Copyright

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

Harper

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Sam Hepburn 2017

Sam Hepburn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Scott R Barbour/Getty Images (townhouses);

Shutterstock.com (broken glass)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780008209599

Source ISBN: 9780008209582

Version 2017-01-09

Dedication

To James, Charlotte, Murdo and Lily

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Loved Her Perfect Life? Enjoy Another Psychological Thriller…

About the Publisher

1

Hard heels clack across the floor above Juliet’s head. One way across the sitting room to the window. Then back the other – clackety bloody clack – to the door. Juliet slides her legs off the sofa, blinking groggily into the gloom as she gazes from the pale flicker of the television to the timer on the cooker – 02.13.

She stretches to ease the crick in her neck and feels the first throb of a hangover behind her eyes. She checks the bottle on the floor beside her. It’s empty. She searches the fridge and the cupboards, wincing at every stab of sound from upstairs – the judder of water into a kettle, the yank of a drawer and the endless clack of those bloody heels. She grabs hold of the broom, about to thump the handle on the ceiling. Then she laughs – not much of a laugh – and lets the broom drop. It’s been a bad day but not bad enough to turn her into the mad old woman in the downstairs flat. At the back of the cupboard under the sink she finds a half-bottle of whisky. She doesn’t usually drink spirits, just on nights like tonight, when it all gets too much. She pours half a glassful, fills it up with orange squash and takes it back to the sofa, lighting a cigarette as she goes. She reaches for the remote and flicks through the channels. An impossibly shaped blonde in silver lamé spins a roulette wheel – ‘be lucky, lucky, luckeee …’ – a cheese-ball preacher begs her to find a place in her heart for Jesus, a lizard darts its tongue to catch a fly and – fuck – there she is. Our perfect pocket-sized Gracie Dwyer. Clean, clean, clean in her perfect kitchen. She’s leaning ever so slightly towards the camera, a come-on-we-can-do-this together smile on her lips while her nimble little fingers beat flour into a pan of yellow gloop on a spotless stone worktop. ‘The trick to perfect choux pastry,’ she is saying, ‘is to keep beating until every fleck of white has gone from the mixture.’

Juliet tries for the off button but her clumsy fingers hit the pause. Gracie freezes on screen. She stares at the face. Always if you look long enough at a frozen frame you can find something – some imperfection: a spot, a patch of caked makeup at the hairline, a drag in the skin at the throat. If not that, then something gormless and off-guard in the eyes or in the halted movement of the mouth. Something.

But there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Gracie Dwyer is perpetually perfect. Even frozen.

This time Juliet finds the off button. She stubs out her cigarette, lurching a little as she totters to her bedroom.

2

Gracie keeps count. She can’t help it. She’s doing it now. While the passengers around her sip their drinks and flick through the in-flight entertainment she’s skimming the dates in her diary. It’s been nearly five months – one hundred and forty-three days to be exact – since she’s received an anonymous package, a taunting message or a silent phone call. She’s hurrying on through the pages, adding to the ‘to-dos’ on her list and scoring through the tasks she’s completed when a jolt of excitement puckers her cheeks into a smile, her first real smile for days. She’s going home. No more dawn risings to go over her filming notes. No more missed calls from Tom. No more juggling shooting schedules and time zones to Skype Elsie at bedtime, only to wave at her and tell her silly jokes, when all she wants is to fill her lungs with the after-bath smell of her skin. She snaps the elastic around the diary, lays down her pen and gazes at the syrupy oval of sky framed by the cabin window, almost breathless at the thought of that small damp body pressed against hers.

But there is guilt there too, at how good it had felt to be in New York. To walk from her mid-town hotel to the TV studios, join a queue for coffee or test out a lipstick untroubled by the glances of strangers or the scuff of a footfall catching up with her own. If the Americans buy her show is she crazy to think that at least in the States life could go back to the way it was before the threats began? When she enjoyed being recognised in the street, and jokey requests from passers-by to sign crisp packets, plaster casts and body parts made her laugh and reach for a Sharpie?

She folds forward rubbing her arms. Two weeks in New York have softened her, weakened her guard, but she feels it now, the wariness seeping back into her bones, stiffening her spine, vertebra by vertebra. How quickly it comes, she thinks, and a part of her accepts its return, welcomes it even; the part that still clings to the childhood belief that she can pay with pain to keep the precious things safe.

She glances up, drawn by the hiccupping wails of the baby across the aisle. He’s a square-faced little boy in a tiny checked shirt and denim dungarees, writhing in his mother’s arms and batting away the bottle she dabs at his mouth, just like Elsie did, all the way home from St Lucia that first summer she and Tom took her on holiday. Gracie remembers their helpless attempts to comfort her, the irritation of the other passengers and her own mounting fear that her mothering would never be good enough. The woman thrusts the baby and the bottle at her husband and stands up, smoothing her milk-stained T-shirt and wrinkled skirt. Gracie darts her a sympathetic smile. The woman is pregnant again, two, three months maybe; barely enough to show, but enough to draw her hands to the curve of her belly. The sight of those cupped, protective fingers loosens other memories. Gracie’s thoughts skid and slide away to seek calm among her plans for the weekend: the park with Elsie, bed with Tom.

Her heart beats hard as she returns the glazed goodbyes of the cabin crew and passes from the warmth of the plane into the cool of the covered walkway. Not long now. Tom will be standing in the arrivals hall, holding Elsie’s hand and pointing at the flashing ‘landed’ sign beside her flight number.

The baggage hall is busy, even for a Friday night. Fretful children traipse after ratty parents and hollow-eyed tourists grip their trollies and twist around looking lost. Gracie stands beside the carousel, head down, pretending to rummage in her handbag. The moment her suitcases bump into sight she sweeps them onto her trolley and runs.

‘Gracie! Gracie Dwyer! Would you mind?’

Damn! Heads crane. She feels them. Taking a breath she stops and turns. A middle-aged woman is fluttering towards her in a pale blue mac, phone held high, while her tall, balding husband stands by, clenching apologetic hands. ‘I love your show,’ the woman says, breathy with delight. She tilts the handset and presses her powdered cheek to Gracie’s as she clicks. ‘Your lemon and walnut tart is the only way I can get my son to come home.’

‘There’ll be lots more puddings in the new series, so make sure you catch it.’ Gracie’s smile is warm.

The woman glows and says coyly, ‘You know, you’re even prettier in the flesh than on TV.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, but after six hours in the air I feel like a total wreck.’

With another smile Gracie breaks away and hurries through ‘Nothing to Declare’.

The glass doors slide back. Her eyes flit across the waiting faces. A swell of joy as she spots them behind the barrier, jammed between a collection of bored drivers bearing name cards; Tom’s dark head, bent to check something on his phone, and Elsie, her gorgeous girl, reaching out shouting, ‘Mummy, Mummy!’

Gracie runs faster, letting her trolley roll away as she scoops Elsie into her arms and presses her nose into her hair. She lifts her face to Tom’s, eager for the greedy pressure of his lips. He’s bending down, snatching Brown Bear from the floor, returning him to Elsie’s outstretched hand and his kiss, when it comes, is almost lost in their exchange of eye-rolling relief at disaster averted.

Tom picks up her bags. She follows him to the car park, hand in hand with Elsie who jumps and skips, bursting with stories about school and sleepovers and other people’s dogs. When the fuss with luggage and seat belts is over Tom sits and holds the wheel for a moment before he turns the ignition. She sees a tiny patch of stubble he’s missed with the razor, six or seven coarse dark hairs standing upright and defiant on the curve of his jaw.

‘You OK?’ she murmurs.

‘Yeah, fine.’

‘You seem … tired.’

‘Oh, you know.’ He tilts the mirror and backs out of the space. ‘So, how did it go?’

‘The execs seemed happy enough. But in the end it’s all down to the focus groups.’

‘When will you hear?’

‘Could be weeks, could be months. But if they do go for it why don’t you bring Elsie over for the last week of the shoot? We could stay on for a few days, have a holiday.’

‘Depends what I’ve got on.’ He shoves the ticket into the machine. ‘Things at work are a bit … up in the air.’

The car gives a little jerk as he accelerates up the ramp and out into the grey Heathrow dusk, blustery gusts of rain buffeting the car. She lays her hand on his shoulder. ‘Pain about Bristow’s.’

He rams the gearstick and pulls out into the traffic. ‘If they want crap they’ve gone to the right place to get it.’

She twists round to catch Elsie’s sleepy story about the real witch’s cat she saw when she went trick or treating. ‘He had a little pointy hat and everything.’ Gracie looks back, seeking Tom’s smile. The wet road holds all his attention. The raindrops on the windows glitter blue and green and red, brightening the darkness as he pulls off the M40 onto the rain-slicked streets of Hammersmith. The wipers thump and swipe across the windscreen. She murmurs softly, ‘Was there anything … in the post?’

He shakes his head without looking at her. ‘God, no.’

Gracie waits for him to acknowledge her relief, slide his hand through her hair and tell her how glad he is to have her home. But he’s flicking on the news – Syria, Iraq, the economy. She tries not to mind. Losing the Bristow’s tender will have hit him hard. All that work. All that build up. All that disappointment. Best to say nothing. They’ll talk about it later. When they are alone and she can comfort him properly. A flicker of warmth curls between her thighs.

As Deptford gives way to Greenwich she stares out at the ghostly domes of the old admiralty buildings, the winking blur of pubs and cafés, the narrowing streets and the stretches of river glimpsed between blocks of newly built flats. He pulls off the road onto a cinder track that winds past shadowy building sites caged by wire fences, lit here and there by the jaundiced flare of security lights. The tyres splash and bump through puddles of oily water until they find tarmac again. Tom clicks the fob, the security gates slide open and the pale glow of their house of glass rises through the darkness.

Gracie swings her legs out of the car. Blinking into the rain she turns to gaze across the vast black shimmer of the river to the glitter of lights on the Isle of Dogs. There is a taint in the air, a reek of rot pouring in from the sewers of the city and seeping up through the silt. A squat river barge chugs downstream, its bow lights casting a gauzy glow across the water. As the slide of the electric gates cuts off the view she turns back to the Wharf House. Even after three years she still has moments like this when she can’t quite believe that this minimalist expanse of glass and sunken spaces is her home. It took years to complete and won Tom a prize: a moment of glory and a shard of bronze sprouting through a block of granite. She remembers the first time he brought her to see the site; how she’d picked her way across the pipes and coils of cable lying idly in the mud, and nodded and smiled as he’d turned his back to the wind to steady the flapping plans, wishing she could lift her eyes to the skeleton of ribs and struts and see what he could see.

‘Look, Mummy, look what I made!’ Elsie is hopping from foot to foot, pointing to the ‘Welcome home’ banner strung across the door.

‘Wow, darling! That’s amazing!’

Tom lugs her bags across the hall and dumps them down while Elsie hovers close, pulling at the catches. ‘What did you get me, Mummy?’

‘Oh, no!’ Gracie claps her hand to her mouth. ‘I forgot to buy presents.’

Elsie howls with laughter and swings back on Gracie’s free hand, pivoting on one foot. ‘No you didn’t!’

Gracie unzips one of the suitcases and pulls out a pair of pink sequined trainers. ‘Ta – daa!’ She smiles at the joy on Elsie’s face, delves again and brings out a grey cashmere beanie hat for Tom that took her a stupid amount of time to choose. He pulls it on and wears it as they put Elsie to bed. They stretch out, one either side of her, while she hugs the trainers to her chest and Gracie opens The Worst Witch, picking up the story where she left off the night she left for New York. After a couple of pages Tom kisses his daughter and slips away, murmuring about supper. Hungry for one of his blackened, bloody steaks and some good red wine, Gracie smiles and glances up to watch him go.

She reads on until Elsie’s eyes flutter shut and her breath grows deep and steady, then she sits for a moment, drinking her in; the dark curls coiling across the pillow, the golden skin, the snubby little nose and chin – softened versions of Tom’s – before she kisses her forehead and runs down to the kitchen.

The absence hits her.

No clinking plates. No hissing pans.

So it’s a takeaway then. Their favourite Thai, or the new Burmese she’s been dying to try. Tom fills a glass and passes it to her. She sets it down beside the discarded beanie hat and moves closer, hips swaying, arms held high to slip around his neck. He stiffens, sweaty and grey, his pupils fixed, unwilling to focus even as he looks at her.

‘Tom?’

He pulls away and picks up a paper tub, still icy from the freezer. She moves forward, her eyes seeking the label on the lid. A little laugh erupts from her throat. Laugh with me, Tom. Tell me you love my fish pie. Tell me you didn’t want to waste time cooking on my first night back.

He clicks open the microwave and in it goes. Her homecoming supper.

‘I’ll make a salad.’ She bends into the fridge, little detonations of panic exploding down her spine.

Behind her he’s opening drawers, rattling cutlery, making noises that float in the silence. Thoughts stream across her mind like a band of breaking news: robberies, accidents, death, disaster. But how bad can it be? Elsie is tucked up in bed and the two of them are here, safe, together. Refusing to acknowledge the darker possibilities unfurling in her brain she tears at leaves, makes a dressing, picks up the servers.

The microwave pings.

‘It’ll need a few minutes in the oven to get crispy,’ she says.

He doesn’t move. She gives it a beat and says quietly, ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’

He stands looking at the floor, gesturing helplessly with his hands. ‘You have to believe me, Gracie. I never meant it to happen.’

She pushes at the rising dread. ‘Just tell me. Whatever it is we’ll deal with it.’

He drops into one of the narrow steel-backed chairs he designed himself, his head down, his fingers pressing into his scalp; long, sensitive, blunt-nailed fingers that wear the slim platinum band that matches hers. She reaches for the moment when she slipped it over his knuckle, the pride and nervousness she’d felt as everyone they cared about looked on. Please, God, let it be a problem with money or work. Something that can be borne, or fixed, or forgotten.

‘I swear I didn’t plan it. I hardly know her.’

‘Her?’ The word spurts like vomit through her teeth. She knows then that this is beyond fixing or forgetting.

‘We’d just lost the tender. I was drunk. We all were.’

She pictures the women she meets at ACP functions: attractive, smartly dressed women who smile at her and remember her name when she struggles to remember theirs, an eternity passing before she manages to whisper, ‘Who?’

‘One of the interns.’ Tom clenches his fists. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. I was in a bad way. You know how much I had riding on that job.’

All that fear, Gracie thinks. All that pain. It wasn’t enough to keep the precious things safe.

‘So you thought, oh, I know, I’ll fuck a twenty year old. That’ll cheer me up.’

‘No!’ His head hangs on his chest. ‘I lost it. I wanted to pass out, forget everything. Then someone called me a cab and suddenly there she was, telling me she’d always wanted to see the house.’

She backs away, her head shaking slowly. ‘Not here, Tom. Please don’t tell me you slept with her here.’

His hunched silence rips something inside her and all the quiet confidence she has built up over the years of her marriage comes spilling through the tear. She slithers down the wall, crushed by the realisation, stark and sudden, that the barrier between having everything and having nothing is as flimsy as a rejected blueprint.

‘Where was Elsie?’

‘Issy’s sleepover.’

That pinpoints the night. Gracie sees herself finishing up at the studios and rushing off to eat sushi with the crew. Sipping sake, discussing the next day’s running order, catching a cab back to her hotel room. Sleeping alone. She raises her head. ‘Is she beautiful?’

‘What?’

‘I said, is she beautiful?’

‘No! God, no.’ He says it vehemently, as if somehow this will exonerate him. ‘It wasn’t about that.’

She looks around her at her home, her life, her husband. All she sees is a tumble of rubble. ‘So what was it about, Tom?’

‘I don’t know.’ He presses his palms against the bevelled edge of the table and sinks his head towards the green of the glass. ‘I felt empty, angry. I couldn’t face being on my own.’

‘Don’t you dare put this on me. Don’t you dare!’

‘I’m not …’ He throws back his head and drags in air. ‘When I sobered up I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I told her it was a mistake and she went crazy. She … threatened me. She said she’d tell you and the board if I didn’t let her work on one of my projects.’

‘So did you?’

He swallows. ‘The Copenhagen clinic. But I won’t have to see her. I put her with the team working on the atrium and I’ve handed that side of things over to Geoff.’

As if this is penance enough, he kneels down and reaches for her. Her hands fly out, pushing him away, startling them both with her strength. ‘You’d never have done this to Louise!’

He jolts at the accusation, a shock response as if he’s been struck. She can see he’s steeled himself for fury, tears, distress. But not for this. She doesn’t care. He searches for words to deny it but the effort breaks him down into sobs. ‘It’s not about Louise.’

‘I’ve never been enough for you.’ She shunts away from him, pushing her heels against the slate floor. ‘I was always second best.’

He crawls towards her, appalled, dumbfounded. ‘No! You’re you and Louise … was Louise.’

She turns her head away, trying to hide her tears, but her fingers clutch her top, clawing the thin fabric in an effort to gain control. ‘And what about this bloody intern?’

‘She’s nothing.’

‘So you were willing to risk everything we have for some scheming little nothing?’

‘Christ, Gracie, what do you want me to say? I was drunk … I feel like shit …’

‘So that’s it? You got laid and she got a plus point on her CV?’

He drops his head and scrapes his hand down his face. ‘It wasn’t just about getting on a project. She’d got it into her head that she and I had … some kind of future … and now she’s lashing out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s threatening to make a formal complaint.’ He closes his eyes. ‘To tell the board and the press a pack of lies about me offering her work, pretending I was going to leave you … getting her drunk and fuck knows what else.’

Gracie waits until he looks at her. She stares into his eyes. Dark brown eyes, that shift and dither. There’s a screeching in her head, a feeling of weightlessness.

‘That’s what this confession is about, isn’t it? Damage limitation!’

‘No!’

She throws back her head. ‘If you’d managed to buy her silence, you’d never have told me.’

‘Gracie—’

She glares at him, daring him to lie.

‘I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’

At least he hasn’t denied his cowardice. But the angle of his head and the tilt of his shoulders trigger a creep of suspicion. ‘How many others, Tom?’

‘Christ!’ He turns away, furious. ‘How can you even ask?’

In that moment she sees a stranger. A lean-faced, dark-haired stranger in a black T-shirt and expensive jeans who has no idea that he has broken something he can’t mend; something precious that was hers and Elsie’s, as well as his. Can’t he see that this drunken fuck with a pushy intern nearly half his age has made a rupture in their lives – clean, complete and total – with everything that has gone before?

‘What’s her name?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alicia.’

‘Alicia what?’

‘Sandelson.’

She struggles to her feet. He moves towards her.

‘Don’t come near me!’

He lifts his hands and watches her leave.

3

That night Tom sleeps in the spare room and Gracie lies awake, listening to the drum of the rain and picturing Alicia touching her things, lying between her sheets, pushing her face into her pillow and she wonders how she will survive. Yet when she tries to imagine a life other than this one she has built with Tom all she sees is a vast emptiness devoid of joy or comfort or hope. This is the way she had felt in the bleak, lonely months before she met him, the way she’d thought she would never have to feel again. She reaches for her mobile then lets it drop. Daphne is in Milan, probably in bed with her latest lover, and even if she picked up what would Gracie say? What’s happening inside her is too frightening, too visceral to explain, even to her closest friend.

She slips out of bed and tiptoes downstairs, past the photographs that hang on the open brickwork. Stark looming images, shot by Louise, charting the first stages of the creation of the house. Gracie thought she knew them, every line and shadow; the demolition of the old wharf, the bulldozers arriving in a scarred expanse of moss-grown debris, spindly saplings thrust into the wind, the writhing tree root washed up by the tide, dead but for one determined shoot of green. But tonight, in the dim light of the lamp left on for Elsie, they seem alive, taunting her with renewed power and vigour; her own face, puffy with crying, a wavery distraction in the glass. Her eyes fasten on the photo of the tree root. Taken the day Louise found the plot of land, the shot has been reprinted on a thousand posters and postcards, variously interpreted as an image of hope, regeneration and a dogged refusal to die. The Observer magazine used it in their memorial tribute to Louise’s work, along with the most haunting of the worn faces and desolate landscapes she’d taken for them in Bosnia, Albania and Darfur. Gracie’s legs buckle. She reaches for the wall, imagining Alicia pausing here on her way to the bedroom, halted by this picture. Did Tom stand behind her, holding her shoulders, kissing her neck as he’d once kissed Gracie’s when she’d stopped, drawn by this same photograph, in the hallway of his flat in Holloway?

She pulls away and stumbles down to the kitchen. She feels the cool slate beneath her feet, sees the pearly shadows of the raindrops speckling the white of the walls and the square of sky above the light well, all realised exactly as Louise had envisaged them, the DNA of her vision imprinted not just in the design and structure of this house but in the subtle ageing of the wood, the ever changing reflections in the angled glass and the long slow weathering of the stone.

Gracie sits in the dark for nearly an hour before she drags herself back to bed. She closes her eyes, too tired to fight it now. Cogs uncouple in her head, dismantling her defences, and she sleeps. For a while she hovers in a restless dark. And then it begins. The dreadful pitch into a ruined landscape where she runs and runs from someone she can’t see until the way is blocked by an iron gate fastened by a padlock and chain. Forced on by a brush of breath on her neck she swerves away, stumbling through the doors of a blackened warehouse and spiralling down a stone staircase until she senses a flutter of movement in the shadows and trips and falls like dreamers do, to wake with a buck of panic, struggling to scream. She reaches for Tom. Her bed is empty. He is not there to turn in his sleep, pull her to him and murmur that she is safe.

She rises and moves around the house, tormented by reminders of the contentment she has lost – a snapshot of the three of them stuck on the fridge, their joint names on a school permission form, their shirts and socks entangled in the dryer, all cruelly untouched by the savage unravelling of her grief. She takes down the snapshot and gazes at the faces – hers, Tom’s and Elsie’s – trying to envision a future untainted by the fear of losing everything she loves.

Over the next few days Tom gives her time, something he’s been careless about for a while. He talks animatedly about the layout of her next cookery book and her plans to open a second branch of her café bakery, sending her details of properties he’s found on the internet. She feels his helplessness – the tightened lips and weary exhalations signalling his irritation. He wants things back the way they were, yet he has no idea how to make it happen. She is the one who always smooths out the problems, the one who mends the broken things. But she can’t mend this. Right now she can’t even think straight. Using the search for new premises as an excuse to detach herself from the rhythms and demands of her own life, she spends hour after hour driving through the streets of London, losing herself in the everyday comings and goings of others. Somehow, catching the swish of a curtain or the slam of a front door, slowing her car in an unfamiliar side road to accommodate someone else’s drop-off or pick-up or hurried trip to the corner shop, helps to soothe the turmoil in her head and dilute the fear and anger corroding every cell of her being.

In the evenings she and Tom avoid all mention of Alicia and her threats, although once when Tom thinks she’s downstairs, she hears him on the phone.

‘It’s the powerlessness, Geoff, not knowing if the little bitch is bluffing … Christ, I don’t know how much longer I can take it …’

There he is, the father of her child, contrite and attentive as they arrive at the launch of her new cookbook, smiling as she mentions him in the speech she wrote before she went to New York and hasn’t had the heart to change. She even reads out the line where she thanks him for just being there because she couldn’t do any of the things she does without his love and support. His smile doesn’t falter when every face in the room swings round to see the husband of ‘adorable queen of the kitchen’, Gracie Dwyer; a hundred pairs of eyes taking in his appealing long-limbed slouch, the rumpled hair, the open-necked shirt gleaming white against skin the colour of perfect toast. She can almost hear the sighs of approval. Afterwards she bears it stiffly as they pose for the photographers – the beautiful couple with the happy wholesome life – he with one hand pulling her close, the other holding up a copy of her book. This is the shot they’ll use, she thinks as the lights flash. If the intern goes to the papers, this is the picture they’ll plaster all over the tabloids.

In the taxi home she sits forward, hanging onto the strap to stop anything of her body brushing Tom’s, but there’s hope in his eyes as they walk into the house, as if the pretence of tonight has become reality. She stops the hand he lifts to caress her cheek, moves it aside and hurries to the kitchen to fill the kettle. ‘Tea?’

‘No thanks.’ Tom pours himself a whisky and sprawls in a chair a little drunk, grunting as he picks up the papers on the table. He takes a moment to register that they’re property brochures: pubs, restaurants, shops. He flips through them. ‘Christ, have you seen the rents on these places?’

‘You can throw them away. I’ve found somewhere.’

He looks up, hurt. ‘You never said.’

She stirs the teapot, staring into the steam.

‘Are you going to show me?’

She doesn’t respond.

‘Come on, Gracie.’

She opens her handbag. Hesitates for a moment then hands him a folded sheet. He shakes open the details of a seventies pub in Battersea – stained red brick, peeling green paintwork and tinted glass. ‘You’re kidding. It’s ugly, overpriced and way too big.’

‘I need space.’

‘Not this much.’

Gracie eyes him uneasily. ‘It’s going to be more than a café bakery. I’m going to have a cook shop, serve a bistro menu in the evenings and run cookery workshops upstairs. Kelvin’s developing a spin-off series built around the courses.’

‘When did you come up with all this?’ That hurt face again.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I’ve been back from the States.’

‘And what? You weren’t even going to consult me?’ He flings the brochure across the table. ‘This is what I do, Gracie! What I know about!’ He swallows and softens his voice. ‘You need a building with character, something distinctive that will reflect you as well as your food, like the amazing old chapel this new French client wants me to convert into a restaurant. Why don’t you come and have a look at it, get some inspiration?’

Her eyes dart away from him.

‘Don’t do this, Gracie. Don’t shut me out.’

A silence grows between them, barely dented by her agonised whisper. ‘How can I make any plans that depend on you?’

‘Fuck!’ He mouths the word, and claws back his hair. ‘So what are you saying? That I’m not part of your future?’

‘I don’t know, Tom. Sometimes I look at you and I catch myself seeing the man I love, then I realise he doesn’t exist.’

‘What can I do? Just tell me what I can do.’

‘Why are you asking me? I didn’t make this mess.’ She puts down her mug and moves to the door. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Gracie, please—’ He lurches after her.

She turns on the landing. ‘Shh. You’ll wake Elsie.’

He lowers his voice. ‘The new café is something we can build together. You and me.’

‘You destroyed what we built together, Tom. Have you even thought what it will do to Elsie when that girl’s tacky revelations are splashed all over the papers? She’s five years old for God’s sake! And what about me? I can cope with the sniggering and the pity but every single penny I put into paying off the crippling mortgage on this house depends on the way people see me – happy, wholesome Gracie. How’s that going to work when they find out my husband can’t keep his dick in his pants?’ She closes the bedroom door and leans against the wall, biting back her tears as his footsteps fade away down the landing.

4

‘OK, Gracie. Let’s go again. Just hold the bowl a bit higher when you show us the chillies.’

She pouts for Emma’s waving wand of lip-gloss and swings into action. This is how I get through this, Gracie thinks while her hands move deftly over the bowls and pans on the countertop. I chop and dice and stir for the cameras and pretend that everything is fine, that I sleep at night, that this suffocating sense of loss is something I can bear.

The running order is full – black noodles with prawns, then her super quick fig and blueberry tarts, a chat on the sofa with specialist herb grower Akshay Kumar, tips for healthy packed lunches that kids will actually eat and, for the leftovers slot, her new garden pie, adapted from a family recipe sent in by a viewer. She spears a prawn, bites through the spicy pink flesh and smiles at the camera.

‘Cut!’ The floor manager gives her a thumbs-up, calls a ten-minute break and stands back to let a flurry of assistants swoop in to reset the counter. Emma hands her a mug of coffee. ‘You all right?’

‘Bit tired.’ Gracie slips off to the loo and locks herself in a cubicle. She presses her forehead against the tiles and spends the first five minutes of the break sobbing quietly, imagining the worst, the second five patching up her makeup and assuring herself that the worst can’t happen. She won’t let it. She twists a strand of hair back into the soft knot on top of her head, flicks her fingers through her fringe and gives her cheeks a savage prod. She’s nearly thirty-six for heaven’s sake and her face still has an open, almost childlike quality which she tempers for the cameras with sweeps of black eyeliner and slashes of crimson lipstick. Her height doesn’t help. At five foot four she’s used to people blinking when they meet her. ‘Gosh, you look so much taller on TV.’

So different from Louise’s fair, willowy elegance and the pert freckled features of that scheming little cow Alicia Sandelson. She rocks forward, closing her eyes. Like a fool she’d looked Alicia up on Facebook and now that hiss of a girl has a face – a milk-skinned, pink-lipped, heart-shaped face with a halo of pale curls. She’s smart too – Oxford and an internship at ACP. But it’s not the endless posts charting her glittering time at university or the photos of her partying in skinny jeans and halter tops that flicker through Gracie’s head on an unstoppable loop, it’s the shot of her lying on a beach in a white bikini. Not because Alicia looks particularly pretty in it. She doesn’t. And not because her body is anything special, it’s angular and streaked with sunburn across the chest and shoulders. It’s the unshakeable self-confidence in her eyes that spreads hurt through Gracie’s body. This is a girl who has no fear of failure, a twenty-two year old who functions without doubt.

She pictures Alicia sitting up pale and freckled against her own freshly laundered pillows, those small nubby breasts flushing pink with indignation as she threatens to tell the world that Gracie Dwyer’s husband lured her into bed with promises of future employment and long-term emotional commitment.

She appears back on set, moving stiffly across the studio floor as if she’s carrying a brimming pan. She reaches the safety of the counter and focuses on the flour drifting through her fingers, ghosting the sides of the glass bowl. This is how I survive. She pricks and peels and slices and sprinkles and listens to the light-hearted voice that flows from her lips extolling the virtues of unsalted butter and unbleached flour. But her heart is not light. Not light at all and her mind is spinning and spinning and spinning.

She smiles for Akshay Kumar, rattles off the link to her filmed discussion with a class of face-pulling six year olds about the yuckiness of squidgy bananas and soggy sandwiches, keeps her voice upbeat as she guides the viewers through a selection of stuffed pitas, cold pastas and gaily filled wraps, and gets serious about waste as she slices cold carrots for the garden pie. When the floor manager signals that the gallery is happy she calls a hurried thank you to the crew and leaves without stopping to check in with the production team or even to wipe off her makeup.

5

Juliet needs this job. God, how she needs it. A fledgling brand with a sure fire future doesn’t come her way very often. But get this meeting right and the marketing contract for Shoesmith and Hayman’s artisan gin could turn her life around.

‘In the end, it all comes down to the botanicals.’ Don Shoesmith – bland and fortyish – gazes at the bottle in his hands as if it’s some kind of holy relic. ‘What the judges went for was our unique blend of natural flavourings.’

Juliet, who has spent the previous night mugging up on the terminology, nods knowledgably. Don’s on side, eager to sign her up and get back to sourcing his orris root and organic Sicilian lemons. It’s Matt Hayman, his partner, who’s not so sure. He’s rocking back in his chair, assessing her. He’s younger than Don, but not by much. Two middle-aged engineers in badly designed promotional sweatshirts, swept way out their depth by the rip tide success of their backyard distillery. Their ‘office’, a hastily assembled table and chairs at the end of Don’s garage, is proof of that – boxes of papers and cases of bottles vying for space among tins of paint, coiled extension leads and a dusty deflated paddling pool.

Juliet turns her head and aims unblinking eyes at Matt. He’s a worrier, so terrified about paying the mortgage now that he’s jacked in the nine to five he daren’t make a decision. She stokes up his insecurities. ‘There’s no point having a great product and winning awards if you don’t get the marketing right. When are they making the announcement?’

‘Friday.’

She sucks her breath. ‘Four days to create a social media campaign to capitalise on the publicity and get a strategy in place to keep up the momentum. It’s going to be tight. Do-able but tight.’

He’s visibly twitching, desperate for reassurance. Time to throw him a lifeline. ‘The first thing I’d have to do is fix your website. Sorry, but it’s sending out totally the wrong message.’ Brisk professional smile. ‘From now on everything associated with your brand has to be as crisp and distinctive as your product.’ Juliet taps her computer and brings up the home page she’s mocked up for them. ‘I could have this online for you by Wednesday night.’

Matt thumps forward on his chair and runs an eye across the screen, obviously impressed but still hesitant. What’s his problem?

‘My wife’s got a friend at one of the big agencies. She says they can offer us a complete PR and marketing package.’

So that’s it. Well fuck you Mrs Hayman. A sympathetic shake of her head. ‘We both know the big agencies are all about processes, systems and top-heavy teams. Fine for big corporate clients but totally wrong for a niche start-up like yours. What you need is the personal touch. Someone who’s always going to be available when you pick up the phone. Someone flexible who can move swiftly to deal with the tiny problems that crop up day to day leaving you,’ she flicks a finger at Matt’s peeking polo shirt collar, ‘to concentrate on the product. All for a fraction of the price the big boys charge.’

Matt knocks his knuckles against his chin, almost hooked. She pictures him relaying these lines to his pushy wife, asserting himself as the thrusting entrepreneur who knows what’s right for his business and his brand.

‘And with me you get a single vision developing the strategic and creative solutions as well as planning and executing the campaign.’

‘And you could handle all that?’

‘Absolutely.’ He’s nodding now, clinging to every word. ‘Obviously as I helped your business to grow I’d expand my team but it would always be me overseeing the decisions. Now, let me show you the thoughts I’ve had about product placement.’

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. ‘Excuse me.’ She pulls it out. Thumb poised to decline the call she glances at the ID.

Nononono. Not now.

A flare of resentment burns hot and bright, dipping to a flicker in the sudden rush of panic.

She looks at Matt. He’s twitching again. ‘Sorry.’ She presses the phone to her ear, rising on wobbly legs as the words Freya, climbing frame, fall, pulse to the frantic beat of her heart. ‘She got a nasty bump on the head,’ the school nurse is saying, ‘the ambulance is on its way.’

Face numb, fingers cold, she’s throwing her laptop into her bag, barely able to breathe. ‘My daughter … I have to go.’ She turns at the door and says desperately, ‘Could we pick this up tonight? Maybe on Skype? I promise … this won’t happen again.’

It’s a lost cause. The look of abandonment on Matt’s face and the bitter taste of defeat at the back of her throat tell her that.

6

Gracie steps out of the shower and emerges from the bathroom to find Tom in their bedroom rooting through his sock drawer.

‘Tea,’ he says, pointing to the tray beside the bed.

‘Thanks.’

He watches as she lifts first one foot then the other onto the bed to smooth cream onto her legs. ‘Here.’ He tosses a brochure across the duvet.

She glances down at the photo of a slate-roofed chapel, its scarred walls defaced with graffiti and peeling posters.

‘What’s this?’

‘The place I was telling you about. That French guy, Mersaud, he’s pulled out. It could be ours, Gracie.’ His eyes come back to hers, narrowed and hopeful. ‘It’s ideal for the new café and there’s masses of space for a cook shop and your cookery school.’

She tightens her towel across her chest. ‘It’s a ruin.’

‘Which is why the agent thinks we could get the price right down. I could do something really interesting with it – look at those fantastic windows. It’s exactly the kind of place you should go for.’

‘You mean it’s exactly the kind of conversion you like working on.’

‘That’s not fair.’ His voice is scratchy with hurt.

She wipes her fingers on the towel and turns the page. ‘E5? That’s—’

‘Clapton.’

‘Clapton? That’s miles from anywhere.’

‘Twenty minutes from our old flat. In five years’ time it will be on a par with Hoxton.’

‘I’m tired of schlepping across London every day, wasting time I could be spending with Elsie.’

‘This has got to be a business decision. I’ve sent you the stats Mersaud had done. That whole area is perfect territory for an upmarket food retailer.’

‘So why did he pull out?’

‘I don’t know. And now he’s stopped returning my emails. God knows what he’s playing at.’

‘That’s odd.’

‘Yep. He hadn’t actually signed anything, but he was messaging me all last week telling me how excited he was about meeting me and how my vision was exactly what he was looking for.’

‘Maybe he realised how much it was going to cost.’

‘It’s an investment, Gracie. I’ve sent you a couple of the preliminary sketches I did for him.’

She sighs. ‘I’ll look at them later.’

He pulls open the wardrobe and fingers a row of ties. ‘Blue or pink with this shirt?’

She can’t bring herself to answer. Aware of his eyes on her, she sifts through the letters he’s brought up on the tray and rips open a plain white envelope. She tips the contents into her hand. ‘Oh, no … please God, no.’

A coral earring lies in her palm. A single teardrop of polished rust-coloured stone. Beside it a slip of paper printed with two words:

She recoils as if she’s been burned and hurls the earring, the note and the envelope onto the floor. ‘The bastard,’ she sobs. ‘The bastard!’

Pauline Bryce Diary

January 1st

It’s the same every morning, I open my eyes, see the zig-zag crack in the ceiling and the brown stain round the window and I feel sick inside. But today it’s like I’m suffocating. I roll over, see the date on my alarm clock and realise why. I can’t take another year of this. I just can’t. So I go downstairs and ask Mum for a loan, not much, just a few hundred pounds to get me to London and keep me going till I find a job. She won’t even listen, keeps saying she doesn’t have that kind of money – which is a lie. Then Ron piles in with his ‘stick with college, young lady, get your qualifications’, blah blah. No point telling him there’s another world out there. If I get a job in London – property, advertising, something like that – I won’t need qualifications. I can work my way up. And when I start my own business I won’t have to put up with Ron Bryce or anyone else telling me what to do. Robson’s as bad. All that fuss about a few packs of Silk Cut and a copy of OK!. I’d go mad without my mags. So now I just run a razor blade down the pages I want and shove them down the lining of my coat. It’s not enough though. I need the real thing. Sitting up here in this shitty little room, reading about other people’s houses, cars and lives – it’s killing me. Screwing me up so tight I’m just about ready to snap.

7

Gracie stares down at the torn envelope as Tom pokes it with his socked toe. It’s half the size of the stalker’s usual brown jiffy bags. The typeface on the note and the address is different too. ‘It’s been nearly six months,’ she says, her voice small and bitter. ‘I was actually beginning to convince myself he’d stopped.’

‘When did you last see those earrings?’ He’s gone into calm mode, taking control.

She lifts her head. ‘The day before I went to the States. I wore them for The Times photo shoot.’ She runs to the wardrobe and digs wildly through her jewellery box. ‘The other one’s gone too.’

‘You probably left them at the studio.’

‘They’re the ones you got me in Florence.’ She pulls at her earlobe, frowning, uncertainly. ‘I’m sure I’d have noticed if I’d left without them.’

‘Anything else missing?’

‘I … I don’t think so.’

‘Do you want me to call Reeves?’

‘I’ll do it.’

They both know the drill. He runs downstairs to fetch a freezer bag from the kitchen and Gracie uses her eyebrow tweezers to drop the envelope, the note and the earring inside. She’s closing the zip seal – a trembling pinch and slide of her fingers – when her head begins to shake. ‘I don’t understand … why the change of packaging? It’s like … like it’s not him.’

His gaze sharpens though his words come slowly. ‘Maybe it’s a copycat. Someone playing a sick joke.’

‘Oh, great! So now there’s two crazies out there who hate me. And why now?’ Gracie’s eyes slide away, her hand rising to her mouth. ‘Oh, God … that girl!’

‘No. No way.’ He’s shaking his head, but the movement seems strained, mechanical.

‘She had a motive.’ Gracie grimaces. ‘And an opportunity.’

‘She wouldn’t. Not something like this, it’s … it’s not her style. It’ll be someone at that shoot. Or one of the nannies Heather’s had round.’

‘If there’s even a chance it was her we have to tell the police.’ Her face crumples. ‘And we’ll just have to pray they don’t leak it to the papers.’

‘But they will. They always do.’ His hands chop air. ‘We can’t risk it, not when I’m certain she didn’t do it and when there’s still a chance she’ll keep quiet. It’ll just mean having our private lives dragged through the press for nothing.’

‘So what do we do, Tom?’

‘I’ll talk to her. Geoff sent her off on a course but I’ll do it as soon as she’s back in the office.’

He’s taking care not to look at her. She’s taking equal care not to raise her voice.

‘What do I say to Reeves?’

He moves to the window. Outside a seagull hovers on the wind, beak parted, wings outspread before it dives for a scrap of flotsam bobbing on the tide. ‘Just tell him she came round to look at the house. At least until I’ve spoken to her.’ He swings round. ‘If I think there’s the slightest possibility she was involved I swear I’ll tell him everything.’

She sees the face she once trusted through a blur of tears, unsure if he’s trying to protect her, himself or that scheming little intern.

‘Don’t cry, Mummy!’

Elsie scampers across the room in a ladybird onesie and catapults herself onto their bed. Gracie hurries to dab her eyes with the corner of the towel. Elsie wriggles between them and inspects their faces with disapproval. Pursing her lips she taps each of them with a finger and says in her small husky voice, ‘Mummy, Daddy, one two,’ ticking off the immutable constants in her life, the load-bearing struts that can never be allowed to weaken or give way. Gracie squeezes her eyes tight shut but the tears keep coming. Tom tries to enfold them in his arms, his wife and his child. Gracie flinches away, his attempt at a moment of healing marred for her by the fleecy touch of Elsie’s onesie, bought for the bug-themed sleepover that left their home clear for his betrayal.

Gracie doesn’t want to look at the bulging Ziploc bag on the duvet. She stares instead at her mobile and inhales the smell of coffee. Music from the radio drifts up the stairs. Tom opening a door, calling to Elsie, Do you want a boiled egg? Knowing she has to do this, she makes the call.

‘Inspector Reeves, please.’

‘Inspector Reeves is on secondment.’

She bites her lip, overwhelmed by a shiver of abandonment. ‘How … how long for?’

‘Eighteen months. What is the nature of your call?’

‘It’s about … an existing case.’

‘Name?’

Gracie hesitates. ‘Dwyer. Grace.’

The familiar pause. Just a fraction of a second as the operator registers who she is. ‘Putting you through to Inspector Jamieson. One moment, please.’

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