She remembered she’d wanted to go to the police, then not, a vaguer memory of something about keeping it secret forever. She was certain the others would remember it too, because they hadn’t been as bad as her, and Matt had only had a couple of drinks.
That made it worse because the more she thought about it she didn’t think it was such a good idea to keep it secret anyway. If they kept it secret and then it came out they’d all be in trouble. She didn’t want to see Matt get hurt, and it hadn’t been his fault, but he’d been the one driving.
She knew what would happen today. Matt would want to go to the police like he’d said, claim he was on his own, the whole story, but then the others would talk him out of it. It just didn’t seem fair somehow, that they’d try to keep this secret when it would be better for all of them if they didn’t.
The others probably wouldn’t care about the consequences either, but it scared her, the thought of having to phone her parents and tell them she’d been thrown out, maybe even prosecuted. And it was even more unfair because all she’d been doing was sitting in the back seat, a passenger. She’d been a bystander and yet this could be left hanging over her head indefinitely.
She’d just turned off the water when she heard the shower-room door open. She pulled back the curtain and saw Sarah Devine putting her towel up on one of the hooks along the bench from where her own things were. Natalie was pretty confident she wouldn’t speak.
She turned as Natalie stepped out of the cubicle though, and said, ‘Hi, did you hear the news? A student was killed in town last night.’ She looked excited, like she’d heard it on the radio and had been itching to tell somebody.
Natalie reached quickly for her towel and held it in front of her, making an appearance of being in a hurry, drying herself as she said, ‘Killed how?’
‘Hit and run. It didn’t give her name, just said she was a student at the university.’
‘How awful.’ Sarah responded with something or other but Natalie started to dry her hair, obscuring her face, making clear that the conversation was over, and she continued to focus on drying herself until Sarah gave up and got in the shower.
It left Natalie shaken again, not so much the information that the girl had been a student, not even the reality of it being information now, something that was in the public domain. She was concerned about how transparent she’d felt. Maybe Sarah Devine wouldn’t have noticed it anyway because Natalie never spoke much to her, but other people would pick up on it, a complicity she felt she wouldn’t be able to conceal.
She hurried back to her room and dressed, and as she walked back along the corridor to Alex’s room she saw Will approaching from the other direction. He was wrapped up in his coat, scarf, ski hat, his face almost hidden. He looked like he was trying to disappear completely and she felt sorry for him, conscious that he wouldn’t be finding this easy either.
She got to the door first but waited for him and when he got there she put her arms round him and held him for a second. She stood back and looked at his half-hidden face, ruddy, surprisingly healthy-looking. His eyes still had that caught in the headlights stare they often seemed to have.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Not good,’ he said. She got the feeling he’d have said more but even those two words sounded like they’d stuck in his throat with all that impacted emotion. She smiled at him and pulled his hat off, his hair left unkempt like he’d just fallen out of bed. He managed a smile back and they walked in.
Rob was already in there, talking to Alex. She headed straight for the bed and lay on it. Alex was asking Will if he wanted a coffee, Will replying that he could kill a drink. She only half-heard the banter that followed but the end result was Alex reaching for the whisky bottle and lining up the glasses.
‘Natalie?’
She looked over and said, ‘God, no, not after what I drank last night.’
They bantered on and Alex came and sat next to her on the bed. She wasn’t listening to them at first. All she could think about was how this whole group dynamic was beginning to get her down. Will was wired and needed a drink in the middle of the morning, so everyone had to have one, all boys together.
Then she heard Will say, ‘I heard it on the radio. She was a student.’
She leaned up on her elbow and said, ‘I heard that too. Sarah Devine told me.’ She’d known it already and yet it was only hearing Will say it that she became conscious of this being a real person who’d died, a student, someone she could have sat next to in a lecture or encountered in passing around the campus.
Then Will broke the real news.
‘They found the body at four o’clock this morning.’