The Night of the Sleepover by Kerry Wilkinson

Author:Kerry Wilkinson [Wilkinson, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781835250228
Published: 2023-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

It had been a long day.

Zac was in his room, largely oblivious to much of the stress he had accidentally caused his mother. He had taken his leftover cinema popcorn up with him, saying he was going to ‘tidy up’ his homework. The house was quiet, regardless of what he was doing. Plus he was a floor away, safe.

Leah didn’t use her laptop often, only usually if there was an important email to which she needed to reply, when she didn’t trust the autocorrect on her phone. One of the other parents had once typed ‘gnome work’ instead of ‘home work’ and it was still a running joke on the WhatsApp group. The same group that now had over 250 unread messages.

She clicked the link from Owen’s newest email, which sent her off to a cloud storage site. She typed in the password he’d given, which gave her access to a folder marked ‘RAW to edit’. There was a film file inside, which Leah double clicked. Moments later, a woman’s face filled her screen as a camera zoomed in and out, before settling on a shot that framed her from the chest up.

It all felt very familiar to Leah, who’d sat for her own interview not long before. She wondered if her footage was in a folder, waiting to be cut – or if they’d already isolated the part where she had stormed off.

Leah heard Owen’s voice for the preambles of the interview. He asked if the woman was comfortable, the same thing he’d asked Leah. Then they asked her to say her name and address. Leah didn’t recognise the woman, though it seemed like she lived diagonally across the road from Vicky’s place. There was a chat between the crew off-camera about levels – and then they were off.

The woman said she’d told the police that she saw Leah’s dad, Paul Pearce, on the night the girls went missing.

‘How did you know him?’ Owen asked, out of shot.

The woman straightened herself and there was a momentary wrinkle between her eyes. A person about to explain that two plus two was four. ‘Everyone knew him,’ she said. ‘You’d cross the street to avoid him. He was from one of those families.’

Leah glared immediate hatred. ‘One of those families’ was Leah’s family. She hadn’t chosen for it to be, but it was. It wasn’t only the legacy of her missing friends that followed her, it was that of her parents.

The woman was still talking: ‘He was always fighting and drinking. You’d see him around. Horrible man.’

‘What did the police say when you told them?’ Owen asked.

‘They didn’t want to know. They said he was in prison, so it couldn’t be him. I assumed they knew what they were on about, then I found out later – years later – that he wasn’t in prison.’

Leah paused the footage and stared. The woman had leaned in slightly and gestured with an open hand towards Owen, incredulous that she’d been dismissed by the police. What’s more, Leah believed her.

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