Hide and Seek, page 10
“No.”
The wind gusted, and I took a step forward without meaning to, blown off balance. “Look, you don’t have to talk to me. I’m not the police. But the police are looking for her. They’re taking it seriously. I found a diary she was keeping, and—”
“You found her diary?” Nessa’s voice was sharp.
“Yeah. And I read it.” And I understood one word in ten, to be honest …
Nessa drummed her fingers on the edge of the door. “OK. Come in. But you can’t stay long.”
She led me into the room beside the front door, a formal drawing room full of antique furniture, a huge oriental rug, and elaborate curtains. Nothing could have looked more incongruous than the two of us in our jeans perching on brocade-covered chairs. The blinds were pulled down so the light was dim.
“No one comes in here,” Nessa said, seeing me looking around. “They only use it for parties. Just keep your voice down and they won’t even know you’re here.”
“Your parents?”
“Yeah.” She seemed to realize that she might have sounded rude. “It’s not that I don’t want you to meet them. It’s just that they’d get so overexcited. ‘Oh, Nessa’s made a friend. Let’s take you out for dinner. Why don’t you stay over?”’ She rolled her eyes. “I like my own company.”
“And Gilly’s.”
“Yes.” She squeezed her palms between her knees. “It’s not what you think.”
“What isn’t?”
“The reason we stopped being friends.”
“Why do you think I think you stopped being friends?” I asked carefully.
“Because of what people were saying about Gilly at school.”
“After someone read her diary?”
Nessa nodded. “People were calling her all kinds of things. I knew none of it was true.”
I was about to get thrown out of Nessa’s house, I thought, and braced myself. “Were you the one with her? In school?”
“Me?” Her eyes went wide and then narrowed. “That’s a pretty big assumption you’re making there. Actually, two. That I’m interested in girls and that I was interested in Gilly.”
“I could be wrong,” I said.
“People assume I’m a lesbian because of the way I dress.” Her eyes were fixed on me and there was a challenge in them.
“You might be. You might not. What does it matter?”
A little of the defiance went out of her face. “My parents are sure I am. They keep trying to get me to come out.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I should be able to sleep with whoever I like without explaining myself to anyone—as long as it’s legal and safe. I bet you don’t talk to your parents about who you’re sleeping with.”
“Definitely not.”
Nessa sat back. “They’d just boast about it to all their friends. About how cool they are about it and how much they’ve donated to LGBT causes and this really important campaign they’re supporting.”
“That sounds really annoying.”
“Doesn’t it?” She almost smiled for a moment, then went back to looking pained. “Anyway. I like to keep them guessing. I like to keep everyone guessing.”
“As long as you know what you like, that’s the important thing.”
She wriggled. “I kind of haven’t made up my mind yet.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “So if it wasn’t you, who was it?”
“I don’t know.” Nessa’s shoulders slumped. “She never told me. I just assumed it was a mistake and she wanted to forget about it.”
“That’s not the impression I get from her diary.”
“Can I read it?”
I hesitated. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“It might upset you,” I said, thinking of the entry where Gilly wrote about being let down. Was it Nessa who’d hurt her? “What happened with you and Gilly? You were such good friends.”
“She cut me off.” Nessa looked bleak. “She was hiding something from me. She wouldn’t tell me what was going on or who she was with at school. She was keeping all kinds of things secret. And I couldn’t leave her alone, even though I knew I was pushing too hard.” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I just wanted her to talk to me.”
“What happened?”
“She cut me off and then we argued, not the other way round. I racked my brains to work out what it was I’d done wrong, and I still don’t know. I mean, we didn’t fight. We never fought. But I’d started to think she was avoiding me.”
“Why?”
“Twice in the same day she saw me and turned round and walked away. She still had her phone then, and I texted her a few times, trying to get a response.” Nessa bit her lip. “I got angry. I was frustrated. I started saying mean things just to provoke her into replying. It was the silence I couldn’t stand.”
“Did she reply?”
“No. She came and found me. She told me to stop texting her. She told me she was getting rid of her phone so I was just wasting my time. She said we couldn’t be friends anymore and she couldn’t say why.”
“Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?”
“I’m sure she said ‘couldn’t.’” Nessa looked perplexed. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Did she seem angry? Upset? Worried? Scared?”
“Um, all of the above.” Nessa shook her head. “I handled it superbadly. I started shouting at her about how she was letting me down, and she just looked at me and said, ‘Sorry,’ and walked off. And that’s the last time I spoke to her.”
“Did she try to talk to you again?”
“No. She avoided everywhere I went, as a rule. I wouldn’t stop going to the places we used to go together, but she did. I saw her at school, but we never spoke.”
“It sounds as if she picked a fight with you deliberately. She pushed you away.”
“That was how it felt. I told her I wasn’t going to be her friend anymore.” Nessa’s voice was husky. “I told her we couldn’t be friends if she didn’t trust me. I told her I didn’t trust her since she’d been lying to me for months.”
“Why wouldn’t she talk to you?”
“Because she was scared. And I let her be scared. I abandoned her to sort things out for herself when I knew she was struggling.”
“But if she wouldn’t talk to you—”
“I shouldn’t have gone off in a huff.”
“When did it start?”
It was as if Nessa had been waiting to say it. “When she started seeing Max Thurston.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “He wanted to own her. He didn’t like me and he didn’t like the fact that I was close to Gilly.”
“So you two never got on.”
“Never.” She frowned. “He wasn’t good enough for Gilly. I let him know I felt that way. He treated her like dirt until he found out there was someone else, and suddenly Gilly was the love of his life. Sorry if I didn’t believe a word of it.”
“Did Gilly like him?”
“Ye-es,” she admitted. “But he was her first-ever boyfriend. Her mum didn’t want her to see anyone while she was at school. She had nothing to compare him to. And he knew she was going to wake up one day and realize he wasn’t Mr. Right, so he did his best to control her.”
I thought about the way he’d hung around, trying to force her to talk to him. “Someone told me he gave her a black eye.”
Nessa nodded. “That’s what I assumed. She did have a black eye, but she wouldn’t talk to me about it.”
“Do you think she was scared of him?”
The reply was immediate. “I’m sure of it. He was obsessed with her. And she wanted to stay away from him.”
Something occurred to me. “Was he at the party the night Gilly cut herself?”
“He was standing right behind you,” Nessa said simply. “I went past him to help her.”
“Did she tell you why she cut herself?”
“She just said it was all too much.” Nessa’s face twisted as if she was about to cry. “I thought it was going to be different from then on. I thought she’d forgiven me. But she was just the same afterward. She didn’t talk to me or look at me.”
“Why did you hit Max at the market yesterday?”
“Because he knows where Gilly is.”
“Are you sure?”
There was total conviction in her eyes and voice. “I don’t know if he made her leave or if he just helped her, but he knows, believe me. If you want to know where Gilly is, make Max Thurston tell you.”
11
Max Thurston lived on Ogilvy Close, a small cul-de-sac of five houses that were about average by Port Sentinel’s standards but practically mansions anywhere else. They were white-painted with big bow windows on either side of a vivid front door. The Thurstons’ door was blood red. I rang the bell, even though the blinds were still down at the front of the house. I wondered, as the seconds passed and no one came, if they were away, or asleep, or refusing on principle to come to the door.
But when he opened the door, Max was dressed, and he looked as if he’d been awake for a while. His clothes were rumpled and there were violet shadows under his eyes. His nose looked bruised and a little swollen from the previous day’s altercation with Nessa. He seemed on edge and he barely met my eye—a quick glance, a look of surprise that immediately became sullen.
“What do you want?”
“To talk to you.” I thought he’d say no—he looked as if he wanted to say no—but he stood back and let me walk in. I stopped in the hall, wondering where to go. The rooms on the left and right were dark, shaded by the blinds.
“I was in the kitchen. Down here.” Max shouldered his way past me and led the way to a sunny room with a white kitchen and yellow blinds. The sink was full of dirty dishes, though, and the room was untidy. A mug of coffee stood on the table, steam spooling out of it.
“Where are your parents?”
“In Edinburgh for the weekend.” He opened the back door and shook a cigarette out of a crumpled packet. He lit it and blew a plume of smoke into the garden. “Next question.”
“Have you been up all night?”
“Most of it.” He rubbed his eyes, then shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Good answer,” I said, sliding into a chair at the table. “Do you want me to tell you what I think is the matter?”
Max looked at me warily.
“Gilly Poynter,” I said.
“What about her?” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.
“She’s disappeared. And I think you know more about it than you’ve been letting on.”
A swallow made his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “What do you mean?”
“You were following her around. Watching her. I saw you.” I leaned on the table. “If anyone knows where Gilly is, it’s you.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I saw you at the library on Friday night.”
“Which was when Gilly went missing.” Max took another drag on his cigarette and blew three smoke rings that shivered and disappeared in the cold air. “So how could I have been involved?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“Obviously I wasn’t.” A glance up to see how I reacted to that.
I was underwhelmed, and looked it. “That’s not what I’ve heard. I know you were obsessed with Gilly. Especially after she broke up with you.”
“Piss off.” He looked at me with total disgust. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know what I’ve seen, and I know what other people have told me.”
“What people?” Max demanded, flicking the cigarette butt into the garden in a shower of sparks and slamming the back door. He dragged out the chair opposite mine and sat down. “Who said that?”
“Nessa.”
He nodded. “Why am I not surprised you said that?”
“She’s not your biggest fan.”
“No, she’s not.”
“How do you feel about her?”
“I can’t stand her,” he said frankly. “She tried to get Gilly to dump me.”
“Why was that?”
“Because she wanted to keep her for herself. She’s a twisted little dyke. She couldn’t accept that Gilly was straight and she thought she could convert her.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Wow. That’s absolutely not what Nessa said.”
“Yeah, of course Nessa denies it. But Gilly told me Nessa was freaking her out.”
“In what way?”
“She told her she had feelings for her that went further than friendship. She tried to kiss her.” Max snorted. “Gilly wasn’t having any of it, obviously, because she wasn’t like that. She felt completely betrayed. She just kept saying how much it hurt to be let down by someone she’d trusted.”
I flashed back to the diary entry, written in pencil that dug into the paper.
Why do people have to let you down?
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Nessa had lied to me. I shoved it to the back of my mind to think about later, and frowned at Max.
“Didn’t Gilly feel as if you’d let her down?”
Max looked down at his hands. “Probably. I was a bit of a jerk when we were going out, if I’m honest. But it was such hard work. She didn’t want her mum to know about us, so I couldn’t go round to her house and she couldn’t meet me. We’d get together after school for a few minutes. Sometimes at weekends we’d both go to the library and pretend to work. It was hard to find places to be together in private. She came here a couple of times when Mum and Dad were away, but that was it.”
I thought about the few snatched moments I’d managed with Will, and felt the first hint of sympathy for Max. It wasn’t easy to have a decent relationship when you never saw one another.
But then he went on, “I mean, I liked her a lot, but I got fed up with her not being at parties and not hanging out. It was like I was single but I couldn’t pull anyone else.”
“Poor, poor you.” I’d cranked the sarcasm up to eleven, and he winced. “It was worse for Gilly, wasn’t it, if you were out having fun and she was stuck at home.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t great,” Max acknowledged. “Her mum is crazy strict with her. That’s why—” He broke off.
“Why what?”
“Why I wasn’t surprised when I heard that Gilly had done a runner.”
My interest sharpened. “Why’s that?”
“Because I was supposed to help her get away.” He paused to let that sink in. “She wanted to go and live with her dad, so she was planning to run away. That was always her plan.”
“Where’s her dad?”
“Bristol. Her little sister lives with him.”
I rocked back on my chair, thinking about how Gilly had reacted when I said I was an only child. “So you think she ran away to be with him? Have you tried to find out?”
“I don’t know where he lives. I don’t have his number.” Max ran his hand through his hair. “I’d have called if I did.”
“Presumably the police will have been in touch with him. They’d know if she was there. They wouldn’t be looking for her any more.”
Max shrugged. “I just know that she talked about leaving Port Sentinel all the time. She hated living with her mum.”
“Because she was so strict.”
“And because she was crazy.” He shook his head. “I only met her once, but I thought she was going to knife me then and there. We bumped into her on Fore Street and Gilly was terrified. I was holding her hand and she snatched it away, like even holding hands was enough to get in trouble. Her mum made her come home with her straight away.”
“What happened to her when she went home?”
Max looked shifty. “She never said.”
“You never asked.”
“Look, I said I was a terrible boyfriend, all right? I made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But I really did care about Gilly, and I was worried about her. She was behaving so weirdly. That thing at Claudia’s party…” He ran his hand over his face. “That freaked me out. I knew she didn’t want to get back together with me, but I really thought she needed a friend.”
“Oh, right. So your interest was purely friendly.”
“Yeah. It was.” Max stared at me, daring me to argue the point. “You say I was obsessed with her, but I wasn’t. I just wanted to talk to her, that’s all. I missed her.”
“She tried to talk to you, though, didn’t she? To explain what was in the diary. But you wouldn’t speak to her about it.”
“Not at first. I was so angry with her. I’m not going to pretend I was OK with it. We were supposed to be together and she was seeing someone behind my back. That was bad. But it was a hundred times worse that she wouldn’t tell me who she was with.” He stood up, shoving his chair back so hard it tipped and fell over. He walked around the kitchen in a tight little circle. “Imagine what that was like for me—looking at all my friends, wondering who it was who had gone behind my back with Gilly.”
“It must have been hard to know who to trust.”
“Yeah.” Max braced his hands on the kitchen counter and dropped his head down. “And it was hard to know that she’d done it too. That she’d let someone do that to her. That she had so little self-respect.”
“Is that what you said to her?”
“At first.” He looked sideways at me. “Not the best reaction.”
“Not really.” I frowned, thinking. “Did she ever give you any hints about who she was seeing?”
“No.”
“Did you have any suspicions?”
Max blew out a lungful of air. “Everyone? No one admitted it to me. And whoever was lying, they made a great job of it. Usually that sort of thing gets out, but no one seemed to hear. Or if they did, they didn’t tell me.”
“I read her diary. She wrote about it, but she didn’t use any names or anything that would help me identify the person. She just called them X.”
Max nodded. “She liked nicknames.”
“What did she call you?”
