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Jennie’s heart is still racing. Her legs feel shaky as she wheels the dripping bike into her mum’s hallway and props it against the wall. Peeling off her drenched coat and helmet, she removes her shoes and stands beside the radiator, trying to get a bit of warmth into her bones. She’s shivering, from the cold and the shock of what just happened. But the heating is cranky at best and the radiator’s efforts don’t offer her much comfort.
Walking through to the kitchen, Jennie unfastens her rucksack and removes her phone. She opens her helmet cam app and scrolls back to the incident with the car, hoping the tiny camera in the front of her cycling helmet has picked up something that identifies the vehicle, or the driver. The camera footage is grainy and largely out of focus; first the driver sits on her tail along the lane, then she pulls over and challenges them, and finally the car lurches forward and charges right at her.
Jennie flinches as the car swerves around her on the video. It looks as much of a near miss as it felt. She shudders. Her teeth begin to chatter.
They had me trapped. If they’d wanted to, they could have killed me.
She scrolls back to the best shot of the car and pauses the video. Zooming in on the image, she looks for identifying markings, the number plate, the driver’s face, but the picture quality is too bad, and in close up the image is too blurred.
Jennie swears under her breath. She swipes back along the time-counter, looking for the moment earlier in her journey home when she’d first had the feeling she was being watched. Finding it, she replays the moment she looked round at the car. Again, the picture quality is too poor to make out any specific identifying details, but she’s pretty sure it’s the same car that almost hit her – the shape of headlights and the vehicle’s size look the same, but she can’t tell the make or model, or what colour it is, although she guesses it’s black or dark blue.
Frustrated, Jennie closes the app and puts her phone down on the kitchen table. It didn’t look random or accidental. It looked as if they targeted her on purpose. Kids muck about in cars, sure, but this felt – and on the video footage, looks – far more calculated.
Why does someone want to scare me?
She thinks about it as she takes a ready meal out of the fridge and puts it in the microwave. She’s put a lot of people away during her time on the force; could one of them be holding a grudge? Or is it something to do with her new case, with Hannah’s murder? Either way, she hopes whoever it was has got it out of their system tonight. She needs to stay focused on the case, not have to look over her shoulder all the time. Pressing cook on the microwave, Jennie peels off the rest of her clothes and chucks them into the washing machine, then heads upstairs for a quick shower.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s sitting at the pine table in her pyjamas and big, fluffy dressing gown eating her mac and cheese for one out of the plastic tray. As she eats, Jennie checks her phone. There are many missed calls from Lottie Varney, all made one after another while Jennie was in the shower. Jennie sighs. She regrets giving Lottie her number now. She’s bound to be calling to pump her for information. The announcement identifying the body found at White Cross Academy as Hannah Jennings was going out from the press team at eight o’clock and Lottie’s first call to her was made one minute after.
Finishing the last of her meal, Jennie chucks the plastic tray into her recycling box and heads upstairs. All she wants to do is chill out on the sofa watching some rubbish reality show, but she can’t rest; there’s so much still to do in the house, decluttering and sorting out all the stuff. God knows what she’s going to do with it all.
Up in her childhood bedroom, Jennie starts to sort through her own old things, figuring it might be easier than tackling more of mum’s hoarding piles tonight. Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Madonna, and Soundgarden look down from the faded posters still clinging to the wall behind the bed, put there to cover as much of the brown floral wallpaper as she could, and left there for the same reason.
Working her way through the first box, Jennie sorts the things into ‘keep’, ‘donate’, and ‘bin’. A bunch of old tape cassettes go in the ‘bin’ pile, a Paddington Bear toy and her Barbie bedside lamp go onto the heap to donate. She looks into the box, ready to grab the next thing, and sees her old SLR camera – the one her dad gave her for her birthday just a few months before he died. Lifting it out, Jennie feels a wave of nostalgia. She spent hours following her dad’s lessons about framing shots, using the light to create different effects, and perfecting her technique. ‘You’re a natural,’ he’d told her, and she’d felt on top of the world. Even after he’d died, she continued taking pictures, just playing around really, but it gave her something of her old life to hang onto when her mum moved them to White Cross. Jennie quickly learnt to hide the camera, though. If mum ever caught sight of it, she’d lose her shit. But Hannah encouraged her, and that meant a lot.
In the box, beneath where the camera was, is a stack of photos she took while she was in the sixth form. Jennie flicks through them, stopping at a picture of Hannah. She remembers taking it as if it were yesterday. It was a couple of months before Hannah disappeared. She asked Jennie to take some pictures for her modelling portfolio. They went up to the woods and along the trail towards the top of White Cross, stopping in a small clearing where a couple of the huge oak trees had come down in the recent storms.
‘Let’s do it here,’ said Hannah, putting her green velvet bag down against a small silver birch and kicking off her trainers. She ran her fingers through her hair, then gave Jennie a wicked grin as she climbed up onto the massive trunk of one of the fallen oaks.
Jennie took the lens cap off her SLR and lifted it to look through the viewfinder. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw Hannah. She was lying on her back along the oak’s trunk with her face turned to the camera. She looked like a woodland spirit, ethereal in her white dress and no make-up, her long, strawberry blonde hair falling down over the side of the tree trunk.
‘Perfect,’ said Jennie, pressing the button to take a photo. She moved slowly, changing the angles, taking shot after shot. She captured the roughness of the bark, the dewiness of Hannah’s skin, and the dappling effect of the light shining through the tree canopy. ‘You look amazing.’
‘Really?’ Hannah said, for a moment sounding uncharacteristically vulnerable.
‘Really,’ said Jennie. ‘The camera loves you.’
As Hannah looked directly into the lens, Jennie felt her stomach flip. She took another photo, trying to capture the look on her friend’s face. She was like an enigma: happy and sad, brave and afraid, womanly and childlike. Jennie had no idea how she could emote such a range of contradictions in a single expression, but it made the pictures phenomenal.
Later, when Hannah saw the developed photos from the shoot, she pulled Jennie into a hug. ‘Oh my God. These are amazing. I have to use them in my portfolio. There’s this job coming up and with these pictures I’m totally going to get it. It’s like you’re looking right into my soul.’
Jennie blushed. ‘You think?’
‘I know. You’re a real talent, Jen.’ Hannah held up the photo of her lying on the tree trunk. ‘This is your superpower.’
Jennie smiled to hide how self-conscious she felt. ‘I’d love to be a photographer.’
‘Then do it,’ said Hannah, grabbing Jennie’s hands. ‘You know my plans – get modelling work, move to London, and become the next Kate Moss.’
Jennie nodded. She didn’t want to think about Hannah leaving town.
‘You need to come with me,’ said Hannah, pulling Jennie closer until she was entirely enveloped in the heady scent of Opium perfume. ‘We can make a new start, together. You’ll take amazing pictures and I’ll be booked for all the fashion shoots.’
‘That sounds a lot better than staying here,’ said Jennie, feeling hope flare inside her for the first time since her dad died.
‘It will be.’ Hannah held Jennie’s gaze, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘We have to do this. Promise me you’ll come with me? Promise we’ll take the city together?’
‘Yes.’ Jennie nodded, a smile spreading across her face. ‘Yes, I promise.’
