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  Suddenly, Vikki was spun around in front of Sonja, her black extensions fanning out in an arc all around her. Vikki burst into a cackle of surprised laughter as the grinning lad grabbed her waist and whirled her round. He was, Sonja noticed, one of the crowd of boys she’d been wary of earlier. But now, she decided, they seemed all right. They were just goofing around, having a good time, and entertaining everyone into the bargain.

  “Hey-hey. Matt!” she shouted, spotting her friend pressing past the crowd that was now clapping on Vikki and her dance partner.

  Matt turned and smiled at her, but still had that glazed look about him she’d noticed an hour or so before when she last talked to him.

  “Cheer up!” she tried to cajole him. “Look how many people are here: this is your most successful party yet, if you hadn’t noticed!”

  Matt gazed round the den as if he hadn’t realised how packed it was with party animals.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Definitely!” Sonja beamed. “We’ll be talking about this one for months, I bet!”

  Just as she grabbed his hands and tried to get him to dance, there was an almighty crash and the music stopped dead.

  CHAPTER 19

  THINGS GET OUT OF HAND

  Ollie spotted Kerry over by the bookshelf. Behind her, some candles were still burning, spluttering in pools of melted wax. Their glow cast a halo of golden light around Kerry’s reddy-brown curls. She looked gorgeous, he thought, till he spotted her agitated expression.

  “All alone? What’s up?” he asked, slipping his arms round her waist.

  “Oh, nothing,” she shook her head. “I’m probably just being stupid.”

  “How come?” asked Ollie, now concerned.

  “Well… I was tired out dancing and left the others to it,” she nodded over in the direction of Vikki, Cat and Sonja, who’d been joined by Billy and Andy. “And I was just, y’know, people-watching, when I thought-I was sure that the guy over there in the blue shirt shoved a CD in his pocket.”

  “What, that guy who was mucking around and bashed into the CD player along with his mates?” said Ollie, remembering the moment half an hour earlier when the dancing throng had let out a groan as the music died. Luckily, there hadn’t been any damage done. Matt wasn’t even all that bothered, once he saw that everything was still working.

  “Uh-huh,” muttered Kerry.

  “Really? Maybe I should—”

  A commotion beside them made Ollie stop in his tracks.

  “Jesus-look what you’ve done, you idiot!”

  A girl they vaguely knew had been sprawled on one of the blow-up chairs. Sitting on the floor next to her was one of the rowdy bunch of lads, looking worse for wear and brandishing a cigarette.

  “Sorry, sorry I didn’t mean to—”

  The boy’s apology was halted when he started giggling. His mates, hearing the girl’s protest, had stopped dancing and turned round to see what was going on. Their laughter only fuelled the girl’s irritation.

  “Where’s Matt?” the girl shouted, angrily trying to get out of the rapidly deflating chair. “Wait till he sees what you’ve done with your stupid cigarette! You’ll have to pay for this!”

  “It was an accident!” the giggling boy managed to get out, before he doubled over laughing.

  “Maybe I should go and find Matt…” Ollie muttered to Kerry as they watched the scene in front of them.

  “I’ll go,” came Anna’s voice. They hadn’t seen her come over and join them. “I was just about to look for him anyway and apologise for being late.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ollie reassured her. “I don’t think he’ll have noticed. There’s too much going on here tonight for him to do a headcount of his mates…”

  “Hey, stranger!” Anna said softly, looking around the door into a low-lit bedroom.

  Over by the window, Matt sat looking into a dressing table drawer, his profile illuminated by an ornate lamp.

  “That’s pretty.”

  Anna stroked her finger down the stained-glass shade of the lamp and settled herself on the edge of the cabinet.

  “Yep, my mum chose it. She was into all that Art Deco stuff back then.”

  Anna nodded and looked into Matt’s face.

  “What’s wrong? How come you’re acting like a ghost at your own party?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the others say they’ve hardly seen anything of you tonight and here you are, hiding away on your own.”

  Matt shrugged and said nothing. The hand he had in the open drawer seemed to be playing with something small and metallic. Anna snuck a look and saw it was a clip-on earring.

  “Anyway,” she said, sweeping over his silence, “I just wanted to say sorry for being late. My fridge suddenly decided to pack up today-the floor was swimming with water when I finished up at work. It took hours to get the place sorted.”

  “Yeah?” said Matt, looking concerned. “You should have phoned me-I’d have come and helped!”

  “What, when you’ve got a houseful of people to entertain?” Anna laughed gently.

  “Oh, yeah!” Matt managed a laugh. “How could I forget that?”

  “So…” said Anna, dropping her glance to the earring. “Are you thinking of trying that on?”

  “Nah,” smiled Matt. “It’s my mum’s. It must have been lying here for years and years; she must have left it behind when she moved out. This used to be my parents’ bedroom… but it’s just spare now. Dad switched to another room.”

  “What’s got you thinking about her?”

  “It’s nothing. It’s stupid really,” he replied, looking down at the piece of jewellery. “It’s just that sometimes I… miss her, I guess.”

  “And Gaby?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s all piling in on you, isn’t it?” said Anna gently, seeing that the two things weren’t unconnected. To her, it sounded as if Matt hadn’t ever got over his mum and dad’s split; the not-so-long-ago break-up with Gabrielle seemed to have brought everything to the surface.

  “I guess. But it’s like my dad says, there’s no point getting hung up on the past. You’ve got to look forward…”

  “Sounds like good advice,” nodded Anna. “That’s the way I try to think myself.”

  “So what am I moping about for when I could be having a good time?” he said, sitting up straight and shaking himself as if he were shaking the memory of his mother away.

  “Exactly,” smiled Anna, taking the earring from his fingers and shutting it firmly back in the drawer again.

  “Joe, c’mon-dance!” yelled Andy, waving Joe over from the wall he was hugging.

  Joe shook his head; he wasn’t in the mood. There was a funny atmosphere at Matt’s tonight and he couldn’t quite relax.

  “Oooh, c’mon! C’mon and dance!” Joe heard a loud, sarcastic voice yell above the music.

  He spotted a guy in a blue shirt and combats standing with his mates by the side of the dancers. It was obvious they were seriously taking the mick out of Andy, flopping their wrists and mincing in some clichéd imitation of someone gay. It was true that Andy was gay, but he never acted like these guys were doing.

  Joe saw Andy turn round and throw them a look of contempt. He checked out the expressions on his other friends’ faces as they hesitated in their dancing and watched what was happening.

  Joe wasn’t close enough to hear what was said next, but the body language said it all. The boy in the blue shirt and his half dozen cronies started moving menacingly towards Andy through the crowd of dancers.

  His eyes flicking momentarily back to the others, Joe could make out the look of horror on the girls’ faces and the tension in Ollie and Billy’s as they squared up for what was about to happen.

  “Whoah there, lads!” he heard Alex suddenly say, stepping in in his best teacher-like manner to diffuse the situation.

  No one seemed to pay him the slightest attention.

  “Shit…” swore J
oe as he felt the adrenalin course through him. There was probably going to be a fight. And he was going to be in it.

  Joe saw the first punch land as he rushed into the crowd-the boy in the blue shirt aimed a blow to Andy’s stomach. Andy dipped out of sight, doubled up in pain, and Billy appeared in his place, cracking a retaliatory punch to the blue-shirted lad’s jaw.

  Alex’s long arms tried to stretch between the two factions and stop things escalating, but that was as effective as mad old King Canute ordering the tide to go back. Joe threw himself on to the back of a lad who was now hammering into Alex, using all his strength to pin the assailant’s arms to his sides in a vice-like grip.

  “Nice one, Joe!” he heard Ollie yell, and looked down at his friend’s wide-eyed face, right before a stray punch took Ollie unawares and sent him spinning back, crashing into shocked partygoers who went flying like skittles across the room.

  As the lad Joe was restraining thrashed about wildly, trying to dislodge him, Joe heard a girl scream above the shouting throng. A wave of panic seemed to rush through the room-and it wasn’t just because of the fight.

  “Oh my God,” muttered Joe, as he saw the sharp, glinting brightness of flames against the far wall.

  “Ready?” said Anna, holding out her hand to her friend. Her face was flushed prettily pink; her eyes flashed him a warm and knowing look.

  “Ready,” Matt grinned at her and leant over to switch off the lamp before he went downstairs and tried to enjoy his party properly.

  Spotting his reflection in the attached mirror, Matt quickly wiped away the tell-tale lipstick smudge around his mouth. In the same instant, a movement outside caught his eye.

  “Look,” he said, squinting out of the window into the randomly illuminated garden. “What are all those people doing? They’re running…”

  Anna leaned closer to him to have a look.

  “Just mucking around, I suppose. It’s a pretty mad party down there, even if you haven’t been aware of it. I mean, just listen to the racket going on downstairs!”

  The racket instantly became louder as the bedroom door was shoved open.

  “Quick!” said the girl in the doorway. “There’s a fire!”

  “What?” asked Matt, frozen to the spot.

  “There’s a fire!” the girl repeated, her eyes wide with alarm.

  At that moment, Matt heard the distant wail of a siren…

  Cat looked around frantically, but in the crush of bodies rushing to escape she couldn’t find any of the friends who had been so close to her only a few moments ago.

  She’d lost track of where everyone was when the fight had broken out. She’d been aware of Sonja and Vikki diving into the throng, trying to pull away two lads who were thumping punches into Andy. Ollie, Billy and Joe weren’t able to help; they were lost somewhere in the tumble of bodies moving across the room. Cat had heard someone screaming, then realised it was her. From somewhere Kerry had appeared, trying to comfort her, but then she’d disappeared, lost in the acrid billows of smoke that began swirling around the room.

  Cat hadn’t expected to feel any more terrified than she had been the previous Saturday, but terror was disorientating her: she should know her way round this house with her eyes closed, she’d been in it so often… Still, she blindly stumbled into the chest of drawers, when she thought she was close to the stairwell, and stopped dead. She took a deep breath as tears overwhelmed her and immediately broke into a choking cough.

  The arms that encircled her didn’t alarm her; she felt suddenly too weak and ill to protest as she was dragged away. Beneath her feet, she felt the wooden stairs that led up to the hallway, but she hardly had the energy to make it up them. If it wasn’t for the arms around her, bearing her weight, she felt she might have drifted down to the warm wood and never got up again.

  “Not far,” she heard an encouraging voice say, a voice that sounded very far away to her confused mind. The strobe light was still flickering madly in the hallway, casting an eerie light across the wafting smoke that was following them up the staircase from the basement.

  The cold air outside the front door hit her like a slap in the face.

  “Take deep breaths,” said the voice.

  Her eyes still stinging with the smoke, she did as she was told, all the while studying the face of the boy holding on to her.

  Who is he? Do I know him? she wondered, trying to put a name to the face.

  And then she realised; he was the boy with the glasses who’d unwittingly come to her rescue when that leering lad had been blocking her way out of the bathroom before. It looked like he’d come to her rescue again.

  “My friends…” she said feebly.

  “Um, I don’t know who they are,” muttered the boy, gazing off into the gloom of the garden, where dozens of people sat or stood around the lawn and driveway. “But you know Matt, don’t you? The guy whose party this is? He’s just over there.”

  Cat carried on with her deep breathing, feeling the cooling oxygen bring her mind back into focus.

  “Matt…” she murmured, watching him staring at the firemen spilling out of their truck. Then she noticed that his eyes were fixed on something else. Something that made his mouth hang open.

  “Dad?” she heard him gasp as his father clambered out of the car in the driveway.

  On the other side of the car, the passenger door sprang open. A woman stepped out and surveyed the scene with shock written all over her face.

  Cat did a double-take. This couldn’t be right, could it?

  “Mum?” she croaked as the woman spun round in her direction.

  CHAPTER 20

  COMING CLEAN

  It was chilly in the kitchen-the door that led out to the conservatory and the door that led from there into the garden were wide open, letting the early morning air whisk away the last wisps of black smoke.

  All the windows in the house were open for the same reason. Apart from the front door, the only door resolutely closed was the one that led down to Matt’s den. Luckily, the fire had been contained down there and now that the firemen had left, there was nothing more that could be done tonight but close it up-sealing in the strange, choking odour of first charred and now soaked furniture and fixtures.

  “I still can’t believe you had candles down there! And letting any old gatecrasher just wander in, for God’s sake…” Matthew Ryan Snr muttered, hugging his right hand round a rapidly cooling mug of tea and running his left hand through his receding hair.

  Like the other three people sitting around the kitchen table, he looked exhausted after the drama of the last couple of hours. Not to mention the excessive amounts of swearing and ranting he’d done when he’d first been confronted with the vision of his home billowing with smoke.

  Matt Jnr had used up a year’s worth of apologies in that last same hour and so said nothing in reply to his dad’s comment.

  “Christ-it’s just sheer luck that it didn’t spread through the whole house! Someone could have been seriously hurt, or killed, even!” Mr Ryan exclaimed for the fortieth time, shaking his head in disbelief.

  His son remained silent, nervously biting at his lip.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Catrina? Are you sure we shouldn’t drive down to casualty?” said Sylvia Osgood, looking uncharacteristically concerned over (rather than irritated by) her daughter.

  “I’m fine, Mum. The ambulance guys looked me over. They said I was OK, remember?”

  Physically, Cat felt amazingly unscathed by her ordeal, but she was sure she was in shock. In shock at being caught up in the whole panic during the fire, naturally: but also in shock at seeing her mother climb out of Matt’s father’s car not so long ago.

  “Mum,” said Cat, gathering her senses together now that the hot sweet tea had done its job, warming her up and calming her down at the same time. “What are you… I mean, weren’t you supposed to be away with some friend?”

  “Well, I was,” replied her mother, bristling slightly. Fa
ced with an awkward question, Sylvia was reverting to type, her barriers immediately coming up.

  “What, him?” squeaked Cat, pointing over at Matt’s dad. “He’s who you went on holiday with?!”

  In her befuddled state, Cat had found it hard enough to understand what the two of them were doing together this evening. It only now sank in that Matt’s father was the person her mother had spent the entire week with.

  “Yes,” replied Sylvia Osgood, trying to appear calm and collected.

  Cat opened and shut her mouth a few times, completely stumped for what to say next. Luckily, Matt seemed to find his voice at last.

  “Uh… and how long… I mean, how long have you two…” he bumbled, his eyes saucer-sized with shock.

  His father coughed-though whether it was from the effects of smoke inhalation or sudden nervousness it was hard to tell. “I’ve been seeing Sylvia since the beginning of the year.”

  Cat stared from Matthew Snr’s face to her mother’s. She’d always been aware that their parents knew each other through mutual connections. She even vaguely remembered that her mother had come to a party at Matt’s house around Christmas or New Year. But the fact that they were going out? She couldn’t get her head around that…

  Suddenly, she remembered the other matter she hadn’t been able to get her head around.

  “So, if you’re going out with him, why are you moving away from Winstead?” she asked, her heart thundering.

  “Moving?” Sylvia Osgod frowned. “What are you talking about, Catrina?”

  “I heard you on the phone,” Cat mumbled, suddenly feeling about five years old under her mother’s glare. “You were talking about checking out property.”

  “Ah! Property!” exclaimed Matt’s dad. “I’ve got an old factory that I’m redeveloping into luxury flats down in the West Country. I’ve been boring Sylvia rigid about it, and thought it would be nice to show it off seeing as we were taking a few days holiday together anyway.”

  Cat felt her face flush at hearing the truth; so her mother hadn’t been planning to move away. She’d been worrying over nothing.