I knew then that he was telling the truth. This was the man I had grown up with, the man I would trust with my life. He had made a stupid mistake, but he had not betrayed me, and he hadn’t changed throughout all this mess.
Still, I checked. ‘It was only a kiss?’
‘Nothing else happened.’ He shook his head. ‘But it’s bad enough. If… if you can’t forgive me, I understand. But I’ll never do anything like it again. As soon as it happened, we both realised how wrong it was. We’ve been avoiding each other ever since; it’s been so awkward. When we did talk, it was to assure each other that neither of us would ever tell anyone. We knew it wouldn’t happen again, so we just left things.’
A kiss. Only a kiss. It churned my stomach, but after losing you, it was nothing. We could get past this.
Eighty-Four
Monday dawned; 5.03 a.m. You had been dead for four days. The numbness and anger were giving way to constant tears. We shuffled along, hunched, broken. Jacob’s bosses had told him to take as long as he needed. We told our parents not to come over. Each of them had taken over a task for the funeral, now that it had been decided what we wanted. My life was in jagged shards, thoughts slashing me and making me gasp. I wanted to bleed.
Upstairs, Jacob stirred. I heard his gentle footsteps, then a door opening and closing softly. He had gone to your room, Beth. I sensed by the fact he had closed the door that he wanted to be alone.
So with nothing to do but grieve, I found myself flipping aimlessly through the Sunday newspaper Jill had left on the step the day before. My eyes roamed over the words but not long enough to take anything in.
Suddenly they stopped. Widened.
‘Tiffany’s murder is killing me,’ says tragic mum
Read the headline running across two pages. Below sat a picture of a woman whose eyes were as haunted and angry as my own.
I leaned over the print. It was an interview with the mother of the girl who was killed a few months before you were attacked. The one who stole our publicity from us. At the time I was so furious, but now the words of the article resonated with my own agony. At least our mystery had been solved, and I knew who was responsible for your death; this poor woman, Angela Jones, 34, had no clue. I felt her pain alongside my own.
Fleetingly I wondered if I should contact her. Perhaps we could offer each other comfort.
There were the briefest details of the crime. I didn’t dwell on those, remembering them instead from the initial coverage. How twelve-year-old Tiffany had disappeared on 27 September 2015, the night of the blood moon, from her home in Clifton, Nottingham. Her body had been found weeks later, her head caved in. She’d been sexually assaulted after death, then dumped in some undergrowth by the side of the M1.
The police had initially looked closely at her family, mainly because Tiffany had apparently half-heartedly tried to run away a few months before her death, going walkabout in the middle of the night. When the newspapers got wind, there had been some pretty unsavoury reports, sneering at her relatives, seemingly because they lived on a large council estate. Her mum’s boyfriend, Bear – who the hell had a name like Bear? – had been given a particularly hard time. He had looked the part of a pervert, to be honest: slightly dishevelled, with uneven eyes that gave him a permanent leer. But looks aren’t everything, are they?
When it became clear the family (and Bear) were innocent, the police worked on the assumption that Tiffany had run away again and been taken by an opportunist who had spotted her in the night. The A453 ran fairly near her home, and connected to the M1. It was a busy road, and police reckoned someone passing by in a car may have spotted the girl and snatched her. Dumped her before making his escape along the busy motorway.
All that had stopped when Tiffany’s phone had been found in bushes near where her body was dumped. Text messages showed she had been lured from her home by someone posing as a teenage lad her age. Police believed this ‘Justin’ was actually a paedophile who had deliberately targeted her. How he had got her number remained a mystery.
The media had then launched a charm offensive to make up for the hatchet job they’d done on the family earlier. They were on a crusade to make the family look good – and to catch ‘Justin’. That was one of the reasons why her story ran while your attack didn’t make the news, Beth.
That, and the fact that the moniker the ‘Blood Moon Murder’ had a great ring to it.
Your attack didn’t have that. Apart from your dad smoking a joint, which had been splashed briefly over the front pages of the nationals, there was nothing juicy about this case that could be reported. The fact that your attacker was a young girl meant restrictions imposed by the court were in place over what could be printed. Chloe’s identity was legally protected – and because of that, so were her parents’. As a result, your death had been the smallest of paragraphs, buried in the back half of the national newspapers. Easily missed.
Unlike this huge report on Tiffany’s murder. So far, there were no new leads in the case.
I had to stand for a moment. To distance myself physically from the arctic glare of the article on the kitchen table. Not because I was sobbing in sympathy. No; it was because I was so bloody furious at the injustice of yet another young girl’s life snuffed out. I knew exactly the hell this mother was going through.
Eighty-Five
TIFFANY
SUNDAY 27 SEPTEMBER
School crap, friends crap, life crap, Tiffany thought to herself.
Her mum sat downstairs, watching Gogglebox on catch-up, by the sound of her laughing to herself. Let her laugh. At least it was better than the sound of her crying after yet another bust-up with her butt-ugly boyfriend, Bear. Who the hell had a name like Bear? That alone should have given her mum warning that he was well peak. The latest in a long line of crap, butt-ugly blokes.
Tiffany should have been sleeping, but the students next door were all up, so she’d got no chance. The walls were so thin she could tell from the music that the bloke in the bedroom beside hers was playing World of Warcraft. And swearing a lot.
With a sigh, the twelve-year-old turned her bedside light on, put on her round specs, dug out her notebook and started writing. She wrote constantly. Tiffany could lose herself, block out the shitty reality of her life and create a whole new world. One with dank vampires, and werewolves, and she was thinking about introducing a talking dragon. But not a crap one. One that was dark and a bit evil and, like, totally sick.
Her mobile phone lit up, buzzing like an angry wasp had climbed inside it. She almost didn’t bother looking at it. Curiosity got the better of her, though, as she wondered who the hell would be sending her texts at just gone midnight on a Sunday.
It was from a number she didn’t recognise.
Hey, Tiffany, seen u round. Want 2 chat?
And get scammed by someone? Not likely. Knowing her name wasn’t enough to gain her trust.
Loser
She typed back.
Seconds later, it buzzed again.