Isabelle leaned forward, her eyes sombre. ‘I sent him to his room to get some sleep, Allie. He’s been right here for days. He’s exhausted.’
‘Days?’ She searched Isabelle’s eyes. ‘How long …?’
‘You’ve been unconscious for three days, Allie. You were very badly hurt – you have a head injury. Your left arm is broken.’
Allie gave a slow shallow nod to show she wasn’t surprised. Then her gaze met Isabelle’s and held it. ‘Jo.’
A long pause followed, but then Isabelle’s reply came in a low, steady voice, as if she’d prepared for this moment. ‘Jo didn’t make it, Allie.’
Somebody moaned and Allie wondered if it was her. Picking up her good hand, Isabelle held it tightly. ‘Zoe ran fast; we got there quickly, but she’d lost too much blood.’ Her voice caught and she paused for a long moment. ‘There was nothing anyone could do. She was already dead when we got there.’
A tear rolled down the side of Allie’s face. ‘How?’
The headmistress’ lips trembled. ‘We found some things in her room.’
‘What?’ Allie asked, although she thought she might already have guessed.
‘Letters and notes,’ Isabelle said, ‘from Gabe.’
Hatred filled Allie’s heart.
‘They’d been in communication for a while. He told her he wanted to talk; that he missed her and wanted to say he was sorry. He played on her emotions, her unresolved feelings for him. They must have arranged to meet that night. When she got there the gate was open. They argued. She tried to run away. He had a knife …’
A sob wrenched through Allie and she let go of Isabelle’s hand to cover her face. ‘Oh Jo.’
Was it her fault? Hadn’t Jo warned her, in a way? She said, ‘I never got to ask him why he did what he did.’ Why hadn’t she realised Jo wouldn’t be able to accept that? That she’d insist on knowing why?
Now Isabelle was crying, too. ‘You did everything you could, Allie. Nobody could have saved her.’
But that was a lie, wasn’t it?
Early the next morning, Rachel appeared in her doorway with a steaming mug of coffee and a bowl of porridge. Her eyes were red and puffy but she was composed.
‘I don’t know if they feed you up here,’ she said, forcing a sad smile.
Sitting in the chair by the bed, she stirred the oats (‘with brown sugar and cinnamon, the way you like it’). Allie’s bruised jaw and throat made eating painful but she was surprised to find she was hungry. Rachel fed her small spoonfuls and waited patiently while she forced the food down. When she’d eaten enough, Rachel closed the door to her room, moved the side table out of the way and climbed up on the bed beside her, careful not to jar her broken arm. Then, holding Allie’s good hand, she told her everything she knew.
Gabe most likely passed notes to Jo through Nathaniel’s spy. The last note probably arrived the night of the ball, thus sparking the panic that the school was being attacked. It must have been his footprints the guards saw in the snow. That person had then slipped the notes into Jo’s room at night. It wasn’t clear if Jo knew who the spy was, or if they had some system for her writing back.
‘Then, just before eleven o’clock, that person, whoever it is, opened the gate,’ Rachel said.
Allie’s heartbeat seemed unnaturally loud in her ears.
‘The gate opens by remote control kept in Isabelle’s office,’ Rachel explained. ‘There is no other way. So whoever opened the gate is close enough to all of us to get into her office and not be noticed. A teacher, most likely. Although it could be a senior Night School student.’
Allie’s chest seemed to constrict her lungs and she forced herself to keep breathing.
Isabelle and Raj believed the driver had parked the car off the road in the forest about a hundred yards from the entrance. Gabe then went ahead on foot to meet Jo.
‘We don’t know why he killed her. Maybe she was planning to tell Dad or Isabelle about her meetings with him.’ Rachel’s hand was warm against hers. ‘Or maybe he only meant to hurt her and it all went too far. Either way, Dad thinks Gabe knew you and Zoe would be patrolling at that time. And that the only thing that would get you to leave the school grounds would be to help someone you loved.’
A tear rolled down Allie’s face on to the pillow. She closed her eyes, wanting the story to end.
‘After that we think he just waited for you to try and save her.’
Allie’s shoulders shook with grief.
‘But what he didn’t count on,’ Rachel was crying now, too; her voice shook as she stroked Allie’s hair, ‘was how very good you are at fighting back.’
Jo was buried on Christmas Eve at Highgate Cemetery in London. It was a slow news week, so the national newspapers picked up the story. They all reported the tragic death of a beautiful, wealthy teenager in a car accident on an icy country road.
EPILOGUE
Ten steps, eleven steps, twelve steps …
Moving slowly and painfully, Allie walked down the infirmary hallway. It was seventeen endless steps up the hall to the window at the end, and seventeen long steps back down the hall to the stairwell. Her legs were shaky. Her slippers made a zombie-shuffling sound on the floor.
‘Still practising?’ The nurse stopped to watch her with kind eyes. ‘You’re getting better, Allie.’
Setting her jaw, Allie took the seventeenth step and stopped to breathe. Sweat poured down her face. ‘Thanks.’ She tried to smile but feared she’d made a hash of it. She didn’t smile much any more.