How to Fall (22 page)

‘How do you know?’

‘Because Freya was a silly little girl with a head full of romantic notions, and she didn’t have the sense to stay away from high places.’

I leaned back against the seat, wishing I could move further away. ‘You sound like you knew her well.’

‘Well enough.’

It was a mad idea – completely insane – but I looked at Dan Henderson and found myself wondering if Freya’s substitute for Will had been someone who looked a lot like him. Someone well respected, who was confident and controlling and in love with his power. In love with himself enough to encourage a teenage girl’s crush? To take advantage? What if something had happened between them? The idea was enough to make me gag, but he wasn’t actually that old. Mum was thirty-six. He’d be about the same.

I very much wanted to shower for about fifteen years just for having the thought, but I couldn’t ignore it. Dan was watching me. I hoped he couldn’t read my mind. Considering what he said next, I was glad I couldn’t read his.

‘You know, I’m not surprised Ryan was all over you. He’s got good taste.’

Oh. My. God
. I stared at Dan wordlessly. He grinned. ‘You remind me of her.’

‘Freya?’ I managed.

‘I was thinking of Molly.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Well. Not surprising really. Genes will do that.’

His grip on my arm loosened, but he didn’t let go. Slowly, deliberately, he stroked my wrist with his thumb, trailing it across the veins where the blood ran close to the surface. ‘Stop talking about Freya. Stop asking questions. You’re getting mixed up in things you don’t understand.’

I pulled my arm away from him and scrabbled for the door handle, completely freaked out. He reached round and took hold of my chin, turning my face towards him with too much force for me to be able to resist.

‘Wait.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Your lipstick is smeared.’ Before I could stop him he drew his thumb along my lower lip, staring into my eyes the whole time. ‘There. That’s better.’

I’m not sure how I got out of the car, but I know I did it quickly, before anything else could happen. I know I didn’t say thank you, or goodbye. I know I ran to the front door on wobbly legs, and that Darcy’s face was all startled speculation.

And I know Dan watched as I fumbled for my keys, unlocked the front door and let Darcy in.

Somehow I gathered myself together before Darcy could ask what we’d been talking about – she would be the world’s worst person to confide in, anyway.

I turned round. ‘Well? What did you want to talk about?’

Her face was grave; there was no hint of the airhead who had sat behind me in Dan Henderson’s car and talked-talked-talked all the way home. She looked different somehow – older and more serious. She had opted for elaborate eyeliner and a fifties-with-a-twist pompadour hairdo that night, and her general look seemed more like a costume than ever.

‘I wanted to apologize.’

‘What do you have to apologize for?’

‘I didn’t tell you the truth about me and Freya. I
want
to tell you what happened. And I wanted to give you this.’

She reached into her bag and pulled out a sketchbook, and I couldn’t quite believe it until I was actually holding it in my hand – a hardback book only a little bigger than a notebook, with an elaborate hand-drawn monogram on the cover, an F and an L intertwined.

‘Is this—?’

‘Freya’s.’ Darcy couldn’t look me in the eye, I realized. ‘Her last one.’

‘You had it all along.’

‘I hid it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t want anyone to know what was in it.’

‘So why are you giving it to me now?’

She looked straight at me and her eyes were swimming in unshed tears. ‘Because I don’t want to lie any more.’

13

BEFORE I HEARD
any more from Darcy I made us both some really strong tea. I had my priorities in order. Freya was dead, I was in shock and Darcy was cold. Our need was greater than my poor cousin’s. So, tea first. Then talk.

‘Sorry, no biscuits.’ I handed Darcy her mug and curled up at the other end of the sofa. She was sitting on the very edge, shredding a tissue all over the floor and sniffing every ten seconds or so, but she had pretty much stopped crying.

‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ she asked.

‘Because you obviously feel terrible about whatever happened last year and I want to know why. If you don’t calm down I won’t be able to understand what you’re telling me. It’s self-interest, really.’

‘That’s not true. You’re just a good person.’

‘It’s at least half true.’ I extended one leg and poked
her
in the thigh with my toe. ‘Come on. Drink up, sit back and tell me all about it. But not too loudly. I don’t want to wake Mum.’

Mum who was upstairs, safely tucked up in bed, and fast asleep when I’d checked on her. There was no way to tell when she’d got back or what she’d been doing, but I would find out. I would tell her, I thought, that Dan had given me a lift home, but I wouldn’t say what had happened afterwards. It was the sort of thing he could laugh off, if I made a fuss. I wasn’t even sure what had happened myself, and I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on it when Darcy was sitting in front of me, ready to tell all.

‘Where do you want me to start?’

‘The beginning, obviously.’ I laughed at the look on Darcy’s face: pure disgust. ‘Right. You and Freya were really close until something happened, a few weeks before she died. Petra said you had a row. Was it about Ryan?’

‘It was about Freya wanting him to leave her alone. She wasn’t interested and I couldn’t persuade her to fake it.’ Darcy peeked at me through the wreckage of her eye make-up – falsies were not made for crying fits and hers were peeling off. ‘I tried to explain to her that it was a golden opportunity. I’ve spent years watching Ryan and his friends have fun.
It
was our turn to join in and she just couldn’t see it.’

‘You blamed Will for that the last time we spoke.’

‘Well, it was his fault really. Freya was obsessed with him. She wouldn’t even consider seeing Ryan because he didn’t measure up to Will.’ Darcy snorted. ‘I don’t know what planet she was on. Will is so boring compared to Ryan. He doesn’t go out. He barely talks. He works obsessively – even in the holidays he’s always busy doing jobs. He’s like a machine or something.’

‘He’s not your type. We know that.’

‘We sure do. But he was Freya’s type even if he wasn’t interested in her.’ Darcy cupped her mug in both hands, shivering. ‘That was a help – knowing what she liked. I’d heard about him often enough.’

‘A help with what? What did you do?’

Darcy stared into her tea as if she were trying to read fortunes, mainly so she didn’t have to look at me.

‘It wasn’t my idea in the first place. It was Natasha who came up with the plan.’ She swirled the mug so the liquid in it spun around, threatening to slop over the side. ‘You know she thinks Ryan is irresistible. She was panicking in case Freya suddenly realized she’d been wrong about him, because obviously Freya had to be crazy if she was turning him down. Natasha wanted to distract Freya – find someone else for her to
fall
in love with. There just wasn’t anyone obvious around.’

‘So?’

‘So she invented someone.’

‘The mystery boyfriend? The one no one knew about?’

‘He never existed. Except in Freya’s head.’ Darcy blew her nose again. ‘She was completely taken in.’

‘Because you were helping to make him into her perfect man,’ I said, suddenly getting why Darcy was finding it hard to confess. ‘They couldn’t have done it without you, could they? They didn’t know Freya well enough to create someone she would find appealing. But you did. And that was how you got into the gang.’

‘I betrayed her trust. You didn’t put it like that, but it’s true.’ Darcy’s voice was hollow, a world away from the high-velocity chatter that was her usual way of talking. I was starting to realize that it was all an act. She was fake to the ends of her fingernails and I wasn’t even sure the woebegone figure on the end of the sofa was the real her.

‘How did you do it? Invent him, I mean?’

‘It was easy. It was just an email at first. He told her she was looking beautiful and sent her a picture that reminded him of her –
The Lady of Shalott
by John William Waterhouse.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘You’d recognize it,’ Darcy said. ‘It’s a Pre-Raphaelite painting of the Lady of Shalott floating down the river to Camelot – very atmospheric, very beautiful and a little bit fey, so it was perfect for Freya. There’s a print of it in the art room at school so it wasn’t a massive stretch to think that one of the boys might have seen it and thought of her. They call it “the bird in the boat”.’

‘That was clever,’ I commented. ‘To choose an image anyone might have known, I mean.’

‘Don’t. I feel terrible about it.’ Darcy
did
look uncomfortable. ‘Anyway, she wrote back and asked who he was.’

‘And you said?’

‘That he just wanted to be known as “Pale Knight”.’

I snorted. ‘That sounds like a kind of beer.’

‘It’s a reference to a Keats poem, actually. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”. He said that Freya was the Belle Dame and he was enchanted by her.’ Darcy sounded defensive and I guessed that had been her idea too.

‘I know the poem and it’s not very nice about the Belle Dame, if I remember it correctly. She turns out to be a vicious life-sucking hag.’

‘At the end. Before that she’s a beautiful girl with
wild
, wild eyes,’ Darcy said dreamily, back to her old self for a second. Then she snapped out of it. ‘We wanted Freya to think that he was too shy to tell her how he felt, to explain why he was hiding behind his secret identity. Otherwise there was nothing to stop him from telling her who he was. Port Sentinel’s a small place. There weren’t too many guys who the mystery man could be, so we needed to keep her guessing.’

‘I see. So the boy was supposed to be interested in Romantic poetry and Pre-Raphaelite art.’ It sounded like the kind of thing that would make me roll my eyes until I fell over from chronic dizziness, but it had been said before and would probably be said again: I looked like Freya but I wasn’t anything like her really. ‘Presumably this was exactly what Freya liked.’

‘Exactly. And the messages we wrote were the same – very romantic, very poetic. They had a lot in common.’

‘Is Will interested in that kind of thing?’

‘No, but he would have known that Freya was. And we put in some references to things that he
does
like.’

‘As in?’

‘Fixing up old cars. Photography . . .’ Darcy hesitated. ‘Did you know he took pictures of her for a series of nudes she did?’

‘I saw the paintings in the studio at Sandhayes.’ Though Will hadn’t mentioned that he’d taken the photographs, I was pretty sure. Just imagining it made me feel as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I hoped my face didn’t show it.

‘He took them with her camera,’ Darcy continued. ‘In one of the emails I asked her to send me those pictures. That really convinced her that it was Will who was writing the messages because hardly anyone knew about the paintings or that there were photographs to go with them.’

‘Please tell me Freya wasn’t stupid enough to send the pictures.’ Darcy’s expression told me the answer. ‘Oh my God. That’s basic. It’s rule one. Never send nude pictures to anyone, ever, no matter who they are. Even if you trust them completely. And Freya didn’t even know who she was emailing.’

‘She believed in him. She
wanted
to believe in him.’

‘You knew that and you totally took advantage of her. There were only a few people who knew about the photographs, so it was your idea to get her to send them. You must have thought it would really impress Natasha.’

Darcy reddened. ‘I know you think this is awful. It
is
awful. But I didn’t think it would do any harm. It was cute, you know – we thought of little presents
he
could send her. Gifts that showed he’d been thinking of her. They were small things, mostly. Jewellery, flowers – that sort of thing. I thought it would make Freya happy for a bit to have someone in love with her, and then, when he disappeared, she’d find someone in real life who would do the same. You have to believe me, I didn’t know what Natasha was going to do.’

Uh-oh
. ‘What was that, exactly?’

‘She let it go too far,’ Darcy said softly. ‘She couldn’t believe how easy it was to convince Freya that this boy existed and was in love with her. She wanted to find out more about Freya – “know your enemy” was what she said – so she started sending messages asking Freya personal questions.’

‘How personal?’

‘Very. Like who she fancied – Natasha wanted to get her to admit she was mad about Ryan. Like her fantasies. Like whether she was a virgin or not.’

And poor innocent Freya, who seemed completely deficient in common sense, had answered them all in detail.

‘What a bitch,’ I said softly. ‘And you helped her?’

‘I told you – I didn’t know what was going to happen.’

‘You mean it got worse?’

Darcy stood up and started to pace back and forth, but since the sitting room was tiny and full of furniture she only managed a couple of steps in each direction. ‘She started telling people about what Freya had written – gossiping about her. She sent the pictures around to everyone she knew. She made it seem like Freya was being a huge slut by emailing the pictures in the first place. Everyone was talking about her.’

‘Did Freya know that?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think she knew the extent of it but she knew people were talking behind her back and she knew Natasha hated her.’

‘She probably got a clue that might be the case when Natasha cut her hair.’

Darcy looked sick. ‘That was horrible. It was in the locker room after school one day. A whole group of girls cornered Freya and held her down so Natasha could cut off her ponytail. Up here.’ She indicated the nape of her neck. ‘I didn’t know about it beforehand and I didn’t join in – I mean, I wouldn’t have. I couldn’t do something like that.’