Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Alice Jenkins

And that bullshit you're spouting?

You're going to have to pay for it.

And so the bitch should, thought Alice Jenkins, looking down on Lilly Philipp's unconscious body and tugging off her head the eerie, misshapen Ghostface mask, the white of the plastic skin sliding up like a veil to reveal the equally white face underneath it, with the dark, dark eyes to match.

After all, Luca Stone? Luca fucking Stone? Alice had not spent the last several months perfecting the art of subtle torture just to receive such a half-arsed lie in return. The injustice of it was bitter like the first vodka shot of the night as she reread the last of a long line of texts she'd sent to the crumpled, blonde "friend" who lay, unstirring, at the end of her patent brogues.

Texts that were all from her, Alice Jenkins, "The Supplier".

With a small, assuaged smile at the sight of Lilly, however, Alice slipped her own phone back into the satchel that she wore underneath the black cloak. Bending down, she took a closer look at the unconscious body, untucking her hair from under the collar so that it hung around her face.

"Stupid bitch." She murmured, sliding Lilly's phone out of her limp hand and then standing back up straight again, tugging the black cloak away from her body to reveal the quintessential Alice outfit underneath: an expensive, beige, cashmere cardigan, a white chiffon shirt, and perfectly ironed, close-fitting jeans, not a crease in sight. Folding the cloak up neatly, she shoved it, along with the mask and Lilly's phone, back into her satchel and waltzed out of the flat as if she had just stopped by for some afternoon tea, not without first pulling the door to behind her. Nobody would sense anything was off, she correctly conjectured, as she passed the girl who lived across the hallway leaving her flat with some friends. Alice made sure to flash them all her signature poised smile, and to continue walking purposefully, her stance distinguished. Unsurprisingly, it worked. Not one of the girls looked back at her with any kind of uncertainty, and as she reentered her flat, she thanked, for the ease with which all that came, the line of cocaine she'd taken before heading over to Cleo's, where Lilly was staying. She had tried to stay away from the stuff, she really had, but once she was back on amphetamines, it was less of a leap and more of a small step from one to the other. Greeting her upon entering her bedroom was the board she had composed a few nights before, with all the arrows and the photos, everything exactly as it had been, apart from a few new additions. Next to the question mark she had drawn, a photo of Lilly in the pink blazer she'd worn the night of the party, the wide shots Lilly had emailed months before, and underneath it, two words.

Break her.

On a post-it note above, the text she had sent before making her way over to Lilly's.

 And that bullshit you're spouting?

You're going to have to pay for it.

She remembered saying something similar to Cleo the night everything had first gone down.

People did often forget, just how impeccable her memory was.

And that's why she'd done it; that's why she had fucked Lilly Philipp's life up.

Because she couldn't forget what she had seen the night of Cleo's murder: Cleo's "The drugs, Alice! They're running it all. And they have eyes everywhere!", the flashing of the camera followed by the flutter of that lurid pink blazer Alice knew to be Lilly's in the wind, the glimpse she managed to get of those pale wrists in the breeze as the taker of the photo darted behind a rock before Alice got a chance to see their face.

"So I can give you about £50 for them but I'm not buying them all. Nobody really wants that shit anymore, Alice, I'm sorry, it's too late." Luca Stone had been saying to her, shoving the bag of powder he had agreed to buy into his back pocket, her looking back over her shoulder at the rock she was sure she'd just seen Lilly Philipps dart behind.