“Um, you don’t look good,” he says with concern. “Anyone got a tissue?”
“I do,” Lizzie whispers, and fumbles in the chartreuse abomination. She produces a pack of tissues and blows her nose. I’m amazed that she’s got any fluid left in there at all—it sounded as if she’d cried it all out by now.
“That better?” Jase says.
Lizzie nods, her eyes now fixed on his golden ones.
I realize that I am horrendously jealous of Lizzie once again. How dare she be monopolizing Jase’s attention like this? I’m the one he talks to, the one whose name he knows.
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Jase asks, and he reaches out his hands to take hers.
My envy is so acute now I have to curl my toes till they hurt to stop me leaning forward and dragging the two of them apart. I’m the one whose hands Jase holds! I am! Not Lizzie!
Lizzie parts her lips, staring at him, and I realize with horror that she’s about to talk. She’s going to tell him everything. And when she does, it will all come out. Lizzie may not know whether I’m the Kiss of Death girl, but I’ll have to explain it to him so he understands the whole picture, why Taylor and I were ganging up on her, and then he’ll realize who I am and never want to come near me again, in case he drops dead because of kissing me, too.
“She’s scared of doing trampoline!” Taylor blurts out.
Oh no, I think in panic, why did Taylor have to say that? It’s the explanation Lizzie gave her of why she was crying in the classroom, but Lizzie surely must have been crying about something to do with leaving me the note. . . . Jase isn’t going to believe this for a moment!
Jase turns his head to stare at Taylor.
“You what?”
“Yeah! She has to do it in gym class, and she hates it, but she’s too scared to tell our coach she doesn’t want to do it!” Taylor rattles out at high pitch.
Jase looks disbelievingly back at Lizzie.
“Is that really true?” he asks.
There’s a long pause. Lizzie’s hands are still in his, and she’s showing no inclination of pulling them away. She gulps hard, still looking at him, and I know I need to get her attention now, or she’ll break down and tell him everything.
“I was suggesting I could talk to my grandmother about it,” I break in. “You know, she shouldn’t have to get on a trampoline if she doesn’t want to. People have accidents sometimes. On the springs. Um, it really does happen. So I thought, if I talked to my grandmother, she might change the rule that everyone has to do it.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Taylor nodding in appreciation of the way I’ve gone along with her flash of inspiration. The only thing that mattered in my little speech was emphasizing my close connection to the headmistress—i.e., reminding Lizzie of my threat to tell my grandmother about the note unless she came clean about it to us.
And it seems to have worked. Lizzie gulps again, and says to Jase in such a small voice it’s almost a whisper:
“I am scared of the trampoline. I always think I’m going to fall. It’s really . . . bouncy.”
Taylor does her best to stifle a snort of laughter, but Jase catches it.
“Hey, she’s scared!” he says angrily to Taylor. “You should respect that. Everyone’s scared of something.” And then to Lizzie he adds dubiously, “Is that really it? Is that really why you were crying so hard you sounded like you were going to burst a blood vessel?”
Jase is no fool. He can tell there’s more to this than meets the eye. I hold my breath, but Lizzie nods her head, her eyes widening.
“There are these springs! On the edge of the trampoline!” she says. “I’m always scared I’m going to land on them and hurt myself! They look really dangerous, I can’t believe they actually make us jump near them! I told my dad but he said he was sure the school knew best, and he’s so busy all the time anyway, but I really hate doing it and I’m sure Miss Carter makes me do it on purpose because she’s mean like that.”
My God, it’s true. Lizzie really is scared of the trampoline. Taylor and I exchange glances of disbelief. And Jase has realized by now that once Lizzie gets started babbling, she won’t stop of her own accord. He lets her hands go (about time, too!) and stands up.
“And you two were teasing her about it, were you?” he says to me and Taylor.
“We were trying to help,” I lie. “We just weren’t doing a very good job of it.”
“You can say that again,” he says dryly, and when his eyes meet mine there’s none of the warmth I’ve come to expect from him. “I’ll get going, then. That hedge isn’t going to clip itself, more’s the pity.”
He picks up his shears from the grass beside the bench.
“You sure you’re going to be okay?” he asks Lizzie. “Do you want me to walk you out?”
He doesn’t trust us. Me and Taylor. He doesn’t trust us to take care of a sobbing, upset girl. And the worst part is that he’s absolutely right.
Lizzie looks up, and her face illuminates for a moment with hope, hope that she’ll be able to leave the maze now, with Jase as her protector, save herself from any more blackmail by me and Taylor. And then she catches sight of me, and I shake my head, the tiniest of motions—I hope to God Jase didn’t see it—but enough to convey to her that there’s no easy escape for her, no flight with Prince Charming. She has to stay here and face the music, that’s what the shake of my head says, or I’ll go straight to my grandmother.
“No, I’m fine,” she mutters. “Thanks. I’ll stay here.”
Jase shrugs, a big circling of his muscular shoulders that comprehensively conveys his wish to put this whole messy scene behind him and get on with his work. He looks straight at me for a second as he turns to exit through the gap in the hedge, but it’s a cold, direct stare, nothing friendly about it at all. And then he’s gone.
I want to burst into tears. I want to run after him and throw myself into his arms and confess everything. But that would be ridiculous. I barely know him. And telling him wouldn’t solve anything. I had to make a choice, and that’s what I did: look good in front of Jase, or push forward on finding out what happened to Dan. And I chose the latter. What I need to focus on is right here in front of me: Lizzie, who has a piece of the puzzle in her fluffy little brain. Lizzie, whose information will get me one step closer to solving the mystery of Dan’s death.
I tell myself it’s better this way. It’s better that Jase thinks I’m a bully and a bitch. Because if he does, he’ll stay away from me, and I won’t have to deal with my attraction for him while Dan’s death is unresolved. I won’t be tempted to kiss him and have to push him away, afraid that my weird curse will somehow transmit itself to him.
I tell myself all that, but it doesn’t help at all. Jase’s eyes, always so warm and glowing and golden when they look at me, were like frozen metal just now, icy and hard. I hate that he looked at me like that. Hate it.
I gulp. Taylor’s looking at me, frowning, her straight dark brows drawn together over her slanting green eyes. It’s as if she screamed, “Pull yourself together, Scarlett!”
I nod at her. Then Taylor and I both look at Lizzie. We don’t even need to speak. Lizzie is broken by now, broken by having cried so hard, having had several opportunities to tell Jase the truth and taken none of them, having been offered passage to safety through the maze by him and rejected it. I know that one good hard menacing stare from both of us will be more than enough to make her give up her secret.
And so it proves.
twenty-one
BAD COP/BAD COP
I told Lizzie to start from the beginning. I realize now that may have been a mistake. I’m just surprised she didn’t start by recounting her birth. Blimey, this girl likes the sound of her own voice.
“I’m really in debt,” Lizzie says, winding a tissue through her fingers. “I keep thinking that if I have the latest bag or whatever, they’ll let me be friends with them. And it does sort of work. I mean, they ask me to parties
sometimes, and if I’m in the same club they’ll let me sit with them if I buy lots of drinks. But Dad’s actually quite strict about my credit card, he monitors it online and he shouts at me if I go over a grand, which is nothing, actually, I can’t believe he’s that fussy when he’s a multimillionaire, you know?”
Lizzie’s incapable of holding more than one thought in her head at any one time: from her indignant tone, I can tell that she’s so resentful at her father’s injustice that she’s temporarily forgotten to be frightened of me and Taylor. She starts shredding the tissue she’s holding, ripping it up angrily. Bits of white floaty paper drift off in the breeze and fall to the grass below the bench.
“Anyway, I’m really skint after buying this bag.” She looks dolefully at the ghastly chartreuse thing with its dripping straps and buckles and shiny dangling bits. “I wanted to go out this weekend, but I can’t, because I haven’t got a penny, and then she offered me all this money if I’d just leave a note for you, Scarlett.” Lizzie looks up at me, her eyes still swollen, but with a genuinely imploring expression that makes me think she’s telling the truth here. “She swore it wasn’t anything bad, just that she didn’t want you to know it came from her.”
“Why not?” Taylor asks.
“I don’t know, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. I mean, it was two hundred and fifty pounds! Just for leaving you a note! And then the first one you had a pen leak on, so I had to go and get another one from her, which was really hard to organize because I had to be back by curfew and she made this huge fuss about coming out on the tube to meet me. Wait. . . .”
The penny dropped. Lizzie stares at both of us in shock.
“You didn’t have an ink leak, did you?” Lizzie says, her voice rising. “It was all a setup. You did that deliberately so I’d have to get another note and you could watch me put it in the desk and I still don’t know how you saw me! Unless Meena saw me, but when I came out of the room she was halfway down the corridor. Did you have a video or something in there?”
Taylor and I just look back at her, stone-faced, not giving anything away.
She sighs. It’d be a sob if she had any tears left. As it is, she just looks down at the shredded tissue on the grass, and sighs again.
“No one ever tells me anything,” Lizzie complains. “That note was sealed up, so I couldn’t see what it was, and now you won’t tell me how you knew it was me! It’s so unfair.”
“Life sucks, Lizzie,” Taylor says nastily. “Deal with it.”
I expect now I should be good cop to Taylor’s bad, but I haven’t got the energy to pretend to be nice. This last half hour has been really draining. I decide that we’ll go for bad cop/bad cop instead. It’ll be quicker.
I fix Lizzie with a hard stare, and say:
“What’s her name, Lizzie? The girl who paid you to slip me that note?”
Lizzie starts shredding another tissue.
“I promised I wouldn’t tell,” she whines. “And she was going to let me go clubbing with them on Saturday and not make me pay for everything, like they usually do . . .”
Taylor walks over to the bench, kneels down in front of Lizzie, and grabs her shoulders. Blimey. Taylor must look enormous from that angle, her jaw jutting forward, her arms swelling under her T-shirt. Her hands are really strong, too, and calloused from all the rope climbing. Lizzie visibly wilts in her grasp.
“You’re out of time,” Taylor says. “Give us the name. Now.”
Double-blimey. Taylor is fantastic at being bad cop. I just hope she never turns on me.
Lizzie droops as if she has no backbone at all, as if she’s just made of jelly. Her head hanging, she stares down at the grass, and whispers a name, so softly that I don’t catch it.
“What did she say?” I demand.
My heart’s pounding. We’re getting closer to finding out at least part of this mystery, the real truth of what happened that night, the answer to why Dan died.
Taylor lets go of Lizzie, who flops onto the bench.
“Nadia,” Taylor tells me. “She said Nadia.”
twenty-two
OPERATION OBNOXIOUS AMERICAN
It was really hard to wait till the weekend to stake out Nadia’s block of flats. But there was no way we could get into town long enough to do anything during the week. What with the Wakefield Hall seven p.m. dinner curfew, we’d barely get to Knightsbridge before we’d have to turn around and come home again. On the weekends, we’re free from noon on Saturday onward, as long as we’re home by seven for dinner, of course. That’s like an alternative religion for my grandmother—dinner at seven. And Sundays we can get away all day till dinner, as long as we present a plausible schedule of what we’re doing to our housemistress, and have at least one other girl to go out with.
(Bad luck on loners, that rule, I always think. I mean, what a way to make you feel even worse if you don’t have a friend or two to go out with on the weekends.)
We told our housemistresses (or, in my case, Aunt Gwen) that we wanted to go and explore London parks. Not a complete lie. Aunt Gwen, honestly, wouldn’t have cared less if I’d said I wanted to go and explore London crack dens; but Taylor’s housemistress, Mademoiselle Fournier, apparently clapped her hands and said what a charming idea that was. Bless Mademoiselle Fournier. I’ve had an incredibly soft spot for her ever since the whole incident in the corridor with the disembodied head and her persuading Miss Newman that she might be insane.
So here we are, sitting with our backs against trees, curled up in the roots, looking for all the world like two teenagers hanging out in Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do with our lives.
“He’ll never talk to me again,” I say, picking a blade of grass and twisting it between my fingers, tighter and tighter, till it darkens and gets soggy with moisture. I drop it to the ground, where it joins a pile of other blades of grass, equally tortured and discarded.
“Come on, Scarlett. It’s only been a few days,” Taylor says.
“But he thinks I’m a bully now. I’m sure he’s avoiding me.”
“Hey, you can’t know that!”
“I just think I’d have seen him around before now.”
“He might have had a couple of days off!”
I sigh. “No, he’s avoiding me, I’m sure of it. I really think he liked me a bit.”
“Sure he did. You could tell he liked you when he came into the maze.”
“Oh yeah?” I perk up despite my gloom. “How?”
“The way he looked at you,” Taylor says. “It was totally obvious.”
“But now he thinks I’m a mean girl—”
“When this is all over, you can go and tell him everything,” Taylor says firmly. “It’ll make an amazing story. And then he’ll, like, cover your face with burning kisses.”
“He’ll what?”
She grins.
“It’s in this P. G. Wodehouse book I’m reading to learn how to be more English. The hero just covered his girlfriend’s face with burning kisses.” She points to the book lying on the grass beside her. “Hey, nothing’s happened with the stakeout while you’ve been boring me to death going on about that Jase guy, has it?”
I shake my head, my gaze fixed on Nadia’s building, across the wide road that’s Knightsbridge.
“No one in or out. I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”
“Maybe Nadia’s away for the weekend,” Taylor comments.
It’s the first time either of us have mentioned that possibility, though it’s been on our minds ever since we got here. It’s so frustrating. I scraped up from the depths of my memory the information that Nadia’s parents were art dealers, and finding their gallery’s phone number was easy enough. A call to the super-posh receptionist ascertained the information that they were “away on an acquisitions trip” till the end of next week. And the magic of the Internet also informed us that Nadia’s brother, Olivier, is at Durham University, which is far enough away from London that we could cross our fi
ngers and assume he wouldn’t be back for weekends much.
Which leaves Nadia. And the thought that she might have left for the weekend before we got here yesterday afternoon, and that we’ll be sitting here all day Sunday, with the flat empty, just to watch her roll home sometime this evening, is so annoying that we’ve been deliberately avoiding expressing it to each other.
Taylor takes out her mobile and dials a number.
“I’m calling the flat again,” she says, “just in case.” She pauses, listening to the rings. “Ugh,” she says crossly. “Answerphone again.”
The trouble is, the fact that Nadia isn’t picking up the phone doesn’t mean she isn’t there. All her friends would ring her on her mobile. So she probably wouldn’t bother to get the house phone, assuming it would just be messages for her parents.
A few magazines lie scattered around us, which we’ve been thumbing through, but only with half an eye in my case, as I’m the one who knows what Nadia looks like, and I have to keep staring in the direction of that impressive glass entrance. Knightsbridge is wide enough to have four lanes of traffic, and I know Nadia won’t bother to glance all the way across it over the low wall into the park, let alone have any interest in a pair of averagely dressed girls who can’t remotely compete with her in any glamour or fashion stakes.
A black cab pulls up outside the building. There’s someone in it, but they don’t get out. It just sits there, idling its engine. After a minute or so, the doorman comes out and walks over to the big glass sliding entrance doors to see if the person in the cab needs anything, but the driver waves him away and he goes back inside. And then, a minute or so later—
“Oh my God!” I squeal.
“Keep it down,” Taylor hisses. “Is it her?”
I’ve grabbed a magazine and am holding it up to obscure most of my face. It’s Nadia, dressed in jeans and a tight sweater with a slit neck that shows her thin tanned shoulders. Her wrists are heavy with gold bangles. She exits the building and walks slowly toward the cab, waving at its occupant, throwing her head back to show off how shiny her hair is, extracting the maximum theatricality from this simple crossing of the pavement.
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