My lungs tightened.

It’s just a bird.

I could feel the heat of its eyes on me. Polished black marbles. Charcoal beak shining.

‘Will you tell your parents about me?’ I said as I stood.

She didn’t answer immediately.

‘Please don’t.’

‘I said I wouldn’t,’ she said a little crossly. ‘So I won’t.’ Then she gave me a teasing smile. ‘Not today anyway.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Edie

July 1986

Edie reached out of her window and struck a red-tipped match against the wall. The head burst into flame with a sputter and she held it to the end of her cigarette, the tobacco crackling as it caught. She inhaled then hung her hand out of the window to allow the smoke to curl upwards into the sky rather than into her room. Not that she cared if her parents smelt it. What were they going to do? Send her back to London? Hardly a punishment.

She could still see Tamsyn on the cliffs in the distance. She leant against the window frame as she smoked, her eyes fixed on the girl’s retreating figure, knotted red hair trailing behind her like a knight’s pennant.

The blazing sun had disappeared behind light grey clouds and it had started to rain. The relief from the heat was welcome. The rain wasn’t normal rain but that particular drizzly nothingness Edie only ever saw in Cornwall. More mist than rain. Cornwall had its own weather system as far as she could tell. There was nothing predictable about it at all. She watched the fine spots of water marking the cigarette, tiny dots turning its whiteness a translucent grey, the same grey, in fact, as Tamsyn’s childish cotton bra.

Edie had never met anybody that innocent before. That sheltered. It was so striking she wondered if perhaps it was put on. A well-rehearsed act designed to elicit sympathy and ward off punishment for breaking into houses. Clever if it was. Unnecessary though. Edie didn’t give a shit about her being in the house. When she’d heard noises downstairs her first thought was she was going to be kidnapped by someone who’d then send her father a ransom note made from newspaper cuttings demanding thousands of pounds, so it was quite a relief to discover a girl her own age as terrified as a rabbit in a snare. Plus she’d literally been about to kill herself with boredom and Tamsyn was a perfect distraction.

When Tamsyn finally disappeared out of view, Edie took a last drag then roughly stubbed her cigarette out on the wall below the window, which stained the paintwork with another charcoal smudge and sent out a shower of tiny sparks. She flicked it and it skimmed through the air and landed on the terrace below. She watched the cigarette end smoulder until it burnt out, a thin trail of smoke wending its way upwards and dissolving to nothing. She lifted her head and looked out over the sea. A handful of boats dotted the blue, and the horizon lay in the distance with exciting lands beyond, each of them offering a different adventure, like chocolates in a box.