Someone hammered on the door.
‘Oi! You gonna be much longer?’ A male voice. ‘I need to take a slash.’
‘Coming,’ Iris said. She stood up, opened the lid of the loo to throw in the balled-up toilet paper and flushed.
She stumbled out of the patio doors. It had been a warm day, but it was cool this evening, as if the weather was slowly shifting now that they were officially into autumn. It was still light, though. She’d go for a walk. That would kill some time. And the fresh air might help clear her head. Someone must have told Olly she was in a bit of a state. He caught up with her before she got to the end of the driveway. It sounded childish, even to Iris, when she told her brother what was wrong.
But Olly didn’t look at her like she was being silly. ‘It’s all right,’ Olly said. ‘Josh is probably drunk, or stoned – it’s his birthday. It’s harmless flirting, Iris. He doesn’t mean anything by it. Or if he does, it’s to make you jealous. Which has clearly worked.’
Olly wasn’t a fan of Josh – Iris knew that – and it was like her brother was sticking up for her boyfriend. Iris wanted Olly to be firmly on her side, but his words made her think she was probably overreacting.
‘Anyway, Sasha’s not staying,’ Olly continued. ‘She’s going away for the weekend. She said she was just popping in. Let’s go back and you can have a good time with your friends. Come and talk to Liv and me for a bit, if you want.’ Iris nodded. ‘Charlie’s come by car. I’ll get him to take you back to Dad’s if Josh is still being a dick.’ That made Iris smile. ‘Or we’ll all leave. Liv won’t mind.’
‘Thanks, Bro.’
Olly was pretty cool, as brothers go. He always looked out for Iris and Margo. Millie often said she wished she wasn’t an only child and she’d have liked a brother like Olly.
They didn’t go back straightaway. They sat in the garden for a while and talked about other stuff. School, the holidays, music, Iris can’t remember. At one point, this car pulled up at the end of the drive and the front door of Hilltop House opened at the same time. Sasha stepped outside and teetered down the gravelly driveway in high heels. Iris didn’t even own a pair of high heels. Maybe Sasha didn’t either and they belonged to her mum. Sasha got into the car. Iris watched the taillights until the car rounded the bend and took that as her cue to go back to the fun and games. She got to her feet and Olly followed her.
How long had they been gone? Maybe half an hour? Forty-five minutes tops. Not that long. But when they got back, no one seemed to know where Liv was.
‘She was wrecked, man,’ one of their classmates told Olly and Iris. He looked pretty wrecked himself. ‘Like totally out of it,’ he added unnecessarily.
Olly tried ringing Liv on her mobile, but she didn’t answer. It took them maybe another quarter of an hour to find her – in the summerhouse in the garden. She was almost unconscious. She couldn’t string two words together. Her eyes kept rolling back into her head.
‘How much did she have to drink?’ Iris asked Olly. ‘Did she smoke any pot?’
‘Same as me. A couple of beers,’ he said. ‘She’s not drunk or stoned, Iris. I think she’s been drugged. We need to get her to the hospital.’
Iris took her mobile out of her little handbag to call for an ambulance.
But Olly said, ‘We’ll take her. It will be much quicker. I’ll get Charlie.’
It didn’t occur to Iris it might have been Josh who sold the drugs. Not at first. Iris knew he sold hash, but she assumed it was just to his mates. She didn’t approve, exactly, but it didn’t bother her. After all, they all smoked spliffs at parties. Iris didn’t buy it, but she didn’t turn her nose up when someone passed her the joint. She had no idea Josh sold ecstasy and roofies and shit, too. And not just to his mates. That was, like, a whole other level.
Olly was the one who told her, actually. About the drugs. He said he’d overheard some kids talking about it at school. He came into her room one night, months after she and Josh had split up – months after her video had gone viral, for that matter – and told her Josh was selling roofies. He asked for her help.
‘I think he sold the Rohypnol that was given to Liv that night. What I want to know, is who he sold the drugs to,’ Olly explained. ‘I need to get Josh alone.’
‘What does Liv think about this?’ Iris asked.
‘She doesn’t know. I don’t want her to know. Not until I’ve found out more.’
‘He won’t tell you,’ Iris said.
‘He will if I threaten him. If I can get him alone, he’ll talk.’
Iris didn’t like the way Olly was talking or where this was going. But she got why he needed to know. And there was no other way of finding out. ‘He runs in Lower Buryknoll Wood every Sunday morning. I mean, unless he’s changed his routine. He calls it his LSD run – long slow distance.’
‘LSD. How appropriate,’ Olly commented, rolling his eyes.
‘I know, right? He calls the woodshiswoods. Because of his surname?’ Iris says. ‘I can show you his route, if you like. I went with him a few times, ages ago, back when we were … you know. He always runs the same loop.’
And from there, they came up with a plan. They would put it into action one Sunday. They’d wait for him in the woods.
But then Josh went missing. Olly wanted Iris to call him, but there was no way she was going to do that. Yvonne had been calling her, wanting to know if Iris knew where he might be. Iris thought about it and thought that she probably did know where he was, but she wasn’t going to tell Yvonne. She told Olly, though.
‘Chances are, he’s in the woods,’ Iris said after a couple of days. Josh had shown her a spot on one of their runs and said he’d like to camp there one weekend. With her. Luckily, he hadn’t insisted. Lying on hard ground, being kept awake by strange noises, getting bitten by mosquitoes, their tent surrounded by wild nocturnal animals … it wasn’t Iris’s idea of fun.
