Soul Beach

shake my head. ‘I thought he might not want to see me.’
    ‘Only I think he’s meeting Adrian later.’
    I stare at her. ‘I didn’t know you two still had anything to do with him.’
    She shrugs. ‘I don’t. Adrian does. Too bloody much. He even lives with him now, off-campus, which means I never visit his place. It’s the only thing we argue about. We almost split up over it.’
    That was the other thing Meggie always said: that Sahara had a way of making her problems seem like your problems. That she didn’t know when to stop blabbing.
    But right now, I’m not sure that blabbing’s a bad thing. ‘That must be hard.’
    ‘Mmm. Yeah, I think Tim did it, Adrian doesn’t. Or he thinks we shouldn’t jump to conclusions, anyway. Which is easy for him to say because he wasn’t Meggie’s best friend, was he? He doesn’t get nightmares about discovering her body all lifeless and . . . swollen.’
    Sahara bursts into such loud tears that everyone looks round at us. I hope no one recognises her from all the TV news interviews she did afterwards.
    ‘There, there,’ I say, reaching out even though I don’t want to. It wasn’t even Sahara who found Meggie, though she arrived just minutes after Zoe did. And as for being her best friend . . . I feel irritated by that comment. It’s as though she’s trying to pull rank over me.
    I shouldn’t have told her. All I want now is to get away, try to find Tim myself. If I hurry, perhaps I could follow Adrian. ‘I need to get back.’
    Sahara stops crying almost as suddenly as she started and I prepare my leaving speech. ‘Already?’ she asks. ‘But what about Tim?’
    ‘Maybe it’s not the best idea for me to see him,’ I lie.
    ‘No,’ she says darkly. ‘He might get cross.’
    It feels as though someone’s running an ice cube down my spine. ‘Did he often get cross?’
    She shrugs. ‘Not often, but . . .’ And then she shakes her head. ‘Forget it.’
    ‘It’s not that easy to forget, Sahara.’
    I wait for a few more seconds, then I stand up.
    She puts her hand out. ‘Don’t go. I can let you see it, if it’d help?’ Her voice is muffled but urgent.
    ‘See what?’
    She blinks hard, then leans forward. Her eyes blaze.
    ‘Meggie’s room.’

36
    I’m fighting to stop my teeth chattering, because I don’t want Sahara to see.
    It’s not as though I haven’t been there before. I even slept in that room when I came to stay with Meggie, sandwiched into the single bed between the wall and my giggling sister, listening to drunken punch-ups on the street underneath her window.
    But now it’s different.
    ‘You can get in there?’
    Her brown eyes are wide and proud. ‘No one’s supposed to. But Meggie gave me a spare key because she was always forgetting hers.’
    Sahara is desperate to show me. But do I want to see it?
    I find myself nodding, and she takes my hand and marches off along the Thames, then back through the college grounds, past the arched temples to learning, towards the modern halls. It’s still lunchtime – now I definitely know Adrian was lying about being late for a lecture – and students laugh and flirt across the campus, which makes the gravity of what we’re about to do seem even more obvious.
    I’m out of breath by the time we’re back in the lift and going up to Meggie’s floor. It smells of hot engine in here, and on the walls there are posters for the Last Beach Party of the Season featuring tropical palms and hula-hula girls, and I wish I could magic myself out of here and back to my bedroom, and Soul Beach.
    The lift takes an age to get going, and as my breathing slows I look at Sahara. She’s staring at the steel doors. Her jaw is locked in determination.
    As the lift gears crunch, something slots into place in my head, too.
    Could Sahara have killed my sister?
    My brain seems to be working at treble speed. An argument before the murder. Sahara’s weird excitement at showing me this place. The fact she showed up just minutes after the body was found . . .
    ‘I want to get out,’ I say, in a whisper.
    ‘That’s fine, we’re here,’ she says.
    ‘Right.’
    As we step out, I search in vain for a video camera. Even though I know there aren’t any, because the CCTV trail of my sister’s last minutes stopped three streets away. The uni rejected the whole idea of extending surveillance on the grounds of privacy, but surely the police have added cameras on the main road now. Cameras that might show