The Hoax
Page 28
The woman looked a little taken aback. She shook her head with a rueful smile. ‘It didn’t happen. I seem to spend most of my time looking after everybody else’s children in here.’
‘Look after mine, will you? Please make sure they’re okay.’
The woman leant forward and put both hands on the table. ‘I don’t think we need to worry about that yet. I just need to know what happened. Just tell me the truth.’ She made a note on her pad.
Frankie reached across and held her wrist to stop her writing more. ‘It’s important to me that they are okay. That’s all that matters. That’s why I’m here.’
The detective looked at her. ‘So tell me what happened, Mrs Baxter.’
Frankie smiled at her. ‘It was me. I pushed her.’
Acknowledgements
Any book always belongs to so many more people than the name on the cover and The Hoax is no exception.
I knew I wanted to write a book in 2020, but I didn’t realise that a global pandemic would give me so much time in which to do it. In January, a chance reading of a newspaper article gave me the central premise; it was about a woman who was deceived by her friend and former bridesmaid into giving up her job to take up a fictional new appointment. Bizarre but interesting. I made notes and planned to kickstart the book at a writing retreat in France at Chez Castillon run by my wonderful friends Mike and Janie Wilson (if you have a book lurking inside you, check out www.chez-castillon.com).
Plans change, and the lockdown in March 2020 made me start writing. Daily walks through our local park started to infiltrate themselves into the plot and, though I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to write about a world suffering from a pandemic, much of what happened during that period seeped into the work. I took a diploma in criminal psychology alongside writing the piece, and so many people’s comments and ideas were added as extra seasoning.
A huge thanks to Catherine Cousins at 2QT Books for taking me on board and getting the book out into the world. Thank you to her team, Charlotte Mouncey for her wonderful ideas on the cover, and the indefatigable Karen Holmes for her patience and insight, and for making me aware that I’m not the master of the comma and the pluperfect that I might think I am.
Thank you to all the people who gave me such positive feedback on my first book The Punishment which gave me the temerity to think I could write another one.
Thank you to the fabulous Jane Wenham Jones, who has become my unofficial mentor and is never frightened of being a little ‘teachery’ in her edit and her feedback. It’s her brilliant eye that hopefully means this book makes sense.
Thanks to my friends who may find just a little soupcon of themselves lurking within these pages. And thanks to my partner Richard, whose support and inspiration makes everything possible.