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her best to keep from her mother's eyes. Tucking it under her arm, she ducked into the alley, where she kept her bike. The box she placed lovingly in the basket. Then she guided the bike round the corner to the front of the shop and took a moment to double check the door.
    There'd be hell to pay if she was caught leaving early. There'd be permanent damnation if she not only left early but also left without locking up properly. The bolt was old and sometimes it stuck. Wisdom called for a quick, reassuring, and foiled attempt to get inside. Good, Rachel thought when the door didn't budge. She was in the clear.
    Although it was late in the day, the heat still hadn't abated. The regular North Sea wind—which made the town of Balford-le-Nez so nasty in the depths of winter—wasn't gusting at all this afternoon. Nor had it gusted for the last two weeks. It wasn't even sighing enough to stir the bunting that hung dispiritedly across the High Street.
    Beneath those crisscrossing red and blue triangles of manufactured gaiety, Rachel pedalled determinedly southward, heading for the upmarket part of the town. She wasn't going home. Had she been doing so, she would have been riding in the opposite direction, along the seafront and beyond the industrial estate to the three truncated streets of terraced houses where she and her mother lived in frequently strained good will. Rather, she was heading to the home of her oldest, best, and only true friend, upon whose life recent tragedy had fallen.
    Must remember to be sympathetic, Rachel told herself sternly as she pedalled. Must remember
not
to mention Clifftop Snuggeries before I tell her how bad I feel. Although I don't feel bad like I ought to feel, do I? I feel like a door's been opened wide and I want to rush through it while I got the chance.
    Rachel hiked her skirt above her knees to make the pedalling easier and to keep the thin, diaphanous material from becoming snagged in the greasy chain. She'd known she was going to pay a call on Sahlah Malik when she'd dressed this morning, so she probably should have worn something more suitable to a long bicycle ride in the late afternoon. But the length of the skirt she'd chosen favoured her best features—her ankles—and Rachel was a young woman who knew that, having been given so little to work with in the looks department by the Almighty, she had to accentuate what positives she had. So she regularly wore skirts and shoes that flattered her ankles, always hoping the casual gazes that fell upon her would overlook the mess of her face.
    She'd heard every word in the book applied to her in her twenty years:
Homely, arse-ugly, bagged out,
and
grotty
were the usual adjectives.
Cow, mare,
and
sow
were the nouns of choice. She'd been the butt of jokes and of ceaseless bullying throughout her schooldays, and she'd early learned that for people like her, life presented three clear choices: cry, run away, or learn to fight back. She'd chosen the third, and it was her willingness to take on all comers that had won her Sahlah Malik as a friend.
    Her best friend, Rachel thought. Through thick and through thin. They'd had the thick of it since they were nine years old. For the past two months, they'd had the thin. But things were going to change for the two of them. Rachel was nothing if not certain of that.
    She teetered up the slope of Church Road, past St. John's graveyard where the flowers drooped from their stalks in the heat. She followed the curve by the railway station's grime-soaked walls and panted up the sharp acclivity that led to the better neighbourhoods with their rolling lawns and leafy streets. This section of the town was called The Avenues, and Sahlah Malik's family lived on Second, a five-minute walk from the Greensward, that stretch of perfect lawn beneath which two rows of beach huts perched above the sea.
    The Maliks’ house was one of the grander residences in the neighbourhood, with wide lawns, gardens, and a small pear