Secret Meeting (19 page)

When we came to the edge of the woods that day, all scraped and scratched and doubled over with stitches, we found ourselves in the middle of a housing estate. I don’t think either of us could have run any further. Annie had ricked her ankle and was hobbling badly, and now that we had stopped I could feel my cuts throbbing, making me feel sick.

We managed to stagger to the nearest house and ring the bell. It was an old lady who answered the door. I was just so relieved that she was old! She looked a bit like my gran. She was horrified when she saw the state we were in. We tried to tell her what had happened, but Annie was sobbing too much and I was shaking so violently I could hardly speak.

In the end I just begged to be allowed to ring my mum; but even then, when I heard Mum’s voice, all I could do was weep. The old lady had to take the phone from me and tell Mum where we were. Then Annie rang home and Rachel was there, and I heard her screaming down the phone.

“Where are you? Where have you been? I’ve been going crazy! We’ve called the police!”

After that, it is all a bit of a blur. Mum arrived in a cab, and Rachel’s mum in her car, and Rachel in the police car, and we had to tell the police the whole story. We had to do it in front of our mums. That was almost the worst part. The old lady said she knew the cottage where we had been; she said it had stood empty for months. It was empty when the police went round to investigate. The woman who had pretended to be Harriet had disappeared. But she had left a note which said, I AM SO SORRY. My bag was still there, though not my mobile.

The police told us that they’d put a trace on the phone, but she must have dumped it somewhere ’cos it’s never turned up. Ages afterwards, Annie came across the number written on a scrap of paper in her purse. “Megan’s mobile”. She wanted me to try ringing it, just to see, but I wouldn’t; I would have been too scared, in case anyone answered. I told Annie that she ought to throw it away.

“We don’t want to keep being reminded!”

It was like with my bag. It still had all my stuff in it, but I just couldn’t even bear to touch it, it was like it had been contaminated, like diseased fingers had pawed and palped at it, so Mum emptied everything out and put the bag in the dustbin. I said to Annie that she should do the same with my mobile phone number.

There was a time when Annie would have argued, or even rung the number herself, but sometimes, these days, she actually listens to what I say. Sometimes she even does what I tell her! Which is what she did on this occasion.

“I ’spect you’re probably right,” she said. And lo and behold, she screwed up the paper and tossed it into the bin. I felt a whole lot better once she’d done that. Even if the phone did turn up one day, I couldn’t ever bring myself to use it again.

Another thing the police did was take Annie’s computer away. I don’t know exactly what they do when they take computers away, but I think they were hoping to find out who it was that Annie was talking to in the chatroom. I mean, it was obviously the same person that was pretending to be Harriet Chance pretending to be Harriet’s daughter Lori, but what they wanted to know was:
who was this person
?

Me and Annie both had to go to the police station, with our mums, and look through all these photographs in the hope that one of them would turn out to be her. The woman. We looked and looked as hard as we could, until our eyes started aching with the strain of it, but there wasn’t any photograph that was even the least little bit like. I felt quite guilty that we couldn’t be more helpful. There was this nice policewoman who told us to take our time and not to worry if we couldn’t identify anybody, but I felt that we had behaved so stupidly, and put everyone to so much trouble, not to mention upsetting our mums, and Annie’s dad, and Rachel, that I really would have liked to be able to point my finger and say “That one!” But in the end I couldn’t, and neither could Annie.

We couldn’t even be helpful about the car. All we could remember for sure was that it was red. So then we
had to look at pictures of cars, and Annie thought it was a VW and I thought it was a Ford, and neither of us had noticed the number at all. Not even just one digit. Not even a letter! But I remembered the name “Jan” in the books, and “Love from Mummy,” and then a bit later I remembered how one of the books had had the words “Janis Patmore: her book” written in it. I told Mum, and Mum said we must tell the police immediately. It turned out to be the clue that they needed, ’cos they actually managed to trace the woman. She hadn’t really bothered to cover her tracks, so once they’d got the name it was quite easy. Maybe – this was what Mum said – she secretly wanted to be caught. “To stop her doing to anyone else what she did to you.”

She obviously felt bad about it, or she wouldn’t have left the note saying sorry. And what the police discovered was really sad. Janis Patmore had been the woman’s daughter, her only daughter, and just a few months ago she had been killed in a terrible motor accident. She had only been twelve years old, and Harriet Chance had been her favourite author, just like she is mine.

The police said they thought the woman’s brain had got muddled by grief, and that she had gone into the chatroom hoping to find her lost daughter – and instead,
through Annie, she had found me. With one part of her brain, the muddled part, she might actually have thought that I
was
her daughter. But with the other part she would have known that I wasn’t; which was why, at the end, she had come to her senses and shouted at us to go. It was like she had suddenly woken up to the truth and realised what she was doing.

When Mum heard this she said, “That is so tragic! The woman needs help, not punishment.” The police assured us that she was getting help, and Mum said “Thank goodness. I know that what she did was terribly wrong, but she was obviously beside herself.” And then she said, “That poor woman!”

I was somewhat indignant, at first. I mean, that poor woman had given me and Annie the worst fright either of us had ever had; and as I said to Mum, “Suppose she hadn’t let us go?”

Mum said, “Then I would probably have ended up every bit as distraught and disturbed as that poor soul.” She said that losing a child was just about the worst thing that could happen to a parent, and I knew that I should feel sorry for the woman, and I do try to, thought it is not easy. Mum says that when I’m older I will be more understanding. At the moment, it is still too close and I
still get too scared. But sometimes I find myself remembering how the woman spoke on the answerphone, saying “Darling, where are you?” and “Please speak to me” and then I do, genuinely, feel sorry for her and think that maybe one day I shall be able to forgive her.

In the meantime, our story has been all over the papers, and on the radio and TV. It has been so embarrassing and horrible! I have felt all the time that everyone is looking at me and going, “That is the girl who was so stupid and has caused so much trouble.” For ages I didn’t want to go out for fear of being stared at. Annie felt the same. She always used to say that when
she grew up she wanted to be a celeb, but I think she has changed her mind. She says that being famous is no fun and she would just like to be plain Annabel Watson that no one has ever heard of.

Our mums, I must say, were not very sympathetic. They were right at the beginning, but once they had got over the first shock, and the relief at having us back, they became a bit stern and told us that we had brought it all on ourselves. Mum did say that at least if other children could learn from our mistakes it would be one good thing to come out of “the whole sorry episode”. She said, “You have both got off very lightly, and if a little bit of embarrassment is the price you have to pay, so be it.”

I couldn’t really argue with her. Even now when I think what
could
have happened, I get so tied up inside that I have to immediately start doing multiplication tables very quickly in my head, or gabbling nonsense like Mary-had-a-little-lamb, its-fleece-was-white-as-snow-as-snow-as-snow, until the knots have untied and the panic has stopped.

Before that terrible day, I don’t think, probably, that many people at school knew who we were. We were just nonentities. Now – unfortunately – we are known
throughout the school. We’ve had visits from the police, we’ve had lectures from teachers, we’ve even had a talk from Mrs Gibson in morning assembly, everybody from Year Seven to the Sixth Form, warning us about the dangers of meeting strangers from chatrooms. Mrs Gibson didn’t actually mention me and Annie by name, but by then we’d been in the papers, so she didn’t have to. Everybody knew. Heads turned, all over the hall. People around us started whispering. In the playground at break we could feel that we were being pointed at and talked about.

Most of the people in our class were really nice and said that what had happened could just as easily have happened to any of them – “We can all make mistakes!” But one or two said how dumb could you get, and one girl, Rozalie Dunkin, even blamed us for the fact that her parents had now taken her computer away and would only let her use it under supervision. She said it was so unfair.

“I’d never do anything that stupid!”

Me and Annie hung our heads, not knowing what to say, but another girl came to our rescue. Katie Purvis. (Who we are now really good friends with.) Katie pointed out that
at the time
you don’t always realise you’re being stupid.

“If you realised, you wouldn’t do it.”

Rozalie just tossed her head and said, “
I’d
realise. I’m not an idiot! Now we’ve got to put up with all these boring lectures.”

Fortunately, not everyone thought they were boring, but Annie and me did feel quite bad about it.

We’ve both had to go for counselling (though not together). We’ve had to talk about what happened, and say how we feel. I didn’t want to, at first. I didn’t even want to think about it, but you can’t always choose what you’re going to think about. Thoughts pop into your brain when you are least expecting them. So in the end I started talking, telling it all over again, though I’d already been through it with Mum, and the police. And after a while it started to get easier, so that I now feel a bit better than I did. But I know that it will always be
with me, and that I will never again do anything so foolish, not if I live to be a hundred.