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FIFTY-FOUR
Gossip is a sink hole. It pulls you under no matter how carefully you tread.
The police held a press conference exactly four hours after knocking on our door. Harry Connor sat up on his podium and announced to a roomful of reporters that they’d made an arrest in connection with the Shadow killings and had now charged a man.
‘Following an anonymous call to the tip line, Mr Matty Melgren, a bereavement counsellor from Camden, was arrested for the murders of nine women in North London since 1981, as well as the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Brownstone, Ireland.’
There was no note of triumph in his voice, no sign of gloating. Only the droop of his shoulders hinted at what he felt. Recently, my shoulders had started to droop too. Metaphorical weight taking a physical toll.
‘We can connect Melgren to at least eight of the North London murders, but we suspect he is responsible for dozens more,’ Connor said, pausing to let the words sink in.
My mother pushed her chair back, poured herself a large glass of wine. No juice.
‘Turn it off, Sophie,’ she said. But I didn’t.
It was like the time I’d watched Friday the 13th with Matty, against what my mother had called her ‘better judgement’. I’d covered my eyes when the scary bits came on, but I couldn’t help peeking through my fingers.
The day after his arrest, the whispers started. People I’d thought were my friends shunned me. When I entered a room it went silent. Walking down a corridor, I’d hear my name, but when I turned around, I couldn’t tell who’d said it. It could have been anyone, they were all looking at me. Shifty-eyed glimpses. Hushed voices. Kids I was friends with. Kids I wasn’t.
That’s her.
I bet she knew.
How could she not have?
It was like being back in Miss Bacon’s class. Sally Sniders and I were at the same high school, though up till now, we’d had little to do with each other. I figured she’d learned it wasn’t worth getting on my bad side and secretly hoped she’d spread the word a bit.
‘You got her to walk in your shoes. Good for you,’ my mother said when I announced I’d sorted things out back in Miss Bacon’s class.
‘You mean, Sophie walked on hers,’ Matty corrected. ‘Your ma’s right, pumpkin. Fair play to you.’
I liked his analysis of the situation better than my mother’s, but whatever the cause, since the Jackie/sticker book truce, Sally and I had given each other a wide berth.
Now that berth was breached.
‘You and your mother should be ashamed of yourselves,’ she hissed as I lined up for lunch.
A porcupine rolled over my scalp.
‘What?’
‘All those women your father killed. Don’t pretend you didn’t know what he was doing.’
The porcupine gave way to a hot flush of anger. I shoved her hard against the wall, gripped her by the throat. The lunch hall went silent.
‘Matty Melgren didn’t kill anyone,’ I roared, right up in her face. ‘And he’s not my father.’
Sally sneered.
‘And yet here you are with your hands around my neck.’
I was marched to the headmaster’s office, a grey-haired man with a philosophy doctorate from Magdalen College Oxford, rather confusingly pronounced, ‘Maudlin’.
‘You’re a good student, Sophie,’ Mr Osmond told me, after inviting me to please take a seat and making a show of capping his pen and interlacing his sausage fingers. ‘We have high hopes for you. But if you’re going to get on here, you need to learn to control your temper. I understand this is a difficult time, but you can’t go around assaulting people just because they say something you don’t like.’
‘You don’t understand. . .’
‘There’s nothing to understand, Miss Brennan. Your behaviour was undignified and unacceptable.’
