The Perfect Girl

TESSA

I’m pacing downstairs. The detectives have vacated the dining room for now and I walk around it as if it can give me some clues, or help me to think.

I’m too restless to stay there for long though and, as I go back into the hallway, I almost collide with Zoe.

It shocks her, and she gives a little scream. She seems pent-up and extremely agitated, and she won’t meet my eye properly, which is unusual for her. She tells me in a nervous voice, as if she’s finding it hard to breathe properly, that she wants to gather everybody together in the sitting room.

She wakes up her dad, and she calls Richard in from outside, where he’s been checking on the baby. She gets Chris down from the upstairs bedroom, and she asks us all to sit down, though she saves a seat in the middle of the sofa, beside Chris, which she insists the Liaison Officer takes.

Lucas is there too, and he’s doing something with the TV. He’s turned it on and holds the two remote controls and he’s navigating through a series of screens that look unfamiliar to me.

Once Richard arrives in the room he of course asks Lucas what he’s trying to do, and to offer help and expertise, but the boy brushes him off a bit brusquely. It’s clear to me that he more than seems to know what he’s doing, though undeniably he’s giving off nerves in exactly the same way as Zoe is.

As everyone’s getting seated, Zoe stands beside my chair and I rub her slender wrist. ‘What’s happening, Butterfly?’ I ask her.

She doesn’t look at me, and she doesn’t reply; she’s fixated on what Lucas is doing.

It reminds me of how she used to be at the time of the trial. It broke my heart, because she always seemed to be somewhere else in her head, as if the core of her had curled up in fear, and, though perhaps it shouldn’t have, that did make her somehow untouchable to the rest of us.

‘Zoe?’ I ask again, because her behaviour is scaring me a little, but Lucas says, at the same time, ‘It’s ready,’ and then, as if she’s taking a cue from him, as if it’s something they’ve rehearsed, she turns to everybody, and delivers a short speech in a voice so laconic it sends a chill running through me.

‘Lucas and me were afraid. But now we’ve decided to tell you what we know. This is a film from last night.’

We all turn to face the TV.

Lucas seems to have got it to link to the internet, and it’s displaying a video site. I wonder if it’s the film from the concert that he’s about to play, but it doesn’t look as if it is.

The picture that suddenly appears on the screen looks just like the inside of Chris and Maria’s house.