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

Alex bridled.

‘Mark, stop it. Please, Alex, say you’ll do it?’

‘I’ll have to think about it, Cat.’ Did she, though? Here was a chance to help her friend – her oldest friend – find out the truth about her daughter’s death, even if that truth were unpalatable. And if she found out that Elena did throw herself off the cliff then at least Cat would know for sure. She wouldn’t live a half-life like she, Alex, had done. And she hated seeing the pain Cat was in. Perhaps she could do something to make that a little better. Then there was Elena. A beautiful girl who’d had a bright future in front of her. A girl similar in age to Gus. A girl who had grit and determination and who’d coped with the death of her father and a debilitating eating disorder. Elena deserved her help too. And she knew if it had been the other way round, if she was asking Cat for help with Gus, Cat wouldn’t hesitate.

And what about the mysterious message? The reclusive Kiki Godwin? Alex’s fingers started tingling, a surge of adrenaline in her gut: sure signs she was getting excited about a story. What if Cat was right? What if Elena’s death wasn’t suicide and this Kiki Godwin had some information?

‘It could be a good story, Alex. And I know you’ll be truthful, not sensationalist. It’ll be an exclusive. And you can have an interview with me and Mark, whatever you find out.’

‘Oh, count me out, Cat,’ said Mark, anger evident in his voice. ‘I can go so far but not that far, thank you. I’m not subscribing to this charade any longer.’ He took a few breaths, which seemed to calm him. ‘Please, Cat, let it go. You’ll make yourself ill.’

Cat stood and walked purposefully across to her husband. She took his hands in hers. ‘I have to do this, please Mark, please. I need your support.’ She leaned into his body.

Alex watched as Mark’s anger subsided. Tenderly he tucked a lock of Cat’s hair behind her ear and planted a kiss on her forehead. ‘For you, Cat. For you.’

Cat turned to Alex. ‘One other thing that makes me think – no, know – that Elena didn’t throw herself off that cliff. She was scared of heights. Terrified. She wouldn’t even go to the top of the slide on Brighton beach last year, that’s how terrified she was. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere near that edge.’

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_ee56cc97-7041-5a2b-9c22-a21df0d28ceb)

It was no wonder Cat Devonshire was described by the broadsheets as an ‘up and coming’ Member of the European Parliament with a sharp brain and incisive mind, thought Alex, as she drove along the M11 towards East Anglia. Once Alex had agreed she would go and look into Elena’s death, Cat had gone into overdrive: organizing the house in Hallow’s Edge for her, making sure she had enough cash, promising to email over any documents that could be useful. And the last few days had been a whirlwind, what with preparing to leave her tiny ground floor flat (with garden) in West Dulwich (Tulse Hill, if she were honest), making sure the cat would be fed for however long she was to be away, telling Bud she was going up to North Norfolk and, yes, there could be a story in it, and managing to get custody of a company credit card. Bud had been rather begrudging about that, it had to be said. She did have to come back with a story of some sort now.

The only downside was that it had been difficult to explain to Sasha that she didn’t know when she was going to be able to visit again. But tell her she had, and she even thought she had seen tears in Sasha’s eyes as she left.

The heat was building, layer upon layer, the sky a pale blue as if the sun had bleached the colour out of it. The air vents were blowing warm air around the car and for the umpteenth time she wished she’d had the air-conditioning seen to. The motorway was long and boring and she still had a way to go.

She pressed the CD button and David Bowie’s voice filled the car. That was better. Now she wouldn’t think about Sasha, or about her own 18-year-old son who was somewhere in Europe trying to find himself. She hadn’t heard from him since he’d got the ferry to France two weeks earlier.

‘I’ll be fine Mum,’ he’d said as he heaved his rucksack onto his back ready to catch the bus to Dover. ‘I need to get away, you know that. Exams can wait. And I’ll FaceTime you.’ Then he gave her a kiss on her cheek and went out of the house – whistling. Whistling! As if last night’s quarrel had never happened.

It had started after supper when she took his clean washing into his bedroom for him to stuff into his rucksack.

‘Mum,’ he said, ‘I know you don’t like talking about my dad, which is why I hardly ever ask about him, but—’ He stopped and began to chew his lip.

‘It’s okay,’ Alex said, unnecessarily refolding a tee-shirt and admiring the way she spoke so calmly. ‘I understand. I just thought we had each other all these years and we were a unit. A family.’ And she had never wanted to go into details about how Gus had been conceived during a drunken, drug-fuelled one-night stand in Ibiza.

‘We are. A unit, I mean. You are my family, Mum, and you’ve been bloody brilliant. It’s just that I want to know where I come from. Who I am.’ He didn’t look at her as he carried on packing.

Alex tried to smile. ‘Darling, you are a wonderful person and—’

‘Mum. Who is he?’

‘Gus.’ How she so didn’t want to do this. ‘What’s brought this on?’

‘Tell me. You see, when I was younger I figured he was probably a Premiership footballer, or an actor, or a rock star.’ He laughed. ‘But then as I got older I thought maybe he was a murderer or a kiddie fiddler.’

‘His name was Steve,’ she said, smoothing the tee-shirt flat.

‘Steve who?’

‘I don’t know.’

He turned to look at her. ‘You must.’

She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. I was in Ibiza on a newspaper jolly. We went to a club. He was the DJ there. I was young; it was my first taste of freedom; I didn’t know what I was doing – there was free alcohol, some drugs – and I ended up going back to Steve’s place.’ Every word made her feel ashamed.

‘And you never wanted to find him?’

‘No.’

‘Not even for my sake?’

‘No.’

‘That’s so selfish, Mum, so bloody selfish.’ She could see tears in his eyes.

‘I’m sorry Gus; I never wanted to hurt you. I thought it was best left alone.’ She wanted to cry too.

‘And you wouldn’t have said anything, even now, would you? Even now that I’m eighteen and about to go off travelling. Unless I’d asked.’

‘Gus—’

‘Well, I’ve got news for you. I’m going to find him.’

‘How?’

‘With the help of a friend,’ he said coldly, before turning away from her.

She left his room.

Now she turned up the volume on the CD player, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel in time to Bowie, singing along with him, loudly and tunelessly: determined not to worry about Gus. He was a grown-up now.

Merging onto the A11 she began to feel she was in East Anglia proper, for the first time in two years. She thought about Cat, about Mark, and about Elena. At first sight, Elena’s death seemed such an open-and-shut case. The coroner had thought so, too. A teenager for whom everything had got too much. A teenager with problems. Was that what had made her take her own life? But why so close to Christmas? And what about the text that had been found on her phone?

Mum, I don’t think I can do this any more.

On her phone but not sent. Why?

She’d been depressed in the past. Had suffered from anorexia. Alex drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Christmas – the lead up, the day itself – was always stressful, always the time when domestic violence increased, marriages broke up, people killed themselves; why shouldn’t it be the season when Elena felt she couldn’t go on? She’d crept out of school in the middle of the night (how easy was that these days? In all honesty, Alex’s experience of boarding schools was Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books with their jolly midnight feasts and Harry Potter and magic goings-on – not exactly an in-depth knowledge), found her way to the end of the road that ended abruptly, falling away to the beach. Then she’d apparently thrown herself off the cliff road and down onto the rocks below before the tide had come in and dragged her poor broken body out, then in again; leaving it on the shoreline waiting to be found. What a waste.

According to the newspaper article about the inquest, it was an open-and-shut case. And, of course, her mother couldn’t believe her beloved daughter would do such a thing, would reach such a deep and dark place that she could see no other way out.

Yet Cat’s absolute conviction that it wasn’t so open-and-shut had begun to chip away at Alex. Who had Elena spoken to in those last days, hours? Had the school noticed anything amiss? Had she become depressed and anorexic again, or was that just a convenient excuse trotted out by the school, the police, the authorities? The inquest seemed to exonerate the school of all blame. But still. Wouldn’t they have noticed something about her behaviour in the days leading up to her death? Shouldn’t they have noticed? Would you pay the thirty-odd thousand pounds to the school if you didn’t expect some modicum of pastoral care? And she knew how much Cat regretted sending Elena to the boarding school. ‘It was because I was away so much,’ she’d told Alex, as if wanting Alex to absolve her from some mortal sin. ‘I – we – thought it was best. And I had just got married.’ She’d looked shamefaced. ‘So selfish. Now I wish I could have all that time back with her, all the growing up I missed. All the worries she must have had going to a new school. And what did I do? Texted her. Some mother I am.’

Through Thetford and after – the tall conifers at either side of the road reaching up to the sky, and David Bowie changed for Lou Reed. She ought to try and get into some of the new music, but she liked the old rockers. Always had since hearing them on her father’s old record player as a child.

The road stretched on as the sun became even higher in the sky. Skirting round Norwich – a city she loved and had missed – then up to the flat of The Broads, passing farm shops, bed and breakfast places, garden centres, a huge solar farm that went on for miles, and churches, always churches, some with the unusual round tower. Then on to the busy town of Wroxham, teeming with early summer visitors who spilled from the paths onto the narrow roads. As she went over the little bridge she glanced at where the boats were moored and thought about how she had never taken a boat out on The Broads. Maybe, she mused, she would rectify that this summer. Perhaps take … who? With a lurch she realized there was no one she could take. Gus would be away for the whole summer, and Sasha? Well, Sasha wasn’t likely to be out on day release or whatever they called it anytime soon.

Her mind drifted back to her friend.