Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

  The next day, Sophie did not knock on my door, call or leave a note. I looked for her in the usual places on campus: in the café, in the supermarket, in the park, saying goodbye to the odd acquaintance. In the end, I packed up my small room and left for Dedham without saying goodbye.

  On the spiral notepad at home, I found a message in my father’s elegant handwriting: ‘Sophie called. No point calling her back. She’ll call again when she’s at her grandad’s’.

  ‘Why didn’t she want me to call back?’ I asked my father, later that day, after he had poured his first gin and tonic. His routine had remained the same during my years away: 18.42 train from Liverpool Street to Colchester, cycle ride home, key in the door at five past eight, ten-minute shower, first gin and tonic.

  ‘Oh, something about staying with a boyfriend,’ Dad said.

  ‘With Will?’

  ‘Was it Will? Possibly.’

  Will was Sophie’s on-off kind of boyfriend, whose telephone number I didn’t have.

  ‘Did she sound okay?’

  ‘She was in very jolly spirits. She said she’d catch you before you left. I think she was planning to stay in Exeter for a few days with this Will chap.’

  ‘I’m surprised she’s staying. She’s been so worried about her grandad.’

  ‘Poor thing, having to cancel her trip.’

  ‘She can come and join me when he’s better,’ I said, knowing this was a distant possibility.

  Mum – who was cooking my father his meat and two veg dinner, and checking his glass for a refill – cut in.

  ‘Thought we’d head into Covent Garden tomorrow, darling, and get this backpack from the YHA. Apparently it’s the best place to get a good one.’

  I happily allowed her to move the conversation on.

  Internally, I was battling with my feelings about my friendship with Sophie. I was worn out by her expectations of me. I wanted a break from the guilt, from the second-guessing: had I been suitably attentive, suitably kind, suitably loyal?

  Nevertheless, I knew I had been in the wrong, and I went to sleep that night churning with regrets about my selfish behaviour and how this had impacted upon Sophie. I considered returning to Exeter to see her before I left, to go out of my way to prove to her that I was a good person, a good friend: I would never drink again, I would pay to fix the car windscreen, I would set up a direct debit to a wildlife conservation charity. I would call her every day to check on her grandfather’s recovery.

  Much to my relief, Sophie’s silent treatment did not last. Rarely had I known her to hold a grudge. We spoke a few days later before my flight, and we repeated ‘I’ll miss you so much!’ about a hundred times in the space of a forty-five-minute conversation.

  As the plane roared into the sky, I unwound like twine, twirling freely, free of the bind of Sophie’s neediness. By the time the plane touched down onto the shimmering tarmac of Bangkok Airport, my three years at Exeter with Sophie was like a dream, as though I had lived through them decades ago. Everything was geared towards what was to come. Nothing was about what had gone before.

  Now, everything was about what had gone before. For the past twenty years I had been on death row, unknowingly, in a holding pattern before the guillotine struck the back of my neck.

  A cold shock of fear stopped my heart. I was catatonic at the thought of what we had done.

  ‘Naomi, are you okay? Please tell us what happened,’ I heard Charlie say. To Meg, he said, ‘I’ve never seen her like this.’

  When I finally gathered myself, I spoke to Charlie, and to Meg and Cynthia and their husbands, and I apologised for scaring them and took them through the Facebook page betrayal, like an impostor who had been programmed to be Mrs Naomi Wilson. I explained how our row had escalated. It was like telling children a sanitised version of a terror attack by removing the dead bodies.

  There was no horror in my version, no substance.

  * * *

  I lay in bed, flat and still on my back, sweating into the sheets. Like a spectre hovering above my grave, I was separated from my body, floating away from my solid existence.

  Finally, Charlie’s breathing grew heavy. I slipped out of bed and crept down to my computer in the kitchen.

  The blueish tinge of my screen illuminated the space around me, heightening the sense of unreality. It might as well have been a dream. My thoughts were fractured, my limbs light, my sense of logic had disappeared. Logic would have told me that this could not possibly be real.

  A lie from Sophie’s lips was real. The catastrophic possibility that we had killed someone that night was a cruel joke, sick-making, literally beyond my wildest nightmares.

  So why was I typing ‘hit-and-run deaths, July 1999, Exeter’ into my search engine? Why was I following up on Sophie’s insane claim? Why was I wondering whether this unknown mass, which had hit Sophie’s windscreen that night, had had an identity? A gender. A family. A life. Had they been an old woman? A young girl? A drunk man? Why was I doing this? When, at the same time, I couldn’t allow it to be true?

  The search results popped up in blue type. There were a series of official websites, showing statistical reports and recent newspaper articles about the thousands of hit-and-run accidents that were recorded across the UK every year. Paranoid that my searches could be logged in some algorithm and stored up under my name, I tentatively followed some likely avenues, read some heartbreaking stories, saw some horrendous footage of bodies being flung into the air, and came up against many dead ends.

  After an hour of delving into the ether, through endless newspaper archives, clicking and clicking further into the black hole of information, I gave up. Without a name, I could not find an online record of a hit-and-run death in Exeter at that time, unless I registered with the research data service or digital newspaper archive, which involved giving out my name and my reason for the request. Seemingly, it was going to be impossible to locate detailed information in the middle of the night, on my computer, anonymously.

  There was a part of me that wanted to believe that my thwarted attempt to find evidence of this supposed accident proved that it hadn’t happened, but I couldn’t help the brooding in the back of my mind. My failure to find answers here and now left me hanging in a vast limbo land of possibilities.

  The thought of seeing Sophie again was ghastly, but I would have to confront her, in a calmer state, to find out more, to glean the truth.

  My mouth was dry. I needed a drink. I rinsed one of the dirty glasses that had been left on the side from the dinner party and filled it with the last of the Burgundy.

  As I sipped it, I thought of other options beyond public records. Was there anyone I could call from my university days? Someone might have heard about a hit-and-run incident, if it had indeed occurred. Those who had stuck around after the end of term might have seen it reported in the local papers or driven past a police sign at the scene. Although few of the students I had known had lingered after the end of term, and the halls had been half-empty when I had packed up my room to leave for Dedham – it had been a popular day to leave, following the last of the final exams the day before – there was still the possibility that they had found out about the accident afterwards.

  Sophie had not made it easy for me to make other friends during that era, and I had not kept in touch with anyone after I left. The handful of ex-students who followed me on Facebook would be surprised to hear from me randomly, and I risked raising suspicions about my motives for asking. Nobody should know I was looking into an incident back then. Not another soul.

  Sophie was the only one with all the facts. Earlier, I had shut her down, unable to hear it, but I needed to know the truth.

  The digital clock on the range cooker read 02:34.

  I waited until six o’clock to text her.

  Meet me at the Devil’s Punch Bowl at 7 a.m.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Across the empty car park, Sophie could see Naomi cradling a blue Thermos mug. The dead light and the f
ine rain seemed to flatten her sweet features. She looked grey and haunted.

  As Sophie walked towards her friend, the caw of birds was louder than any other noise. When Sophie thought of the world waking up around them, she thought of car engines and bulldozers and drills, like invaders; the noise of evolution thundering forward. She wanted humankind to halt progress from this moment on, suspend them in the peacefulness of birdsong, right now, forever. Maybe if the world beyond the two of them found peace, if it wrapped itself around them both like a blanket, her beleaguered brain would rest. Over the years, the temptation to tell Naomi had lurked as a dreamlike possibility. Now it seemed that a landmine waited for them on their walk through the wet terrain of the heathland, and it was poised to blow them apart. She thought of the Gandhi quote in black lettering on the back of the postcard that Naomi had given her for her birthday a few years back: ‘The road to peace. Peace is the road’. She silently challenged Gandhi to help them find peace for their road. Bombs or Armageddon or a plague or some other world-ending nightmare seemed preferable to the admission she was about to make to Naomi.

  With the cuttings close to her chest, she was flying, scudding over the ground, delirious with the sense of impending change. If the articles had been lost or damaged in the seconds it would take her to walk across the car park, there would be no replacements for them, or so she felt. Of course, records of Jason Parker’s life could be found in libraries, or online, but these yellowed, brittle papers of that life-changing night belonged to Sophie, and they were as defining to Sophie as her own birth certificate.

  With that sense of ownership burning inside her, she wasn’t entirely sure of how much she was ready to reveal to Naomi. Her moral compass was whizzing round like helicopter blades.

  Some of the details of that night would have to remain a secret forever, but how many could be shared? She was nervous about Naomi’s reaction, regretting agreeing to this remote location so early in the morning. Last night, Naomi had pushed her, hurting her, and Sophie hoped she would be safe.

  Automatically, Sophie leant in to kiss Naomi on the cheek, but Naomi reeled back and began to walk on ahead. Sophie jogged after her as she strode along the path, along the rim of the bowl valley, until they were out of the woods. They arrived at the Celtic Cross on the top of Gibbet Hill. They stopped there to look out across the panorama, which on a clear day showed green fields stretching all the way to London. Today, they could barely see to the bottom of the hill. As Sophie gathered her breath, she thought about the Unknown Sailor, who had been brutally murdered here hundreds of years ago by three villainous highwaymen. The murderers’ bodies had been hung on this hill, near to where they had slain their victim, as a warning to other criminals.

  The atmosphere of those four dead men seemed to cling to this beauty spot, like the mist to the heather, white and solid, tacky almost.

  Not a soul had walked through it before them that morning. Or so it seemed.

  And if they had, Sophie felt sorry for them. Only unhappiness and troubled thoughts would bring them into this damp, empty countryside this early. The contented were snoozing under their duvets.

  ‘We’ll go this way,’ Naomi said.

  They dropped down into the heathland, Naomi up ahead, charging along.

  The gorse spiked Sophie’s legs through her jeans.

  Her hands were cold, and her body burning hot. Zipped, still, into the inside pocket of her down jacket nestled the papers that would change everything.

  Sophie waited for Naomi to engage, to ask her the relevant questions. She braced herself, mentally preparing. She would not gabble the events. She wanted to hone her answers, as though she were explaining it to a judge and jury.

  After fifteen minutes of tramping through the narrow pathways of mud and stone, the path widened and Naomi dropped back to walk by her side.

  She spoke quietly, hardly audible over the brush of fern at their calves. ‘Had you seen anyone on the road before the accident?’ she whispered. A puff of her cold breath shot out in the small space between them.

  ‘No, the weather was bad, remember?’ Sophie replied.

  That first sight of Jason Parker’s slanted eyes under his black umbrella came to Sophie in a rush.

  ‘How did you hit him?’

  ‘You distracted me. Shouting and singing and turning the lights on and off. I couldn’t concentrate.’

  ‘But had you actually seen what hit the windscreen?’ Naomi asked.

  Lit up inside her, Sophie remembered the instant recognition and the hate she had felt for Jason Parker. She dug her fingernails into her palms, imagining the steering wheel pressing there. The night was coming back to her, so clearly into her mind: how, one minute, she had felt that strong surge of emotion, and the next, the unidentified thing had bounced onto her windscreen. What concerned her, now, was the in-between bit, the space that had been filled with an action, with her desire.

  ‘No. It was dark. It happened too quickly.’

  ‘So how do you know it was a person?’

  The thud had been like an alien dropping onto the car. It had borne no connection to the man walking beside the road. It had no form, no approach, no clear journey or landing.

  She swallowed hard. ‘I went back after I dropped you off.’

  Naomi’s footsteps faltered. ‘You actually saw it?’

  ‘Him. Yes. I saw his body.’

  Naomi had stopped and put her face into her hands. ‘Oh my god.’

  Sophie’s chest expanded wide to encompass the return of that heart-stopping terror, and she recalled how the indent of his flung form had been like a black cardboard cutout in the green foliage. As she had approached, the fear had loaded itself inside her like a series of bullets in a barrel. The brambles had torn at her shins. She had pushed through the deep undergrowth to reach the body. Stunned and revolted, she had lifted his arm. Before the limb had had time to flop back, Sophie had felt its deadness, its dead weight, in her heart, and she had bolted back to the car. Born to run. Born to run away.

  ‘What did you do then? Why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘I drove to Deda’s.’

  ‘You drove all the way back to your grandad’s that night?’

  ‘It was a reflex. I didn’t know what else to do. I just drove and drove. I was in shock.’

  Naomi began to walk again.

  ‘And your grandad knew it was a man? All this time?’

  ‘I never told him.’

  ‘But you think he knew?’

  ‘He was very ill, pumped full of chemicals, but he fixed up that windscreen as though he knew.’

  ‘He knew you’d killed someone, but you never actually said? Is that what’s happening here? I’m supposed to just know it’s true? How do I know that?’

  Sophie let Naomi’s insult slide, understanding that Naomi would not want to accept what she was telling her. A wry amusement pooled in Sophie’s chest. The evidence was in her jacket, but she was stalling for a moment or two, enjoying Naomi’s discomfited, childish denial.

  ‘But I am telling you, it happened.’

  ‘Do you even know who it was?’ Naomi asked, almost shouting now.

  ‘He was lying on his front. It was dark,’ Sophie said, unzipping her jacket, realising how welcome the cold air was on her chest as she pulled out the folded piece of newspaper.

  ‘What’s that?’ Naomi’s head jerked back.

  ‘Have a look.’

  But Naomi simply stared at it.

  ‘Please,’ Sophie begged.

  As Naomi put her hand out to take it, the diamond of her engagement ring fell to the left, her flesh shrunken by the cold, perhaps, or by terror.

  ‘He wasn’t found for a few weeks,’ Sophie said, watching as Naomi slid out the short article outlining the discovery of the body. Sophie wondered and waited to see if Naomi would recognise the name, almost certain she would not. Purposefully, she had brought her the article without a photograph. Sophie was like a doctor, drip-feeding th
eir terminally ill patient with information on a need-to-know basis, to soften the blow. Perhaps Naomi never need know his true identity. Perhaps the archived newspapers on a library’s microfiche, or scanned into an online database, would be damaged and the photographs too faded for her to ever recognise him. Perhaps.

  * * *

  The Exeter Local

  * * *

  5th August 1999

  * * *

  YOUNG MAN KILLED IN HIT-AND-RUN

  * * *

  A 22-year-old student, Jason Parker, died in an alleged hit-and-run crash in Exeter.

  Parker was reported missing by his mother, Ilene Parker, two weeks prior to the discovery of his body, which was found in the undergrowth close to Stoke Road.

  In a statement, Devon and Cornwall Police said: ‘The investigation into the young man’s death is in the early stages, but it is believed his injuries are consistent with being involved in a road traffic collision.’

  The area was thoroughly searched, police added, but the vehicle has not been found.

  A post-mortem is due to be carried out today and officers continue to make local enquiries.

  A gargled breath rattled from Naomi as she read. ‘He was a student at Exeter?’

  The piece of paper fluttered to their feet, out of place in the natural landscape.

  Naomi’s blue eyes fixed on Sophie, as bright and brilliant as pieces of sea glass.

  ‘Yes, he was a student,’ Sophie exhaled the words.

  Sophie picked up the article and zipped it away in her pocket.

  ‘We could have walked past him in the halls. We could have stood in line with him at the canteen,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Not necessarily. Exeter has over twenty thousand students.’

  ‘But what if he was at that party at the pub?’