The Whispers

by Perks, Heidi

  Heidi Perks

  * * *

  The Whispers

  Contents

  Prologue

  PART ONE 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

  PART TWO Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  PART THREE Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Heidi Perks worked as a marketing director before leaving to become a full-time mother and writer. Her first novel, Now You See Her, was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Richard and Judy Book Club pick. Heidi is a voracious reader of crime fiction and thrillers and endlessly interested in what makes people tick. She lives in Bournemouth with her family, where she writing her next thriller.

  Also available by Heidi Perks

  Now You See Her

  Come Back For Me

  Three Perfect Liars

  For Bethany and Joseph Always follow your dreams

  Prologue

  Wednesday 1 January

  The body has been found on the beach. At the bottom of Crayne’s Cliff, a spot that the people of Clearwater know all too well for the few victims it has pulled over its perilous edge over the decades.

  The detective stands on the stony coastline, not far from where a scattering of fisherman’s huts are wedged into the base of the cliff. They are empty, of course, as is often the case at the height of the winter. He has always found their desolation in the cold months quite haunting, and never more so than today.

  He shudders as he pulls himself away, giving the SOCOs space to do their job, and starts to walk back along the beach, to where he has parked his car. It is on the other side of the stone wall, which has been built to form a barrier against the waves that can rise high when the sea is rough. Today the sea is a mill pond. In a few hours’ time there might be some hardy sailors or even a few crazy paddleboarders out for a New Year’s Day jaunt, but right now the beach ahead of him is empty.

  He hadn’t been called to the scene, but as soon as he heard about it he had to see for himself. His first case, so many years ago, had found him standing on this very stretch of beach. Though that time it had been the body of a young girl that had gone over the edge. Not a woman; not a mother.

  He remembers it like it was yesterday, but then dead bodies are still a rare occurrence in Clearwater. Incidents like this are a shock to the community, just like the one all those years ago had been.

  As he reaches his car, he pauses and looks back at the cliffs, wondering if anyone else at the station will be asking themselves the question that he is taunting himself with. Could they have known something like this might happen?

  Three weeks ago Grace Goodwin had stood in the station and tried to report a crime, but the officers she spoke with had refused to believe she was right to be worried. And yet his first call this morning hadn’t been to wish him a Happy New Year, but to tell him there was a dead body.

  PART ONE

  September – Four months before

  The whispers started on the first day back of the autumn term. As was often the case at drop-off, a group of mothers from across Year 4 had gathered in the playground to chat. Quite often it was the only time they came together, and it had been weeks since they’d last been here at the end of the summer term so there was plenty to catch up on. They weren’t all friends with each other outside of school, but they liked to drop in and out of the gossip, make sure they were kept in the loop of what was happening inside the school gates.

  Today they were interested in the fact there was an unfamiliar face hovering outside their children’s new classroom. She had a honey-toned tan, sleek auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, and wore white cut-off jeans that made her legs look incredibly long and slim. Even in her gold strappy sandals she was at least five foot eight. A little girl with dark pigtails was standing by her side.

  It didn’t take long for someone to approach her and make an introduction. And when she replied that her name was Grace Goodwin, she’d done so in the very soft twang of an Australian accent. This was enough to draw each of them over to her and, intrigued, they fired off questions at the new mum.

  They soon learned she had moved back to England only three weeks ago from Sydney and that she had attended this very school as a child, as some of them had, too. There were a few murmurs that her name sounded familiar, had she changed it, they asked, to which Grace confirmed she hadn’t. But then it wasn’t familiar enough that she might have been in their year group and it was too soon to be asking her age just yet.

  Grace had lived in Clearwater until she was seventeen, when she and her parents had moved to Australia because of her father’s job. Her parents had returned to England five years ago, apparently because of an aunt’s ailing health. This was three years after her only child, Matilda, was born, and Grace had decided to stay behind in Sydney until this summer.

  Matilda was going to be in 4C, the same class as many of their children. One of the mothers was already talking playdates and snapping out her phone to make sure Grace was included on the class WhatsApp group.

  ‘You need to be on this,’ the mum was saying. ‘Anything you need to know about homework, assemblies, anything school related – just pop on a message and someone will get back to you.’

  Grace had smiled in return and obligingly given her number, though her gaze kept drifting around the playground. As if she were looking for someone else.

  She was very pretty, in her mid-thirties, and looked effortlessly casual yet chic. It was as if she hadn’t gone overboard to make an effort for her first school run but managed to come out looking good.

  ‘So do your parents live nearby?’ another mum asked her.

  Grace told the group that her parents had relocated to Leicester to be close to her father’s sister. That after first the aunt and then her father died three years ago, her mum had made the surprising decision to stay put.

  Someone suggested that maybe she’d move down to Clearwater now Grace was back, but Grace replied that she didn’t see it happening and they moved on to other questions like, ‘And what does your husband do? Is he local?’

  ‘Well, actually Graham works in Singapore,’ she said. ‘He’s a project manager for a big pharmaceutical company.’

  ‘Oh wow, impressive! But that means you moved over here on your own?’

  She had, it turned out, and she and Matilda were renting one of the Waterview apartments, the luxury wave-designed complex that took pride of place on the edge of the road to Weymouth, which made it clear that money wasn’t a worry for her. Although the apartments tended to attract young couples, with the building’s gym and bar, and weren’t family orientated, so surely it wouldn’t be a long-term option.

  But their attentions quickly returned to Graham, and his job abroad, and the knowledge that funnily enough he’d actually been in Europe until the start of July. Grace told them this with a smile and a shrug, as if it were no big deal that her husband lived and worked so many miles awa
y, but they already understood how hard it must have been for her, being in the throes of moving to England when he had been shipped off in the opposite direction, though it was probably too soon to delve deeper into this particular line of enquiry when they had only known her for five minutes.

  Besides, she was professing that it was fine for him to be living abroad, and that Matilda had been very good about the whole thing, and so none of them probed further just yet, though later they would discuss in forensic detail what kind of husband would allow his wife to move across the world all by herself.

  ‘So why have you moved back to Clearwater?’ one of them asked. Clearwater was a small headland town that jutted into the sea on the south coast, and was connected to nearby Weymouth by a single road. One way in and one way out, unless you went by water. It had a long stretch of shingle beach on one side, and small stony coves cut into the coastline on the other. It was beautiful, they could all give it that, but it was quiet and didn’t attract many tourists, who preferred the buzz of Weymouth. It seemed an odd choice for Grace.

  ‘I guess it still feels like home,’ she said, continuing to scan the playground.

  ‘Are you looking for anyone in particular?’ one of the mums asked her.

  ‘Actually, I am,’ she replied. ‘Anna Robinson.’

  ‘Oh! Ethan’s mum? Ethan’s in 4C, too. Do you know her, then?’

  Grace nodded. ‘We were best friends for years. We met here when we were five.’ She gestured a hand around the playground.

  ‘Oh wow, that’s amazing,’ another woman exclaimed, although what she was really thinking was, Well, this is going to put the cat among the pigeons.

  In the minutes that followed they gathered some more basics: Grace and Anna had been inseparable until the day Grace left for Australia. They were both only children – more like sisters than friends – and Anna had spent many nights of those many years at Grace’s house.

  By that point some of them had already spotted Anna at the gate, huddled, unsurprisingly, with her small circle of friends. They liked Anna. She had always been kind and friendly, and her son Ethan, a popular boy, had never uttered an unkind word to any one of their children.

  Anna always turned up to school with a smile, and never bitched about anyone. But she was part of what they all knew to be a very tight clique: four women who had met each other on their children’s first day of school and had been inseparable ever since. Most mornings they were huddled together, arms flung around one another, giggling, whispering. Much younger behaviour than you would expect for women in their late thirties and early forties.

  There was Nancy, a head taller than Anna, tightly squeezing Anna into her side as she rocked with laughter. And Rachel, in too-high heels and a black pencil skirt, dressed for her office job in Weymouth, who was also laughing as she was pulled up the path by her two sons. Beside them, Caitlyn had a hand over her mouth as she giggled behind it.

  And now Grace was making her way towards the group, and it took a few moments for Anna to spot her. When she did, her mouth opened wide in surprise. Finally her face cracked into a smile and she joined Grace in the middle of the playground, the two women hugging each other as the other mums looked on.

  Later they would wonder among themselves how Grace’s arrival might affect Anna’s relationships with her other friends. And as the early autumn term slipped into a biting winter, they would watch with a see-saw of faint amusement and a little pity for Grace.

  But it wasn’t until the second week of December, when the children had almost broken up for the holidays, that things really got interesting.

  Chapter One

  Wednesday 11 December

  Grace

  It’s been nineteen years since Grace Goodwin last sat in the Old Vic. Nearly half her lifetime, and yet it still feels like only yesterday. It’s different now – less of an old fisherman’s pub, with pretensions to be a wine bar – and the crowd it has pulled in on a Wednesday night two weeks before Christmas is mainly young couples.

  Scuffed, stained wooden tables have made way for polished oak ones, with purple and grey velvet armchairs tucked beneath them. Chalkboards with menus of cheeses and meats, and pairing wines, hang on the walls, draped with classy strings of Christmas lights.

  Grace has to admit the interior looks much better than it did all those years ago. It is airier and brighter, though the evening feels more claustrophobic than it should.

  When Anna had asked her if she wanted to join her and the girls for pre-Christmas drinks, she’d been a little surprised. In the three months since Grace had returned to Clearwater there had been no other invites, and she’d jumped at the chance to come. ‘We’re going to the Old Vic,’ Anna had told her, ‘about eight thirty.’

  Anna and her three friends were already there when she arrived bang on the dot of 8.30, a bottle of wine opened on the table between them. She’d needed to steal a chair from one of the other tables, pushing herself in between Rachel and Caitlyn.

  But Grace is pleased to be back here because the pub holds good memories for her. When they were still at school, she and Anna used to sit in the corner drinking Bacardi and Cokes. Even though they’d been underage, the bar staff had never once waved them away.

  ‘Do you remember the first night we came here?’ she asks Anna now, when there is a break in the conversation.

  Anna turns to her and smiles but her lips are drawn into a thin, flat line. Her eyes are dark and seem to look right through Grace, even though only moments before she’d been laughing at something Nancy had said. Nancy is now playing with Anna’s hair, tugging it, twisting it into a plait at one side, hanging it over Anna’s shoulder and telling her she should wear it like that. Watching them, Grace feels as if she were back in school again.

  Only an hour into the evening and she already knows she shouldn’t have come, but then she was keen to spend time with Anna. She has tried over the last three months. At the start there were occasional meet-ups but even they have waned. The other three are always around, like they have booked Anna up weeks in advance, and it isn’t enjoyable being in the presence of these four women, three of whom she still barely knows. Their conversations always veer into in-jokes and shared experiences that she hasn’t been a part of. Their mannerisms mirror each other: the way they curl their fingers over each other’s arms as they speak, twirl strands of hair as they hang off words. As a group they make no effort to include her; in fact, Grace wonders why Anna bothered to invite her in the first place.

  Suddenly Anna stands up and announces she’s getting another bottle of wine, though there is at least a third of a bottle still left on the table in front of them. Her legs, tightly squeezed into black jeans, wobble as she makes her way to the bar, her blonde hair still loosely knitted into the plait Nancy made. Her bra is showing through her black chiffon top and she looks glamorous, if a little too thin. There isn’t an ounce of the puppy fat she had when they were teenagers.

  While Anna leans over the bar and points to a bottle in the fridge, Grace scans the group of women who are sitting at the table with her.

  Nancy Simpson always looks immaculately groomed, and tonight is no exception. Her long, slender legs are pressed into jeans uncannily similar to Anna’s. She looks to be at least five foot eleven, though clearly her height doesn’t stop her from wearing heels. She’s slightly older than the rest of them – in her early forties, Grace guesses. There’s not a grey hair among the blonde curls that hang in perfect waves down her back.

  Her daughter Elodie is a precocious child. Over the last four years Elodie has apparently taken all the leading roles in the school plays: Mary in the Nativity, and then Guy Fawkes, Oliver Twist, and finally Simba.

  In the three months that Grace’s daughter has attended the school, she has clocked the way Nancy sits in the front row at every assembly, every parents’ meeting, every choir competition. Her coat and bag are always draped across three other seats, for when her comrades arrive. And when they do, she beckons
Anna, Rachel and Caitlyn to join her, while Grace sits in the row behind.

  The first time this happened Grace had hoped Anna would seek her out and sit with her – she’d expected it, even – but then she’d seen her old friend arrive with Rachel, and glance guiltily at the one seat beside Grace before indicating that there wasn’t enough room for the two of them to sit there. As if she couldn’t possibly part from Rachel. How was it that she couldn’t do that, when Rachel clearly had two other friends to sit with, and Grace had no one?

  Tonight Rachel has drunk the lion’s share of the wine and is getting louder as the evening wears on. She is wearing a gold glitter shift dress: too dressy for a night at the Old Vic, Grace thinks, but then clearly the woman is up for a party. She has a dark bob of almost black hair that is neatly tucked behind her ears, and she doesn’t stop twiddling a finger through it as she chats with Nancy. Rachel is possibly the one Grace knows the least. She catches flashes of her on the school run, often late, and so it’s interesting to see her tonight. She is actually more fun than Grace realised at first, as she tells her entertaining stories.

  Caitlyn keeps giggling at whatever Rachel is saying. She is by far the quietest of the group, seemingly the most sensible out of them, and yet also the nicest. She doesn’t have Rachel’s coolness at the school gates or Nancy’s control.

  Grace can see the appeal of both Caitlyn and Rachel. She could be friends with them too, she thinks, if she is given the chance. It is one of the reasons she was keen to come tonight: to get to know Anna’s friends better. But not Nancy. Their dislike for each other is mutual. Nancy made it clear in the early weeks of term that she had no time for Grace, a hostility that has only flourished as the term progressed.