Leave Her Hanging: A Noir Thriller

Chapter Twelve

As soon as I got home I hobbled upstairs, closed the door to my bedroom behind me, and sat down on my bed. Only then did I pull out the phone Jeremy had dropped on the grass in the middle of our fight.

It was a flip-top, newer than mine, and it had its fair share of scratches across the plastic outer casing. I flipped it open. Some of the lettering on the keys had faded, but the screen was in good condition.

Let’s see what you’re hiding, you son of a bitch. I went to his contacts first and scrolled down to M. There was a Matthew, and a Max, but no Malcolm Barker. Not even a Malcolm B or a Mal. All right, so maybe he didn’t know this guy Ella was dating. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding something. I’d seen the fire in his eyes.

I had a flash of an idea and dug in my pocket to pull out the photo of Malcolm Barker and the ten digit phone number I’d found in Ella’s room. Maybe this would give me a hit. I tried dialling in the number from the main screen and checked to see if a name automatically popped up. It didn’t. Okay, but maybe it just wasn’t that type of phone. I went back to his contacts and went through each name one by one, comparing the number to the one on the paper.

It was a waste of ten minutes. No matches. Damn it. I shoved the scrap of paper back in my pocket and stared at the phone, trying to suck out its secrets by osmosis. Recent calls, maybe.

A couple of calls to Dave, five or so to “Mum”, two to voicemail. There were three or four to Ella, all outgoing calls, all made before November last year. That made them over four months old, from before everything went to shit. His text messages were equally useless. Organising trips to the movies with the rest of the group, one asking Dave a question about the Physics homework, a couple to his sister asking her where the hell she’d left the TV remote. Bullshit. All bullshit.

I snapped the phone closed, tossed it onto the bed, put my head in my hands, rolled backwards onto the bed. The bruise on my stomach didn’t like that one bit, but the pain was the least of my concerns.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to the ceiling. He had to know something. He had to! That look in his eyes, the way he came at me. That wasn’t a concerned friend. No goddamn way.

I stared at the phone. The camera lens glinted in the sunlight streaming through the window.

The camera!

I snatched the phone off the bed and scrolled through until I found his photo folder. My heart fluttered as I opened it. This was the last shot I had.

I opened the photos and began sifting through them. They were mostly pictures of parties and hang-outs. I recognised pretty much everyone in them. Megan, smiling politely, Dave pointing stupidly to a bottle of beer. Group photos. I was even in some of the older ones. I flicked through, looking for something, anything. I lingered on the ones with Ella in them. They were all older pictures. Some she was pulling faces, some she was grinning, some she obviously wasn’t even aware she was being photographed. My heart had stopped fluttering. Now it just ached.

As I went through the photos, I noticed there were more of Ella than of the others. While most of the photos were of the whole group or two or three people together, Ella frequently appeared alone, sometimes looking at the camera, sometimes not. Sometimes the others were in the background, but the focus was always on Ella. And it was only in those photos I picked up something different in her eyes.

I reached the end of the photos and stopped. There was nothing from the last couple of months. The whole phone was clean. Nothing to give me any link between Jeremy and Ella’s death. But then why all the pictures of Ella?

And then it hit me, and I felt like the idiot I was. I thought back, thought of the way he leaned in close to her, laughed with her, listened to every word she said. The way he stiffened when I put my arms around her. His pictures focussed on Ella because he was focussed on Ella. He liked her. Loved her, maybe.