‘Will you come and see me again?’ her mother asks, when their session has ended.
Olivia stands up. ‘Of course I will,’ she says briskly.
This is what their relationship will be like now, she sees, snatched conversations across tables in prison visiting rooms. Her mother has an eight-year sentence for manslaughter. She changed her plea to guilty in the end in exchange for a lighter sentence but she’ll still be in her early seventies by the time she’s allowed out.
She can feel her mother’s eyes on her as she leaves the room. It’s not until she’s outside, away from people, that she lets the tears flow freely down her cheeks.
On the train home she calls Jenna. They speak once every few weeks. Olivia is hoping to get up to Manchester soon.
‘Still not driving, then?’ Jenna asks now.
‘I will. I promise. I need to do a refresher course or something. It’s been a long time.’
Jenna’s voice softens. ‘And how did it go today?’
Olivia glances out of the window at the countryside rushing past. ‘As well as could be expected. Mum looked okay, though, so that’s good. She hasn’t been beaten up or anything. How are you?’
Jenna lets out a deep breath. ‘I’m okay. The house is on the market. I’m staying in it with Finn until it’s sold. Anyway, eventually Gavin will have Finn every other weekend.’
‘So the divorce is definitely going ahead?’
‘Yes. Finding out about Clara has moved things along.’ She gives a bitter laugh. Olivia wasn’t surprised to hear that Gavin had fallen for another woman, a work colleague ten years his junior. She could hear Jenna fighting back tears when she first told her not long after returning home. ‘It’s not a surprise and I actually feel okay about it.’ She laughs. ‘Well, no, that’s a lie. I’m fucking furious about it but I’ll get over it. At least I have Finn and, on the occasion I do need to stay overnight somewhere, my mum looks after him. Finding out about Clara gave me the ammunition I needed. Gavin has no choice but to be reasonable now.’
‘And what about Dale?’
‘Oh, we keep in contact.’ She hears the smile in Jenna’s voice. ‘I think maybe … in the future something could happen. But it’s too soon right now. I need to be on my own for a while first. It’s going to take me a while to trust a man again.’
‘I definitely get that,’ agrees Olivia, snuggling back in her seat. And in that moment, despite everything, she feels contentment wash over her.
She asks the taxi driver to drop her off at the Devil’s Corridor. She hasn’t been to the forest in weeks and has tried to avoid it since the bodies were recovered. But now she feels a macabre desperation to visit the place where they were found. To say goodbye.
Dale had called her just after Christmas to tell her where Jay – or one of his cronies – had buried them. Their remains have now been removed, funerals held. She went to them all, standing at the back with Dale, trying to make herself invisible, although Izzy and Maggie hugged her at the end of the service. ‘We don’t blame you,’ Maggie had whispered in her ear, as she embraced her. And it had been a huge weight off Olivia’s shoulders.
She heads to the cabin where Jenna had been staying, blissfully unaware that the victims lay in a patch of the forest just beyond the garden. She wonders if Jay had chosen that cabin especially for Jenna, as though he enjoyed toying with her. With all of them.
She barely knew the man. But she hates him with every fibre of her being.
The cabin is still intact but at the foot of the garden there is a massive hole. It took the police a long time to discover where the bodies were buried because her mother professed to not knowing where they were. Olivia hopes she was telling the truth because the least she could do was put her former friends out of their misery.
Olivia steps over upended soil and rocks until she reaches the bottom of the garden. Darkness washes over her as she remembers everything that happened in Jenna’s living room: her mother’s confession, Jenna’s terror, Jay’s psychotic behaviour. He’d acted like a wild animal who knew he was backed into a corner. She kneels down on the hard, uneven ground and bows her head, offering up a prayer to a God she’s no longer sure she believes in.
It’s a cold February afternoon and frost has formed over the soil so that it crunches underfoot. Olivia gets up and pulls her hat more firmly onto her head, blowing on her gloved hands. She half expects to turn around and see Jay standing behind her, with that evil glint in his eye. How could her mother have fallen for a guy like that? But then again, didn’t she do the same thing, not noticing Wesley’s flaws at first?
She whispers a goodbye to her three friends, in particular to Sally, who she’ll miss for the rest of her life. And then she walks away, heading for the field of standing stones that will lead her back in the direction of the stables. Her leg has started to ache but she has enough energy to make a detour past the clearing to where Ralph’s caravan still stands, now empty, the windows cracked.
She bows her head. If only she had some flowers to put there, the place where he died. But that would look weird.
She had been so grateful for Ralph’s help on the night of the accident. Her gratitude had blinded her to his flaws. When he found the money in the footwell of her car – the money she later realized Tamzin had stolen – he’d kept it and told her about it when he came to visit her in hospital a few weeks later. It was the missing two hundred pounds and she’d said he should keep it. She did it to protect Tamzin so she wouldn’t get into trouble for stealing. And she was sure, at that point, that her friends would come back.
When she went to visit him on the night he died she was unaware of the hand grenade he was about to throw her way.
He had been in the forest earlier that day, he said. And he’d heard her mother arguing with Jay Knapton. Olivia had been confused. ‘Why were they arguing? They didn’t know each other,’ she’d said.
And then he’d told her about how he sometimes worked for Jay dealing drugs and that her mother was also involved. She refused to believe it, telling him her mother would never do anything like that.
‘They were arguing about the night of the accident. It sounded like they’d covered something up. About what happened to your friends. I think you need to tell the police,’ Ralph had said. And in that moment Olivia knew her worst fears were confirmed. The lights on the night of the accident. The number-plate. It had been her mother’s car. She didn’t know how or why, but it sounded like her mother was somehow involved.
He was unusually firm with her. Agitated, almost. ‘The police have been sniffing around. I’m fed up with always being the one they point the finger at. They still think I had something to do with your friends going missing. They saw me with Jade the next morning but I know they think it was Tamzin. It wasn’t. I was buying some weed from Jade. The missing girls was nothing to do with me. It’s unfair. And all the time the real culprits are under our noses.’
‘I can’t grass on my own mother,’ she’d replied, aghast. ‘And if she is part of some drugs ring with Jay Knapton, won’t they come looking for you too?’