I bet he did. Spending time in an enclosed space with meathead Moast was not high on her to-do list. Crap. Now she’d have to face the music over this morning’s row too. She’d wanted things to cool off for a few days. Kip at a mate’s. Burgone looked as pleased as if he’d just paid off her student loan. Christ knows how many strings he’d pulled to get her onto this course so quickly. It wasn’t his fault he had no idea what he’d just done. She managed a weak smile. ‘Cheers.’
‘This is a great opportunity, Freddie,’ Burgone said. ‘And I know you’ll really make the most of it.’
She could already see the sarcastic grin on Moast’s Lego head.
Standing in the hallway, the Facebook account she’d opened earlier was still visible on her phone. There were photos of Amber grinning at the camera. This was it. Her account. Freddie watched video clips of her and her friends singing on the back of a bus, Amber’s eyes sparkling with mischief. There was a photo of Paul Robertson from behind, Amber holding an egg up so it was the same size as his bald head. The caption read: When your breakfast looks like your dad! Cracking! Freddie laughed. The sound snagged on her heart as she reached the last post. July 12 last year. The day before Amber and her father disappeared. The girl’s final words.
So many special people in my life. So sorry for any hurt I cause. Love you all. Forever. xxxx
Underneath tens of Amber’s friends had posted comments. Sad emojis. Broken heart photos. They started up a few weeks after the final post. As if enough time had passed that they could no longer hope for the best. Freddie scanned them quickly:
Come home soon!!!
Miss you foreva xxx
Thinking of you always xoxo
And a shiver passed over her, as she realised more than one person had posted the same message:
RIP Amber xxx
Why would they think Amber Robertson was dead?
He can feel the weight of her, her arms thin in his hands, her shoulders rolling, heavy. How can someone so fragile be so heavy? He had to hide her. This is his fault. He panicked. No one can know. He needs time to think. To fix this. He can still hear her screaming. He covers his ears. His heart is battering against his chest, like a dog on a chain going mental. Whoooof. Whoooof. Whoooof. Punching to get out. He feels like he’s turned inside out, that everything is backwards and he can’t quite grab hold of it. His hands are wet, slick. It’s her. She’s all over him. Blood. There is so much blood. This was supposed to be a laugh. Hot. Make him popular. This can’t be happening. It’s in his mouth. He can taste her. He gags. There’s a hair wrapped round his fingers. A long dark hair, stuck like when one catches you in a swimming pool. Cold and dark like pondweed. No, it’s cotton: a thread tying her to him. The dog in his chest is thrashing. Tearing him apart with its teeth from the inside. What has he done?
Kate hadn’t been able to sit still since she’d seen the video. Her laptop, black in power-save mode, was still at its abandoned angle on her dining table. Fifty-six years old, and she couldn’t bring herself to get any closer to the screen. Instead she’d focused on clearing up the mess on the kitchen floor. As she’d wiped up the sick and bile, she tried not to think of the girl’s pleading eyes. She forced herself to take another gulp of sugared tea. She’d changed, and put her soiled clothes in the washing machine.
She could still smell the acid of vomit, and leant over the sink to open the kitchen window. But the familiar square of garden, in which she grew sweet peas and strawberries, twisted and turned away from her. The electric streetlight played nasty tricks with the rows of houses that stretched away over Hackney. Somewhere out there was the girl. Terrified. Hurt. What if the boys knew she’d been watching? What if they’d made a note of her account? Could they find her? A shadow licked at the edge of her garden and she jumped. London, with its exotic blends, its languages, its music and food and dance, that dynamic that made it special, that had made it her home all her life, felt hostile. She was overlooked. An easy target. She let go of the window handle as if it had burned her. Instead she pulled the slim chain to unfurl the kitchen blind, small flecks of dust floating down onto her as she obliterated the city skyline she’d always loved.
She ran up the white-painted stairs to her bedroom, pulled the curtains up there too and fetched her perfume from the bathroom. She sprayed the scent in the kitchen, the tangerine and blackcurrant smell settling uneasily over the sour stench of sick. She would feel better when she knew they’d found the girl. Got her to hospital.
The doorbell buzzed and she jumped. It would be the police. It was a Friday night, presumably they were busy, it’d been just over an hour since she’d called 999. She slid the spyhole aside; the sight of a man made her heart rate spike. You can see the uniform, silly woman, you know it’s the police. Still, she put the chain across before opening the door.
‘Mrs Katherine Adiyiah? I’m PC Jones.’ The man drew the sounds of her surname out, unsure where the vowels sat. He held up his ID. He was young, with close-cropped dark hair, and shadows under his pale eyes. She wondered how long he’d been on duty.
‘Hang on,’ she said, releasing the chain. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Good to see people being security conscious. Better to be safe than sorry, Mrs Adiyiah,’ PC Jones said.
It was an absurdly normal exchange. Words you might say about putting an extra hour on the meter for the car.
‘It’s Miss actually. But call me Kate. Please, come in?’ She had thought there might be two of them, but there was no one else outside. The street was empty, apart from a drained vodka bottle discarded three doors down. Laughter and voices carried over from the road behind: people walking home, or on to the next venue. The gentle pulse of bass mingled with the hum of night buses, taxis, cars and takeaway delivery drivers from the surrounding roads. A man appeared round the corner, his face nothing but a dark shadow under his hood. She shut the door quickly.
PC Jones was standing in the living room, looking at the bookshelves that lined the walls. His eyes snagged on the well-loved copies that were turned out to face the room: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, A Testament of Hope by Martin Luther King. There was something about his manner that felt oddly invasive.
‘Please, sit down?’ She indicated the wingback that was at one end of the dining table. Her home was small: this one room served as lounge, dining room and study, leading straight into the open-plan kitchen. A two-up, two-down. Plenty big enough for her.
He hitched up his trousers to sit on the creaking chair. Kate was on good terms with the PC who worked with her at school, and would have liked to see his familiar face. Having a strange man in her home was only compounding the sense of violation she’d felt watching the video. But that wasn’t PC Jones’s fault. She’d witnessed a horrific crime: she had a duty to report it. She had a duty to that poor girl. He didn’t look eager to get started. She forced a smile onto her face. ‘Can I get you some tea, or a coffee?’
‘Tea would be great, ta,’ he said. ‘Milk, one sugar. Any biscuits?’ He rested his palms on his spread knees, like a spoilt emperor, she thought, eager and greedy.
She nodded. It was nearly 3am. She was discombobulated by it all. She busied herself with pulling the tea things down from the cupboard. She put out a cup for