Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Epilogue: Gemma Akintola: Sunday, 1st March, 2016

A kiss on the forehead.

In the early stages, that was how Gemma identified that it was Ellie Mengiste that was visiting her. It was Ellie's way of saying goodbye. That and the calm, solicitous tone of her voice, always a pleasant alternative to Gemma's mum's shrill questioning of the nurses, asking when Gemma would fully regain her consciousness. Just wait! Be patient! Gemma wanted to sit up and snap every time her mother did this, but even once she did really come around, she didn't have the energy to. Personally, she wasn't all that bothered about it. The only thing that her renewed sentience had brought her was the ability to process all the information that Ellie Mengiste had been trying repeatedly to drip feed her since the accident. The first thing Gemma had managed to get into her head, was that in a strange twist of fate, it had been Vicky Prescott or Vicky "hit-and-run" who had hit-and-run her. Well, not so much a hit and run as a hitting and then calling the police and explaining to them that you're having trouble controlling your new, specialised car and that you think you've just run someone down with it. Apparently, Vicky felt dreadful about the whole thing. Gemma, however, wasn't so sure; it had to be nice running down the woman whose friend you always thought, and were basically right in thinking, ran down you. Then, there was Lilly's fate. According to Ellie, who heard it from Naomi Cookson, she'd been placed in ongoing psychiatric evaluation by the police following the revelation that she had been the one blackmailing Gemma. They said that she'd been through so much trauma, that her acts were somewhat understandable, excusable, even. Gemma wasn't sure quite how much she agreed with that judgement either; every time she thought about her brother, Lilly's so-called "punishment" seemed like the biggest load of bullshit she ever heard, a light slap on the wrist for what was basically murder. But she didn't think about anything much, so for the rest of the time, she remained somewhat ambivalent towards the matter. Josh Young, Ellie said, was still in the intensive care unit in a coma after sustaining severe brain trauma, though he was wanted for questioning as soon as he recovered with regards to the murder of Cleo King and several others, possibly including Alice, following an "anonymous tip-off". It seemed to Gemma that the anonymous tipper may be the very same anonymous tipper that had alerted the police to the location of Cleo's body in the first place: Sasha Evans. Though Gemma did not dare alert Ellie to that, compound the intrigue and aspersions that she would already inevitably have to face once she left the hospital.

Like what was her role in it all? In the crash, in Alice Jenkins' murder, in Clara Wright's "disappearance"? Following the police's discovery of the multiple visits Clara made to the Expedia website on her laptop the morning of the disappearance, police, Ellie told Gemma, believed that she had returned to South Africa. Her leaving and Alice's death were said to be discrete incidents; since Detective March had left to work for the Met in London (how she managed to pull that get out of shitty detective work free card was a mystery to Gemma), the local police force, it seemed, had become even more egregiously bad at their jobs. Holly Khan certainly didn't believe the story, visiting Gemma early on, gripping her hand and practically weeping over her semi-conscious body.

"Please, Gemma, if you know anything about where she is, where she could be, anything..." Holly had whimpered. "Please, tell me, please. I know whatever she did, there's an explanation."

But Gemma, had just lain there, unresponsive. She wasn't much different once she came around. You would suppose that knowing all the details, she would feel a sense of resolution. Satisfaction. But instead, all she felt was numb. Maybe it was the drugs they were giving her.

Maybe it wasn't.

She had a similar reaction to waking up and finding Cleo King sat at her bedside that evening, observing, taking a characteristically long drag on her cigarette.