Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Gemma Akintola

The auburn hair, the collared shirt, the matronly cardigan. There was no need to get any closer than Gemma and Clara were as they sat in St.Edmund's coffee shop, watching the woman they assumed to be Sasha Evans walk past the window. They knew it was her, though she seemed to be oblivious to their presence, their hushed voices and their louring. It was all very Mean Girls-esque, a set up that had occurred profusely back when Cleo was around; she had always been the leader, sparking the conversation with a leading question knowing it would quickly descend into a complete bitchfest. She had a faculty for picking out people that she knew one of the other four harboured a secret loathing for, maybe noticing a subtle roll of the eyes in the person's direction when nobody else was looking, and knew exactly the statements to trigger an eruption of enmity, a spew of vitriol bitter enough to erode away the foundations of houses. All it would take was a simple "Eurgh, there goes Vicky Prescott. Is it just me or is she kind of irritating?", and then she'd watch her target blow with a smirk or maybe a draw on her cigarette, the ashes of the explosion falling into her open palm, waiting until the time was right to use them as she wished.

"Alice, have you tried to make up with her?" Gemma called over to Alice, who was stood at the till with Lilly, once Sasha had passed. She couldn't help but contemplate the events of the last few days in her head, even though she'd rather think about something else. Her feeling of actually having something to go on had been steadily abated over the last couple of days. First was the call from Alice the day before to fill Gemma in on the conversation she'd had with her brother, which had ended with her assuring Gemma that there was "no way in hell" he was the Supplier as far as she was concerned. Then, there was Clara telling them, upon their meeting in the cafe that morning, that she didn't think Sasha Evans was anything more than a jealous arsehole that probably only wished she'd had something to do with Cleo's murder.

"Make up with her?" Alice repeated incredulously, returning with her second coffee of the morning. "Gemma, It's like the bloody Cold War between us at the moment. I'm just waiting for an excuse to detonate a nuke on her arse." She said, one-handedly tucking her skirt underneath her as she sat down, espresso balanced in the other.

"You're going to shit on her?" Spluttered Lilly, following behind Alice, missing the first half of the conversation. She'd returned from the till with the fruit salad she had been deliberating over for the past 20 minutes.

"God, I would love to shit on her smug little face." Gemma said, her comment earning a snigger from Clara and a begrudging smile from Alice. Lilly, on the other hand, still seemed confused.

"Wait, I've got this one. It was a hyperbole?" She asked, stabbing a pappy piece of melon with the plastic spork she'd been given, looking mildly revolted by it.

"No. It was a metaphor...though I suppose in the context you're taking it..." Alice began to explain but obviously thought better of it, putting the coffee down on the table in front of her and taking on her more grave, let's-get-shit-done demeanour. "It doesn't matter. We need to go to this taxi office and speak to the taxi driver I told you all about."

"We're going off what your little brother says?" Gemma asked, her turn to be incredulous.

"Well, can you think of anything better?"

"Uh, yeah, how about we go to the police and tell them about the little shit before he chucks another vat of acid over my head?" She said trenchantly, necking the rest of her own coffee and resting the paper cup back down on the table to glower.

"Gemma, I've been through this with you." Said Alice, her tone as pithy as the cocksure albeit subpar maths teacher that most will encounter at some point in their life, who thinks that the reason his students never seem to grasp what he's teaching them, year after year, is him pulling a class of vacant short straws rather than his own slipshod methods. "My brother isn't the Supplier so either we can sit around bitching about him for no reason and waste time or we can go and speak to this taxi driver and see where he took Cleo or if he even took her anywhere at all."