Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
Sarah Michelle Lynch
Copyright © Sarah Michelle Lynch, 2017
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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. You must not circulate this book without the authority to do so.
All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Cover designed by the author
Front cover image: © Luba V Nel | Dreamstime.com
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For Andrew, who talks to anyone.
Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
Author Note
Hetty is a spin-off from the Angel Avenue series. As the title suggests, this is Hetty’s story. She was a minor character in Angel Avenue and the sequel Beyond Angel Avenue.
Hetty moves the timeline on a few years but she’s still living in Hull. All the characters are in very different places to where they used to be.
As an author of all these books, of course I am going to tell you to read them through from AA to BAA to this one, Hetty. However, I have written this book so that this story can stand alone, and can be understood, as a single book. Hetty is about her, but… other characters central to the plot are featured in earlier books and therefore to be fully invested in everyone in this novel, I do recommend you read all three books in sequence – or if you like, read Hetty and then go back to the beginning. I want to stick my neck out and say you can enjoy these books either way!
Enjoy this story, whether these characters are brand-new to you, or not.
Sarah x
Suggested Playlist
To listen to songs Sarah listened to while writing the book, visit this Spotify playlist:
CLICK HERE
We were just meant to be and fate in all her conniving,
wicked glory, wouldn’t have had this union any other way.
Hetty
a
Sarah Michelle Lynch
novel
WALKING HOME FROM work is an experience everyday. How many languages can I detect? Or different personalities? Are these students passing by, or shop workers, or bankers in disguise? Where did she get her handbag? There are some things on Hull’s Avenues that never change, and others which constantly mutate. Like the people. There’s everyone here. Rich, poor, homeless. Nice. Awful. Beautiful. I don’t know if there’s a single minute of the day when a car isn’t seen rushing down this street, or a bicycle, or someone on the way to somewhere. There’s a gourmet pie shop I adore, a plethora of niche bars and coffee shops I sit inside just to people watch, and a few bars I avoid during the day following my antics on a previous night out. Lucky me, not only do I work here, I live here too. At anytime of the day I can choose from a dozen different foreign foods to eat, take a bus into town and choose from another dozen, or simply walk around and admire the weirdoes, the beggars and the buskers and the Christian criers everyone is heckling. There’s always a couple in town having a fight, or some dude pilled up and wandering aimlessly. Cut to the bars and restaurants on Princes Avenue, which my old school teacher Jules still fancifully refers to as the Upper Avenue, and you’ve got the affluence of Hull all in one place, handing over big notes for big bottles of champagne.
I do love it here but sometimes, there’s nothing like the domain of your own home, on which you can shut the door to block out the world – an escape from the drama and the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s a dark February night and I’m ready to be inside my own private world – all my pretences left at the door.
Pushing the key in the lock, I take a deep breath. I almost forgot – it could have come today! It feels as though I’ve been waiting so long, maybe that’s why I’ve given up hope. Swinging the front door open I catch sight of an official-looking envelope on the mat and my heart starts to pound. Then thud. I’ve waited for this for so long. It’s about time something went my way. This is fate, today. Good news always turns up when you’re least expecting it!
Picking up the envelope, I tuck it into my coat pocket and reverse, turning to go back the way I just came, the door slamming behind me.
I can’t open this alone.
The skies open as my return journey to my workplace gets underway. Not only feeling a sense of urgency, I also don’t particularly want to get soaked to the skin, so I start jogging, untucking the hood of my Hull University sweatshirt from underneath my dark winter coat and pulling it over my head.
A fear that Warrick won’t be there when I get back hits me and I decide to sprint, instead.
He needs to witness this! He needs to know what he’s helped me achieve.
Leaving the offshoot road I live on and turning back onto the main hub of our area, Newland Avenue, I get caught in a crowd of people hanging around beneath the awning outside a seafood shop. Don’t they have somewhere to be? Instead of on this filthy-wet street? Don’t they know to make way for a six-foot tall woman barrelling towards her destiny? It appears not. Despite my hurried demeanour they all ignore me, congregated in their packs, waiting for the rain to pass. God it’s an ugly evening but my cargo could change all of that.
I barge through and get called a few names – when a family car honks its horn and stops beside the road. The passenger window winds down and my boss, Warrick calls, “What the hell’s up?”
Without thinking I jump in his car. He drives off straight away, lest the traffic begins stacking up behind him.
“Belt,” he says.
“Soz.”
“Do you need a lift home?”
“I was coming to see you.”
“Oh yeah?”
Showing him the envelope, he recognises why.
“I see. Well, why don’t you come with? I’m meeting Jules at the university for a show at Middleton Hall. We’ve got time for coffee beforehand.”
“Sounds good.”
AFTER finding a parking space, we locate Jules waiting for us outside the campus coffee shop.
I can tell from her expression she was hoping this would be just her and Warrick tonight. Sorry to disappoint…
“Hetty, nice to see you
. Are you seeing this as well?”
Feeling awkward and also a little embarrassed around my old school teacher, I shrug.
Warrick answers for me, “She got some post today.”
Recognition sets in and Jules’ eyes widen. “Ah.”
Inside the coffee shop, while Warrick orders the drinks, she leans forward and suggests, “Want me to do it?”
I must be giving off nervous vibes. In fact when I look down at my hands I know that my wringing them must be giving me away.
“This is worse than waiting for my degree results!”
“I understand,” she says softly, but a part of me doesn’t think anyone really understands.
I want this so much.
Warrick arrives with a tray and places our hot drinks before us. Even now his hair’s going grey he still has it long, like Poldark. I’ve never understood what Jules sees in him. When she was my teacher she seemed like a dream. She was the one all the boys used to go quiet around, the teacher all the younger girls wanted to be. Pretty and clever and with such elegant, effortless style. Jules has gone blonder now she’s grey too, but her Russian grace hasn’t diminished whatsoever. I wish she would lend some to me, most days I feel too giant and incompatible with the rest of the human race.
I watch them sip their drinks, saying nothing. These people are too nice. Too polite. Too much.
I thrust the envelope at Jules. “Just do it.”
Her eye twitches and she looks at Warrick but he gives her a reassuring smile. I wish I had someone to give me a smile like that. Not that I’d ever want to be with someone as square as Warrick (no way!) but it’d be nice if I wasn’t sat here with my boss and my old teacher, and instead was sat here with someone special. Like, a man, maybe. A guy in my life.
I know the outcome of the letter before I even ask. Jules’ usually light-grey eyes darken and she glances at Warrick with a certain look.
Snatching it out of her hand, I can’t believe this. Here in black and white are the words:
We’re sorry to have to inform you that you have not been selected to join Humberside Police Force at this time. We’ve experienced unprecedented applications… the standards were particularly high… please try again in future… Try other constabularies…
Blah blah blah.
It’s like all the hope I had has just been sucked out of me and now all there is inside of me is a gaping black hole, huge and irreparable.
I feel so empty. And void. What’s the point of anything?
Biting my thumbnail, I tell them, “I wasn’t good enough.”
“It doesn’t say that, Hetty,” Jules encourages, but she’s a namby-pamby teacher who’s not allowed to be negative.
“If I was, I’d have got in.”
I mean, for fuck’s sakes, I had Warrick mentoring me. Warrick who was a detective. Warrick who’s the all-round good guy everyone loves, who’s been trying to put a good word in for me for months. If I couldn’t get in with all his help… I don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of getting in again. I’m so done with all this. So done.
“I did warn you that competition is tough these days. They don’t even recruit often, we knew this already.”
I look at Warrick who looks worried for me. He’s a kind man. Sweet. I’d rather one of them just told me like it is, though. Couldn’t they have put me out of my misery months ago, and warned me that I was never going to be good enough to be a policewoman? I can’t believe I put so much into this, when it was always ill-fated.
I really, really thought I was going to get in. I knew every answer. I passed every aptitude test. I nailed every physical test. I was one of the best. And it still wasn’t good enough.
“Well, looks like I won’t need to quit my job at the community centre anytime soon.”
“Hetty… this is just a setback,” Jules says softly, again with the mumsy approach. I bet she’s never known a setback her whole career. She’s sailed through, hasn’t she?
“There will always be a job for you with us…”
I hear Warrick’s so-called kind words but they gnaw at my synapses like some rancid cockroach, rustling around my brain. His words are piteous. And unwanted. I was counting down the days to getting out of that community centre (nice though it is) and knuckling down to some real work as a trainee copper.
I snatch the letter off the table. I haven’t even sipped any of the cappuccino Warrick bought me but I can’t stand to uphold this travesty any longer. I never should’ve applied.
Jules and Warrick look at one another in despair as I rise from my seat, ready to leave. I can’t stand to be around them sometimes. In fact their love for one another often makes me feel physically sick; you can see it just in the way they look at one another.
“Don’t go, please,” Jules begs, “come have dinner at ours…”
“Thanks but no thanks.” I leave, not wanting to be a gooseberry, not wanting to feel any worse than I already do.
Walking home I don’t even lift my hood. I let the rain drench me. It trickles down my neck, turning me into the proverbial drowned rat, my long blonde strands thin and ropey. Still, I don’t care.
I shuffle home and enter my house-for-one, leaving my wet coat on a peg. I enter the kitchen, my hair still drenched. Leaning against the kitchen counter I stare out of the window at my concrete backyard, at nothing. I stare and stare. I’m completely and utterly numb.
I really thought I’d get it. I really hoped I would. Because I knew if I didn’t, then what would there be to hope and pray for?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
* * *
IT’S been a week now and they still won’t leave me alone. Ever since I got the news that I’m not good enough to be in the police, they keep banging on my door all day long, trying to coerce me out.
“Henrietta Constance Bernard, get out here now!” Liza has shouted numerous times. Not only does she know I hate to be called Henrietta, but I also hate her mentioning the same surname I share with my mother. Not to mention my middle name is my mother’s forename, too.
Today it’s Warrick, knocking again… “We can talk this through, please come out so we can sort it. Nothing is ever as bad as what it seems.”
It is as bad as what it seems and that’s what they don’t seem to get.
I’ve been trying so hard for so long to make it, to do something worthwhile with my pitiful existence, and this was my last hope. Now I have no idea what I’m going to do and I certainly don’t need Warrick coming round with his counsellor’s tone and his reminder that I’ve missed a week of work at the community centre he owns (he gave me that job out of pity; he knows I don’t want to be there but he keeps me on anyway).
“Bring Jules!” I scream finally, because I’m sick of everyone coming round, banging on the door and pleading with me. None of them have a clue what it’s like to be me. At least Jules has some idea.
“Okay,” Warrick says through the letterbox, and when I peer through the curtains and see him walking away, phone to his ear, I realise I had better make myself look presentable if Jules is coming over. The pyjamas I’ve not taken off for a week may need incinerating, I may need the rain-soaked clumps in my hair cutting out and the socks on my feet may have become hermetically sealed. I may also finally have to leave the house, too, having run out of UHT milk and tins of food.
JULES rings the doorbell at seven o’clock in the evening. Having been to her house for dinner a couple of times before, I know she never misses story time with her twin boys, so I’m down the list of her priorities. She’ll have finished work, rushed home, fed her entire family, changed, maybe even marked a couple of books, read the boys their story and then got in her car to come here. That’s okay, her family comes first. I respect I’m totally down the pecking order.
I’ve never envied Jules but I’ve admired her. I guess that’s because she has respect. She only has to open her mouth and people listen, maybe because she says the rights things, maybe because she is the r
ight thing. I don’t feel like a single person respects me. Most just pity me and I’m quite frankly sick of pity.
I swing the door open and she walks in. We catch each other’s eyes and I notice she looks nervous, maybe awkward.
“Do you want a drink?” I ask, and it sounds more unwelcome than I intend it to but the question is from my lips – and I have been rocking in a corner for an entire week.
“I will have a cup of tea, but only if you are.”
She waits for me to invite her to sit down.
“Takes a seat, Mrs Jones. Be back in a tick.”
I knew she’d want tea, so lucky for her, I have all the stuff already set up in the kitchen. With the flick of a switch I re-boil the kettle and have the teapot filled a minute or so later.
Walking through to the living room I find her twiddling her fingers.
“Listen… I know those lot are worried about me, but I’m… figuring things out. They just don’t get it, Jules.”
Sometimes it’s weird to call her Jules. When I was fifteen she was Miss Simonovich and she was still a little screwed up back then, I could tell. I saw her tells. The same as she saw mine.
“I can tell you from experience, hiding never solves anything.”
After I’ve poured tea and offered her a biscuit, I’m sat opposite her in the Ikea recliner I love so much. Jules being Jules has opted for the small sofa nearer the gas fire.
When I don’t have anything to say, she fills the gaps instead. “I love what you’ve done with this house. You have a flair for design.”
I bought this house last year after Warrick gave me a job. When my stepdad died (decent bloke he was), he left me enough to put down a sizeable deposit on a house. I also have savings. My grandparents (mum’s side) were pretty well off. They put money in a saving’s account for me every year until I turned twenty-one. Then they put me in charge of it. £30,000 is just sitting there, with my name on it. But in our family the problem has never been money…
Hetty: An Angel Avenue Spin-Off Page 1