Abby
Abby
Abby listens to the recorded message for the umpteenth time. Swallowing her frustration, she ends the call, puts her phone face down on the kitchen table. It is almost twenty-four hours since Callum was questioned by the police, during which she has left half a dozen messages for the detective supposedly investigating Isla’s case, and he has not even done her the courtesy of returning her call. All the information she has gleaned thus far is from third-party sources: the friend who saw Callum and Jenna emerging from the police station on Broad Street at nine forty-five last night; the gossip circulating at school, relayed to her by another parent, that there is CCTV footage showing Callum near the scene of her daughter’s death; the knowledge, received earlier from Nicole, whom she had badgered to ask Nathaniel, that Callum has been at school today, tight-lipped and defensive.
The thought of it – the thought of Callum waltzing around school as though he has nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about – causes a knot of fury to pull taut around Abby’s heart. She picks up her phone, taps out another email to Detective Webb – her fourth today – asking him to contact her as soon as possible. The detective’s lack of urgency is infuriating and incomprehensible in equal measure.
Over the past week, Abby has felt she is going out of her mind, hunting for clues as to the identity of the married man who coerced her daughter into a relationship. She has searched Isla’s bedroom, looking for diaries, letters, notes, emails – anything that might shed light on who he was – but has uncovered nothing of use. In the trunk at the bottom of Isla’s bed, beneath fleece blankets and some scatter cushions, Abby found a hoard of items she has never seen before: two necklaces, three pairs of earrings, a Mulberry crossbody bag, a Montblanc fountain pen – all extravagant items Isla would never have been able to afford herself: would never have wanted, as far as Abby knows. Items Abby assumes were gifts from the man she was seeing. Abby has examined each item, hoping to find a note, a gift card, anything that might reveal the man’s name. But there is nothing beyond the implication that the man in question is affluent, ostentatious.
The thought of Isla hiding all those gifts in her bedroom – hiding them where Abby was unlikely to find them – reignites her fury towards the monster who no doubt gave them to her. But she will not give up looking, however painful it may be. She has to discover the identity of the man who thought it permissible to take advantage of her daughter in such a repugnant way. She has even considered asking some of Isla’s friends – Meera, Jules or Yasmin – to see if Isla confided in them, but she cannot bear the prospect of telling them if they don’t already know, does not want to tarnish Isla’s reputation if she had chosen not to tell them herself.
The front door slams, and Abby looks at the time, realises that Clio must be home. She hears her footsteps clumping through the hall, wonders what version of her daughter she will be greeted by today – quiet and withdrawn or angry and defiant.
As soon as Clio walks into the kitchen, Abby sees the scowl across her forehead and understands immediately that this is a day to tread carefully around her daughter’s emotions.
‘Hi sweetheart. How was your day?’
Clio walks past Abby, heads straight for the fridge. ‘Fine.’ Grabbing a can of San Pellegrino, she pulls open the ring, drinks thirstily.
Abby studies her daughter’s face. Dark rings hang like crescent moons beneath her eyes, and Abby wonders whether Clio is having trouble sleeping or if she is staying up late, watching TikTok videos or messaging with her friends. ‘I thought maybe we could order in sushi tonight and watch a film. What do you think?’
Clio shakes her head, avoids Abby’s gaze. ‘I’m going out.’
‘Where? It’s a school night.’
Clio takes another glug of drink before replying. ‘Just to Freya’s for a bit.’
Abby forcibly instructs herself not to object, to recognise that Clio needs to manage her grief in her own way, even if that means always being with her friends. ‘Will you have something to eat first?’
‘No, I told her I’d go over as soon as I’d had a shower and got changed.’
‘I can give you a lift.’
Clio throws her can in the recycling bin, heads towards the door. ‘It’s fine, I’ll walk.’
Abby hears her trudging up the stairs towards her bedroom on the top floor.
The house feels preternaturally quiet, the lonely hours until bedtime stretching before Abby like a weary yawn. A sudden, overpowering sense of loss grabs hold of her as she imagines a parallel world, one in which Isla is still alive, in which she walks through the door and sees immediately – as she always did – that Abby is feeling fragile, vulnerable. A scenario in which Isla pretends she has no plans this evening, suggests takeout and a movie. Abby will know it is untrue, that Isla would have planned to see Meera or Kit or Jules, will feel equal parts guilt and gratitude that her daughter is sacrificing an evening with friends in order to keep her company.
Grief skewers like a knife in Abby’s chest. The enormity of Isla’s loss fills the room, her daughter’s absence a deafening silence.
Closing her eyes, she tries to manage the pain of her loss. She had believed that nothing could ever hurt as much as the death of her husband. Now she knows there is worse – far worse – than losing your partner at the age of forty-one. To lose a child is to be robbed of your trust in the natural order of things: to experience equal parts rage and despair, resentment and disbelief. It is unnatural, outliving your offspring, wrong in every possible way. Abby feels it – feels that perversity – in every fibre of her being. To lose your child when they are seventeen, on the cusp of adulthood, just when you can see their future stretching out before them, just when you sense that perhaps you have done a passable job at raising them: to lose a child then is the cruellest trick of all. It is insufferable. Sometimes she cannot help feeling that if it weren’t for Clio, she would have little reason to continue.
Snapping open her eyes, Abby wipes that thought from her mind. She knows that allowing such ideas to fester is dangerous. She contemplates calling Nicole, seeing if she is free to come over for dinner, as a distraction from her all-consuming grief, but decides against it. She has relied far too heavily on Nicole already over the past few weeks, has relied on her endlessly over the past five years since Stuart died. She does not, in truth, know how she would have got through her grief without Nicole’s support.
From somewhere in the hallway comes the trilling of a phone. Abby heads out of the kitchen, spies Clio’s mobile – usually permanently attached to her daughter’s hand – lying on the wooden radiator cover amidst a mountain of letters that Abby cannot find the energy to open. As she reaches it, the ringing halts.
Picking it up, she notices a message from Freya on the home screen.
Don’t forget your ID. Tonight is going to be Sick . Sam’s got whippets. See you at the station at 6.
Abby reads the message, disquiet cantering in her chest.
Opening her own phone, she googles ‘whippets’, discovers they are the silver canisters of laughing gas she sometimes sees strewn across the pavement or collected beneath benches in the park.
Alarm bells ring in Abby’s ears. Clio is only fifteen. Abby is aware that teenagers push boundaries, but this is new territory for her: Clio outright lying about where she is going, what she is doing. Clio meeting up with people – Sam – whom Abby has never heard of. Clio taking drugs. Except perhaps this isn’t new territory at all. Perhaps Clio lies to her all the time and Abby simply hasn’t known until now.
Glancing up the stairs, she hears the hum of the shower, turns back to Clio’s phone. She has seen her daughter tap in her passcode so many times it is as familiar to her as her own. A part of her knows she is invading her daughter’s privacy, but on this occasion it feels necessary, imperative even; she has a duty of care to find out what Clio is up to.
Scrolling through her daughter’s messages, she encounters long threads filled with emojis, gifs, slang she does not understand. But nothing obviously concerning; nothing as egregious as the outright lie Clio has told her this evening. Opening Clio’s camera roll, Abby scrolls through endless selfies of Clio and her friends in mundane settings, countless screenshots of various TikTok accounts.
And then her eyes alight on a series of photographs from Friday night, two weeks ago. Clio vaping, smoke curling from her lips, her arms draped around the shoulders of boys – young men in their twenties – who look too old to be keeping company with fifteen-year-old girls. Clio drinking from a bottle of beer in what looks to be a bar or club. Clio sitting in the driving seat of a car, hands on the steering wheel, laughing into the camera. Abby clicks on the photo to ascertain the details of when it was taken: 1.04 a.m. And yet, on Friday nights, if Clio stays out, she always says she is at Freya’s. Until now, Abby had no reason to disbelieve her. No reason to verify the truth of the claim with Freya’s mother.
Looking back down at the photo, thoughts spiral in Abby’s mind: where the photo was taken, and by whom. What on earth Clio was doing behind the wheel of a car at one o’clock in the morning. Whether Clio is regularly drinking and taking drugs with older boys and, if she is, what else she might be doing.
Anxiety constricts her throat as she continues to scroll through the photos.
And then she sees something that makes her breath hold still in her lungs.
It is a series of photographs taken the night Isla died. Grainy photos, on maximum zoom. And yet there are two figures, clearly visible.
Isla and Callum, standing on the street close to Meera’s house.
Abby sifts through the photographs – so many of them, thirty or more – knowing she has peeked through a door she was never meant to open, unable to close it now that she knows what’s behind.
It is a sequence of pictures that tell an undeniable story: arms gesticulating in the air, a palm held out in front of a face, a back turned away. An argument.
Grief and angst entwine in Abby’s throat. Seeing photos of Isla the night she died is like being swept out to sea by an engulfing wave. She tries to zoom in on the photos, tries to decipher the expression on her daughter’s face, but the images blur and haze, leaving her with nothing but a series of meaningless pixels.
Clicking on the information button, she checks the time one photo was taken, then another and another. Anger swells inside her. The last was taken at nine o’clock, just minutes – literally twenty-five minutes – before people from the party went outside and found Isla’s body in the road. Here is proof – incontrovertible proof – of what she has long suspected: that Callum is one of the prime suspects in her daughter’s death.
And then another thought dawns on Abby.
Clio has all these photos on her phone, proving that Isla and Callum were arguing outside the party just minutes before Isla’s death, and yet she has not shared them with Abby or the police.
A realisation creeps into Abby’s mind, unsure it wants to be seen.
If Clio took all these photos of her sister the night she was killed, then Clio had been watching Isla. Spying on her. Photographing her from afar.
Clio was present just before Isla was killed.
Abby spools back through her memory to recall where Clio was supposed to be that night. Freya’s, she is sure. She is always at Freya’s. And yet, according to the evidence in her hand, Clio was not at Freya’s. Clio was standing on Windermere Road, spying on her sister.
Scrolling back further through Clio’s photo roll, her eyes catch on a series of pictures that send fear snaking across her skin.
They are photos of Isla, downloaded from the school newsletter, the swim club website, the online albums Abby keeps in the cloud for them all to share.
Except these are not normal photos. Every single picture – a dozen or more – has been doctored. Each one has been altered in the most vile way imaginable.
In one image, blood has been digitally drawn dripping from Isla’s eyes. In the next, a crude, animated, thrusting penis has been placed next to Isla’s mouth. In another, an arrow pierces Isla’s chest.
It is the final photograph, however, that makes Abby’s blood run cold.
It is a photograph of Isla on their most recent holiday, on a beach in the Maldives. She is laughing into the camera, having just emerged from the sea, her long hair draped across her shoulders. It is one of Abby’s favourite photographs; Isla looks so happy, so ebullient, so full of vitality. It is a photo Abby has framed in her bedroom.
Except this version is nothing like the original. This version is an abomination. In this iteration, someone has drawn a noose around Isla’s neck and written, in thick red font, across Isla’s body, two words: Die Bitch .
Abby stares at the photograph, overcome by a sense of vertigo, unsure of her footing, as though, if she takes a step forward, she may fall into an unknown abyss.
The click of the bathroom door two floors above causes Abby to fumble with Clio’s phone. Hands shaking, she exits the photo app, returns to the home screen, places the mobile back where she found it just as Clio arrives at the top of the stairs, wrapped in an oversized bath towel.
‘I can’t find my phone.’
Abby allows a beat, determined not to give herself away. ‘It’s just there, by the front door.’ She points, as though she has only just seen it herself.
Clio does not answer, does not thank Abby for helping her locate it. Instead, she thumps down the stairs, grabs the phone and tramps back up, one hand scrolling, the other holding the towel tight around her chest.
Watching her go, Abby thinks about all the years since Stuart’s death that Clio has been overtly rivalrous with Isla. All the times Isla tried to reach out to her – tried to reconnect with her, to rediscover the closeness they’d enjoyed when they were younger – only to be rebuffed. She thinks about how jealous Clio has been in recent years: jealous of Isla’s swimming, her academic achievements, her popularity. She thinks about how emotionally volatile Clio has been since Isla’s death – antagonistic, truculent, argumentative – volatility Abby has put down to Clio’s grief, but now a niggling suspicion worms its way into her head and will not leave.
She recalls the night Isla was killed: how Clio had said she was sleeping at Freya’s and then returned, unexpectedly, without good reason, not long before the police arrived.
Her brain replays the images she has just seen on Clio’s phone: photos stalking Isla the night she was killed. She recalls the horrific doctored photos she knows will haunt her in the darkness of night: Die Bitch . A voice whispers into the silence, dripping poison in her ear, filling her head with suspicions she dares not entertain. Because she knows that if she allows herself even a splinter of belief that they may be true, there is a risk her whole world will implode.