'Alyssa,' Adam began. He ignored his mother and Jack. 'I'm glad I caught you. I was just arranging funeral details with the principal which students will represent the school, who will speak the eulogy, which hymns and so on. Dr Webb thinks it will be appropriate for you and Paige to speak during the service.'

I noticed Anna's reaction little shudders on words like 'funeral', 'eulogy' and 'hymns', as if sharp darts were piercing her pale skin. Her face was an open book, emotions all on the surface, just like Lily's. Like mother, like daughter, I realized.

'What would I have to say?' I asked.

'Oh, it needn't be a long speech. Maybe you could focus on what Lily was like as a roommate any good, recent memories you might want to share. I'll get Paige to cover the pre-sixth form stuff.'

I nodded and muttered that I would try to write something down.

'Great, thanks. The police have accepted the coroner's initial report.' Adam went on without missing a beat. 'There's no sign of a struggle or any suggestion at this stage that anyone else was involved. And of course we have Lily's email.'

Was this man a machine? I glanced at Jack, who stood with narrowed eyes and clenched fists.

'Which frees us to go ahead with the funeral next week. We're fending off press interest by insisting that it's a private family occasion, and that's one of the reasons why we're holding it out here in the Cotswolds, away from the full media glare. Although of course there can't be a complete news blackout, given my father's international profile.'

OK, enough! Really I had to put some distance between myself and Adam Automaton Earle. Jack obviously felt the same so we mumbled our goodbyes and got out of there together.

'How are you doing?' he asked.

'Terrible, thanks.'

'Thought so.' We walked together under the archway on to the front drive. That part felt good, at least. 'What do you say we get out of here?'

I nodded and let him steer me towards the sports centre and new library.

'Now we know why Lily hated her family and stayed away as much as she bloody well could,' Jack said as we grabbed a couple of mountain bikes from the bike shed next to the sports centre. St Jude's provides them for the school community to use as and when a bit like Boris Bikes in central London. It makes it easier for students to get into Chartsey.

Jack and I rode there mostly in silence, sharing the misery of Anna Earle's situation.

'What about Lily's mum,' I asked as we hit the top of Main Street. 'She seems different.'

'Like she might even care,' Jack agreed.

'Look what I snuck out of Lily's box of oil paints!' Paige crowed. She'd texted me and found out that Jack and I were at the Squinting Cat, holding hands across the table and busily avoiding Anna Earle and the automaton. She joined us now, slapping a small notebook down on the table. 'Her diary!'

I recognized it straight away the pale blue cover scrawled all over with Lily's intricate designs, dog eared and paint spattered.

'You stole it!' I yelped.

Jack trapped it with his hand, as if it might have legs and walk away unaided.

Paige came over all innocent. 'I wouldn't say "stole". I was just tidying stuff, ready for Adam and Mrs Earle to pack up and take away. The diary kind of fell out of the box into my hand.'

'You stole it,' Jack confirmed.

'Did you get a chance to read it?' I asked.

'Parts of it.'

'Does she come across as you know, depressed?'

'Enough to throw herself in the lake?' Paige shook her head. 'No, like we said she's up and down, the way she always was. And she doesn't mention being pregnant either, unless these little marks above the date mean something.' Sliding the page-a-day diary away from Jack, Paige opened it at random and pointed to small shapes that Lily had drawn. They reminded me of Egyptian hieroglyphs part geometric, part pictorial. One was a square with four legs, one a stick-man, along with other twiddles, triangles and swirls.

'Could they be Lily's version of writing in code?' Jack wondered.

'But why would she?' I wondered. 'I mean, who did she think was going to read her private diary?'

'Paige?' Jack's question in answer to my question came quick as a flash, but Paige didn't even blush.

'I'm not sorry I took it before Adam could get his mitts on it,' she insisted as she turned the page and stabbed at an entry with her finger. 'There's stuff here that Lily would never have wanted her family to read.'

Saturday, April 5th. Big fight with the tyrant.

Followed by a clever Lily-style caricature of Robert Earle, instantly recognizable. Bald head and scrawny neck, deep-set eyes with dark circles like a meerkat.

Will not, repeat WILL NOT play his game.

Paige flicked to a later entry.

Monday, July 4th. Called Mum to ask how she was. Tyrant came in and grabbed phone from her. HATE HIM!!! Met J after school. LOVE HIM!!!

Then a row of tiny hearts in red felt tip, linked by capital letters spelling out Jayden's name.

Am thinking of getting tattoo around ankle, with J's name linking chain of hearts, as above.

'Good job she didn't,' Paige commented. 'You can get chucked out of St Jude's for less than that. They don't regard getting a tattoo as part of expressing your individuality.'

I took the diary and flicked through until the start of September. 'You were right about her not going to stay with her cousin,' I found out. 'It says here she was with Jayden in Upper Chartsey.

September 5th. House was all ours, I read. J's mum and kid bro staying in caravan in N Wales. J and I lived on chips, pizza and LURVE!!!

More hearts followed and a rectangle with legs maybe a bed? And at the top of the entry I noticed new hieroglyphs a circle with a dot followed by a question mark, a smiley face which didn't need a super intellect to interpret and the stick man walking what looked like a stick dog.

'Wasn't your aunt a famous spy or something?' Paige mentioned. 'Come on, Alyssa, didn't you inherit the family code-breaking gene?'

'Great-great-aunt,' I told her. Then, 'Give me chance.'

'So what else do we learn?' Snatching the diary back and knocking it against her cup of coffee ('Oops!'), Paige studied more entries. 'We know she loved Jayden and stayed with him while his mum was away sorry, Jack.'

'No, Lily was doing her own thing. We'd moved on.' He looked steadily at me as he said this, as if saying, Now do you believe me?

I do. I believe you!

'We also know that within a couple of weeks of being loved-up in Upper Chartsey, Jayden had dumped her and Lily's life sucked,' Paige reminded us. 'And listen to this.'

'Wednesday October 3rd,' she read. 'A came here after big fight with the T on the phone. Won't take any more meds, just in case. Didn't explain why. Hate him. Don't want to end up like M. Took it out on work in progress. A and P tried to stop me. Swear I'll never paint again.'

'Remember that?' Paige asked me excitedly. 'Come on, you're Memory Girl. Give us an action replay.'

Wednesday, October 3rd. A date is enough to plunge me once again into total recall: I was sitting on my bed when Lily stormed in and started flinging things around the room. She wasn't crying but she kept on grunting as though someone was using her as a punch bag.

'I'm sixteen. They can't tell me what to do.' Tearing clothes out of her drawer and throwing them on the floor, she seemed to be looking for something she couldn't find. 'Has anyone seen my phone?'

'It's on your bed,' Paige told her.

'Not that phone my secret phone!'

'Sorry, I don't know anything about it, and that's probably because it's a secret.' Paige pointed out the Catch 22. Lily ignored her.

Instead she turned on me. 'Alyssa, have you seen it?'

'Is it the one in the black case?'

'No, that's my normal phone. I mean the red one without a case.' There was a heap of T-shirts and sweaters on the floor, which Lily was burrowing into. 'Jesus, I hate all this!'

'What do you mean?' I asked, getting up to help her look. 'What do you hate?'

By this time Lily was crying and she'd left off looking for her phone and throwing things and picked up the palette knife instead. 'Everything.'

Paige and I tried to stop her from wrecking her canvas. Lily held the knife like a dagger and slashed into the abstract painting. It was very Gerhard Richter controlled chaos, bright red circle and sweep of yellow across the diagonal, with paint laid on in thick layers, which were scraped back in some places to show areas of black underneath.

'What do you mean everything?' I grabbed her wrist, but she broke free and made more slashes with the knife.

'What do you know, Alyssa? You've only just got here. What could you possibly know?'

Paige was stronger than me and she stepped in briskly to take the knife from Lily. 'Breathe,' she told her. 'Calm down and we'll help you find your phone.'

'They won't even let me speak to him and anyway he's not answering my texts,' Lily sobbed. 'I wish I'd never told my mother. Or him, or anybody!'

She collapsed forward and we could hardly tell what she was saying, too focused on stopping her from turning the knife on herself to really listen or to ask who 'he' was.

Only now I got what I hadn't got at the time. When Lily stabbed the canvas and it seemed to me she was trying to kill part of herself that was the baby, the secret that she'd dared to share with her mother.

'You see this circle with the dot?' I said to Jack and Paige as we studied the stolen diary. 'I reckon that's a symbol for the baby. And I think the stick man with the dog is Jayden.'

Jack rocked back on his chair while Paige flicked through the book.

'Yeah,' she said. 'That must be right.'

You're thinking, What if Jayden doesn't have a dog, Alyssa? What if it turns out you're crap at breaking secret codes, despite your great-great-aunt Caroline?

'I'm sorry, I have to go,' Jack decided after two cups of coffee in the Squinting Cat. 'I don't want to. I'd rather stay and help you two work this out, but I have study group in fifteen.'

We do this on Saturdays at St Jude's it's a non-uniform day, but not a non-work day. We still get together for informal study groups that are meant to help with a big project in say science or French. Yeah, I agree it sucks not to have the whole weekend free.

'See you later, Alyssa.' Jack stood up then leaned over and kissed me on the lips. Our first PDA nothing major, but still a big step forward for both of us. And the brush of his lips against mine was a totally pleasurable sensation that I longed to repeat.

'Me too I have to go.' Paige pretended not to notice, but she gave me a secret wink as she stood up. 'Are you coming, Alyssa?'

'No, I'll stay. Leave the diary with me.'

'You're sure?'

I nodded and told them I wanted to be certain that the automaton was clear of the school premises before I ventured back. 'I'll see you both later.'

This left me alone with my third caffeine kick and time on my hands to study Lily's entries. I reread all the way through September and into late October, where the circle with the dot appeared every day, sometimes with a smiley face but more often with a sad one. By this time there was no stick man and dog. On October 20th she'd devoted the whole page to headlines from the business sections of national newspapers, which she'd first photocopied, reduced in size then cut out and haphazardly pasted on to the page. Comco Buys Talk TV, Earle in Fresh Takeover Battle, Comco Leads Campaign to Expose International Fascist Cells. In the middle of the jumble of newsprint Lily had drawn her caricature dad in thick black ink. She'd made him super-grotesque, with that scrawny neck and those meerkat eyes.

'Hey, isn't that your bike?' Susie the waitress asked from behind her counter.

I looked up in time to see two kids aged about ten hop on to the St Jude's bike, which I'd left propped against a lamp post. The one with the shaven head straddled the cross bar and began to pedal while the other with dark hair flopping down over his forehead perched on the saddle and stuck his legs straight out. As they wobbled out of sight I saw that they were followed by a brown-and-white dog.

Yeah, that was my bike. I thanked Susie, shoved Lily's diary into my pocket and was up out of my chair and on the pavement in five seconds flat.

Notice the dog.

The thieving little bastards didn't get far along the pavement only to the Bridge Inn before riding tandem on a one-person bike became too much for them and they both fell off. The dog barked, the kids hooted as they picked themselves up then kicked my bike while it was down.

I sprinted towards them. The dog, who was between me and my transport home, heard me and turned to bare its teeth.

'Go get her, Bolt!' the kid with the jailbird haircut cried, stamping hard on the front wheel.

'Kill, boy, kill!' the other one croaked.

For a second it looked like the dog would. It snarled like only a broad-chested, bow-legged Staffie can. So I stopped in my tracks.

Partly because of the dog, but also partly because Jayden had just stepped out of the alleyway down the side of the pub.

He didn't say anything, just shoved the kids to one side and picked the bike up from the ground.

Stubble Head swore like an underage trooper while Floppy Hair slunk off without a word.

'Look at that!' I protested, pointing to the bike's buckled front wheel. 'It's wrecked. How do I get back home?'

Now Jayden did speak, not to answer my question but to swear back at the kid and thrust the mangled bike towards him. 'Take this into JD's get it fixed.'

'Who's going to pay for it?' the kid retaliated.

'You are.'

'Who's going to make me?'

Would you have dared to stand up to Jayden this way? No me neither. Anyway, Lily's ex was fired up enough to take the kid by the scruff of the neck, haul him off his feet and throw him and the bike in the direction of the car-repair place down the street.

While this was going on, Bolt the dog kept up a chorus of low growls.

'Sit,' Jayden snarled, and Bolt at least had the sense to do as he was told.

'So same question,' I said as kid and bike got on their way. 'How do I get back to school?'