The Heatwave

by Katerina Diamond

  ‘Was Mandy the kind of person to just get in a car with a stranger?’

  ‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t stupid. But it was pissing down that night, so maybe she did.’

  ‘Have you ever seen an old brown Cortina in town? It’s a real mess of a car, not the usual for these parts.’

  ‘Once or twice, I think, maybe,’ Allie said and her friends all nodded in agreement.

  ‘Has it ever approached any of you?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Has anything else like this ever happened, did anyone else ever go missing?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘And Mandy wasn’t the kind of girl who would run away?’

  ‘She was kind of messed up, I guess, but I don’t think she would run away. She never ever talked about it or anything,’ Allie said.

  ‘Messed up how?’

  ‘Same as everyone else. Family stuff.’

  ‘Her mum works up the newsagent’s, right? What about her dad?’ I ask.

  ‘She never knew him. Died before she was born. Her stepdad is in prison for dealing.’

  ‘How did he die? Her real father.’

  ‘Killed himself. Threw himself off a cliff or something.’

  I feel goosebumps and my skin runs cold. I ask the question even though I already know the answer.

  ‘Do you know what his name was?’

  ‘No, but he was a teacher up at the school. Got fired for sleeping with one of the girls then he killed himself.’

  This changed everything. Mandy going missing was clearly connected to the past, to that summer, to everything that happened. So, the person who took Hannah all those years ago got away with it and now they were doing it again. Why? Sixteen years is a long time to go without hurting someone, if that was your thing. I wanted to believe that I was seeing things where nothing was there but it was hard to deny that the one factor all of these things had in common was me.

  I pull a twenty-pound note out of my pocket and hand it to Allie. I can see her clothes are worn and she doesn’t really take care of herself. I wish someone had tried to make me value myself when I was her age, not that I would have listened.

  ‘Thanks,’ I reply, walking away. I hear them all swoop in on the girl who now has the money. At their age we would have found someone to buy some alcohol for us. I remember there was a guy who used to wait on the corner of the marketplace and he would buy alcohol for anyone who wanted, charging a two-pound fee for each purchase. He didn’t do badly out of that work at all.

  I feel a picture of the past forming in my head, like a book you read once and then when you watch the movie several years later, you know it’s not exactly as you remember it, but you aren’t sure what’s different. It would be easy to find out; all I need to do is go back home. I’m not sure I’m ready.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Then

  Jasmine had three large assignments to complete over the summer for her A Level interviews. The college had asked for a piece for each course she wanted to attend, as there was high demand for the ones she was interested in. She decided she wanted to focus on those rather than what had happened last night; she couldn’t keep torturing herself by thinking about Tim and what they had done together. If she told her parents about him going through their room then she would have to admit what she had done with him, why he was even in the house at that time of night. She couldn’t bear the thought of the look of disappointment they would give her.

  They had been asked to fill a seventy-five-page scrap book, so she planned to use five pages for each country they had visited since she was in her mother’s stomach. Her parents had put a world map up in their dining room, which filled almost a whole wall, and had flag stickers on all the countries they had visited, a few from before Jasmine was born. There was a slightly heavier concentration in central and South America, as her mother was fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and could get by with many of the local dialects.

  She ran upstairs and rooted through her wardrobe. She was almost out of clean summer clothes. The small amount of rain last night had made little difference to the suffocating heat – she thought today might be the hottest day yet. She found an old pair of harem trousers and a halter-neck top. They didn’t really match but she didn’t care. She scooped her dirty clothes from the chair and the floor before taking them downstairs and throwing them in the washing machine. She turned the machine on and then went straight to the freezer to look for an ice lolly or something because it was so hot, she could barely think. There was a freeze pop in the bottom drawer and she laid it across the back of her neck to try and cool herself down.

  The side gate to the garden opened and Tim walked through holding a heavy-looking messenger bag which he put on the ground immediately as if to hide it from Jasmine. He looked surprised to see her in the kitchen but came to the door anyway. She hadn’t seen him since he’d looked up at her from the garden in the pouring rain; they hadn’t spoken since he’d whispered words of affection into her ears as they lay on her bed. Was he even going to try and explain himself?

  He opened the door and stepped inside, looking through to the back of the house, presumably to check that she was alone. She had noticed he did that a lot. She was afraid to smile or be nice or anything. Which Tim was this?

  ‘How is your day going?’ he asked, his eyes boring into her, almost daring her to challenge him on what she had seen.

  ‘Felicity was asking after you. She’s got it bad,’ Jasmine said, partly to see how he reacted to the information and partly to make sure he knew she didn’t want to play his game.

  ‘Did you tell her? About us?’ he said, acknowledging what had happened between them. Was he just going to pretend that she hadn’t seen him in her parents’ bedroom? That wasn’t a dream, she knew it happened, and yet the way he was acting said otherwise. Either she was crazy or he was a very good liar.

  ‘No. I don’t want to make her feel bad.’

  ‘She didn’t mind making you feel bad.’

  ‘That’s on her. Where have you been?’ Jasmine nodded towards the bag on the ground.

  He didn’t move his gaze once from her eyes and she found herself inhaling, preparing for a period of less air. She remembered kissing him and how it felt to have his lips on hers. He leaned towards her, stepping forward at the same time so she had no choice but to step back and rest her hands against the dining table. Standing so close to Jasmine, her only option was to lean right back and stare up at him. He didn’t kiss her immediately. She watched as the blues of his eyes moved slowly across her face. When his gaze finally reached her mouth, he moved towards her, his hot breath reaching her lips long before she felt his soft, wet lips on hers. She wanted to push him away but there was nowhere to go. Her heart thumped as she let it happen, scared to tell him no, hoping this would be enough.

  She ran her hand along his forearm, She felt the veins and the downy hair on his skin. He pulled away, hovering close to her face, looking straight at her with his glistening mouth just millimetres away from hers. Was this all about making her want him? She hated that it was working. Her hand on his arm trailed down to his wrist and her fingers brushed against the knotted braid.

  ‘Where did you get that friendship band from?’ she asked, surprising herself.

  His smile faded immediately.

  ‘A good friend of mine gave it to me.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  He thumbed the knotted band gently, a softness creeping across his face, an expression she didn’t recognise. He had so many faces, she wondered if she had even seen the real one.

  He looked at her again, all trace of sentimentality gone, a storm raging behind his eyes.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

  The way he said it petrified her. He had never uttered two more loaded words in their time together. His statement felt like a warning, or maybe even a threat.

  The sound of her parents’
car crunching on the gravel outside startled her. They would walk in at any moment. She had to decide right now if she was going to tell them what she had seen him doing in their room. Telling them that would lead to a whole load of other questions that could put her relationship with them at risk – it might change what they thought of her, what they thought about what happened with Mr Morrell. She couldn’t tell them. She was close to Tim now; she could try and play him at his own game. She thought about her mother at her own age and wondered what secrets she had kept from her parents, whether she’d ever done anything like this.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jasmine muttered.

  ‘I need to go. I’ve got things to do.’ He pulled away from her and left, grabbing his bag from outside the kitchen door and walking into the guest house without looking back.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Sitting at the dinner table with her parents was hard for Jasmine. She felt as if she was lying to them all the time, because she was. Her biggest fear was that she would tell them that she’d seen Tim rifling through their belongings and they wouldn’t believe her. She knew full well how manipulative Tim was. If they asked, he could tell them anything. She suspected, maybe unfairly, that they had their doubts about what happened with Mr Morrell. There were lots of carefully crafted questions at the time about how much she may or may not have led him on. She knew other people had accused her of being the instigator of the incident, even with the video evidence. She didn’t think it would be a total leap for her parents to imagine she might have been less innocent than she had claimed to be.

  The silence at the dinner table had become unbearable and so Jasmine grasped for something to say to fill the void.

  ‘I have lots of washing to do, I’m out of summer clothes. It’s been so hot,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll put a load in after dinner. How are you feeling? You’re very quiet.’

  ‘Just a lot going on at the moment, you know?’

  Lisa jumped on the opening. ‘I didn’t realise you were friends with the Torrence girl. You’ve never mentioned her before.’

  ‘I don’t mention a lot of people,’ Jasmine said, trying not to sound snippy.

  ‘How did you know her?’

  ‘Just from around. I heard some talk about the vigil. The police say the evidence points to Mr Morrell. He did it and now he’s gone and they have no idea what he did with her body.’

  ‘What else have you heard?’

  ‘Just the usual crap. People found out about him coming after me at the fair. Some people said it should have been me, that I was the one he wanted to take and not Hannah. They are saying it like it’s my fault she’s missing.’

  ‘What happened to her wasn’t your fault, darling,’ Frank said. ‘That creep was always going to do something crazy like that. He’s got form. Would you rather it was you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Thank goodness Tim was there. That was some luck. He’s like your guardian angel.’ Her mother smiled, resting her knife and fork on the plate to indicate she was done.

  ‘Your mother and I finish work early on Friday. We thought maybe we could do a trip to the Indian restaurant and then go to the cinema together or something. We haven’t done that in a while.’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know, I’d like to go to the vigil,’ Jasmine said, before excusing herself from the table. She knew her parents would chalk it down to fallout from Mr Morrell’s suicide and she was happy for them to think that for once.

  Jasmine had barely touched her dinner – it was too warm to eat anyway – and so she took her plate to the bin and scraped the remnants away. She went back into the dining room to work on her geography project as a distraction from Tim, from her parents.

  The powerlessness of her situation was making her crazy. She pulled out the photo albums from their trip last year to Nicaragua. She had fond memories of the place. The landscape was staggering; it had felt almost prehistoric, a far cry from their quaint little house in their model village of a town. She started to go through the photos, the volcanic scenery making her nostalgic for a country she would probably never go back to. They had never been to the same place twice. She saw faces of people she had become close to and then, after they left, lost touch with entirely. She couldn’t imagine doing anything differently, but it occurred to her that they existed within this tiny snapshot of happiness and when they left everything likely went back to the way it was before. Were they really changing anything?

  Jasmine placed the pictures she had selected for Nicaragua face down on the scanner one by one and pressed copy. When she was done, she put the original photos back in the albums and returned the albums to the shelves. She sat and wrote an account of her stay there, leaving the space between photos on the first page blank for the country status which she would draw up nicely. Over six million inhabitants and a GDP of almost fourteen billion dollars. It was late and her shoulders ached from hunching over on the floor. She placed her copies inside the scrap book, ready to stick them down later when she had drawn her stats chart.

  She got a drink from the kitchen and then went back into the dining room and grabbed some more of the photo albums to go through them. She noticed how young she looked in the pictures and realised how recent that was; she had been fourteen – almost fifteen – years old. The girl she was in those pictures was playing with the other children. She felt so much older than that now.

  The albums for Honduras were next. They had visited when Jasmine was thirteen years old and built wells in several villages, as there was a severe lack of clean drinking water. She wrote a paragraph on how the country made a lot of money from mining but unfortunately the metal leaked into the water, making a lot of it undrinkable.

  She had made a good friend in Honduras, Maria, who still wrote to Jasmine sometimes. Her older sister had gone missing and the police had never found her, although Maria didn’t think they’d looked very hard. Crime in Honduras was a huge problem and it had the more homicides than almost any other country on the planet. She decided to use the Marcus Aurelius quote that her dad had told her once – ‘Poverty is the mother of all crime’ – but it didn’t feel right to talk about Maria’s sister in her homework. Once she had chosen her pictures of her time in Honduras, she decided to move to another room; it was a bit stuffy in the dining room. She took the next set of albums into the kitchen, wishing it wasn’t so warm. It was approaching midnight and her parents were in bed, but she was buzzing and she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She grabbed a bottle of coconut water from the fridge and sat down to her albums. She hadn’t noticed before, but Tim was outside in the dark, digging the hole for the swimming pool. Every day when she looked out there the hole got bigger but she never saw him actually working on it – now she knew why. Seeing him digging in the dark like this was like watching him dig a grave. It would be big enough to fit all three of them in. She shook off the thought – it was ridiculous, she was being melodramatic. She had no proof he was a killer.

  The Cambodian albums took a lot longer than anticipated because she couldn’t concentrate. Tim was shirtless because of the heat and she found herself staring at the tattoo on his hip that was illuminated by the soft solar lighting in the garden. It was a black rose with the words forever yours wrapped around it. She shrank as she remembered being with him, embarrassed that she had let him so close. There was also the dagger on his back. There was another tattoo on the top of his arm that she hadn’t noticed before. It looked like a pair of guns crossed over with the letter S over the top of them. If she wanted to get rid of him she had to have proof that he really was bad. She couldn’t let him suspect that she was turning the tables on him.

  She poured an ice-cold glass of orange juice and took a sip before going outside.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said, holding out the drink.

  He took the glass and she watched him drink, throwing his head back until every last drop was gone. Her eyes wandered down his neck, his chest, his stomach and then on to his tattoo. She wonde
red who he’d got that for. Was it the girl who gave him the friendship band he wore on his wrist? The dead girl.

  ‘I didn’t wake you, did I?’

  ‘No, I was up anyway. I wondered when you were digging that hole.’

  ‘Too hot in the day for that kind of work.’

  ‘Kind of creepy doing it at night though.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better get to bed?’ he said, handing her back the glass. ‘I have to get on with this.’

  ‘Not really tired. I find it hard to sleep in this heat. I’ve got some work to do anyway,’ Jasmine said before going inside and locking the door behind her, making sure he noticed her doing it. She grabbed her books and headed back into the dining room to work through the night. She looked back to the garden to check he had stayed there. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t afraid of him; the truth was that there was still this conflicting feeling within her. There was something wrong with him, there was no doubt about that. One thing was for certain: he had a plan, something he was working towards. Maybe she was part of it or maybe she was just in his way. One way or another she was going to find out what he was doing there.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Jasmine didn’t particularly remember much from the first few countries they’d visited; she was too young and spent most of the time either on a sling strapped to her mum or being cared for by elderly women not strong enough to do the physical work. Her dad loved to regale her with stories of their travels, particularly of the many embarrassing things she had done on those trips. Her parents had given her a cheap little handheld camera when she was really young so she could document things for herself. She still had the pictures somewhere.

  The next country on the list was Belize. She decided to take a break and see if Tim was still digging the garden. She went outside but he wasn’t there. The shovel was abandoned on the ground and it looked like he hadn’t got much further than when she’d left him out there a couple of hours ago. She wondered if he was in the guest house. She could go in under the pretence of making sure he was OK, under the pretence of wanting to be alone with him again. Her hand hovered over the handle and she considered what the worst that could happen was. She realised she had no idea what that might be.