by Mia James
‘Tilda did say she hadn’t seen the property in a while,’ said Silvia, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘She’s very busy.’
‘Why don’t you both go and unpack? The removal men put the boxes in the bedrooms,’ said William, walking over to the large marble fireplace. He had been down earlier in the week to arrange the furniture and belongings. ‘I’ll get a fire going, make it all cosy while you two go and explore.’
April knew that her dad was just trying to see the positive side - as always - but this gloomy welcome had done nothing to alleviate her homesickness for her friends and her life back in Edinburgh. Sighing, she followed her mother through the dining room and into the large kitchen at the back of the house. At least here it was well lit: fluorescent light bounced off the marble worktops and the shiny red Aga stove. Silvia pulled open the large American-style fridge.
‘I knew Tilda wouldn’t let me down,’ she said, reaching in and pulling out an expensive-looking bottle of wine. ‘Right then, glasses …’ she muttered, opening cupboards impatiently.
‘I’ll just go and look around by myself, shall I?’ said April, knowing that her mother wasn’t listening. ‘Maybe do some drugs, or go into the cellar and get chopped up by the mad axeman, okay?’
Silvia waved a vague hand. ‘Yes, darling, that sounds nice.’
April didn’t find any axemen, just a rather tired-looking Georgian terrace house with several dingy bedrooms and a lot of very creaky stairs. She had decided the small room at the top of the house would be her bedroom, partly because it had a view across the roof to the village and partly because it was the only place she could get a signal on her mobile. The room was full of cardboard boxes stuffed with her possessions, but at least someone - her father, when he had been down the previous weekend? - had made up the bed with white sheets and an unfamiliar duvet. She sat cross-legged on the bed and speed-dialled Fiona.
‘Hi, this is Fee, you know what to do …’ said the sing-song message, followed by the beep. April was disappointed her best friend wasn’t there to listen to her moan about her new home, but it still made her smile a little to hear her breathy, enthusiastic voice. Fiona Donald—‘a good, solid Scots name’, she always liked to point out, while making gagging motions - had kept April sane since they had been allocated desks next to each at St Geoffrey’s five years ago. ‘Just imagine how wrong it could have gone if they hadn’t seated us alphabetically,’ Fee had said just before April left for Highgate. It was the only time April could remember feeling grateful to her parents. Without the quirk of fate that brought them together she might never have bonded with Fee over their love of low-quality pop music, and they might not have then shared everything from hair-dye disasters to doomed crushes ever since. April couldn’t imagine life without her best friend, but now she was going to have to try to cope.
‘Hey, babes,’ said April into the voicemail, ‘just arrived. It’s raining and everyone is old. Yep, that just about sums it up. Call me when you get this, okay?’
She snapped her phone shut and lay back on the bed. She could already hear raised voices downstairs - big surprise. From up here she could only pick out odd phrases from her mother: ‘Why didn’t you accept it?’ and then, ‘He’s only trying to help,’ and from her father: ‘Christ, Silvia, is it a crime to provide for my family?’
April knew exactly what that was all about. Tomorrow she was due to begin at the prestigious Ravenwood School on the far side of Highgate. They weren’t even giving her a single day to unpack and acclimatise to her new environment. From the little April knew about the school it sounded like some sort of freak show, one half stuffed with maths geniuses and chess masters, the other half made up of some of the richest kids in London, all there because they had been tutored within an inch of their lives or their daddies had made some generous financial gift to the school. It sounded completely intimidating and the drive past it on the way to the house had done nothing to reassure her. A huge grey Gothic monstrosity on the edge of Hampstead Heath, it had obviously been an important stately home a couple of hundred years ago and looked like it was still haunted by the original owners. But it wasn’t even the creepiness of the place that bothered April, it was the students. She could just picture the scene tomorrow: people being dropped off in Ferraris while she clumped up in her trainers. That was the big problem, of course, and the cause of the argument downstairs: Ravenwood wasn’t cheap and, given their reduced circumstances, her parents would struggle with the fees. Her grandfather Thomas, Silvia’s dad, who owned an impressive house in the backstreets of Covent Garden and had put Silvia through the best schools in the land, had offered to pay the fees, but William had refused point blank and her parents had been arguing about it ever since. So, since she was going, she assumed her dad had used his once-great name and maybe a few highly placed contacts to swing it. It wouldn’t make her mother happy either way, given the irony of the situation: finally she was getting the opportunity to shop till she dropped, and just as suddenly couldn’t afford it due to the sky-high school fees.
Sighing, April walked over to the window to look out at the village. The rain seemed to have stopped and the moon was now shining down on the wet roof tiles, although she could see that funny fox weathervane on top of the church still being jerked back and forth by the gusts.
‘Chill out, Foxy,’ she whispered.
To the left, she could see across the square and beyond that to the top of the High Street. If the dark clouds lift, thought April, it might actually be quite pretty. As she scanned the view, she saw movement in the little park - three figures walking slowly under the big trees, then perching on a bench. April squinted - definitely two boys and a girl. Her heart leapt: young people! They looked to be about her age, although she couldn’t be sure from this distance. She snatched up her phone and ran downstairs.
April walked into the living room to find it transformed. Her dad had a glowing fire popping and spitting in the hearth and had lit a load of big church candles which were dotted all over the room. It actually did look as warm and inviting as he had promised. He was already ensconced in an armchair pulled up in front of the fire, papers and open books spread all around him, stabbing angrily away at his laptop. It was no surprise to find her dad hard at work only minutes after moving into the new house, and minutes after finishing a big fight with her mother. Nothing stopped her dad working. She couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t bent over a book or a paper or barking questions into a phone. Actually, now she came to think of it, she couldn’t remember ever seeing him sleep. If he wasn’t working on some story about a corrupt government department or a drug company scandal for the paper, then he was beavering away on his books: heavy non-fiction books debunking conspiracy theories that sold almost no copies except to nut-jobs and university professors. From what April could tell, her dad’s books involved highly technical scientific explanations for ghosts and UFOs and the abominable snowman. Something like that, anyway. April was more into chick lit.
‘I’m nipping out,’ she said, pulling on her favourite coat.
He looked up from his laptop. ‘What’s your hurry? You must have taken three steps at a time back there.’
‘I’ve spotted signs of life in the village.’ She smiled.
‘If you’re going out, can you post a letter for me?’ he said, turning to the cracked leather briefcase next to his chair.
She watched him with grudging affection as he pulled out handfuls of paper, plonking them down in haphazard piles. She didn’t like to think of her dad as handsome but she knew he was; all her friends’ mums fancied him. No doubt his looks were what had attracted Silvia to him in the first place; April couldn’t think of any other reason. Silvia was privileged, snobbish and superficial, whereas William was hard-working, cynical and academic. And under that dishevelled, disorganised surface, her father had a big heart. Anyone who had put up with Silvia for so long had to have hidden depths. And despite all April’s annoyance at the upheaval o
f moving down here, she knew it was her dad who had suffered most in all this, being pushed out of a job he loved and forced to start again. Having a surly teenager and a disapproving wife in tow couldn’t have helped much either.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said, as he handed her a creased envelope.
He frowned slightly, cocking his head. ‘For the letter?’
April smiled. ‘Yeah, for the letter.’
As she opened the front door and ran down the path to the gate, the wind whipped up and blew April’s hair into her face. Pulling it back, she looked up - and that’s when she saw him. A tall, dark-haired boy standing on the other side of the road. He was staring straight at her.
Wow. He’s good-looking, she thought, with a mixture of excitement and nerves. Tall and slim in dark jeans and a navy pea coat, he looked as if he had just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch advert. His hair was swept back off his forehead and she looked into his deep-set black eyes. Just for a moment, there was a flicker of something in his face: recognition, perhaps? Surprise? She stared back, mesmerised by his eyes, so dark and intense; so intense, in fact, that, after a moment, April had to look away.
Who was he? Was he one of the people she had seen on the bench earlier? And why was he staring at her?
‘April?’
She turned around to see her mother standing in the doorway, arms crossed. Silvia had changed into white skinny jeans and a thick cream cashmere jumper that looked completely inappropriate for unpacking boxes. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
April waved the envelope. ‘I’m just going to post a letter for Dad.’
‘Inside,’ snapped Silvia impatiently. ‘You’ve got a big day tomorrow.’
April glared at her mother. Why did she always have to interfere? She was only going for a walk, for heaven’s sake.
‘Mum …’ she complained.
‘Now! I mean it,’ said her mother, taking a few steps down the path.
April glanced back at the square. The boy was gone. The square was totally empty, as if no one had ever been there. She frowned; where had he vanished to so quickly? Reluctantly, April walked back up the path.
‘What’s the big deal?’ she asked sulkily as she reached the door. ‘Why can’t I go out?’
Her mother looked over her shoulder at the spot where the boy had been standing, then up and down the street.
‘I’ll tell you why,’ she said, pulling April inside. ‘There’s been a murder.’
Chapter Two
‘Dad. What’s this about a murder?’
April stuffed a piece of toast in her mouth as her father walked into the kitchen. It was 8.30 on a Monday morning and her mother was hovering by the door, jangling the car keys.
‘Don’t start him off,’ said Silvia sarcastically, shooting a dirty look at her husband. ‘We have to leave in about thirty seconds if I’m going to give you a lift to school.’
Yeah, like I’m going to rush for my first day at freak-school, thought April. Right now she would welcome the distraction of one of her father’s stories, especially one about a grisly local murder. Last night, when Silvia had pulled her back into the house in full view of that totally fit boy, she had just muttered something about ‘something on the news’ and ‘dangerous streets’, then sent her upstairs to unpack. Then Fiona had phoned back with the latest gossip, which had put all thoughts of murder from her head. Apparently Fee had just seen Miranda Cooper, one of April’s classmates at St Geoffrey’s, at the cinema with Neil Stevenson, the boy April had been nursing a crush on for the past eighteen months. Neil was an Orlando Bloom lookalike whom April had slowly managed to befriend over the past year. He was sporty and cool, one of the popular clique at Marshgate Boys, and normally their paths would never have crossed, but as luck would have it, Neil’s mum was one of Silvia’s cronies. Consequently, whenever Silvia popped by’ Neil’s house to drop off something at the weekend or on the way to school, he and April would be forced into each other’s company. ‘Just go and chat to Neil for five minutes, darling,’ she would say, waving a hand. ‘Listen to a CD or something.’ It had always grated on April that her mother clearly trusted her to go into some random boy’s bedroom unsupervised; did she really think her daughter was that unattractive? Anyway, the upside was that after the initial awkwardness, she and Neil had bonded over their mothers’ respective failings as parents and started to get to know each other. April hadn’t exactly rated her chances with Neil, even after he invited her to his seventeenth birthday party in a pub on Princes Street, but a girl could hope, couldn’t she? April had borrowed her mum’s Gucci peasant dress, the only thing she could find in her wardrobe that didn’t make her look about fifty, and had gone along with Fee and another friend. When they had bumped into Miranda on the street a few hundred metres away from the party, they had invited her along too. Big mistake.
‘The murder in Dartmouth Park?’ said William, draining his coffee. ‘Thought you’d know all about that by now.’
‘Why would I?’
‘Well, the bloke who was murdered was in that band, Belarus.’
April’s eyes widened. ‘Alix Graves was killed?’
Unlike half the girls in her class, April wasn’t a mad Belarus fan. They were a bit too morose, the lyrics too dark. Half the tracks on the last album were just too experimental— or so one reviewer in NME had described them. But Alix Graves was sexy. She knew at least three girls who would have to phone the Samaritans when they heard he’d been found murdered in his London home. Fee for one - she had been known to kiss his picture before retiring for the night.
‘Who’s Alix Graves?’ said Silvia, fastening the belt of her silk trenchcoat a little tighter.
‘He’s only one of the biggest rock stars in the country,’ April gasped, incredulous. ‘ “Moon Cry”? “Dark Angel”?’ She looked at her mother’s blank face with amazement. ‘You’ve really never heard of him?’
Her father smiled. ‘Your mother prefers Sting. Anyway, Alix’s house was in Dartmouth Park, which is a fair way from here, so you don’t need to worry too much. The police are evidently still baffled by what happened and who might have done it, though. The latest thinking is some crazed fan but no one really knows.’
April pulled her phone out and speed-dialled Fiona as her mother gave a theatrical cough.
‘April,’ said Silvia impatiently, ‘it’s late. Do you want me to give you a lift or not?’
April shot her mother a withering look. Didn’t she understand that this was earth-shattering news? Alix Graves had been murdered and, what was more, it had happened down the road! She had to talk to Fiona. She would be wearing a black veil around Edinburgh for the weekend at least.
‘Off you go, love. We’ll talk later,’ said her father. ‘I’ll see what the guys at work know about it. But don’t worry and don’t let it ruin your first day at school, okay?’
‘In the meantime I want you straight back here after school,’ said Silvia briskly. ‘I don’t want you wandering around when there’s some maniac on the loose.’
‘And how am I supposed to make friends if I’m trapped in here?’ said April, in her mind changing the words ‘make friends’ to ‘meet boys’.
‘Join the chess club or something,’ replied Silvia absently.
‘You are kidding?’ asked April, looking pleadingly at her father.
‘I’m afraid I’m with your mother on this one,’ said William sympathetically. ‘Just until we find out what’s going on.’
April shook her head and grabbed her bag. ‘Well, I think I’ll walk to school—is that okay? You don’t think I’ll be murdered in broad daylight, do you?’ she said sarcastically. She stalked to the front door, angry at her parents - how could they even consider grounding her at such a crucial time? - but also glad that walking would delay her arrival at her new school for those crucial last few minutes, because it was the last place on earth she wanted to be going. Right now she reckoned that being stalked by a killer would be less scary than
Ravenwood School.
‘God, Fee, it’s like I’m a prisoner here,’ she said. ‘I seriously think they’d rather lock me in the cellar until I’m old enough to be married off than let me make a decision for myself.’
April had rung Fiona as soon as she was out of the house. Her parents would never understand what massive news Alix Graves’ death was (although their generation never stopped banging on about John Lennon, so they should) and they certainly wouldn’t get how hard it would hit someone like Fiona, who had posters and cuttings of Alix plastered on every available surface in her room.
‘Yeah, it sucks you’ve been grounded.’ Fiona sighed. ‘But at least you’re alive.’
‘Oh, Fee, I’m sorry,’ said April, wincing. ‘I was so mad with them, I didn’t think. How are you doing?’