24. Starling
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
STARLING
We expected Goldie to be national news the very next day, the moment Patricia realized she was gone.
We expected police to come knocking on all our doors and our story to quickly crumble.
Goldie would be found within hours, and our futures would be over because then the whole damn mess would come tumbling out.
Two bodies—how does one group of girls come to hide two bodies?
But it didn’t happen like that.
It was me, in the end, that raised the alarm.
Goldie, of course, hadn’t messaged us in two days.
It would have been suspicious not to go round and check if she was alright.
Patricia answered the door unbothered until I told her we hadn’t heard from her, and finally a flicker of concern crossed her face.
She had been convinced, she said, that Goldie was with one of us after their argument.
This was it, I thought. Full-scale investigation time, like the kind in documentaries and podcasts. A committed detective who would stop at nothing to find her. Now we had to prepare ourselves.
That’s not what happened either.
Patricia had her five minutes on the local news.
I watched her, speaking to the camera with red eyes and a wrinkled tissue in hand, and the journalist asked sympathetic questions, and she gave such basic answers.
She doesn’t know Goldie at all. She said Goldie wanted to be a model, but she didn’t tell the world that Goldie lived and breathed it.
She didn’t tell the world that Goldie once ran away because she wanted her mother to come home that much.
But Patricia must have told the police because it’s all they think happened. That she has run away again. Patricia spent the entire segment asking Goldie to get in touch, to let the authorities know she’s alright.
She didn’t ask her to come home.
Will Goldie’s mother find out somehow? Will she return, twenty years from now, seeking to make amends, and find out her daughter died decades ago, and she wasn’t there?
I convinced everyone to delete our group chat messages, sure there must be an investigation ongoing that hasn’t been revealed to the public.
We were questioned, very briefly, by the police, but it’s not as though we were suspects.
They just wanted information about Goldie, where she might be, what she’s like.
They didn’t consider us at all, and they didn’t come back with any more questions.
After weeks of nothing, Crow calls.
“Starling?” she says when I answer, not waiting for me to talk. “The police can’t trace this, right?”
“No. They’d have to access our phones, and even then they’d only see you phoned me. Nothing else.”
“They’ve changed the results,” Crow says. “For our A levels. They announced it today. We’re getting teacher-assessed grades after all.”
Another thing has been changed in an instant, a click of fingers and our futures reshaped once more, and within a week of shattering them previously.
Crow has been proven right to worry, as originally our grades had been decided differently on Results Day, at the whim of people long out of exams. Crow cried when she found out, when the A grades she had studied and prepared for and would have certainly achieved in her exams anyway were turned to three B’s and a C.
A C! It was inexplicable; she had never seen a C in her life.
And Cuckoo, who never tried too hard but would have nailed the exams in a way that would have driven us all mad: four C’s.
Wren and I fared better, we had two of our A grades awarded to us, and then two B’s.
Everything was thrown into question. There was outcry, especially when certain schools seemed to not be affected by this decision to even the average with the previous year.
And now, it is changed again. Righted, but not without cost. Nothing is without cost.
“Durham for you, then?” I say.
“If I can get my place back,” she says, ever the pessimist.
There is a pause. Is she thinking what I am: Why are we talking about results when Goldie is dead and we are the only ones who know?
“She died right away, didn’t she?” she whispers, reading my mind. “I keep . . . I keep worrying that she . . .”
“She died right away,” I tell Crow, even though I have no idea. “That height—it’d be impossible. She didn’t . . . suffer.”
I hear Crow exhale over the phone. “That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“The Daily Mail ran an article about her today. Have you seen it?”
They have? On my desk, my laptop is on sleep, bursting to life with a wave on the trackpad. “No. I’m looking it up now.”
“It’s not . . .” Crow hesitates. “It doesn’t say anything new. Just states that she had an argument with Patricia, went out, never came back. And that she was an aspiring model, with a photo Patricia must have provided. I wonder if she got paid for it.”
“Probably,” I say bitterly.
“Don’t . . . don’t read the comments,” Crow says. “They’re not . . . very nice.”
So naturally this is where I first look. I scroll past the awful headline: aspiring model in her prime disappears, and head straight for the comments at the bottom of the page. I’m expecting dozens, but there are only seven.
Aspiring model??? She’ll be lucky to be on Love Island in a few years
Runaway, probably on drugs
Why do chavs all have this same look??
Let’s not waste police resources on this, please, it’s obvious she’s run away and selfishly not telling anyone. It’s what she deserves for being out during lockdown.
Too thin, looks nasty
Poor girl.
All she has to do to disguise herself is take the cakeload of makeup off!!
Goldie has always been beautiful. All of us agreed.
But now I stare at her picture with different eyes.
Yes, she wears a lot of makeup—aren’t you supposed to if you want to look good?
Maybe her foundation is slightly orange, but the stuff that matches your skin tone is expensive.
Her curls are scraped back into a high ponytail in this picture, which isn’t her best look.
But are hoop earrings chavvy? Goldie isn’t a chav.
Is she? I stare at her clothes, the pink tracksuit she loved to wear, scuffed at the sleeves, and what was once cute and stylish morphs into cheap and tacky.
I shake my head. No. These comments are horrible. They’re just trolls. And what does it matter if she is? What does that have to do with her being missing?
Further down the article is the photo of the five of us winning the poetry competition, the same one Miss White has pinned to her classroom wall. I wonder if the school provided them a copy. Seeing the five of us laughing and smiling together makes me want to throw up.
“They all think she’s run away,” Crow says, and I jump. She’s still on the phone. “You read the comments, didn’t you?”
“Everyone thinks it,” I whisper.
“That’s good, right?” she asks, the shame of her words evident even through the call. “That’s what we wanted?”
Is it?
Is this really the outcome we desired?
“It’s nothing like Hugo,” I say.
Because Hugo did make it to the news in the end, and then he was everywhere.
His wife with her peroxide-blonde hair and his father with the same piercing green eyes as his son have been interviewed on multiple news stations.
The police are sparing no effort or expense.
A reward has been launched, a website, a social media campaign.
“They’re still talking about him,” Crow says. “He was on the news again last night. Instead of Goldie.”
As time goes on, she disappears completely.
The police claim they are still looking into her case, but it’s obvious no resources are put into it.
She’s been written off as a runaway. And the lies that are told in the comments that exist on the few news articles astonish me: Her aunt murdered her; she ran away with a secret boyfriend; she was groomed by a teacher; she fell for a modeling scam and is now a victim of sex trafficking.
The most outlandish theories, all complete nonsense, and all written as if fact.
They make up things about Goldie herself too.
She was angry, she was lonely, she was hooked on drugs and alcohol (all this based on Patricia saying she stole bottles of vodka from the cupboard).
She wanted to be a model because she was failing her exams, never mind that she got her grades changed to three A’s in the end, and she never cared about her results anyway.
They say she lived in a rough area, and the people are dangerous, when they know nothing about the community.
She lived above an old woman, for God’s sake.
They act as if her life was at stake every time she walked outdoors.
Goldie becomes a footnote, one of the thousands of people who go missing every year. One of the ones who never turns up, but nothing is done anyway.
The incompetence of it, the willingness to sweep her under the rug like nothing, stirs something in me, the same feelings I had about the girl who went missing years ago.
I won’t be like that. If it was me, I’d have found out that Goldie was there with her four friends that night.
That they know what happened, and they ran away.
We got away with it. With everything.
Cuckoo doesn’t suggest sneaking out again.
The group chat, Goldie a lingering ghost, is abandoned.
Bishop’s House sits empty, Goldie left behind in its grounds.
The four of us collectively, implicitly, agree to move on somehow, without her and without each other.
Goldie is never found, so she never gets to have a funeral.
She said once she wanted to be cremated.
I’d like to take her ashes, spread them over the places in London Goldie always envisioned visiting.
But she won’t have ashes. She’ll crumble and decay like many undiscovered bodies, and we have to let it happen.
The world returns to normal. Our weird, wonderful, fatal summer is over.
The pleasure that flourished in my chest these past few months is replaced by an odd sort of anxiety, a heavy weight I can’t seem to shift. We were genuinely wild, both repulsive and thrilling, and perhaps that’s why, in the end, it had to stop like it did.