'Bus.' Squeezing one-syllable answers out of Jayden was like getting blood from the proverbial stone.

I was still mad, so I pointed after the retreating kid. 'Who is that, anyway?'

'Brad.'

'You know him?'

'I should do he's my kid brother.' Jayden launched off in the opposite direction with Bolt close behind. Stick man and stick dog.

Running after him, I took a huge risk. 'You heard what happened to Lily?'

He halted, nodded then walked on with shoulders hunched, wearing a deep scowl.

'The funeral's Wednesday.'

He shook his head.

'Yeah, it is. I talked to Lily's brother, Adam.'

'It's not happening, not any more,' he insisted.

I overtook him and stood in his way. 'Why, what do you know that we don't?'

'No body, no funeral.'

'But there is obviously there is!' I couldn't bring myself to say the word 'body'.

Jayden's hooded eyes were almost closed under that overhanging brow. 'Talk to Alex.'

'Alex who?' I looked frantically up and down the street, in time to see young Brad and the bike disappearing into JD Repairs.

'Driffield. You know him.'

'What's he got to do with anything?' I asked the question realizing that I wouldn't get an answer.

Bolt kept pace with Jayden as he turned off the high street down Meredith Lane a road leading to a small housing estate built in the 1950s for council workers. The back end of a Staffie isn't attractive thin, pointy tail curving up to reveal tight white anus and squat haunches. Is that too graphic for you? Anyway, they walk like bodybuilders on steroids.

Silence from Jayden and never a backwards glance.

What the ? What, dear Reader, was that all about? Jayden's kid brother destroys my bike. Jayden appears out of nowhere and reins him in. He tells me there isn't going to be a funeral. Hold the eulogy.

Driffield? Alyssa the Memory Girl gets to work. JD John Driffield is the name of the guy who runs the car-repair garage. His name is in small letters under the main sign. Alex must be his son.

'Jayden!' I cried as man and dog turned into the garden of a house with an overflowing wheelie bin at the gate.

The door banged and then silence. And now I was on a mission straight back down the high street to JD Repairs where I saw my broken bike propped up inside the wide entrance. A bald man in overalls stood chest-deep in a service pit under an ancient Volvo. Radio 2 played loudly. There was a small office at the back of the workshop.

'Hi!' I called above Take That circa 1995.

The guy in overalls pointed me towards the office, where I found Brad sulking with Alex Driffield.

Brad's vocabulary of anatomically-based swear words was impressive for a ten-year-old. I won't sully the page.

'Eff off,' Alex told him as he swiped at the kid's head with the back of his hand. 'Sorry about that the kid was out of order,' he told me.

Brad effed off and I shrugged, coming straight to the point. 'Jayden says you know something about Lily's funeral.'

Alex logged info into a computer as he talked. 'Yeah, it got held up.'

'How? Why?'

'No body, no funeral.'

'That's what Jayden told me. But how come?'

'From what I heard, the police aren't ready to release it.' This was right up Alex's street. What with his fascination for TV crime series, he relished being in possession of confidential police information.

'Who said?'

'A kid in school Micky Cooke. His dad works at the morgue in Ainslee.' Slowly Alex revealed the precious, scavenged facts, savouring the moment.

My heart hammered at my ribs. 'And?'

'The pathologist handed over his report. He found something they weren't expecting.'

'For God's sake, Alex!'

'Chill. I don't expect it'll be anything too y'know gory.'

I bit my lip and steadied myself against the desk.

'Maybe nothing at all. They're not sure yet.'

Still I waited. The DJ segued from Take That into One Direction's latest number one.

'Micky's dad says it's just enough to make the cops think twice. Yes, Lily did drown, yes, she was pregnant and, no, there was no sign of a struggle . . .'

'But?'

'Like I said, they're holding on to the body for the pathologist to put in a second report.' Know-it-all Alex wouldn't let go of his big moment.

'Alex, for God's sake, this is real not some poxy TV series!'

'You're right sorry.'

'No, you're not. You're getting some kind of weird thrill.' I was really angry and didn't care if he knew it.

He shrugged. 'So now what?'

'So now you find out from Micky Cooke exactly what the pathologist found.'

'Just like that?' Alex made it clear he was done with me by turning his back and bringing up the messages inbox on his iPhone.

'Yes, just like that!' I yelled. 'You can't go around spreading rumours without any proof.'

'Watch me,' he muttered.

chapter five.

Paige wasn't around she was probably still at study group when I got back to school, so I sat alone in our room, staring out of the window at the darkening scene.

Nothing had changed. There was a smooth lawn and a lake and beyond that an oak wood stripped of its leaves. Rooks rose from their untidy nests and circled in the dying light.

But everything shifted in the lengthening shadows from sedate to sinister, sane to crazy, suicide to possible murder.

This could be a suspicious death! I said to myself as I put my finger on what had felt so wrong from the very start. Maybe Lily didn't kill herself.

I had nothing concrete to go on only a funeral delay and a request for a second, in-depth pathologist's report but the thought insinuated its way into my brain and I started to shake. Murder, not suicide. Unlawful killing.

But what about the email containing the desperate last thoughts of a gifted but unstable girl with an unwanted pregnancy and a boyfriend who'd dumped her the minute she'd told him about the baby?

Nothing too gory. I thought if I repeated Alex's phrase often enough it might make my racing heart slow down. Nothing too y'know gory!

But the lake and the woods still made me shudder. I almost saw Lily out there, or her pale ghost, standing at the water's edge, staring up at my window, begging for help.

I turned away but then it felt as if she was in the room, sitting cross-legged on her bed, breathing, beseeching.

'Lily, you have to help me. I don't know what to do!' I said.

Five minutes later Mercury knocked and came in (aka Zara, messenger to the gods). 'Hey, Alyssa. You look awful.'

'Thanks.'

'I'm just saying I don't know, I thought maybe you needed someone to talk to.'

'No thanks.' Unlawful killing. Some terrible mystery about to be revealed. The new notion kept me in its iron grip.

'So anyway,' Zara said, 'Sam wants to see you.'

'When?'

'Now.'

'What about?'

Actually, the name Mercury doesn't suit Zara. She's too luscious for that a goddess in her own right, although as a scientific genius she would reject the old, classical myths as stories invented by primitive peoples to explain away natural disasters. If she has a god, it would be Professor Stephen Hawking and her bible would be his Brief History of Time.

'D'Arblay didn't say.' She backed off from offering sympathy and reverted to that distant, don't-bother-me way she can adopt, except when she's seducing Luke or Tom or either of the two Jacks, in which case she's fully engaged in the task and doesn't have time for small talk. She looked at me a while longer then and her face softened again. 'Sorry, Alyssa. He just asked me to pass on the message. It's probably to do with Lily. Isn't everything?'

Ouch! 'Don't you care that she's dead?' I asked.

'Yes, I care, but spare me the shit.'

'What shit?'

'The shit that is about to hit the fan.' Zara led me to the window and pointed down the front drive to the main gates where cars were parked and a growing knot of people were milling around in the gloom. 'Journos. Cameras, reporters.'

I groaned.

'Vultures,' Zara said.

'Come in, Alyssa.' Saint Sam's voice was calm and quiet as I knocked on his door. 'Take a seat.'

I entered and sat, doing my best to ignore dapper, smart-arse D'Arblay who stood in the doorway that connected the principal's study with his own.

'First and most importantly, I wanted a private chat to ask how you're coping with the stress of Lily's death.'

'I'm OK.'

Head tilted to one side, Sam studied my face. 'We do have a counselling service,' he reminded me.

'I don't need it, thanks.'

'No. I can see that you're a strong personality. Besides we know that you're no stranger to tragedy losing your parents at a young age and so on. You've already had to cope with a lot in your life.'

'I'm OK,' I insisted. Which of those two short words didn't he understand?

'Would you like us to inform your aunt? You could go home, perhaps skip the last few weeks of term then come back refreshed in the New Year.'

I looked down and studied my fingernails.

'Alyssa?'

'What about my eulogy?' It was a leading question, I know. I was digging to see if Saint Sam knew about the postponement.

'Someone else could do that for you,' he said without hesitating.

In the doorway D'Arblay nodded and smiled like the Churchill dog. O-o-oh yes!

'Alyssa?' Sam prompted again.

'No. I want to do it. Anyway, the funeral won't be Wednesday it'll be later.'