Helen Grant - Wish Me Dead

PENGUIN BOOKS

Helen Grant was born in London, and read Classics at St Hughs College, Oxford. In 2001 she and her family moved to Bad Mnstereifel in Germany, and it was exploring the legends of this beautiful town that inspired her to write her first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden , which was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Prize. Helen now lives in Brussels with her husband, her two children and two cats.

BOOKS BY HELEN GRANT

The Glass Demon

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Wish Me Dead

As ever, I would like to thank Camilla Wray of the Darley Anderson Agency for her enthusiasm and energy. I would also like to thank Amanda Punter, Editorial Director at Puffin, and everyone at Puffin and Penguin for their continuing support and encouragement.

Special thanks are due to Frau Hildegard Quasten of Bckerei Cafe Quasten in Mechernich-Kommern, and to Herr Nipp and the team at the Erft-Caf and the Caf am Salzmarkt in Bad Mnstereifel, for their advice about the running of a German bakery and German bakery products. Any inaccuracies are entirely mine.

Last but definitely not least, I would like to thank my husband Gordon for his unflagging support.

For William Grant

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 2011

Text copyright Helen Grant, 2011

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

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

ISBN : 978-0-141-33774-6

The funny thing is, I never even meant the first one. I had nothing against Klara Klein, nothing at all. It was Max who started it, with his plan to visit the witchs house.

There were six of us: Max and Jochen, both of them tall and well built, but Max sprouting a head of unruly dark hair while Jochen had blond curls; Izabela, who had slightly exotic looks and an accent, both inherited from her Romanian mother; robust, dark-haired Hanna, who went through her life with her chin out; wiry, compact Timo, who had been my boyfriend for three years; and me, Steffi Nett, the shy blonde one. Six of us, but as usual it was Max who came up with the plan.

I knew it was a crazy idea, just the same as it was a crazy idea to go skinny-dipping in the Steinbach dam that time, or steal stale pastries from my parents bakery kitchen to see who could eat the most. Max and Jochen were always egging each other on. It was a pattern that had started when we were in kindergarten together and it showed no sign of changing. When Max and Jochen are both in their nineties and sitting side by side in easy chairs in the old peoples home at Otterbach they will probably still be putting each other up to all manner of idiocy, stealing each others hearing aids and trying to peer up the orderlies skirts.

I can recall the precise instant when this particular scheme occurred to Max. It was the last night of April and the first dry evening of a wet week. We were waiting in the snack bar on the Orchheimer Strasse, all six of us, because Jochen had decided that he couldnt do anything unless fortified with a beforehand.

I was standing at the big plate-glass window, staring out. There was a red sports car idling at the other side of the street, a streamlined monster with gleaming bodywork. I didnt need to look closely to see who was behind the wheel, but I did anyway. Kai von Jlich. Blond, blue-eyed and staggeringly gorgeous. Wealthy too; I didnt know anyone else in Bad Mnstereifel whose parents could have bought them a car like that, even Max, whose family were very well off. Kai was only a year or two older than me, but he might just as well have come from a different planet.