Scenes from a Tragedy E-Book

Carole Hailey

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 548

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'COMPULSIVE AS HELL' ABIGAIL DEAN If you hurt me, I'll hurt you. Not right away of course, because where's the fun in that? When an empty passenger plane mysteriously crashes in the Lake District, journalist Carly Atherton is determined to get to the truth of what happened - the love of her life was one of the two pilots on board. But when she contacts the family of the other pilot, the conflicting memories of his wife and his sister draw her into a story far darker than she could possibly have imagined. As Carly delves into the dynamics of a seemingly ordinary family, she realises that the bonds that shape us can also tear us apart - and that sometimes there are monsters living among us, hiding in plain sight... 'MASTERFUL' JANICE HALLETT 'EXTRAORDINARY' JENNIE GODFREY READERS LOVE SCENES FROM A TRAGEDY 'Sensational' ***** 'Completely unputdownable' ***** 'I stayed up until 2am to finish' ***** 'Phenomenal' ***** 'A blooming cracking read' *****

Leseprobe

Also by Carole Hailey

The Silence Project

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Copyright © Carole Hailey, 2025

The moral right of Carole Hailey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 153 1

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 80546 154 8

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 155 5

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

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For Andrew and Fiona

Contents

Psychological Evaluation (Excerpt)

Introduction

Planet Home Article I

Notes

Izzy’s Story 1984–1992

Notes

Planet Home Article II

Notes

Izzy’s Story 1997–1998

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2001–2003

Notes

Grace’s Story 2005

Notes

Grace’s Story 2005–2006

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2008

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2009–2010

Notes

Grace’s Story 2012–2013

Notes

Grace’s Story 2016

Notes

Grace’s Story 2016

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2017

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2018–2019

Notes

Grace’s Story 2019–2020

Notes

Izzy’s Story 2020

Notes

Grace’s Story 2020

The Inquest

Notes

Grace’s Story 9 September 2020

Notes

The Trial

Notes

Interview with Fiona Mackie: Part I

Interview with Fiona Mackie: Part II

Notes

Izzy’s Story 15 December 2012

Final Notes

Postscript

Psychological Evaluation (excerpt) prepared by Fiona Mackie, BSc (Hons), MSc, PGDip, Forensic Psychologist

The client presents as an intelligent, verbally fluent, self-confident individual.

During assessment, the client displayed pronounced antisocial behavioural traits including narcissism, excessive self-esteem, grandiosity and sensation-seeking. Also present was a highly superficial response to others, a pronounced lack of empathy, a ruthless and calculating attitude towards interpersonal relationships, coupled with a relative immunity to experiencing negative emotions, such as phobias, stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms.

The client’s presentation is highly consistent with that of a psychopathic personality.

The results of the Psychopath Checklist: Screening Version assessment are as follows: a score of 12 for Part 1 (personality) and 9 for Part 2 (antisocial behaviour). This gives the client a total of 21 out of a possible 24. Scores of 18 or higher offer a strong indication of psychopathy.

It should be noted that 12 is the maximum score obtainable for Part 1 and is a very strong indication of the presence of traits displayed by highly psychopathic individuals.

The client does not view themselves as suffering from a disorder or mental illness and is content with their lifestyle and actions, regardless of the consequences that may result.

[Reproduced with kind permission of Fiona Mackie]

Introduction

My part in this story began with a news alert on my phone one Wednesday evening.

Associated Press

9 September 2020

19:05

Breaking News

Reports are coming in of the disappearance somewhere over the Lake District of an Airbus A320 believed to belong to the Goldfinch Airlines fleet.

More information to follow shortly …

I had set ‘Goldfinch Airlines’ as a flag on a news alert service back in 2017 when my brother Jamie began working for them as an A320 pilot. Jamie had been recalled from furlough after Covid had grounded the planes and on 9 September he was due to make his first flight since the start of the pandemic. I was still staring at the first news alert when a second one popped up.

Associated Press

9 September 2020

19:11

Breaking News

The UK’s air traffic control agency has confirmed that shortly after 18:15 this evening it lost contact with Goldfinch Airlines flight GFA578 which had departed from Stansted Airport bound for Glasgow.

Jamie usually flew out of Stansted. I fumbled with my mobile, jabbing at the screen, finally managing to dial his number. It rang and rang. I hung up and called again. This time it went straight to voicemail. I left a message. I’ve seen the news. Where are you? Call me. I opened my laptop and searched for Goldfinch Airlines, scrolling through their corporate website and pictures of the shiny new planes they had taken delivery of in late 2019, one of which was now missing somewhere in the Lake District.

One of which my brother was due to be flying.

I drank a mouthful of coffee and immediately wished I hadn’t because I felt sick. I got up from my desk in the corner of my bedroom, paced around the room, then checked the BBC News website, but it was just showing the same information: a missing flight somewhere over the Lake District.

I tried my brother’s number again, and again it went straight to voicemail. I could hear myself making a weird high-pitched noise, which I didn’t seem able to stop. I turned on a twenty-four-hour news channel. A ticker ran along the bottom of the screen.

Breaking News: Reports of missing Goldfinch Airlines plane over the Lake District … National Air Traffic Services confirms lost contact …

I tried Jamie’s phone again and this time it rang. Was that good? Did it mean he was OK? I willed him to pick up, but it went through to voicemail. I left another message. My hands were shaking. Should I ring my parents?

I turned back to the news. Nothing had changed. The presenter was talking about the gloomy predictions for the British economy and I stared at the words rolling past on the news ticker. Then my phone rang. For a moment I didn’t look at it. I couldn’t bear it if it wasn’t him. The phone kept ringing. I picked it up off the desk and held it to my ear. When I heard Jamie say, ‘Hey sis,’ I burst into tears.

My brother wasn’t on flight GFA578, but he should have been. Jamie was supposed to be the first officer, sitting alongside the captain, but that same morning he had tested positive for Covid so another pilot flew in his place. If my brother hadn’t caught Covid when he did, if he’d been asymptomatic and hadn’t realised he had it or if he’d decided to go to work anyway, he would be dead.

From the Head of Communications at Goldfinch

Airlines

10 September 2020

For Immediate Release

Goldfinch Airlines can confirm that the two people on board flight GFA578 that crashed into the slopes of Big Crag mountain in the Lake District were Captain Daniel Taylor and First Officer Luke Emery. Both pilots had completed mandatory simulator training in the days before the flight, after returning from COVID-19 furlough.

Goldfinch Airlines wishes to convey its deepest condolences to the family and friends of the deceased pilots. Daniel Taylor joined Goldfinch Airlines in 2016 and had recently been promoted to captain. He was married with an infant daughter. First Officer Luke Emery had been working for Goldfinch Airlines since 2018. Both pilots had exemplary flight safety records.

As has been widely reported, flight GFA578, which was en route from Stansted to Glasgow, was a so-called ‘ghost flight’ with no passengers or cabin crew on board. In common with other airlines, Goldfinch Airlines has a contractual obligation to utilise landing slots at airports or lose its right to land. The requirement to maintain ghost flights has only recently been reintroduced after being temporarily suspended at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is impossible to know if things would have been different if the plane had been carrying passengers. What is certain is that flight GFA578 was in the air solely for the purpose of making an utterly pointless journey between Stansted and Glasgow.

My brother is haunted by the knowledge that it should have been him on the doomed flight. He tortures himself by wondering whether he could have prevented what happened or whether, like Daniel Taylor and Luke Emery, his life would have ended that day.

If this was a twisty psychological thriller then a reader might be presented with several questions – Who? How? Why? – and the answers revealed at key points during the story as the writer builds pace, intrigue and tension.

But however much I might wish this story was fiction, it is not. There is no unsolved crime for the reader to puzzle over. You already know who died and how. Very shortly you will know who was responsible. The only question this story concerns itself with is why. Why did flight GFA578 crash into a mountain, killing two men?

As a journalist, this question has consumed me for the last four years. I have thought of little else because not only was my brother supposed to have been on that plane but also, until eight months before he died, the pilot who replaced him on the flight had been my boyfriend.

My brother and I had known Luke – First Officer Emery – since we were kids. Now, Luke was dead. Luke, who cracked jokes that should have been left behind in the playground, who would rather be an hour early than five minutes late, who was chronically messy and unfailingly kind, happy to listen to anyone who wanted to talk. Luke, who, since he was a small boy, had a habit of pinching his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger whenever he was thinking and a slow way of blinking that gave him the look of someone permanently on the edge of sleep. Luke with his red hair and freckles, his love of birthday cards with terrible puns, his revolting homebrewed beer and his not-so-secret obsession with Strictly.

Jamie and Luke had gone through school and university together, completed their flying training together, gone to cricket and rugby matches together, had numerous camping trips and been on holiday together, played five-a-side football on the same team. Jamie joined Goldfinch Airlines and a year later Luke left his previous airline and followed him. Three weeks before the crash, my brother had asked Luke to be his best man.

My relationship with Luke was more complicated. As teenagers, he had been my first boyfriend, my first kiss, my first everything. And I was his. But as we got older, our relationship evolved into one of those on-again/off-again situations until in 2018, surprising absolutely no one but ourselves, we decided it should become permanently on. And that’s how it remained right up to the moment in January 2020 when I did something that hurt him so badly that, as lockdown loomed, Luke told me he wanted us to spend it apart. He said he wasn’t sure he could forgive me, but I knew the separation wasn’t permanent. How could it be? We were Luke and Carly. Carly and Luke. We’d be on again soon enough. Everyone knew that.

This is why I needed to understand what had happened. I had to find out for Luke, for his parents, for Jamie, for everyone who had known him. Most of all, though, I had to find out for me. I needed to know why he had died. And why I would never hear him say he forgave me.

In truth, though, that wasn’t all. I had another motivation.

In 2020, I was one of the journalists responsible for the publication of a story which made national headlines. It broke during the first national lockdown and, aside from Covid, was the biggest news story for almost a week. I have to be careful about what I say. I can’t mention the company involved by name because the litigation is still ongoing, but you’ll probably know who I’m referring to when I say that my key source’s ‘recollections’ were a complete fabrication. The backlash was huge. I was accused of inadequate and incompetent fact-checking. Of bringing my employer into disrepute. I was forced to leave my job, and my career as an investigative journalist – the only thing I’d ever wanted to do – seemed to be over.

Which is why I not only wanted to find out what had happened on board that plane, but I needed to find out. By investigating the story behind flight GFA578 I hoped I could begin to redeem my reputation. I would use the tragic deaths of the two pilots as the focal point for a series of articles about the requirement for airlines to fly entirely empty planes all over Europe. It wasn’t the most earth-shattering story – certainly not on a par with the sort of reporting I’d been doing before – but if nothing else, I could try and shine a light on the catastrophic environmental impact of this ridiculous policy and at least I’d still be able to call myself a journalist.

I approached several publications but only the online climate-emergency journal Planet Home was interested and, with their kind permission, I have included short extracts from the series of articles they commissioned me to write (which can be found at www.planethome.org).

By the time I’d finished my investigations, I not only had many hours of recorded conversations but had come to realise that what lay beneath the tragedy of flight GFA578 was a far darker and more terrifying tale than I could have possibly imagined at the outset.

It appeared that I had the makings of a book.

As a first attempt, I spent a couple of months making a misguided effort to fictionalise the story, changing names and situations, but the whole thing felt flat. It was a genuine case of truth being stranger than fiction. My next attempt was to transcribe the interviews word for word, but that didn’t work either. Unedited transcribed conversations do not make for an engaging read: there were far too many repetitions, recollections of the same events, questions, prompts and clarifications.

I had been on the point of abandoning the project completely, deciding it was all too complicated to turn into something anyone might like to read, when I happened to go for drinks with a group of friends and found myself chatting to someone I hadn’t met before. She was a curator at a small art gallery just off New Bond Street, and as she explained how she went about her job, selecting and arranging the artworks to form a narrative which she interpreted with catalogue notes, I realised I had the solution.

Rather than including hundreds of pages of transcripts, I instead would use them to create a coherent, fluent story, removing repetitions, incomplete sentences, dead ends and random conversational segues. You will find large stretches of this book read almost like a novel: scenes from life, if you will. This is entirely deliberate and was done with the consent of all concerned.

I selected only the most relevant, illuminating content to present in the form that you now hold in your hands: part reportage, part narrative. Other than where it was necessary for the story to make sense, the material appears in the same chronology as it was told to me, and where relevant, I have included news-clippings – although, as the details surrounding the plane crash itself are extremely well-documented online, I have kept these to a minimum.

I fact-checked everything as far as possible – I will not make that mistake a second time – but I should make clear that because significant parts of what happened took place behind closed doors, often with no witnesses, or witnesses who are no longer alive, or ones who were unwilling to speak to me, there are inevitably many things I have been unable to corroborate.

The only exception to my decision not to include transcripts is an interview I conducted with a forensic psychologist in April 2023. She received written permission from one of her clients to discuss their case history (including reproducing the excerpt from the psychological evaluation which precedes this introduction) and I am very grateful to Fiona Mackie for allowing me to include our conversation in its entirety.

Lastly, I have included my own notes, which are collated from notes and recordings that I made during the interviews and investigations and they will show how, initially, I couldn’t see what was right in front of me. My desire to get to the bottom of this tragedy meant I allowed myself to get too close and, for a while, I became part of the story. I am prepared for the inevitable criticism that I have not adhered to acceptable journalistic standards.

However, this is not intended to be a piece of journalism and, as much as this book may read in parts as though it is a novel, and as much as you might come to hope it is, this is not a work of fiction.

Instead, it is a cautionary tale. The story of a family that, on the face of it, could be yours. A story in which you may even recognise elements of yourself. But at its heart is a monster. Very early on you will understand who the monster is, but until the end you may not understand how they did what they did, and even then, you may still ask yourself why they did what they did. This book is an attempt to expose how they, and so many others like them, systematically destroy the lives of those they are closest to, even as they hide in plain sight.

Carly AthertonDecember 2024

Planet Home Article I

This is an extract from the first of a series of articles investigating ‘ghost flights’ written by Carly Atherton and published in the online journal Planet Home.

Last October I boarded a train from Euston in London bound for the Lake District. For each kilometre I travelled my carbon footprint was approximately 41 grams of CO2 emissions, but had I made the same journey on a domestic airline, that figure would have soared to 255 grams per kilometre.

I was heading to the northern tip of the Lake District National Park and the slopes of Big Crag, which boasts one of the highest peaks in England. A popular destination for climbers and hikers alike, Big Crag was thrust into the public consciousness on 9 September 2020 when an Airbus A320 smashed into the upper reaches of its south-east facing slope. The only two people on board – both pilots – died instantly.

I was on my way to visit the site of the crash. It was tragic that two lives had been lost, but although I was thankful that there weren’t more deaths, like many others I wanted to know why there were only two people on board flight GFA578. Why was a plane designed to carry 180 passengers flying empty? In the face of the climate emergency, what possible justification could there be for a pointless 600-kilometre flight from Stansted to Glasgow?

In this series of articles I shall be seeking to answer these questions by investigating the mendacious practices of the airport authorities who impose ‘use it or lose it’ policies on their landing slots, as well as the complicity of governments around Europe who have consistently failed to put an end to this scandal in the sky.

Notes

The inquest into the deaths of Captain Daniel Taylor and First Officer Luke Emery was opened in December 2020 for the purpose of formally confirming their identities, then adjourned to allow the investigators to do their work. It would not be reopened for almost seventeen months.

On 6 January 2021, as England entered its third national lockdown, my brother persuaded an engineer he was friendly with at Goldfinch Airlines to have a Zoom call with me. Before our conversation, I had to agree to two conditions. The first was that I wouldn’t reveal the engineer’s real name, so here I am calling him Anthony. The second was that I would tell no one what he was going to tell me until the data from the two black boxes on flight GFA578 had been analysed and made public.

On the three-way Zoom, my brother and I listened as Anthony explained how Airbus A320s transmit real-time reports to a maintenance operation centre. I hadn’t realised that if a plane develops a fault during a flight the issue is reported simultaneously to both the pilots and the engineers on the ground. Anthony said he had been at work on 9 September 2020 and no faults had been reported by flight GFA578.

‘There was absolutely nothing wrong with the plane,’ he said. ‘It was one hundred per cent serviceable.’

‘How about if an engine fails and the plane plummets from the sky?’ I asked. ‘Surely there’s not enough time for reports to be sent back?’

Anthony shook his head. ‘Impossible. Firstly, if an engine fails, the plane will keep flying without any problem at all. Secondly, planes do not plummet from the sky because of some mechanical failure. They just don’t. Thirdly, real-time means real-time. GFA578 was reporting itself as one hundred per cent serviceable – that’s the terminology we use – until the moment it hit the mountain. There was nothing wrong with the aeroplane.’

‘So what does that mean?’ I asked.

Jamie said, ‘That’s what you need to find out, Carly. If there was nothing wrong with the plane—’

‘Which there wasn’t,’ said Anthony.

‘—which there wasn’t,’ Jamie continued, ‘then something else caused the crash.’

‘Why would a perfectly functioning plane hit a mountain?’ I asked.

‘My first thought was a bomb,’ said Jamie.

‘It wasn’t a bomb,’ Anthony said, and Jamie nodded – they’d obviously discussed this already.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Because, as I said before, the plane was serviceable until the moment of impact. If there had been a bomb, there would have been a catastrophic failure at some point before impact.’

‘So what else?’ I asked. ‘Why would a fully functioning plane fly into the side of a mountain?’

‘The real-time data lets us know if there’s anything wrong with a plane – mechanical faults, software issues, that sort of thing,’ Anthony said. ‘The one thing it doesn’t tell us is what the pilots are doing. That’s the information recorded on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, what you’d call the black boxes.’

I stared at Anthony through the laptop screen. I had a horrible feeling I knew what he was getting at. ‘So …?’

‘So, we know there wasn’t a mechanical failure and there wasn’t a bomb. Which only leaves one alternative …’

We looked at each other, and when I didn’t say anything, he continued, ‘That plane was deliberately flown into the mountain.’

I sat back in my chair.

‘Fuck,’ I said.

Jamie was looking down, away from the camera, and I thought he might be about to cry. I knew my brother was thinking of Luke. I was thinking about him too. I swallowed back my own tears. One of us had to hold it together. ‘You really think that’s what happened?’

Anthony nodded. ‘I’m certain. It’s not like there were many other planes flying that day, what with the Covid restrictions still in place, so I was monitoring the flight even more closely than I might have at other times.’

‘Fuck,’ I said again. ‘So …?’

‘So,’ Anthony said, answering the question I hadn’t asked, ‘either someone else on board made them do it, which could be possible—’

‘But very unlikely,’ Jamie said, looking up.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘Because it would mean someone having to evade airport security, stow away on board, force their way into the cockpit through a door that cannot be opened by anyone except the pilots and make one of them deliberately crash the plane, all without air traffic control having any idea what was going on.’ My brother shook his head. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘I agree,’ said Anthony. ‘I don’t believe it either.’

‘So what did happen?’ I said.

‘One of the pilots deliberately flew into the mountain,’ Anthony said.

Before I could say anything, my brother leaned forward, his face filling my laptop screen. We spoke at the same time. ‘It wasn’t Luke.’

Anyone who knew Luke knew it was inconceivable that he would have taken his own life. I’d seen him at his lowest. I’d been the reason he’d been down there. And, sure, he was sad, really sad and upset and angry, but never once had he shown any sign that he might do something like that.

But if Luke wasn’t responsible, that meant Daniel Taylor – the captain of the aeroplane and father of a young daughter – had deliberately killed himself and murdered Luke.

And, until the data from the black boxes was released, I was the only journalist to know this. I needed a story and here it was.

This was the story that would get my career back on track.

The idea of deliberately flying an aeroplane into a mountain is terrifying. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what sort of person would be capable of doing something like that. Jamie had flown with Daniel Taylor on many occasions, and while he described him as friendly, he didn’t consider him a friend. On the occasions they were away overnight, Daniel would always refuse – albeit politely – to join the rest of the flight crew for dinner, preferring instead to eat alone in his room.

My starting point had to be Daniel Taylor’s family. I approached his widow, Grace, but she refused to talk to me, as did his father, which is when I contacted Daniel’s sister. She had no hesitation in agreeing to meet me, and shortly after the final lockdown restrictions were lifted I arranged to meet Izzy Taylor in a coffee shop near her father’s house in Richmond.

I was already seated at a table when she arrived, and my first sight of her was a well-dressed woman standing outside the café checking her reflection in the window, smoothing down her coat and flicking perfectly groomed hair back over her shoulders, before pushing the door open and striding in. Once I’d introduced myself, she removed the coat to reveal a gorgeous cornflower-blue wrap dress, spotless suede pumps and a handbag costing more money than I made in months. She looked considerably younger than her thirty-six years. Right from the beginning, I understood she was someone who did not like being ignored.

She also had an intensity about her. Her speech was rapid and energetic, and I found myself looking down at my notebook more than was necessary in order to give myself a break from maintaining eye contact with her.

Izzy was very friendly towards me in our first meeting, mentioning that she knew my brother was a pilot for Goldfinch Airlines – apparently she had found a picture on social media of me with Jamie in his pilot’s uniform.

Over the next few weeks I met Izzy several times, always in the same coffee shop. During those sessions – and all the ones that followed – I kept my promise to Anthony and did not tell her, or anyone else, that it was almost certain that her brother had deliberately crashed the plane. Instead, I asked Izzy to tell me about her childhood, what life had been like at home, her relationship with her parents and, more particularly, with her younger brother Daniel.

Her memories are collated in the following section.

Izzy’s Story

1984–1992

1.

On 4 December 1984, when I was three months old, my parents moved into 72 Silver Street and for the next eighteen years that’s where I lived, on the edge of Richmond in south-west London, in a typical 1930s house dominated by large bay windows and spacious, airy rooms.

I’d classify my family as well-off but not rich, certainly not as rich as I would have liked. At the time of my birth my father – a civil engineer, tall, handsome, athletic (he played rugby at county level) – had recently started working for a large construction company. My mother, a nurse, was also tall, also athletic (tennis was her thing), and at the time of our move into Silver Street she was on maternity leave. She wouldn’t return to work until my brother and I were both at school.

My earliest memory is of lying in the garden squinting up at an expanse of blue sky. Our house was directly under the flight path into Heathrow and I found it thrilling how the planes appeared above the box hedge at the bottom of the garden, thundering over my head before disappearing out of sight beyond the rooftops on the opposite side of the road. I haven’t really considered it before, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say my life to date has been framed by aeroplanes.

When I think about those first few years before Danny was born, I remember them as an idyll of only-childness. Years later, I found out there had been another baby before me. Daisy lived for sixty-seven days before she stopped breathing. I can’t imagine having an older sister and I’m not at all sure I would have liked being the second child. As it was, I was all the more precious to my parents for surviving when Daisy had not.

One of my mother’s nicknames for me was DoubleP, by which she meant not only precious but also precocious. I hit all the usual milestones early, which I know because they are recorded in my mother’s rather childish handwriting in a pink book with ‘Baby’s First …’ picked out in white on the front. I rolled over at four months, sat up at six, crawled at eight, walked at eleven. When I began talking at ten months old I immediately spoke in full sentences and according to my father my first words were ‘I am Izzy’. None of this surprises me. I have taken several IQ tests and they all rate me as highly gifted/borderline genius.

Intelligent as my parents both were, there is no doubt they were at a loss as to how to handle a daughter with such prodigious talents. I would often look up from a book or take a break from playing with my toys to find one or other of them staring at me, although their eyes would flick away as soon as they saw me looking. There were whispered conversations behind closed doors, even a doctor whom they took me to, although that was later on.

Their decision to have another child was primarily for my benefit – they hoped my sibling would be as gifted as me and we would be company for each other. Although Danny didn’t really have a chance of matching up to my talents, it is certainly true that I was his best friend, right up until the time his plane hit the mountain.

Between Danny and me there had been another pregnancy, although I didn’t know about it until it was over. I wandered into the bathroom one afternoon to find my mother lying on the floor, shoulders wedged in the space between the toilet and the bath, pants round her ankles, legs slicked with blood. She was crying and snuffled, ‘Izzy, darling, go and watch television,’ but I stayed where I was. She shouted at me to go away, which was curious because my mother usually wanted me near her – she was forever stroking my hair, covering my face with kisses, squeezing me so tight it hurt. In any case, I didn’t move.

Eventually Mum heaved herself off the floor, holding onto the side of the bath for support, and ineffectually rubbed her legs with a towel. She wouldn’t look at me, or talk to me, or stop crying. She called my father at work and sobbed her way through enough words to ensure he arrived home as she was being bundled into the back of an ambulance. I was three years old and I can honestly say watching the ambulance turn out of Silver Street carrying my mother away from me was the only time in my entire life I have ever experienced fear. I’m certain it’s because the miscarriage got mixed up in my head with the dead fox.

A few days before I found Mum bleeding on the bathroom floor, she and I had been on our way to the local playground. It wasn’t far from our house and I used our daily walk to practise my counting – fifty-two steps to the end of our street, turn the corner, thirty-seven steps, cross the road, turn again, and so on. On that particular day, I’d only counted up to forty-one when I saw the fox in the gutter. His eyes were open and his back legs were a bloody mangled mess but his fur was a beautiful deep orange which begged to be touched. I pulled away from my mother’s grasp and knelt on the pavement, reaching my hand out.

‘Izzy! No!’ my mother shrieked. ‘Don’t touch that thing.’

She picked me up.

‘I want to stroke it,’ I said, as calmly as my dignity would allow, from my position hoisted around my mother’s waist.

‘Foxes are dirty,’ Mum said. ‘Riddled with fleas.’

‘Why isn’t it moving?’ I asked.

‘It’s having a lovely rest,’ she replied, but I knew there was more to it than that. Mum marched along the pavement, still carrying me, and after I’d finished playing in the park, we took a different route home.

By bedtime on the day of the miscarriage when Mum still wasn’t home, I asked Dad where she was and he said she had gone away for a day or two to have a ‘lovely rest’. I understood my mother was never coming home. She was in the gutter with the fox.

I was mistaken, because less than forty-eight hours later my mother did come home. And very soon afterwards, she was pregnant again.

My parents must have read books about preparing a first child for the birth of a second because they threw themselves into readying me for sisterhood. On a daily basis I was encouraged to talk to ‘the bump’ so it would ‘know you’re its big sister’. When the kicking started, my hands were forcibly clamped to my mother’s stomach to ‘feel your baby brother or sister saying hello to you’. When my parents found out they were having a boy the messaging became even more fervent: ‘your baby brother is going to be so excited to meet you, Izzy’ and ‘your baby brother loves you so much, Izzy’. All of which meant that long before Danny took his first breath, it was abundantly clear to me he was mine. My brother, my baby, mine, mine, mine.

I chose his name. My parents presented their proposals and I vetoed several I couldn’t pronounce – they particularly liked Stuart but I hated the feel of it in my mouth. Daniel – Danny – was on their list and once I’d heard that name I wasn’t interested in any others. Danny, I whispered to my mother’s stomach, Danny, my brother, my Danny, my baby.

He was born on 19 September 1988, two weeks after my fourth birthday. Nan came to look after me. She suffered no fools and her favourite activities were bridge (she had a reputation as a card shark), drinking gin gimlets (once she started drinking, she would only stop when the gin ran out), flirting with men (regardless of their relationship status) and lying.

For Nan, lying was akin to performance art. She was inordinately proud of her talent and would regularly give me tips on perfecting deceit, such as: for maximum believability always include some truths with the lies; for maximum fun, push your lies right to the brink of credibility and peer into the abyss of impossibility; and if you’re challenged on a lie, go on the counter-attack, hard and fast.

On one notable occasion Nan was forced to make an exception to this last rule. She was born on 31 December 1928, but she couldn’t bear anyone to know her real age. By the time I was born in 1984, although she was actually fifty-five, she would swear blind she was in her ‘late forties’, which is where she remained for several more years.

On the final day of 1988, Nan turned sixty and shortly thereafter tried claim her state pension. Unfortunately, because she had consistently lied about her age on so many forms and to so many employers over the years, the Department of Social Security did not recognise her true age, although they did find multiple conflicting records which variously listed her as fifty-seven, fifty-two and forty-nine. Not one record listed her as sixty. She was, the Department insisted, too young to be eligible for a pension. Nan was furious at being denied what was legitimately hers, and her fury was provoked even further when she had to produce, at her own expense, an official copy of her birth certificate and present herself to a civil servant at an office in Croydon to confirm she really was, horror of horrors, sixty years old.

My nan was sharp-tongued but funny with it. Years before I was born, my grandfather died when some scaffolding collapsed as he was coming out of the building where he worked. Nan revelled in recounting the story of his untimely death, then when her audience were stumbling through their condolences she would say, ‘He’d have been delighted to die like that – he always loved heavy metal,’ then cackle in their faces like a mad woman.

I was Nan’s favourite and she was shameless about it: Danny barely existed as far as she was concerned. She treated me as an equal, never talked down to me and when we were together she would ask my opinion on all sorts of things, always contemplating my answers with the utmost seriousness.

‘Now then, Izzy, I’ve got a date with Derek from bridge club,’ Nan might say, after describing Derek as lumpy, sweaty and rich. ‘What do we think? Green dress or navy trouser suit?’ Or, on another occasion, ‘I’m considering joining Slimming World, but it’ll mean laying off the chocolate. Is it a sacrifice worth making?’ We debated at length whether she should accept an offer from Pauline (buxom, snobbish, desperate) to share a cabin with her on a cruise around the Norwegian fjords. ‘The most important question,’ Nan said, ‘is whether I can manage six days in confined quarters with her. What do you think, Izzy?’

These were weighty matters for an almost-four-year-old and I gave them due consideration before proffering my advice (in the above cases: navy trouser suit, no it’s not and no you can’t). The describe-a-person-in-three-words game was also Nan’s invention but we only played it when we were alone because my parents had told Nan she was encouraging me to be superficial in my opinions of other people. Nan said the three words she would use to describe that attitude were predictable, unimaginative and humourless and we carried on playing the game.

On the day Danny was born, my mother had dropped me off at nursery as usual, but it was Nan who was waiting for me at the end of the day.

‘How was nursery?’ Nan asked.

I shrugged. Nursery had been nursery. Right from the start I had never minded going and had never cried when I was left. The other children learned very quickly to let me have first choice of toys, to allow me to select the games we played and take the best position on the carpet at story time. Danny, by contrast, sobbed like a baby every day for weeks when it was his turn to go to nursery. It’s funny how different we were.

‘Can you guess why it’s me picking you up today?’ Nan asked.

‘My Danny has been born,’ I said.

‘That’s my girl, sharp as a tack,’ Nan said. ‘Shall we go and meet your baby brother?’

At the hospital, my parents were laughing and smiling and Dad’s cheeks were a bit wet. Mum held her arms out towards me but I ignored her.

‘Where’s my baby?’ I asked and all three of them laughed.

I didn’t understand the joke so I said again, calmly and politely, ‘Where’s my baby?’

Dad put his hand on the bassinet beside the bed.

‘Danny’s in here,’ he said but I was too short to see in, so Dad lifted me onto the chair. My baby brother was lying on a blue mattress wrapped in a white blanket. He was wearing a woolly hat and all I could see were puffy red cheeks and a huge forehead. His eyes were tight shut and it struck me how unlikely it was that this unappealing, scrunched-up object would provide me with the lifelong companionship I’d been promised.

‘Well, Izzy,’ said Mum, ‘say hello to Danny.’

I looked around. All of them – Mum, Dad and Nan – were staring at me, waiting.

I looked back at the baby, and at precisely that moment he opened his eyes. Apparently newborn babies can’t focus on faces but that’s wrong because Danny looked straight at me and I looked straight back at him.

Tiny.

Vulnerable.

Mine.

2.

Throughout our childhood, there was a picture of me and Danny stuck to the top left corner of the fridge door. I was four when the photo was taken and out of the two of us I was always the most striking, never going through a ‘puppy fat’ stage. To give Mum her due, she always dressed me well, and in my diaphanous pink sundress I’m already lithe and long-limbed, strawberry-blonde curls framing my pretty heart-shaped face.

I’ve been told people find my gaze very direct – and I was certainly confronting the camera head-on in that photo. I was sitting on the sofa and Danny, who would have been about six months old, was in my lap. In the picture, although I was staring at the camera, Danny – my Danny – was staring at me. Even in my brother’s first few months, I had assumed my most important role: my brother looking to me for protection while I looked defiantly outwards, ready to fight anyone who came too close.

He wasn’t an attractive baby – face scrunched up, hardly any hair, chubby arms waving around – but Danny the baby was exactly the same as Danny the man: devoted to me. Right from the beginning, we only needed each other. Sure, our parents fed and clothed us, kept us healthy, put a roof over our heads, but in all other respects, we were self-sufficient, best friends, as close as any siblings can be. I was his big sister, and he was my little brother.

My parents’ friends used to comment on how adorable it was to see Danny and me together. It was a refrain I never tired of hearing, but the truth was that for the first year or so of his life, my brother was quite boring. He just lay around, not doing much other than sleeping and eating and indulging in a lot of crying. So much crying.

Once my brother could walk, I began to get more enjoyment from our relationship. Sometimes, I would run away from him, fast, so he couldn’t keep up, or I’d hide from him. I always enjoyed hearing him calling my name with his cute baby lisp: Ithy, Ithy, and the catch in his voice as the tears started. Ithy. Ithy. It was the sound of his love for me, although our mother never understood that.

‘It’s not nice, Izzy,’ she would say. ‘You can hear how upset he is.’

She always seemed determined to twist Danny’s and my relationship, always imputing bad intentions to the games we played. For example, there was a particular favourite involving a one-eared teddy bear called Biff. Biff went everywhere with Danny, who became hysterical if Biff was ever misplaced. Danny and I used to spend hours playing a game called Where Is Biff? There were limitless versions of the game: me hiding Biff in cupboards, me throwing Biff into bushes in the garden, me trying to flush Biff down the toilet, but probably our favourite version of all was the simplest one, which involved me putting Biff on a shelf just out of Danny’s reach. My brother would marshal his limited powers of concentration, digging his little toes into the carpet, swaying unsteadily, trying to get purchase as he reached as high as he could, curling and uncurling his chubby fingers, desperately trying and failing to rescue Biff.

On one unfortunate occasion, Danny overbalanced and fell, hitting his chin on the bookshelf where I’d put Biff. He started howling and Mum came running into the room.

‘What have you done now?’ she asked me, unfairly, since I wasn’t the one bleeding all over the carpet. She pulled Danny into her lap and rubbed his back in small circles, trying to calm him down.

Later, while Danny was having a nap, I sat outside my parents’ bedroom listening to Mum on the phone to her best friend Liz. I always knew when my mother was talking to Liz because she would leave me in front of the television, go upstairs and shut the bedroom door. If I stayed where she left me, I couldn’t hear anything, but if I waited a minute then followed her upstairs, I could hear her just fine, and by the time I settled myself outside their room, Mum was already in full flow.

Usually, I enjoyed hearing her talk about me. The words she used most often were: precocious, clever and independent. But sometimes, she said things which weren’t as positive and that particular day she was telling Liz how I was a tease and unkind.

‘I worry her behaviour is getting worse,’ she was saying. ‘But Roger refuses to see it.’

There was silence for a minute, presumably while Liz managed to get a word in edgeways, then Mum was off again, sighing dramatically and saying, ‘Izzy behaves as if she’s much older. You know how self-reliant she is. I mean, I’m all for raising an independent kid, but every now and again it would be nice to feel like she needs me.’

Across the hallway, I heard the hiccupping cry which signalled Danny was waking up. Naptime was over, and my mother’s conversation was coming to an end.

Mum was determined to twist everything. She should have been thanking me not criticising me. After all, Danny was sensitive and pliable and ripe for being walked all over. I couldn’t bear the thought of him leaving himself open to being hurt and upset once the time came for him to venture from the safety of our home, and in the absence of my parents doing anything to help him, I took it upon myself to teach him some life lessons. That game with Biff? Not everything my brother wanted would be within easy reach. Sometimes he would have to work for things, and sometimes he might not get what he wanted. That’s what the game was about.

The last thing Mum said to Liz before she hung up was, ‘Yes, you’re right, I’ll talk to Roger this evening. Convince him we need to set some clear boundaries for Izzy.’

I beat Mum to it. That evening, when Dad came home from work, I was waiting on the doorstep. I timed it to perfection so my tears started flowing just as he pushed open the wrought-iron gate.

‘Izzy, sweetheart,’ Dad said. ‘What’s the matter?’

I turned up the tears and shook my head, indicating that I was too upset to speak.

Dad crouched down so he was level with me and held out his arms. ‘Come on, chicken,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

I stepped forward and let him hug me. I sniffed once or twice for good effect.

‘There’s a good girl,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about then?’

I stepped back to ensure he had a good view of my stricken expression and the tears caught fetchingly on my eyelashes. ‘Mummy told Auntie Liz I was a bad girl,’ I said.

‘Did she?’ he asked. ‘Has my little chicken been naughty?’

‘No,’ I said, squeezing out a few more tears. ‘I was tidying up our toys, mine and Danny’s. I was trying to help Mummy, but then she was on the phone to Auntie Liz and she told her I was bad.’

Dad frowned and pressed his lips together. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, let’s go and talk to Mummy, shall we? Sort this out.’

He scooped me up in his arms and carried me into the house. Mum came into the hallway and I buried my face in Dad’s neck. Before my mother could say anything, Dad said, ‘I found a very upset little chicken on the doorstep. Apparently, she overheard a conversation between you and Liz.’

I turned to regard my mother from the lofty heights of Dad’s arms and sniffled a bit.

‘Danny cut his chin badly this afternoon,’ Mum said.

‘It’s all been going on here,’ said Dad, and I let him give me a kiss on the cheek. He looked at Mum. ‘Is the little man OK?’

‘He’ll be fine. I told him you’d go up and tuck him in.’

‘Of course I will, but what about this one?’ he said, tugging gently on my ponytail.

‘Danny fell over because Izzy had deliberately put Biff on a shelf which was too high for Danny to reach.’

Dad smoothed my hair. ‘I think our little chicken was only trying to help you tidy up.’

Mum shook her head. ‘You weren’t here, Roger.’

Dad kissed my cheek again, then lowered me to the floor, where I reached for his hand, allowing myself a small sob.

‘I’m going to go up and say goodnight to our little man, Izzy,’ Dad said. ‘Do you want to come upstairs with me? Or stay down here with grumpy Mummy?’

Later that evening, after I’d gone to bed, I heard Mum and Dad doing the shouting-not-shouting thing they did when they didn’t want me to know they were angry with each other. Our house had a staircase with a ninety-degree turn halfway up, which meant if I sat on the bottom stair of the top half, I could hear everything from downstairs, but no one could see me. By the time I got into position, their argument had already assumed a pattern I was familiar with. Much of what they said was about boundaries. Mum would tell Dad what they needed to do was set boundaries for me (which made me sound like a flock of sheep), whereas Dad said I was only testing the boundaries, like all kids. Then Mum told Dad he indulged me far too much, which Dad said was a ridiculous thing to say because he refused to baby me. I was a very bright girl, he said, and I needed stimulation, not cosseting.

‘What Izzy needs,’ Mum said, ‘is consistent parenting. And to understand that her actions have consequences.’

Dad refused to be drawn in. ‘As I see it, Sarah, poor Izzy was really upset earlier because she heard what you’d been saying about her.’

Then they started on about boundaries again and, confident I wasn’t going to miss anything important, I went to bed.

*

As Danny got older, I tried to pass on other life skills to him too, such as showing him where Dad kept an old ice-cream tub into which he dumped his loose change each evening; and how important it was to be selective with the coins we took (too many too frequently and Dad might realise we were helping ourselves to his money); and the art of using those coins to buy a sufficient amount of low-value sweets at the corner shop so as not to arouse suspicion that our pockets were bulging with the higher-value sweets which we really wanted. In other words, the usual sort of stuff which an older sister might be expected to pass on to her younger sibling – in addition, of course, to making sure Danny knew that our relationship, his and mine, would always be the most important relationship of his life.

‘Mum won’t always be here,’ I told him one Sunday afternoon as we were watching Aladdin on video for the gazillionth time while our parents drank wine in the garden.

Danny didn’t react. He was repeating Princess Jasmine’s dialogue, which he had memorised, so I said again, more loudly, ‘Listen, Danny, it’s important. Mum won’t always be here.’

He dragged his attention away from the screen long enough to say, ‘I know. Mummy’s going to go to work, like Daddy.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about, Danny.’

I paused the film and in protest Danny kicked his little heels against the base of the sofa in the way which always made Mum lecture him about respecting the furniture.

‘You know Mum hates you kicking the sofa, Danny. But soon you won’t need to worry about that because she is going to get sick and leave us. She got sick before but then she came back to give me a brother. Next time she leaves, she won’t come back.’

I had his attention now, because his eyes filled with tears and he sniffled a bit before saying, ‘Where’s she going?’

I shrugged. ‘She’ll be dead, so in the ground, I guess. Then it’ll just be you and me.’

‘You, me and Daddy?’ he said, hopefully.

‘When mummies go, daddies usually leave too,’ I said, although I was hazy on the details.

Danny’s tears began to plop onto the sofa. Mum would probably think that wasn’t respecting the furniture either.

‘I don’t want Mummy to go,’ he managed to say through trembling lips. ‘Who will look after me?’

‘I will, Danny,’ I said. ‘I’ll always be here for you. You’ll always have your big sister.’

He didn’t appear to be as immediately reassured by this as he should have been. ‘When is Mummy going?’

I shrugged. ‘Last time there was a lot of blood. That’s the sign and I expect it will happen quite soon.’

Some people might consider this wasn’t the kindest thing for me to be telling such a sensitive little boy, but I was only a kid myself – a fact which everyone often seemed to forget – and I had to work with the limited information available to me. If Danny spent his early childhood in the mistaken belief that our mother was about to die at any moment, then frankly you have to blame my parents for not explaining the whole miscarriage thing more clearly to me.

In any case, the effect was to bring Danny and me even closer together. I was the point of certainty around which my brother’s life revolved. I was the one who would always be there for him and, for all of his thirty-one years, the only person he would ever need.

3.

Filing into assembly on the first day of school, I felt like a conductor who had finally found her orchestra. Entertaining myself with my family had become boring and I was ready for new challenges. I needed more variety in my instruments, as it were, and school provided them in abundance.

For the first couple of years, I confined my attentions to my classmates, honing my talents for engendering rifts between erstwhile best friends. I made it my business to be well-liked and affable, and very rarely did anyone suspect my machinations had anything to do with their volatile and often devastating relationships. I also spent time getting the measure of how things worked in the school, and by the time we began Year 3 I was ready to set my sights higher up the scholarly food chain.

Our teacher, Mr Brown, was tall, energetic and hairy. A mass of wiry blond coils sprang from his head, hairs peered over the top of his collar, crawled over his knuckles, emerged from his cuffs. He even wore hairy jumpers when it was cold, the sort of horribly scratchy things my grandmother who wasn’t Nan used to knit for me. I would guess Mr Brown had been teaching for no more than a year or two when he became our teacher. Even to us seven-year-olds he didn’t seem very old, although that was at least partly due to his relentless enthusiasm. He would begin each day by clapping his hands and saying, ‘Girls and boys, boys and girls, how wonderful it is to see you all looking so bright and cheery this morning,’ and somehow he managed to keep up this level of bonhomie throughout the day, circulating around the class like a butler among his underlings, giving a word of encouragement here, a pat on the arm there, a ‘well done’ over here and a light touch on the head over there.

I worked out early in my school career that the most effective way to navigate this phase of my life was to do as I was told. Not, you understand, because I had any innate desire to be good, but being compliant meant I would be awarded the coveted stickers which were handed out to well-behaved children. I didn’t care about the stickers themselves, of course, which were hideous primary-coloured stars, but they were stuck onto a class chart and the accumulation of sufficient stars meant the granting of privileges. I wanted those privileges.

Privileges included being chosen to leave class to collect more stationery, or art supplies, or stacks of photocopying from the school office. Or being excused from class entirely in order to help show prospective parents and their offspring around the school. Privileges meant access to parts of the school where other children didn’t go, when the corridors were deserted and the teachers all busy. Privileges meant ample opportunity to lurk unseen in places where I wasn’t intended to lurk and garner information which wasn’t meant for my ears. Gossip about poor Mrs Reed and her terrible divorce, for example. Or how Mr Dobson had applied for a head-teacher post and the only person who was surprised when he didn’t get the job was Mr Dobson himself.

Many times I never found any reason to deploy the information I gathered – in fact, I often didn’t fully understand it – but knowledge is power, and I made it my business to ensure that very little went on at the school that I didn’t know about.

By Year 3, then, I was well aware of the connection between exemplary behaviour, stickers and privileges and had successfully garnered myself a reputation for being unfailingly polite, overtly considerate of others and, of course, always coming top in tests.

Each Friday, right after lunch, we had Mr Brown’s Quiz of the Week. I suppose it must have taken him quite some time to put together thirty age-appropriate questions about subjects ranging from current affairs (Who is the president of the United States? So easy. Clinton, of course, although three of the boys actually answered ‘daddy’) to geography (What’s the capital of France? A surprising number of idiots didn’t know it was Paris) to animals (Name three animals which lay eggs. Give me strength). Mr Brown’s Quiz of the Week was the perfect vehicle for me to demonstrate my superior intelligence, and without fail I always came top, receiving two stickers by way of reward. For all that I had no strong feelings about Mr Brown, what’s indisputable is that I was his star pupil.

The turning point in our relationship came one Friday when it transpired Mr Brown had, for the first time, failed to put together a quiz. While I had been loitering outside the office waiting to collect swimming-lesson permission slips, I overheard a conversation about how Mr Brown’s mother was seriously ill and he was doing a lot of driving back and forth to visit her. Still. That was no excuse. His Quiz of the Week was my highlight of the week, the opportunity to showcase my intellect to my fellow seven- and eight-year-olds and add to my haul of stickers in the process.