Mary-Jane Riley - After She Fell - A haunting psychological thriller with a shocking twist

Alex tried to keep her expression neutral. So this was what it was about: Catriona’s daughter. She had seen the results of the inquest and knew the verdict had been suicide.

‘Cat,’ she said. ‘The inquest—’

Catriona leapt off the sofa, knocking her cup over, spilling the coffee. ‘Fuck the inquest,’ she shouted.

The three of them watched as the brown liquid spread across the white leather. Alex wondered if it would stain and how much it would cost to get out.

Catriona looked out of the window. Alex knew she wasn’t seeing the London street, but was seeing her daughter, her beautiful 17-year-old daughter. ‘Fuck the inquest,’ she said, quietly this time.

‘Was it an accident?’ Alex kept her voice neutral.

Catriona rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands.

Mark stood impassively. He sighed. ‘My wife thinks Elena was murdered,’ he said.

May: twenty-nine weeks before she dies

It starts halfway through the summer term.

Wednesday at two o’clock in the afternoon. For weeks after, I knew I would remember the exact moment when I felt someone watching me. Stupid really. I thought it was bollocks when people said the hairs on the back of their neck stood up, but that’s exactly what I felt right at that moment.

I am plucking the petals off a daisy: ‘Knob.’ Pluck. ‘Dick.’ Pluck. ‘Knob.’ Pluck. ‘Dick’ … What does it matter? My mother’s husband, my new stepfather, is both of those – and more. I throw the daisy on the ground. How could she have done it? Replaced Dad like that? And he’s younger than her, for Christ’s sake. I want to cry.

I look around, take the scrunchie off my wrist and gather my blonde hair away from my face and up into a ponytail. I am sitting on the grass by the tennis courts revising for my AS levels. All four of them. That’s the trouble with this damn school – they push and push and push until you feel as though your head is going to fucking explode. Surely your brain can only take in so much knowledge? The trouble with my brain is that the knowledge goes in and then bleeds out. I like Art and English, but I know my teachers want me to take Physics and Maths to A level. What the fuck for? I don’t need Physics and Maths. I need English and Art. I want to take English and Art, no matter what my teachers or my mother and new stepfather say. My new stepfather. Even as I think it I still can’t believe it. What did Mum do that for? Was it for the sex? Eeugh, please. Too much information. Mark Munro makes pots and pots of money. Some sort of banker wanker. And the bloody headlines when they got married! Jeez! You’d think no one in the world had ever married anyone younger than themselves. But there was such a lot of crap written and spoken about it all, especially as Mum is well-known and a bit older. There are times when I feel quite sorry for them. But, still …

‘Get your exams then you’ll have choices,’ Mark said to me just after he’d married Mum, when he thought he could get away with trying to be something like a dad to me.

I wanted to tell him to get fucked. You aren’t my dad.

And it always makes my insides curl up when I think about my real dad: dead from an asthma attack when I was only ten. But I can remember him, I really can. And the good times, like when we went to the seaside together – just me and him – leaving Mum to network or phone Obama or something. We paddled and swam and built sandcastles and had ice cream and fish and chips and ate them sitting on the harbour wall, watching people go by.

He wouldn’t have made me come to this school.

I shade my eyes from the sun. The Queen Bees are lying some fifty metres away, stretched out sunbathing, shirts tucked under their bras, skirts hitched as high as they dare, books discarded by their sides. Looking like razor shells in a row on the sand. They don’t seem to care about revising. Lucky sods. The line shifts, sits up, looks around. Queen Bee Naomi Bishop’s plump lips (courtesy of a so-called doctor in a clinic on Harley Street) are moving and I guess she’s talking about catching the rays and the glories of having a tan. Or perhaps she’s whining about something more meaningful like what colour to paint her nails at the weekend, and, of course, the acolytes are breathing in every word. When I first arrived at the school, full of simmering resentment because I felt Mum had listened to Mark and had pushed me away, I was courted by the Queen Bees.

‘Come on, darling.’ Queen Bee Naomi always manages to make every statement sound like a command. ‘You want to be one of us. We know the best hot men to shag, the purest smack, and the best high living. You know it makes sense. We don’t ask everybody, you know. Only girls like us.’

I remember I gave them what I hoped was a cool look (Tara said later I had looked cool), even though my heart was beating, like, really, really fast, and said, ‘No thanks’. Just like that.

Naomi laughed, but I thought at the time it sounded a bit strained, you know?

‘You will so regret it,’ warned Jenni Lewis, Naomi’s right-hand bee. ‘You can’t survive on your own in this dump.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said. But I’m not one for cosy confidences, giggling late at night, sneaking out for sex with one of the sixth form boys. Not my style.

As I watch them, trying not to look as though I am another of the Queen Bees, Natasha Wetherby sits up, looks around, flicks her hair off her face. She smiles over at me and blows me a kiss. Yeah, right. I roll my eyes massively. Helen Clements, the mousy one of the group with hair that hangs like a pair of curtains and eyebrows thicker than Frida Kahlo, giggles: a high-pitched noise that carries over to where I’m sitting.

A second group of girls is over the other side of the tennis courts, laughing and talking. Two from my year sit on a bench, revising. Actually revising. Bloody hell. And further away, under a large oak tree, three or four boys from the Lower Sixth are lying down or are propped up on their elbows, chatting. One of them – Felix – is trying to smoke a cigarette, all cocky looks and holding it by his finger and thumb, but sort of looking around as if he’s frightened of being caught. Another of the boys is Theo, in skin-tight jeans and gun-hugging tee-shirt: the current Queen Bees’ heart-throb. I don’t like either of them that much. Felix looks a bit, I dunno, angry all the time, as though it wouldn’t take much for him to explode. He has a mean look in his eye. And Theo? Smarmy. Knows he’s buff, got half the girls here thinking he’s gorgeous. Doesn’t do a lot for me.

And Max is with them. He should be doing games or homework or something with his mates from Year 11, not hanging around with guys from the sixth form. They treat him as a sort of mascot for them, get him to run their errands. I sigh as he catches my eye. Mistake. He smiles that wobbly, tentative smile of his that makes him look as though he’s about to be hit with a big stick. He’s had a bit of a thing about me ever since I found him being pushed around by the likes of Naomi and Natasha. They’d ambushed him in the changing rooms and were pulling his clothes off him, taunting him, laughing at the size of his dick, that sort of thing. He’s a boy that invites taunts. But I couldn’t let it happen and I managed to get him away from them. Since then he’s had a bit of a thing for me.

Now he glances around to make sure no one’s looking at him – no one is, they never do – and he gives me a little wave. I smile back. What else can I do?

‘Hey, Lee,’ Naomi calls across. ‘Whatcha doing? Come over here.’

My best mate, Tara Johnson, who is trying to find a blade of grass wide enough to make a squealy-farty noise, looks at me; almost pleading with me to get up and join them so that she can follow too. She desperately wants to be part of the club. I sigh. I understand Tara’s feelings, I really do. She likes to belong, be liked, to be part of the gang. Always wants to but never quite manages it. Laughed at for being fat and frumpy, for not being pretty enough, fashionable enough or interesting enough. At our old school I felt sorry for her and could protect her, but here at The Drift, life isn’t so easy. Tara has to swim in a sea of piranhas. I mean, I do my best to defend and shield her, but it’s tough. Tara does not fit in. At all. Any more than I do, but I can pretend if I have to. Tara tends to wear her heart on her sleeve. But she’s a good and loyal friend sticking with me through thick and, quite literally, thin. Tara knows most of my secrets. Knows about my depression, my bouts of anorexia; knows the hard protective shell I’m growing after Mum’s marriage to Mark. The shrinks said the eating thing and the depression were because I didn’t grieve properly when Dad died. Mum went to pieces. I had to be strong. There was only her and me at that time, until Mark Munro came along. Then Mum got her life back on track and I was the one who went to pieces. Because I couldn’t control my environment, they said. The only thing I could control was my eating.