فصل 31

31

SEAN

I was roused by the sound of a woman calling out, a desperate, faraway sound. I thought I must have dreamed it, but then I was jolted awake by banging, loud and close and intrusive and real. There was someone at the front door.

I dressed quickly and ran downstairs, glancing at the clock in the kitchen as I passed. It was only just after midnight—I couldn’t have been sleeping for more than half an hour. The hammering at the door persisted and I could hear a woman calling my name, a voice I knew but for a moment couldn’t place. I opened the door.

“Do you see this?” Louise Whittaker was shouting at me, red-faced and furious. “I told you, Sean! I told you there was something going on!” The this to which she referred was an orange plastic vial, the sort you get prescription drugs in, and on the side there was a label, with a name. Danielle Abbott. “I told you!” she said again, and then she burst into tears. I ushered her inside—too late. Before I closed the kitchen door I saw a light go on in the upstairs bedroom of my father’s house.

It took quite a while to understand what Louise was telling me. She was hysterical, her sentences running into one another and making no sense. I had to tease the information out of her gradually, one gulping, breathless, furious phrase at a time. They had decided at last to put the house on the market. Before viewings could start, she needed to clear out Katie’s bedroom. She wasn’t having strangers tramping through there, touching her things. She had made a start on it that afternoon. While she was packing away Katie’s clothes she had found the orange vial. She’d been removing a coat from a hanger, the green one, one of Katie’s favourites. She’d heard a rattling noise. She’d slipped her hand into the pocket and discovered the bottle of pills. She was shocked, even more so when she saw that the name on the bottle was Nel’s. She had never heard of the drug—Rimato—before, but she looked it up on the Internet and discovered that it was a kind of diet pill. The pills are not legally available in the UK. Studies in the United States have linked their use to depression and suicidal thoughts.

“You missed it!” she cried. “You told me she had nothing in her blood. You said Nel Abbott had nothing to do with it. But here”—she banged her fist on the table, making the vial jump into the air—“see! She was supplying my daughter with drugs, with dangerous drugs. And you let her get away with it.”

It was strange, but all the time she was saying this, attacking me, I felt relieved. Because now there was a reason. If Nel had supplied Katie with drugs, then we could point to that, and say, Look, there, that’s why it happened. That’s why a brilliant, happy young girl lost her life. That’s why two women lost their lives.

It was comforting, but it was also a lie. I knew it was a lie. “Her blood tests were negative, Louise,” I said. “I don’t know how long this . . . this Rimato? I’ve no idea how long it stays in the system. We’ve no idea if this even is Rimato, but . . .” I got to my feet, fetched a plastic sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer and held it out to Louise. She picked the vial up from the table and dropped it into the bag. I sealed it up. “We can find out.”

“And then we’ll know,” she said, gulping for air again.

The truth was, we wouldn’t know. Even if there were traces of a drug in her system, even if there was something that had been missed, it wouldn’t tell us anything definitive.

“I know it’s too late,” Louise was saying, “but I want this to be known. I want everyone to know what Nel Abbott did—Christ, she might have given pills to other girls . . . You need to speak to your wife about this—as head teacher, she should know someone’s selling this shit in her school. You need to search the lockers, you need—”

“Louise”—I sat down at her side—“slow down. Of course we’ll take this seriously—we will—but we have no way of knowing how this bottle came into Katie’s possession. It’s possible that Nel Abbott purchased the pills for her own use . . .”

“And what? What are you saying? That Katie stole them? How dare you even suggest that, Sean! You knew her—”

The kitchen door rattled—it sticks, especially after rain—and flew open. It was Helen, looking dishevelled in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, her hair uncombed. “What’s going on? Louise, what’s happened?”

Louise shook her head, but said nothing. She covered her face with her hands.

I got to my feet and spoke to Helen. “You should go on up to bed,” I said, keeping my voice low. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“But—”

“I just need to chat to Louise for a bit. It’s all right. You go on upstairs.”

“All right,” she said warily, glancing down at the woman sobbing quietly at our kitchen table. “If you’re sure . . .”

“I am.”

Helen slipped quietly out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her as she left. Louise wiped her eyes. She was looking at me oddly, wondering, I suppose, where Helen had been. I could have explained: she doesn’t sleep well; my father’s an insomniac, too; sometimes they sit up together, do crosswords, listen to the radio. I could have explained, but the prospect felt tiring all of a sudden, so instead I said, “I don’t think Katie stole anything, Louise. Of course I don’t. But she might have . . . I don’t know, picked them up absentmindedly. She might have been curious. You say they were in a coat pocket? Perhaps she picked them up and then forgot about them.”

“My daughter didn’t take things from other people’s homes,” Louise replied sourly, and I nodded. No point arguing this one.

“I’ll look into it, first thing tomorrow. I’ll have these sent to the labs, and we’ll look at Katie’s blood tests again. If I missed something, Louise . . .”

She shook her head. “I know it doesn’t change anything. I know it won’t bring her back,” she said quietly. “It would just help me. To understand.”

“I see that. Of course I do. Would you like me to drive you home?” I asked her. “I can bring your car over in the morning.”

She shook her head again and gave me a shaky smile. “I’m OK,” she said. “Thank you.”

• • •

THE ECHO OF HER THANKS—unwarranted, undeserved—rang out in the silence after she’d gone. I felt wretched, and was grateful for the sound of Helen’s footsteps on the stairs, grateful that I wouldn’t have to be alone.

“What’s going on?” she asked me as she entered the kitchen. She looked pale and very tired, with circles like bruises under her eyes. She sat down at the table and reached for my hand. “What was Louise doing here?”

“She found something,” I said. “Something that she thinks might have some bearing on what happened to Katie.”

“Oh, God, Sean. What?”

I puffed out my cheeks. “I shouldn’t . . . probably shouldn’t discuss it in detail just yet.” She nodded and squeezed my hand. “Tell me, when was the last time you confiscated drugs at school?”

She frowned. “Well, that little toe rag, Watson—Iain—had some marijuana taken off him at the end of term, but before that . . . oh, not for a while. Not for a long while. Back in March, I think, that business with Liam Markham.”

“That was pills, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Ecstasy—or something purporting to be Ecstasy, in any case, and Rohypnol. He was excluded.”

I vaguely remembered the incident, though it’s not the sort of thing I involve myself in. “There’s been nothing since? You haven’t come across any diet pills, have you?”

She raised an eyebrow. “No. Nothing illegal, in any case. Some of the girls take those blue ones—what do they call them? Alli, I think. It’s available over the counter, although I don’t think it’s supposed to be sold to minors.” She wrinkled her nose. “It makes them horribly flatulent, but apparently that’s an acceptable price to pay for a thigh gap.”

“To pay for a what?”

Helen rolled her eyes at me. “A thigh gap! They all want legs so skinny they don’t meet at the top. Honestly, Sean, sometimes I think you live on a different planet.” She squeezed my hand again. “Sometimes I wish I lived there with you.”

We went up to bed together for the first time in a long time, but I couldn’t touch her. Not after what I’d done.