Be careful who you trust. It might just be the death of you...
Holly Krauss lives life in the fast lane. A successful young businesswoman with a stable home life, she is loved and admired by all who meet her. But that's only one side of Holly. The other sees her take regular walks on the wild side - where she makes evermore reckless mistakes. And when those mistakes start mounting up, the two sides of Holly blur together and her life quickly spirals out of control. She thinks she's being stalked, someone is demanding money from her - threats lurk around every corner and those closest to Holly are running out of patience.
But is she alone responsible for what's happening? Are her fears just the paranoia of an illness - or intimations of very real danger? And if she can no longer rely on her own judgement, who can she trust to catch her when she falls?
Download and read the prologue and first chapters of Catch Me When I Fall here
'I'm attracted to danger,’ he said. 'Always have been. What can I get you two?'
I thought for a moment. Pace yourself, Holly. It was an hour since Meg and I had left the office but I was still buzzing. Fizzing. I once had a friend who was working as an actor. He'd told me how after a show it would take him hours to wind down, which was a bit of a problem if the curtain fell at half past ten and you had any ambition to fit in with the rest of the world. Mainly he found himself fitting in with other actors, who were the only people who felt like heading out for dinner at eleven and sleeping until noon every day of the week.
Another friend from college is a long-distance runner. She's impressive. She almost got into the Olympics. She runs ridiculously fast and far just to get her body going. Then she runs a properly serious distance and punishes herself up steep hills. After that, the difficulty is to bring her body back to normal. She does more running simply to wind herself down. Afterwards she puts ice on her muscles and joints to cool them. I could do with that. Sometimes I feel I'd like to put my whole head into a chinking barrel of ice.
'It's not that difficult a decision,' he said. 'Meg's already asked for a white wine.'
'What?' I said.
For a moment I'd forgotten where I was. I had to look around to remind myself. It was wonderful. It was autumn, but it was a hot evening and the crowd in the Soho bar was spilling out on to the street. It felt like the summer was going to go on for ever, winter would never come, it would never rain again. Out in the countryside fields needed water, riverbeds were dry, crops shrivelling, but in the middle of London it was like being by the Mediterranean.
'What do you want to drink?'
I asked for a white wine and some water. Then I put my arm on Meg's shoulders and murmured into her ear, 'Did you talk to Deborah?'
She looked uneasy. So she hadn't.
'Not yet,' she said.
'We need to talk about this. Tomorrow, OK?'
'Still or sparkling?' asked the man.
'Tap,' I said. 'First thing, Meg, before anything else.'
'All right,' she said. 'Nine o'clock, then.'
I watched her and she watched the stranger walking over to the bar. He had a nice, open face: what was his name? Todd, that was it. We'd all staggered over from the office. It had been a hard day. We'd arrived as a group but gradually been diluted by the crowd. I saw familiar faces around the room, which was full of happy people who had escaped from their offices. Todd was a client who had come in to check our proposal and he'd tagged along with us. Now he was trying to buy the drinks at the crowded bar. He was having difficulty because one of the women behind it was being shouted at by a rude customer. She was foreign - something like Indonesian - and the rude customer was yelling that she had given him the wrong drink. She was having difficulty understanding what he was saying. 'Look at me when I'm talking to you,' he said.
Todd came back clutching the drink for Meg, the two for me, and a beer for himself. 'They wouldn't give me tap water,' he said. 'It's from a bottle.'
I took a sip.
'So, you like danger,' I said.
'You make it sound stupid but, yes, in a way.'
Todd proceeded to tell us about a holiday he'd taken. He was cheerily proud of it. He and a group of friends had been celebrating something so they had undertaken a succession of dangerous sports across southern Africa. They had whitewater-rafted in Zambia, canoed past hippos in Botswana, bungee-jumped from a cable car going up Table Mountain and scuba-dived with Great White Sharks.
'Sounds amazing,' said Meg. 'I don't think I'd have the nerve to do that.'
'It was exhilarating,' he said. 'Terrifying as well. I think maybe I liked it more in retrospect.'
'Did anybody get eaten?' I asked.
'You go down in cages,' he said, 'and we didn't see any.'
'Cages?' I said, pulling a face. 'I thought you liked danger.'
He looked bemused. 'Are you kidding?' he said. 'I'd like to see you jump from a cable car hundreds of feet up with just an elastic band for protection.'
I laughed, but not meanly, I hope. 'Haven't you read our brochure?' I said. 'We've arranged bungee-jumps. We've done the risk assessments, we've organized the insurance. I can tell you that it's less dangerous than crossing the road.'
'It's an adrenaline rush all the same,' Todd said.
'You can get adrenaline off the shelf,' I said. Was he going to be offended, or was he going to smile?
He shrugged self-deprecatingly and smiled. 'So, what's your idea of danger?' he said.
I thought for a moment. 'Real things, where it matters. Searching for unexploded mines and defusing them. Working as a miner - but not in Britain. I mean in Russia or the Third World.'
'What frightens you most?'
'Lots of things. Lifts, bulls, heights, bad dreams. Almost everything about my job. Failure. Talking in public.'
Todd laughed. 'I don't believe that,' he said. 'It was a good presentation today.'
'I was terrified beforehand. I always am.'
'So you agree with me. You like challenges.'
I shook my head. 'Your bungee-jumping and canoeing past hippos, that was in a brochure. You knew how it was going to turn out.' I heard a noise behind me and turned round. The man was complaining to the woman again, but worse this time. She was trying to explain and she was almost crying.
'What about you, Meg?' Todd asked, turning towards her. She smiled up at him shyly and opened her mouth, but I interrupted her reply.
'You're saying you like risk?' I said.
'Yes.'
'Adrenaline?'
'I guess.'
'Do you want to show me?'
For more information please contact Becke Parker on 020 7010 3259 / becke.parker@uk.penguingroup.com
