Chapter One

Ten-year-old Molly Hooper stared at her mother's lifeless body for one last time before leaving the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.

Most people would have cried, but not Molly. She hadn't made any sort of reaction since two days ago when her father told her gently, expecting her to erupt into tears. She just felt heavy inside, like the Greek god holding up the sky who she'd learnt about at school had decided to take a rest and hand the weight over to her.

The funeral was even worse. People she didn't even know kept coming and attacking her with words like 'oh you poor poor dear' or 'such a burden on such a young thing', thrusting tuna sandwiches at her and then asking her father if she was eating properly when she refused. Molly hated being the centre of attention. Mostly she just wanted to curl up somewhere small with a book and lose herself in it for a while. Alone. Where the silence would comfort her like a friend she'd had her whole life.

Soon afterwards her father became sad. Quiet. Molly thought maybe the gods had handed some of the weight of the world to him, but much more than they'd given her, as it seemed to be too heavy to do anything else but bear it. He didn't eat or talk or laugh or smile. Molly became used to this, and learnt to make meals for herself and to entertain herself in the woods by her home. She had a special spot, a perfect low branch of a tree where she'd sit and read. There were lots of other dead things in the forest, mostly squirrels, but sometimes birds and once she saw a rabbit. It didn't scare her. In fact, she liked them, and found it peaceful. She sometimes told them about things, even though she knew they couldn't hear her. They provided someone to tell about Mum and about Father, someone who wouldn't judge her like her classmates or say that she needed emotional counselling like the adults at school. Once she'd completely got over her squeamishness, she buried them after talking to them, marking the grave with a small pebble and a few leaves.

Molly finally cried half a year later. She'd found a dead cat and was rather pleased with herself, when it hit her like a wrecking ball in the stomach. Mum was dead just like her animals, her eyes staring lifelessly into nowhere, her mouth twisted into a perpetual frown, under the ground packed tight in a wooden box. She'd never sit on her Mum's lap again or have Mum kiss her again or have Mum pick her up from school again or go swimming with her again, where Mum would toss her light frame up so she'd splash down into the deep end, then ruffle her wet hair and call her 'my little dolphin' when she rose up to the surface. Molly put her head in her hands and cried, but no sound came out, the cat lying forgotten under her special branch.

A twig snapped behind her. Molly turned round, startled, her eyes still shining with overdue tears.

"Why are you crying?"

It was a boy. She recognized him from the year above in school, but never spoken to him at all, and was surprised to find he had an accent. Irish, she thought. "My mum's dead," she said, sniffing.

"I know," he said. "You're the girl who likes the dead things, aren't you?"

"Yeah," Molly said unsteadily. "How'd you know about Mum?"

"I found out. I know lots of things." He shrugged. Molly didn't know what to say, so all she could manage was "Oh." She hadn't figured out if she liked the way that the boy's eyes seemed to twinkle at her. As if they'd known each other forever.

"Are you going to talk to that cat like you usually do?" he said a touch impatiently. "It took me ages."

"Wait.. what'd you mean? What took you ages?"

"Finding the cat. Duhh."

"You put it there? You..put all of them there?"

He smiled. "I knew you liked them."

"But why?" Her eyes began to widen.

"I was bored. I get bored very easily and.. well, you gave me something to do. It's fun."

Her eyes got even bigger. "You killed them?"

"Most of them." The boy smirked. "Stop looking so startled. You look like a deer in headlights. I know lots of people who would think your obsession with dead things morbid enough." He chuckled. "Silly, silly Molly."

This should have hurt, but it felt like a welcome truth. "Yes, I s'pose you're right," she said, pausing. "What's your name?"

"Guess." He smirked, leaving her annoyed and slightly frustrated.

"How'm I supposed to know?"

"I know that you're Molly Hooper and you're ten and nine months. Your mother died of cancer half a year ago. Your favourite subjects are Science and Geography and your favourite colour's blue. You like dead things because you find them comforting seeing as your mother's dead too." He paused. "I can go on if you want."

"No, no.. it's fine," Molly said. How had he done it? It was like he had got inside her head.

"I know so much about you. Come on, you should at least be able to work out my name."

"I don't like stalking people, now I come to think of it."

He laughed. "You're feistier than I expected. You're shy at school. Anyway, no, you wouldn't, you're far too ordinary for that. Far too ordinary to know anything about anything." Molly would have protested that she was in fact top of the class in Science, but he probably knew that anyway. "You're not even trying. James Moriarty. But you have to call me Jim."

"Why?"

"Because you just do."

"OK." James – or Jim – was strange. But then again, so Molly thought, she was strange too. "Thanks for the cat," she said.

"You going to talk to it?"

Molly decided she liked the twinkle.

"No. Can I talk to you?"

"If you insist."

Over the next few months Molly learnt that Jim was very clever. A genius, actually, and he told her that he had 'big plans'. "Am I involved in these plans of yours?" she remembered asking tentatively. "Yes. You're in a few."

"What are they?"

He smirked wickedly. "Not telling. Not just yet."

They went on to the same secondary school and ended up dating. He eventually let her call him James and told her he liked the way she said it. When she was 15 and he 17, her dad was over the drinking and married again, a peroxide blonde ten years younger than him who ignored Molly at all times, who they both made a plan to get rid of. Molly was expecting it to be scary, even though she wasn't doing the actual shooting, she was just distracting her step mother. But it wasn't. During the whole thing it was like electricity was shooting through her veins, making her feel more alive than she'd ever felt before, even when she faked sobbing down the phone about the death, knowing James was safe at home and not in danger at all of being caught. There was no guilt, none at all.

Molly's father got a job in London and took her with him. The nigh before the move, she sneaked out to see James and they held each other in the darkness of his room. "They can't take you away from me," he murmured softly in her ear. "I'll be back, and we can text, can't we?"

"I'll see you again," she said, and was thinking of him all the long drive to London.

Molly remembered how her mother had told her that one day she'd meet a man who'd love her and care for her and make her happy. Somehow she thought that James Moriarty wasn't the man her mother had in mind. But did it matter?