'You know Lily was bipolar,' big bro Adam saw fit to tell us now. 'That's the reason her behaviour was sometimes a little . . . bizarre.'

Oh well that's OK, then. Stick a label on her, give it a medical framework. I shook my head and bit my lip. So, Adam, don't whatever you do let the grief get to you. Don't break down and say that she was your kid sister and you miss her like hell.

'Her illness could be a problem sometimes,' he acknowledged. 'Especially if she didn't take her medication.'

So here's the solution tuck her away out of sight in an obscenely expensive Cotswolds sixth-form college where she could be bipolar and exceptional in private. A sore thumb among other sore thumbs, just like me. Good thinking. I couldn't help frowning as Adam talked on.

'On the day she left did she seem . . . preoccupied?' he asked.

I hated his habit of mulling over words until he came up with the one that fitted best.

'Not so you'd notice,' Paige said as she backed towards the door. I could see she wanted to be galloping Mistral over cross-country jumps, not dealing with questions she couldn't answer.

'And she didn't say anything? Anything personal?'

'Jesus!' Paige was halfway to the door. 'Why is he asking us all this stuff?' she asked D'Arblay.

Saint Sam stood up and came out from behind his desk. 'Adam thinks you have a right to know this,' he confided gently. 'It seems Lily was pregnant.'

That stopped us dead in our tracks. Paige gasped. I stared while the principal drew a folded piece of paper from his inside jacket pocket.

'She sent this email,' he added. 'Telling us exactly why she killed herself.'

chapter three.

The first question you ask when you get news like this well, me anyway is, 'So who's the father?'

It cut through the stunned silence and thudded into my chest like an arrow. Who got Lily pregnant?

The second thing that occurred to me was, 'Am I the only one who didn't know about this?' But no a quick glance in Paige's direction told me it was as new to her as it was to me.

'This is a printout of an email from Lily the police have another,' Adam said, taking over from where Saint Sam left off. From the way red blotches had formed on his neck I could see he was struggling to stay calm and was actually doing a pretty good job. 'She doesn't give any details about the pregnancy, but the preliminary forensic report confirms her . . . condition.'

'How pregnant was she?' Paige wanted to know. Like me she was obviously working out the paternity issue.

Think about it. As far as we knew, Lily hadn't had a boyfriend since Jayden did the dirty and dumped her in the first week of term. Sure she'd been seriously slutty at Tom's party, but she'd gone home alone (or at least with Harry as her bodyguard-cum-chaperone and that definitely didn't count). We were now early December.

'They think about thirteen weeks,' Adam told us.

It had to be Jayden, then.

Unless Lily had been with someone else during the summer break. I imagined a different scenario a holiday fling in Greece, Italy, the Bahamas wherever the Earles hung out en famille. A sexy local guy with a tanned and ripped torso, too much wine, a starlit sky, a walk along the beach with Lily in one of her manic, daredevil phases . . .

I was still working it out when Paige had her meltdown. She was halfway out of the room, remember, when Saint Sam dropped his pregnancy bombshell, and she stayed fixed to the spot. She kept shaking her head then she let out a small, soft groan. More head shaking until finally she hugged herself and bent double then started to sob.

'Don't!' I begged. Meltdowns are infectious. I couldn't bear the sound of Paige crying and I was scared I was about to go the same way. Anyway, there were hot tears in my eyes and I was shaking like a leaf, thinking of Lily almost halfway through a pregnancy and locked in a lonely, dark night of the soul.

'Why didn't she tell us?' Paige said over and over as the bursar tried to help her.

'She didn't tell anybody at St Jude's,' Adam explained. 'We don't think she even saw a doctor.'

'So that wasn't the reason you came to visit four weeks after term started?' I had to keep on asking questions, otherwise I'd have been with Paige in total collapse, and D'Arblay only had one pair of hands.

Adam shook his head, obviously ill at ease, possibly lying.

'She was upset,' I told him. 'She came back to the room and wrecked one of her paintings.'

My razor-sharp memory replayed the scene and I give it to you again, with added details, in case the extra info turns out to be crucial: Lily took a knife and slashed through the reds and oranges. Stab, stab, stab, then slashed right across the diagonal, like she was killing a part of herself.

'I hate all this,' she'd cried.

'What do you mean?' I'd asked. 'What do you hate?'

'Everything.'

(The trouble is when someone is as OTT as Lily was you tend not to take them seriously.) 'What do you mean, everything?' I'd moved in to stop her cutting the canvas, though it was too late the painting was already ruined.

She raised the knife and turned on me with a wild look. 'What do you know, Alyssa?' she yelled. 'You've only just got here. What could you possibly know?'

'Lily, cut it out,' Paige said, sensible and determined. She came and grabbed Lily's wrist. The knife dropped to the floor, the crazy look faded from Lily's eyes and suddenly it was over. We never mentioned the slashing incident again.

'Lily may not have told anyone at St Jude's that she was pregnant, but she actually did discuss it with our mother,' Adam went on. 'We know that she used an over-the-counter pregnancy test.'

And the family did nothing? I shook my head over and over. What's with that?

Adam cleared his throat. 'Anyway, Lily's email is a form of suicide note. It makes it clear that she was well aware how far on she was and how upset she was about it.'

If you close your eyes to steady yourself, it sometimes makes you even more dizzy. I found this out during the conversation I was having with Adam Earle. When I opened my eyes again, the room swam. The lions and unicorns in the coats of arms in the leaded windows danced. It turned out my brain had gone to mush and I'd run out of questions too.

'Worse than upset, actually.' Adam obviously wanted to be more precise. 'The pregnancy must have plunged Lily into unrelieved depression.'

'No.' Paige was back on her feet, breaking away from D'Arblay's ministrations. She shoved the bursar aside and advanced towards Adam. 'Alyssa and I were with Lily all this term and I personally didn't see any massive difference. Up and down just the same old, same old.'

'Believe me.' There was steel in Adam's voice now. 'I knew my sister better than you did. The mood swings, the silences, the deliberate staying away from family.'

'No.' Faintly I backed up Paige's refusal to agree with the official version. Remember Lily's contribution to the King Lear debate about ungrateful daughters? Spend a moment: Lily's voice rang clear in my head. Her eyes flashed with rage; she was totally intense: 'I have no idea why Cordelia would even want to stay loyal to that nasty old perv.'

Our group of English literature baccalaureate students sat in a sunny classroom overlooking the lake, amazed that she felt so strongly. Jack Hooper, who is a sensitive soul, actually edged his chair away from where she sat.

'I would have got the hell out,' Lily insisted. 'The old man's a fool for trusting the other two daughters. He gets what he deserves.'

'But that's the point,' Bryony explained. 'The king is a fool and he has to literally go mad and get through to the other side before he sees the truth.'

'I still say she should have ditched the tyrant straight off,' Lily muttered.

'Tyrant' that's the way she talked about her own father, as you know. 'The tyrant has bought another TV network, yawn, yawn', 'The tyrant is flying out to Chicago in his private jet. How green is that?' 'Jesus Christ, not again the tyrant wants to see me!'

Yeah these were her last words as she hurtled out of our room with her hastily packed bag; 'The tyrant wants to see me. I'm out of here!'

'It was definitely Jayden's baby.' Afterwards Paige and I both fixated on this one point.

We were back in our room, beds unmade. Paige's horse tack hung from the back of her chair ready for cleaning. Adam's car was still in the visitors' car park under the glare of bright security lights.

'Adam focused on the fact that Lily didn't mention a name,' I reminded her. 'Why couldn't it have been somebody she met on holiday?'

Paige shook her head. 'Lily wasn't like that. She didn't do one-night stands.'

'No? Didn't you see her coming on to Tom at his party?'

'Only because she knew Jayden was watching her. She wanted to make him jealous.'

'OK.' It only took me a few seconds to realize that Paige was probably right.

'Anyway, Lily didn't go on holiday this year.'

'She didn't?' No luxury yacht in Monaco, no penthouse suite in Nassau. Bang went one of my theories.

'No. She was in the UK, drifting, doing her own thing, staying away from her dad.'

'The tyrant.'

'Yeah. She came to see me ride in the Burghley Horse Trials. That was late August. Harry Embsay and Guy Simons were there too.'

'Guy?' I echoed.

'Yeah. He's mad about three-day eventing didn't you know?'

Funny I hadn't pictured Guy Simons in dressage gear. Like Harry, he was more the rugby type, with muscles but without the flattened nose.

'Anyway, Lily, Harry and Guy they all stayed with us for a few days.'

'And then?'

Paige shrugged. 'Lily went into one of her moods over something Harry said. She told me she was heading off to her mother's cousin's estate in the Highlands for the last week of the holidays. I didn't believe her, though.'

'Didn't her mother check up on her? How come she just let her sixteen-year-old daughter float around the country?'

'You haven't met her mother,' Paige pointed out, which struck me as vague though I didn't follow it up. 'Anyway, I reckon she never made it to Scotland.'

'Which would give her free time to hook up with Jayden.'

Paige nodded. We thought for a while.

So here it is my new theory.

Lily finishes her GCSEs. She has a whole summer ahead and she's in a state of rebellion. No one's going to tell her what to do or where to be. She lies to her parents, says she's fixing to visit friends and distant family then deliberately strays from her plans in order to spend time with lean and hungry Jayden. She probably has him marked out as some kind of Heathcliff figure wild and dangerous, origins unknown.

Guess the rest.

She loves Jayden, is totally into him mind, body and soul, but he just uses her. When term is about to begin and she tells him she's pregnant, he acts like a total shit.

Goodbye, he tells her. Be seeing you. Adios.

Doesn't it make you sick to your stomach? Wouldn't you just like to kneecap him or strike him dead the next chance you get?

'Who did she send the suicide note to?'

Word of Lily's suicide message had spread beyond the honeyed walls and arches of St Jude's, across the rolling hills to Chartsey Bottom.

It was two days later and Paige, Jack Hooper, Harry Embsay and I had met up in the Squinting Cat cafe with Tom from the Old Vicarage and his Ainslee Comp mate, Alex Driffield. Alex was the one who asked the question.

'Email actually,' Paige told him.

'So who did she send it to?' Tom added.

Paige and I shook our heads. The silence was thick with emotion mainly shock/horror, even forty-eight hours after Adam's visit.

'Lucky for the family that there was an email,' Alex said, knocking back the remains of his Coke as the waitress scooped up our empties. 'Otherwise the filth would've been all over this.'

'Filth,' Paige mocked. 'Did I hear you say that, or did I imagine it?' That's what she does she shows contempt every chance she gets. But it's a cover and we all tolerate it.

'He's right,' Jack Hooper pointed out.

The other Jack my Jack is nowhere on the scene, notice. Where is he? Where the hell's he been since the suicide news broke?

In fact, where's he been all term? You're bound to be asking this. After our romantic first date, you might think we'd have been joined at the hip. I wish.

He'd called me the most beautiful girl at the party and we'd kissed in the stable yard. My heart was singing: 'Love is a window that opens up your heart.'

The Sunday after the party it was strange I thought about Jack all day but didn't run into him. I quickly got to thinking . . . Was he deliberately avoiding me, and, if so, why?

'Stop pissing about, Alyssa. Go find him.' Lily broke through her own misery long enough to offer me advice.

Paige backed her up. 'Yeah, you go, girl.'

But I didn't want to risk coming out into the open, showing Jack how smitten I was and making a fool of myself. That's pride, you see a kind of Achilles' heel of mine. I dress it up as shyness but it's definitely part pride too.

Anyway, on Monday morning I was summoned to the bursar's office before lessons.

'You're new here, Alyssa,' were Terence D'Arblay's ominous opening words. 'And that's the only excuse I can think of for Saturday night.'

I swallowed hard.