Soul Fire (30 page)

My hand goes up to the burned, raw patch on my scalp. ‘I know. Zoe was very insistent about being sensible.’

She sighs. ‘Your friends told me that Zoe was covered up. Yet she has sustained an injury to her face. How would you explain that?’

‘I
can’t
explain that.’

‘There must be a reason, if she wasn’t drunk.’

‘Look, I just want to go home.’

Except I know they won’t let me go yet, will they? There’s still Meggie to talk about. There’s no way Sahara would have got through her interview without a long, emotional
explanation of what we’re doing here and how many tragedies have affected
her
.

Unless she kept her mouth shut because she has something to hide . . .

The two detectives exchange a glance. ‘We have no reason to make you stay any longer,’ says the man. He sounds as though he wishes he could lock us all up and throw away the key.

‘I can go?’

‘You have a flight this afternoon. You can take it, since none of you appears to have anything useful to tell us about the accident.’

‘Incident,’ the woman corrects him. But I can tell from their tone that they’ve already made a decision: drunken, drugged Brit falls over. End of story.

‘And Zoe? How is she?’

‘That is a matter for her next of kin. There is nothing more we are permitted to tell you.’

‘But we can’t just go home and leave her with no one to look after her.’

The woman stands up, opens the door to get rid of me. ‘Her parents are flying in around now. It’s up to them if they’ll see you at the hospital. If I was them, I am not certain
I would want a reminder of what happened to my daughter when her friends were not looking.’

The others have waited for me outside the office with our bags.

‘We thought we’d go to the hospital before we head for the airport,’ Cara says.

I’d hoped to go onto Soul Beach, to see if Javier has gone, to find out if anyone saw him leave. But it’s too late to make a difference there.

Maybe it’s too late for Zoe, too.

We’re dodging bikes and skateboarders on the boardwalk, pulling our trolley cases behind us. It’s hotter than yesterday and already the beach is packed. My skin seems to be burning
and my luggage feels heavier, even though I haven’t bothered with souvenirs. I don’t need plastic castanets or Barcelona mugs to remember
every
detail.

I think of Javier, and Gabe, and there’s a lump in my throat.

I’m walking slightly behind the others, watching them. Sahara keeps sighing, and I want to ask her outright: was this you? But I can’t, and so with every step, I get angrier and
angrier. Halfway along the shore, I realise I’m probably angriest with myself.

I let this happen.

Even if Zoe’s parents are willing to let us see her, I’m not sure we deserve it.

‘Keep up, Alice,’ Cara slows down as we approach the hospital. She reaches for my hand. ‘I know this is tough. Especially for you. But it’s not our fault, is it?
Accidents happen. When we get home, it’ll all get back to normal.’

‘Not for Zoe.’

‘No. That’s true. But you can’t feel responsible for everyone and everything, hon.’

Except I do, because the rest of the world seems untrustworthy now. The detectives investigating Meggie’s murder have two more deaths to answer for. They should have
made
Zoe talk
to them, found the photos, searched her emails. It only took Lewis a few seconds to find the one that Tim sent on the day he died, the one where he told Zoe things were getting better.

At least I have Lewis. It’s the geek and the teenager against the world. But we care. And maybe caring will be enough to help us succeed where the rest of the world has failed so far.

It’s the least Meggie, Tim and Zoe deserve.

Lewis is already at the hospital. I hadn’t expected him to be there.

‘I got here first thing. In case. I’m the only one with any Spanish, after all.’ He takes us up to the right floor in a lift. ‘Her parents just got here. They’re
with her at the moment.’

‘Have you spoken to them?’ Sahara asks.

He shakes his head. ‘Thought that could wait.’

‘So how did you persuade the staff to tell you where she was?’ I ask, when the lift stops and the others get out.

‘I told them I was her cousin,’ he says, and when I pull a face, he raises his eyebrows. ‘You’ve taught me everything I know about making up stories to get what you want.
Remember how you were Triti’s
school friend
?’

‘That was different.’

‘If you say so.’

No one seems in the mood for conversation. I sit down opposite Lewis. Ade and Cara sit next to each other. Sahara paces.

What a mess.

After a few minutes, a couple step into the corridor from a side room. The man carries a holdall. He’s tall and as pale as the white walls. She’s plump and has bright red hair, but
her jutting chin is identical to Zoe’s.

Ade walks steadily towards them. They look up, faces frozen, expecting a doctor, perhaps.

‘Mr and Mrs Tate, I’m Adrian. A college friend of Zoe’s. We were all visiting her this weekend.’ He waves at the rest of us, and we stand up, keeping a respectful
distance. ‘We’re so sorry.’

Mr Tate shakes Ade’s hand. Mrs Tate doesn’t move.

‘You were
there
?’ Zoe’s father asks, and I hear her voice in his. The same brusqueness.

‘We didn’t see it happen,’ Ade says. ‘There were a lot of people around and we all got separated and—’

‘Not what I’d call friends, then, are you?’ Zoe’s mother snaps. ‘Or maybe this is what counts as friendship these days.’

‘Eve, please.’ Zoe’s father turns back, touches his wife’s arm. ‘They’re not to blame.’

‘Her
friends
should have stayed at her side. She’s vulnerable.’

‘Love, we let Zoe come here because we didn’t want to wrap her up in cotton wool.’

‘We should have done, though, shouldn’t we?’ his wife cries.

She looks at us properly for the first time, and her flat grey eyes accuse me. Why does she look so familiar? I’ve never met her before. Then I realise, it’s not
her
, but her
desperation I recognise. My parents were the same after Meggie died.

‘We should go,’ I whisper to Lewis. He nods. Sahara is already halfway to the lift.
It’s not like her to avoid a drama
, I think,
so why doesn’t she stay?
Unless she’s feeling guilty at coming face to face with what she’s done.

‘We’ll go. But we would really, really appreciate it if you could tell us anything about how she is,’ Ade says.

Zoe’s father sighs. ‘She hasn’t woken up. They say it’s too early to know, that it’s better we keep her in this . . . limbo for now. But they also said that the
first twenty-four hours are the most important. Now it’s been, what, nineteen hours? She should be responding by now.’

Mrs Tate makes an odd choking noise.

‘We’ll be thinking of her,’ Ade says, and we nod and back away.

The lift is musty, full of stale air and misery. When we get to the ground floor, I have to run outside. The sun shines brightly. A little boy runs past, a yappy dog at his heels, and the kid
laughs as he throws the ball and the dog tears after it in a blur.

I’m desperate to be back on
my
Beach. And back home.

In that order.

At the airport, we go from check-in to security to departure lounge like zombies, glad of the tedious queues and rules that stop us thinking.

The security people give Lewis a slightly harder time because he has two laptops, but no one in our group seems to remember that he arrived with just one. Ade and Sahara disappear without saying
where they’re going. Cara goes shopping, even though she has no money left.

That leaves Lewis and me to find seats in the far end of the departure lounge, where we can talk. He opens up his own laptop straight away.

‘Did it work?’

Lewis looks up at me. ‘What?’

‘The Denial of Service thingy.’

He nods. ‘Of course. Can I show you something else?’

‘If it’s a piano-playing kitten on YouTube then I’m not in the mood.’

Lewis smiles. ‘I’ve been looking at the stuff I downloaded from Zoe’s first laptop. There’s some interesting information.’

He turns his laptop round to face me. There’s a list of hundreds, maybe thousands of files: emails, logs, documents.

‘Am I meant to be looking at anything specific?’

He turns it round again. ‘Well, it’s all potentially useful. This here is the background to Burning Truths: the domain registration, the hosting. But the most interesting stuff is
between Tim and Zoe. He keeps talking about an “insurance policy”. At first I thought it was life insurance or something, and it made me wonder if Meggie had had a policy he benefited
from somehow.’

‘She never took out that kind of policy, Lewis. She was only twenty years old.’

‘I realised that pretty fast. It’s not a policy. It’s the photographs Zoe told you about, the ones Tim hid in the locker. I did download some of them off her hard drive, but
only the ones she’d already uploaded, or was
about
to upload.’

‘
About
to upload? New ones? What do those show?’

He frowns. ‘Do you really want to see them now? It’s been such an awful twenty-four hours, I thought they could wait till we got home. They’re just a couple more odd close-ups
of your sister, but I don’t want to upset you anymore . . .’ Lewis looks up at me.

‘Now. Please.’

‘OK, let me call them up on my laptop. They’re fairly heavily encrypted – I thought that was a good idea in view of what’s happened – so you’ll have to give
me a few minutes.’ He starts tapping. ‘Anyway, I think the other pictures, the thousands she told you about, must be on the other laptop.’ He pats the messenger bag that
he’s keeping tucked under his shoulder.

‘Have you cracked the security on it yet?’

‘Give me a chance, Ali. I need to try that at home. But there’s plenty to keep me busy in the rest of the emails. Zoe set up the site without Tim knowing, and when he found out, he
was cross. He asked her to close it down, but she kept insisting it would protect them both.’

I shudder. Tim’s dead. Zoe’s in a coma. She couldn’t have been more wrong. ‘Do you think it did the opposite? Incited someone?’

Lewis frowns. ‘Impossible to be sure. I did look at the visitor stats for the site. Hardly anyone knew about it. There’s you – I can tell your location. There’s me
– I’ve hidden my location, but the times fit. And then there are several different locations in Greenwich.’

‘Zoe lived in Greenwich, though, before she moved here.’

‘True. So one is likely to be her. Another of the visitors is obviously Tim going online to look at the site, the emails he sent to Zoe tie in exactly with when he went online. But
there’s another regular visitor somewhere near the university . . .’ he hesitates.

‘
Where
near the university?’

‘I don’t want to freak you out, but I think it’s the halls of residence.’

I stare at him. ‘Where Sahara still lives.’

Lewis nods. ‘It doesn’t automatically mean . . .’ he doesn’t finish the sentence.

The airport’s lights seem to dim and it feels as though the temperature’s dropped by ten degrees.

‘Are you OK, Ali? Maybe I shouldn’t have told you now, not after all the other shocks.’

‘I’m pleased you did.’

‘Let me get you a coffee. And something sweet,’ he says, standing up. Then he adds, ‘I’ll only be over there by the cafe´. Not far.’

‘Lewis. Can I go online from your laptop here?’

He looks at me. ‘That was a fast recovery.’

‘There’s something I need to do before we board the plane.’ Or somewhere I need to go – the only place I can ever feel safe.

The actions of trying to log on to Soul Beach are automatic now, which is just as well, as all I can think about is Sahara. What I think she’s done. Why she did it.

Whether she’ll try to do it again.

‘Florrie, where have you been?’

My sister is standing on the shoreline. Her eyes are puffy.

‘Away, Meggie. I’m sorry. I’m back now, though.’

The airport fades away. My bare feet tingle thanks to the hot sand, and an intense warmth spreads through me like a flame, banishing the chill I felt moments ago.

‘You helped Javier.’ It’s not a question. She knows.

‘He’s gone?’

‘Between dusk and dawn. We’d gone to sleep in a big huddle last night, watching the most fantastic sunset. I woke up cold. Javier had been holding my hand but he wasn’t there
anymore.’ She’s trying hard not to cry. ‘With Triti, we knew it was coming. But this time, I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.’

‘I’m sorry, Meggie.’

Even though I was expecting it, losing Javier hurts like hell.

Without his smartness, his cynicism, the Beach will be a blander place. But of course, the sharpness was armour-plating. Underneath it was a hurt, lost boy who loved his sisters, his mother, and
a guy called Gabriel.

Life is change, Alice
. One of the last things he said to me. Perhaps it was him telling me he was ready to let go.

‘I had so much to tell him, Florrie,’ Meggie says. ‘About how much he helped me when I first arrived. He was the only one who never lied about how tough it could be here. I
should have thanked him for that.’

‘Maybe goodbyes aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, sis. The important thing is that he knew how you felt about him. But what’s happened here in the real world. The
things that have allowed Javier to . . . go . . .’ I hesitate, ‘they’re for the best, for the people he left behind.’

‘Honestly?’

‘I promise you it’s true.’ Helping Javier is the only thing I feel I did right on this trip, even though losing him forever feels like losing a member of my family.

‘We’ve still got each other, Florrie.’

I look at my sister, and I try to imagine how it’ll feel if I manage to set Meggie free. Will I
ever
be able to do that? I take a step forward to hug her, but she holds up her
hand.

‘I have to ask you something, little sister. I know you have to be careful how you answer, but does Javier going make it more likely that
I’ll
be going . . . somewhere else,
too? Has it helped you work it out? I don’t care either way except I’d like to be prepared, if I can be.’