Chapter 1

I reckon any father would worry if his ninth-grade daughter started hanging out with college-age guys. Lucie isn’t what you would call a delicate personality, but still, fifteen - and fifteen for only a few weeks - is a vulnerable age for a girl: they’re developing physically, but they’re not equipped to deal with adults on an equal level. They can be insecure and impressionable, even though they know everything.

So last month, when Lucie showed me herself on YouTube in the company of two young men and a young woman of around twenty, I was a bit freaked. She wasn’t thinking what I was thinking of course, she was just proud of what she was doing, which for sure was impressive: it’s called ‘parkour’ apparently, or ‘free-running’, and consists of running along rails, jumping off buildings, running up vertical walls, leaping off bridges and somehow landing into a somersault without even hurting themselves.

It was extreme, though Lucie has always been an athlete and good at all kinds of sports. But I wasn’t so much concerned about a sprained ankle, or even a broken bone, as about why a group of people so much older wanted to hang out with her. Lucie is very attractive. Not small at five-six, and not weak, but still...

“That’s awesome, but why are they interested in you?” I blurted clumsily. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that how it came out. I mean, when you’re so much younger?”

For the thousandth time I wished her mother was still around to help deal with these things, instead of being in Connecticut with that woman she’d suddenly run off with. It had been difficult enough three years ago, and now since Lucie had hit adolescence I constantly seemed to say the wrong thing.

“Oh thanks!” she said sarcastically. “I was watching them, is all, and I copied a couple of things and they saw and asked if I’d done it before and it just happened from there. It’s a buzz. They’re not like grooming me or anything, and they’re only a few years older. Maddie is only nineteen even and they live at home too just like me. I never knew you were so uptight and controlling.”

“I’m not being controlling,” I defended myself. “I just wanted to be sure that’s all, and understand why they’re interested in you. If it’s just about the parkour then that’s fine obviously. I guess it’s not every day they come across a girl who wants to try it.”

“It’s all healthy and I have to work out to be fit and it doesn’t do any harm.” Just because she’d won didn’t mean she couldn’t keep on arguing. “It’s not like doing drugs or drinking or going clubbing or hanging around the mall and things you ought to be worrying about. I’ll bring them over and you can meet them.” She switched on her father-melting smile. “Anyway we even like the same music and everything.”

“Okay,” I smiled back gratefully. At least if they came here I could get an idea what they were like, and they’d know Lucie wasn’t on her own but had someone who’d be after them if they tried anything.

So the next Saturday afternoon I was welcoming the three young people I’d seen in the video. To my relief they came across as very decent, polite and likeable, and I didn’t worry when they all went up to Lucie’s room. After all one of them was a girl, and pretty soon the music Lucie said they had in common was thrumming faintly through the house - faintly because I moved Lucie’s room from over the living room to the back of the house last year when she briefly developed a taste for Metal.

It was just an instinct, a couple of hours later when I heard them coming down the stairs, that made me go out into the hall to say goodbye. In hindsight I guess I’d picked up that they were being a bit quiet about it. They were acting a little guilty, all four of them, and by the time I’d said goodbye and closed the door, Lucie was halfway up the stairs on the way back to her room. It was a trifle hasty.

“Just going to grab a shower,” she called down.

I went back into the living room, trying to decide if my nose had smelt anything. I couldn’t decide. Lucie had looked and sounded completely confident and happy, so I was pretty sure nothing had gone down that she hadn’t wanted. But I couldn’t shake the feeling something had gone down that I hadn’t wanted.

Drugs? There hadn’t been time really, and it didn’t fit with the parkour super-fitness thing. They hadn’t shown any sign of that or of drink. And why a shower at five in the afternoon? That aroma in the hall...

I didn’t want to believe anything sexual had happened, which anyway I couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t just that Lucie is so young. She doesn’t present herself as a sexual creature. She’s strictly a person: someone who does things. Her clothes are baggy and shapeless, and she doesn’t wear makeup or jewelry or take any particular care over her appearance. Her medium-length straight brown hair gets washed and that’s it.

But anyway when Lucie came down for dinner I copped out. I just knew that if I asked what they’d been up to I’d get a snappy and uninformative reply, with a comment about how I didn’t give her any space and a barbed question about what I thought she’d been doing. So I asked her about parkour and admired her, like a good devoted parent.

I mentioned how pleasant her new friends seemed and we ended up on the couch while she played videos on the TV of all kinds of parkour and girls boarding, surfing and cliff diving. It was impressive, and I was happy to say so. If these were her role models I could only feel good about it, and in fact altogether I was pretty thrilled to see my daughter turning out the way she was headed, even if she can be a challenge sometimes.

She isn’t super-duper intelligent, just a decent A/B student, but she does enough work so that she’ll have options and be able to fulfil herself. She has charisma and character, and I love having her around and knowing I helped to create and nurture her.

She had her normal friends over the next day, and I didn’t hear any more about her new parkour buddies until the next Saturday, when she had them over again, in the evening. This time I couldn’t quite stop myself being suspicious, though there wasn’t anything I could do about it: Lucie’s room is at the end of the corridor so there’s no excuse for being around the door, and I’d long ago stopped going in there. It’s her private space and to call her for dinner or anything I either yell or literally have to phone or text her.

So I sat watching TV and wasting time on my laptop. After a while I went ineffectually upstairs into the spare room next to Lucie’s, pretending to put something in there, but the music made it impossible to hear anything of what they were doing. I mooched back down.

When they left I went and said goodbye again, but I didn’t glean anything apart from a sarky “wow you’re so polite Daddy,” from my daughter as I closed the door. And the impression she’d just had a shower.

During the next days I kept wondering if I was seeing a change in her - as in, from child to young woman - but it was hard to be sure whether it was just my imagination. She is at that stage of course, and spending time with older kids could have that effect in any case, I assumed. But she was still seeing them.

In the end I did what any concerned father would do, and put spy cameras in her room. Yes alright any concerned paranoid over-protective father maybe, and there were all kinds of reasons not to, but it was all I could think of. If the kids weren’t doing anything I could take the cameras out again and no harm done. I wasn’t going to watch her getting changed or anything like that, just take a look at what she was doing with her older parkour friends. A glimpse or two would be enough. After all they weren’t here to do parkour, were they?

So when they came round, the following Friday evening, I was ensconced in my bedroom with my laptop and two camera pictures side by side on the screen: one from a fake smoke alarm on the ceiling, and one from a fake PIR burglar alarm sensor on the wall looking across the bed parallel to the window.

For once my history of fussing over her had worked for me, and Lucie had accepted the new ‘protection’ merely as further evidence of my paranoia, with just a lift of her girlish unplucked eyebrows and half an eye-roll. If she’d been older she’d have wondered, probably, but she’d never come across anything so sneaky as these gadgets, and the camera holes really were too small to notice.

As a feeble compromise I’d chosen not to have audio, so I just watched, feeling nervous and guilty, as they came into her room, which is the main bedroom for the house and used to be mine and her mother Val’s before I opted for a quieter life. Also, to be honest, I’m kinda bribing her, with the space and ensuite, to spend more time here and less in Connecticut with her mom. Though suddenly the big double bed was looking ALL wrong.

They all looked energized while Lucie chose some music on her phone, that plays through the hifi, and I heard it begin in the distance. She span round and moved up to the taller of the two boys, Greg, slid a deft hand behind his neck and pulled him into a kiss!