The Friendship Pact

  The Friendship Pact

  A totally gripping psychological thriller with a brilliant twist

  Alison James

  Books by Alison James

  The Friendship Pact

  The Detective Rachel Prince series

  1. Lola is Missing

  2. Now She’s Gone

  3. Perfect Girls

  AVAILABLE IN AUDIO

  The Detective Rachel Prince series

  1. Lola is Missing (available in the UK and the US)

  2. Now She’s Gone (available in the UK and the US)

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART TWO

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  PART THREE

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  Lola is Missing

  Hear more from Alison

  Books by Alison James

  A Letter from Alison

  Now She’s Gone

  Perfect Girls

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  What frightens her most about the body is its unresponsiveness. The absolute inertia. It might as well be a piece of wood. That’s what she remembers clearly from that last time, all those years ago when they were children. The instinctive holding of breath, waiting for some sort of reaction; a sigh, a twitch.

  It lies there at their feet, and the absolute stillness starts to play tricks with her mind. Did she just see something – a slight upward movement of the chest, the flicker of a finger? In the dim light, she can’t be sure and convinces herself that they could have got this all wrong. That he wasn’t dead after all.

  But before she can speak – or even articulate this thought – it has slipped away, out of reach, and for the second time in her life she watches that dark, cold water receive a body and swallow it up.

  PART ONE

  One

  September 1995

  The movement is swift and vicious, like an assault. An arm hooked around her neck, half strangling her.

  Lucinda Katherine Mary Gibson twists round to look at her assailant, who has hurtled up to her as she’s innocently walking through the school gates at the end of the day. She knows this girl is in the same class, but Lucy has only been at Redgate High School for two weeks and so hasn’t learned all her classmates’ names. Even so, she recognises this particular girl. She has ‘hard’ written all over her. She’s about the same height, but while Lucy still has the slight, knobbly body of a child, this girl is heavyset and well-developed. She has breasts. Her sandy-red hair is thick and straight, but instead of having the pinkish freckled skin of a redhead, her complexion is a sallow dark olive and her eyes slant in an unexpected way. There’s a distinct gap between her two top teeth and she wears her socks extra-long so that they cover her knees and end at mid-thigh. In an as yet unexplored area of her brain, Lucy understands that this is a provocative gesture, designed to draw attention to the girl’s body.

  ‘You’re the teacher’s pet,’ her assailant says accusingly.

  In response, Lucy walks faster down the street, trying to get away. Wishing it was one of the days when her mother came to collect her in the car.

  ‘Oi, four eyes,’ the girl says, giving Lucy a slight shove with her elbow. The gesture is boisterous rather than malicious. ‘I said: you’re the teacher’s pet. Miss Gresham’s, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not,’ replies Lucy hotly. She can feel sweat breaking out along her hairline, underneath her straight, baby-fine blonde plait. It makes her glasses slip down her nose slightly, and she pushes them back up with a self-conscious little gesture. She reaches instinctively to fiddle with the end of her hair, which is something she does when she’s nervous.

  ‘You’re rich too, though,’ says the girl. She pronounces it ‘dough’.

  It occurs to Lucy that, in her own clumsy fashion, the girl is trying to spark up a conversation, but Lucy doesn’t have any idea why or to what end, so she doesn’t know how to respond. She dips her head. ‘I’m not rich,’ she mumbles.

  ‘You are. I’ve seen your Mum’s car.’

  Lucy’s heart sinks. Her mother drives an ostentatiously shiny 4x4 and is in the habit of parking it on the zigzag lines near the front gates, despite the school’s ban on this practice.

  ‘It’s that big black one, isn’t it?’ the girl goes on, with a knowing smile. ‘Must be nice being rich.’

  Lucy opens her mouth to contradict her, but then shuts it again. Possibly, compared to some of the other pupils at Redgate, she is rich. Or at least well off. She is aware that she and her parents live in a large, comfortable house with a big garden, and that they have a cleaning lady, and go on foreign holidays at least twice a year.

  ‘Where d’you live?’ her tormentor goes on, with her uncanny ability to read Lucy’s mind.

  When Lucy fails to answer, she grabs Lucy’s forearm and jostles her slightly. Lucy’s satchel slips off her shoulder and her new pencil case drops onto the pavement, spilling its contents.

  ‘Is that a protractor?’ the girl asks, snatching it off the ground before Lucy can reply. Their class has just been told they need to use a protractor for their maths homework, which involves measuring line segments and angles. Her eyes gleam. ‘Can I have a lend of it?’

  ‘You mean can you borrow it?’ Lucy corrects her primly.

  ‘Yeah, can I have a borrow? I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Sure.’ Anything to get her to go away. ‘But I’ll need it back.’

  The fact is, Lucy isn’t too worried about the protractor. She has more geometry equipment at home, and if she can’t find a spare protractor her mother will be only too happy to pop out to the shops for one, or ask her father to get one on his way home from work.

  ‘Ask me for it tomorrow,’ the girl says. She turns on her heel to walk in the other direction, thrusting the protractor into her bag with the relish of an archaeologist discovering a rare treasure.

  Is that all it took, Lucy wonders, taken aback. ‘What’s your name?’ she calls.

  ‘Adele.’ The girl shouts over her shoulder. ‘Adele Marie Watts.’

  Adele homes in on Lucy during morning break the next day. She’s chewing on a rubber band, twirling it between her gapped white teeth.

  ‘Have you got my protractor?’ Lucy asks, although she has already completed her geometry homework using one she found in her father’s desk drawer.

  ‘It’s up my house,’ says Adele casually. She’s wearing a denim jacket over her uniform blouse, although the school rules are very clear that only blazers with the RHS badge are allowed. ‘Why don’t you come round to mine for your tea, then I can give it you back.’

  ‘What – today?’ Lucy’s pale grey eyes widen. She is not used to social arran
gements being treated so casually. In the Gibson household, these things are always scheduled in advance, with full parental consultation.

  ‘Yeah, why not? You’re not scared, are you?’ Adele flicks her arm playfully.

  Was Lucy scared? The truth was that she probably was, a bit. ‘I can’t really come today,’ she says, trying to sound unavailable rather than anxious. Her mother is picking her up in the car and they’re going straight to ballet, but she doesn’t tell Adele that. Ballet classes will provide further evidence that she’s rich. Even if today was a day when she was walking home, her mother would probably call the police if she didn’t show up by 4.30 p.m. She can’t just go round to someone else’s house.

  ‘Fine, tomorrow then,’ says Adele.

  What Adele refers to as her ‘house’ turns out to be a council flat on the eastern edge of Redgate. Lucy, on the other hand, lives in a detached Edwardian villa in Haverleigh Park, a slice of stockbroker belt to the north-west of Redgate that enjoys a speedy thirty-minute service direct to Waterloo from Haverleigh Holt station. She’s never been inside a flat in her life, let alone a local authority one.

  The Watts family are numerous, loud and frankly terrifying. In addition to Adele’s mother, who is as wide as she is tall and has Adele’s freckles, there’s her older half-brother Jamil, her younger siblings Tyler and Chelsee and assorted cousins. There’s also an older half-sister Janine, who has a baby and a flat of her own. Adele’s father puts in an appearance, standing in the kitchen, arguing with Adele’s mother and smoking a fat hand-rolled cigarette. He has dreadlocks and is, Adele informs Lucy proudly, ‘mixed race’.

  Nobody sits at the table for tea. In fact, there is no table. People perch on the edge of armchairs and the sofa with crisp sandwiches and – ‘for afters’ – Pop Tarts. Lucy, who has never eaten a Pop Tart before, would have been thrilled by this menu if she weren’t so nervous. She discovers from the family’s exchanges while they’re eating – more argument than conversation – that Adele is twelve and a half, a whole year older than she is, but she has been held back at school and is repeating Year Seven.

  ‘Shall we go into your room and play?’ Lucy whispers, licking icing from her fingers in the absence of anything resembling a napkin. Adele looks at her blankly, then shows her the tiny room that she shares with Tyler and Chelsee. The two younger children sleep on bunk beds and Adele sleeps on a single mattress on the floor next to them, surrounded by a mess of toys and clothes.

  ‘Sometimes I sleep on the couch,’ she says, with a defensiveness that sounds almost like pride.

  Jamil has the other single bedroom and her mother occupies the third bedroom.

  There is no mention of the borrowed protractor or any offer to return it, and Lucy is reluctant to mention it, especially as she has no need of it. Whereas Adele clearly does.

  Lucy’s mother wanted to come to collect her from the Watts’ flat, but Lucy persuaded her to agree to a less awkward compromise and meet her at the bus stop where Adele catches the bus to school. The two girls walk there together, and as they do so Adele slips her arm unselfconsciously through Lucy’s. Lucy is surprised but oddly pleased by this gesture of intimacy. The car is already parked opposite the bus stop, and Lucy sees her mother studying the interaction in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Did you have a nice time, darling?’ she asks as the car pulls out into traffic, with Adele waving from the pavement.

  ‘Um, yes,’ says Lucy uncertainly. She’s still not entirely sure how she feels about the visit. ‘We had Pop Tarts.’

  ‘Goodness!’ Mrs Gibson forces a smile. ‘You’ll need to make sure you brush your teeth when we get back. And this girl, Adele… you like her?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lucy, more with confusion than conviction. ‘I like her.’

  ‘So when am I coming to yours, Luce?’

  Adele barrels up to Lucy in the playground the next day, slinging an arm round her shoulder with such vigour that Lucy almost falls over. Her glasses bounce to the end of her nose and she has to put up a hand to stop them falling onto the tarmac.

  ‘Coming to mine?’ Lucy asks stupidly, rearranging her fair plaits.

  ‘Yeah. You came to tea at mine, so now you need to invite me over to yours. That’s how it works, dummy! You know; being friends.’

  ‘I’ll have to ask my mum when you can come,’ Lucy prevaricates.

  ‘Ask her tonight,’ Adele instructs her impatiently. ‘And don’t forget, okay?’

  Lucy knows that Adele certainly isn’t going to forget, much as she secretly hopes for such amnesia, so has no choice but to broach the topic with her mother after school.

  ‘I don’t know, darling,’ her mother says, stacking freshly ironed cotton sheets into the airing cupboard, ‘I’m not sure she’s the ideal friend for you.’

  ‘Why not?’ Now that her own reluctance is being mirrored, Lucy feels oddly defensive of Adele,

  ‘Well, didn’t you say that she’s a year older than you? She’s almost a teenager. So she’s bound to be more… mature than you are. Maybe it would be better to concentrate on making friends with the girls who were in your intake.’

  Lucy would be only too happy for this to happen, but all those girls seem to know each other from primary school and have expressed no interest in her. And the boys do nothing but shout and pull her plaits. At the very least, Adele is a useful buffer between her and bullies.

  ‘But I want Adele to come,’ she says mulishly and, to her mother’s surprise, flounces out of the room.

  Later that night she gets up to use the bathroom and pauses on the landing. She can hear her parents talking through the open kitchen door.

  ‘I mean, we know this was how it would be if we sent her to the local comp,’ her father says. ‘That’s why we did it, isn’t it? To expose her to a breadth of social experiences. Vital, with her being an only, we decided.’

  ‘I know, Jeffrey, but…’ Her mother says something she can’t quite catch, but it sounds as though it ends in ‘rough’.

  ‘It’ll burn itself out,’ her father says calmly. ‘These types of friendships always do. It’s just the thrill of the unfamiliar. Completely normal as developmental stages go.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t?’

  ‘It will. Just try and be a bit forbearing, for now.’

  So Adele is formally invited to tea at the Gibsons’ house three days later, on a Friday. The table is set with a linen cloth, and there are napkins. They eat chicken casserole – ‘Euh, what even is this?’ Adele grumbles through a mouthful of food when Felicity is out of earshot – followed by apple crumble and custard. After the meal, the girls go up to the top floor of the house where Lucy has her bedroom, along with a playroom and her own bathroom.

  ‘You have three rooms?’ Adele is incredulous. ‘Three whole rooms just for you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lucy nods.

  ‘What about your brother and sisters?’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘What – none at all? Not even half ones?’

  Lucy shakes her head, while Adele spins round on the spot, taking in the heavy lined curtains in pink and white chintz, the thick carpet, the built-in bookshelves. On the wall is a large framed sampler embroidered with ‘Lucinda Katherine Mary, 13th March 1984’.

  Adele points at it. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s me. I’m Lucy for short.’

  ‘Three names?’ scoffs Adele, as though this is sheer greed.

  ‘Katherine and Mary are my two grandmothers. I’m named after them.’

  ‘So what’s your mum called?’

  ‘Felicity.’

  Adele scrunches her nose with distaste. ‘My mum’s called Dawn.’ Her eyes alight on the camcorder that Lucy was given for her eleventh birthday. ‘Oh wow… wicked! Shall we make a TV show with it?’

  ‘Like what?’ asks Lucy uncertainly. The sad fact is that she’s never really used the camcorder, because making videos is no fun on your own. A lot of the things in the playroom are mor
e or less useless when there’s no one else to play with.

  ‘Let’s do something like Noel’s House Party. Except we can call it Dell and Lu’s House Party.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know, on telly. Mr Blobby. Everyone watches Mr Blobby!’

  Lucy doesn’t. Her parents think Saturday-night light entertainment shows rot the brain, and she reads a book or does a jigsaw puzzle instead.

  ‘He’s, like, a character. He’s pink and covered in big blobs and he talks like this – “Blobby, blobby, blobby”.’ She makes her eyes go big and googly and adopts a strange robotic voice. Lucy starts giggling, and finds that once she has started it’s difficult to stop. Adele giggles too, a hysterical yelping which just makes Lucy laugh harder. ‘You film me being Blobby and then we’ll make me go backwards,’ Adele suggests, showing Lucy how to rewind the footage and play it in reverse.

  Adele’s Mr Blobby voice and the walk are even funnier this way, and they spend the rest of the evening falling around clutching their sides, until Felicity Gibson taps on the door and announces that it’s time to drive Adele home.

  ‘We’re best friends now,’ Adele announces, with an endearing mixture of solemnity and confidence, before they head downstairs. She crooks her little finger and links it through Lucy’s. ‘Pinky promise.’