by Lucy Carver
After the unexpected torrent of words, Anna lapsed into silence.
‘How old was Lily when that happened?’ I asked.
‘Eight, nine, ten – it went on for years. First they said she was hyperactive, then she had attention deficit disorder, then borderline autism. And all the time I was desperate for them to leave her alone because they were all so negative and only seemed to make things worse. I pleaded with Robert.’
‘Too much pressure on Lily,’ I said quietly.
‘On both of us.’
There were high, snow-laden hedges to either side of the road and a heavy grey sky overhead. I heard the swish of tyres, the purr of the powerful engine.
‘I’ll always regret that I wasn’t strong enough to protect my daughter,’ Anna sighed. ‘I should have said no – no more tests, no more labels.’
‘But you can’t afford to think that way.’ Guilt nailed her to a cross, adding to her grief.
‘Thank you, Alyssa.’ She gave me that smile with nothing behind it and when she took my hand her fingers were ice cold. ‘Talking to you like this is the only thing that brings me closer to Lily. And, even though it’s painful and you have every right to choose not to give me an answer, still I have to ask you . . .’ She ground to a halt, swallowed hard then shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re asking me what really happened that day?’
Adam’s email was branded on my brain – ‘Family crisis. Come home.’
Bee-stung Lily had packed her bag, the one that was now lying among the sandals and dirty sportswear at the Old Vicarage.
‘Did you get permission from Saint Samuel?’ Paige asked.
‘Yep.’
‘What’s the crisis? Did somebody die?’ I wanted to know.
‘Not yet.’ Lily said.
‘Did your family business go belly-up?’
‘No.’
‘Does your dad want to make you the youngest ever MD of the digital-media section of his multi-national news corporation?’
‘Give me a break, Alyssa.’ Lily stuffed her jeans and favourite top into the bag.
‘Sorry, but we’re only trying to find out what’s wrong.’
She went on with her breakneck packing then stopped to text Adam.
The answer’s still no.
I’d seen the message on Lily’s phone. I saw it again, clear as day.
I relayed to Anna this final conversation with Lily. Verbatim.
‘So at that point, having told me about the pregnancy some weeks earlier, she’s now refusing to talk the thing through with us,’ Anna whispered. ‘That was because of the pressure Robert was putting on her to have an abortion.’
‘An abortion?’ I felt another small shock when I heard the word. ‘Was that the plan?’
‘Yes. It was one of the reasons I didn’t want to involve Lily’s father when she first told me about the pregnancy, but he has a way of extracting information. The minute he found out, he decided abortion was the best solution. Obviously.’
Personally I didn’t see what was so obvious. ‘Lily didn’t agree?’
‘No, that was why I was desperate for her to come home – to work it out face to face.’
And probably the reason why she never got on the London train. Instead she’d written the goodbye email to Jack, bought a different ticket and got shunted off down her own fatal siding.
‘So I have something huge to tell you and you can pass this on too if you like. I’m pregnant, Jack. Big breath. Read again: I’m pregnant. This is not a lie – I did the test twice and both times it came up positive. Careless, huh? You’d have expected better of a smart St Jude’s girl like me.’
God knows which off-the-wall, crazy train she’d actually planned to take.
There on the back seat of the limo I made the decision to tell Anna everything I’d found out so far about Lily and Jayden – how, from the evidence in her diary, she’d hoped he was the father, how happy she was that the baby might have been his and how she’d cut him out of her life when she’d discovered he wasn’t. Exit stick boy and stick dog.
‘She loved Jayden?’ Anna asked in that faint, surprisingly young voice.
‘Yes. And he loved her.’
She sat very still to let this sink in then gave a little gasp, almost as if she had to remind herself to breathe. ‘And the real father – we’re absolutely certain that he didn’t want to play any part?’
I had to shake my head and make her cry at the desperate rejection Lily must have felt. The loneliness of it.
chapter nine
Anna stayed in Ainslee while her driver took me back to school so I had plenty of time to think about her and her relationship with Lily.
She definitely loved her, but she wasn’t strong or fierce enough to stand up for her. She didn’t say, ‘This is my daughter and she’s beautiful and precious in her own right. She doesn’t have to be the same as everyone else.’
She wasn’t there for Lily.
I looked out of the window at bare thorn trees and snow melting into black earth. The driver looked straight ahead and didn’t say a word.
I recognized famous media baron Robert Earle the second I saw him standing in the main entrance to St Jude’s.
He was skinny and stringy beneath his double-breasted, dark-blue coat, wizened and practically bald, with those staring, dark-circled eyes.
The driver had glided past the press scrum at the gates, but when he saw his boss he braked hard and stopped ten metres short of the entrance.
‘Thanks for driving me,’ I muttered, quickly sliding out of the passenger seat and hoping to slip away unnoticed. But one of Earle’s minions spotted me, cut off my retreat and led me towards the great man.
Robert Earle came slowly, deliberately, down the steps. ‘And you are?’ he asked without preliminaries.
‘Alyssa Stephens.’
He looked down his nose, inclined his head towards his up-to-speed aide who informed him that I’d been Lily’s roommate.
I obviously wasn’t interesting or important so the media man brushed me to one side and went to speak to the driver, ordering him to step out of the car. ‘Where’s Anna?’ he demanded.
She’d checked in to The Swan Hotel in Ainslee, the driver told him. His orders were to return there and wait.
‘Since when do you take orders from Anna?’ Robert Earle demanded. It was a short sentence, but long enough for me to be sure that the driver’s answer had annoyed the hell out of his boss. There was a mini eruption as Earle fired off orders to minions number one, two and three – get on the phone to his wife and tell her not to leave the hotel, demand an explanation from the school principal – how come he hadn’t informed him, Robert Earle, of Anna’s whereabouts the moment she’d arrived at the school? Make sure the press pack didn’t get wind of his wife’s latest movements.
‘And you,’ he told the innocent driver, holding out his hand for the car keys. ‘You’re fired.’
Whoa!
The man didn’t see any point in arguing. He just shook his head and stepped away, fading into the shadowy world of the unemployed.
Earle motioned for me to come forward again. ‘You – Alyssa – what did Anna want?’
‘Just to talk.’ It was a free country, whatever Robert Earle thought. I wasn’t going to dish up information on a plate.
He narrowed the bulging meerkat eyes. ‘What about?’
‘Your daughter.’
‘Jesus wept, hasn’t Anna talked enough without having to dump on total strangers?’
This was beyond brutal. I stayed silent while the aides rushed about Earle’s business and Dr Webb appeared in the doorway.
‘Whatever Anna said, you keep it to yourself,’ Earle said in his narrow, nasal voice. Taking a phone from aide number one, he spoke to his wife. ‘Don’t move. Don’t go outside. Wait till I send someone to fetch you.’ End of conversation. He thrust the phone back into his minion’s hand.
Anna was married to the guy. They ha
d two kids together. No way would I have let him speak to me this way.
Saint Sam came down the steps, aware of the longdistance lenses trained on us all. He was keen to lead everyone inside the building but Robert Earle’s anger, once roused, was wide ranging and random in its targets – first the driver, then Anna, now the school principal.
‘I warned you about security,’ he muttered. ‘That includes not letting my wife roam the bloody Cotswold countryside with one of your students.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Saint Sam replied, fear flickering behind the smooth expression. ‘Mrs Earle came to my office. It was impossible to refuse.’
‘You should have called me – I’d have refused for you.’ Earle gestured towards the journalists. ‘Look at them – baying for my blood. They’ll make a big deal of this – Anna coming here alone, secretly taking one of your girls for a country spin. They’ll have pictures.’
‘Come inside,’ Saint Sam suggested helplessly.
Earle ignored him. ‘This girl – Alyssa – they’ll be after her like rats down a drain. They won’t let up until they’ve got their story.’
‘All our students have been warned about the need for discretion.’
Bland and weak again, Saint Sam. At times like this you need to be firmer.
‘Bullshit,’ Earle grunted. He turned and herded me up the steps. ‘What exactly did my wife say to you?’
‘Not much.’
‘Let’s pretend I didn’t hear that and I’ll ask you again – what did Anna tell you?’
I managed to look him in the eye. ‘That she misses Lily. That talking to one of her school friends is the best hope she has of hanging on to her memory.’ Let’s see how you react to that.
There wasn’t a flicker of anything in the dark eyes except fury. ‘I expect she gave you the old sob story, how I failed to do my best for my daughter every step of the way.’
‘Come to my office,’ Saint Sam urged, getting desperate.
Robert Earle shrugged him aside. ‘Yeah well, I don’t need that particular headache right now. You forget all the guff my wife gave you, OK?’
I stared back at him, trying to imagine him as my father. Lily had been right – ‘tyrant’ just about covered it and I decided that my no-daddy status was better than her monster-daddy one.
‘You can rely on Alyssa,’ Saint Sam tried to say.
By now we were inside, out of sight of the journos, and just when you thought Robert Earle might see sense and calm down, he fired off again, worse than before.
‘“Rely”? Yeah – right. Just like I relied on you, Dr Webb, and look how that turned out.’
People were walking past, going about their business – Justine Renoir and Jack Hooper, Guy Simons, Harry Embsay. Everyone noticed what was happening between Saint Sam and Robert Earle.
‘I hope you’re not suggesting that we in any way failed in our duty towards Lily,’ the principal said, struggling to keep his calm.
‘You hit that nail right on the head,’ Earle ranted. ‘That’s exactly what you did – failed in your duty. I told you right at the start that my daughter only came to St Jude’s under strict conditions. Condition number one – your school nurse had to make a daily check to make sure she took her medication. Number two – you would alert us to any health issues – any mood swings or irrational behaviour – the moment they arose. Neither of which conditions you fulfilled. Number three –’
‘I’ll stop you right there, Mr Earle.’ Really, Saint Sam couldn’t let it go any further. ‘I assure you that we were perfectly aware of Lily’s medical condition before she arrived. The school provided excellent care, even when her behaviour was at its most challenging.’
‘And if you’re “perfectly aware” of Lily’s bipolar disorder, you’ll also be “perfectly aware” of the deal we did to get her in here,’ Earle reminded him at full volume. A freight train wouldn’t have stopped this rant. ‘You give my daughter a place and I fund your school to the tune of two million pounds.’
Dr Webb took a step back, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’
‘It was exactly like that. Remember, I was frank with you – I said, “Lily’s a problem. She’s been thrown out of every mainstream school we’ve put her in.” You didn’t miss a beat. You told me, “Here at St Jude’s we believe in every child’s right to express their individuality.” I said, “Good on you, Dr Webb. You manage to keep my extremely individual daughter here for five whole years and I’ll pump money into your Foundation – half when she arrives, half when she leaves.” Needless to say, you bit my hand right off.’
At this point I just wanted to shut my ears. I know they run a business here, but this sounded just too cynical to bear. It didn’t stop there, though.
‘The problem is you didn’t keep to your side of the deal.’ Robert Earle lowered his voice at last, seeming aware for the first time that he needed to tone things down.
His aides looked at their watches and their phones. One went to check out alternative exit routes.
Saint Sam hadn’t recovered from the earlier body blow. He looked confused.
‘Which means I don’t deliver the second million,’ Earle said, ready to be ushered out of a side door. ‘Tell that to the next meeting of your board of governors, Dr Webb.’
Early next morning, Paige, the two Jacks and I gathered round an oak table in the old library. Zara already happened to be there, so she joined us too.
The old library was where they put the current editions of the daily papers – in among the dying technology of paper and print. The rows of decaying, leather-bound volumes made a musty backdrop to our conversation.
‘Front page in the Daily Express.’ Hooper read out the headline: Grieving Anna Gets No Answers. He showed us the clear, in-focus picture of me and Anna getting into her limo – not blurred or fuzzy – so we were easy to identify.
‘Page four in the Mirror,’ Zara said. ‘They go for the family-in-crisis angle, with pictures of Anna and Robert arriving separately, Anna looking sad, Robert ready to commit mass murder, plus a paragraph about lack of police progress.’
‘There’s nothing in this one.’ Paige leafed through another tabloid without success.
‘That’s because Robert Earle owns it,’ Zara pointed out. She seemed knowledgeable about the redtops, maybe because she followed the Hollywood A-listers in their gossip columns.
‘Ah.’ Paige made a typical comment about not shitting in your own back yard then turned to the Independent.
Meanwhile I was busy with the Mail’s headline – School for Scandal where the main picture was of the school building in all its ancient glory, with images of Anna and Robert Earle inset into the top right corner.
‘Let me see that.’ Jack finished with the Mirror and came to peer over my shoulder. ‘Hey, look who wrote it.’
Emily Archer, young journalist of the year. It turned out Emily had tracked down Robert Earle’s sacked driver in a pub in Gloucester and he’d given her the low down on the Earle family’s reaction to Lily’s death, saying that his ex-boss blamed St Jude’s for his daughter’s death and was accusing them of covering up certain facts about the discovery of the body – their lack of action when she first disappeared, their reluctance to involve the police.
‘According to local opinion, the school has not always been free from scandal. Other unexplained deaths have occurred, dating as far back as St Jude’s foundation in 1938.’
‘Shit – D’Arblay and Saint Sam keep that one quiet,’ Paige commented as Jack read aloud.
‘You wouldn’t exactly advertise it in the prospectus,’ Hooper said.
It turned out Emily Archer had been thorough in detailing events. Then she wrote about ancient stone pillars and oak doors hiding unsolved mysteries, moved on to the tragic loss of a troubled young life and finished with Police investigations continue. However, yesterday’s apparently unscheduled visit by members of the grieving family fixes attention firmly on the
building where tragic Lily Earle spent her last days and where her body was pulled from the lake.
‘What about the other unexplained deaths?’ Hooper was the first to speak after we’d put the newspapers back in the stand and walked from the library into the main school building. ‘Is that journos raking up any dirt they can find?’
‘Yeah, it’s ancient history,’ Zara decided.
I agreed on that point. ‘We need to concentrate on Lily.’
Neither of the Jacks said anything as we headed for our first lesson of the day.
School routine held me together through Thursday and into Friday morning. The subject of Lily came up regularly on the BBC News channel and again in the newspapers, and there was no way any of us could ignore the satellite TV vans or the paparazzi at the gate. Still, no journalists, not even Emily Archer, had managed to corner me, despite what Robert Earle had predicted, and I was in the new technology centre when Dr Welford invited Jack to spend his afternoon doing extra maths to get him ready for the Oxbridge entrance exams. Extra maths sounds like torture to most of us, but my Jack acted as if he’d been offered a second helping of sticky-toffee pudding.
He said yes please, he’d like a session on the Newton-Raphson method of solving equations, as long as they could fit it around his tennis-coaching session.
‘Not that you need the extra tuition,’ Shirley Welford told him with a smile. ‘It’s more that I enjoy the challenge of teaching you.’
She was happy, Jack was happy – it was win-win.
‘When do you next get some free time?’ I asked him as we went for lunch, resisting the urge to grab him and kiss him that I felt every time we were together. ‘We still need to get hold of Tom and ask him about Lily’s bag.’
‘Yeah, well, just don’t try that one by yourself.’ Jack reminded me that my last solo excursion to the Bottoms hadn’t worked out well. ‘I mean it, Alyssa.’
‘I hear you.’
