Page 6 of Wanting Daisy Dead

‘Lauren, when you talk about this, your words are so ... evocative . I know I’m right – you have to write this.’

‘A part of me worries that I’d be inviting it all back again. The accusations that one of us knew where she was, the blame for not noticing sooner that she was missing ... and finally that horrible, horrible guilt. We would go on and live our lives – but she wouldn’t.’

‘Yes, and writing it all down might exorcise all that,’ Finty offers persuasively.

‘The others would hate me if I resurrected it all. We’ve moved on, and they have their own lives and want to leave it all in the past, along with Daisy.’

‘Fuck them.’

I look at her.

‘I’m sure they’ll be rightly pissed off if you write another book.

They’ll be jealous and wish they’d done it first. This is your chance to tell the story from your point of view.

You’ll be ahead of the wave, and lifting yourself up above the rabble.

If you don’t write it, be sure one of them will,’ she says.

My stomach lurches. ‘There’s a party, a weekend being organised back at the university to celebrate Daisy’s fortieth,’ I blurt, knowing I might regret telling her this.

‘Oh my God ! And you’re going, of course? What a great setting – the prologue is you all returning to the place it happened twenty years later.’

‘I don’t know if I’m going.’

Finty’s mouth opens in horror.

‘Thing is, I haven’t seen any of them since our last day at university,’ I lie.

‘Besides, I imagine it’s going to be a huge weekend party with everyone from the whole year.

People who didn’t even know Daisy will want to pay their respects, I’m sure.

And even if they attend, I might not actually see any of my old housemates. ’

‘You can seek them out, surely?’

‘I don’t know, Finty.’ Doubts are flooding in again. It’s such a huge risk.

‘But I thought you wanted to do this – you were Daisy’s best friend.’

‘Yeah, at first, until she started seeing David Montgomery. He changed her ... but we were in the same tutor group.’

‘Ooh, so David Montgomery, the one who killed her, he was your tutor too?’

‘Yes ...’ I really don’t want to talk about him.

‘I always thought that other guy did it ... You know, the posh pervert, always on the TV telling “his story”? I always felt he was fake.’

‘Dan? No, I think he was pretty genuine, just loved the limelight. He wasn’t a pervert.’ I don’t want to talk about him either.

‘Wasn’t he two-timing his girlfriend with Daisy when she died?’

Christ, I really don’t want to get into this. ‘His girlfriend?’ I pretend not to know what she’s talking about.

‘Dark hair, brown eyes, very slim, wiry, but she was an attractive young girl.’

‘Oh ... Georgie – yeah, she went out with Dan.’

‘I remember her in that documentary,’ Finty says. ‘Very intense, thin lips, arms folded defensively throughout the interview.’

‘Yeah, that was Georgie. Permanently angry or anxious, and an obsessive clean freak, which was a gift to a bunch of messy students. She did business studies, and wore trouser suits in dark colours with neat little collars, like a contestant from The Apprentice .’

‘And her boyfriend, the wannabe TV star ...?’ Finty asks.

‘I think he went into banking. Probably spends his lunch hours in dark clubs paying for lap dances from women young enough to be his daughter.’ I snort at my own joke.

‘Then there was Alex, who you thought might be the murderer?’

‘Yeah. He’s done surprisingly well for himself. He smoked far too much weed and took nothing seriously, but he was really handsome. Long dark wavy hair,’ I add, smiling at the memory. ‘All the girls had a soft spot for Alex, but, as I said, he seemed to have this thing for Daisy.’

Imagining these people in my book makes it easier to contemplate the awful prospect of seeing them in the flesh on the birthday weekend.

‘And finally, Maddie, the dance and drama student who always wore ballet shoes. She’d been at ballet school since she was six.

She was sweet, quite sensitive really, stunning to look at, long white-blonde hair and blue eyes.

She left uni after Daisy died; she was very fragile.

I heard she went to Dubai and joined a dance troupe. ’

‘Not ballet?’

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘She’d given up ballet dancing by the time she got to uni, but you could tell it was in her bones; she was always pointing her toes and doing ballet poses.

I asked her once why she gave up, and she said because she got too fat.

I thought she was joking, but she said, “No, I’m serious, Lauren, they threw me out,” and there were tears in her eyes. ’

On the way home, I feel positive about writing this book. It seems achievable. Yes, I need the money, but I also want to make amends with Daisy by writing her story, giving her back her voice.

But I have to be very careful. If the podcast were to reveal my secret on this birthday weekend, I’d have nothing. And Finty would have nothing to do with my book, or me.