What does she mean by that?
Jess can see the two girls now, further up the lane, in between the gates that protect the old railway line. In the darkness they’re just shadows, although Jess can see a plastic bag swinging from Lucy’s right arm. Jess should go up there, make sure Lucy knows it’s two against one, but something holds her back. It’s not fear. Jess knows that between her and Amber, they’d win that fight easily. It’s more that she feels like she’d be third-wheeling if she got involved. That this argument is personal between them.
She steps to one side of the pathway, close to the thick hedgerow, and tries to decide what to do. Their voices have lowered, and Jess can’t make out specific words anymore. Just a buzz of hostility. She watches Amber make a sudden lunge for the plastic bag – maybe that’s got the vodka inside – but Lucy is too quick for her, yanking it away, shouting, ‘NO!’ It must be slippery up there though, because Lucy foot-slides away from her and she drops onto one knee before staggering back up again.
It’s exciting viewing, Jess realises. And with that thought, she pulls her phone out, taps on her (shit) camera icon, and slides it to video mode. Then she starts to record. Amber is up in Lucy’s face now and the flash on Jess’s camera is just enough to make out their expressions. Both of them twisted with anger. It’s a shame the microphone can’t pick up their conversation, but Jess keeps recording. Amber reaches for the bag again and makes contact this time. They start wrestling with it, fighting for possession, and suddenly there’s a low thud and a higher-pitched crash – it must have fallen and hit the metal train tracks. Lucy drops onto her knee again, except this time on purpose, to protect the contents of the bag. When she stands back up, she’s holding a bottle of vodka out in front of her, like a weapon.
‘You broke the fucking bottle!’ Amber shouts out, loud enough for the microphone now. ‘You’re not going to get your precious letter back now!’
‘No, you broke it!’ Lucy screams back, fury spiralling out of her, the bottle swaying in her grasp. ‘And you’re too stupid to give me the letter anyway! You think I won’t use what I know; that I’m too scared to tell everyone who you really are? Well, you’re wrong!’
‘You know nothing,’ Amber spits out. ‘That fucking dyke is a liar.’
‘Don’t call Bronwen that!’
Jess’s heart starts to race. Who’s Bronwen? What does Lucy know?
Are she and Amber going to get in trouble? Just because her sister is so desperate to impress Sean?
‘Why not?’ her sister counters harshly. ‘That’s what she is, what you both are! Eating each other’s faces. Oooh, it felt totally right,’ she mimics in a high-pitched voice.
Jess gasps as Lucy charges at Amber. With the change in their positions, she can see that the neck of the bottle is broken. The cap is missing and there’s jagged glass at the top. It catches Amber on the hand. She yelps, and stumbles backwards, but flails her arms forward. Lucy lunges again, into Amber, and they both fall, out of sight.
There’s a noise in the hedgerow. Further up, where the bushes are thicker. Was it a cry? Is someone else watching Amber and Lucy’s fight? Jess narrows her eyes, peers forward, her heart thudding. But she can’t see anything; it’s too dark.
Her phone buzzes in her hand. The shock of it loosens her grip and the device falls to the ground. ‘Fuck,’ she murmurs, crouching down, fumbling for it in the darkness. A fox bounds past her, too fast even for a scream to rise up. Her breaths come fast and shallow. When her phone landed, she heard the clink of glass against stones, and she prays the screen isn’t cracked. A few seconds later, her fingers find its smooth surface and it lights up in response. Her breathing calms a notch. She takes a few deep breaths, then reads the message.
It’s from Sean. Her fingers shake as she reads it for a second time. She looks back at the bushes. But the cry came from a fox, she reminds herself. Sean’s not there.
She reads it again. So what does he mean?
And is there any way that it might not be really bad?
She flicks the message off her screen, out of view. Pushes back up to standing. The video is still recording – even though it’s only picked up Chiltern mud and stone for the last minute or so – and she angles it back at the railway line and the girls.
But there’s no one there. Both Amber and Lucy have disappeared.
She shivers in the dark silence.
AFTER
Thursday 9th May
Rachel
‘How many more lies Lucy?’ I shout, my decibel level reflecting the fury surging through me. My youngest daughter is sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, sobbing, her face hidden in her palms. Her phone is lying on the carpet between us, where I dropped it after watching the video that Jess Scott emailed her in the middle of the night. I know shouting won’t achieve anything, but I can’t help it. I’m done with her hiding behind her sweet nature. And with me always believing her because she’s supposed to be the good one.
Because she did lie. Brazenly. Lucy did meet Amber on Friday night. I’ve just watched timestamped footage of them together, up on the railway track by the path to the Ridgeway. But it was more than just a meeting. Lucy lashed out at Amber with the broken vodka bottle. Did she cut her?
Was it Amber’s blood on the cuffs of Lucy’s missing jumper?
No wonder Jess accused Lucy of killing Amber in the Co-op, with this video in her possession.
‘This is the last lie, I, I, promise,’ Lucy stutters, the muffled words leaking out between her fingers. But I want to see her eyes, to drill into them until I can excavate every last morsel of truth. Because the stakes are higher now. Lucy showed a level of violence I didn’t know she was capable of. I wish she was dead.
‘Look at me!’ I screech.
‘Mum, chill,’ Milla instructs, taking a step towards me, her voice annoyingly authoritative. ‘You want the neighbours to hear?’ She clicks her tongue, disappointed by my overreaction, but the sound ignites a new flare of rage inside me.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that!’
‘Stop, please,’ Lucy begs, her voice still like honey. She lifts her face to me. ‘I wanted to tell you the truth,’ she continues. ‘But I was scared that you’d make me tell the detective. And then they’d definitely think I killed Amber, wouldn’t they? If I was up there, fighting with her? And they’d be right, in a way.’
I gasp. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t talk crazy, Lucy,’ Milla warns. ‘You didn’t kill her.’
‘But I was jabbing a broken bottle at her face!’ She looks away. ‘And I said some nasty things. I was so angry. And soon after that, she ran up towards the Ridgeway, where she died. Which means I sent her to her death.’
‘You can’t think like that,’ Milla hisses, a toxic mix of fear and frustration emanating from her. ‘Amber was trouble. A drug dealer. It’s not your fault that someone who she’s pissed off, for whatever reason, caught up with her.’
In the subdued lighting, just my bedside light on, the images start to return. Amber’s lifeless torso in the bluebells. Her tangled hair. The bruises. All that blood.
I squeeze my eyes closed, breathe to loosen the grip of panic, then open them again. Lucy didn’t cause that.
‘So have you done what she asked?’ I ask, wanting to move the conversation on. Jess sent the video to Lucy via her school email address – I can’t bear to think what server that is sitting on – with the demand that Lucy unblock her as a contact on her phone. I know that messaging apps like WhatsApp or Snapchat are encrypted so I assume she wants to move the chat to one of those.
‘Yeah,’ Lucy whispers. ‘Milla said I should.’
Milla shrugs, the capable adult performance weakening a notch. ‘I get that it’s not ideal. But Jess holds all the cards at the moment, doesn’t she? She threatened to post the video online if Lucy didn’t unblock her.’
‘She still might,’ Lucy whispers, her face creasing again. ‘I didn’t know she filmed us; I didn’t even know she was there. And she’ll have that forever, that hold over me.’
‘Not when the police find the real killer,’ I say, trying to reassure her. ‘Then it will just be an argument between a couple of teenage girls, something that happens all the time.’ I know that’s not true. All those armchair detectives and conspiracy theorists, diving on any so-called new evidence and declaring Lucy the real killer, no trial, no chance to defend herself. But at least she wouldn’t be in jail. And keyboard warriors often have short attention spans.
Lucy looks away. ‘But it’s not just that,’ she mumbles.
‘You heard what Amber shouted,’ Milla explains in a low voice. ‘About Bronwen.’
I replay the words in my mind. Fucking dyke. You both are. Realisation hits. Is that why Lucy was so desperate to get Bronwen’s letter back? Because something more than friendship happened between the girls before Bronwen left? Hopefully Lucy knows that we wouldn’t care, but it’s true that Bronwen’s family – including her grandparents who still live in the village – are much more conservative. They might not approve. But it’s more than that, anyway. Working out your sexuality is a scary, often bumpy road for every teenager. It should never be used as entertainment.
I’m about to say something to that effect when a light flashes from the carpet. Lucy’s phone glowing with a new message. We all stare at it for a few moments, then Lucy picks it up, her arms shaking wildly. The crying restarts almost instantly.
‘Can I read it?’ I ask. ‘Whatever she’s said, we can deal with it together; you’re innocent, remember.’
Lucy looks up at me, a mix of fear and gratitude on her face. This Lucy is so much more familiar than the aggressive stranger I watched on Jess’s video. As she gives me the phone, I squeeze her fingers. Then I look at the screen.
I saw you. You killed my sister.
