34. Crow
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CROW
I am on fire.
Not literally. But the words are flying off the page, I am typing rapidly, and for the first time in forever I am writing, truly writing, and it is flowing easily and I am enjoying it.
Ever since coming back from work, that message, the horror of digging for Goldie and finding nothing, I have been writing with a passion. A fury. I don’t even know what this story is about. It is just anger, put to the page.
Downstairs there is noise again, a crashing, then something being dragged across the floor.
She has been doing it ever since the others came round.
I wonder if this is her idea of some kind of revenge for Cuckoo, trying to disturb me.
But I have my headphones to solve that, and I have way bigger problems.
The writing has gone so well I don’t realize the time until the sound of a beeping lorry reversing interrupts me.
I heave myself off the sofa and peer out of the front window.
Sure enough, there is a large van outside, parked up across the road from the house.
Removals is written on the side. Two men, middle-aged with paunches and tattoos, emerge from the front.
One opens up the back of the van; the other crosses the road toward us.
It’s only when he disappears from view and I hear the faint buzz of Chelsea’s doorbell downstairs that I realize what’s happening.
She’s moving.
In confirmation, Chelsea emerges from the house with the moving man. They stand and talk to each other for a minute, him gesturing, her nodding, and then the other man joins them, and they head back inside again.
She’s actually leaving. I can’t believe it.
Chelsea, who when I first moved in, said my accent was interesting and was stunned to learn I had a degree.
Who told me to hurry up and leave or find a boyfriend so a nice couple could have the flat instead, and that I made far too much noise.
Always too much noise, always coming up and complaining.
She’s leaving. I don’t have to worry about her ever again. Cuckoo will be chuffed.
Goldie would have loved this.
“Thank you,” I say out loud.
The doorbell rings again, but this time it’s for me. Time really has run away from me because everyone is coming round about that message and I haven’t had the time to think about what I’m going to do. How I’m going to help the situation, if there’s any possible way to help when Goldie is gone.
They’re all there: Cuckoo, Starling, Wren.
It no longer feels weird to see them after so many years, our natural way of slotting together returning as if no time has passed at all.
They’re worried, I can see it in each of their faces, but the moving van has brought a welcome reprieve as Cuckoo jerks her head in the direction of it with a triumphant grin.
“Did you see Chelsea chatting to those removal guys?” she says. “Is she moving out?”
“I think so,” I say, and she claps her hands in glee.
“We did it,” she says. “Power in numbers. Power in our group. Justice again.”
Again? Is that truly what we did before?
“And that’s what we’ll do to whoever is messing with us,” she adds, and my stomach clenches.
The writing is abandoned, the three of them invited inside, and the kettle flicked on.
When I put four mugs of tea on the coffee table, I expect them to immediately sit down, gather round, begin discussing what to do, but they are mesmerized by the scene unfolding outside.
Chelsea’s existence, compacted into that van, soon to be driven far away from here.
I join them at the window, watching too.
At one point I think Chelsea catches us staring, glaring up toward us, but then she shields her eyes, and I think the sun’s reflection is keeping us hidden.
The last item is loaded into the van, and it is closed up with a bang.
Chelsea speaks with the men and waves as they drive away.
She hasn’t gotten into the front with them; there is clearly more to do here first. I know she doesn’t have a car.
On the rare occasions we both go to work at the same time, she walks firmly ahead of me.
With nothing else to see, we retreat from the window. But just as we sit, finally ready to talk, there is a knock at the door.
It can only be Chelsea.
“I’ll get it,” Cuckoo says automatically, but I raise my hand to stop her.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “This is my moment of triumph, after all.”
Chelsea smells vaguely of sweat as she stands in the hall.
Her face has that sheen of it too, which she seems self-conscious of as she keeps wiping her brow.
Her hair, pulled back into a tight bun, is coming loose, the efforts of the previous few hours taking their toll.
I haven’t seen her without makeup before, or without looking perfectly put together.
Her clothes, a loose-fitting white T-shirt and black leggings, are tidy enough, but the leggings have scuffs and dust on them.
She has a set of keys in one hand and an envelope in the other.
“Philip said to give you these to hang on to,” she says, no polite greeting apparently necessary. “They’re the keys to my—to the flat downstairs, and in here is a printout of the final inventory I’ve done and my forwarding address. He’ll be down next week to get them.”
“You are leaving then,” I say. “I saw the moving van.”
“Yes.”
No further information, no explanation. I sense movement behind me, turn and see Cuckoo has crept along the hallway to listen to the conversation. I pull a face at her, and she retreats into the living room.
“Careful with that one,” Chelsea murmurs.
“She’s my friend.”
“Yeah? How come I never saw her around before then?”
“We lost contact since school. We reconnected recently.”
Chelsea raises her eyebrow. “Well, you know best, I’m sure. She’s made herself very cozy, very quickly. And the others too. You should be careful with all of them.”
I ignore her, reaching out for the keys and envelope. “Where are you moving to?”
“Far away from here,” she replies.
She turns and walks away, and I can’t resist having the final word. “Did Cuckoo bother you that much?”
Chelsea stops but doesn’t turn around. “You’re very different when you’re with them, and it’s not in the way you think.”
In a good way, I want to tell her, and it is how I think, but she resumes walking down the hall and disappears down the stairs.
“She’s gone!” Cuckoo shouts when I return. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead!”
“Truly gone,” I say. “Here are her keys.”
“If this were any other time, I’d say let’s look in her flat,” Starling murmurs. “But we have more important priorities right now.”
The message.
“This is about Goldie,” Wren says. “They knew we were at Bishop’s House that night; the message was timed too perfectly. They know something, at least, if not the whole truth.”
“They’re pretending to be her,” Cuckoo says. “It’s sick. And quoting the damn theory the police went with even though no one has seen her since.”
Starling laughs bitterly. “The police never cared. You want to get away with something, choose your victim well enough and you’ll be fine.”
This is the truth. It’s odd to look back on because to us Goldie was the perfect victim, and this was what we were so terrified of.
That we’d be found out immediately, that with even the weakest attempts at investigation, everything would be uncovered.
Goldie was blonde and beautiful and young and kind.
In Netflix documentaries, the girls always look like her.
The cases that go viral, the ones everyone is talking about.
But actually, the rest of the world didn’t see Goldie like that.
Blonde, but cheap peroxide blonde. Beautiful, but in an obvious, overdone, classless way.
Young, but eighteen soon and able to make her own decisions.
Kind, but actually no one cared about that.
Perhaps we imagined her all along, our fifth friend, and she never existed at all.
Cuckoo takes a sip of her tea. Mine is forgotten, and must be lukewarm now.
Wren has also left hers untouched. I am aware, suddenly, of the emptiness of this house.
Chelsea is gone, and though someone new will replace her in due course, when these three leave, I will be all alone.
It is what I pictured wanting so much when I was younger, but now I’m reminded of Bishop’s House, and a shiver passes through me.
“Who could this be?” Starling says. “Someone who knows us, someone who could know about Goldie. Someone who wants to scare us.”
“As long as it’s not one of us,” Cuckoo says. “Anyone want to own up right now?”
There is a pause. We look at each other in turn. She’s there, Goldie, determined to make herself known. She might as well be pointing to her chest—look at me, look at me, look at me—but I look at the others, and even though my gut twists, I can’t think it of them.
I shake my head. “Why would one of us do something like this? It makes no sense.”
And Goldie, in the corner of my eye, smiles.
“Someone must have been watching somehow,” Wren says.
Cuckoo finishes her drink, places it on the coffee table but not on a coaster, which itches at me to correct. “Then who? Has anyone ever mentioned anything to anyone—even something maybe innocuous at first? Any kind of link that they could then investigate?”
There is a relief in the four of us together. Chelsea called me different, but I am better with them. I don’t need to fight it; I need to embrace it.
“I never have.” Wren bites her lip. I notice the dead skin peeling from it, a long-term habit she has never been able to break. She tears a piece off, puts it into her mouth, and swallows, which makes me feel even more queasy than I already am.
“Crow?” Cuckoo says. “What about you? Didn’t you mention you had lots of close friends at university? None of them know anything?”
“My friends?” I swallow. “I—no, we didn’t talk about that.”
Starling frowns. “What is it? You’ve gone bright red.”
“You have said something,” Cuckoo says. “For God’s sake, Crow—”
“No!” I say. “It’s not that. I haven’t, I promise.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“It’s just . . . I didn’t . . . I may have . . .”
“May have what?”
“I didn’t have any friends at university, alright?” I snap, face hot. “I tried. They just . . . They were so different. I don’t know. It didn’t happen.”
And I really did try. Researched all their posh schools, tried to understand the references they made to particular people or bars or places, always volunteered to help out at various societies.
But it was like they physically recoiled from me, as if no matter what I did, they could sense I didn’t belong, even though I worked so hard.
The others don’t know how to respond to this. They look, worst of all, embarrassed.
If Goldie were here, she would rescue me right now. Bring the attention onto her. But when I look for her again, she’s gone.
So I have to do it myself. “What about Hugo’s wife?”
We have been dancing around her, around him, this whole time.
“There is no one with more motive,” I say. “She has to be the one who sent the message.”
“So what do we do?” Wren asks. “We can’t exactly just confront her.”
“Maybe we can, in an indirect way,” Cuckoo says. “I have a plan.”
Oh God. We all know how a plan from Cuckoo ends up.