Page 4 of Dead Fall

‘Yep.’ Cassie pictured the infamous image of Bronte in the tabloids. It was night-time and she wore a figure-hugging evening dress but was barefoot and clearly drunk, stoned – or both – lipstick smeared, mascara gone walkabout down her face. Caught at the door to her block she had turned to remonstrate with the paparazzi, face angry, mouth open – a moment illuminated by a brutal flash. Under the unflattering picture one of the headlines had screamed: BRONTE MELTDOWN! And underneath, the faux-concerned subhead read: FEARS THE TROUBLED STAR WILL BE THE NEXT AMY.

Aka Amy Winehouse.

Bastards.

The effort of memory twisted Jason’s face before he burst out, ‘Bronte! Yeah, that’s her. She did “Clean Break”.’

Cassie shrugged, frowning.

Jason looked incredulous ‘You must’ve heard it? Biggest dance track of last summer.’ Excitement had flushed his already ruddy cheeks. ‘We’ve never had a celeb in before.’

Moving so that she blocked his view of Bronte’s body, Cassie fixed him with a look. ‘She isn’t a celebrity in here, OK? We treat her exactly the same as we would any of our guests, understood?’

Jason shrugged, but as he walked away she could hear him singing the earworm she dimly remembered playing everywhere last summer, ‘“Break, break, I need a break, break, break. Gimme a break” .?.?.’

After she’d removed the skullcap to access Bronte’s brain, her eye fell on the stream of water that constantly sluiced the autopsy table, carrying the blood away towards the drain-hole between her feet. She gripped the table edge, pitched back to that terrible moment in the showers in Year 10.

The thread of what looked like blood in the water heading for the drain. Muffled laughter. Then the high-pitched sound of a girl keening.

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.’

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