Chapter 10: The Truth

I waited for him in the clubhouse car park, next to his bike.

It was ten to midnight and the mill windows were lit up on the first floor, where the meeting was.

I sat on the low wall under the broken lamp with my coat buttoned to the neck.

I'd run out of crying in the car.

At twelve minutes past, the side door opened, and Joss came out alone.

He saw me and stopped dead on the step.

He looked at my face, then back at the lit windows.

Then he came down to me fast.

"What are you doing here?"

"Show me where."

"Mari, you can't be here."

"Show me where you found her."

He went very quiet.

After a moment he took my elbow and walked me across the gravel, away from the windows.

We stopped at the far corner by the bins, where the hedge runs down to the canal.

There was a dark patch of bramble under the fence.

"Here," he said.

"She told me."

He stared at me.

"All of it. Who."

He closed his eyes.

I watched his big shoulders go down an inch at a time.

"Aye," he said. "I thought she would, in the end."

"Tell me yours."

"Mari."

"Now. Everything. I want it from you."

So he told me.

He didn't touch me.

He stood with his arms at his sides and his bandaged hand opening and closing.

He told me in a flat, low voice, looking at the bramble.

"July. A Thursday. I came out to lock the bike shed and heard someone being sick."

His jaw tightened.

"It was Poppy. She'd got the bus from Leeds with a carrier bag, and she was grey in the face."

"And she told you."

"I asked her who. I thought it was some lad. She said, don't tell Mari, and then she told me the name."

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