by Lucy Carver
‘I know they want me off the scene, especially since yesterday.’
‘Ah yes, yesterday. Tell me.’
‘It was snowing. The roads were bad.’
‘You had a near miss with a motorcycle.’
‘It skidded on to the pavement.’ Which was the truth, but probably not the whole truth because I needed Aunt Olivia to skim over this incident too. ‘Honestly, the school’s got this wrong. I’m perfectly OK – see!’
She studied me then told me with a sigh that I was exactly like my mother. ‘Helena was always convinced she was right too.’
I was sitting calmly across the table and my aunt has almost zero imagination so she takes things at face value – if I look OK, as far as she’s concerned I am OK.
‘So I shouldn’t worry too much about you?’ she double-checked.
‘It’s the school – they’re overreacting.’
‘And I don’t suppose I’m obliged to take their advice,’ she said cautiously. ‘After all, they can’t force you to leave early.’
I may have looked calm and composed, but my heart was setting up a new world record for most beats per minute. I had to stick around to find out why Tom had Lily’s overnight bag at his house for a start, and for a hundred other reasons.
‘Alyssa dear, I don’t mind admitting that I don’t know what to do for the best.’ My decisive aunt was suddenly dithering. ‘I came here with the firm intention to follow Dr Webb’s advice and take you home. Even though I’d explained to him I frequently worked in Geneva and that you might have to spend a considerable amount of time alone in the Richmond house, he was still of the opinion that it would be best to remove you from the school.’
I shook my head. ‘No, Aunt Olivia. I have to stay here – it’s important.’
She nodded and thought some more. ‘Then I have to trust your instinct,’ she decided.
The words fell from her lips like shiny gemstones. I’d got the reprieve I’d been working for. Be still, my beating heart.
‘I’ll drive you back to St Jude’s and insist on an interview with the principal. I’ll tell him in person that I wish you to continue until the end of term.’
‘So that’s that.’ I sat with Paige in our room, enjoying one small victory. ‘They can’t get rid of me, even if they want to.’
‘But why would they want to?’ Paige wondered. ‘Why not me as well? I was as close to Lily as you were.’
‘Closer.’
‘But they’re not putting the same pressure on me.’
‘Maybe it’s something to do with not trusting me. I’m still an outsider.’
‘And brainy with it.’
‘Not compared with some others around here.’
‘Alyssa, you’re bloody clever. And you’ve got this memory thing going on, which none of the rest of us have. It’s like they’re scared of you remembering some little detail that might get the school into trouble.’
‘With who?’
‘With the Earle family, or the journos – I don’t know.’
We heard footsteps stop outside our door so the guessing game had to stop.
Knock, knock, followed by a hissed request. ‘Alyssa – Paige – can I come in?’
It was Jack’s voice so I was the one who shot to the door. ‘What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be here!’
At St Jude’s we have one long corridor for the girls, one for the boys – visits only allowed between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. It was now 8.30 p.m. Punishment for breaking the rule – immediate suspension.
‘I know. Paige, you have to stand guard.’
She huffed and puffed and effed but eventually she went to sit on the top step at the end of the corridor.
‘So can I come in?’ he asked. He stepped into the room without waiting for a reply and before I knew it, his arms were round my waist and he was pulling me towards him and kissing me.
I went weak at the knees, my heart raced – you know the usual clichés. Again, before I knew it, I was kissing him back until more footsteps dragged us back to earth.
‘Jack, is this a purely social visit, or is it important?’ Paige burst through the door and caught us eating each other’s faces. ‘I’m out here freezing my tits off.’
‘Sorry.’ Blushing, he stepped away from me. ‘Get back out there, Paige. Call me if anyone comes.’
She closed the door and stomped off.
‘What if someone does come?’ I asked. ‘Will we have a St Trinian’s moment of you climbing out of the window and down the drainpipe?’
Jack grinned. (You know what I’m going to say – Oh, that grin! I had to kiss him again and again.) ‘So, anyway, I dropped in on Tom at the Old Vicarage.’
‘When?’ I gasped.
‘While you were busy with your aunt. How did that go, by the way?’
‘Excellent. She’s cool with me staying.’
‘Great.’ Another pause for more kissing before we got back to business. ‘So Tom and I arranged a date for the next five-a-side match.’
‘No, really? Did you sneak another look at that bag?’
‘Maybe.’ Jack looped his arms round my waist.
I leaned my weight back against them and looked straight at him. ‘And?’
‘I found this.’ Suddenly unclasping his hands and letting me stagger back against the window ledge, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a red smart phone.
‘Lily’s?’ Yes – Lily’s secret phone that she was rummaging for after her September meeting with Adam and Saint Sam, when she was crying and chucking stuff across the room, wailing that ‘they’ wouldn’t let her speak to ‘him’, before she took a knife to her latest masterpiece. ‘Did you ask Tom how come he had the bag?’
‘No. I decided I didn’t want him to know that we knew.’
‘You stole it?’ It was a rerun of Paige with Lily’s diary. With Paige it didn’t surprise me, but with Jack it did. He must have planned the whole thing, invented the five-a-side excuse to get inside the vicarage then somehow distracted Tom’s attention while he went through the contents of the bag, found the phone and slipped it into his pocket. And he’d kept his nerve and walked away with what could be a vital piece of new evidence.
‘Yeah, if you like. But right now it doesn’t tell us anything.’
‘Didn’t you look at her voicemail and messages?’
‘I couldn’t. It’s out of battery.’
‘Right – of course. We need the charger, but Adam and Anna probably cleared it out with the rest of Lily’s stuff.’ Still, there was a small chance that they’d left it behind so I started to search in the top drawer of Lily’s old bedside cabinet.
‘Anything?’ Jack asked.
A single silver stud earring shaped like a star, a handful of fluff, three pink paperclips. I shut the drawer and looked in the cupboard where I found a hair drier without a plug.
Then I peered underneath and fished out the very thing we were looking for. Standing up straight, I dangled the charger from my forefinger.
Jack’s phone started to vibrate. He checked it. ‘Warning call from Paige. Someone’s coming.’
‘Jack, quick – you’ve got to get out of here!’ I dashed to the window and opened it.
‘Who do you think I am – Spiderman?’
Footsteps headed down the corridor. ‘Get out!’
‘It’s bloody freezing.’ It turned out he was a reluctant superhero. Still, he did throw Lily’s phone for me to catch, then made a risky exit into the cold night.
I still had the phone and its charger in my hand when the door flew open and Paige made her second entrance, crouching low with an imaginary gun in her hand. ‘Everyone, freeze!’ she said in an American gangster accent.
Jack had gone to a lot of trouble over Lily’s secret phone. Paige and I charged it up then checked her messages, which were all from Jayden and dated early September:
Lily, I need to see you.
Lily – meet me – Smith’s Arms, back room.
Lily, answer your phone
And so on. Then we checked her missed calls – all from Jayden again. And her voicemail:
I need to talk to you. Why won’t you answer?
Call me. Let me help you.
We need to talk. This is driving me crazy.
Lily hadn’t answered any of them – neither messages nor calls. They came to an abrupt stop in the third week in September.
‘All those heroics for nothing,’ Paige told Jack when we saw him at breakfast next morning. ‘There wasn’t a single message from Lily to Jayden. She totally cut him dead.’
‘Yeah, but we did learn something new from the whole bag situation,’ he argued. ‘About Tom and Lily and the fact that she didn’t pack her bag, run out of here and throw herself straight in the lake.’
‘Doh – we already knew that she didn’t throw herself in!’ When Paige runs down a blind alley, she gets irritable. Today she took it out on her boiled egg, which she quickly and cleanly decapitated.
I pushed my own plate to one side. ‘You’re missing Jack’s point. He’s saying that Lily and Tom met up – we don’t know where.’
‘Or why,’ Jack added.
‘But they must have done because Tom now has Lily’s bag with the belongings she packed for her supposed trip home, which means she gave it to him for some reason.’
‘Or he took it,’ Jack said. ‘From Lily or from someone else.’
‘And he hasn’t brought it back to the school or taken it to the police.’ This led to the one thing I really couldn’t explain. ‘Or said a word to anyone about being involved in Lily’s disappearance.’
I ran into D’Arblay in the corridor as I went into my French class.
‘Alyssa.’ He acknowledged me with a stiff little nod then went ahead of me into the classroom to speak with Justine Renoir.
Inside the room, Hooper smiled and moved his bag to make room for me on the chair next to his.
I was glad of the smile. Hooper isn’t someone you notice in a crowd – he’s self-effacing and it takes a while to get to know him. Still, there was something about him that I instinctively warmed to.
‘Ça va?’ he asked.
‘Hi, Hooper. Yeah, I’m good thanks.’ I’d only just got settled when D’Arblay left and Justine called my name.
Justine is unbelievably chic and uses Chanel Coco Mademoiselle. She has a sexy gap between her two top front teeth and plump, cushioned lips. Anyway, she told me that D’Arblay had asked permission for me to leave the class early and go to Dr Webb’s study – all in French, of course. In ten minutes, she said. Dix minutes.
‘What does Saint Sam want?’ Hooper asked, keeping to the spirit of the lesson. Qu’est-ce qu’il veut, Saint Samuel?
‘He’s probably changed his mind about sending me home,’ I groaned.
‘En français,’ he whispered as Justine began the lesson. Ten minutes later he murmured bonne chance when I got up to go.
I decided there and then that I love Hooper – his deadpan expression, his way of trying to keep dark situations light.
To get to Dr Webb’s office I had to pass through the main entrance hall and I glanced out at fresh activity at the far end of the drive. I guess we’d got used to a dozen or so reporters, photographers and a couple of satellite vans hanging around, even in this weather, and no one had tried to sneak in since Emily Archer’s undercover entry into the sports centre, so I’d pretty much stopped noticing them. Today was different though.
‘Whoa!’ Harry remarked as he noticed the scrum at the gates. He happened to be exiting the bursar’s office as I headed for my appointment with Saint Sam. A limo had just driven into the grounds. ‘Guess who!’
‘Who?’
‘Anna Earle. According to D’Arblay’s secretary, she’s due any time.’
And Anna it was – still in black, still pale and fragile as the car pulled up at the main door and she stepped out. She recognized me and gave me the ghost of a smile before Saint Sam opened his door and invited us both into his office.
The principal offered Anna a seat and left me standing by the door. He waited for her to begin.
‘I’m so sorry to take up more of your time, Dr Webb.’
‘Not at all. We’re happy to help in whatever way we can.’
The word ‘help’ had a grating effect – too impersonal, too polite for the occasion of losing your daughter in potentially violent circumstances. Anna Earle’s eyes closed briefly and she sighed.
Saint Sam quickly tried to up his game. ‘Of course, we’re very disappointed that the request for a new pathologist’s report is holding up the funeral arrangements. We can only imagine how terrible it must be for the family.’
Let me out! In fact, what am I doing here in the first place?
‘It’s the waiting,’ Anna said. The voice was as ghostly as the smile. ‘The not knowing.’
‘We understand.’
She shook her head. ‘I realize – I have to accept – that Lily has gone and I’ll never get her back, but there are so many unanswered questions.’
Dr Webb did the steeple thing with his hands, tapping his fingertips together. I guess at this point he’d run out of platitudes and was trying to think of something meaningful to say.
‘I only want to know what happened.’ Anna’s voice quavered and quivered to a halt. ‘I have to do something. I can’t sit at home.’
I totally get that. Paige and I – we feel the same way.
‘No. Honestly, Mrs Earle, I do understand. Many of us at St Jude’s wish we could do more.’
I sure do. Wanting to do something is the reason I chased after Jayden and almost got myself mown down in the process.
‘What exactly are the police doing? Have they involved the school?’
‘Of course. I gave them a statement yesterday, as did Guy Simons, our head of physical education, who was the last teacher to see Lily on the day she disappeared, as indeed did our bursar, Terence D’Arblay, who gave his permission for Lily to leave school and travel to London.’
‘What about you, Alyssa?’ Turning with sudden eagerness, Anna drew me into the conversation. ‘Have you spoken to the police?’
‘Not yet,’ Dr Webb answered for me. ‘Inspector Cole understands the need to tread carefully as far as Lily’s fellow students are concerned. He plans to interview Alyssa and Paige at a later date. Meanwhile, there are many other demands on police time.’
You’re being much too bland again, Saint Sam. And how come you’re answering for me?
‘I see.’ Anna left a long pause before she spoke again. ‘You’ll let me speak to Alyssa? I can take her out of school?’
Ah – that’s what I’m doing here!
‘We’ll do anything that can be of comfort to Lily’s family,’ he assured her. ‘We’ve taken Alyssa out of lessons especially to be here, though whether or not she can provide any answers . . .’
Anna Earle stood up with more determination than I would have expected. ‘That’s beside the point, Dr Webb. Alyssa was one of Lily’s closest friends.’
‘I understand,’ he said again as he stood and made his way across the room to open the door for us. ‘Take all the time you need, but with one proviso – that you don’t leave Alyssa to find her own way home. You’ll send her back to school with your driver?’
‘Oh my good God!’ Anna sank back on to the white leather seat as her driver coasted down wintry back lanes. The press feeding frenzy at the school gate was over – faces and lenses pressed against the car windows, reporters yelling heartless questions. ‘How are you feeling, Anna?’ ‘Where’s your husband?’ ‘Have they decided that Lily was murdered?’
I sat beside her in silence, seeing myself in the driver’s overhead mirror as Anna leaned forward and closed the privacy screen.
‘That man!’ she sighed. ‘Did they cut out his heart before they made him principal of St Jude’s?’
I was expecting her to shrivel at the onslaught of the piranha press, not launch this attack on
the sainted Sam.
‘Sorry,’ she sighed. Her hand trembled as she flicked her hair back in a gesture that reminded me so much of Lily that it took my breath away. ‘What else could I expect – Dr Webb has to keep things on a professional level, doesn’t he?’
‘It’s the way he is,’ I agreed.
‘He can’t get personally involved – I realize that. In any case, over the years I’ve learned to deal with men like Dr Webb.’
We cruised on along the lanes, the hedges and fields still laden with snow.
‘Lily went to many different schools before she settled at St Jude’s,’ Anna explained. ‘Each one had a principal who was no doubt good at his or her job, but who never showed a scrap of genuine emotion, even when they were excluding her.’
I said I knew what she meant.
She looked hard at me. ‘There’s something about you, Alyssa.’
I blushed then stared out of the window.
‘No, I noticed it the moment I saw you.’
‘What exactly?’
‘I realized that you and Lily are similar – you don’t follow the rules.’
‘Only if they make sense to me.’
‘Yes, I can definitely spot that in you. That’s why I wanted to have this time with you. You know, Lily is a free spirit. Her father doesn’t see it, but I do.’
I let Anna do the talking, but each time she spoke of Lily in the present tense it gave me a small shock, like static electricity.
‘Robert tries to rein her in. I tell him you can’t tame Lily’s creative spirit, she has to be free. We’ve had this battle for as long as I can remember, ever since Lily began to show signs of what they termed bizarre behaviour and I saw as the beginnings of her creativity.’
‘You could say that about a lot of kids,’ I said, meaning myself. I remembered being afraid of turning the light off because I was sure that witches would burst through my bedroom wall when I was asleep.
‘Lily had an imaginary friend called Peter with a magic pebble that allowed him to make wishes come true.’ Anna smiled at the memory. ‘It didn’t matter to her that she had no real friends because we moved around the world so much when she was young. She always had Peter. But it worried Robert because as a newspaperman he deals in facts and doesn’t pander to the world of the imagination – he’s very old school. And then of course eventually the doctors were involved. They put Lily through test after test until they came up with a diagnosis.’