After She Fell: A haunting psychological thriller with a shocking twist

Silence. Sasha kept staring through the window, her shoulders tense. Alex knew there would be nothing more from her today. She bent down and kissed her sister’s cold cheek. ‘Bye, Sash. I’ll come again as soon as I can.’

Nothing.

Alex shut the door quietly and leaned against it. Was this a better visit than last time? At least, Sasha had spoken to her. Most of the time when she came to see her, Sasha didn’t say anything, so she supposed even a few bitter words were progress of a sort. But she could hardly bear the pain that was almost tattooed on Sasha’s eyes. Alex couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live inside her sister’s head, to know that you had killed your own children. She thought of her own boy – eighteen years old but still her boy – and how he had coped with the last few years. She was proud of him. She couldn’t even contemplate life without him.

‘Ah, Alex, I wanted to catch you before you left.’ Heather McNulty, the matron of the unit, bustled along the corridor towards her. A well-groomed woman a little older than Alex, Heather always had a cheerful expression on her face even though she was surrounded by unresponsive or troublesome patients. She didn’t wear a uniform, and today had a long skirt made of some sort of floaty material festooned with printed roses, teamed with a crisp white shirt. Alex liked the fact the staff wore their own clothes; it made it less of an institution, and made her feel better about Sasha being incarcerated there on the orders of the judge. Two years before, the judge, old and wrinkled but with a kind-looking face, had decreed that Sasha had suffered enough: for more than fifteen years she had lived with the knowledge that she had been responsible for drowning her own 4-year-old twins. But she would have to have treatment in a secure unit. Jez, Sasha’s police officer husband, hadn’t been so lucky to escape the wrath of the judge. He was jailed for weaving a tissue of lies and misinformation about what had happened on the fateful night, and for being responsible for the imprisonment of two people who had been wrongly convicted of murder. So, yes, Alex was grateful for Leacher’s House. A secure unit it might be, but it could have been such a lot worse.

Alex frowned and rubbed her forehead. ‘Is everything all right with Sasha? She hasn’t started to self-harm again has she?’

‘Not exactly. I only need to have a chat. Come with me to the office.’

Alex followed Heather down the corridor, transported back more than a quarter of a century to when she was a schoolgirl following the straight back and sharp shoulders of her head teacher to the office for a telling-off. She felt that same degree of apprehension now: stomach knotted, wanting to drag her feet, wanting to get it over with.

‘So, sit down, Alex.’

Alex sat.

Heather went round to the other side of her desk and neatly lowered herself into the chair, folding her hands in front of her. She took a deep breath. Fear rose in Alex’s throat.

‘Is Sasha ill?’ She laughed nervously. Shut up Alex. ‘I mean, more ill than normal?’

Heather clasped her hands together. ‘Sasha has not been responding to treatment as well as we would like.’

‘What do you mean?’

A small frown crossed Heather’s face before the sympathetic smile was in place once more. ‘Sasha has been suffering from, um, delusions, lately.’

Alex blinked. ‘Delusions?’

‘Sasha believes she murdered Jackie Wood.’ Heather’s voice was kind.

Alex caught her breath. Jackie Wood was the woman who had been imprisoned for fifteen years for what was then thought to have been her involvement in the murder of Sasha’s children. It was only after she was let out on a technicality that the truth about the children’s deaths began to unfold, and Sasha finally confessed. But before Jackie Wood could be exonerated she was murdered, and the murderer had never been found. There had been a time when Alex had wondered whether her sister had killed Jackie Wood, but now she refused to entertain that thought.

Heather was still talking. ‘And obviously, we don’t want her to regress further, so we feel – that is, her team feel – she needs a different regime.’

‘Regime? What does that mean? And what sort of treatment? She can stay here in Leacher’s House, can’t she?’ Alex heard her voice rise. Oh God, oh God. She had visions of her sister being force-fed drugs by a Nurse Ratched figure or being forced to undergo ECT and Sasha becoming a shell, losing her personality, any sense of identity and—

‘Alex.’ Heather’s voice was firm. ‘I can see the panic in your face. Sasha is in good hands.’

‘But she will get better, won’t she?’

‘As I say, she is in good hands. The best possible. Please don’t worry; this sort of review is part of an ongoing process, and this is the twenty-first century, you know.’ Her face was kind. ‘Things are very different now.’ Heather stood. The meeting was clearly over. ‘You will be kept informed every step of the way.’

Alex stood. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Though for what, she wasn’t quite sure.

Review. Ongoing process. Regime. Jackie Wood. The words went round and round in Alex’s head as she pushed open the door and went out into the fresh, warm air, trying to shake off the chemical floral smell of Leacher’s House. She took a few deep breaths to steady herself. The sun was bright and the sky was blue, like a children’s painting. A perfect day. It was at times like these Alex found herself thinking of Harry: drowned by Sasha, brought to the shore by Jez. She thought of Millie who’d been taken away by the North Sea, and wondered if her body would ever be found. She still looked for Millie in crowds of young people, just in case.

Walking to the car park, she glanced back to see Sasha still sitting, still in the same position, still looking. She had always known her sister was not right and had needed proper help, but over the years she had been so blinded by her grief over the twins and the guilt she carried around at having an affair with the man who was imprisoned for killing Harry and Millie that she hadn’t been able to see beyond her own feelings. She had let Sasha down. Now she was trying to make up for it.

Alex raised her hand and waved, and was rewarded by the tiniest of finger movements. The nearest she had come to a wave for a very long time. Love for her poor broken sister swelled in her chest. She couldn’t let Sasha down again.

CHAPTER 2 (#u6c244bc9-dad8-5eb4-a1f8-e99bcb74d694)

The small mews house was a stone’s throw away from Harrods and the moneyed part of Knightsbridge. Alex could smell the cash as she found the right address. Blood-red door flanked by two rose trees in square pots. The petals were a blush pink and when Alex bent to smell them they gave off a cloying scent. The woodwork of the windows was in the same blood-red, as were the garage doors. The other houses in the row had either the red or dark green wood. Three storeys of perfection. Not bad for a set of buildings that was once a line of stables.

She knocked on the door.

The woman who answered looked as though she hadn’t slept for days. Heavy make-up couldn’t disguise her grey skin and sunken eyes, the black shadows underneath. She was dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, diamond studs in her ears. Her perfume was expensive though overlaid with the smell of cigarette smoke.

‘Alex. Thank you for coming.’ The woman held onto the door as if by letting go she would fall down.

‘Cat,’ Alex said, reaching out to hug the woman who had once been her closest friend. ‘Of course I came.’

There had been no question about her going to Grosvenor Place Mews, even though she should have been hunting for stories, chasing commissions, chasing the cash.

She’d been in her news editor’s office pitching an idea for looking into a story about people being trafficked for illegal organ removal when he’d leaned back in his chair and looked at her from under unruly eyebrows. ‘I had a call this morning.’

‘Right,’ said Alex, not sure what that had to do with her.

‘Someone looking for you.’

‘Right.’ Typical Bud, he liked to think he was being mysterious, building up the tension – all it succeeded in doing was to make her impatient. Even so, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of winning the game. ‘Anyway, Bud, about the organ removal story. It’s early days, but I heard from a reasonably reliable source—’

‘Don’t you want to know who it was?’

She looked at him: sitting in his cubbyhole in a dark corner of the office ‘so the bean counters can’t find me’; overweight, paunch almost resting on the desk. Computer pushed right to the back; the front of the desk piled high with editions of The Post going back years. And a higgledy-piggledy heap of press releases, cuttings, jottings, and God knows what. Coffee mugs littered the desk too, dark slime at the bottom of some. All Bud Evans needed to complete the ‘I’m an old-fashioned editor and I don’t take any nonsense’ look was a green eyeshade. Bloody rogue. But he’d been good to her: employing her when nobody else would after it had all come out about Sasha and she felt she needed to leave Sole Bay and lose herself in the anonymity of London. Having taken her under his wing once in her life – when she was a raw recruit – Bud had come to her rescue again. She owed him.

She grinned. ‘What if I said no?’

He made a gruff noise, somewhere between a snort and a cough. ‘You want to know. Of course you do.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Go on then.’

‘A Member of the European Parliament,’ he said with a flourish. ‘Asking for you personally. Said she was an old friend of yours. Didn’t know you moved in such illustrious circles. Or have you gone native on me? Hobnobbing with the enemy?’

‘An MEP?’ Her heart began to beat faster. There was only one such person who could be asking for her personally: Catriona Devonshire.

She and Cat Devonshire had been inseparable through primary school and on into high school. Cat had been the sister to her that Sasha hadn’t been. They had shared secrets, problems, worries. They swore to look out for each other forever. They went their separate ways to uni, but they still kept in touch. When Gus came along, Cat made no judgements, but left her new husband, Patrick, at home, put her fledgling political career on hold and came to stay. Her presence had been a soothing balm on Alex’s soul.

And then the twins had been murdered and Alex’s life had been consumed by guilt and the need to look after Sasha. Her world began to narrow; she had no time, no room in her head for anyone but Sasha, so she excluded everything and everyone else from her life, including Cat. And when Cat’s daughter, Elena, had been born, a few short weeks later, Alex had broken off all contact.

‘But I want you here,’ Cat had pleaded. ‘I want you to be Elena’s godmother.’

‘Cat,’ Alex kept her tone deliberately without emotion, ‘you have your family. Your career. Any association with me would spoil both those things. We need to put distance between us.’

‘But Al—’

‘No, Cat. I have to be with my family.’ And then the sentence that had sounded the death knell on their friendship: ‘I don’t need you any more, Cat. I’ve got Sasha to look after. Gus. They are my family. They are the ones I need to look after now.’ It had almost killed her to say the words, to know that she was losing Cat’s friendship, but she didn’t want the events of her life to taint Cat’s. It had to be done.