling one of the knots in the wood of the picnic table with my finger, then realised what he was asking. ‘No. This is about my friend. Really.’

And it was, but as I sat there, under the marmalade-coloured sky, I thought that maybe it was about me, too. Me and my body and how I’m responsible for it now, not my parents. I can drink and smoke and cut my hair and get a tattoo and when I have sex, it should be because I want to, not because I’m wearing a short skirt or I’ve had one too many cocktails and some asshole thinks he can make that decision for me. I guess that’s why I was so upset – so involved – because if what happened to Orla happened to me, I’d want someone to give half a shit.

‘And this happened last Saturday?’

I nodded.

‘Did you get a description of the car?’

‘No –’ I had to stop myself before I said Chloe’s name – ‘
my friend
doesn’t remember anything about it. She said it was too dark.’

‘Did your other friend see it?’

‘No, she doesn’t remember anything, just going to the party then waking up in her room. But it has to be the same guy, right? It’s too much of a coincidence.’

He looked at his hands. ‘And she’s sure she was raped?’

‘She said that when she woke up, she wasn’t wearing underwear anymore.’

‘That doesn’t mean she was raped.’

‘And
that
,’ I pointed at him, ‘is why she won’t tell the police.’

He looked at his feet, then rubbed his face with his hands. He was quiet for a second or two, then he stood up and I thought he was going to go back into the pub, but he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wallet. When he sat back down again, he opened it and handed me two business cards.

‘The top one is for my wife, Lisa. She works for the New Swindon Sanctuary.’ I knew it from my research last night. ‘Your friend needs to go for an exam, if she hasn’t already. And she needs to speak to someone. If she won’t speak to the counsellor at Crofton, Lisa can help. The Sanctuary is nothing to do with the police so tell your friend not to worry.’

I nodded. ‘Thank you.’ I stopped myself adding
Sir
.

‘The second card is mine, for when she’s ready to talk. She doesn’t have to speak to me, she should probably talk to a SOLO—’

‘What’s a SOLO?’ I interrupted.

‘A Sexual Offences Liaison Officer. I can arrange for her to meet one, or she can talk to me, if she prefers. I don’t care as long as she talks to someone and I hope she does.’ His gaze narrowed in mock disdain. ‘I haven’t known you long, Adamma, but if anyone can persuade her, I think you can.’

I felt a tickle of hope at that. ‘So you don’t think it’s too late?’

‘At the risk of sounding like a poster: it’s never too late.’

‘Even though she can’t remember anything?’

He shrugged. ‘She might.’

‘Not if she was drugged. I looked it up.’

‘She might not have been. It’s strange that she doesn’t remember anything. Most people usually remember stuff up until they were drugged.’

‘So you think she has short-term memory loss?’ I’d read something about that last night, too. ‘That fits, I suppose. It can be triggered by stress.’

He nodded, but I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

‘What?’

He scratched the corner of his mouth, then let out a long sigh. ‘Sometimes it’s triggered because the victim doesn’t want to remember.’

I frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t she want to remember?’

‘Because she knows who did it.’

TWO DAYS AFTER

MAY

Ostley Police Station wasn’t what I expected. I think I’ve watched too many cop shows, because I thought it would be chaotic. I thought the phones would be ringing off the hook and there would be police officers pacing up and down, knocking back cups of coffee. I don’t know why, it’s hardly Scotland Yard. I must have passed it a dozen times before I knew what it was. After Scarlett’s house, it’s the second largest building in the village, which isn’t saying much. It’s only fractionally bigger than the pub so, with its pitched roof and leaded windows, it looks like the other houses around it. If it wasn’t for the blue-glass POLICE lantern over the door, I might never have noticed it.

With a population of just under a thousand, Ostley shouldn’t have a police station. Like the Post Office, its days are numbered, and every now and then there’s a polite protest outside. I’ve seen the pictures in the local newspaper; lots of men and women in wellies waving grammatically correct signs. DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING.

I could see why they wanted to keep it; it was kind of lovely, with its tub of pansies and the posters about missing bicycles and bake sales pinned to the noticeboard by the door, but when I walked into it today, I held my breath. I can’t say that I’d thought too much about what it looked like inside, but I was surprised to find that the reception was white-walled and tidy, like a dentist’s waiting room, just without the dog-eared magazines. There were no surly prostitutes smacking gum, like on television, no crying mothers with crying babies on their hips, no drunk men singing ‘Danny Boy’, just a few plastic chairs and a yucca plant in the corner.

I don’t know how long we had to wait, but it felt too long, long enough to make me fidget. Mrs Delaney did too, she fussed over her hair and crossed and uncrossed her legs several times before she eventually stood up and wandered around the tiny waiting room. She peered through the window, then took a tissue out of her purse and wiped the dust from the leaves of the yucca plant.

It made me fidget more. ‘Are you sure it’s nothing serious?’ I asked for the fourteenth time when she sat down again. ‘Did they say what it was about?’

‘Don’t worry, dear.’ She patted my knee. ‘You’re not in any trouble. The police just want to ask you some questions about Scarlett.’

‘What sort of questions?’

‘I don’t know, dear.’

She didn’t look at me and I felt a shudder of dread. It wasn’t the first time the police had wanted to speak to me about Scarlett running away, but they always spoke to me at Crofton. They’d never asked me to go to the station.

‘Don’t we have to tell the Foreign Office?’ I asked when I noticed her fiddling with her wedding ring. I wished she’d let me bring my cellphone. I wanted to call my father, hear him tell me that it was going to be OK.

‘I’ve left a message for your father.’ She patted my knee again.

‘When?’

‘When DS Hanlon called asking you to come in. About an hour ago.’ She checked her watch and arched an eyebrow. ‘Actually, more like two hours ago now.’

‘Did you speak to anyone at the embassy?’

‘To someone called Chinwe. She told me that it was fine for you to speak to the police as long as you’re not under caution.’

I knew Chinwe, so that made me feel better, but I still had to close my eyes and take a deep breath as I felt the muscles in my legs begin to twitch.
Run
, a voice in my head said as I looked across at the door.
Run
.

Mrs Delaney sighed and checked her watch again. ‘They’re making us wait an inordinate amount of time given that this is urgent,’ she said, raising her voice for the benefit of the police officer at the reception desk who wasn’t paying attention. She sighed again. ‘We’ve been waiting over half an hour.’

Finally, the door next to the reception desk swung open and PC Hill looked across the waiting room at me. ‘Adamma Okomma?’ he said, as if we’d never met, as if he wasn’t the person who I spoke to every time Scarlett did this.

‘Hello again, PC Hill,’ I said with a pointed smile, standing up. But he didn’t flinch, just gestured at me to follow him.

Mrs Delaney and I followed him through the door and up a flight of stairs to the first floor. When he led us through a set of double doors into the main office, I was startled. It was more what I had expected – busy. Noisy, even. I don’t know what it looked like before, but it was clear that the room, which wasn’t much bigger than one of the classrooms at Crofton, with two smaller offices on either side, had never seen such chaos. There was a bank of untidy desks in the middle – two worn ones and three newer beech ones – suit jackets hanging on the back of each of the swivel chairs next to them. The phone was ringing and a woman in a creased white shirt, who was standing in the middle of the office, talking into a cellphone, interrupted her conversation to lean down and answer it, ‘CID?’

I missed a step, then missed another as we passed a whiteboard with green writing all over it. Scarlett’s name was in capital letters at the top and I turned away, stepping on Mrs Delaney’s toe as I did. I apologised and when I stopped to catch my breath, I glanced through the open door to one of the offices and saw Dominic in his Crofton uniform sitting slumped at the desk next to a man in a suit.

‘Dominic,’ I gasped.

He blinked at me a few times, as though I’d just woken him up. ‘Adamma.’

‘What are you doing here?’

Before he could respond, I heard someone bark, ‘Keep them apart,’ and looked up as Bones marched across the office towards us.

‘Bones.’ My heart stopped. ‘I thought you were based in Swindon?’

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked and when his jaw clenched, I wished that I could take it back. I shouldn’t have called him Bones there.

‘I called her in,’ the women in the creased white shirt said from across the office as she hung up the phone.

That seemed to irritate him more. ‘Take them into room two,’ he said, pointing the manila file in his hand at PC Hill, before marching over to the woman.

I heard them whispering furiously while PC Hill led Mrs Delaney and me to the office on the other side, and, as we sat in the grey plastic chairs he gestured at, I heard her hiss, ‘I got it, Mike,’ a moment before she appeared in the doorway.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ she said with a quick smile, nodding at PC Hill as he left, then closing the door and sitting on the other side of the desk. ‘Thanks for coming in to have a chat with me, Adamma. My name is DS Hanlon and I’m one of the officers investigating Scarlett Chiltern’s disappearance.’

‘What’s wrong?’ I breathed, my hands balling into fists in my lap. ‘Is Scarlett OK? Did something happen?’

‘No.’ DS Hanlon put the manila folder and legal pad she was holding down on the desk in front of her. ‘I just want to ask you a few questions about Scarlett.’ She looked at me, her green eyes suddenly brighter. ‘Is that OK?’

I nodded, waiting for my heart to settle. It didn’t.

‘I’ve asked your housemistress to join us because you’re seventeen.’ She glanced down and opened the folder. ‘Just.’ She smiled at me. ‘By a month.’

When she reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a Dictaphone, I felt Mrs Delaney tense. ‘That’s rather formal for a
chat
, isn’t it, DS Hanlon?’

‘I’m sure Adamma understands. You have one of these for when you do interviews for the school newspaper, right?’ She held it up and when I nodded, she smiled again, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. If she was trying to put me at ease, it wasn’t working. ‘I don’t know shorthand so I have to record everything.’

I watched Mrs Delaney sit back in her chair, her hands folded neatly in her lap, then turned to look at DS Hanlon again. ‘How can I help?’

She asked me to confirm a few details – my full name, date of birth, address – and when I did, she asked me when I had met Scarlett. ‘Last September,’ I told her, trying to control the tremor in my voice, ‘on my first day at Crofton.’

She wrote that down. ‘Were you close?’

‘We were.’

‘When was the last time you saw Scarlett?’

‘On Saturday night.’

‘Where did you see her?’

‘At her seventeenth birthday party.’

‘Where was that?’

The tops of my ears burned as I remembered that Mrs Delaney was next to me. I don’t know what was worse, being questioned by a police officer or knowing that I’d just admitted to sneaking out in front of Mrs Delaney. But I couldn’t lie.

‘In Savernake Forest.’

‘Did you speak to her?’

I started fiddling with my necklace and told myself to stop. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘We haven’t spoken in a while.’

‘You fell out?’

I nodded, looking down at the scuffed desk.

‘Why?’

‘We grew apart,’ I lied, and even though I knew the words – I’d said them so many times – they still felt strange, like a pair of jeans that were suddenly too short.

‘Grew apart?’

I nodded.

‘When was the last time you spoke properly?’

‘Not for a while.’

She looked up from the notepad. ‘A while?’

‘Not since last year, I guess.’

‘Since her sister Edith’s wedding?’

I had to take a breath before I said it and I hoped she didn’t notice. ‘Yes.’

‘I hear you argued.’

I nodded again.

‘About Dominic Sim?’

I felt it like a punch in the jaw and was too stunned to speak for a moment. I blinked at her and when she held my gaze as if to say,
Go on
, I looked at Mrs Delaney. She was so used to Scarlett and our drama that I thought she would give me a withering look, but she reached under the table and squeezed my hand.

When DS Hanlon realised that she wasn’t getting a response, she opened the manila folder and took out a photo, sliding it across the table at me. ‘We found this in Scarlett’s bedroom.’ I lifted my eyelashes to look at the photo, then looked away again, as my heart began to thump and thump. ‘Do you know what it is, Adamma?’

‘It looks like a credit card,’ I lied.

‘Really, Adamma? Why don’t you look at it again?’

I didn’t have to. I knew what it was. I knew the colour, the shape, recognised the grey line scratched back to reveal the number, but I made myself look at it as I wondered when the trash in my room was last emptied. ‘It looks like a top-up card.’

‘A top-up card?’

‘For a disposable phone.’

‘Why would Scarlett Chiltern have a disposable phone, Adamma?’

‘How would I know?’ I didn’t mean to sound so surly, but when I heard myself, I looked at the door.
Run
, the muscles in my legs twitched again.
Run
.

‘You’ve never seen her with one, Adamma?’

‘No.’ That wasn’t a lie, at least.

‘What phone have you seen her with, Adamma?’

‘An iPhone with a red case.’ I stopped for breath. ‘The screen was cracked.’

She nodded. ‘Why would Scarlett have two phones?’

My heart was beating so hard she must have heard it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Was she seeing someone?’

‘I’m the last person she’d tell.’

‘That doesn’t mean you don’t know.’ She sat back and looked at me. ‘You’re a very bright girl, Adamma. You write for the school newspaper, don’t you?’ She waited for me to nod. I didn’t – couldn’t. I was too scared that, if I moved a muscle, she’d know I was lying. ‘You know that Scarlett bought two theatre tickets for a play on Sunday night. I know you called the theatre to check that she’d picked them up. That was very clever.’ She paused again and I don’t know whether she was waiting for me to thank her for the compliment, but I didn’t. ‘Who was she seeing, Adamma?’

‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t.

I don’t.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, sitting forward with another faint smile. ‘You won’t be getting her into any trouble. Her family just needs to know that she’s OK.’

I felt dizzy and made myself take a breath. ‘I don’t know.’

She licked her lips and sat back. ‘Could she be seeing Dominic Sim?’

I thought of Dominic sitting slumped in the other office and panic started kicking at me. ‘Scarlett is capable of anything.’

‘Yes. But what is Dominic Sim capable of?’

Mrs Delaney raised a hand. ‘I think that’s enough.’

But before DS Hanlon could object, I heard my father and my heart leapt. ‘Where is my daughter?’ I heard him say and we looked up in unison at the door.

My father isn’t a big man, even if that’s what my grandmother likes to call him. ‘My son the Big Man,’ she tells him whenever we visit, fingers lingering on the collar of his pinstripe suit as she hugs him. But he isn’t big. Sure, he isn’t as fine as my uncle Som, who, as my mother always says, has to run around the shower to get wet. But then he isn’t as big as my uncle Oluchi, either. He doesn’t have uncle Oluchi’s big hands and great big laugh. My father is average, I suppose. Neither fat nor thin, tall nor short. Yet there is something solid about him, something immovable. He doesn’t raise his voice and throw his hands about when he loses his temper, like my uncle Oluchi. He doesn’t lose his temper at all, in fact. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, never even heard him curse. But I’ve seen him silence a room with a look and make men twice his size step back.

It’s a look that would derail a freight train, but it’s never been directed at me. He always has time for me, even when I call and interrupt a meeting or linger in his study, complaining about school or another hopeless crush. He never tells me that I’m disturbing him, just listens and nods in all the right places until my breathing isn’t as furious, then tells me to go to bed. And I miss that. I can’t talk to him about those things any more. The exams are harder and there’s more at stake – university, a future, freedom – and the crushes aren’t so hopeless. I’m seventeen. This isn’t puppy love any more. The boys are nearly men, when they bite they leave scars.

I suddenly wished that I was four years old again, back when my heart still felt new and my father would make me think that I could do anything. He’d stand in the doorway of my room while my mother plaited my hair before bed, and when she’d kissed me goodnight, he’d come in and tell me a story. There was one about a drummer boy and one about a leopard who gets his claws, but my favourite was the one about the little boy who had to cross the Niger River. Every time he finished it, I would tell him that even though I was a girl, I was that brave. ‘Of course you are, Adamma,’ he’d say, tucking me in so tightly that I couldn’t move and when I’d stopped giggling, he’d kiss me on the forehead and say, ‘You have a light.’