AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She’d finished speaking on the phone with Matty. I didn’t hear what he said, but from her end it was all monosyllables and long silences.
‘He says he’s coming back to London this week,’ she told me, her tone so different from the last time he’d said he was home.
I remembered how she’d told me to grab my coat that day, that we were going to surprise him. The excitement in her voice, the glitter in her eyes. Now those eyes were dull as stones.
‘You seem disappointed,’ I said.
She didn’t answer. On the radio:
Police are re-interviewing Grace Keenan, the twelve-year-old sister of the victim, Niamh. . .
I went to my room to get cracking on my homework. My mother had bought me a desk for my birthday so I no longer had to study at the kitchen table. I took out my books, popped the recording I’d made of Lucky Star into the cassette player.
‘How can you concentrate with that racket on?’ she called from the hallway.
‘Madonna’s hardly a racket,’ I shouted back, but I turned it off.
We had a science test the next day, I wanted to do well, was addicted to good grades.
I emerged ten minutes later, needing the bathroom. My mother was making supper, the phone on speaker.
‘I’m falling apart, Lin. And now he’s talking about coming back to London. I’m just not sure I can face seeing him.’
‘I don’t know what else to tell you, Am.’
‘I have to call the police. I don’t see what choice I’ve got.’
I sank to my knees, half buried under the weight of it all. Part of me wanting to burst in and remind her of her promise. The other part knowing it was better to hear what I was up against first.
Linda came on again.
‘And what if it’s not him?’
‘What if it is and I say nothing?’
A pause, a sigh. A softer tone.
‘What’s your gut telling you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Her voice was breaking. Shattered into shards of glass.
‘Well, I do. See what happens with that witness before you go doing things you can’t take back.’
‘But—’
‘It’ll be okay, Am. Trust me.’
Matty used to say the same thing.
