I got off the train, heading for the Tube. The cheque felt heavy in my pocket and as I waited for the tube train to arrive I allowed myself a small cash-based fantasy. The other day, Emily and I were talking about my writing ambitions: she read a couple of my short stories and told me they were “incredible”. Of course, she’s biased, but it made me glow to hear that. My dream has always been to write full-time; to be a writer, not a fucking call centre worker. I’m sick of McJobs. I remember Mum telling me once that it was stupid to have such unrealistic ambitions. ‘You’ll just come crashing down,’ she said. Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s better to try to fly than spend your whole life hugging the ground because you’re scared. There was a poster on the wall behind me, a huge pair of star-shaped sunglasses from the cover of a debut novel looming over me. The author of that novel must have been in the same position as me once. It isn’t impossible to fly. I decided right there and then that over the next couple of months, while I was looking for work and while the £4000 lasted, I would spend every spare minute writing.

I found a wrinkled copy of The Camden Journal on the tube train and stuffed it into my bag, thinking it might be worth checking the job pages, just in case there was anything worth applying for.

As soon as I got home I called Emily.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

‘Hmm. Well…I’ll tell you later. What time can you come round? Or do you want to go out?’

She hesitated. ‘Do you mind if we give tonight a miss?’

‘I...’

‘I’m really tired. I need to sleep.’

‘Oh.’ My throat had dried up. ‘Okay.’

She sighed, half-amused, half-exasperated. ‘Alex, sweetheart, don’t sound so down. It doesn’t mean I’ve gone off you. I’m just really knackered and I wouldn’t be good company tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘And the other reason I need to get an early night is that I can’t afford to be late tomorrow.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well… actually, it was really weird. I saw Pernilla outside the office and told her I’d been to the doctor. But then, a few minutes later, she came into the office and said that if I lied to her again I’d be back on slush pile duty. She said she knew I’d been with my boyfriend. And I’m really bad at lying, Alex – I could feel myself blushing. I asked her how she knew and she said a little bird told her.’

‘A little bird?’

‘Yeah. And get this – she said, “I’m awfully pleased to hear that you’ve managed to finally lose your virginity, but if you don’t shape up you’ll have to make a choice between getting laid and getting paid”.’

‘What a bitch.’

‘You said it.’

‘Poor Emily. Pernilla’s probably just jealous... and I bet she was just guessing, anyway. Maybe you’ve got the air of a well-satisfied woman.’

She laughed, a low, throaty chuckle that sent a thrill through me. ‘The cat who got the cream. Actually, after she’d had a go at me I went into the ladies to check that I didn’t have any love bites.’

We said goodbye and I went to my bedroom. I felt restless and bored, an evening without Emily stretching out drearily before me, the taste of the day’s events still in my mouth. Sitting on my bed, I pulled The Camden Journal out of my bag and started leafing through it. And that’s when I saw it: on page 8. There was a picture of a scowling woman, and underneath was the headline ‘Woman Urges Police to Investigate Fall Death’.

I caught my breath; my heart started thumping like a techno track. I read on:

When Elaine Meadows returned home from a year-long backpacking trip around Asia last week, she was a woman with a mission. While she was in Asia she had been informed that one of her closest friends had died in a fall from the fire escape of her building.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ said Ms Meadows, 30. ‘I know that Kathy used to climb that fire escape a lot. She was such a careful person, I find it really hard to accept that she just slipped.’

Kathy Noonan, 31, had, according to the official report, been out drinking in a pub near her home in Camden. That night she had attempted to climb onto the roof and had fallen to her death. The police said there was no suspicion of foul play.

But Ms Meadows decided to do some investigating of her own, unable to believe that her old friend had died in ‘a stupid accident.’

‘I went to the pub, the George V, where Kathy had been drinking that night and spoke to the regulars there. They remembered Kathy well. And one guy told me that he saw Kathy there that evening – with a man.’

Ms Meadows wants to know why the police have never tried to find this man and talk to him. She is calling for the police to reopen the investigation.

‘I want them to find and interview this man. If he’s reading this, I want him to come forward and explain himself. Only then will I rest. Only then will I be convinced that my friend was not murdered.’

If anyone has any information about Ms Noonan’s death, The Camden Journal has opened a confidential hotline. The number is...

I threw the paper to the floor, trying to catch my breath, trying to calm down. Every hair on my body was standing on end. I thought I was going to be sick, but somehow I held it back.

I knew my hometown was cursed. My own mother is my bad luck talisman. Just when it looked like everything was going to be fine, this happens.

Fuck. Fucking fucking fuck.

Chapter 23

Siobhan

Wednesday morning.

As I was halfway through chapter 8 of my ‘novel’, obliviously typing away, the telephone rang, heralding the end of my writing career. It was Patricia. I have put ‘novel’ in inverted commas, since she does not appear to think it even deserves the description.

And besides, now it really isn’t a novel anymore. When our interminably awkward call was finally over, I dragged the computer file into the trash folder on my desktop and emptied it, putting the lid back on the cyber-dustbin before I had time to change my mind. Then I took the memory stick containing the back-up, placed it carefully on the kitchen floor, and pounded it with a hammer until it splintered and shattered, destroying all my carefully thought-out words. Broke one of my kitchen tiles too. But who cares.

All that work. All that effort, gone, for nothing. My career is now officially in the toilet. Of course Patricia didn’t put it that bluntly. In fact she was complimentary enough about certain parts of it – but basically she didn’t think it was good enough yet to bring up at an acquisitions meeting. Which means she thinks I’ve lost it, I’m finished. There’s no other explanation, when my last publishing deal was garnered on a mere six chapters of TLA. I’m buggered if I’m going to slave over 130,000 words of a new one and then get it rejected – no thank you very much, life’s too short.

Once again, my judgement is totally screwed up. How can I be that deluded? I really thought the book had been going well, that I’d broken the back of it, and that it would be plain sailing from here on in. But no: Patricia didn’t like the main character (I didn’t tell her it was me – that would just have been too depressing), she said she was too unstable and paranoid to be appealing to readers. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about – or maybe she’s just out to get me? She complained that something should really have happened after seven chapters, but that there was no action. What does she expect? Bloody ‘Diehard – The Novel’?

And to make matters worse, I’ve since had an email from her, trying to be placatory, telling me to ‘keep going’ with it, and that she’s sorry if she came over a little bluntly but that she really values my work, and is sure that the new novel will be ‘splendid’ when it’s finished.