'We really want to know,' said Daisy, and then added, rather spitefully, 'We won't let you go home until you've told us. Everyone's done their bit, except you.'
Clare was still looking for a way out. Her gaze fell on me. That's not true,' she said. 'What about him? He hasn't said anything yet.'
'Never mind about me,' I said. 'I go last. I always go last.'
In desperation, she turned to Miles. 'I don't want to. They can't make me.'
If she thought Miles was going to do the gentlemanly thing and take her part against the rest of us, she was wrong. He was pretending to be solicitous, but it was just a ploy to get her to do what he wanted; I recognized it because it was a technique I used as well. Miles obviously thought it would be a personal triumph for him if she could be persuaded to talk: he was the one who had brought her along, after all, and up until now she hadn't exactly been knocking us out of our socks with her social skills. Besides, I think he was getting a sadistic kick out of seeing her squirm. I know I was.
He draped his arm around her shoulders in a way that was more proprietorial than supportive, and I heard him say, 'Why not? Maybe it'll do you good to get it out of your system.'
Clare gave up. Her face lost its edge and went slack again. She looked at Miles one last time, but he was smiling in that supercilious way he has. I wondered why she put up with him. I wondered why she was putting up with us. Maybe, deep down, she was keen to spill the beans after all.
Then she seemed to make up her mind that, since she was being forced into it, she might as well do things properly. In an abandoned gesture, oddly out of keeping with the reserved front she'd been presenting up until now, she tipped her head back and drained her glass in one gulp. I found myself strangely moved by the sight of her exposed throat as she swallowed. I was beginning to find Clare rather intriguing.
'Oh, all right,' she said crossly, holding out the empty glass for a refill. 'You want to hear about Sophie? OK, I'll tell you about Sophie. I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you the whole story.'
And she did.
Afterwards, there were some of us who rather wished she hadn't.
Chapter 2
Sophie hadn't spent more than a couple of nights in her new flat, so when she woke up at three o'clock one morning, it took her a while to work out where she was.
The air was cold against her face. She lay in bed, staring in the half-light at the unfamiliar ceiling and shivering, until she realized that if she wanted to get back to sleep, some sort of action would have to taken.
The curtains had been left by the previous occupier, and although they were not at all to Sophie's taste…
'Hang on a minute, said Luke. 'How do you know all this?'
'Sophie told me,' said Clare. 'She told me everything.'
'Yes, but how do you know what she was thinking?'
'Shut up and let her get on with it,' said Susie.
Clare sighed. 'You'll just have to trust me on this. I know what I'm talking about.'
'Yes, but…'
'Shut up and let her get on with it.'
The curtains had been left by the previous occupier, and although they were not to Sophie's taste, she hadn't yet had a chance to replace them. They were made out of some grubby man-made fibre which didn't flutter or even flap so much as bulge. They were bulging now, in the night breeze. Sophie slid out of bed and padded naked to the window with the intention of closing it.
It wasn't until she got there that she saw the window was already closed.
At the time, she never gave it a second thought. She rummaged around in the nearest suitcase until she found a big white shirt. She put it on, went back to bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
We'd been best friends since the age of twelve. I was one of two pupils assigned to look after Sophie when she arrived midway through term. For some reason I can't recall, she arrived very late at night, when the rest of us were already changed into our pyjamas. She stood there gravely, like a miniature grown-up, neatly buttoned up in non-regulation Burberry, clutching a small brown suitcase in one hand and a battered teddy-bear in the other. She told me later that the teddy-bear had once belonged to the Marquis of Montrose.
By that stage, most of the other girls in our class had paired off, or formed cliques, except for the dregs and the misfits, who were lumped together by default because no one else wanted to touch them. I lived in terror that someone would discover my secret — that I was a dreg and a misfit too — and had been searching in vain for someone to latch on to. And here, as if in answer to my prayers, was Sophie.
She was the prettiest girl I'd ever seen. She had long fair hair that was usually tied back in a ponytail or woven into a fat braid that hung neatly down her back. She had perfectly even white teeth (with a slight gap between the incisors), and skin that had a café-au-lait glow to it, as though she had only just come back from somewhere faraway, like Tahiti or the Bahamas. Even her name was glamorous. Sophie — it made me think of satin ballet shoes and velvet collars and whipped cream and Belgian truffles and pancakes with maple syrup — all the things I associated with the high life I had never led.
And Sophie's home life seemed so much more romantic and interesting than the drab mothballed world of my grandparents. They had been my legal guardians in the nine years since my parents had been killed in a pile-up on the M42, leaving behind them just enough money to put me through a relatively posh school. But the M42! Even the road was wrong. Had it been Sophie's parents, they would have got themselves killed on the Via Veneto or the Pacific Coast Highway, or on one of those hairpin bends leading down to the French Riviera.
We'd been told Sophie had missed half the term because her mother had died, but it wasn't long before she swore me to secrecy and whispered the truth. Selina — Sophie always referred to her parents by their first names — had run off to Venezuela with a man called Ramon who bred racehorses. In my eyes, of course, this made her life seem even more exciting and romantic; I'd known girls whose parents had split up, but none whose parents had split up quite so emphatically.
Sophie detested her mother, but adored her father. As far as she was concerned, Hamish could do no wrong. In a rash moment, I once asked why, if he was such a fabulous father, had he not brought her up himself, instead of packing her off to boarding school?
'He travels abroad a lot,' said Sophie. 'A child would get in the way.' I remember thinking it peculiar, the way she referred to herself in the third person, as 'a child'.
'But why pick this school?'
'It's the best one, that's all.'
'Yes,' I persisted, 'but this is Sussex, and your father lives all the way up in Scotland.'
Maybe Sophie herself didn't know the answer. At any rate, that was the first time she ever told me to fuck off.
I was reminded of that as I came up the stairs and heard her shouting, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, I told you needed this room finished before the fucking hallway!' She had to shout loudly to make herself heard above the noise from the radio.
Sophie didn't swear very often. Nor was it usual for her to raise her voice above her habitual breathy whisper; she usually didn't have to. People always craned forward to hang on her every word, whereas whenever I strained for the same effect they would always cup their hands around their ears and tell me not to mumble.
I'd started feeling apprehensive the second I turned the corner into Hampshire Place and laid eyes on number nine. It looked familiar, though that wasn't surprising since it was standard-issue Victorian terrace, and it sometimes seemed as though I'd spent half my adult life wandering up and down these streets, gazing longingly at the windows and trying to divine what lay behind them.