Chapter Four

On the way home that evening, Cassie picked up a takeout: Thai – Archie's favourite. Aware of how grumpy she'd been recently she'd made a resolution to be ‘good girlfriend' tonight. Slowing as she reached the spot where Sophia aka Bronte had fallen she was surprised to see that the police cordon had already gone. In its place was a single massive bouquet of white roses, expensive-looking – no note but perhaps left by her family. Dropping to her haunches at the spot she'd seen the cartoon speech bubble of blood, she scoped the towpath but found no trace of it. She nodded to herself. The crime scene cleaners had done a good job. She hated the idea of Sophia's blood being there for any rubbernecker to see: these days the images would be all over social media in a heartbeat.

Looking up at the balcony where she'd seen the cop earlier, she frowned. It looked like Bronte had fallen more or less in a straight line. Surely you would push off when you jumped? So as not to hit anything on the way down?

She climbed on board Dreamcatcher , opened the cabin door and found Archie sitting on the banquette with his knees up, laptop propped there, with Macavity lying beside him. The cat – her cat – gazed up at him with an adoration he hardly ever granted her. Still, she had to admit it was a cosy scene, especially with the warm fug in the cabin and the resinous tang of woodsmoke in the air.

‘Well done for getting it going,' she told him, looking at the woodstove which was roaring in a way she took forever to achieve. ‘What did you do?'

‘Gosh, no clue. I just used the kindling and got a good draught going.' He sent her his cutest grin. ‘Dib dib dib!'

‘What?'

‘I'll have you know I was a sixer in the Cub Scouts, the first to get a fire building badge.'

‘Of course you were. Was this before your gymkhana career took off?'

Archie might as well have been raised on a different planet to her. Public school in Wiltshire, horse riding, the pursuit and slaying of innumerable fish and furry animals .?.?. then Harrow, choir, rugby .?.?. yada yada . Meanwhile, by the age of fifteen, Cassie had been bunking school to smoke weed by the canal or drink cider in graveyards with her goth and emo pals, giving each other stick-and-poke tatts. Archie had gone on to do a ‘gap yah' in Cambodia and Vietnam before medicine at Oxford; while Cassie had dropped out of school after GCSEs and left home at seventeen to go and live in a druggie squat.

While she served up the food, he reached for the table that pulled down across the banquette. ‘Could you check the news for me?' she asked. ‘See if there's any mention of Bronte?'

‘Charlotte or Emily?' He pulled a frown, before breaking into a grin. ‘Kidding. Even I've heard of her, she's that bad-girl singer, with the bad-boy boyfriend, right?'

‘She was. She's my latest guest. Jumped off her balcony, according to the cops.'

‘Blimey!' Scrolling on his phone, he said, ‘Yep, here we go. "brEAKING: Camden Police say woman who fell from canal-side apartment was troubled singer Bronte".'

Cassie blinked hard, realising that ‘troubled singer' was now her old schoolmate's epitaph, fixed and unalterable: her chances of getting through her turbulent twenties and finding some kind of peace gone forever.

As they ate, she told him about the injuries. ‘Cervical fracture, major brain trauma, complex fracture of radius and ulna on one arm.'

He nodded, twirling some noodles onto his fork. ‘All pretty standard for a fall from height.'

‘I dunno,' said Cassie unhappily. ‘She had an abrasion on the wrong hand. And if she jumped, it's hard to see how she landed where she did.' She imitated a jump with her fingers. ‘I'd say she ended up less than a metre from the edge of her balcony.'

‘Meaning?'

She shrugged unhappily. ‘Surely if you jump off a building you travel some distance? Seeing where she ended up it was more like she'd been dropped, like .?.?. a dead weight.'

But then surely the cops would be all over details like that? Or not. She pushed her plate away, her green curry half eaten.

‘No signs of foul play though?' Archie asked. He put his head on one side. ‘It's bothering you, I can see.'

She bit her lip trying to decide how much to tell him. ‘I knew her at school.'

‘You were friends?'

Shaking her head, she stood to clear her plate and get another beer out of the fridge. How to explain the Year 10 politics at her all-girls' state school – the rival cliques, the brutal food chain with mean girls and bullies as apex predators, and at the bottom, girls like her and Sophia who just didn't fit in.

Sophia leaving suddenly like she did wasn't my fault , she told herself.

Once Cassie might have put in a call to DS Phyllida Flyte to discuss the case, but the last time she'd spoken to the uptight cop was six months ago. Since then she had left the Met after her unofficial investigation into a fellow officer had almost ended in her death. Flyte was now working as an investigator for the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the body that looked into complaints against the cops. Which, given the tsunami of stories emerging about the behaviour of Met officers, would be keeping her nice and busy.

Getting a vivid image of some dodgy cop on the business end of Flyte's icy stare, Cassie smiled for the first time that day.