Chapter Twenty-Three

The cab/train/Tube schlep back from deepest Wiltshire the following day took Cassie nearly three hours and felt like twice that. When she finally climbed aboard Dreamcatcher Macavity cantered down from the deck where he'd been sunning himself to greet her. Following her below deck he jumped up onto the banquette, arching his back.

‘So you missed me? Even though Uncle Gaz gives you bigger rations than I do?' Gaz was her neighbour on the next-door mooring. She sat down beside him. He gazed up at her lovingly, his purr as loud as a two-stroke engine, but when he set his paw on her thigh she felt something break inside. Burying her face in his hot black fur, smelling of canal and his own dusty mustiness she murmured, ‘Have I fucked up?'

The scene in the hotel bedroom that morning kept playing on a loop behind her eyes: she and Archie getting dressed like two polite strangers, and then the phone ringing to say her cab had arrived. They'd hugged each other hard then, the first time they'd touched since the previous evening, before it all went tits up, cutting short their little holiday.

‘I do love you, you know,' she had told him, her words muffled by his big shoulder.

She felt him nod.

‘It's just .?.?.'

‘I know,' he had murmured.

‘Can we be friends?' – pulling her face back to see his.

He had blinked rapidly before kissing her on the top of her head. ‘I don't think I could handle that.'

On the boat, after a cup of black coffee with an outsize vodka chaser, she was starting to feel a bit better. She would miss him horribly, but she couldn't see any alternative. Archie deserved a future that fitted his dreams: marriage to some gorgeous toff like L?titia, a gaff in the countryside, a couple of strawberry-blonde kids, Pimm's on the patio, the whole deal . Ever since the kids-and-countryside conversation she had tried a hundred times to insert herself into that picture – and failed every time. Imagined herself doing the school run in a Chelsea tractor, the other mums at the school gates eyeing her tatts and piercings, asking, What do you do? I work in a mortuary . Yeah, right.

Cassie hadn't slept much alongside an equally restless Archie the previous night and after her unaccustomed lunchtime vodka she felt her eyes drift closed.

She had no idea how long had passed before they snapped open. ‘Uhh?'

‘I said, why the fuck didn't you come to my PM?'

Opposite her sat Bronte, her elbows on the table, the left side of her face a livid purple, one eye half closed. She was wearing her body bag like a hoodie, and through the half-open zip Cassie could see the black-red Y of stitches on her chest used to close the midline incision.

‘I .?.?. uh .?.?.' Cassie stuttered.

Bronte dropped her head to gesture at the stitches visible through her hair – mending the ear-to-ear incision that allowed the scalp to be peeled back. ‘Your locum did a crap job: here feel!' – reaching for her hand.

Crack! Cassie jumped but it was only the cat flap in the cabin door banging shut as Macavity legged it.

WTF? The seat opposite was empty, but Cassie's heart was still flopping round in her chest like a landed fish.

It took her a moment to calm herself. ‘Just a dream, it was just a dream,' she murmured. A dream born out of a subconscious guilt that instead of swanning off to Wiltshire for port and posh eats she should have been at Bronte's forensic PM.

She opened her laptop and started to research Bronte's rise to fame – how she'd gone from the skinny but charismatic girl with the unruly curls who Cassie had seen playing niche Greek-influenced blues/jazz at local haunt Dingwalls, to Bronte – the polished-looking dance-pop phenomenon who could fill the Shepherd's Bush Empire. She was astonished to discover the sheer graft it had involved. In the three years before ‘Clean Break' went triple-platinum Bronte had played more than forty gigs a year and not just in the UK but Amsterdam, Berlin, Oslo, Serbia, Sofia .?.?. a brutal schedule. But it was only after her mega-hit and signing by Melodik that she'd spiralled into a drink and drugs meltdown, regularly snapped by the paparazzi looking messed up, usually hanging on the arm of Ethan, who looked handsome but equally wasted.

She read the two longest interviews Bronte had given the music press. In the first one in NME right on the heels of her recording deal, Bronte sounded wide-eyed at her sudden success, ‘thrilled' to be working with Melodik, and planning an album inspired by genres Cassie had barely heard of, like rebetika, gypsy jazz and klezmer. After a delve into Spotify she'd discovered it was roots music – non-Western and about as far as you could get from the clubland banger that had won her the big deal.

The second interview was on YouTube, just a couple of months before her death – and it felt strikingly different. Bronte looked drawn and distracted, sounding lukewarm about her first project for Melodik – another EDM single. Now and again her real feelings punched through. When the interviewer asked if the roots-influenced album she'd hinted at in the past would ever happen she snapped, ‘You're damn right it's going to happen.'

The flash of defiance on her face took Cassie back to a moment in school. While waiting for the teacher to arrive in class, one of the girls who periodically baited the then-Sophia had snatched the sketchbook she was always drawing in. Waving one of the sketches around, she hooted, ‘Look, at what Dobby's been drawing! Hang on, is this supposed to be Raven? Are you a dirty lezza , Dobby?'

Cassie had been totally mortified, of course. At that age she'd only had one aim: to keep her head down and get through the school day without attracting attention. Thankfully the exchange had been cut short when Sophia, looking furious, jumped up to snatch back the book, just as Mrs Hooper had sailed in. ‘Settle down, girls!' she said in her distinctive honk and that had been that, for the time being anyway.

The memory flooded back .?.?. The awful sound of a girl's keening, the thread of vermilion in the shower tray.

Cassie couldn't undo the past but there was something she could do. Just leaving things to the cops wasn't an option: she owed it to Bronte to find out who had killed her.

Turning to TikTok, she found Bronte still trending and started to wade through the latest outpouring of rumour dressed up as informed comment, a contest in which her enemy @Charly_Detective still led the field. Her latest vid was a mash-up of unflattering stills and footage of Ethan – stoned and playing his guitar badly at some gig to scattered boos .?.?. drunk and snarling at a photographer, Bronte at his side, dwarfed by his height and looking vulnerable .?.?. an old tabloid headline about him being arrested for threatening behaviour in a pub (which never reached court) and so on. Charly described him as a ‘failed pop star' and ‘the boyfriend Bronte dumped just before her death' and the piece ended with her outside Ethan's flat, laying on the fake concern. ‘There have been no sightings of Ethan Fox since Bronte's tragic death.'

The inference viewers were meant to draw was obvious – that Ethan was a prime suspect in his girlfriend's death and had done a runner. If he'd been wealthy and powerful he could sue her for libel, but these armchair sleuths never aimed their outflow of septic innuendo at anyone who could afford to hit back. She replayed her own encounter with Ethan, trying to imagine him struggling with Bronte, pitching her over the balcony, perhaps in the heat of a row? He might be a wayward type with an impulsive streak, but capable of serious violence? She couldn't see it. You've been wrong before , said her caustic inner voice.

She closed down TikTok with a sigh. Once the police went public with the news that they were treating Bronte's death as suspicious, people like Charly would no doubt be crowing over ‘their victory'. It made her want to throw up.