‘Who?’
The man behind the counter brings Nancy a cup of black coffee. Nancy thanks him, and turns back to me. ‘Mary Sayers. Died in 1897, of drowning. That’s what it says on her gravestone. It was William who first took us to see it, hidden away near the back of the churchyard. It was covered in ivy and moss, and very, very old. And it was William who told us the story about her.’
‘What story?’ I’m fascinated, despite myself. I lean forward in my chair, arms folded on the table. I’m aware of someone standing by the counter, the itching feeling of a gaze having fixed on us. It’s there in my peripheral vision like a swelling blot of ink, but I dismiss it.
‘Ah, God. You’ll have heard versions of it over the years. These sorts of stories always end up that way. The way William told it, every winter a girl – this “Quiet Mary” – is seen hitchhiking on the road from Newhaven into Lewes. She only appears on nights when it’s raining, along the stretch of road by the river as you come into town. Drivers who stop to pick her up have spoken of a chill that seems to come into the car with her, and that even if it’s not raining she’s always dripping wet, like she’s just climbed out of the Ouse. You can smell the river on her. She doesn’t speak, and as they enter Cuilfail Tunnel some people have said they can see movement out the corner of their eye, frantic, like she’s clawing at the window to get out. When they turn around she’s disappeared.’
I laugh uneasily. Nancy straightens up, brushing her hair away from her face, finishing her coffee.
‘We all got caught up in it. Took it too far. The romance, the drowned girl, the haunted road. When I look at that photo I don’t see four girls on the cusp of the rest of their lives. I see frightened young women who didn’t fit in and couldn’t find a valve to release the pressure. That picture is probably one of the last ones of us all together.’
‘How come?’
Nancy is silent for a moment, her pale eyes grazing me, the table, the window. Her fingernails tap against her cup. They are highly polished, a delicate shade of coral.
‘A couple of days after that photo was taken, Edie Hudson disappeared right in front of us.’
I open up the picture again. There’s Edie, William’s arms draped around her. She isn’t smiling, and her pretty kohl-ringed eyes look defiant.
‘What happened to her?’
Nancy shrugs. ‘Don’t know. They never found her. One minute she was there, the next? Gone.’
Shock is a detonation, a hollow boom in the chest. I stare at the girl in the picture, so like Kim, so like Samira. That attitude. That sneer. It unsettled me at first, how similar she was to both women, but now there’s something else. The girl who is not there. My mouth is dry and dusty. I reach for my tea, sip it. It’s gone cold.
Nancy sees my disorientation, smiles a little. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘Like I said, he doesn’t often mention his old life down here.’
But that’s not quite true, is it? I’ve heard stories from his childhood, from both William and Alex. About the time William tried to make his mother breakfast in bed and nearly burned the house down. How they both nearly got arrested for climbing scaffolding in the town centre. How William once put his hand through a window, leaving a small, pale scar on his right palm. Kids’ stuff. But still. This – this is something else. How could he not have told me this?
‘It was the worst day of my life,’ Nancy continues, her voice softer. ‘Everything changed after that. Everything.’
She looks at me and smiles briskly, and just like that she seems to shrug back into the frosty, uptight woman who walked in through the door of the chemist. She grabs the white paper bag and stands, putting a five-pound note on the table.
‘This is for the drinks. Tell Alex I said hi.’
Then she turns and leaves, tall and thin as a reed nodding in the breeze. As the door closes behind her I become aware of that movement again at the corner of my vision. There’s a woman sitting at the counter, partially hidden by a pillar. She’s watching us in the mirror. I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. Her expression is as cold and hard as rain-soaked stone. I can feel her gaze even as I wrap my coat around me and pick up the bag from the pharmacy, and it’s not until I’m out the door and over the road that the feeling, like legions of ants crawling beneath my scalp, dissolves.
Samantha – Then
It was Nancy who interested me. Out of the three of them. She was so guarded: her folded arms, her legs wrapped around themselves, the way she stared at the floor. I wished I could talk to her alone.
The girls sat opposite me in the headmaster’s office. His name was written in gold paint on the frosted glass of his door, like a hard-bitten detective in
