by SJI Holliday
‘They arranged it on Facebook. We didn’t see it until it was too late. I’m shocked at how quickly the rumours spread, how quickly people got fired up . . .’
‘I’m not. Remember Chris Jefferies? Didn’t take much for him to become suspect number one. Trial by media. I suppose mine was trial by smoke signals. You hardly need social media in a town like this. People seem to know bloody everything the minute it happens.’ He pauses, starts to cough.
‘Do you need some water?’
He nods, and she lifts the cup from his cabinet and directs the straw between his parched lips.
‘Sorry, Lucas, but what did you mean when you said you should’ve told us everything? I thought you did tell us everything, about your friendship with Katie . . . Was there something you missed? Something that might help?’
‘A couple of things, yes.’ He sighs. ‘Katie won some money. On a scratch card.’
He starts to cough, and she holds the plastic beaker up to his mouth again. He sips. She places the cup back on the stand and pulls a tissue from the box. Wipes his mouth.
‘Thanks. Kind of humiliating, this. Being helpless.’
She can feel his embarrassment coming off him in waves. Don’t worry about that, she thinks. Just be bloody grateful the fuckers didn’t kill you.
‘This scratch card?’ Louise says.
He nods, takes a breath. ‘Her and Neil. They won five grand. She wanted to use it to help them get a deposit for a flat for university. They were both planning to go down to London. She was scared to keep the card at home, wasn’t ready to cash it in yet. Her and Neil had a bit of an argument about it. He wanted them to go and spend some of the money – have a day out in Edinburgh – a night, maybe. In a hotel.’ She could see his cheeks reddening slightly.
‘When was this?’
‘She texted me on Sunday night. Told me about the argument. Asked me to come round. I did. One of the neighbours saw me. I don’t know his name. He nodded a hello, but he seemed to be in a rush.’ He sighs. ‘So, yeah. I was there. She asked me to look after the scratch card. She didn’t explicitly say so, but I got the impression she was a little worried about Neil.’
‘In what way?’
‘That maybe he was getting cold feet about going to London with her. That maybe he’d been seeing someone else.’
‘And had he?’
‘I don’t know. I took the scratch card, anyway. It’s in a drawer, at home. In the kitchen. Don’t worry. It’s safe.’
Louise thinks about the fire that Davie was putting out as she’d entered the property. The kitchen was a state. Drawers yanked out and stuff strewn across the floor. Had someone found it? Had it been damaged in the fire? She decides not to worry him with it for now.
‘Did anyone else know about it?’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I know she wouldn’t have told anyone in her family. She’d be too scared they’d try to convince her to split the cash. She wasn’t being selfish, you know. But this university thing . . . it was her big chance.’
‘I know, I can understand that. What about her sister? Do you think she knew anything about the money?’
‘If she did, it didn’t come from Katie. Like I said, they fought like cat and dog. No, if anyone else knew about the money, it could only have come from one person because I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘Neil.’ Louise says. Fuck. Five grand might not be the biggest sum of money in the world. But for a couple of school kids, or a poor family, it was a motive, definitely. Was Neil up to no good? He’d seemed genuinely distraught, but people could be good actors when they wanted to be. She’d seen it often enough. Something was niggling at her. Just something about the way Neil was. Upset, yes. But cagey too. Did he know something? Had he told someone about the scratch card?
‘Thanks, Lucas. This has been really helpful.’ She watches him close his eyes before turning away, ready to leave. Pauses for a moment. Turns back to him. Finds herself channeling Columbo.
‘Just one more thing . . .’ she says. His eyes open slowly. ‘The people who attacked you. Any idea who they were? Even one of them. If we could get the ringleader . . . we’ve questioned half the town – everyone is pleading ignorance. Even the arseholes who threatened violence via the Facebook group are trying to tell us it was all just a joke, that it was nothing to do with them—’
‘I’m sorry, DC Jennings,’ Lucas says quietly. ‘I’m really very tired now.’
He closes his eyes again. Her cue to leave.
Louise pats him on the hand and walks away. No matter what they’ve done to him, there’s no way he’s going to make things worse by grassing them up. She opens the door.
‘Wait,’ Lucas says. He blinks. ‘I should’ve mentioned this earlier . . . '
She holds the door. Raises her eyebrows at him. ‘Yes?’
‘You might want to talk to her friend Diane . . . and Lois, too . . .’
‘Lois, the teaching assistant?’
‘Yes. She and Katie were close. The three of them were doing an experiment of some sort. A psychology thing. I don’t know if it ever happened or not, but they were talking about setting up some sort of blog. A sort of gossip column. I warned her she should be careful about that sort of thing. It’s not always as anonymous as you think it is. The internet, I mean.’
Louise wanted to kick herself. Of course. Katie’s laptop. So far the tech team hadn’t found anything of interest – but maybe that’s because they didn’t know what they were looking for. Maybe it wasn’t public yet. If they’d started a blog, but it hadn’t been published yet, it’d be more difficult to find it. They might have found the blog provider, but with no live content . . . Maybe Katie had been good at keeping it concealed. One of Katie’s friends must know something, though. Maybe more than one of them. This blog . . . this was going to answer a lot of questions. Louise was sure of it.
THREEWISEMONKEYSBLOG
Telling It Like It Is
Posted: 1st Jan 2017 by SpeakNoEvil
Status: Published
Comments: 0
Oh little enemy,
I cannot fight with you,
My mommy said not to
Boo hoo hoo hoo
I can’t scratch your eyes out
And make you bleed to death
But we’ll be jolly enemies
Forever evermore.
This is the last verse. This is the last you’re going to hear from me. I’m not going to carry on with this shit. What’s the point? It’s a funny verse, this one – as if my mum would tell me not to fight with anybody. Bloody loves a fight, my mum. Nice of her to pass down her shitty genes to my little sis, eh? Cow. You and her are well suited as mates, actually. You’re both as bad as each other.
Fucking hell – I have loved writing these posts – so cathartic. Better than a diary, ’cause I can just scrub the lot and no one ever has to know. I feel better just writing it. I push all my anger and disappointment onto the screen and I read it back, and I feel better. Until I see you . . . you, HAYLEY. Hanging out with my sneering little bitch of a sister, BROOKE.
OOPS – not so anonymous now, is it?? See, that stuff I told you about LUCAS – you’re just fucking jealous. Jealous that someone interesting wants to be my friend. Jealous that I get to spend time with someone who knows more about the world than any of you fuckwits from this crappy little town. Yeah. Well, fuck you. Fuck you for trying to ruin things. Guess what? YOU FAILED.
One day, you little bitch . . . one day I might actually publish these blogs . . . and I’m not going to make them anonymous again, Hayley Marsh. I’m going to let everyone know what a two-faced disappointment you really are. You and Brooke are welcome to each other. My only question is: whose life are you going to fuck up next, before someone calls you on it?
You know, it was Lois who had the idea for this experiment. Her and Diane and me, we all came up with it together. They’re doing their own posts too – SeeNoEvil and HearNoEvil. Bet they won’t be as honest as
me, though, will they?
**Girls, if you’re reading this in drafts, I’m sorry – don’t worry – I was never going to publish them
---Comments are open---
38
Polly
PC Sarah Evans tells Polly that she will be sending in Karen Zucarro to replace her again and asks if she can photocopy any notes she has been taking from the students’ talks to pass on to the investigation team. Even with the recordings of each session, they want to make sure they aren’t missing anything that might need to be followed up. Polly closes the door and breathes in a sigh of relief. Finally, a bit of time to herself. She’s been non-stop all day and she really needs to gather her thoughts. She picks up her handbag, checks that she hasn’t left anything important on her desk and she’s about to head out and finally get that break – her stomach has been making loud gurgling sounds for the last ten minutes and she’s starting to feel a little lightheaded – when the door bursts open.
‘Miss, Miss – please . . . you’ve got to help us!’
‘Diane, Lois . . . what’s wrong? What’s happened?’ She steps back into the room and lets them follow her inside.
Diane’s voice comes out in short gasps. ‘Oh God! We didn’t mean it to happen, but now it’s too late and we don’t know what to do – please – you’ve got to help us, Miss—’
‘Lois?’ She cuts Diane off and addresses the teaching assistant, hoping for a calmer response, but the young woman’s face is entirely devoid of colour. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears.
Diane drops into a chair and holds her head in her hands. ‘I knew we should’ve kept it as one username for all three of us. Then we’d have seen it before—’
‘Seen what before?’ Polly has no idea what the girl is talking about. ‘Lois?’ She tries again, hoping to shake the woman from the trance that she seems to have fallen into.
‘The blog,’ Diane says. ‘It was . . .’ She looks at Lois, then back at Polly. Her face holds a guilty expression. ‘It was Lois’s idea. We all thought it would be fun . . .’
Polly sighs. ‘Right. Can you just slow down a bit and tell me what’s happened? What blog? I’m not sure I follow—’
‘It’s called Three Wise Monkeys, you know . . . See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?’ Polly nods, and Lois carries on. ‘It was supposed to be ironic. Just a bit of fun. It’s the kind of thing I see a lot back home, but there’s not so much of it here, so we thought . . . I thought it might be a good psychology experiment for the girls. It was supposed to be . . . it wasn’t supposed to contain real names. It . . . wasn’t supposed to contain real things – it was meant to be anonymous. It was meant to be a trigger, to see how people would react to things. You know, like horoscopes – you read them and you apply them to yourself, even though the person who wrote them made them completely general – it’s all down to the individual’s interpretation.’
‘I get it,’ Polly says. ‘So what was on this blog?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Diane says. She steals a sideways glance at Lois. ‘Nothing was meant to be on it. Not yet. We were all working on different pieces. They were drafts – as in, unpublished. We were going to talk them through before we started publishing them – before we made them open for comments. We wanted to start slowly, gauge people’s reactions. If there was no interest, we’d stop. We, um . . . we had a username each. I was See No Evil, Lois was Hear No Evil—’
‘Who was the third one? Who was Speak No Evil?’
‘It was Katie,’ Lois says. ‘Only . . . we just found out that she wasn’t making it anonymous—’
‘What do you mean? Found out how?’
‘Diane borrowed Katie’s old laptop because hers was broken. She went over there and got it on Saturday. We decided to look at the blog today. We weren’t sure what to do with it, what with . . . now that Katie’s gone.’
‘We hooked it up to the screen in the IT lab,’ Diane says. ‘Not on purpose. I didn’t realise the Bluetooth was on. It popped up on the screen automatically. Anyway, then we realised that Katie had written a load of posts, and she was talking about Brooke, and Hayley . . . and it was angry stuff. We were scared. We didn’t want anyone to see them, so we decided to delete the posts . . .’
‘Only something went wrong,’ Lois continues. ‘Instead of deleting them, we published them. They’re live. We’ve been scrabbling about for the last half-hour trying to take them down again, revert them to draft, delete them, whatever, but there’s something messed up with the blog server – it won’t let us update it. We can’t get the things down.’ Panic is back in Lois’s voice.
‘OK. OK,’ Polly says. ‘Let’s not panic too much yet. No one else knows about the blog yet, is that right? So no one else has seen the posts. They’ve only just gone up. Unless anyone knows where to look for this blog, they’re not going to find it, are they?’
Diane’s voice is barely a whisper. ‘It auto-posts to the school magazine page on Facebook as soon as they’re made live . . . that’s how we planned to spread the word. Anyone who asks can get admin access to that page. It’s what we all use for announcements and stuff.’ She drops her head into her hands again.
‘That’s not all of it, is it?’ Polly says.
Lois takes a deep breath, blows it out slowly. ‘We think someone saw it on the screen in the IT room. Someone was in the anteroom – you know, that connecting room between the two labs?’
‘Who?’
‘The only person who could’ve been in there was Mr Hennessy,’ Diane says.
‘Or Pete,’ says Lois.
Pete. That name again. Damn it. What had he seen? If the girls were this upset, it was highly likely it was bad. Really bad. Maybe he hadn’t seen it. If they’d slammed the laptop shut as soon as they’d realised . . .
‘That last blog,’ Diane says. ‘I don’t know what had got into Katie, but she was so angry. The things on there – she accused Hayley of all sorts. I just hope we can get it taken down before Hayley sees it. I know they’d fallen out, but Hayley was upset. She was scared of her boyfriend. Too scared to tell anyone. She just kept up this bravado all the time . . . But, oh God! If anyone has notifications switched on for the magazine page on Facebook, they might be reading it already.’
‘Jesus,’ Polly says, under her breath. She picks up her phone, starts scrolling through for Louise Jennings’ phone number. Spots that she already has a missed call from her. Ten minutes ago. Shit. ‘Have you seen Hayley today? Have you any idea where she might be?’
Diane shrugs. ‘She hasn’t been in school all week, but I doubt she’s sick. She’s a mess. She’s got herself mixed up in all sorts. I feel really bad now. I should’ve gone round, maybe. Seen if she was OK—’
‘She probably wouldn’t have spoken to you, Diane. Don’t beat yourself up about it—’
‘But if she sees these posts . . . we need to calm down. I’m sure we can remove them before anyone else sees.’ She pauses, as if a thought has struck her unexpectedly. ‘You know, Miss . . . if you’re wondering where to find her, she’s probably not even at home at all. She’ll be hanging out in the same place that everyone goes to when they’re skiving off.’
Polly frowns. ‘And where’s that?’
Diane glances at Lois, a worried look on her face. ‘The river.’
39
Neil
Neil feels sick. Everything inside his head is swirling round and round like draining bathwater. His stomach is churning. He feels like he hasn’t slept for days. Last night he’d taken a bottle of vodka from the back of the kitchen cupboard, mixed it with Ribena. It had knocked him out for a bit, given him nightmares, and he was suffering for it now.
Going into school had been a stupid plan.
But it was better than being at home. His mum’s been giving him a wide berth. She must’ve known he’d taken the vodka from her stash, but she didn’t bother mentioning it. She doesn’t know what to say to him. She’s never been very good at all that stuff.
His dad is better, but he’s away and Neil isn’t sure when he’s coming back. Mum says he’s working on the rigs again, but Neil is sure he’s banged up. The two of them are useless, really. Neil’s used to getting on with things himself.
He walks around the edge of the playing fields, heads towards the river – hoping that the fresh air will remove the cotton wool from his head. Take away the memories of the visions. He couldn’t work out if they were real or not. Last night, Katie had come to him. She was perched on the end of his bed, wearing black knickers and a faded Soundgarden T-shirt. One of his. She’d smiled at him, and he’d reached for her, but just as his fingers were about to touch her shoulder she’d blown him a kiss then disappeared.
He’d barely slept at all after that, even with the drink to numb his brain. He’d tossed and turned, throwing the duvet off, sweating like a pig despite the chill in the air.
His eyes feel scratchy. Too small, suddenly, like dry stones pushed into his head. He takes a pouch of tobacco from his pocket, pulls out the pack of papers from inside. He’d taken it from his brother’s bedside table, and even that grumpy bastard hadn’t given him a hard time. No sympathy there either, just stunned silence.
What are people supposed to say, anyway? Katie’s gone. She’s not coming back. Except in his dreams. She’ll never leave those.
He rolls a cigarette. Stops and turns into the thick bough of an oak tree to light it away from the wind. Takes a drag. It’s quiet here, down by the river. The surface is frozen over in parts, and the sound of the water flowing underneath is barely noticeable. He walks along the path, crunching broken twigs and small clumps of ice underfoot. He’s not even sure where he’s going. He’s just walking. Keeping away from all of it.
