The Girl Who Came Back

by Susan Lewis

  Sighing, Jules rested her head on Kian’s shoulder as he slipped an arm around her.

  “I know the car doesn’t make up for anything,” he said softly, “but it did make you smile.”

  “Not as much as the outfit,” she assured him. “You look a complete dick, and I suppose you went parading through the town dressed like that, making sure everyone saw you.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be wanting them to miss out on a good laugh, now, would I?” he admitted. “Which reminds me, I was thinking we could make our grand opening a fancy dress affair. Can’t you just see it? We could go for a nautical theme, you know, pirates, smugglers, jolly matelots, mermaids…”

  Jules looked at him askance.

  “OK, maybe not mermaids, they wouldn’t be able to walk, but the topless bit would go down well.”

  “I wonder what you’re going to think of next,” she laughed. “You’re the one who loves dressing up, not everyone else. Well, maybe everyone in your family—”

  “Who’s that?” he broke in as a large white van came trundling along the cove’s only access route from the main road. “Oh, great, it’s Bob. I bet he’s brought our new computers.”

  “That fell off the back of a lorry?”

  Kian’s hands went up. “He knows we don’t take any of his dodgy stuff,” he assured her. “Apparently these are totally on the level, still in their boxes. I thought you wanted one.”

  “I do. Definitely. Who’s going to teach us how to use them?”

  “We’ll find someone. You know they’re saying that within ten years everyone’s going to have one….I’ll go give him a hand to unload. Christ! He nearly hit my new car, stupid b—” He turned sheepishly to Jules. “Your new car,” he corrected.

  Her eyes were shining as she watched him taunting Bob with his cape, zigzagging over to the van, where Bob was clearly enjoying the performance as he jumped down onto the gravel. They’d been friends all through school, lived on the same street, played on the same football and hurling teams, been best men at each other’s weddings, and promised to be godfathers to each other’s kids when the little rascals finally came along. (Bob’s wife, Izzie, was expecting their first at the end of next month.) There probably wasn’t anything the two men wouldn’t do for each other, although Jules had to admit there wasn’t much Kian wouldn’t do for anyone.

  He was just that sort of bloke. He absolutely loved to help others, to the point that he found it almost impossible to say no, and it didn’t even seem to bother him if he was taken advantage of, which happened more often than he probably knew. Not that anyone ever did him wrong—it wouldn’t have been wise given the family he came from, and besides everyone was far too fond of him to want to hurt him in any way, or to cause any deliberate offense. It was simply that he was a lot of people’s first port of call when something needed doing, since he had a knack for sorting out problems and making things happen. He filled in complicated forms for the elderly and infirm, organized transport for their hospital visits, found plumbers for their leaks, made sure cars were properly fixed before bills were paid, dealt with snooty power companies, called in the Brightest Spark (the business name that his cousin Finn, the local electrician, operated under), or another cousin who was a nurse, or Carrie, who worked for social services. He had a bigger network in and around Kesterly than British Telecom, his mother would often tease, and Jules was convinced that Aileen was right.

  Like Jules’s mother, Marsha, Aileen had lost her husband at a young age and had had to bring up her child alone. However, with so many brothers and sisters all over the Temple Fields estate, as well as back home in Ireland, and all the nieces and nephews that entailed, plus further extended family and of course friends of family, it could hardly be said that Aileen had lacked support. In Marsha’s case the circumstances had been entirely different. Apart from her lovely next-door neighbors Trisha and Steve, parents to Jules’s lifelong best friend Em, she’d had no one to help with the burden—or share the joys—of being a single parent. Unless she counted her mother-in-law, Florence, but it was hard to do that when Florence had always seemed to resent every single finger she was forced to lift in assistance of others.

  “It’s a miracle your father turned out to be as kind and lovely as he was, having a mother like that,” Marsha would often sigh when she and Jules were talking about Florence. “So let’s just be thankful he didn’t take after her.”

  Jules’s father had died when she was five years old. It was an accident that should never have happened, and wouldn’t have if he’d left work a minute earlier or later. He’d been driving home when a tree fell on his car, crushing it.

  Whether it was the shock of fate changing her world so abruptly that had made Marsha so nervous of life or whether she’d been like that before her husband was killed, Jules couldn’t be sure. She only knew that her mother, as sweet and funny and wise and supportive as she could often be, would leap out of her skin at the merest unexpected noise, constantly shy away from confrontations in case she ended up being punished in some ghastly cosmic way, and worried herself ragged from the minute Jules left the house until she came home again. It was a part of her mother’s character that Jules had always found wearing—and intensely annoying when she was in her teens—although it had made her extremely protective of her.

  Since Grandmother Florence had departed the world when Jules was eleven, it had been just Marsha and Jules, with Trish, Steve, and Em providing all the family they needed. And when it became evident, a few years later, that Jules’s relationship with the dashingly lovely Kian Bright was turning serious, they were all more than happy to be a part of Kian’s chaotic family, in spite of them living on the wrong side of the estate. (This was something that had only ever mattered to Marsha and Trish until they met Kian and Aileen, whom it was impossible not to adore.)

  It hadn’t even seemed to bother Marsha too much that Kian had no plans to go to uni. He’d seemed quite chill about continuing to divide his working hours between his cousin Danny’s boxing club on the edge of town and the Red Lion for as long as it floated his boat—a phrase that had tickled Marsha to bits when she’d first heard it. (She’d known in her heart that Kian was going to amount to something. Everyone did. It was just going to take time to find out what.) Jules had also worked at the pub back then, but because she’d been only sixteen, her duties had been restricted to washing glasses, wiping tables, and sweeping the floor. By the time she was seventeen and halfway through the sixth form, she was a part-time server behind the bar (Kian’s uncle Pete, with his flamboyant mustache and twinkly eyes, had always considered the law something to be stretched and molded to suit a person’s needs), and she and Kian had already decided that one day they were going to run their own pub.

  “Wouldn’t you just love it to be the Mermaid?” he’d sighed one warm Sunday afternoon as they strolled on the deserted beach in front of the forlorn-looking inn. “Just think what we could do with it if we had a bit of cash.”

  “A lot of cash,” she’d corrected, “and then we could make it the best pub in Kesterly by a mile, the way everyone says it used to be.”

  And now, miraculously, here they were happily married with their extravagant plans built up over the past several years coming to fruition, and enough in the bank to create even more.

  When the money had come to them, last year, Kian had been working in Damian Boyle’s car showroom on the outskirts of Paradise Cove. One of his many tasks, besides selling the secondhand rides at which he was extremely good, was to run the staff lottery scheme. This meant collecting the money, popping out to the newsagent’s to buy the tickets, and checking the results when they came in.

  However, it wasn’t the syndicate that owned the only winning ticket one momentous Saturday evening. It was Kian, who’d tossed over a pound coin before leaving the shop, saying, “Give us one for luck, mate.”

  So the newsagent had, and by the end of the day Kian was in such a profound state of shock that he hadn’t been ab
le to speak to tell anyone what he was sure couldn’t be true. It was only when he made the call and found out it was true, that he finally owned up to Jules, who’d as good as fainted when she’d heard how much he’d won.

  Being Kian, he couldn’t face telling his colleagues in the syndicate that by some mind-boggling fluke he was rich and they weren’t, so when the winnings came through he’d ended up giving them all twenty grand each, no strings attached. There were handouts for his family too, naturally, and the biggest of all for his mother. Weirdly—or perhaps not, since his family wasn’t like most others—no one had used their windfall to leave the estate. A few spent it on home improvements, others lost it all on the horses or dogs, a couple made good investments in a new waterside development next to Paradise Cove, and just about every one of them, including his mother, had bought themselves a brand-new car and taken a fancy holiday. Aileen’s choice of car had been a funky blue Fiat Panda, which she’d picked up a day before taking off on a luxury cruise around the Med with her best friend, Marsha. In return, Marsha had used some of her own little windfall from Kian to take Aileen, Trish, and Steve on, of all things, an African safari. Such courage from her mother! Jules could hardly believe it when Marsha, who worked at the dog rescue center, had owned up to a secret lifelong desire to see wild animals in their natural habitat.

  Now Jules was about to start back inside when Aileen’s funky Fiat, as everyone called it, swerved in from the main road and skidded to a halt inches from Bob’s white van.

  Realizing Em was at the wheel—Aileen had given Em the keys the day Em had arrived from the States, telling her to think of the car as her own for the duration—Jules ran over to greet her.

  “Did you get through?” she asked as a beaming Em climbed out of the driver’s seat.

  “I did,” Em confirmed, her spiky blond hair and riot of gingery freckles making her look as airy and frivolous as a teenager, when she was actually twenty-six and already a mother. “Kian! What have you come as?” she shrieked.

  “Julio Rivero at your service,” he responded, with an extravagant flourish of his cape and clatter of heels. “So, tell us, chiquita, are you staying a bit longer?”

  “Two days,” she told them excitedly. “The travel agent was such a sweetheart. He actually let me use his phone to call Don while he checked out the flights. Don’s totally cool about me extending—he’s just really sorry that he can’t be here too. But you’re all to come visit us just as soon as you’re able.”

  “You can count on it,” Kian assured her.

  “How’s Matilda?” Jules wanted to know, referring to Em’s almost two-year-old bundle of joy.

  “Oh, she’s doing just great,” Em replied, seeming to melt. “Apparently she’s being really good for Grandma, Grandpa, and Daddy and when Don put her on the phone she actually said, ‘Hello, Mommy, miss you.’ I swear I nearly sobbed. I wanted to get on a plane that very instant, but you and I get so little time together these days, and I’ll see her again by the end of the week. Bob Stafford, as I live and breathe! How are you? I haven’t seen you in so long.”

  Appearing slightly perplexed by this new Em, who was actually the same as the old Em, full of warmth and exuberance, except she had a kind of mid-Atlantic accent now with little West Country waves washing all over it, Bob allowed himself to be hugged.

  “Looking good, Em,” he told her gruffly. “Suiting you over there, is it?”

  “I love it,” she assured him, “but I love coming home to visit. Nothing changes, which is the most wonderful part of it, and yet it does, because look at these guys getting this fabulous old pub up together….I only wish I could be here for the opening, but the fall semester starts on August eighteenth and I have to be back for that.”

  Flooding with pride at her friend’s achievements, Jules was about to slip an arm around Em’s shoulders when another car pulled in from the main road. This time it was a silver Mercedes with blacked-out windows that neither Jules nor Kian recognized, but as it came to a stop and two men dressed entirely in black stepped out Jules felt a chill run through her.

  “Who is it?” she murmured to Kian.

  “Go inside,” he told her.

  “I want to know who it is.”

  “Go and call our Danny,” he growled. “Tell him to get himself over here pronto.”

  —

  Even before she’d made the call to Danny, Jules had realized who the unwelcome visitors were.

  “It’s the Romanians,” she said softly as she, Em, and Ruthie watched from the window. “Or Albanians. I’m not sure about their nationality, but you can guess why they’re here.”

  “They’re messing with the wrong family if they think they’re going to get anything out of us,” Ruthie muttered fiercely.

  “Are you saying it’s protection they’re after?” Em asked, appalled.

  Jules nodded. “They turned up in Kesterly back in April or May, and they’ve been harassing businesses all along the coast ever since, especially in Paradise Cove.”

  “Is anyone paying up?”

  “I’ve no idea, but I’m guessing some are or they’d surely have cleared off by now.”

  “Or someone would have been hurt,” Ruthie added ominously.

  To Jules Em said, “Will Kian pay?”

  Jules was indignant. “No way!” she declared hotly. “I’d rather close the place down than start bowing to the likes of them.” In a sudden blaze of fury, she started for the door. “I’m going out there.”

  “No, Jules, you can’t!” Ruthie and Em cried, grabbing her back.

  “You don’t know what they’re capable of,” Ruthie cautioned wisely. “If you go upsetting them, they might take it out on Kian.”

  Jules returned to the window, still steaming and frustrated. When she saw what was happening now her jaw dropped in shock. “Oh my God! He’s only treating them to a bloody flamenco,” she exclaimed, starting to laugh. “He’s out of his mind.”

  The others started to laugh too. Kian was nothing if not unpredictable.

  Suddenly Jules froze. “Christ! Is that a gun?” she gasped, fear coursing through her so fast she started to shake.

  Bob was backing off, white-faced, hands in the air.

  Kian carried on dancing, clicking his heels, waving his hands and throwing out his cloak.

  “This is like the scene from Indiana Jones when he pulls the gun and shoots the baddie,” Liam declared over their shoulders.

  “Except in this case the baddie’s got the gun,” Ruthie pointed out.

  Jules couldn’t watch another minute. She had to get out there and put a stop to it all.

  “Come back,” Ruthie seethed, grabbing her again. “I’ll tell you what he’s up to. He’s making out he’s a nutjob, or drunk, someone who isn’t the owner of the business, so they’re wasting their time trying to get anything out of him.”

  “If you go out there,” Em told her gravely, “there’s every chance you’ll get hurt, and that definitely wouldn’t be Kian’s plan.”

  Unable to argue with that, Jules turned to Liam as he said, “Looks like they’re going.”

  Returning to the window, she watched the thugs getting into their car while Kian, unbelievably, just carried on dancing and Bob, by the look of him, was bending double trying not to laugh.

  As the Mercedes reversed back to the road and disappeared, Jules threw open the door and shouted across the garden, “My husband and his best friend have to be the only idiots in the world who treat a visit from the Mafia as a joke.”

  Kian spluttered, “Did you see their faces? They didn’t know what the hell to do.”

  “So they pulled a gun. These guys are dangerous, Kian. People who mess around with them end up dead.”

  “Did you call Danny?” Kian wanted to know.

  “He’s on his way, with backup.”

  “OK, we’ll deal with it from here, so you just go on about your day and don’t worry yourself anymore about nasty little men who make nasty little thre
ats that they can’t carry out. Especially not with Julio Rivero!”

  Unable not to laugh, Jules turned back inside, still worried, although loyally confident that Kian and his cousins would find a way to see the Romanians, and any other chancers with similar aims, off for good. If they didn’t, then their dreams really might be over before they’d begun, since she was serious about not working for some lowlife hoodlums of any nationality who had the audacity to try to set up their vile racketeering in her hometown.

  “Have you had many visits like that?” Em asked as Jules led the way past the bar to the stairs.

  “No, that was the first, and let’s hope it’s the last or things could really turn ugly. Actually, I heard the other day that the police are calling a meeting with local business-owners to come up with a solidarity type of plan to try to sort this out. Kian will be sure to go, especially now, probably along with half the Temple Fields estate. You know how they’re always spoiling for some sort of fight.”

  “It’ll make a change for them to be on the same side as the police,” Em remarked drily as they climbed the stairs. “So, are you missing being over there? It must seem very quiet on the posh side of town by comparison.”

  Jules paused as she reached the top of the stairs, where boxes were piled on the landing and a warm breeze was stealing through an open sash window.

  “What is it?” Em asked, trying to peer around her.

  Jules shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I just thought…” She picked up an old-fashioned cream leather shoe with a fraying lace and broken stitching around the pointed toe. There was no heel as such, and the sole was worn thin, though not through. “The builders found this lodged in one of the window frames while they were carrying out the renovations,” she said, showing it to Em. “I keep wondering about who might have owned it.”

  “It looks very old,” Em commented, treating it carefully as she turned it over in her hands.

  “It is. Mum took it to one of the antiques dealers in town, who reckons it dates from the mid-nineteenth century and probably belonged to a young girl or small woman. Because it’s leather and is clearly for the right foot, he says she was unlikely to have been a peasant.”