Oh God.
‘As we got older, the physical abuse stopped, but he started messing with me in other ways – like he’d steal things from other kids and put them in my locker and get me in trouble. He said if I told anyone about it, he’d kill me. And I believed him. I still believe that he was serious. He would have killed me, and enjoyed doing it. But that was his plan B. He didn’t want me dead because I was useful to him. I don’t know how many times I provided him with an alibi; said he was with me.’
‘Andy, I’m sure Nick was only joking when he said he would kill you.’
‘No.’ Andy shook his head vigorously. ‘No, Lulu. He meant it.’
How awful, for teenage Andy, that he had thought his best friend was genuinely threatening to kill him. How awful that he still believed it. But how to reassure him? ‘I’ve got two brothers,’ she tried. ‘They were real tearaways when they were children. Dennis has a scar too, on his leg. It was ripped open on a broken twig when John pushed him out of a tree. And they were always coming up with terrible ideas of how they might kill one another. But they didn’t mean it. They were only joking.’
‘Nick wasn’t joking!’ Andy suddenly shouted at her.
‘Okay.’ She kept her voice calm. ‘It was very wrong of him to say it, whether he was joking or not.’
‘He wasn’t joking when he murdered Dean Reid!’
Oh my goodness. Had she heard that right?
Andy was looking down at his hands, clutched in fists on his lap. ‘You know who Dean Reid was? One of the disadvantaged youngsters Duncan mentored at The Phoenix Centre in Langholm? Nick set the whole thing up in an attempt to frame Maggie. He had it timed to the second. He’d texted Dean, pretending to be Duncan, saying he’d pay him the money Dean was trying to blackmail out of him and telling him to be at The Phoenix Centre at eight-thirty on Thursday night and wait till he got there. We had a rehearsal for the school play that night. In the interval, Nick used my bike to get to The Phoenix Centre, stabbed Dean, got back to the school in time to be back on stage. When the police questioned me, I said I’d been with him for part of the interval. That meant there was no time for him to have got to The Phoenix Centre and back. Rock solid alibi. He used a knife from Sunnyside with Maggie’s fingerprints on it to frame her. He called her from a phone box on his way back to the school from the Centre, pretending to be a concerned neighbour worried about what was going on in there. Then he called the police. Maggie hot-footed it over there, presumably. But she was streetwise. Former young offender. She must have found Dean dead, realised what Nick was trying to do, and legged it before the police turned up. There were no fingerprints on the knife, so she must have wiped it.’ He looked up at her at last, focusing somewhere around her left shoulder. ‘Oh, Nick was not happy about that at all. Particularly when Duncan was arrested for the murder. Duncan was charged, but then it turned out there was CCTV footage proving he was miles away at the time.’
The poor, poor guy.
All these years, he had really been convinced that this had all happened, that Nick had committed a murder? Could she make him see that he was wrong, that what he was saying didn’t add up? If he’d really thought Nick had murdered someone, would he have continued hanging out with him? The day the family had disappeared, Nick had been returning from a nice day out in Edinburgh with Andy and Carol. At some level, the teenage Andy must have known it was all nonsense, Nick’s wind-up about the murder of this boy.
She had to tap into that part of his brain now.
‘So you lied to the police to give Nick an alibi, even though you knew he’d done it?’
‘I’m not proud of it.’
‘Isn’t it possible, Andy, that that’s what you told the police because you really were with Nick?’
‘No! I wasn’t! But Nick said if I didn’t give him an alibi, he’d tell the cops I did it. He said –’ Andy suddenly leapt from the chair as something crashed through the doorway behind Lulu, and Lulu was up on her feet too as a pigeon flapped around the room before exiting into the back hall and out through the half-open door.
Andy was breathing fast. ‘I’m just going to check, okay? Check there’s no one out there. Stay here.’
When he came back, he didn’t sit down. ‘I need to make this quick. I don’t like it, being here, so close to Sunnyside.’ He went to stand by the window and stayed there looking out as he spoke. ‘So – Nick told me he’d dob me in to the cops for Dean’s murder if I didn’t cooperate. He said the tyre tracks on the muddy path leading to the back door of The Phoenix Centre would confirm that my bike was at the scene of the crime. He threatened to tell the cops I had made him give me an alibi. He had it all worked out. He even engineered an altercation between me and Dean a week or so earlier. Dean was always on a short fuse, so that wasn’t difficult. He made sure there were witnesses. Ironically, a similar incident between Dean and Duncan was what pointed the cops in Duncan’s direction.’