Page 83 of The Friend Request

He’s lying on his side at the base of the shelves, one arm bent underneath him, the other flung out across the carpet. His head is at an angle – my stomach lurches – tilted too far, turned too sharply, resting against the bottom shelf in a way that looks wrong in every direction. His eyes are open. His mouth is open. And he’s not moving.

He’s not moving at all.

‘Alex.’ My voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long corridor. ‘Alex, what happened?’

‘He went into the shelves,’ Alex says. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at Ross. His hands are still up, and his voice is thin and strange and doesn’t belong to him. ‘We were – I had him, I had hold of him, and he twisted, and I shoved him, and he went backwards into the shelves, and they—’ He stops. His breath hitches. ‘His neck. Kim. His neck.’

I glance at Ross.

His eyes are still open, staring at nothing.

Behind me, Olivia is crying – free now, half out of the chair, her arms wrapped around herself. The tape is trailing from one ankle. The lamp is still burning on the desk, casting its warm gold light across the carpet and the scattered books and the body of the boy I loved, lying at the foot of a bookshelf in the room where he first kissed me.

I can’t breathe.

I look at my husband, on his knees, trembling. I look at my daughter, standing behind me, sobbing. I look at Ross, and I wait for him to move, to blink, to take a breath.

He doesn’t.

The library is very quiet.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Alex makes the call. I can’t do it. My hands won’t work, my voice won’t work, and every time I try to form a sentence, my brain stalls on the same image – Ross’s head against the shelf, the angle of his neck, his open eyes looking at nothing. So Alex does it. He takes his phone out of his pocket with hands that are shaking so badly the screen light jitters across the ceiling, and he dials 999. I listen to my husband tell a stranger that a man is dead on the floor of a school library and that he’s the one who killed him.

He doesn’t use the word ‘killed’. He says, ‘There’s been an accident. A man’s been hurt – badly hurt. I think he might be dead. We need an ambulance and the police.’ He gives the address, the name of the school, tells them the main entrance is locked, but we’ll open it from inside. The operator asks him to stay on the line, he says, ‘Yes,’ then puts the phone on the desk beside the lamp and stands there with his arms hanging at his sides, staring at the wall.

Olivia is on the floor by the chair. She’s pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She’s crying in a steady, rhythmic way that frightens me more than screaming would. Her wrists are red and raw where the tape was, and there’s a strip of it still trailing from her left ankle, stuck to her sock. She hasn’t looked at Ross. She hasn’t looked at the shelves, the scattered books, or the shape on the carpet that used to be a person. She’s looking at the floor between her trainers, and she’s rocking forward and back. The sound she’s making is somewhere between breathing and sobbing, and it goes right through me.

I kneel and put my arms around her, and she grabs hold of me so hard it hurts – fingers digging into my coat, face buried against my shoulder, her whole body shaking against mine. She smells of sweat and dust, but underneath that she smells of herself, of my daughter. I hold her and press my lips to the top of her head and say, ‘I’m here. I’m here. You’re safe.’

The words feel like a lie, because nothing about this is safe.

The sirens arrive faster than I expect. One, then two – the sound growing from a thin whine in the distance to a full wail that fills the corridor outside the library and bounces off the walls. Blue light sweeps across the tall windows. I hear doors, voices, the crackle of a radio, and then footsteps on the stairs, heavy and fast, and two paramedics break through the library doors, followed by a uniformed officer with a torch.

After that, the room stops belonging to us.

The paramedics go to Ross. I watch them crouch beside him, check his pulse, check his airway, speak to each other in low voices I can’t hear properly. One of them touches his neck, two fingers pressed below the jaw – and looks at the other and shakes his head. That’s it. One tiny shake, and it’s confirmed. Ross Mercer is dead on the floor of the library where we first kissed, and the man who did it is standing four metres away with his phone still lit up on the desk and his hands at his sides.

More officers arrive. The corridor fills with torchlight and voices. Someone props the library doors open and puts tape across the entrance – police tape, the kind I’ve only ever seen on television. A female officer wraps a foil blanket around Olivia’s shoulders and walks her down to the ambulance to be checked over. Every cell in me wants to go with her, but they steer me the other way, into a classroom that smells of whiteboard markers and dust, and someone puts a paper cup of water in front of me that I don’t drink.

Alex is still in the library. I can hear them talking to him, but I can’t make out the words.

The questions start.

A detective arrives – plain clothes, tired face, a woman in her forties with short hair and a lanyard around her neck. She introduces herself, but I don’t catch the name because my brain is doing something strange: it’s focussing on details I don’t need – the scuff on her shoe, the pen in her breast pocket, the way her lanyard is twisted – while refusing to process the things that matter. She sits across from me at the desk and opens a notebook. She speaks calmly and clearly, and I can see in her face that she already knows this is going to be complicated.

‘Mrs Stiller, I need you to talk me through tonight. From the beginning.’

The beginning. Where is the beginning? The school gates at fourteen? The library, the kiss, the window we climbed through? The day Ross vanished and didn’t come back? Or is it closer – the cottage, the brick, the note, the drive home, the lie I told PC Heywood at my kitchen table?

‘I came here tonight because of a note.’ My voice sounds wrong. Thin and detached, as if someone else is speaking and I’m watching from across the room. ‘It was wrapped around a brick that was thrown through the window of a cottage in Wales where I was staying. The note told me to come to this school, alone, no police. It said my daughter’s life depended on it.’

‘Do you have the note?’

‘It’s in my coat pocket.’

She holds out her hand. I reach into my pocket and pull it out – crumpled now, soft, the creases deep – and hand it to her. Gloves on, she reads it, turns it over, places it in a clear plastic bag she takes from her jacket.