I set off down the lane, walking fast, ignoring the woods on my left, but too aware of the trees and shadows. The night Bella died, I was out there in the woods with her, but I don’t know why. Then there’s a gap and it’s like I went to sleep and woke up in the woods, rotting leaves on my face and in my mouth, soaked with rain and streaked with mud. But alive. Bella was lying next to me and I thought…I thought she was asleep but when I got up and looked, her eyes were open and staring and there was blood on her face and…I blanked out again then, woke up in the ambulance.

I stop and hunch over, sliced in two by a spasm of pain so sharp it stops my breath. We were at the bottom of a gully, made slick by rain and a summer storm. They said we fell. They said there was a landslide. They tested Bella’s alcohol levels and they were too high for a few glasses of champagne and they said we’d sneaked out drinking and Bella had slipped, pulling me with her, falling and tumbling thirty feet, Bella’s life ending on a sharp rock at the bottom.

They found cigarettes in her pocket, a plastic-wrapped lump of dope. Everyone clamored to tell how much she used to drink, how much of a wild child she was. But…but…I never went into the woods at night. Bella sneaked out to drink, yes, and I know she’d take the shortcut home through the woods, but I was never invited along. She’d go into the village, or up to the amusement park with her friends—those cool, hostile girls who ignored me when Bella let me tag along.

I told them. I said all that as I lay in my hospital bed, dehydrated and in shock. Something happened, I said. Something terrible happened. And I think I started babbling about the killer who was on the loose, the rumors and stories that thrilled and terrified us all in equal measure. The “summer of death,” the local papers called it—all those stories about a killer who never got caught, who stopped his spree after the previous summer and disappeared into legend.

I was looked at with pity, treated with sympathy and frustration as my memory refused to come back. The inquest ruled it an accidental death in the end, but people still look at me, even now, curiosity on their faces, a question tucked away in their cheeks, not spoken but always there. Do you remember? Do you, Tess?

Tess