'I hear you. If it had been one of you in the lake. But it wasn't. So where does that leave us with all this? Are the police anywhere near to finding an answer?'

'Not really.' This was me being realistic, watching the dreary, rhythmic to and fro of the wipers.

'So you're absolutely sure it has nothing to do with errors in the autopsy procedure?'

'How could it?'

Adam stared ahead along the straight, narrow road. 'You're saying it was murder, even though there were no other signs of violence?'

I seemed to be waiting forever for a non-automaton, behind-the-suit reaction. We were discussing the death of his sister, remember.

In the end it was like buses you wait all day for one and two come along together.

'For Christ's sake!' Without warning Adam raised his fist and slammed it against the steering wheel. The car veered violently on to the wrong side of the road then swerved back again. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white.

Where did that come from? And, by the way, thank God for seat belts.

He slammed on the brakes and punched on his hazard lights the beginning of reaction number two. 'How long is it going to take to clear this mess up? How many more people have to suffer? First Lily, then you, Alyssa, now Paige.'

'And your mother,' I reminded him, which really broke down his robot defences.

Pulling up on the frozen verge of the Roman road, Adam slumped forward over the steering wheel. 'My family is falling apart. I don't think we can get through this!'

'I'm sorry,' I began.

But he shook his head and pulled himself upright. 'Anna is in hospital,' he told me more calmly.

'I know.' Even then I noticed all the small things the fact that he called his mother by her first name and that he wore a ring on his wedding finger even though Lily had never mentioned a wife.

'She's convinced they'll never let her out, that she's in there for the rest of her life. She says she wants to die.'

'But it won't always be like this. They can treat her depression like they did before.'

This seemed to pull him back from the emotional brink. 'You knew about that too? Did Lily tell you?'

I shook my head. 'Lily didn't talk about Anna. It was in the press at the time it happened.'

'Yeah, that was ironic. The Earles own half the world's media, yet even pre Twitter we couldn't keep Anna's breakdown off the front pages.'

'I guess there are things that even you can't control.' I didn't plan to be mean and after I'd said this I regretted it. After all, the guy was suffering enough.

Adam gave a hollow laugh. 'You know what Anna's done? She's only turned her back on the psychiatrists and gone religious on us. Yeah, right! She asked for them to let a rabbi visit the clinic and they said yes. Apparently she opened up and relived the events of the last few weeks with him poor guy, it must have felt like being hit by an express train.'

'Your mother's Jewish?'

'Non-practising until this latest meltdown. I guess it's like a drowning man crying out for help . . .' When Adam realized what he'd just said, the simile proved too much and he broke down a second time. 'I'm sorry, but this latest thing with Anna I wasn't expecting it. Honestly not after how well she coped with the news of Lily being pregnant. Back in September she had the strength to stand up to my father. She said Lily should be allowed to keep the baby if that was what she wanted. All that mattered was that Lily should be happy.'

I remembered what Anna had told me that Robert Earle was in favour of ending the pregnancy. 'He didn't agree?'

'You're kidding. He was still in Chicago but he went right ahead and fixed up for her to have an abortion. He wouldn't listen to Anna or Lily, just went ahead and made the arrangements.'

'And that's why he ordered Lily to come home to have an abortion?'

'Yeah, and she obviously suspected what he'd planned.'

'That makes sense,' I agreed. 'But we think that she never really meant to get on the train. She just packed her bag and planned to disappear for good. That's what Paige and I worked out from the email she sent Jack.'

'So what happened? We know that she never even left the school grounds.'

'Sorry, I can't answer that.'

'Do you think she'd arranged one last meeting with the baby's father the boy from the village? Is that what you're saying?'

Which is where I had to go over more of the ground I'd covered with Anna and explain to Adam that Jayden wasn't the daddy after all, that he'd really loved Lily and had wanted to be there for her regardless. Stick man wasn't the villain it was someone else.

'And if it wasn't Jayden, who was it?' Adam asked with a touch of the familiar robotic detachment.

I didn't know this either, I confessed. Not yet. Not for sure.

'Give me a name.'

'I can't.'

You're reading this and thinking that the first name that comes to mind is 'Harry Embsay' and I admit I was tempted to share this theory with Adam, but Harry was still no more than guesswork and gut feeling so I had to keep him to myself for now.

'But we're supposing it was someone she knew?'

'I'm not even sure about that sorry.' If only Lily's diary had given me more to work on, instead of two blank pages. 'I was wondering, though can they still do a DNA test?'

'To establish paternity? I guess so.'

'Well, I think they should if they haven't already so they can make a match when we find the right person.'

Adam agreed that he would contact the coroner as soon as he got back to his office. He turned off his hazard lights then signalled and eased back on to the road before he had one more little, human blip.

'Poor Lily,' he murmured, short and sweet.

'Poor Lily,' I sighed, short and angry.

She was bipolar and sixteen, for God's sake, pregnant either by a guy she didn't love or by a total stranger, hurtling towards an abortion she didn't want. Things couldn't have got any worse.

Then they did. She came face to face with psycho killer. The end.

chapter thirteen.

Christmas was looming. So was the end of term.

'I swear I'm going to miss you every day, every hour, every minute of the holiday,' Jack told me in the stable yard where we'd shared our first kiss all those weeks a lifetime ago. 'I don't want to go home.'

'Not even if your dad lets you drive the Maserati around your country estate?' This was me, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Boys' toys vroom-vroom.

'No, Alyssa you're supposed to say, "I'll miss you too, Jack." We're meant to kiss and swear eternal love.'

That's one in the cornucopia of good things about Jack (maths genius who knows everything there is to know about conic sections, he of the amazing quads, hottest boy on earth) he can do lightness yet still come through with the genuine emotion. I kissed him in between the bits and bridles of the spotless tack room where the kid in the hoodie had hidden. For a few precious moments I lost myself in that embrace.

'A kiss but no promises,' I warned.

'No eternal love?' He pouted then said, 'You're right nothing is forever.'

After that he grinned, went into the tack room and got on with tipping feed into a bucket and adding water, giving it a stir. He and I had agreed to help Guy Simons look after Mistral while Paige was in hospital the very least we could do.

Outside in the floodlit yard, cold rain came down. There were puddles everywhere and the sky was leaden. Bored horses stared out over their stable doors, knowing that no rider would show up until the weather brightened. I smiled back at Jack then carried the bucket across the yard into Mistral's stable.

Smiled then sighed. It was hard and perhaps not even right for me and Jack to stay cheerful and in love after what had happened to Paige. You realize how much my world view has shifted since the heady few days leading up to Tom's party? Look back and you can see how that was paradise and this is pure and simple hell.

'I wonder how Paige is,' he murmured, reminding me that we hadn't had an update recently. 'What do you say we go and visit once we're done here?'

'Yeah, good if they'll let us in.' I opened Mistral's door and put his feed down in his usual corner, stepping back quickly before he shoved me to one side in his eagerness. When I came out and re-bolted the door, I looked up at the security camera that had failed to capture the evidence of the attack on Mistral one glance was enough to throw me back in time and trigger total recall.

'Where is he?' I asked Paige, rushing into the stable yard as soon as I'd recovered from almost being knocked down by Harry and Franklin.

'Where's who?' She carried Mistral's saddle into the tack room, leaving him tethered to the wall. She went in and didn't spot the kid in the hoodie hiding in there. She came out again as if everything was normal.

'Harry Embsay. He almost ran me down, for Christ's sake!'

Pause and think further back. Out on the edge of the woods Harry had laughed at me and galloped on. This meant he should've arrived back at the stables before me. So where was he?

'Not back yet,' Paige had replied.

Why not? Had he deliberately stayed away because he'd known what was about to happen?

I remembered Paige brushing Mistral and speaking sweetly to him, telling me that Harry was an idiot, but that he hadn't tried to mow me down on purpose.

'Yeah, but it wasn't deliberate.'

'I don't know maybe it was.'

Yes, definitely it was on purpose now that I reran it. If at first you don't succeed in scaring Alyssa off the scent of Lily's killer by employing a hit man to stage a motorbike accident, then try, try, try again with a thousand pounds of horseflesh to turn Paige into a quivering wreck, to get us both hauled out of school early.

But Paige had stopped brushing and sighed.

'Just a teeny bit par-a-noid?' she suggested, and she winked to ease the tension. 'Chill, my friend.'

Then hoodie boy burst out, carrying the knife in his left hand. He looked at me then at the angle of the security camera fixed high on the wall. He detoured to stay out of shot, meaning he at least thought it was working and he already knew enough about the security of the place to avoid being caught on camera. Then he grabbed the wheelie bin and shoved it straight at Paige's horse, raised the knife to slash at his neck.

Up went Mistral, hoofs flailing. Hoodie boy backed off. He moved fast, yelled at me to stay out of his way as he panicked and fled directly under the lens, creating the perfect photo op.

Come on, come on! I told myself. Recall every last detail.

As Mistral squealed and came crashing down to the ground, the kid scaled the wall. He sat astride it and leaned out to sever the cable with his knife. He slashed it clean through. Then he swung both legs over the wall and jumped down. Gone.

'Harry Embsay was definitely in on it,' I told Jack as the rain spilt over the gutters on to the cobbles below. 'He stayed away to give the kid with the hoodie time to do what he had to do. And, cross my heart, I swear I'm not paranoid.'

There was nowhere at St Jude's more out of Hooper's comfort zone than the stable yard on a cold and rainy winter's day, not even the sports centre. Yet here he was, splashing through puddles without a jacket and looking like a drowned rat, as Jack and I got ready to leave.

'What are you doing here?' I asked, in a hurry to get to the hospital to see Paige.

'Wait it's important,' he insisted.

'What?' I asked, feeling the hairs at the back of my neck rise. How important did it have to be for Hooper to drag himself out here?

'Before I start, I'm not making any of this up OK?'

'OK, we believe you,' Jack said quickly. 'Just tell us.'

'I went back and did some more research on Eleanor Bond.'

'Not this again, please!' I was already shaking my head before he reached the end of his sentence.

'Yes, this again.' Hooper dug in his heels.

'What about Eleanor Bond?' asked Jack.

'I started with the whole Bond family. The mother, Simone she got caught up in the Nazi takeover of Vienna remember I told you, Alyssa? That was for obvious reasons, because she was Jewish. So I started looking at Edward Bond, who, it turns out, wasn't Jewish, but he had pro-Jewish business interests in Birmingham and all through Europe.'

Jack realized there was a lot of history to get through and like me he was eager to get out to see Paige. 'Where are we going with this?'

'Somewhere you're not going to like,' Hooper warned. 'Listen. All through the 1930s there were marches in the streets of the main British cities London, Manchester, Birmingham it's well documented. You've heard of Mosley's Blackshirts and those extreme fascist groups? Yeah, right. They organized the marches, targeting communists and Jewish groups and it turns out they included Edward Bond in this target group because of his wife and his businesses, and because he was known to be offering a place of safety to Jewish refugees. He went public about the evils of Nazism even wrote articles about it for some national newspapers. That caused an argument about him setting up St Jude's in 1938 nimby residents in Ainslee viewed Edward Bond as a troublemaker. They didn't want the school anywhere near. They were right, in a way, because the Nazis tried to bomb St Jude's during the war.'

I was tuning in now, listening more carefully, paying attention to those tiny hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

'That was the atmosphere back then people over here mostly didn't see fascism for what it was until after Hitler went into Austria then Czechoslovakia then finally Poland. They didn't diss his haircut or laugh at his moustache. He was building the VW Beetle the people's car and they thought he might actually be a good guy.'

Jack's attention was also fixed on the emerging story. 'Come on, Hooper what are you saying?'

'OK, as we know Edward Bond was an idealist. He went ahead and set up St Jude's Academy anyway. He ignored all the political stuff and founded it on the principle of nihil sed optimus, focusing on the talents of the individual student, fostering brilliance. Then his wife was swallowed up in a Nazi pogrom in Vienna, which happened without warning, and in the same year his daughter a pupil at this school was found drowned.'

'We already know this!' I exclaimed. 'So what's new?'

'OK, I moved on from Edward and Simone Bond to the daughter, but you have to take into account the political stuff I've just mentioned. Now, Eleanor the first verdict was misadventure, but it turns out that wasn't accurate. I shouldn't have stopped investigating at the point where she died; I should have moved on into 1939 when someone presumably Edward Bond asked for Eleanor's body to be exhumed for a second autopsy and the coroner agreed.'

'Oh my God!' I sighed. Of all the shit life throws at you, exhuming your daughter's body is about as bad as it gets.