How to Fall (23 page)

‘Didn’t Freya tell anyone? A teacher? Didn’t anyone notice that she’d lost about a metre of hair?’

‘She decided not to complain. She thought it would make them worse.’ Darcy managed a lukewarm smile.
‘She told me it was a relief not to have so much hair to wash and she was glad they’d done it because she wouldn’t have had the nerve.’

‘What was she, Pollyanna? There’s looking for the silver lining and then there’s being completely out of touch with reality.’ I was almost getting angry with Freya for not helping herself. ‘Freya had a chance to get rid of Natasha and she didn’t take it. No school would have kept a student who did something like that.’

‘She would have been expelled,’ Darcy agreed. ‘But she would still have been around. As I said, this is a small place. You can’t get away from people easily. Even in the holidays, Freya kept bumping into Natasha and her friends. Nothing stopped, just because they weren’t in school, and it would have been the same if Natasha had been permanently excluded.’

‘So what was Freya thinking? If she waited long enough Natasha would get tired of tormenting her and move on to someone else?’

‘Basically.’

‘But that was never going to happen. Natasha’s like one of those yappy miniature dogs. She’s got a gift for bearing grudges.’

‘I know.’ Darcy hugged herself. ‘She took it too far
and
she wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell her to stop.’

‘Did you?’

She looked exceedingly uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know her well enough for that.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Nothing, and I know that makes me a failure as a human being.’ She brightened. ‘Except that I stopped helping her with the emails. I told her I wasn’t going to do it any more and she’d have to come up with her own ideas. I backed out of it completely. I don’t know what she was planning and I don’t know what she did. I don’t even know if she was there the night Freya died. I wasn’t. I’d walked away.’

‘At a pretty late stage. And even then you didn’t do anything useful, like telling Freya what had been going on.’

‘No. I didn’t.’ Darcy sighed. ‘I don’t expect you to understand, but I hope you can forgive me.’

‘It’s not really about whether I forgive you, though, is it? I didn’t even know Freya. You should be apologizing to her family and her friends. You should be apologizing to her.’

‘She shouldn’t be dead,’ Darcy said with a sob that seemed to take her by surprise.
Genuine emotion at last
, I thought. ‘She should have realized what was
happening
. She shouldn’t have fallen for Natasha’s schemes.’

‘That’s right. Blame her. It’s all Freya’s fault.’ I was rubbing my eyes. I wanted to go to bed. I wanted to stop thinking about this horrible situation, and stop talking to Darcy, who was spending way too much time blaming other people instead of owning up to what she’d done. I wanted to stop imagining how Freya must have felt, but I couldn’t. It was taking me to a very dark and scary place. ‘You know, this whole thing makes me wonder if she did kill herself after all. That kind of bullying can make you insane. There’s something so sick about it. Natasha set Freya up, and the more she did to her, the more Freya depended on this person who didn’t even exist. Once she found out the truth, don’t you think Freya would have fallen apart on the spot?’

‘I suppose.’

‘And she might have found out the truth the night she died.’

‘I’m fairly sure she did.’

‘What do you mean?’

Darcy picked up the sketchbook from the coffee table. ‘You know Freya used these books as her diary . . .’ She was flicking through it, looking for something. I leaned over, seeing page after page of
doodles
, lists, reminders and heavily shaded drawings flash by. A wide border of birds, lilies, hearts and briars surrounded one page, very stylized and effective, and I put my hand out to stop Darcy from skipping past it.

‘What’s that?’

‘A bit from “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”.’ She turned it round so I could read the elaborate calligraphy that Freya had used for the central panel.

‘
And there I shut her wild wild eyes with kisses four
. How long do you think it took her to do that?’

‘Ages. Days.’ Darcy took it back to look at it. ‘That was how she was. Obsessive about things. The Pale Knight took over her mind, basically. She was preoccupied with him, with finding out about him and imagining what he might be like in real life. This whole book is all about him.’

‘She was happy, wasn’t she, in spite of the bullying. That’s why you couldn’t let anyone see the sketchbook. She wasn’t suicidal. Then they might have started looking for the Pale Knight and found you.’

‘I said I’m not proud of what I did,’ Darcy snapped. ‘At least I’m telling you now.’

‘Yeah, it’s a real help a year later.’

She slammed the book down on the table and pointed. ‘There. That date is the day she died.
PK,
ten
p.m., Angel Bridge
. She was going to meet him.’ Freya had drawn clouds of hearts on the page, and little cherubs holding up a banner with the words written in the centre. They had round cheeks and mischievous expressions; she had managed to give them personality with a couple of pencil strokes.

‘Where’s Angel Bridge?’

‘In the woods. It’s just a small wooden bridge over a stream that comes down off the headland, but it’s very pretty there. People call it Angel Bridge because there’s a hollow tree trunk near it that looks like a woman with soaring wings, if you stand in the right place.’

‘And if you don’t stand in the right place it’s just a rotting tree.’

‘Freya loved it there,’ Darcy said and there was a hint of a reproof in her tone.

‘I’m sure she did. So how did she end up falling off the cliff if she was supposed to be on the bridge?’

‘I don’t know.’

I leafed through the sketchbook, recognizing bits and pieces I’d seen on the wall of her room, like the bushes from the Dartmoor painting crammed in at the bottom of a page, under a shopping list. The next page was a bit of verse that I recognized – the lyrics to
a
song that had been everywhere the previous year. The band had sunk without trace since then and I struggled to remember their name. The lead singer had sky-high cheekbones and a tortured expression. Through excessive cynicism I had not been able to take them seriously. Conrad – and I’m not joking – had a T-shirt with their logo on it that he’d barely taken off. It was a shame he’d never met Freya. He’d have loved a chance to be her Pale Knight.

Love you for ever

For ever’s too long

Too long to be lonely

Lonely for you
 . . .

The tune kept playing in my head as I went through the rest of the pages.
Lonely for you
. Freya had been lonely. She had wanted to be loved. She would have done a lot for someone who understood her and wanted her because she was a genius artist who wasn’t bothered about conforming. She hadn’t worried about being different, until being different made her a threat to someone who was far below her on the evolutionary ladder.

‘One step above a slug,’ I said out loud without meaning to. I snapped out of my reverie and looked
up
to see Darcy putting on her coat, poised for flight. ‘Where are you going?’

‘It’s late. I should go.’

‘It
is
late.’ I yawned. ‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t stay up too long looking at that.’

‘It’s fascinating. It’s the contents of Freya’s head.’

‘Which explains why it’s mainly about him.’ Darcy gave me a sad smile. ‘Don’t hate me for what I did. Or what I didn’t do, maybe.’

‘You can’t change the past. You can only do better in the future.’

She buttoned up her jacket. ‘With that in mind, can I give you some advice? Don’t get involved with Ryan. He’s not worth it.’

‘What makes you think I might get involved with him?’

‘The fact that you were snogging him on the beach?’

‘Oh. Technically,
he
was snogging
me
.’

‘Well, technically, Natasha is going to go completely mental when she finds out about it. And I like you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.’

‘I can take care of myself.’

‘Maybe. And maybe she’ll leave you alone.’ Darcy didn’t look convinced. ‘If it was me, I wouldn’t take the risk.’

‘You’ve done your bit. Whatever happens this time, you needn’t feel guilty about it.’

‘I will anyway.’

With that doleful remark she left, and I closed the door after her as softly as I could. I couldn’t help shivering as I turned off the lights and started up the stairs, even though I wasn’t cold any more.
It was someone walking over my grave
, I thought, and really wished I hadn’t.

I got into bed and found myself replaying the evening in my head, over and over.

I don’t want anything bad to happen to you . . . For ever’s too long . . . I wouldn’t take the risk . . . She let it go too far . . . You’re beautiful . . . Stay away from there . . . Whatever happens . . . Whatever happens
 . . .

Not surprisingly, it was a long time before I slept.

14

IT WAS A
quiet morning in Fine Feathers, by which I mean Sylvia and I made it to eleven o’clock without seeing a single customer. The sun was shining and it was actually warm for a change. The people of Port Sentinel and the holidaymakers had better things to do than rummage in a charity shop when there was a beach to sit on and ice cream to eat. I stuck a bucket and spade in Marilyn’s hand and put a floppy straw hat on Brenda, backwards because the front of it was badly frayed, but it was a lost cause. We were never going to pack in the punters on a sunny day.

Sylvia was totally unconcerned. ‘Don’t worry, dear. I like it when it’s not too busy. Gives you time to get things organized.’

Organization didn’t seem to be in Sylvia’s skill set but I wasn’t about to disagree. A job was a job. Now that the place had been sorted out a bit, it was much
easier
to keep it ticking over. Sylvia might decide she didn’t need me after all, but I very definitely needed her – or rather, I needed the money I could earn by working for her. What I also needed was something to do because standing around waiting for customers was incredibly boring. I couldn’t clean the glass of the display cabinet again; it was pristine.

‘What should I do next, Sylvia?’

She looked vague. ‘Aren’t there clothes to sort out?’

‘We unpacked the last bag when I was here on Tuesday. Unless there have been some more donations.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Sylvia started to twist the long necklace she was wearing. ‘Although . . . There’s the back stairs. I don’t think we’ve tackled that.’

I was puzzled. ‘Tackled it? I didn’t know about it. I thought the shop was just on the ground floor and upstairs there’s a flat.’

‘That’s right. But there’s a flight of stairs that goes up from the back room – you might not have noticed the door in the corner. I keep it bolted shut.’

‘I thought it was a cupboard.’

‘It is really. The door at the top is sealed off and plastered over. So I just use the back stairs as extra storage. Or I did. Until it got too full.’

‘That explains how there was so much stuff piled up in the shop on my first morning.’

‘Yes, but there’s an awful lot more on the stairs.’ Sylvia looked worried. ‘I hope you don’t mind going through the bags. They’re quite old, some of them. Just things I didn’t get around to dealing with at the time, when they came in.’

‘And then you forgot about them.’

‘No, I didn’t forget. But there were other bags. Other donations . . .’ She trailed off. The necklace-twisting was reaching the stage where it would break or she’d garrotte herself, so I smiled reassuringly.

‘Don’t worry. I like a challenge. I’ll just take it one bag at a time.’ I headed for the back room.

Sylvia called after me, ‘Be careful when you open the door, won’t you, in case anything falls down on top of you.’

I thought she was being far too cautious, but since my life plans didn’t include being totalled by a rogue platform shoe or a shower of Jeffrey Archer hardbacks, I slid back the bolt and inched the door open with great care.

‘Dear Lord above.’

It was like something from a TV programme about chronic hoarding. The space was rammed with plastic bags of every size and colour, many of them split so that their contents were bulging out, and because they were stacked on the (invisible) stairs, it looked like a
vast
tower of junk, seconds away from cascading down on top of me. I couldn’t tell how long Sylvia had been using this space as a dump but it smelled musty and had to have been the work of many months, if not years. It was no wonder she had been reluctant to mention it.

Opening the door – even by a few centimetres – had made the entire pile unstable, as the bags near the bottom pressed forward and the ones above them began to shift. Containing the potential avalanche was the first order of business. I yanked a few of the nearest bags out through the gap, then forced the door closed again.

‘Are you managing, dear?’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said firmly, shooting the bolt across and hoping it would hold. Something fell against the door with a loud thud and I winced. One to remember the next time I was getting anything out of Sylvia’s secret stash.

I hauled the bags through to the shop, where the light was better, to assess what I’d managed to retrieve. I was dusty and hot and not best pleased to discover that one customer had arrived since I’d left my post, given that the customer in question was Coco Golding. She was wearing cut-off jeans that showed off tanned, lean legs, the muscles super-defined
without
being bulky. She still seemed on the slight side to be a runner but she certainly had an athlete’s body-fat percentage. She was flicking through a rack of dresses, shadowed by Sylvia, who looked distinctly relieved to see me.

‘Here’s Jess now. She knows where everything is.’ To me, she said, ‘I’m making tea.’

‘Not for me, thanks.’ I dragged the bags behind the counter and straightened up. ‘What can I do for you? Were you looking for something in particular?’