She jumped up from the step. 'You're not still thinking of going to see Jayden? Yeah, you are. Don't deny it, you totally are!'

'I can't sit and do nothing.'

'At least wait until Jack has finished his coaching session,' she pleaded. 'I'd come myself and back you up but I just saw Georgie pull into the car park.'

It was good advice, which I chose to ignore. 'Go do your dressage. If you see Jack, mention that I'm heading for Chartsey,' I told Paige, pushing past her. 'Tell him not to worry I'll be OK.'

chapter seven.

I took another school bike and cycled into the Bottoms, quickly calling in at JD's for a progress report on repairs to the first one.

Alex was there with Micky Cooke, whose dad works in the morgue. The two of them saw me talking to Alex's dad and straight away decided to give me a hard time for the hell of it. I was surprised because to look at Micky you would have thought butter wouldn't melt open face, big smile, loose-jointed and laid back.

Alex started it with, 'Look who it isn't the numero uno super-sleuth.'

'Miss Marple on a bike,' Micky laughed. They cut me off on the pavement outside the workshop and stupidly I rose to the bait.

'What did I do?' I asked Alex.

'You don't have to do anything, you just are.'

I made another wrong choice and went proper Miss Marple on them. 'Get out of my way, please.'

'"Get out of my way, please"!' Micky mimicked in a prim voice.

'OK, Colonel Mustard, where did the murder take place and which weapon was used?' Alex acted like the Cluedo analogy was hilarious.

'Why are you being like this?' I asked as I tried to wheel my bike past them and Alex grabbed the handlebars with both hands. 'Alex, let go!'

'"Alex, let go!"'

I pushed harder.

Alex braced himself and pushed back. 'What are you doing here, Alyssa?'

'What's it to you?'

'"What's it to-"'

Wrenching the bike from Alex's grasp, I swung the front wheel towards Micky and ran it over his toes.

'Wow!' Alex's hilarity knew no bounds. He was cawing like a crow and flapping his arms, hopping from one foot to the other. 'Didn't you know Micky's feet are his fortune? Southampton signed him up for their junior squad. What are you trying to do wreck his career?'

At this point I threw the bike on to the ground. 'Forget it I'll walk,' I said through gritted teeth.

'Seriously, Alyssa.' Alex and Micky kept pace as I cut up Meredith Lane. 'You've got that famous don't-mess-with-me look.'

'Which we like,' Micky said as he faked a serious limp.

'Which makes us think more Sarah Lund than Miss Marple.'

'Minus the ugly sweater,' Micky added.

God, they were pathetic.

'Sarah Lund sniffing out clues.'

'Tracking down the killer in this case Lily's.'

'If there is a killer . . .'

'Letting nothing stand in her way,' Micky said as he stepped right in front of me. 'She never lets up in her hunt to bring the villain to justice.'

'She doesn't show her feelings.'

'Which we also like,' Micky said, this time with a definite leer.

'So?' I yelled angrily (proving them wrong on the last point at least). 'What are you two going to do about Lily? What's the rest of the world doing?'

'See!' Alex crowed. 'We knew it.'

'She's a girl on a mission,' Micky agreed. 'Who's the killer, Alyssa? Really we want to know.'

'Does he live in the Bottoms?'

'Or Uppers? Is he at Ainslee Comp?'

'Is it Jayden?' Alex dropped the raucous laugh. He stared me in the eye. 'Come on, Alyssa is it?'

I stared right back.

Eventually I lost the two idiots and went on foot along Meredith Lane out of the village and up the hill to Upper Chartsey. A light snow had started to fall so it was good that I'd left the bike behind. As I entered the village, the street lights came on and the whole scene started to look sparkly and white, beautiful as a Christmas card but freezing cold. A car crawled up the hill behind me, its tyres skidding and sliding into the kerb, then a four-wheel drive, stopping to unload two passengers outside the Smith's Arms. A guy on a motorbike rode slowly down the hill and turned into the pub car park.

I stopped outside the pub. What did I do now? I thought of walking in out of the cold and asking the bar staff where Jayden lived then decided against it. Snobby girl from St Jude's goes into pub desperate to find boy from Ainslee Comp it didn't give a good impression, and even at a time like this I cared about my reputation. So did I find his number in a directory instead? Not unless I knew his surname, which I realized I didn't. Did I knock on doors? There weren't that many houses to choose from maybe twenty or thirty in the whole village.

I walked on past ex-workmen's cottages, prettified with names like Swallow's Nest and The Old Granary, tarted up with rustic porches and double glazing made to look like leaded windows that didn't fool anybody. I began to lose heart and wonder how I would get home if it kept on snowing.

Then a kid shot out of a door and slammed it behind him. He skidded down the path and on to the snowy pavement. If I hadn't got out of his way, he would have mowed me down.

'Brad!' I spoke one word before he saw me, scooped a handful of snow off the top of the garden wall, compacted it into an icy ball and launched it right in my face. I ducked it missed. He ran, slid and vanished round a corner.

Which left me with the obvious choice of knocking on the door Brad had just slammed.

I rehearsed it a few times before I plucked up the courage to walk up the path.

Knock knock.

'Hi, Jayden, I've come to talk about Lily again.'

Door slams in my face.

Knock knock.

'I just want to ask you one question.'

Door slams again.

Knock knock.

'Were you the baby's father?'

I knocked and a girl came to the door. This wasn't scripted.

'Yes?' Not a friendly 'yes' either more a suspicious one and delivered out of the side of the mouth by a blonde-with-dark-roots girl about my age wearing heavy black mascara, half a dozen studs in each ear and a nose ring.

'Erm, does Jayden live here?' I asked. I was hatless, shivering and caked in snow.

'No.'

'Are you sure? Only, I saw Brad . . .'

'Still no.'

'So do you know where I can find him?'

'If I did, would I tell you?'

And she wouldn't not to save her life. This, by the way, was a girl you wouldn't argue with in case she had a knife slipped inside her boot, or she wore a hat with a razor-edge rim like Oddjob in the old Bond movie. I'm exaggerating again, but you get the idea.

'Thanks anyway.' I turned and walked down the path, right into stick dog Bolt.

Whoa!

Bolt growled at me as I came out of the gate. He barrelled past and scratched and whined at the front door.

Scary girl opened the door and let him in.

Snowflakes landed on my eyelashes. This was turning into a blizzard.

'Jeez,' Jayden said when he saw me shivering outside his house.

He took me to a back room at the Smith's Arms and got his barman mate to make me a hot chocolate.

'Why are we here?' I wanted to know. 'Wouldn't it have been easier just to invite me into the house?'

He ignored the questions, hunching forward with both elbows on the table. 'What are you doing here?'

'Looking for you, obviously.'

'Why? And don't say to talk about Lily.'

'Yes, actually.'

'OK, so I'm out of here,' he said, but didn't move.

'Here' was a tiny, unheated room with four round tables, a dozen heavy wooden stools and a few tacky hunting pictures on the walls. I think it was where they served pub food to ramblers and furtive couples from Ainslee engaged in extra-marital affairs.

'Of course it's about Lily,' I told him. 'Who else? And listen, Jayden, you don't scare me.'

'Yes, I do.'

'OK, you do. And who was scary girl?'

'At the house?' he laughed. 'That was Ursula.'

'Ursula?'

'Her dad was Austrian. He's dead, the same as yours, but not in a plane crash.'

'How did you know that? Did Lily tell you?'

'Back to the same old topic,' he sighed, nibbling his thumbnail and spitting out the paring.

'She couldn't have. You'd dumped her before she knew me.'

Jayden's mouth twitched, but he let it pass. 'So what did you think of Ursula?'

'We didn't have much in common.' Besides dead parents.

'She's cool. She'll do anything I tell her.'

Wow, on my great-great-grandmother the suffragette's grave, I wasn't going to let that one go by. 'You like girls who do everything you tell them? Funny I wouldn't have put Lily in that category. Is that why you dumped her? Or was it because she was pregnant?'

The who-dumped-who issue was what got to him, not the pregnancy. After I'd used the word 'dumped' twice in quick succession, he stood up and lurched across the room to wipe condensation from the window and stare out at the snow. Things were quickly coming to a head.

'You knew she was pregnant right?'

'Sure I knew.'

I decided to push even harder. 'But you didn't want to keep the baby?'

Suddenly short of breath, Jayden slumped down on the bench beneath the window. He looked terrible and it took me by surprise.