Catch Me When I Fall

by Nicci French

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CATCH ME WHEN I FALL

  ‘Persuasive and relentlessly believable, this book keeps you guessing

  right to the very end’ Marie Claire

  ‘Nicci French [has] come up with yet another superb and chilling

  psychological thriller’ Mirror

  ‘Terrifyingchiller from the husband-and-wife writingteam who have

  cornered the market in psychological suspense’ Eve

  ‘Very well done, exciting’ Spectator

  ‘Highly persuasive… dextrous and edgy’ Independent

  ‘A thrill-a-minute narrative as Holly’s manic misbehaviour makes for a

  genuinely exciting page-turner’ What’s On

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writingpartnership of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk.

  There are now ten bestsellingnovels by Nicci French: The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living, Secret Smile, Catch Me When I Fall, Losing You and Until It’s Over (the new hardback, published in May 2008).

  Catch Me When I Fall

  NICCI FRENCH

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Michael Joseph 2005

  First published in Penguin Books 2006

  This edition published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Joined-Up Writing, 2005

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of bindingor cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition beingimposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-191848-8

  Contents

  Part 1: Dying Once

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Part 2: Dying Twice

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  To Jackie and Tomàs

  I died twice.

  The first time, I wanted to die. I thought of death as the place where the pain would stop, where the fear would finally cease.

  The second time, I didn’t want to die. In spite of the pain and in spite of the fear, I had decided at last that life was where I needed to be: messy, scary, tiring, lovely, hurting life, with all its failures and its sadness, with all its sudden and unlooked-for bits of joy that make you close your eyes and think: Hold on to this, remember this. Memories can carry you through. Dancing in the dark; seeing the sun rise; striding through the city, lost in a crowd; looking up to meet your smile. You saved me when I could no longer save myself. You found me when I was lost.

  I didn’t want to be dead, but someone else wanted me to be. They tried very hard to make me die. I’m a person who people seem to either love or hate. Sometimes it’s been hard to tell the difference between the two. Even now, when it’s all over and I can look back at it like a landscape I’ve walked through and left behind, there are things that remain hidden, secrets lost to me.

  Dying takes you to another place. All alone, you cross a line and nobody can join you there. When my father died, I was sixteen years old. I remember the spring afternoon when he was buried. My mother tried to make me dress in mourning clothes but my father always hated black, so I put on my pink dress and my reddest lipstick and wore high heels that sank into the soft earth. I wanted to look like a hussy, like a tart. I smeared blue eye-shadow on my eyelids. And I remember the words the vicar said – ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ –and that people were crying and holding on to each other. I knew they wanted me to cry as well, and then they could have put an arm round me and comforted me, but my father hated people weeping. He always liked us to show the world we were happy. So I smiled through the service, and I think, because of the way everyone was looking at me, I even laughed a bit. My mother put a single white rose on his coffin when they lowered it into the ground, the way you’re supposed to. I took the bracelets off my arm and tossed those in, so for a few seconds it felt more like a pagan burial than a respectable English funeral. One of the bracelets broke, and its bright plastic beads rolled around crazily on the cheap wooden lid. Rat-a-tat-tatting on my father’s face.

  For a while I thought I would go mad with loneliness and rage, although I never told anyone about that because I didn’t have the words. For ten years, I tried to get back to him. In despair. In love. In disgust, hilarity, loathing and revenge.

  I died twice. Only twice. You’d have thought that with all my frantic striving I could have done a bit better than that.

  So here they are, then. The people who loved me and hated me, who wanted me to live and who wished me dead, who tried to save me and who let me go. They all look happy. They are gazing at each other, holding hands; some of them are kissing. I can tell that they are making promises to each other for the life ahead. That great and mysterious journey. Only one is missing.

  Dying Once

  1

  ‘I’m attracted to danger,’ he said. ‘Always have been. What can I get you two?’

  I thought for a moment. Pace yourself, Holly. It was an hour since Meg and I had left the office but I was still buzzing. Fizzing. I once had a friend who was working as an actor. He’d told me how after a show it would take him hours to wind down, which was a bit of a problem if the curtain fell at half past ten and you had any ambition to fit in with the rest of the world. Mainly he found himself fitting in with other actors, who were the only people who felt like heading out for dinner at eleven and sleeping until noon every day of the week.

  Another friend from college is a long-distance runner. She’s impressive. S
he almost got into the Olympics. She runs ridiculously fast and far just to get her body going. Then she runs a properly serious distance and punishes herself up steep hills. After that, the difficulty is to bring her body back to normal. She does more running simply to wind herself down. Afterwards she puts ice on her muscles and joints to cool them. I could do with that. Sometimes I feel I’d like to put my whole head into a chinking barrel of ice.

  ‘It’s not that difficult a decision,’ he said. ‘Meg’s already asked for a white wine.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  For a moment I’d forgotten where I was. I had to look around to remind myself. It was wonderful. It was autumn, but it was a hot evening and the crowd in the Soho bar was spilling out on to the street. It felt like the summer was going to go on for ever, winter would never come, it would never rain again. Out in the countryside fields needed water, riverbeds were dry, crops shrivelling, but in the middle of London it was like being by the Mediterranean.

  ‘What do you want to drink?’

  I asked for a white wine and some water. Then I put my arm on Meg’s shoulders and murmured into her ear, ‘Did you talk to Deborah?’

  She looked uneasy. So she hadn’t.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  ‘We need to talk about this. Tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘Still or sparkling?’ asked the man.

  ‘Tap,’ I said. ‘First thing, Meg, before anything else.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Nine o’clock, then.’

  I watched her and she watched the stranger walking over to the bar. He had a nice, open face: what was his name? Todd, that was it. We’d all staggered over from the office. It had been a hard day. We’d arrived as a group but gradually been diluted by the crowd. I saw familiar faces around the room, which was full of happy people who had escaped from their offices. Todd was a client who had come in to check our proposal and he’d tagged along with us. Now he was trying to buy the drinks at the crowded bar. He was having difficulty because one of the women behind it was being shouted at by a rude customer. She was foreign – something like Indonesian – and the rude customer was yelling that she had given him the wrong drink. She was having difficulty understanding what he was saying. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you,’ he said.

  Todd came back clutching the drink for Meg, the two for me, and a beer for himself. ‘They wouldn’t give me tap water,’ he said. ‘It’s from a bottle.’

  I took a sip.

  ‘So, you like danger,’ I said.

  ‘You make it sound stupid but, yes, in a way.’

  Todd proceeded to tell us about a holiday he’d taken. He was cheerily proud of it. He and a group of friends had been celebrating something so they had undertaken a succession of dangerous sports across southern Africa. They had whitewater-rafted in Zambia, canoed past hippos in Botswana, bungee-jumped from a cable car going up Table Mountain and scuba-dived with Great White sharks.

  ‘Sounds amazing,’ said Meg. ‘I don’t think I’d have the nerve to do that.’

  ‘It was exhilarating,’ he said. ‘Terrifying as well. I think maybe I liked it more in retrospect.’

  ‘Did anybody get eaten?’ I asked.

  ‘You go down in cages,’ he said, ‘and we didn’t see any.’

  ‘Cages?’ I said, pulling a face. ‘I thought you liked danger.’

  He looked bemused. ‘Are you kidding?’ he said. ‘I’d like to see you jump from a cable car hundreds of feet up with just an elastic band for protection.’

  I laughed, but not meanly, I hope. ‘Haven’t you read our brochure?’ I said. ‘We’ve arranged bungee-jumps. We’ve done the risk assessments, we’ve organized the insurance. I can tell you that it’s less dangerous than crossing the road.’

  ‘It’s an adrenaline rush all the same,’ Todd said.

  ‘You can get adrenaline off the shelf,’ I said. Was he going to be offended, or was he going to smile?

  He shrugged self-deprecatingly and smiled. ‘So, what’s your idea of danger?’ he said.

  I thought for a moment. ‘Real things, where it matters. Searching for unexploded mines and defusing them. Working as a miner – but not in Britain. I mean in Russia or the Third World.’

  ‘What frightens you most?’

  ‘Lots of things. Lifts, bulls, heights, bad dreams. Almost everything about my job. Failure. Talking in public.’

  Todd laughed. ‘I don’t believe that,’ he said. ‘It was a good presentation today.’

  ‘I was terrified beforehand. I always am.’

  ‘So you agree with me. You like challenges.’

  I shook my head. ‘Your bungee-jumping and canoeing past hippos, that was in a brochure. You knew how it was going to turn out.’ I heard a noise behind me and turned round. The man was complaining to the woman again, but worse this time. She was trying to explain and she was almost crying.

  ‘What about you, Meg?’ Todd asked, turning towards her. She smiled up at him shyly and opened her mouth, but I interrupted her reply.

  ‘You’re saying you like risk?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Adrenaline?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Do you want to show me?’

  ‘Holly!’ said Meg nervously.

  Todd’s eyes flickered from side to side. I detected a flutter of excitement, but also of nervousness. What was coming?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You see that man at the bar, the one being rude to the girl?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think he’s being a bully?’

  ‘Probably. Yes.’

  ‘Go and tell him to stop it and to apologize for his behaviour.’

  Todd tried to speak, but started to cough instead. ‘Don’t be daft,’ he said finally.

  ‘You think he’ll hit you?’ I said. ‘I thought you were attracted to danger.’

  Todd’s expression hardened. This wasn’t funny any more. And he had stopped liking me. ‘It’s just a way of showing off,’ he said.

  ‘You’re scared of doing it.’

  ‘Of course I’m scared.’

  ‘If you’re scared of it, the only way to get rid of the feeling is to do it. It’s like scuba-diving with sharks. But without the cage.’

  ‘No.’

  I put my two glasses down on a table. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘No, Holly, don’t…’ said Meg and Todd together.

  That was the only encouragement I needed. I walked over to the man at the bar. He was wearing a suit. Every man in the room was wearing a suit. He must have been in his mid-thirties, balding, especially on the crown of his head. He was florid-faced from the heat of the day and maybe from the week’s work and his agitation. I hadn’t noticed how large he was. His jacket fitted awkwardly across his broad shoulders. And I hadn’t noticed that he was with two other men. He was still saying something basically unintelligible to the woman.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  He turned, startled and angry. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he said.

  ‘You need to say sorry to this woman,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t talk to people like that. You need to apologize.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  He pronounced it with particular emphasis on the k, so there was a pause between the two words. Did he think I was going to walk away? Did he think I was going to cry? I picked up his drink from the bar. It was a tumbler. I brandished it at him, holding it barely an inch from his chin. It would be good to say that the whole bar fell silent, like in an old Western, but there was no more than a ripple of attention just around us. The man looked down at the glass, as if he was trying to see the knot of his own loosened tie. I could see he was thinking quickly: Is this woman mad? Is she really going to smash a glass in my face? For this? And I should have been thinking much the same: If he could insult and shout at some poor woman behind the bar for giving him the wrong drink, what would he do to me for
physically threatening him? And I might have been thinking, as Todd had probably been thinking, that this man might be just out of prison. He might have a propensity for violence. He might especially enjoy picking on females. None of this occurred to me. I was just looking into his eyes. I felt the throb of the pulse in my neck. I had the vertiginous feeling of having no idea what would happen in the next five seconds.

  And then the man’s face relaxed into a smile. ‘All right,’ he said. Delicately he took the glass from my hand, as if it might explode. He downed it in one. ‘On one condition.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I buy you a drink.’

  I started to say no and looked round for Todd. He was gone, as was Meg. I wondered at what point they had fled the scene. Was it in anticipation of what might happen? Or was it when they saw what actually had happened? I gave a shrug. ‘Just do it,’ I said.

  He was quite gentlemanly about it. He gestured to the nervous barmaid. He nodded at me. ‘This woman – what’s your name?’

  ‘Holly Krauss,’ I said.

  ‘Miss Holly Krauss tells me that I was rude to you and that I ought to apologize. On reflection I think she is right. So, I’m very sorry.’ The woman looked at me and then at him again. I don’t think she understood properly what was going on. The man, whose name was Jim, ordered me a double gin and tonic and another for himself.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘And, incidentally, she really is a bloody awful barmaid.’

  I gulped back my drink and he ordered me another, and from then on the evening speeded up. It was as if I had been on a big dipper and it had climbed and climbed all day, and at the moment when I held the glass under Jim’s chin it had got to the highest point where it perched for a moment, then began to descend more and more quickly. The bar began to feel like a party where I knew quite a lot of the people or wanted to know them or they wanted to know me. I talked to Jim and his friends, who found the whole episode with the glass very funny and kept on telling it, teasing him about it.

  I was talking to a man who worked in the office across the courtyard from us, and when he headed off with some friends along the road to a private club for supper he asked me along and I went. Events occurred quickly but also in snapshots, like moments illuminated by a strobe light. The club was in an eighteenth-century townhouse, all shabby wood panelling and bare boards. It was an evening where everything seemed easy, available and possible. One of the men at the table where we ate was the director of the club so he was joking with the waiter and getting special food for us to try. I had a long, intense conversation with a woman who worked for something amazing, a film or photographic company or a magazine, and later I couldn’t remember a word of it. The only thing I remembered was that when she stood up to go she kissed me full and hard on my mouth, so that I tasted her lipstick.