What the hell is wrong with him?
‘Chill, Dad, okay?’ Milla pushes up to sitting, then swings her legs out of bed and pulls on the joggers that she’d left on the floor the night before. She grabs a scrunched-up sweatshirt from the bottom of the bed and puts that on too. Her dad is pacing her room and it’s giving her a headache. ‘I don’t understand why you’re so stressed about Mum going AWOL for five minutes.’
‘There’s a message on our answerphone.’
‘What, like a human voice coming out of a machine?’ Milla can’t help mocking him, even though she knows it will incense him more. She loves her dad, deeply, but it can be hard to like him sometimes. Especially when he’s like this, feeling out of control and lashing out.
‘You know, one day someone’s going to take exception to your smartarse tone.’
Milla glares at her dad, but forces herself not to come back at him. Her mum is an open book – so easy to read – but it’s different with him. She can’t always predict how he’ll react. ‘Who’s the message from?’ she asks instead.
‘That detective who interviewed Lucy. DC Bzowski.’
‘Oh.’ Milla’s voice lowers.
‘Yeah, exactly. She wants me to call her. It must be about Lucy, talking to her again; they’ll probably want a DNA sample too.’
‘Fuck.’
‘But why did they ask for me, not your mum? I know I’m Lucy’s dad but …’ His voice trails off.
‘Maybe they’d already tried her phone?’
‘Exactly. You see now why I need to track her down.’
Out of nowhere, Milla feels tears burn the backs of her eyes. She gives them a quick brush with the back of her hand. God, why didn’t Lucy listen to her last Friday night? Milla made it so clear. Stay away from those girls who are making your life hell. But for once in her life, Lucy decided to ditch her compliant – bordering on submissive – nature. And what a stupid decision that proved to be. ‘Does Lucy know?’ she asks.
‘I haven’t told her,’ Matt admits, looking towards the window. ‘She left for school about ten minutes ago. And she seemed a bit happier, at last. As though she thinks that paying Jess the ransom money has solved all her problems.’
‘Well, you can’t blame her for that. That is what you keep telling her.’
‘I thought it would work out,’ Matt whispers, more to himself than Milla. ‘That making sure Jess kept her mouth shut would be enough.’
Milla squeezes her eyes shut, then flicks them back open. ‘Maybe it will be. If Lucy holds her nerve. She can’t have killed Amber, can she, Dad?’
God, why did she say it like that? Like she’s asking him to make it true.
‘I wish I’d known about that blog,’ Matt mutters, frustration seeping out of him. ‘It’s so threatening, isn’t it? What she wrote?’ Matt looks towards Milla for assent, but she turns away. It’s strange. She feels more loyal to Lucy now than she’s ever done before. Now – when her sister might actually have done something terrible.
‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ she says instead.
‘Maybe I should take her away.’
‘Huh?’
‘I don’t have any school visits this week; I could work from anywhere,’ Matt explains, speeding up as he warms to the idea. ‘And Lucy deserves a break. We could go wild camping in Wales, or maybe Ireland. A chance for Lucy to clear her head.’
‘Do you not realise how that would look?’ Milla asks, her pitch rising. ‘You and Lucy running away when the detective wants to talk to you?’
‘It’s not running away,’ Matt counters. ‘A father and daughter spending some quality time together. We could say we missed her message.’
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ Milla stutters. She tries to run the idea through her brain – the risks and the possibilities – but it’s sluggish. Like it needs a service due to overuse. ‘Wouldn’t they come find you?’
‘But the alternative feels …’ Her dad’s words peter out, and as his breathing becomes heavier, the whoosh and whirr of it filling Milla’s room, she feels an intense urge to get rid of him.
‘Go and call Mum again,’ she instructs. ‘She was probably in an early meeting. We can work out what to do about that detective later. It will all be fine.’
‘You’re a tough one,’ her dad observes. ‘It’s a good skill to have.’
It’s not a skill, Milla thinks. It’s bloody-mindedness. She doesn’t ignore the fears in her head. She can’t. She wrestles them to the back of her mind and locks them away. And then she suffers the pain of them knocking against her skull as she pretends to the world. ‘I’ll come down in a bit,’ she says abruptly.
Matt scratches his forehead – as though he genuinely doesn’t know how to function – then finally twists away from her and leaves the room.
Milla sighs with relief, then pulls down a textbook and flicks to organic chemistry. She needs to revise, act normal. But the words just swim in front of her eyes. She folds at the waist and lets her head rest on the cool pages.
Of course she doesn’t know for sure that Lucy killed Amber. She hasn’t asked her. But her dad must think so too if he’s suggesting hiding out in some remote wilderness. And Milla can’t get the phone conversation she had with Lucy on Friday night out of her head. How angry she sounded. Like her elastic band of suffering had been stretching for months – pinging every time Amber did something cruel. It stretched to breaking point when they stole her sports bag Friday lunchtime, and then she discovered that Amber had stolen Bronwen’s letter. SNAP. Suddenly Lucy was flying free of it.
But Milla would never have suspected her sister of a violent crime if she hadn’t seen her later that night, when Lucy was missing, and she and her mum and dad were searching. It was 23.25; she’d seen the time on her phone. And it was a sight that made her blood run cold. Lucy crouching outside the RSPCA charity shop, heavy breathing like she’d been running, rummaging through a bin bag of donations. Milla had paused, confused, and watched her sister pull out a T-shirt and jumper. Then as she’d stood up, swaying a little, it had suddenly made sense. Her own top was covered in blood, and the front of her jacket too. And not just a few drops. Big smeary patches. Not knowing what else to do, she’d followed Lucy into the churchyard, and watched from a distance as her sister changed into the new clothes, then dropped her own ones into the bin.
Milla didn’t know then that Amber was dead. She didn’t know who the blood belonged to. But she knew that throwing the bloodstained clothes into the church bin was a very stupid thing to do. That’s why she waited until their mum found Lucy, and a while longer to make sure she wouldn’t bump into her dad, and then retrieved Lucy’s dirty clothes and took them to Kiln Lakes. Once they were stuffed inside scavenged plastic bags, weighed down with heavy rocks, and thrown into its deep centre, she knew they wouldn’t rise to the surface any time soon.
But burying the memory – and what it might mean – is proving a lot harder to do.
AFTER
Monday 13th May
Rachel
