Lowewood Academy

Coming back to Lowewood has been a bit weird. After all, it’s not every day that you get kidnapped at gunpoint, locked in a cellar for two days, stage a daring escape then watch someone you really like get shot right in front of you. Not to mention making the national press. Some tactless third year has already asked for my autograph, little idiot!

The best bit has been I’ve been able to spend the whole of Easter with Dad! Apparently, Vladimir and his bunch were rounded up outside Scotland Yard, just after Kate shot Jessica, so it was safe for him to come out of hiding. I had a bit more on my mind at that point – watching Dad and another policeman perform urgent first aid on Jessica till we heard the thud thud thud of a helicopter, an ambulance in the air.

I thought she was dead…….I was covered with her blood and so was Dad……I got taken straight to the hospital – in a normal ambulance – and after being checked out, we waited, me, Dad, Commander Cadwallader for news. We were put in one of those little relatives rooms, the kind they put you in when you see a hospital drama. About an hour after arriving, a nurse came in and asked Dad if he knew who Jessica’s next of kin was. That made me start crying again.

But after another three hours, in fact, just as Lord Fawcett burst into the relatives room and started shouting at Dad and Commander Cadwallader and demanding to see Jessica, the doctor came in to tell us she was going to be ok.

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“You’re not losing your touch,” Beth said vehemently, stirring her cappuccino. We were looking out onto a London street though a rain-lashed window of a cafe. The weather fitted my mood perfectly.

“Sweet of you to say that, even if it’s not true. Shall we count how many major Lowewood events I have spectacularly failed to find out about? Hardly a shining example of newspaper journalism.” I was repeating verbatim what I had already written in an email to Angus, my boyfriend and the erstwhile editor of ‘Glory in the Fight’.

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I suppose I’m used to airports being a bit out of town. Heathrow’s nowhere near London, really, and Gatwick’s even further away. So it’s a bit of a surprise when you arrive at the airport in Las Vegas to find you’re literally over the road from the Strip.

And the hotels! Yes, I know they’re funky shapes and colours. There’s a pyramid, and a castle, and the Eiffel tower, and all sorts. Absolutely HUGE hotels. But as you come in to land, and get off the plane, they look like toys, all lined up along the street opposite the airport. It just dazzled me – well, that and the sunshine!

It was so nice, to leave the snowy, rainy skies of England and swap them for the glorious, blue desert skies of Nevada. I’m sure it gets much, much hotter here in the summer, but even over Easter, the weather was way better than what we’d left behind…

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