Christobel Kent was born in London and educated at Cambridge. She has lived variously in Essex, London and Italy. Her childhood included several years spent on a Thames sailing barge in Maldon, Essex with her father, stepmother, three siblings and four step-siblings. She now lives in both Cambridge and Florence with her husband and five children.
Also by Christobel Kent
The Crooked House
The Loving Husband
The Day She Disappeared
*
A Party in San Niccolo
Late Season
The Summer House
A Florentine Revenge
Copyright
Published by Sphere
ISBN: 978-0-7515-6877-6
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 Christobel Kent
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
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50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
About the Author
Also by Christobel Kent
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Postscript
For all the women who have supported and tolerated
and argued and encouraged and listened and warned and
loved, without whom life would be impossible.
They know who they are.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my steadfast and sharp-eyed agent, Victoria Hobbs, for her tenacity, her warm heart and her cool head, my editor Maddie West at Sphere for her insight and patience, and the inimitable Sarah Crichton at Sarah Crichton Books in the US for her fierce commitment and brilliance.
The Sphere team: Kirsteen Astor and Emma Williams deserve many medals for their publicity and marketing genius and the eternally forbearing and kind Thalia Proctor a halo for services to proof-tidying and much much more.
To Richard Beswick of Little, Brown/Abacus, without whom I would never have dared write anything, I owe a debt of thanks and love for close on thirty years of good humour and friendship, and most of all I need to thank my husband Donald, for lying awake worrying about the bills, fixing bicycles, looking after children, making coffee and for generally being the best and kindest there is.
My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –
In Corners – till a Day
The Owner passed – identified –
And carried Me away
EMILY DICKINSON
Chapter One
The university sat tall and dark above the town: three towers looking across the roofs and out over a grey estuary. Perhaps Rose Hill had been wild once and covered with a pink-petalled tangle of briar roses but now it was groomed to smoothness, cropped lawn and concrete in the shadow of the towers.
It could have been a woman’s name – and there had been an incident, far back, decades ago, not long after the towers went up and regrettable, when a young woman from the town gained entrance to the towers, took the lift to the fourteenth floor and smashed her way through the security glass. Apparently an impossibility but there are circumstances – the psychotropic drugs popular then, or the more common or garden misery, or rage, or madness – under which the unfeasible can be accomplished. Her name wasn’t Rose and besides, the hill had been named long before but her death was now wound into the story, part of the name that was too soft and pretty for the way it looked.
The only relic of a former landscape was an older building that sat at the foot of the hill behind dense hedging, grey brick and something like the Victorian gatehouse to a grander structure long vanished. Perhaps it had once had a rose garden, but there was no longer any sign of that, either.
Bridget stood at the shop window and looked out, down the cobbled curve, watching the light leave the narrow sloping street.
November wasn’t always a quiet month, but this one had been, for whatever reason – the papers said it was uncertainty, by which they meant everyone worrying about money, and the world turned upside down. The short days and the light dimming to grey so early gave the lane a melancholy look too, in spite of the strings of lights, their mirrored gleam on the cobbles and the tinny sound of Christmas music – but Bridget liked Christmas. She’d learned to love Christmas: kids did that for you, just one kid did that for you. Even if he was sixteen now, and a foot taller than her.
Finn, Finn, Finn. Matt, bringing tea this morning, had lowered his voice and said he had a few ideas about what to get him, before sliding back in beside her for those nice five minutes before work. It would involve something for his bike and a lot of stuff for his computer. Bridget would get him clothes: gone were the days when she could work him out, but he didn’t seem to hold it against her. Still planted a kiss, absent-minded, on her cheek shuffling down to breakfast with his hair sticking up and his eyebrow grown thick and dark as caterpillars overnight. Clothes she could do: she knew what logos he liked, nothing bright, warm stuff, practical stuff. Socks. Her mind wandered, down the little cobbled hill, into town.
There was a music shop on the corner, further down and out of sight but if it had been there when she was considering the premises, she would have looked elsewhere. The sight of the instrument, the curve of varnished maple, the inlays, the snail curl of the scroll and something happened in her head, a buzz, white noise. Notes on a page, an orchestra tuning up, did the same thing.
She was on her own in the shop. Her shop.
Four thirty on a November Tuesday. So quiet she’d sent Laura out to the post office. One of Bridget’s regulars from across the county had phoned for a specific dress and – though Bridget hadn’t really got into selling online because she was wary and stood resolute in the face of Laura’s hints and pleas – they’d boxed it up between them as a favour and off Laura had gone, sailing down the darkening street bearing the box high. Close on a grand’s worth of dress: Bridget didn’t want that kind of stock out
for two weeks to someone she didn’t know only to come back again, never mind getting lost in the post.
That was the wariness she expressed to Laura, anyway. Just like when she got up at two a.m. and did her stretches in the living room because she couldn’t sleep: she told Matt she was fretting over the VAT. Who didn’t wake in the middle of the night, these days? If it wasn’t recession it was people out rioting. Matt would reach out a hand to her when she climbed back in, resting it on her until eventually she would get back to sleep. It wasn’t the VAT, though, it wasn’t fretting about stock getting lost in the post. She couldn’t say to Laura, after all, I don’t want people to find me on the internet. She couldn’t say, I don’t want people looking at pictures of me. It’s not worrying, either. It’s terror. Laura would think there was something wrong with her.
It was a relief, sometimes, to have Laura out of the shop. Ten years younger, so certain of everything, so pink and white, so blonde and pretty. So pregnant it set Bridget’s nerves jangling, though Laura had told her, babies were always late in her family and she wanted to work. Needed the money: didn’t we all. Perhaps they could close up early: perhaps Bridget could send Laura straight home when she got back from the post. She would take her time anyway, she’d dawdle and look in baby shops and buy herself a chocolate flapjack and pat her belly, anxious and satisfied at once. Bridget remembered that feeling: she’d like to jump to a month ahead and Laura sitting up in hospital with the baby safely in her arms and Nick the sainted husband at her shoulder. She turned her back to the window and surveyed the shop.
Home early, why not? Last night had been a late one, after all. Monday the shop was closed but she’d been in anyway, on her hands and knees repainting the old wooden floor, another layer of cream eggshell and all the stock swathed in dustsheets, along with the velvet chair, the sofa for husbands, the mirrored cube for the newspaper to sit on perfectly centred. Laura had once called her OCD in an unguarded moment, for her straightening of rails and scrupulous repainting of the floor once every six months, if it needed it or not. How many layers must there be, by now? Bridget had laughed. She didn’t really know what OCD was, but she was fairly sure it didn’t cover what she had.
Last night Matt had picked her up without being asked, taken her hands in his, sore and cracked from the white spirit, put her bike in the back. The party dresses had all been hanging straight again and the dustsheets folded and back under the rails in the stockroom. She’d hung up her coat and made the tea, though, because he’d been at work too and it was only fair. She didn’t want their little world falling down round their ears for lack of sausage and mash. Besides, pretty much the only time she saw Finn these days was when he heard the table being laid.
It was normal, everyone said so, although what would she know was normal? Bridget’s teenage years were a blur. Her quiet, shy, kind husband and her big, soft son wouldn’t have known her, if you showed them a picture of fifteen-year-old Bridget O’Neill standing with her huge eyes staring out, gawky and angular, all knobs and bones. Whereas she’d seen Matt, an old yellowed photograph of him standing by his bike in glasses at that age, frowning with shyness and had known it was him straight away.
Something moved under the velvet chair in the back and immediately Bridget was over there on her hands and knees. Moth. In November? She must be keeping it too warm in here. It fluttered, velvety: Bridget didn’t like moths and catching them was like trying to catch a bird, but it had to be done. Kill it? She didn’t want to kill it. She had it between cupped hands when the bell pinged over the door and she looked up, expecting to see Laura.
A man and his daughter, more likely granddaughter: the man half turned away from her under the downlighters but she could see bushy eyebrows, the sheen of scalp under thinning hair. He was holding the door for the girl and she walked in, bright, upright and excited, face upturned. Fourteen, maybe fifteen but looking young, with her hair pulled in bunches either side of the head, though Bridget knew that was the look. She didn’t have the skinny jeans on though, that would have completed the look but a knee-length school skirt and her coat was tweed, like something from fifty years ago. Scuffed school shoes. Pretty.
And then abruptly Bridget felt a flutter of panic, sudden and extreme and in that moment she couldn’t tell if it came from inside her own chest or was the caged moth, its wings beating furry between her hands. She stood hurriedly and moved past them, apologising, to put it out into the dark before the door swung shut again. When she came back the man was standing at the rails, turned away from her and frowning down at things like he knew what he was looking for, and the girl standing in the middle of the room, all eagerness.
Then the man spoke.
‘Tell the lady what you want, Isabel,’ he said, and from nowhere, nowhere except the sound of his voice, a prickling heat rose through Bridget’s body. She couldn’t stop it, she couldn’t name it: she reached blindly for a rail to hold on to.
‘We’re looking for a party dress,’ the girl piped up. The man raised his head then, quarter profile towards her. Unsteady suddenly, Bridget caught the edge of a smile before turning to focus on the girl. Isabel. His hand was on the girl’s shoulder, slowing her down.
‘What kind of party?’ she said, as he moved along the rails behind her. The girl was too young for almost everything in the shop: the thought nagged at her, troubling. Bridget’s stock was geared towards women of her own age and older, thirty-five to seventy, women who liked to dress up for weddings and the races or a weekend away in a country house hotel.
‘Oh, it’s a recital,’ said the girl, shuffling and shy suddenly. ‘And then there’s a reception thing afterwards.’ She started for a rail and pulled something out, bright silk and short: Bridget smiled at her. ‘Why don’t you choose what you like first?’ she said, wary. The man had moved off, was leaning down to pick up the newspaper beside the sofa, sitting down.
A recital. The word set up a pounding inside her and Bridget swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry: in her head she saw a row of black-clad girls, gazing over their instruments. Think of something else. But she could still feel it as she stepped closer, had to stop herself putting her hand to her mouth as the girl held something against herself in the mirror. Maybe fifteen going on sixteen after all: but jumpy as though it was all an act, being grown-up. Isabel. Behind her the man turned a page of the newspaper.
Focus on the girl. Isabel was moving from rail to rail, bright among the muted tones, the cream and grey, but growing in confidence, pulling things out. None of it looked suitable to Bridget, something like panic pattering at her, ridiculous, stop it and she didn’t know if the words in her head were for her or Isabel. She couldn’t say anything, not yet, she didn’t want to crush the girl.
‘Ready?’ she said, and Isabel nodded, excited.
The fitting room was in an alcove at the back, with the velvet chair beside it. As Bridget pulled the curtain around the girl and stepped away, the man got up from the sofa behind her abruptly, saying nothing, and crossed to the velvet chair beside the curtain. He moved the chair so that his back was to Bridget and the window, and sat down, crossing his legs. A bit of skinny ankle emerged from brown trousers.
Father or grandfather? You couldn’t ask. The girl hadn’t called him anything. But there was no accident in his sitting down right there, between her and the girl: he was paying, and he was going to have his say. The ticking of anxiety that had set up with her first sight of them, that she might have expected to settle down, wouldn’t go away. Bridget had a sudden sharp irrational desire out of nowhere for them to leave. She’d seen it before, husbands, fathers, criticising. And it was late, she was tired. If Laura would come back—
The curtain rings clicked softly and the girl came out: she’d pulled out her bunches and was blushing as if she knew. The dress was a mistake: black, low cut and too long, a bit of beading on the shoulder. Bridget saw the man shift, his profile to her for a second, saw him half smile, superior, she saw him nod and in the tilt of
his chin – older now, sagging, dusted with grey stubble – she could suddenly see him as sharply as if she had a telescope on him. She felt her mouth open and they turned, they were smiling at her, and suddenly her insides were liquid.
Something happened, she didn’t know what, something spun, the world turning, back, back, too fast. She would be sick. Bridget put out a hand to steady herself against the wall.
He beckoned the girl over and she obeyed, hesitant: he sat there unmoving so she had to bend, in the low-cut gown and seeing the shadow between what were not yet breasts, seeing her expose herself unknowing Bridget felt her throat close; her hand was at her mouth. She saw him whisper something in the girl’s ear, she saw the child’s chopped hair swing forward to hide their faces so close together.
‘I don’t—’ Bridget had begun to speak but she didn’t know what came next, she had only wanted to stop what was happening: she saw him turn at the words – again superior, amused, and knowing and she felt it, tight and knotted and terrible under her ribs. And something that crept, something that brushed the hairs on the back of her neck. He looked at her. She saw the tip of his tongue flicker at his upper lip.
And then the door behind her pinged and she could hear Laura come in, breezy, mid-complaint about something, the post office queue, the cold, her aching feet, the everyday world beyond the door that was so remote, in this moment, that she might have walked back in from China.
Turning around she saw Laura falter for a second at her expression then, looking back again at the cubicle, saw the tableau all quiet, the curtain closed, the man with his back turned in the chair, hands resting on the padded velvet arms, very still. Blindly Bridget retreated behind the till.
After a moment’s hesitation Laura was set back in motion, fishing in her pocket for the receipts from the post office, putting the kettle on. Bridget knelt behind the cash desk, pretending to be looking for her pins, hearing Laura begin to make conversation with them. Standing up again she saw that something had changed: Isabel was bright again, chattering, and he had smoothly become gentler, more grandfatherly. She saw him move his chair, though, an inch or two, to get further away from the great curve of Laura’s belly as she leaned to confide advice.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 1