“I don’t know, do I? I didn’t know he was fucking dead.” He shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair. “You’re so damned selfish. My father was murdered, my mother is upstairs dying, and you’re having a tantrum because I told the police the truth.”

“Dad didn’t do anything.”

“Then he has nothing to worry about, does he?”

Of course he doesn’t. So why is that knot of fear in my stomach growing?

Chapter 22

Chapter 22

I close the front door quietly. I don’t want anyone knowing I’m going for a run. I jog slowly down the lane, footsteps heavy on the ground, sounding reluctant at this slow pace. My ears are straining for the sound of following steps but there’s nothing but my own steady rhythm, my own breathing, getting faster as I up the pace.

I can think more clearly out here alone. About all of them, about Bella…and about Greg.

Bella and I both thought Greg was our friend and maybe he was. But was there something wrong with him, or was Lena just making stuff up? Were the police just fishing with their questions, or do they genuinely believe he might have had something to do with Nicole’s and Annie Weston’s murders? And there was that other poor girl who went missing and was never found. I think of the great expanse of the woods and the back of my neck prickles. I can see it more objectively now, ten years on, how others would have seen that friendship. He was odd, strange—why did he keep inviting Bella and me round? Why was he happy to keep both…friendships a secret? We were teenagers, he was forty, living alone in that creepy house. It wasn’t right. With me, there was never any hint of anything weird, but I was…I was nothing. Clumsy and plain and nothing.

Bella was different. Beautiful, bright, shining Arabella. If Bella went round there after the fight we had…It may have been an accident, but he could have killed my sister. I never thought of Greg back then. Not really. He’d already gone, moved away, he’d texted Jack from abroad, or so Jack says. I was relieved he’d gone, a problem gone away without me having to deal with it. But he could have come back, couldn’t he? Could have been at Dean House the night of the wedding. But if it was Greg, who then killed him?

I’d begun to think it could have been Jack. I thought Jack might have been the one who killed Nicole and the other girl. Jack with his fake alibi.

Maybe they were in it together.