Soul Beach

meet, you know, Alice, if you wanted.’
    Before this call, I’d have wanted that to happen, but now the thought terrifies me. ‘Why would we?’
    ‘There are things . . . well, things that can’t be said on the phone. But for now I should ring off. In case they’re tracing your calls, Alice. It’s not impossible.’
    ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
    ‘I promise I’ll call again soon. Work on a way we could meet, away from prying eyes. But whether that happens or not, please forgive me for not keeping her safe.’
    That’s what my father always says. But how am I meant to respond? Tim isn’t the man I thought he was, but does that mean he killed her?
    ‘Just call again. Please.’
    But I’m talking to dead air.

The mark of murderers is that they always ‘keep themselves to themselves.’
    Or at least, that is what one would believe from watching inane TV news bulletins. A neighbour of a newly convicted killer will be interviewed, or a colleague, and the same mantras are recited.
    ‘We hardly saw them,’ one will say. ‘Though they kept their garden tidy.’
    Another will add, ‘They’d smile, but they were never part of the community, were they, Ethel?’
    ‘No, no. Kept themselves to themselves.’
    As though the desire for privacy marks out a killer.
    I am not sure whether I was a loner before Meggie, but now I am, of necessity. There are times when the desire to confide, to confess all, to bare the soul, is almost as overwhelming as the instinct that prompted the act that is now hidden. But I must keep my true self to myself. All the while pretending to be normal.
    To murder takes a moment’s lapse.
    To stay free takes a lifetime of concentration.

55
    ‘Biscuits or Doritos? Or both? Have both if you like!’
    Mum is embarrassing. All I want to do is hear Lewis’s news, and I couldn’t care less about snacks. But she insists on pouring corn chips into a bowl, and then filling a dish with supermarket hummus, and putting them both on a tray along with glasses of OJ and a plateful of cookies.
    ‘I’m coming here again,’ says Lewis, when we finally get upstairs.
    ‘She thinks you’re going to rescue me from my life of misery,’ I explain.
    ‘I only rescue people for ninety-five an hour plus VAT,’ he says, ‘but I make an exception for hacking, which I see as a hobby!’
    ‘Tell me!’
    ‘Ah, come on, let me do my fanfare first. Build myself up. Hero battling the system and all of that.’ He sees the expression on my face. ‘OK. Given the circumstances, whatever the hell they are, and even though you’re not telling me the whole story, I’ll tell you straight. I hacked her webmail, found her passwords and then logged into her Facebook account. And then, well . . . see for yourself.’
    He takes a tiny, almost girly laptop out of his pretentious messenger bag.
    ‘I’ve cached all the pages so we’ve got a permanent record. Actually, some of them had been messed with already, deleted or edited, but Triti had kept them all stored in her email account, so I’ve rebuilt the list offline so you can see it all in date order.’
    OK, I’ll admit I am impressed, but I’m not about to flatter his ego by gushing like a fangirl. ‘Thanks,’ I say, before leaning forward to read what’s on the screen. Triti, according to her homepage, had 211 friends, kinda average for a kid our age, I guess. Though the Triti I know on the Beach is so withdrawn that I’m surprised she was on Facebook at all.
    Her profile picture shows a girl who would be photogenic if it weren’t for the fact that she looks half-starved. In the photo, she wears over the top jewellery that only emphasises the sharpness of her collarbones. Large dark eyes scrutinise the world from under hooded lids. Her nose and lips seem too large for her pinched face, as though I’m staring at her through the peephole in a door. Her skin is paler than it should be.
    I click onto her photo album and it’s heart-breaking to see the other pictures, which are more like the ones on the wall of her home. She was stunning when she wasn’t so thin. Dewy skin, those eyes still Bambi-like in her face, but not out of proportion. In all the pictures except the profile one, she’s smiling. I thought Soul Beach made kids cuter then they were before death, but Triti was far prettier and more natural in real life. Her figure is enviable, too, curvy in all the right ways without being remotely fat.
    Yet the skeleton picture is the one she