C.L. TAYLOR
The Lie

Copyright

Published by Avon an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This ebook edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2017

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Copyright © C.L. Taylor 2015

Cover photographs © Arcangel images

Cover design © Henry Steadman

C.L. Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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.

Source ISBN: 9780007544271

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007544264

Version: 2017-10-27

PRAISE FOR C.L. TAYLOR

‘The Missing has a delicious sense of foreboding from the first page, luring us into the heart of a family with terrible secrets and making us wait, with pounding hearts for the final, agonizing twist. Loved it.’

Fiona Barton

‘Black Narcissus for the Facebook generation, a clever exploration of how petty jealousies and misunderstandings can unravel even the tightest of friendships. Claustrophobic, tense and thrilling, a thrill-ride of a novel that keeps you guessing.’

Elizabeth Haynes

‘A gripping and disturbing psychological thriller.’

Clare Mackintosh

‘As with all her books, C.L. Taylor delivers real pace, and it’s a story that keeps calling the reader back – so much so that I read it from cover to cover in one day.’

Rachel Abbott

‘A dark and gripping read that engrossed me from start to finish.’

Mel Sherratt

‘Kept me guessing till the end.’

Sun

‘Haunting and heart-stoppingly creepy, The Lie is a gripping roller coaster of suspense.’

Sunday Express

‘5/5 stars – Spine-chilling!’

Woman Magazine

‘An excellent psychological thriller.’

Heat Magazine

‘Packed with twists and turns, this brilliantly tense thriller will get your blood pumping.’

Fabulous Magazine

‘Fast-paced, tense and atmospheric, a guaranteed bestseller.’

Mark Edwards

‘A real page-turner … creepy, horrifying and twisty. You have no idea which characters you can trust, and the result is intriguing, scary and extremely gripping.’

Julie Cohen

‘A compelling, addictive and wonderfully written tale. Can’t recommend it enough.’

Louise Douglas

See what bloggers are saying about C.L. TAYLOR …

‘An intriguing and stirring tale, overflowing with family drama.’

Lovereading.co.uk

‘Astoundingly written, The Missing pulls you in from the very first page and doesn’t let you go until the final full stop.’

Bibliophile Book Club

‘[The Missing] inspired such a mixture of emotions in me and made me realise how truly talented you have to be to even attempt a psychological suspense of this calibre.’

My Chestnut Reading Tree

‘Tense and gripping with a dark, ominous feeling that seeps through the very clever writing … all praise to C.L. Taylor.’

Anne Cater, Random Things Through My Letterbox

‘C.L. Taylor has done it again, with another compelling masterpiece.’

Rachel’s Random Reads

‘In a crowded landscape of so-called domestic noir thrillers, most of which rely on clever twists and big reveals, [The Missing] stands out for its subtle and thoughtful analysis of the fallout from a loss in the family.’

Crime Fiction Lover

‘When I had finished, I felt like someone had ripped my heart out and wrung it out like a dish cloth.’

By the Letter Book Reviews

‘The Missing has such a big, juicy storyline and is a dream read if you like books that will keep you guessing and take on plenty of twists and turns.’

Bookaholic Confessions

‘Incredibly thrilling and utterly unpredictable! A must read!’

Aggie’s Books

‘A gripping story.’

Bibliomaniac

‘It’s the first time I have cried whilst reading. The last chapter [of The Missing] was heart-breaking and uplifting at the same time.’

The Coffee and Kindle

‘Another hit from C.L. Taylor … so cleverly written and so absorbing that I completely forgot about everything else while reading it. Unmissable.’

Alba in Book Land

Dedication

To Laura B, Georgie D and Minal S

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for C.L. Taylor

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

Book Club Questions for the Lie by C.L. Taylor

A Conversation With C.L. Taylor

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by C.L. Taylor

About the Publisher

Chapter 1
Present Day

I know he’s trouble before he even sets foot in the building. I can tell by the way he slams the door of his 4×4 and storms across the car park without waiting to see if his short, bespectacled wife is following him. When he reaches the glass double doors to reception, I avert my gaze back to my computer screen. It’s best to avoid direct eye contact with an aggressor. When you spend twelve hours a day with dangerous animals, you learn a lot about confrontation, fear and hostility – and not just in relation to dogs.

The bell above the doors rings as the man enters the reception area, but I continue to enter the details of a seven-day evaluation into the computer database. An Alsatian-cross called Tyson was brought in by an inspector a week ago. We’ve been evaluating him ever since, and I’ve identified behavioural issues with other dogs, cats and humans – unsurprising in a former drug-den guard dog. Some people believe that a dog like Tyson should be put down for his own good, but I know we can rehabilitate him. Your past doesn’t have to define your future.

“Where’s my fucking dog?” The man rests his elbows on the reception counter and juts out his chin, contempt etched onto his thin, sunken face. His shoulders are narrow beneath an oversized leather jacket and his jeans hang loosely from his hips. He can’t be much older than late forties, early fifties tops, but he looks worn down by life. I suspect he’s the sort to own a dangerous breed. Small man, big car. Big dog, too. No wonder he wants him back. He’s missing his canine penis extension.

“Can I help you?” I swivel round to face him, and smile.

“I want my dog. One of my neighbours saw the inspector turn up when we was out. They took him out the back garden. I want him back.”

“He’s called Jack, he’s a Staffordshire bull terrier and he’s five years old.” His bespectacled wife puffs into the reception area, her black leggings sagging at the knees, her pink lipstick neatly applied and her grey-streaked hair scraped back into a tight ponytail.

“And your name is?” I look back at her husband.

“Gary. Gary Fullerton,” the man replies, ignoring his wife.

I know the dog they are talking about. Jack was brought in four days ago. His right eye was so swollen it was sealed shut, his lip was torn and bloody and his left ear was so mangled the vet had to remove half of it. He’d been in a fight but it clearly wasn’t a one-off. You could tell that by the scars on his body and the wounds on his face. This owner’s obviously fresh from the police station. On bail pending a hearing, probably.

My smile fades. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“I know he’s here,” the man says. “You can’t keep him. We haven’t done anything wrong. He got into a fight in the park, that’s all. We’ve got seven days to claim him. That’s what my mate said.”

I angle myself away from him so my shoulders are square on to the computer and we’re no longer facing each other. “I’m sorry but I can’t discuss special cases.”

“Oi!” He leans over the counter and reaches for the monitor, yanking it towards him. “I’m talking to you.”

“Gary …” His wife touches his arm. He glares at her but lets go of the monitor. “Please.” She peers at my name badge. “Please, Jane, we just want to see Jack, that’s all, just to check he’s okay. We don’t want any trouble; we just want to see our boy.”

Her eyes mist with tears behind her glasses, but I don’t feel sorry for her. She must know Gary enters Jack into fights. She’s probably objected from time to time, maybe tried her best to clean Jack up with a wet flannel afterwards, but, ultimately, she’s done nothing to stop that dog getting torn to bits.

“I’m sorry.” I shake my head. “I really can’t discuss individual cases.”

“What bloody case?” the man roars, but his hands hang loosely at his sides. The fight’s gone out of him. He knows he hasn’t got a leg to stand on and the shouting’s just for show. The worst thing is he probably does love the dog. He was no doubt proud of Jack when he won his first few fights. He probably gave him a big handful of dried dog biscuits and sat next to him on the sofa with his arm around him. But then Jack started to lose and Gary didn’t like that; it knocked his pride, so he kept entering him into competitions, kept waiting for his fighting spirit to return, kept hoping his luck would change.

“Everything okay, Jane?” Sheila, my manager, strolls into reception from the corridor to my right and puts a hand on my shoulder. She smiles at Gary and his wife but there’s a tightness around her lips that suggests she’s heard every word.

“We’re going.” Gary slaps the counter with the palm of his right hand. “But you haven’t heard the last from us.”

He turns and stalks towards the exit. His wife remains where she is, fingers knotting in front of her, silently pleading with me.

“Come on, Carole,” Gary snaps.

She hesitates, just for a second, her eyes still fixed on mine.

“Carole!” he says again, and she’s off, trotting obediently at his side.

The bell rings as they leave reception, and they cross the car park in single file, Gary leading, Carole following behind. If she glances back, I’ll go after her. I’ll make up an excuse to talk to her on her own. That look she just gave me … it wasn’t just about the dog.

Look back, look back, Carole.

Lights flash as Gary points his key fob at the Range Rover, and he opens the door. Carole clambers into the passenger seat. Gary says something as she settles herself, and she takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes.

“Jane.” Sheila gently squeezes my shoulder. “I think we should have a nice cup of tea, don’t you?”

I get the subtext: Jack’s your business, Carole’s not.

She heads for the staffroom then stops suddenly. “Oh! I forgot to give you this.” She hands me an envelope. My full name is handwritten on the front: Jane Hughes, Green Fields Animal Sanctuary. “A thank you letter, I imagine.”

I run my thumb under the seal and open the envelope as Sheila waits expectantly in the doorway. There’s a single piece of paper inside, A4, folded into four. I read it quickly then fold it back up.

“Well?” Sheila asks.

“It’s from Maisie’s new owners. She’s settled in well and they’re head over heels in love with her.”

“Great.” She gives an approving nod before continuing into the staffroom.

I wait for the sound of her footsteps to fade away then glance through the glass double doors to the car park beyond. There’s an empty space where Carole and Gary’s 4×4 was parked.

I unfold the piece of paper in my hands and read it again. There’s a single sentence, written in the centre of the page in blue biro:

I know your name’s not really Jane Hughes.

Whoever sent it to me knows the truth. My real name is Emma Woolfe and for the last five years I’ve been pretending to be someone else.

Chapter 2
Five Years Earlier

Daisy doesn’t say a word as I sit down opposite her at the table. Instead she pushes a shot towards me then glances away, distracted by a group of men squeezing their way through the pub to an empty table near the loos. One of the men at the back of the pack, a short, dark-haired guy with a paunch, does a double take. He nudges the man next to him, who pauses, glances back and gives Daisy a nod of approval. She dismisses him with the arch of one eyebrow then looks back at me.

“Drink!” she shouts, and gestures towards the glass. “Talk afterwards.”

“Nice to see you, too.”

I don’t ask what it’s a shot of. I don’t even sniff it. Instead I knock it back then reach for the glass of white wine that Daisy pushes towards me. I can barely taste it for the strong aftertaste of aniseed from the shot.

“You okay, darling?”

I shake my head and take another sip of wine.

“Geoff the Arsehole giving you shit again?”

“Yeah.”

“So quit.”

“If only it were that easy.”

“Of course it’s that bloody easy, Emma.” Daisy runs both hands through her blonde hair then flicks it over her shoulders so it cascades down her back. “You print out a resignation letter, you give it to him and then you leave, middle-finger salute optional.”

A man holding two pints knocks the side of my chair with his hip. Lager slops out of the glasses and soaks my left shoulder.

“Sorry,” I say automatically. The man ignores me and continues onwards, his mates in his sights.

Daisy rolls her eyes.

“Don’t.”

“What?” She gives me an innocent look.

“Don’t give me shit for apologising, and don’t go after him.”

“As if I would.”

“You would.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well, someone’s got to stand up for you. Want me to have a word with your boss for you, too? Because I would, you know.”

Her mobile phone, on the table in front of her, bleeps and she jabs it with a bitten-down fingernail. Daisy’s eyeliner is deftly applied, her blonde hair straightened and shiny, but her cuticles are ragged, her red nail varnish chipped and flaking. Her nails are the one chink in her perfectly polished armour. She catches me looking and clenches her fingers into fists, burying them in her lap.

“He’s a bully, Emma, pure and simple. He’s been criticising you and making you feel shit since the day you started.”

“I know, but there’s a rumour he’s going to take over the Manchester office.”

“You’ve been saying that for three years.”

“I can’t just leave.”

“Why? Because of your mum? Jesus Christ, Emma, you need to grow a pair. You’re twenty-five years old. You only get one life; do what you want. Fuck your mum.”

“Daisy!”

“What?” She tops up her glass and knocks it back. From the glazed look in her eyes, I suspect that this bottle of wine isn’t her first of the night. “Someone’s got to say it and it might as well be me. You need to stop caring about her opinion and do what you want. It’s getting boring, your obsession with what your bloody family thinks. You’ve been on about it since uni and—”

“Sorry I’ve bored you. I thought we were supposed to be friends.” I reach for my bag and stand up, but Daisy reaches across the table and grabs my wrist.

“Don’t be like that. And stop bloody apologising. Sit down, Emma.”

I perch on the edge of my seat. I can’t speak. If I do, I’ll cry, and I hate crying in public.

Daisy keeps hold of my hand. “I’m not being a bitch. I just want you to be happy, that’s all. You’ve already told me you’ve saved up enough money to stop work for three months.”

“That’s emergency money.”

“And this is an emergency. You’re miserable. Come and work with me in the pub until you get something else. Ian would take you on in a heartbeat; he loves redheads.”

“It’s dyed.”

“For God’s sake, Emma—”

Her phone vibrates on the table and the tinny sound of Rihanna and Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” cuts through the chatter and hum in the pub.

Daisy holds up a hand to me then snatches up her phone. “Leanne? You okay?” She puts a finger in one ear and frowns in concentration. “Okay. Yeah, we’ll be there. Give us fifteen minutes to grab a cab. All right? Okay. See you in a bit.”

She tucks her phone into the tiny clutch bag on the table then looks across at me. There’s concern in her blue eyes, but a sliver of excitement, too.

“That was Leanne. She’s in that new gay club, Malice, in Soho with Al. Al’s on the hunt for Simone and her new girlfriend.”

“Shit.” I clutch my bag and reach round for my coat on the back of my chair.

“You okay if we go? I know we were talking about your job but—”

“It’s fine.” I stand up. “Al needs us. Let’s grab a cab.”

We sit in silence as the taxi splashes through puddles and the bright lights of London’s West End speed past us. The streets are unusually empty, the heavy rain forcing locals and tourists into already packed pubs, their windows misty with condensation.

Daisy looks up from her phone. “You know it’s the anniversary of her brother’s death, don’t you?”

“Al’s brother?”

“Yeah. I rang her at lunchtime.”

“How was she?”

“Pissed.”

“Shit, at work?”

“No, skiving; she was in the pub.”

“She’s been doing that a lot recently.”

“Yeah, when she’s not stalking Simone,” Daisy says, and we share a look.

It’s been over a month since Al and Simone split up, but Al’s behaviour is becoming more and more erratic by the day. She’s convinced that Simone left her because she met someone else, and she’s determined to find out who it is. She spends hours on Google, looking for “clues”, and she’s created several false Facebook profiles to try to get access to Simone’s page and the pages of anyone she’s friends with. None of us had seen the split coming, not least Al, who’d been planning on proposing. She’d been saving up for months for a ring and a safari in Kenya so she could propose on an elephant ride – Simone’s favourite animal.

“Here we are, ladies,” the cab driver says over his shoulder as we pull up in front of the neon pink Malice sign.

Daisy pokes a tenner through the glass partition then opens the taxi door. “Let’s go and get Al.”

“Excuse me, darling. Thank you. Excuse me.”

Daisy elbows her way through the throng of bodies clogging up the stairs, and I follow in her wake. We’ve already squeezed our way across the dance floor on the ground level in search of Leanne and Al, but there was no sign of them. No sign of Simone, either.

“Loos!” Daisy twists back and waves her mobile phone at me as she reaches the top of the stairs then takes a left.

I struggle to push my way through the huge crowd of women drinking beer and hanging out outside the women’s loos but finally manage to make my way inside.

“Oi!” A large woman wearing a Superdry T-shirt and oversized jeans shoots out a tattooed arm to bar my way as I attempt to squeeze past her. “There’s a queue.”

“Sorry, I’m just looking for a friend.”

“Emma, in here!” A cubicle door swings open and Daisy waves at me through the gap. She pulls an apologetic face at the woman in the queue. “Sorry, we’re dealing with a crisis in here.”

“Bloody lesbians,” the woman says, “always a melodrama.”

There’s no room for me to squeeze inside the cubicle so I hover outside and poke my head around the door. Al is sitting on the loo with her head in her hands. Leanne and Daisy are pressed up against the walls either side of her. Every couple of seconds, the main door into the loos opens and pumping house music floods the entire space as women file in and out, grumbling as they squeeze past me to find an empty cubicle.

“Al, sweetie.” Daisy hitches up her dress and squats down next to her friend. “Let’s get you home.”

Al shakes her head. The hems of her jeans are wet with rainwater and the laces of one of her trainers are untied. There’s cellophane poking out from beneath the arm of her T-shirt. She’s had another tattoo but I can’t make out what it is.

Leanne catches my eye, as though noticing me for the first time. She’s dyed her fringe pink since the last time I saw her. Her sharp black bob has always looked a bit severe, but with the pink streak and her new thick-rimmed black “geek” specs dominating her thin face, she looks like she’s wearing a motorbike helmet.

She shrugs and angles her arm towards me so I can read the time on her Mickey Mouse watch. It’s midnight. She flashes her fingers at me then holds up two more. Shit, Al’s been drinking for twelve hours.

This isn’t the first time Leanne’s had to call Daisy and me to take Al home. At five foot six, fourteen stone and bull-like in temperament, it takes all four of us to manoeuvre Al anywhere, especially when she’s drunk. Simone used to manage it, but she had an advantage: Al was in love with her. She could always talk her into going home, no matter how much she’d had to drink.

Two of the girls washing their hands in the sink behind me start laughing, and Al looks up.

“Are they laughing at me? Are you fucking laughing at me?” She half rises but Leanne presses down on her shoulder and Daisy grips hold of her wrist so Al is rooted to the toilet.

I glance behind me. “They can’t even see you.”

“They know.” Al runs a hand over her Mohican. “Everyone knows. I’m a fucking laughing stock.”

“No, you’re not,” Daisy says. “Relationships end all the time, Al. No one’s judging you.”

“Oh yeah? Then why did Jess on reception say ‘Ticket for one?’ when I came in?”

“Because you came alone?”

“Oh, fuck off, Daisy” – she yanks her hand out of Daisy’s grip – “what would you know? You haven’t been dumped once in your whole life.”

“Well, I have,” I say, “and I know how much it hurts, especially if they leave you for someone else. I’d had my suspicions about Jake for a while, but then when he—”

“Emma!” Leanne makes a stop talking gesture with her finger across her throat.

“Not that Simone left you for someone else,” I say, but it’s too late. Al’s on her feet and barging past me.

“If she’s here with that fucking bitch, today of all days, I’m going to swing for her. I’ll swing for both of them. Fucking baby dyke bitches.”

“Al!” Daisy totters after her, reaching for her arm. “She’s not worth it. Al!”

“Well done, Emma.” Leanne glares up at me from behind her neon fringe. “I’d just talked her down and you fired her up again.”

“She didn’t look very chilled to me.”

“You didn’t see her before. She was punching the cubicle walls. She nearly got us both thrown out.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

She pushes past me. “You never do, Emma.”

By the time I find the others, they’re standing in the centre of the dance floor downstairs with a circle of people surrounding them. Al is in the middle, jabbing her finger at Simone and some other girl I don’t recognise. Daisy and Leanne are either side of her.

“I fucking knew it,” Al says. “I knew you were sleeping with Gem.”

“Actually” – Simone squares up to her, even though she’s several inches shorter and several stone lighter – “Gem and I got together after we split up, not that it’s any of your business.”

“I think you’ll find it is.” Al turns her attention to the other woman, who takes a step closer to Simone and slings a heavy arm around her shoulders. She’s at least six feet tall, all sinew and muscle, with a heavy jaw and close-cropped hair. She’s got a boxer’s physique and the attitude to match.

“Think you’re clever, do you?” Al says. “Taking Simone off me?”

“I don’t think anything.”

“’Course you don’t. Pig shit doesn’t think.”

Boxer Woman smirks. “Piss off, Al. No one’s interested, least of all Simone. And for the record, I didn’t take her off you, she came running.”

“Bullshit. We were happy before you started sniffing around.”

“Is that so? According to Sim, you’re a possessive control freak who wouldn’t let her out.”

“Is that what you told her?” Al glares at Simone. “That I’m a control freak? After everything I did for you? When we met, you had nowhere to live. You had nothing, Simone and I let you live with me rent-free. I gave you money to go clubbing. I would have done anything for you.”

“You smothered me.”

Al’s eyes mist with tears. “Then you should have told me, not run off with this bull dog.”

“What did you call me?” Boxer Woman drops her arm from around Simone’s shoulders and takes a step towards Al. “Say that again to my face, you fat bitch.”

“Fuck you.” Al half steps, half jumps forward and swings at the taller woman before Leanne or Daisy can stop her. Her fist makes contact with Gem’s jaw and she stumbles backwards. Her foot slips on the beer-stained floor and she tumbles to the ground. The crowd whoops with excitement, and out of the corner of my eye, I spot a male member of security, walkie-talkie pressed to his ear, striding towards us. Daisy sees him too and gestures for me to help Leanne, who’s desperately shoving Al towards the door.

It doesn’t take much persuasion to get her to leave now. She’s so jubilant she practically skips out of the room.

“Fucking yeah!” She punches the air then winces and hugs her right hand to her body. She glances behind us as we hurry her towards the exit. “Where’s Daisy?”

Leanne and I exchange a look. “She’ll be fine. She’s chatting up the bouncer.”

“Dirty slut.” Al laughs all the way out of the building and into the waiting cab.

Chapter 3

It’s the next morning and I’ve only been at my desk for ten minutes when Geoff, my boss, wanders over. He lingers behind me, his hand on the back of my chair. I shuffle as far forward as I can so I end up perched right on the very edge of the seat.

“Late again, Emma.”

“Sorry.” I keep my gaze fixed on the spreadsheet in front of me. “Tube was delayed.”

It’s a lie. We didn’t get Al into bed until 2 a.m. and then I had to wait for a taxi to get me back to Wood Green. By the time I rolled into bed, it was after three.

“You’ll have to make up the time. I want you here until seven.”

“But I need to get to Clapham by then, my brother’s in a play.”

“You should have thought about that this morning and got up earlier. Now …” My chair creaks as he rests his full weight on it and leans around me so his mouth is inches from the side of my face. I can feel his breath, hot and sour in my ear. “I’m expecting that spreadsheet by lunchtime so I can look over it before I speak to the sales team this afternoon. Or should I expect that to be late, too?”

I want to tell him to stick his spreadsheet up his arse. Instead I curl my hands into fists and press my fingernails into the palms of my hands. “You’ll get it.”

I’ve been Geoff’s PA for three years. He’s Head of Sales here at United Internet Solutions, a software, hosting and search engine optimisation company. I was only supposed to be here for three months – it was meant to be just another of the countless temping jobs I took after university – but he extended my contract and then offered me a five-grand pay rise and a permanent position. Daisy told me back then to turn it down and do something else, but the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do is be a vet, and you can’t do that with a business degree. And I couldn’t face temping again.

I wait until Stephen Jones, Geoff’s favourite salesman and self-proclaimed “top dog”, strolls past us and into his office, closing the door behind him, and then I head for the ladies’ loos, my mobile phone hidden up my sleeve. I check the stalls to make sure that neither of the other two women who work for UIS are about, then I dial Mum’s number. It’s Tuesday, which means she should be at home. She works in the GP surgery she and Dad set up when they were newly married and still childless, but she only does Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The phone rings for several minutes before she finally picks up. She’s had her mobile for years but still hasn’t worked out how to set up voicemail.

“Shouldn’t you be at work?” That’s how she greets me. No “Hello, Emma,” no “Everything okay, darling?” just “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“I am at work.”

“Should you be on the phone? You don’t want to upset your boss, not after your recent appraisal.”

“Mum, can you just … never mind. Look, I can’t make it to Henry’s show tonight.”

There’s an audible intake of breath followed by an exaggerated sigh. “Oh, Emma.”

There it is, her disappointed tone, the one perfectly pitched to make me feel like utter shit.

“I’m sorry, Mum. I really wanted to make it but—”

“Henry will be disappointed. You know how much work he’s put into his one-man show. Tonight’s the night he’s invited lots of agents along, and it’s so important that the audience is on his side and—”

“Mum, I know.”

“He wants to take it to Edinburgh, you know that, don’t you? We’re ever so proud.”

“Yes, I do know that, but Geoff—”

“Can’t you ask him nicely? I’m sure he’d understand if you explain why.”

“I have asked him. He said I have to work until seven because I was late this morning.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. So it’s your own fault you can’t come? Don’t tell me, you were out drinking until late with your friends again.”

“Yes. No. We had to help Al. I’ve told you how upset she’s been about Simone recently, and—”

“And that’s what I should tell Henry, is it? That your friends are more important to you than your family?”

“That’s not fair, Mum. I’ve been to all George’s matches, and I was there when Isabella opened her dance studio.”

I spent most of my childhood being dragged from one sibling event to another, a habit that has now become so ingrained that I start each day by checking the calendar in my kitchen to see who’s doing what. Isabella is my oldest sibling. She’s thirty-two, an ex-dancer, ridiculously beautiful and married with a son. George is my older brother. He’s twenty-eight and a golf pro. He lives in St Andrews and I rarely see him. Henry’s the youngest; he’s twenty-four and the next Jimmy Carr, if you believe my mother.

“Mum?”

There’s a pause, a pause that stretches for one, two, three, four seconds.

“Mum? Are you still there?”

She sighs again. “You should get back to work. It sounds like you’re in enough trouble as it is.”

I swipe at my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Could you wish Henry good luck from me?”

“I will. I’ll speak to you soon. You’d better get back to it. Work hard and make us proud.”

The line goes dead before I can reply.

Chapter 4
Present Day

I’m sitting in the staffroom, the letter in my hand, my messenger bag at my feet. It’s been six hours since Sheila handed me the envelope, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve examined it. There’s my name, my assumed name, Jane Hughes, at the top then Green Fields Animal Sanctuary, Bude, Nr Aberdare, Wales. There’s a first-class stamp in the top right corner. It’s been stamped but it’s too smudged to make out the town or date. The letter itself is written in blue biro in cursive handwriting. The words aren’t large and bold and shouty. They’re neatly written, punctuated, spelled correctly.

“You haven’t stopped reading that since I gave it to you,” Sheila says, taking a step towards me, hand outstretched. “Can I see?”

“It’s nothing. Like I said, just a letter from Maisie’s owners. Nothing important.” I crumple the letter in my hand and throw it towards the bin before she can reach me. It hits the rim and bounces in.

Sheila stops short in the middle of the room. Her outstretched hand drops to her side and she makes a small “Oh” sound, but she doesn’t retrieve the letter from the bin. Instead she gives me a puzzled smile then heads for the coat stand in the corner of the room. She pulls on her waterproof jacket, grabs her oversized handbag from one of the chairs and hoists it over her shoulder.

“I’m off, then,” she says. “Are you in tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Make sure all the gates are secured before you go. We don’t want Mr Four-by-Four and his mates attempting a dognap in the middle of the night, do we?”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“I won’t.” Her smile widens and she raises a hand in goodbye then heads for the door.

Thirty seconds later, the bell above the main doors tinkles as she leaves. I fish the letter out of the bin, tuck it back into its envelope, and put it in my back pocket. Then I pick up my messenger bag and take out my mobile.

There are two texts and one missed call.

17:55 – Text from Will:

You still on for dinner tonight? x

17:57 – Missed call, Will.

17:58 – Text from Will:

Sorry, just wanted to check. You do eat sea bass, don’t you? I know there’s one kind of fish you don’t like but couldn’t remember if it was sea bass or sea bream? Not too late to pop to Tesco if you don’t like it!

Shit, I forgot I was supposed to be going to Will’s for dinner.

The phone vibrates in my hand and a tinkling tune fills the air.

Will.

I’m tempted to swipe from right to left and pretend I’m working late, but he’ll only worry and ring back.

“Hello?” I press the phone to my ear.

“Jane!” He says my name jubilantly, his voice infused with warmth.

“Hi! Sorry I didn’t get back to you about dinner but I’ve only just finished my shift. One of the dogs developed explosive diarrhoea when I was doing final checks, so I had to strip his bed and get it in the washing machine.”

“Mmmm, explosive diarrhoea. I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

He laughs. I want to laugh too but I can’t.

“So, are you still on for tonight, then?” The smallest note of tension enters his voice. Ours is still a fledgling relationship in many ways. We’re still on best behaviour, still testing the waters, still figuring each other out. “Because I’ve got a bet with Chloe, you know.”

Chloe’s his daughter. She’s nine. Will’s not officially divorced from her mum yet, but they’ve been separated for eighteen months and, according to him, living separate lives a lot longer than that.

“What kind of bet?”

“She thinks you’ll be dead by morning.”

“You can’t be that bad a cook!”

“The first time we took her to bonfire night, she sniffed the air and said, ‘Smells like Daddy’s cooking.’”

This time I do laugh, and the tension evaporates.

“I’ll be round in half an hour,” I say. “I just need to lock up here and pop home for a shower first.”

“Do you have to?” Will says. “I was looking forward to a whiff of eau de diarrhoea.”

“You’re grim.”

“And yet you still like me, so what does that say about you?”

My grin disappears the second I leave the staffroom. I lock the doors to reception first then walk through the building so I’m outside the dog compound. The sound of frenzied barking greets me as soon as I step out into the dusk. I enter the building and double check that all the doors to the kennels are shut, the bedding and toys are clean and there’s water in the water bowls. I completed my checks before I finished my shift, but I have to reassure myself everything’s still in order before I leave for the night. As I round the building and approach the runs, the barking increases and cages rattle as Luca, Jasper, Milly and Tyson throw themselves at the fences. Only Jack stands motionless and silent, staring at me through his one good eye.

“You’ll be okay, boy.” I speak softly, my eyes averted so we’re not making direct eye contact. “You’ll be okay.”

His tail wags from side to side but it’s a hesitant movement. He wants to trust me but he’s not sure whether he should. Unlike Luca, Jasper and Milly, Jack’s details won’t be entered on our website to advertise him as available for re-homing once his seven-day observation is over. Instead, like Tyson, we’ll look after him until his neglect case comes to court, whenever that might be. He could be here for months, but I’m not planning on going anywhere. Or rather, I wasn’t until the letter arrived earlier.

I check the other dog compound then cross the yard to check on the cattery. Two of the cats press their paws against the glass and mew plaintively, but the others ignore me.

I pass quickly through the small animals facility, checking doors are locked and windows are secured. It’s quieter in here and my reflection – pale and ghostly – follows me from window to window as I hurry down the corridor.

“Hello! Hello!”

The sound makes me jump as Freddy the parrot makes his way along the cage towards me.

He tilts his head to one side, his beady eyes fixed on me. “Hello! Hello!”

He used to belong to a retired army major called Alan, who taught him to swear at visitors, particularly unsuspecting Jehovah’s Witnesses and double-glazing salesmen. When Alan died, none of his relatives wanted anything to do with Freddy, so he ended up here. He’s an expensive breed of bird and I don’t imagine he’ll be here long, but we tend to rush any visitors of a sensitive disposition past him as quickly as we can.

“Bye, Freddy,” I call as I head towards the main doors. “See you tomorrow.”

“Bitch!” he calls after me. “Bye, bye bitch!”

Will has been talking for the last ten minutes but I haven’t the slightest clue what he’s on about. He started by telling me about something funny that happened at school this morning, some ten-year-old who confused tentacles with testicles in his lesson about octopuses, but the conversation has moved on since then and I can tell by the look on his face that smiling and nodding isn’t enough of a response.

The letter is burning a hole in my pocket. It has to be from a journalist, that’s the logical explanation. But why not sign it? Why not include a business card? Unless they’re deliberately trying to spook me into talking to them … It’s been five years since I returned to the UK, and four years since a journalist last tried to get me to sell my story, so why now? Unless that’s it – it’s the five-year anniversary of our trip to Nepal, and they want to dig it all up again.

“You lied, didn’t you?” Will says, and I look up.

“Sorry?”

“About the sea bass? It’s not the sea bream you don’t like; it’s the bass. That’s why you haven’t touched it.”

We both stare at the untouched fish on my plate, the dill and butter sauce congealed around it like a thick, yellow oil slick. “I’m sorry, I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“Spill …” He runs a hand through his dark hair then rests his chin on his hand, his eyes fixed on mine. “You know you can tell me anything.”

Can I, though? We’ve known each other for three months, been sleeping together for half that time, and yet I feel we barely know each other, not really. I know that his name is William Arthur Smart, he’s thirty-two, separated with a nine-year-old daughter called Chloe. He’s a primary school teacher, he likes folk music, his favourite films are the Star Wars trilogy, and he can’t stand the taste of coriander. Oh, and he’s got a sister called Rachel. What does he know about me? I’m called Jane Hughes, I’m thirty, childless and I work at Green Fields Animal Sanctuary. I like classical music, my favourite film is Little Miss Sunshine and I don’t like the texture of sea bream. I have two brothers and a sister – Henry, George and Isabella. It’s all true. Almost.

“What’s the worst lie you’ve ever told?” I ask.

He frowns momentarily then smiles. “I told my teacher my dad was Harrison Ford when I was ten. I said he might let me bring the Millennium Falcon in to school if I promised not to scratch it.”

His answer is so typically Will that I can’t help but smile. He’s a good person. Nothing he’s said or done in the last three months has given me reason to think otherwise, but I don’t trust my instincts. You can spend years of your life with someone and still not know them. So how can I trust someone I barely know?

“Hello?” He waves a hand in front of my face. “Anyone there?”

“Sorry?”

“I just asked why you asked that? About the lie?”

“No reason, just curious.”

He stares at me for several seconds then sighs softly and reaches for my plate. “I’ll get dessert. And if you don’t eat my world famous raspberry cheesecake, I’m taking you to a doctor to get your tastebuds checked.”

“Will,” I say as he disappears into the kitchen.

“Yes?” He pokes his head out the door, my plate still in his hand.

“Thank you.”

He looks confused. “But you didn’t like it.”

“I wasn’t talking about the fish.”

“What for, then?”

I want to thank him for not pushing me to talk about my past and for just accepting me at face value, but the words tie themselves in knots on my tongue.

“For this.” I wave a hand towards the bottle of wine and the flickering candles on the table. “It’s just what I needed.”

He pauses, as though trying to work out if I’m being sarcastic or not, then grins broadly. “If flattering me is your subtle ruse to try and get out of tasting my cheesecake, I’m not falling for it. You know that, don’t you?”

Chapter 5
Five Years Earlier

“So did you sleep with the bouncer, then?”

Daisy smirks from behind her mug of tea. “Someone had to distract him from throwing Al out.”

Leanne looks up from her mobile. “That’s a yes, then.”

It’s been a week since we manhandled Al out of the nightclub, and the three of us are gathered in Leanne’s tiny studio flat in Plaistow, East London, to talk about how best to help her. Daisy and Leanne are sitting cross-legged on her single bed, the crocheted bed cover pooling on the threadbare beige carpet, while I’m perched on the only chair in the room, a hard-backed pine affair by the window. There’s a basic kitchen on the other side of the room – sink, microwave, fridge and a two-ring portable electric hob – and a clothes rail along the wall opposite the bed, and a small chest of drawers with a 14-inch flat-screen TV on the top. Leanne’s tried to cheer up the room with a print of a sunny poppy-filled field, a small porcelain Buddha, a plaque that says, “Only Truth Will Set You Free” on the windowsill, and a spider plant next to the cooker, but it’s still undeniably bleak. In the two years that Leanne’s lived here, it’s only the second time she’s invited me round. Correction: Daisy invited me round. Leanne texted her to suggest they get together to talk about how best to help Al; Daisy suggested I come, too.

“Right.” Leanne sits up a little straighter and presses her glasses into her nose. She’s been unusually chirpy ever since we turned up, which is slightly weird considering she told Daisy on the phone that Al was sacked from her job three days ago and she was worried she might be a suicide risk. “I’ve been thinking about how best to help Al and I’ve come up with an idea.”

Daisy puts her mug down on the chest of drawers. “Go on.”

“There are three main issues here.” Leanne pauses, relishing the fact that she’s got a rapt audience, then holds up her index finger. “One: Al is physically stalking Simone and Gem. She sat outside Gem’s house all night last night – literally on the front doorstep – waiting for Gem to come out. Simone called the police.”

“Shit.”

Leanne raises her eyebrows. “I know. Apparently they just had a ‘friendly word’ and told her to move on, but if she does it again … Anyway.” She raises a second finger. “Two: Al is stalking Simone on the internet. Now she’s lost her job, she’s spending every bloody second on her laptop. I was round there yesterday and when she went to the loo, I took a quick look at the screen. She was on some kind of forum about hacking Hotmail accounts. And three,” she adds before I can interrupt again, “well, it kind of ties in with one and two. She’s spending too much time on her own. We need to keep an eye on her, but none of us can do that twenty-four seven, unless …” She pauses dramatically. “… we take her on holiday.”

“Yes!” Daisy’s silver bracelets rattle as she punches the air. “Let’s go to Ibiza. I love it there. I know a guy who used to work for Manumission who could get us free tickets.”

“Did you shag him?”

She gives me the middle finger.

“That’s a yes, then,” I say, and she laughs.

“So? Ibiza, then? Ian will give me the time off, and I’ve got a month until my next runner job. Whoop, whoop! Ibiza, here we come.” The bed squeaks in protest as Daisy bounces up and down.

“How long for?” I ask. “I’ve got three weeks’ holiday left but I was hoping to save one of those weeks for Christmas.”

“Quit. Honestly, Emma. It’ll be the best decision you ever make. Go to Ibiza and get another job when you come back. You can afford it. You’ve got three months’ emergency money saved up, you said as much last week.”

“Actually …” Leanne tentatively raises a hand but Daisy ignores her.

“Go on, Emma, it’s for Al. She’d love a couple of weeks in Ibiza. She went last year, didn’t she?”

“Didn’t she go with Simone?”

“How’s that a problem? She won’t be there this time. Will she?”

“I don’t know, but she’ll have lots of memories of going there with Simone, and—”

“Emma!” Leanne snaps. “Can I get a word in, please?”

“Why are you having a go at me? I wasn’t the only one talking.”

“As I was saying” – she peers over her specs at Daisy – “I think we should go on holiday, but we should go to a place where, a) she’s a long way from Simone, and b) she hasn’t got access to the internet, and c) she get can her head together.”

“Like where?”

“Nepal,” Leanne says.

“Where?”

“Nepal! It’s in Asia, near Tibet.”

Daisy wrinkles her nose. “Why would we want to go there?”

“There’s an amazing retreat in the mountains called Ekanta Yatra. My yoga teacher told me about it. Look!” She flashes her mobile at Daisy then taps the screen. “Amazing fresh, home-cooked food, yoga, a river you can swim in, a waterfall, massages, facials. We could spend a day in Kathmandu then do two weeks at the retreat, then we could fly to a place called Chitwan and go on a jungle safari. It would be the adventure of a lifetime.”

Leanne’s face is aglow. I’ve never seen her look so energised; she normally looks so wan and tired. She’s desperately thin, and Daisy and I have speculated several times about whether or not she might have an eating disorder.

“Could I see that?” I reach out a hand for her mobile. She presses it into my palm without saying a word.

I scroll through the website. It would seem Ekanta Yatra’s run by a group of Westerners who met when they were travelling through Asia and decided to start a “retreat from the world” nestled in the Annapurna mountain range, an area popular with hikers. It’s beautiful, and the idea of spending a couple of weeks being pampered, reading novels and swimming in a crystal-clear river appeals, but …

“There’s no Wi-Fi,” I say.

“Is that a problem?”

“Well, yeah. I’ve started applying for new jobs and I won’t be able to check my email.”

Leanne slips off the bed and takes five steps across the room to the kettle. She picks it up and refills it from the tap. “You don’t have to come, Emma. No one’s forcing you.”

It’s not that Leanne and I actively dislike each other; we are friends but only when we’re with Daisy or Al. We don’t go for drinks together or have text message marathons. We’ll laugh at each other’s jokes and buy each other birthday presents, but we’ve never developed any kind of closeness or warmth. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the way she looked me up and down the first time we met. Maybe it’s because I forgot to get her a drink when I went to the bar to get a round. Or maybe it’s because, sometimes, when you meet someone, you get a vibe that they just don’t like you, and that vibe never quite disappears.

“I’ll bloody force her,” Daisy says, jumping off the bed and onto my lap. “You’ll come, won’t you, Emma?” She cups her hands around my face and nods it up and down. “See, look, she’s saying yes, she says she’ll come.”

“It sounds expensive.”

“No more expensive than a couple of weeks in Ibiza,” Leanne says as she pours boiling hot water into three mugs.

“Al’s lost her job,” I say. “How’s she going to afford to go?”

“I’ll pay for her,” Daisy says. “Or, rather, Dad will.” She jumps off me and back onto the bed, but I catch her smile slip. I don’t think she’s ever forgiven her dad for sending her away to prep school when she needed him most. She was only six years old, and her little sister had died tragically a year earlier. Shortly after her baby sister’s death, unable to cope with the grief, her mum killed herself. Daisy’s dad, a City trader, justified the decision to send her to boarding school by saying it would give her life some stability, plus a mother figure in the shape of a house mistress, but, to Daisy, it was like being abandoned all over again. It’s why she’s so ruthless when it comes to ending friendships and relationships. It’s better to leave than be left, no matter how painful the separation might be.

“Well? Are you up for it or not?” Leanne turns to face us, a steaming mug in each hand. She’s smiling again but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. She squeezes past me to reach the chest of drawers. Tea slops onto the pine top as she sets the mugs down. “I thought we could go next month.”

“Next month?” I catch Daisy’s eye but she shrugs. She’s got Ian, her boss, wrapped around her little finger. He lets her work in The King’s Arms whenever she’s in between runner jobs, so he won’t bat an eyelid if she suddenly announces she’s off on holiday for three weeks. And Leanne’s an aromatherapy massage therapist who rents a room in a beauty salon, so she can take off whatever time she likes. Geoff won’t make escaping to Nepal for three weeks so easy for me.

“You are entitled to time off,” Daisy says, as though she’s just read my mind. “Or you could just quit.”

“Daisy …”

“Fine, fine.” She holds out her hands as though in surrender. “But if you don’t come, I’ll never talk to you again.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Is that a yes, then?” Leanne twists her hands in front of her. “Are we going to Nepal?”

“Only if we can convince Al.”

Daisy grins. “Leave that to me.”

Chapter 6

I have no idea why Al and Leanne are laughing. It’s our first night in Nepal, the bar’s rammed and, as Leanne beat me to the last seat at our table, I’m half squatting, half leaning against the low wall that separates the seating area from the rock band. I say rock band but the music the four Nepalese musicians are playing is like no rock I’ve ever heard. The drummer and the bassist are out of time, and the guitarist sounds like he’s playing a completely different song. Daisy nods at me from across the table, then sticks out her tongue and holds her hands in the air, folding her fingers into devil’s horns like a blonde, perfectly made-up Gene Simmons.

“Yeah!” she shouts, then whips her hair back and forth as she head-bangs to a guitar solo that would make Jimmy Page weep. I reach for my beer as the table wobbles precariously.

“Woah!” Daisy says, rubbing the back of her neck and looking towards the band for a reaction. The guitarist gives her the thumbs up and shouts something unintelligible.

Leanne squeals with laughter as though it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen, while Al, to my left, drains her bottle and reaches for her mobile. There’s no Wi-Fi in the bar, but that hasn’t stopped her checking for texts every couple of minutes.

“Shots!” Daisy shouts, jumping to her feet. “Then drinking games. Fuzzy Duck, or I Have Never?”

“Fuzzy Duck!” Leanne says, pushing back her chair to stand up.

Daisy dismisses her with a wave of the hand. “I’ll get these; you can get the next lot.”

Silence descends on our table as the band stops for a break, and Daisy weaves her way through the bar, her denim shorts riding low on her hips, the strap of her red bra escaping from beneath her black vest top and resting on her shoulder. Every man she passes glances up at her. She’s the only woman I know who sashays as she walks.

Leanne nudges Al. “Have you seen that couple snogging over by the window? She’s got her hands down his shorts. It’s gross.”

“Yeah,” Al says, without looking up from her mobile.

It’s like she can sense that everything we’ve done tonight – the head-banging, the jokes, the observations, the drinks – has been for show, to try and cheer her up and distract her from thinking about Simone. It hasn’t worked. Al’s normally right up there with Daisy, telling stories and bantering, but she’s crawled into her shell since we first discussed coming to Nepal a month ago, and no amount of cajoling or piss-taking will tempt her back out.

“I’m going to the loo.” She stands up, shoves her phone into the pocket of her cargo trousers and shuffles away.

Leanne and I watch her go.

“Looking forward to Pokhara tomorrow?” Leanne asks.

“I can’t wait. I need a massage like you wouldn’t believe. How long’s the bus journey again?”

“About six hours.”

“Wow.”

“I noticed a little corner shop just down from our guest house. We should grab some water and snacks and things after breakfast.”

“Good idea.”

We lapse into silence as I gaze around the bar. We’re on the first floor of a building on the main stretch of Thamel, the tourist district of Kathmandu, and the sound of car horns drifts through the open windows. The walls are painted a deep red and decorated with fairy lights and paintings of temples and mountain ranges.

“Guys!” Daisy bounces back into view with a tray bearing eight shot glasses in her hands, just as Al rejoins us at the table. “There’s a wall over by the bar that loads of people have signed. We need to write something. Come on!”

“I don’t know what to write.” Daisy bites down on the piece of chalk in her hand then cringes as a squeaking sound fills the air.

“I do.” The tip of Al’s tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth as she drags the chalk over the wall. The whole expanse has been painted with blackboard paint, and it’s filled with sketches, messages, dates and obscenities.

“Fuck you, Simone!” Leanne rolls her eyes as she reads aloud what Al has written. “Seriously, Al, you can’t leave that up there.”

“Why not?” Al folds her arms over her chest and stares admiringly at her handiwork.

“Because it’s really negative. This holiday is supposed to be about new starts.”

“Okay, then.” Al pulls her sleeve over her hand and rubs at the wall. “There you go.”

“Fuck?” Leanne says, and everyone laughs. “That’s it?”

“That’s the best you’re getting out of me. Your turn, Emma.” She hands me the chalk.

“Oh, God.” I look at Daisy, who’s still deliberating what to write, a pale chalky patch now smeared on her bottom lip. “I don’t know what to write, either.”

“Give it to me, then.” Leanne snatches the chalk from my hand and, before I can object, she steps towards the wall and starts scribbling. When she steps back, there’s a self-satisfied grin on her face.

“What the hell?” Al squints at what she’s written. It’s longer than the things other people have written and, to fit it all in, she’s had to twist the sentence over and around other scribbles like a snake.

“It’s a Maya Angelou quote,” Leanne says. “‘The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.’”

I have to fight not to roll my eyes. Trust Leanne to be pseudo-deep when everyone else has drawn dicks and bollocks and written things like “I love beer” on the wall.

“Okay, I’ve got it.” I twist the chalk from her fingers and read aloud as I write. “Emma, Daisy, Al, Leanne: the adventure of a lifetime.”

Daisy steps forward and nudges me out of the way. She rubs out “the adventure of a lifetime” and replaces it with “best friends forever”.

“There.” She stands back and pulls the three of us into an awkward hug. “Perfect.”

Al rummages around in her backpack, pulls out two cans of lager and chucks one at me. We left the bar half an hour ago and we’re back at the guest house, ostensibly to sleep, but Al seems to have other ideas.

I catch the can of beer. “What’s this for?”

She settles back on her bed and kicks off her trainers. “Not being a dick.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tonight. It was like the Daisy and Leanne Show. Well, the Daisy Show, with a one-woman audience.”

“They were trying to cheer you up.” I pull the tab on my beer and take a swig. We drew lots to decide who’d share with whom in the guest house. Leanne wanted to share with Al, and for me and Daisy to share, but Daisy thought it would be fun to “mix things up a bit”, especially as we’ll have to share rooms at the retreat and in the jungle, too.

“I know, and I would have laughed if it wasn’t so sad.”

“Al!”

She smirks at me over the lip of her can. “Come on, Emma, admit it. I could see you cringing.”

“Well.” I shrug. “Maybe a bit. I felt like I should have held up a neon sign pointing to our table that said, ‘We Are Having FUN!’”

“Best friends forever!” Al bursts out laughing and the tension I’ve felt all evening finally dissipates.

There’s a knock at the door and we both freeze.

“Come in,” Al shouts.

The door swings open and Daisy’s blonde head peers around the doorway.

“Are you two bitches having fun without me?” She points at our beers with mock horror. “And you’re drinking the duty free!”

Al reaches into her backpack and chucks a beer at Daisy. “Join in, let’s be friends forever!”

She cackles with laughter and the sound fills the room.

Chapter 7
Present Day

“Jane? Have you got a minute?” I’m elbow deep in dried dog food when Sheila calls my name. She’s standing in the doorway of the supplies room with a woman I’ve never seen before. Unlike Sheila, who’s nearly six feet tall and all bosom and bum, the woman standing next to her is tiny. She’s barely five feet tall and her Green Fields’ standard issue navy polo shirt hangs flat from her shoulders, skimming her non-existent chest. Her grey trousers nearly cover the toes of her black trainers.

“Of course.” I stand up, tip the scoop into one of the twenty metal bowls on the table to my right, then wipe my hands on my trousers and cross the room.

“Jane, this is Angharad, one of the new volunteers. Angharad, this is Jane; she runs the dog section.”

“Hi!” I smile at the newcomer. From a distance, she looked about nineteen, but, up close, I can see she’s nearer my age. She tucks a strand of her neat bob behind an ear as she smiles up at me.

“Hi.” She holds out a hand and I shake it.

“Angharad’s between jobs at the moment,” Sheila says, “so she thought she’d do a bit of volunteering while she’s looking for something permanent. She particularly requested the dog section – a big dog lover, apparently.”

“Great.” I smile at Angharad.

“Okay, so, I’ll leave you to it, then.” Sheila nods then turns to leave.

“You said you came to work by bike; do you live nearby?” Angharad asks as we speed past Freddy and head towards the wild boar pen up near the top field.

“In a cottage down the road. I can see Green Fields from my back garden.”

“Wow, that is close. Have you worked here long?”

“Three years, give or take.”

I’m giving her the official guided tour of the sanctuary. She’ll already have been shown around when she attended the volunteer evening, but I’d rather chat as we walk than stand opposite each other in the silence of the supplies room.

“Where did you train?”

“Bicton, near Exeter. I did a Foundation Degree in Animal Science Management and Welfare when I was twenty-five.”

“You were a mature student, then?”

I can tell by the expression on her face that she’s waiting for me to go into more detail, to explain what I did before my degree and why I waited until I was twenty-five to study animal welfare, but I ignore her unspoken questions. Instead I point at the pigs. They greet us with a series of increasingly noisy grunts and squeals as we approach them.

“Bill and Ben. I shouldn’t imagine you’ll have anything to do with them if you’re going to spend most of your time in the dog compound, but watch out for them if anyone asks you to help out. They’re half wild boar,” I explain. “We’re not sure what they’re crossed with, and they’re a damned sight more dangerous than they look. Clever, too.”

Angharad gestures towards the multiple locks, clips and chains on their pen. “That’s a lot of locks.”

“They’ve escaped several times since they arrived, but I think we’ve outfoxed them. They’re vicious buggers, too. Turn your back on them for a second and they’ll bite you. That’s why we always lock them in their shed if we’re cleaning their run, and vice versa. They locked me in, once.”

She laughs and I’m astonished by the way it transforms her. Gone is the studious look of concentration that’s been etched on her face since we were introduced. Her laugh’s a snorty chuckle, so infectious I find myself laughing, too.

“You’re kidding?” she says as the laughter dies away.

“I’m not. I was cleaning their shed on my own, the door was closed, and one of them flipped the stable catch over with his nose, locking me in. I had to reach over with a broom and flip it back to get out.”

“You don’t think they did it on purpose?”

“Who knows? I don’t know much about boars and pigs. At least with dogs you can predict how they’re likely to react, most of the time, anyway.”

“If only it was that easy with people.” She gives me a sideways glance. I don’t meet her gaze.

“Quite.” I gesture for her to follow me back down the track. “They’re harder to figure out than the pigs.”

“So?” Sheila asks as I reach into the fridge for my lunch box. “How’s she getting on?”

“Angharad?” I sit down on one of the hard plastic chairs that line the staffroom wall, and pop open a Tupperware lid. The scent of warm cheese and tomato sandwiches drifts, unappealingly, upwards. I should have taken Will up on his offer of a slice of cheesecake for my packed lunch. “She’s okay. She was pretty quiet when she started, but now she’s warmed up there’s no shutting her up. She’s full of questions. Gets on with her work, though. She didn’t complain when she had to clean up Jasper’s sick or spend an hour in the laundry washing blankets and bedding.”

“You think she’ll be back tomorrow?”

“I think so. She did seem keen to get stuck in.”

I take a bite of my sandwich as Sheila taps away at the computer in a corner of the room, but then subtly spit it into a tissue. The bread is soggy from the damp tomato. Not that I’ve got much of an appetite, anyway. Other than a couple of bites of cheesecake, I’ve barely eaten since yesterday morning.

“She was very keen to work with you, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“Angharad,” Sheila says. “When she came to the volunteer night, she specifically requested that she work with you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She asked who worked in the dog compound, and when I listed everyone’s names, she said, ‘I’d like to work with Jane, if I could.’”

I look up sharply. “Why would she say that?”

Sheila stops typing and glances at me over her shoulder. “Who knows? Maybe she saw your name in the local paper when we had the fundraising? Maybe you helped one of her friends adopt a dog? Your guess is as good as mine.”

The computer bleeps and Sheila twists back to look at it then swears under her breath.

“Why do people do that?”

“Do what?” I wrap the cellophane back around my sandwich and put it back in the box.

“Enter spam into the contact form on our website. What’s the point? It’s not like I’m going to click on their stupid impotence pill links, or whatever. I mean, look, this one’s just ridiculous; it doesn’t even make sense. ‘Daisy’s not dead.’ What does that even mean? Is that an animal? Wasn’t there a ferret called Daisy?”

The Tupperware box clatters to the floor as I stand up. I cross the room as though in a dream and peer over Sheila’s shoulder at the computer. The email software is open.

“See?” She points at the screen. “There it is. ‘Daisy’s not dead.’ That’s all it says. Weird, isn’t it?

“Jane? Where are you going? What’s wrong?” Her voice follows me as I run from the room and head for the toilet, one hand clutched to my throat, the other pressed to my spasming stomach. “Jane?”

Chapter 8
Five Years Earlier

“You should have seen him!” Daisy gets up from her chair and mimes running alongside a car, her coat caught in a closed door. “His stubby little legs pounding the pavement, his fat face bright red, and Emma hanging out of the window screaming, ‘Stop the car! Stop!’”

She finishes her story with a flourish and there’s a beat – a split-second pause as Al and Leanne glance over at me – and then the silence is destroyed by an explosion of laughter.

Daisy continues to scream “Stop, stop!” at the top of her voice while she jumps up and down, her wedge sandals thumping the patio, a near-empty bottle of red wine in one hand, a full glass slopping around in the other.

I take a sip of my own wine and stare into the firepit as it pops and crackles, watching sparks leap into the air. It’s our second night in Pokhara, and we’re sitting on the patio in our swimsuits. Damp towels lie at our feet like sleeping dogs, the sky is a black blanket speckled with holes, and the night is alive with the sound of motorbikes, car horns and cicadas. This was supposed to be a treat – a couple of nights’ luxury in a hilltop Pokhara hotel – before we hike up the Annapurna range to Ekanta Yatra tomorrow. I don’t know if it’s the humidity, the really shitty email Geoff sent me the day before the holiday, questioning my ability to do my job, or the fact that Daisy’s spent three days getting laughs at my expense, but I’m finding it hard to join in with the frivolity. Back home, I could retreat to my flat in North London when things got a bit overwhelming, but the four of us haven’t spent a second apart since we got here.

“Oh, come on, Emma!” Daisy shouts. “Cheer up!”

“I’m not miserable.”

“Have you told your face that?”

She laughs and glances at Al as if to say, “Right?” but Al doesn’t respond. If anything, her smile slips, just the tiniest bit. This is the drunkest any of us have seen Daisy in a while.

“I’m fine, Daisy,” I say. “I’ve just heard that story before, that’s all.”

“Ooh.” She raises her eyebrows and widens her eyes. “Sorry if I’m boring you, Miss Emma Woolfe. Are my storytelling skills lacking? I do apologise.”

“Well, I think you’re funny,” Leanne says. She’s sitting cross-legged on her chair, her bony knees poking over the arms, a thin grey cardigan wrapped around her shoulders.

“Thank you, darling.” Daisy takes a little bow then totters over to me. “What’s up with you, misery guts?”

“Nothing. Forget it.” I reach for my wine glass and stand up. “I’m going for a walk round the grounds. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”

I slip away quickly, Daisy’s mocking voice following me out into the darkness of the garden. She’s doing her “northern voice”, a cross between Yorkshire and Geordie. I’m not even a northerner – I’m from Leicester – but “everyone who lives north of Watford is a northerner”, according to Daisy. Daisy and Al both claim to be from London, but Al’s actually from East Croydon, while Daisy’s from Elmbridge in Surrey – “the Beverley Hills of Britain”, apparently, not that Daisy spends much time there. She went straight from Cheltenham Ladies College to university in Newcastle. Apparently, she was being groomed to go to Oxford or Cambridge, but she was more interested in shagging boys in the grounds after dark than studying for her A-levels, and only scraped three Cs. And then after uni we all moved to London.

“Daisy, you’re hilarious!” Leanne laughs at Daisy’s impression of me like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. It’s been seven years since she first did it at uni, and apparently the joke still hasn’t worn thin.

I make my way slowly around the swimming pool, checking the wet tiles for snakes, lizards and frogs, then follow the winding steps down into the gardens. It’s darker here, away from the glare of the hotel lights and the glow of the fire, but the moon is full and bright and I head for the crest of the hill and perch on the edge of a wooden bench there. We’ve only been in Nepal for a couple of days and I still feel as though I’ve been transported onto another planet. Forty-eight hours ago, we were in Kathmandu, with its roaring, beeping, haphazard traffic, men on bicycles piled up with treacherous, wobbling loads and monkeys jumping from building to building, their young clinging to their chests. Now, in Pokhara, the Annapurna range looms like a dark dragon in the distance, while the lake below, black against the glittering lights of the city, glistens in the moonlight. London couldn’t feel further away than it does right now.

I take a sip of wine then place the glass on the ground. It wobbles precariously but doesn’t tip over. I’m drunker than I thought. The sound of someone shouting along to Madonna’s “Holiday” drifts across the night air towards me. There’s a pause, a loud splash from the swimming pool, and then the singing continues. It’s Al. The laughter is all part of the act that she’s okay, just like the ceremonial burning of Simone’s photo in the firepit earlier and the solemn promise to “never, ever, get involved with a baby dyke again”. Two thousand miles away and a bottle of red wine in her hand, and she’s over the love of her life. If only it were that easy.

Leanne joins in the singing, her thin reedy tones picking out the words “holiday” and “celebrate” then falling silent for the rest of the song because she doesn’t know the words. Al laughs and Leanne laughs, Al dances and Leanne dances, Al sings and Leanne sings. Leanne does exactly the same with Daisy – it’s her M.O. She reminds me of one of those birds who jump from one rhino’s back to another, hitching a ride, pecking for food and enjoying the protection of the bigger animal.

Movement from the bushes to my right makes me glance round. The leaves at the base rustle ever so slightly as a gecko creeps out. Its padded fingers grip the ground and its bulbous eyes swivel from side to side. I stare at it, transfixed. I’ve only ever seen a gecko in the zoo before. It’s strangely beautiful and almost other-worldly with its black, unblinking eyes.

“Here you are!” Daisy comes crashing down the steps towards me, a fresh bottle of wine in one hand, a glass in the other, a blanket thrown over her arm.

“Don’t hate me, Ems!” She throws herself onto the bench beside me and wraps her right arm around my neck, pulling me into her. Red wine sloshes out of the bottle and drips down the front of my swimsuit. “I was only having a laugh.”

“I know.” I peel the bottle from her fingers and place it on the floor then untangle myself from her arm, but she continues to push the blanket into my face in a clumsy attempt to mop up the wine. “But I wish you’d stop doing it at my expense.”

“Stop being so sensitive. It’s just a bit of fun.”

“Yeah, because I loved being the punchline of my family’s jokes as a kid.” I can hear the whiny, self-pitying tone in my voice but I can’t stop myself. Daisy’s an aggressive drunk; I’m a maudlin one.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Sometimes I think Leanne’s right.”

“What about?”

“You.”

I inch away from her. “Go on.”

“No.” She peers at me. She took her contacts out earlier because they were gritty at the end of the day, and she’s too vain to wear glasses. “You’ll get pissed off.”

“Tell me.”

“No.” A smile plays on her lips as she shakes her head. She’s so drunk this conversation has become a game. She knows it’s dangerous but she can’t stop herself from playing it.

“Just tell me, Daisy.”

“Okay, okay. Fine. She thinks you can be a bit of a misery guts, sometimes. You say stuff that lowers the mood. Your parents are doctors, they’re still together, your brothers and sister are successful and you’ve got a job that pays okay even if your boss is an arsehole. Compared to what Leanne’s been through, what the rest of us have been through, you haven’t really got that much to moan about. That’s all.”

“And you agree with Leanne, do you?”

“Sometimes.”

I stare at her in bewilderment. Seven years, Daisy and I have been best friends, and this is the first time she’s said anything about me being a drama queen. Leanne’s been trying to drive a wedge between us for years, ever since we met at uni. “The three amigos”, that’s how Leanne referred to herself, Daisy and Al when they stayed up in Newcastle for the first Christmas holidays because none of them wanted to go back to their families. I wanted to stay up with them too, but Mum pulled a guilt trip on me. She told me Granny wasn’t very well and how would I feel if I missed her last Christmas because I chose to get drunk with my friends instead (Granny’s still alive and well). Leanne went out of her way to exclude me when I came back in the New Year. She invited Al and Daisy to the cinema, to club nights and to dinner parties at their halls of residence, all the while telling Daisy that she’d invited me but I’d made excuses about revision and said no. I know Leanne and Daisy have been spending more time together in London than usual because they both work flexible hours, Daisy in the pub and Leanne in the salon, and consequently they’ve been “babysitting” Al in the run-up to the holiday, but I never once thought they’d spend their time slagging me off.

“Thanks, Daisy.” I stand up. “I try and talk to you about you taking the piss out of me and you use it as an excuse to have a dig at me.”

“Stop being so bloody sensitive.” She stands up too. “And anyway, that story wasn’t about you. It was about that tosser you pulled. That’s who I was taking the piss out of. It was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny. Elliot could have been run over.”

“Elliot, was it? And there was me thinking he was some random guy who was just after a shag. He was rude and he deserved to be kicked out of the taxi. I did you a favour, Emma.”

“No, you didn’t. You kicked him out because he called you a drunken bitch. Daisy, you threatened to find out where he worked and hunt him down if he shagged me and didn’t call afterwards.”

“And?”

Her eyes glitter. There’s no reasoning with her, not when she’s like this. The evening can only go one of two ways now – she’ll either have a raging argument, or she’ll pass out. And, if I keep quiet, hopefully it’ll be the latter.

No such luck. Daisy’s on a roll now and won’t shut up. “Because he tried to snog me, you know, Emma – lovely Elliot, who you’re so keen on defending. He was all over me while you were in the toilet at Love Lies. That’s the real reason I kicked him out of the taxi, not because he called me a drunken bitch but because he was a shit and he didn’t deserve you.”

I’m just about to respond when – “Surprise!” – Al leaps from the top step and lands next to Daisy. Still soaking from the pool, she wraps Daisy in a wet bear hug, and clamps a hand to her mouth. Daisy puts up a half-hearted fight to free herself, but she and Al both know it’s in jest. Al looks across at me, and smiles. “No arguing, you two. We’re on holiday, remember? Oh! Look at that gecko.”

“What gecko?” Leanne makes her way gingerly down the steps. She pulls the grey cardigan tighter around her shoulders but it doesn’t stop her shivering. “What are you two doing? We could hear you shouting from the pool.”

“Here.” Al crouches down on the ground and reaches out a hand to the creature. The gecko speeds away and zips under the bench.

“Leave it.” Daisy tugs at the black strap of Al’s swimsuit. “Let’s get some more wine and go back in the pool.”

“I’ve never seen one of those before.” Al peers intently under the bench.

“Al!” Daisy yanks her swimsuit again, but this time she’s swatted away.

“Not now, Dais.”

The playful expression on Daisy’s face vanishes, and she twists away, wrapping her arms around herself as she turns her back to us and looks out towards the lake.

“I’m going to get my camera. Come with me and grab a blanket.” Al stands up and gestures at Leanne, who’s still standing on the bottom step, staring at us through the darkness. “You look cold.”

“Yeah.” Leanne hesitates. She can sense tension between us and she’s torn between going after Al and staying to find out what’s happened.

“Come on,” Al urges, grabbing Leanne by the elbow and angling her up the stairs, “we’ll grab some more wine, too. I think the hotel manager’s still awake.”

Daisy doesn’t acknowledge Al and Leanne’s departure as they stumble up the steps and crash through the undergrowth. Instead she continues to stare out at the lake. I head for the steps too. Staying and arguing isn’t going to solve anything. We’re drunk, we’re tired and we need to sleep.

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“Sorry?” I turn back.

“This. Is this how it’s going to be? You and Al making excuses not to spend time with me?”

It’s at times like this that I wonder how much more I can take. Daisy pushes and pushes and pushes, almost as though she’s deliberately stretching the boundaries of our friendship to see how much I’ll put up with. If I stay, she’ll berate me for being a walkover, for not standing up for myself; if I go, I prove her theory that everyone will eventually abandon her. It’s a catch-22 situation.

“Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about, Emma. First you wander off when we’re all having fun round the fire, then Al shrugs me off when I ask her to go in the pool with me. And then there was our first night in Kathmandu when you and Al pretended to be jetlagged instead of carrying on drinking with me.”

“We were jetlagged.”

“You were laughing and drinking beer in your room. Why couldn’t you have done that in a bar with me?”

“Daisy, it was one can each, hardly a party. Come on.” I take a step towards her and put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to go to bed.”

“No.” She shrugs off my attempt to drape the blanket over her, swiping it away, knocking it to the ground. “I don’t want to go to sleep. I want another drink and I want to go back in the pool. Where’s my wine?”

She glances towards the bench. The bottle of wine is on the ground where I left it. The gecko has moved back out from under the bench and is a couple of centimetres from the wine bottle.

“I don’t think you need any more wine, Daisy.”

“Don’t tell me what I need.”

She pushes me out of the way and totters towards the bench. The gecko scuttles towards the wine bottle. Daisy slows her pace, inching forward on the toes of her cork wedges as though she’s taking care not to startle the creature. I keep expecting the gecko to zoom off as she approaches, but it doesn’t move. It grips the ground by the wine bottle with its suction-like feet, the only movement the back and forth motion of its eyes.

Daisy stops walking. She bends at the waist and reaches her right hand towards the wine bottle. Her left leg twitches, she steps forward, and she stamps the gecko into the ground with the sole of her wedged sandal. At the same time, she grasps the neck of the wine bottle and whips it into the air. She glances round at me, her expression victorious. “Got it!”

I stare at her in disbelief. She just stamped on the gecko. Deliberately. The pause, the leg twitch, the step. She didn’t need to do any of that to get the wine bottle. She was close enough just to grab it.

“What are you staring at me like that for?” She raises the bottle to her lips and takes a swig.

“You just stamped on the gecko.”

“Did I?” She hops on one leg and grabs her left ankle with her right hand. She hoiks it up for a closer look, squinting into the gloom, then promptly unbalances and has to grab the bench to stay upright. “Fuck.”

“Didn’t you see it? It was right next to the bottle.”

“Was it? I can’t see a thing in this light. Come on.” She loops her arm through mine. “Let’s go and see what the other two are up to.”

Chapter 9

“You okay?” Al touches the back of my hand. “You didn’t come to breakfast.”

“I couldn’t find my tablets.”

We’re sitting on the back seat of the rusty, ramshackle bus that will take us to the base of the mountain so we can trek up to the retreat. It’s a lot more rickety than the bus that took us from Kathmandu to Pokhara but, according to Leanne, this journey will only take half an hour rather than a six-hour slog. I made it on the bus first and took a seat by the window, folding up my waterproof jacket to cover the springs poking through the ripped leather seat. Al, Leanne and a sunglasses-wearing Daisy filed on several minutes later. Al immediately tucked herself in next to me.

“Not your malaria tablets?”

“No, the anti-anxiety ones. I looked everywhere. I’m sure I packed them.”

“They’ll be in a side pocket, or something. Don’t worry, I’ll help you look once we get to Skanky Yaka, or whatever it’s called.”

“Cheers, Al.”

We lapse into hungover silence. We didn’t carry on drinking for long last night. When we returned to the patio, Leanne had already gone to bed, and, with no sign of the hotel manager, we only had Daisy’s half bottle of wine to drink between the three of us. By the time I dragged myself into the room I was sharing with Leanne, she was snoring softly.

I glance across the bus. Leanne’s laughing uproariously at something Daisy’s just said. She looks remarkably fresh-faced in her My Little Pony T-shirt and skinny jeans, while Daisy looks like she dragged herself out of bed and crawled into her clothes. She notices me staring and presses a hand to the side of her head.

“You as hungover as me?” she asks.

I nod. “I feel like hell.”

Satisfied with the response, she sits back in her seat and whispers something to Leanne, who glances at me and laughs.

I close my eyes to try and conjure up the memory of Daisy stamping on the gecko, but the images in my mind are blurred by my hangover and lack of sleep. If she couldn’t focus on me without her contact lenses in, and I was sitting across from her on the bench, how could she even have seen it? I’m misremembering what happened. I have to be. There’s no way she deliberately stamped on a living creature, not after the accusations her mum levelled at her when her sister died.

Al snorts with laugher beside me, and I open my eyes.

“I don’t suppose you got a photo of that gecko, did you?” she says. “I just remembered I was supposed to get my camera, but I was so obsessed with finding more booze I completely forgot about it.”

“No.” I shake my head. “No, I didn’t.”

“No worries.” She shrugs. “I’m sure we’ll see loads more.”

Thankfully, we arrive at the Maoist station within minutes. Their desk is on a platform at the end of the rickety bridge that connects the café at the base of the mountain with the start of the trail. None of us are shocked to see them there – you’re warned about the “tourist tax” in all good guidebooks – but the guns they clutch to their sides take us all by surprise. Shankar, our trek guide, nods for us to approach. I try to read his expression. While many Nepalese people support the Maoists, others are fearful of them. But Shankar’s eyes give away nothing of his thoughts.

Daisy approaches the desk first, her shoulders back, chin high. She runs a hand through her hair and smiles at the man behind the desk as she hands him her passport, trek visa and 150 rupees, but he doesn’t acknowledge her. His expression doesn’t change as he flips through the passport and then slides the money to the man at his left, who slips the notes into a money belt around his waist. Daisy reaches for her passport then jumps as the man slaps his hand on top of it.

“I tell you when to take,” says the man behind the desk. He stares at her for an unbearably long time then lowers his eyes to her visa on the desk in front of him. He flips the passport open again and compares the name on the visa with the name on the passport, then looks back up at Daisy.

“Why you here?”

“Um …” She clears her throat. “Just to trek up to the summit.”

Leanne has told us what to say. She seems to think the Maoists will charge us extra if they think we’re going to be staying in a Western establishment rather than one of the Nepalese-owned hostels.

“You sure about that?” He continues to stare at her.

“Of course. I’m dying to see the view from the top. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

He pushes Daisy’s possessions across the desk towards her then dismisses her with a wave of his hand. He doesn’t speak to Al, Leanne or me, and our documents are processed wordlessly. When we’ve been checked, the two armed men standing either side of the gate take a step back to let us enter the trail.

Daisy grabs my arm the second we’re all through. “Wow.” She pushes her sunglasses onto the top of her head. She has bags under her eyes, and dozens of red blood vessels streak the white around her eyeballs. “That was mental.”

She releases me and links her arm through Shankar’s before striding off up the path. If she notices him flinching at the unwanted physical contact, she doesn’t let on.

The muscles in my thighs burn from weaving my way from left to right and back again as I climb the three thousand steps up the Annapurna mountain. I was expecting actual steps – I think we all were – but these aren’t evenly sized concrete blocks; they’re slabs of rock, dug into the side of the mountain, so uneven and wonky you have to look where you’re placing your feet. They’re the rustic, higgledy-piggledy winding steps of a fairytale. Or a nightmare. With the exception of Al, we all go to a gym back home in London, but running 5K in thirty-three minutes on a treadmill prepares you for this in the same way that jumping in puddles prepares you to swim the English Channel.

It’s 2 p.m. and Shankar is leading the way, leaping from stone to stone, as enthusiastic and energised as he was when we started our trek five hours ago. Daisy and Leanne follow in his steps, both breathing heavily, both swearing whenever they look up and see how many more steps there are to go until we reach the end of the trail. Green mountains striped with brown paddy fields and capped with snowy peaks wrap around us, hiding us from the rest of the world. I have never been anywhere so breathtakingly beautiful or so back-breakingly harsh. We passed donkeys earlier, roped together, stumbling up the steps with huge saddle bags strapped to their backs, their knees buckling, their hooves slipping under the weight of their heavy loads. One of the donkeys was carrying a fridge, strapped on top of its saddle bag like it was the most normal thing in the world. Watching the poor animals climb and stumble, heads down, eyes sad, was more than I could bear. I wanted to set them free and tell their handler that he was cruel for forcing them to live such a miserable life, but I bit my tongue.

Al trails behind me, her face puce, her enormous backpack waving from side to side with each step she takes, the belt undone around her waist, her hands on her hips. Every dozen or so steps she stops, takes a puff of her asthma inhaler and continues on again. If I were Al, I’d ask to slow down or take more breaks, but she’s ox-like in her determination to get to the retreat before nightfall and hasn’t complained once. I hear the puff-puff of her inhaler and stop walking. That’s twice in the last five minutes.

“You okay?”

She shrugs off her backpack then bends forward and grips her knees with her hands. She sucks at the mountain air like a fish on a hook.

I put a hand on her shoulder. “Stand upright if you can. Leaning over like that squashes your lungs.” My brother Henry had asthma as a child, so her attack doesn’t faze me. Though the fact that we’re 3,500 metres above sea level and at least five and a half hours away from the nearest hospital does.

Al straightens up, puts her hands on her hips and cranes her chin towards the sky as she continues to gulp in air. Her cheeks are still a violent shade of red, but it’s not them I’m looking at. It’s her lips. They’re pink, not blue. That’s a good sign.

“Nice deep breaths,” I say. “Slowly. Don’t panic. In … and out … in … and out … Relax your shoulders. You’re tensing them because you’re scared. Relax your shoulders and exhale for as long as you can, then a nice deep breath in again.”

I can hear Daisy’s voice in my head as I speak, saying the exact same words to me a couple of months ago when I was in the grip of a panic attack. We were in a crowded cinema, people filling every seat, and it was hot, really hot. We were watching a thriller Daisy wanted to see and each time the main character jumped, I jumped. Each time she saw shadows where there weren’t any I saw them too. As her world grew smaller and more claustrophobic, so did mine, and I became convinced that there wasn’t enough air in the cinema for everyone to breathe, and I had to get out.

“Everything okay, miss?”

Our guide nimbly picks his way back down the mountain towards us, his tiny rucksack strapped to his back. Shankar’s weather-beaten face is as lined as befits a man in his late forties, but he moves like a man twenty years younger.

“She breathe okay?” he asks as he reaches us.

“No. She’s not. I think the altitude might be affecting her asthma. Maybe we should go back down.”

“No!” Leanne says so loudly I jump. I hadn’t realised she and Daisy had joined us too.

“I’m sorry?”

“We … we should carry on,” she says, the base of her neck colouring. “It can’t be much further to the retreat, and they might have a doctor or a nurse there.”

“But if the altitude is making her asthma worse, the best thing for her to do is go down again,” Daisy says.

I nod in agreement. Thousands of people do this trek every year, but occasionally people die. None of us wants to be part of that statistic.

“I still think we should continue to the retreat,” Leanne says. She glances from Al to the steps, as though she’s desperately hoping Ekanta Yatra will magically appear before us. “We’ve come this far. It would be such a shame to give up now. You can make it a little bit further, can’t you, Al? We can take it slowly, take lots of breaks. And like I said, I’m sure there will be someone there who can help.”

Daisy and I exchange a look. Normally, Leanne would be the first to put her best friend’s health before everything and charge down the mountain to get help. And then there’s the fact that she’s disagreeing with Daisy. That never happens.

“Yeah, yeah, we heard you,” I say, “but conjecture isn’t going to magically conjure up a nebuliser, is it? Are there doctors and nurses up there or not?”

Leanne shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably. There are a lot of people there from different professions, and—”

“We’re going back down.” Daisy holds up her hands. “We’re not gambling with Al’s health. Come on.” She gives Leanne a small shove. “Let’s go.”

“No!” Leanne twists sharply to one side and, for one heart-stopping second, I think she’s going to hit Daisy. “You can go back down if you want, but I’m—”

“Could everyone please stop talking about me as if I’m dead, or something!” Al steps out from beside me and holds up her hands. “I am here, you know. Seriously, I appreciate the concern, guys, but no one is going to miss out on the holiday of a lifetime just because I’m a twenty-a-day lard arse with crap lungs and a heavy load.” She pats the roll of flesh that overhangs the waistband of her black combat shorts.

Daisy shakes her head firmly. “Nice speech, but no one loves a dead hero.”

“Fuck off, Dais!” Al laughs then looks at Shankar. “How much further have we got to go? Like, how many more hours?”

He shrugs. “Thirty minutes, maybe forty?”

“All right, then.” Al reaches down for her backpack but Shankar grabs it first. There’s a stand-off as they each hold a strap and lock eyes, urging the other to back down. Normally, there’s no way Al would ever let a man do something she’s capable of doing herself.

“Miss. I carry. You breathe.” There’s a quiet tenacity to the way Shankar speaks, and although Al shakes her head, I can see her resolve waver. Her high colour has paled but she’s still breathing shallowly.

“I’ll take yours,” she says, reaching for the smaller rucksack on the guide’s back. “We can swap, but only until I’ve got my breath back. Five minutes, ten minutes tops.”

Forty-five minutes later, Shankar shrugs off Al’s backpack, flipping it onto the ground as though it’s a pillow, and points to the building down a small track to our left. “We are here.”

Rising out of the white blanket of cloud that surrounds us are three separate houses, linked by fenced walkways, their three-tiered roofs silhouetted against the landscape like Chinese temples. The window frames are painted in shades of red, ochre and turquoise, and stone steps lead up to an enormous wooden door on the front of the main house. A high wall runs around the perimeter of the grounds, a large wooden gate closing the retreat off from the world. Prayer flags flutter in the wind and the sound of laughter drifts across the breeze.

“Wow.” I unbuckle my own backpack, twist my body sideways so the pack drops to the ground, lean back and groan with pleasure and relief as I press my shoulder blades together.

Daisy skips towards Leanne, grips her arm and presses her cheek against the top of her shoulder. “Oh, my God, it’s even more gorgeous than it looked on the website.”

Leanne grins at the compliment, drops her backpack and wraps an arm around Daisy. “Told you! And you all thought I was going to bring you to some kind of shack.”

“Actually,” says Al, climbing the last few steps, “I thought we’d be sitting in a paddy field, meditating for twelve hours a day before being force-fed mungbean sandwiches.”

“The paddy fields are back down the mountain,” Leanne says, pointing. “Off you go!”

“There’s the river!” Daisy lets go of Leanne and points excitedly into the distance. I strain to see through the trees then spot something blue and shimmery. “Is that the waterfall I can hear?”

“Probably.” Leanne reaches for her backpack and hauls it back onto her shoulders. “Come on, they’re expecting us.”

Daisy squeals and hurries after her as she makes her way down the track. I wait for Al to catch up. She slips Shankar’s rucksack off her shoulders and hands it to him. He slips it on effortlessly.

“Thank you.” She holds out her right hand. “I couldn’t have made it up here without your help.”

Shankar shakes her hand while simultaneously touching his left hand against his right forearm as a sign of respect. “No problem, miss.”

“For you.” Al reaches into her pocket and pulls out a hundred rupee note. “Please.” She presses it into his hand.

He accepts the money with a smile and tucks it into the little leather wallet attached to his belt, then turns to go back down the mountain.

“You’ll come in?” I say. “The least we can do is offer you a sandwich and a cup of chai. I’m sure the owners won’t mind.”

The smile slips from his face. “No, thank you.”

“Please, you can’t walk all the way back down again without a break. It wouldn’t be right.”

His gaze flicks to the left, to the retreat at the end of the track. “No.” An emotion I can’t read flickers across his face, and then it’s gone.

“But …” The words fall away as Shankar turns on his heel and, without another word, starts back down the mountain.

“Emma, Al, come on!” the girls shout from below us.

A tall man with shoulder-length black hair, wearing cut-off camouflage trousers and a grey long-sleeved T-shirt, is standing beside them, holding the gate open.

“Hi,” the man shouts, raising a hand in greeting. “I’m Isaac.”

Chapter 10
Present Day

Sheila sent me home, no questions asked. She heard me throwing up in the ladies’ loo and immediately diagnosed me as suffering from an upset tummy. She didn’t even give me the opportunity to object.

“I saw you nibbling the corner of that sandwich and I knew something was wrong. It’s not like you not to have an appetite. Get yourself home, Jane. We don’t want to risk you passing it on to everyone else. We’re short-staffed as it is.”

I think she would have driven me home herself if I hadn’t pointed out that I had my bicycle with me. No point driving me home when I only live a five-minute cycle away and it’s all downhill.

That was two hours ago. I’ve spent the last thirty minutes sitting in front of my laptop. I thought it would be harder to find Al. I thought that, after five years, she’d be impossible to track down, but, unlike me, she hasn’t changed her name. She’s even got a Facebook profile. Alexandra Gideon. There were only three listed and two of them live in the States. Her cover image is of Brighton seafront and the profile picture’s a rainbow, and that’s it, that’s all the information I’ve got to go on, but I know it’s her. She always said she wanted to leave London and move to Brighton.

It’s been four years since we last spoke. We kept in touch for the first few months after we got back from Nepal, talking on the phone every day, trying to make sense of what had happened, but then Al sold her story to the press and everything changed. I couldn’t understand why she’d done it. I called her, over and over again, begging her to explain why she’d gone back on what we’d agreed, but she ignored my calls. I don’t know if it was the money or the attention or what, but it was the worst kind of betrayal, especially after everything we’d been through.

I hold down the delete button and the cursor zips from right to left, swallowing the message I’ve been trying to compose for the last half an hour. I start again:

Al, it’s me.

No. I created this Facebook account as Jane Hughes, and she won’t know who that is.

Al, it’s Emma. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me, but I need your help.

I delete the last sentence.

Al, it’s Emma. I think Daisy’s still alive. Please contact me. Here’s my mobile number …

I touch the button beneath the swipe pad, ready to click send, but then change my mind again. Does she already know? Whoever typed the message onto the Green Fields’ website could already have contacted Al. If I found her in minutes, they could have, too.

I reach for my mobile and click on Will’s name. The call goes straight to voicemail. His tone is professional and impersonal but the sound of his voice is comforting.

“Hi, Will, it’s Jane. Could you give me a ring when you finish school? I need to talk to you; it’s important.”

I place the phone on the desk next to the laptop. I stare at the screen, drumming my right index finger on the button under the swipe pad.

Delete or send? Delete or send? My heart tells me to trust Al. My head says not to.

I click send.

The second Will sets eyes on me, he gathers me into a tight hug.

“Sorry, darling. I thought I’d mentioned that it was parents’ evening tonight.” He pulls away, his hands on my shoulders. “You okay? You sounded worried on the phone.”

“Yeah … I …” I hand him a bottle of red wine. “I’ve had a bit of a weird day and …” The sound of two people talking drifts towards us as a couple of dog walkers stroll past the end of Will’s garden, their high-visibility jackets glowing in the light from the house. “Can we talk inside?”

“’Course, yeah.” He reaches an arm around my shoulders and ushers me into the house.

It’s warm and bright in the hallway. Dozens of black and white photos of Will and Chloe, and Will and various friends and relatives, smile down at me from one wall. On the other is a faux Banksy print of a large Star Wars AT-AT walker saying, “I’m your father” to a smaller AT-AT walker (I only know what they’re called because Will told me).

“I need to explain why I was being so obtuse last night,” I say as I head towards the living room. “The reason I was asking about lying was because—”

“Hi, Jane!” Chloe waves at me from the sofa where she’s sitting cross-legged with a loom band maker in one hand and a crochet hook in the other. She doesn’t shift her gaze from the Disney movie blaring out song tunes from the television in the corner of the room.

“Hello!” I glance questioningly at Will. He normally only has his daughter at weekends during term time.

“Ah, yes, Chloe … the other reason it took me a while to get back to you. Sara rang during my last meeting. She sliced her thumb on a food processor blade and needed me to take Chloe so she could go to A&E.” He glances at the clock above the fireplace. It’s after nine. “We agreed it would be best if Chloe stayed here for the night. God knows how long it will take her to be seen.”

Sara is Will’s ex-wife. They’re separated, but amicably so. According to Will, their relationship gradually became more like brother and sister in the years after Chloe was born, but it wasn’t until Sara admitted that she’d developed a bit of a crush on a colleague and Will felt feelings of relief rather than jealousy that they confronted the issue. Sara went on to have a relationship with her colleague, but it fizzled out almost as quickly as it began.

“Here” – he thrusts my bottle of red wine at me – “why don’t you go into the kitchen and get this opened while I take Chloe upstairs? We can have a proper chat once she’s in bed.”

“Okay.”

“I can make a bracelet for you, if you want, Jane!” Chloe says, waving the loom board at me. She’s got the same generous wide smile as her father. “What are you favourite colours? Or I could make you a rainbow one, if you like.”

“A rainbow bracelet would be wonderful.”

“I could make collars for the animals you look after, too. Or you could sell them in the sanctuary to raise money for—”

“Bed!” Will says, with a smile on his face. “You’ve seen Jane now. No more excuses, let’s get you upstairs.”

Chloe’s face falls. “But …”

“We can talk about your ideas this weekend, Chloe.” I glance at Will, who nods. “In fact, we could discuss them at Green Fields. I’ll give you the VIP guided tour.”

“No way!” Chloe throws her loom bands to one side and runs at me. She wraps her arms around my hips and buries her head in my stomach.

I rest a hand on the top of her fine, mousey hair.

“You’re very lucky, you know,” Will says. “They don’t let just anyone wander around Green Fields.”

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to meet the dogs,” I add. “They get upset when too many strangers visit.”

“That’s okay.” Chloe gazes up at me. “I only really want to see the cats and the ferrets and the mice. And the swearing parrot.”

“The what?” Will pretends to look aghast, and Chloe giggles. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Come on, teeth time.”

“Night, Jane.” Chloe gives me another squeeze then skips past her father and climbs the stairs, two at a time.

Will and I exchange smiles then he presses a hand to my cheek. “Thank you. You’ve made her very happy.”

I shrug. “It’s nothing.”

“Still …” His gaze lingers, the emotion behind his eyes weighty and intense. We had a discussion on our third date about how neither of us wanted to get into anything “heavy”, and we’re still not officially “together”, even though Will insisted I meet Chloe three weekends ago. We “bumped into” each other while they were feeding the ducks at the pond in the centre of the village, and he introduced me as “my friend Jane”. She accepted the introduction unquestioningly, but her eyes grew wide and round when I told her what I do for a living. She’s been badgering her dad to spend time with me ever since.

My chest tightens with anxiety. I shouldn’t have told Chloe about visiting the sanctuary this weekend, not when I’m about to tell Will that I’ve been lying to him since the moment we met. I got carried away by her excitement; I forgot that none of this is real.

“I should open the wine.” I touch his hand briefly then break eye contact with him and step away. “Give Chloe a goodnight kiss for me.”

He turns and heads for the stairs. Like his daughter, he takes them two at a time then disappears into the bathroom off the landing.

It’s cooler in the kitchen than the rest of the house. Will’s cooking prowess is demonstrated by the well-stacked spice rack to the right of the cooker and the shelf full of cookery books, the pages rippled and stained. The wine rack to the left of the cooker is well stocked with a variety of red, white and rosé bottles and two magnums of champagne, and there’s a plentiful supply of chocolates in the cupboard above the mug tree, too – presents from grateful parents, no doubt.

I dig around in the cutlery drawer until I find the bottle opener then yank the cork out of the bottle of red wine. I don’t wait for it to breathe. Instead, I half-fill the largest wine glass I can find in the mis-matched selection in the cupboard and down half of it. Then I refill the glass and pour another one for Will.

As footsteps reverberate on the ceiling over my head, I wander down the hallway and back into the living room. I turn off the television, tidy the spilled loom bands into their correct colour compartments then, with nothing else to do, I sit on the sofa and reach for Will’s iPad.

I swipe from left to right to unlock the screen, Will only bought his iPad a few weeks ago and he still hasn’t got round to setting a password. I sent Al the message at seven o’clock. Has she read it? If she’s as addicted to Facebook as half the girls at work, she’ll have read it the second her phone bleeped with a new message notification. She may even have replied.

The sound of Will’s laugh and Chloe’s high-pitched giggle floats down the stairs as I log into Facebook.

The messages icon at the top of the screen is still blue. No message from Al. She hasn’t even read it yet. I’m just about to log out when I notice there’s another tab open in the browser. Will’s been reading a tabloid newspaper online – one he’s ranted about several times. I click on it.

The headline alone fills a third of the page.

HUMILIATED, ABANDONED AND BETRAYED.

BRITISH WOMAN ESCAPES DEADLY CULT THAT ROBBED HER OF

TWO OF HER FRIENDS AND NEARLY STOLE HER OWN LIFE.

Alexandra (Al) Gideon, 25, from London talks exclusively to Gilly McKensie about the dream vacation that turned into a holiday from hell when she and her three friends – Daisy Hamilton, 26, Leanne Cooper, 25, and Emma Woolfe, 25 – journeyed to Nepal. Now Al puts the record straight about what really happened and the mystery behind Daisy and Leanne’s disappearance …

I stop reading. I already know what it says. It’s the article Al sold, the reason we haven’t spoken for four years.

But why has Will been reading it? There’s no way he could connect me with that story. Unless …

I reach into my back pocket, but the note’s not there. It’s still in my work trousers, lying in a crumpled heap on my bathroom floor after I took them off to have a shower after work. Did the same person who sent me the note contact Will to tell him I’m not who he thinks I am? That might explain the real reason he didn’t reply to my voicemail for a couple of hours – he wanted to check me out on the internet first.

A floorboard creaks above my head.

Unless he was the one who sent the note?

I reach for one of the school exercise books on the coffee table and flick through it. On one of the pages there’s an image of a plant, drawn in pencil, with the various parts labelled in school kids’ untidy handwriting – stem, stamen, petal, etc. Underneath, written in blue biro, are the words:

A great piece of work – well done.

The handwriting is small and neat.

The floorboard creaks again, louder this time and, panicking, I reach for my messenger bag, slip the book into it then walk into the hall.

“Sorry, Will,” I shout up the stairs. “I’ve got to go. There’s been an emergency at work.”

“Hang on, Jane,” he shouts back. “I won’t be a—”

The door clicks shut behind me before he can finish his sentence.

Chapter 11
Five Years Earlier

“Help yourself to a beanbag and make yourselves comfortable,” Isaac says as he ushers us into a cool, dark room. His voice is deep and resonant with a soft Scottish burr. He rubs a hand over his stubbly jaw. “Just dump your backpacks wherever. I’ll just grab you some chai. You must be knackered after your trek.”

“You’re not kidding.” Daisy flashes him a smile as he slips back out of the room. She groans as she wriggles out of her backpack. It slips to the floor with a thump. Al, Leanne and I do the same and then grab a beanbag each from the pile in the corner of the room and collapse onto them.

“This is the meditation room,” Leanne says reverently. “It says on the website that they meditate three times a day. The first session is at five a.m.”

Al laughs. “Well, I won’t be spending much time here, then.”

I gaze around, taking it all in. The floor is a dark polished wood, the walls roughly plastered and painted a vibrant turquoise and adorned with prayer flags and fairy lights. There’s a bookshelf at one end of the room and a wooden altar at the other, with a large gold skull taking pride of place in the centre, a metal gong to its right and several church candles arranged on golden plates to the left. Plumes of grey smoke swirl in the air from the dozens of incense holders arranged in front of the gold skull, and in plant pots and wooden holders around the room, and the air is thick with the rich, heady scent of jasmine.

“Here we go, then,” Isaac says a few minutes later, ducking his head as he passes through the doorway and wanders back into the room carrying a tray of steaming metal cups.

He takes the tray to Leanne first, crouching down to offer her a mug. She sits up straight and beams at him, then bites down on her bottom lip as though trying to suppress her smile. Al twists round and gives me an incredulous look. In the seven years we’ve known Leanne, she’s never reacted to a man like this. Her normal modus operandi when a man approaches her is wariness, swiftly followed by sarcasm and put-downs disguised as jokes. She’s only been out with two guys in the whole time I’ve known her – she went out with the leader of the Socialist Society at uni for six months before they split up, for unknown reasons, and then she dated some Dutch guy she met at yoga after we all moved to London, but they finished after three months when he moved back to the Netherlands. Al thinks he broke her heart, but Leanne never talked to any of us about how she felt, not even Al. Unlike the rest of us, who always analyse our failed relationships to death, Leanne refuses to talk about her private life. Scratch the surface and you get more surface.

Isaac straightens up and takes the tray to Daisy, who flicks back her hair and pushes back her shoulders so Isaac is greeted with a faceful of cleavage as he squats down. She makes no attempt to hide her attraction to him – why should she? If Daisy’s interested in a man, she makes it blatantly clear, and, with her long blonde hair, narrow waist and perky boobs, nine times out of ten she gets him. Unlike the rest of us, she’s never been dumped and never had her heart broken. She’ll pursue a man until she gets him, but she never lets her defences down, never lets herself fall for anyone. She’ll dump a guy or move on if there’s any danger of that happening. You don’t have to be a psychologist to work out that it’s got something to do with her mum abandoning her when she was five.

Al gives Isaac a cursory nod as he presents her with a cup of tea. He says something I can’t hear and she laughs and gives him a high five. My stomach twists as he straightens up once more and makes his way towards me. I don’t know why, but attractive men make me feel insecure and self-conscious. My mouth dries up and I struggle to make conversation.

“Hi, Emma.” Isaac squats down in front of me. His eyes are the warmest brown, framed with dark eyelashes and eyebrows. They smile at me as he hands me the last cup of chai. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” I press my lips together. “I’m fine.”

“Cool.” His gaze slips from my face to my legs. “Did you fall over on your way up the mountain?”

“Yeah, how did—”

“Your trousers are ripped.” He gently runs a finger over the tear in my dusty cotton trousers. I flinch, even though the skin on my knee is no longer tender. “Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you.” He pulls his hand away sharply. “If it still hurts, Sally in the kitchen has got a first aid kit.”

“It’s fine, honestly.”

“Okay.” He smiles warmly and stands up. Then he crosses the room, picks up a beanbag and plonks it in front of us. “So.” He opens his hands wide. “Welcome to Ekanta Yatra. I know you’ve all had a look at the website so I’ll keep this brief, because I know you’ll all be gagging to have a shower or a sleep, or whatever.

“I founded Ekanta Yatra three years ago, along with Isis, Cera and Johan – you’ll meet them soon. We were all travelling separately and became friends when we found ourselves staying in the same guest house in Pokhara. We were all looking for somewhere that would be a retreat from the world, and we pooled what little money we had and bought this place. It was basically a shack when we bought it.”

“It looks lovely now,” Leanne says, and Isaac smiles at her.

“Cheers, we’ve worked hard. Johan’s the big hulking Swede you’ll see shuffling about. He’s in charge of the vegetable patch and the animals – anything outside, basically. Isis is a short, grey-haired woman. She’s got a background in massage and holistic therapies, so she’s your go-to woman for your facials and aromatherapy sessions. Cera’s the tall, elegant woman you’ll see drifting about. She keeps the place running efficiently and makes sure everything is clean and tidy and that the kitchen’s got all the supplies it needs. And I’m Isaac. I run the meditation sessions and the seminars and, um … I make a mean cup of chai, too.”

Everyone laughs.

“That’s about it, basically. Everything else you need to know is in your welcome packs on your beds.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a small green tin. He prises off the lid and offers us the contents – half a dozen hand-rolled cigarettes. “Anyone want one?”

Leanne’s smile slips. “But we’re in a pagoda. I thought smoking … well, I thought you couldn’t.”

“We meditate in here,” Isaac says, a rollie dangling from his lower lip, “and we do yoga outside on the patio, and all these sort of things, but this isn’t a religious retreat. We’re a community of people making a life for ourselves outside of mainstream society.”

He pauses to blow a stream of smoke up towards the ceiling. “When you look in your welcome pack, you’ll see that we’ve got set times for meals and meditations and seminars, but what you guys choose to do is up to you. You can get as involved as you like, or not get involved at all. Ekanta Yatra is a place where you can escape from all the stresses and strains of everyday life and just be. There’s a lot the outside world could learn from the way we live here.”

“I’m always up for learning new things.” Daisy slips off her beanbag and crawls towards Isaac, slinking through the gap between Al and Leanne like a cat. She takes a cigarette from Isaac’s tin and looks up at him expectantly, the cigarette dangling from her lips.

“I think you could all learn a lot.” He lights her cigarette but his eyes are on me.

“Hi, girls,” says a voice behind us, and Isaac glances away.

A tall, willowy woman with pale lips and dreadlocks the colour of dark sand twisted on top of her head is standing in the doorway. She makes her way towards us, drifting through the room barefoot, her sari-like skirt sweeping the wood as she walks, her beaded necklace reaching down to her bare navel. Her smile is beatific, her eyes soft and compassionate. There’s a serenity about her that’s mesmerising.

“Hello,” she says, her benign gaze flitting over each of our faces as she stops next to Isaac. She reaches out a hand and ruffles his hair then glances at Daisy. Her smile widens. “I’m Cera. I look after the house, so if there’s a problem with the solar showers, or you need a snack between mealtimes, or anything else, just let me know.”

“Hi!” I raise a hand in greeting. Al and Leanne do the same.

“I’ll show you where you’ll all be sleeping in a few moments,” Cera continues, “and then I’ll give you the guided tour, but first, if you could all give me your passports, please.”

“They think we’re going to skip off into the night without paying,” Al says. She catches my eye and grins. Six years ago, the four of us hitchhiked up to Edinburgh from Newcastle and stayed in a B&B run by the snootiest woman on earth. The bathroom was grotty, the sheets were stained and the bedroom curtains smelled of rotten eggs, but she refused to give us a different room when we requested one. The woman just sniffed, said something about bloody students and stalked off. We went out drinking until 4 a.m., returned to get our bags and left without paying. It was Daisy’s idea, of course, but the rest of us didn’t need much persuading. It wasn’t as though we’d actually slept there, was it?

“You’ll have to get past me first,” Isaac says, and winks at Al. Then he stretches his arms above his head and stands up. “I’ll leave you to it, then, Cera,” he says, before strolling across the room, his cigarette still dangling from his fingertips. He raises a hand as he reaches the doorway. “See you later, girls!”

“Bye, then, Isaac!” Daisy calls from beside his abandoned beanbag. If she were a dog, she’d be bristling. The next couple of weeks are certainly going to be interesting; Daisy doesn’t take kindly to rejection.

“Wow.” Daisy peers around the door to the shower block then glances back at us. “The website wasn’t lying when it said the living accommodation is basic. There’s a kitchen sink in here. Literally.”

“Let me see.” She steps out of the way so I can take a look, too. She’s right. There are two shower cubicles, each with a rustic-looking door, two toilets with equally basic doors and, right at the end of the room, there’s a kitchen sink with a colourful mosaic-framed circular mirror hanging above it.

“Are they sit-down toilets or holes in the floor?” Al shouts out.

I step into the shower block and push at one of the toilet doors. “Proper toilets.”

“Well, that’s something.” Daisy rolls her eyes and walks back into the girls’ dormitory. She stands beside the mattress she’s been allocated in the corner of the room and nudges it with the toe of her flip-flop. “At least we had proper beds at boarding school. God knows what’s going to crawl over me in the middle of the night.”

“Don’t be like that.” Leanne, sitting cross-legged on the mattress beside her, slaps her guidebook shut.

“Yeah, come on, Dais.” Al looks up from the cigarette she’s rolling. “It’s not like we didn’t expect to rough it. We’re in Nepal, not the Hilton.”

“Roughing it is fine. Sharing a room with you guys is fine. But this?” She gestures at rough, cherry-red wooden walls and the row of mattresses on each side of the room. “It’s like a sheep shed, piling all the women into one room together. God knows who we’re sharing with.”

“Daisy …” I move to put an arm around her then change my mind. The best way to deal with her when she’s in this kind of mood is to ignore it. She’s barely said a word since Isaac left us in the meditation room – not when Cera showed us the rustic dining room, the basic kitchen, the yoga patio, the orchard, the vegetable patch, the goat enclosure, the chicken pen or the massage huts – and she was the only one of us not to squeal with excitement when we were led down to the river and the waterfall. The only time the vaguest flicker of interest registered on her face was when we returned to the house and Cera gestured to the walkway to the right and said it led to the boys’ dormitories. It vanished when we were led to the left. It’s astonishing, really. We travel halfway around the world to one of the most breathtakingly beautiful mountain ranges in Asia, and she’s in a huff because Isaac didn’t flirt back with her. I’d laugh if she wasn’t my best friend.

“I bet the other women snore,” Daisy says. “And smell.”

“Well, you’ll be in good company, then,” Al says. “I couldn’t sleep for all your farting and snoring last night.”

“Sod off, Al,” Daisy says, but the edges of her lips twitch into a smile. She yanks her sleeping bag from its sheath, lies down on top of the mattress and starts rummaging around in her backpack. “Who fancies a shot of lemon voddy? I think we’ve earned it.”

Everyone holds up a hand.

“Have you seen this?” Leanne waves the welcome pack in the air. “There are three yoga sessions a day, right after meditation. I’m thinking I’ll do two a day – one in the morning, one in the evening.”

“Why the hell would you want to do that?” Al licks the Rizla, rolls the cigarette over itself and sticks it behind her ear. “Unless you want to add supremely bendy to your advert.”

“What advert?”

“The one you put in phone boxes in London.”

“Oh, ha ha. Seriously, are any of you up for meditation or yoga?” Leanne persists.

“Nope.” Al shakes her head. “I intend to sit on my arse and do precisely nothing for two weeks.”

“Daisy?”

Daisy pours vodka into the bottle lid and knocks it back. She winces then looks at Leanne. “Did you say something?”

“I asked if you want to try a bit of meditation or yoga.”

“Maybe.” She shrugs her shoulders. “Do many men do yoga? Does Isaac?” She glances at me. It’s only a split-second look but it’s enough to confirm my suspicions about her bad mood.

She squeals as a balled pair of socks hits her square between the eyes.

“You are SO boring!” Al chucks another pair of socks at her, this time clipping Daisy’s left ear. “Men, men, men, men, men. Give me a shot of that vodka then let’s go down to the river. Anyone up for skinny-dipping?”

Chapter 12

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” Al says as she stirs a pot of dahl so vigorously that hot, gloopy lentils threaten to overflow the rim of the saucepan.

“Because someone” – Daisy fake-glares at Leanne – “thought it would be nice to help out with the community. At five o’clock in the bloody morning.”

Everyone laughs, including Leanne, and I swipe at my eyes with my forearm. They’re smarting so much I can barely see for tears. Al and I have been chopping onions for the curry, and the mountain of vegetables in the sack on the floor doesn’t seem to be shrinking.

Three days have passed since we first arrived at Ekanta Yatra and we’ve spent the majority of our time outside, reading or sleeping in the many brightly coloured woven hammocks that hang from the plum and walnut trees in the orchard, doing yoga on the patio to the rear of the main house, and daring each other to stand in the waterfall for as long as possible, laughing and screaming as the icy cold water thunders onto our heads and freezes our bodies. It’s come as a shock to actually do some “work” again.

“This can’t all be for breakfast?” Al looks imploringly at Rajesh the chef, who’s sitting on a squat wooden stool peeling potatoes. His knees are spread wide, potato peelings sprinkling the top of his enormous stomach like hundreds and thousands on a cupcake.

“Yep. Takes a lot of food to fill thirty people.”

I put down my knife and wipe my face with the hem of my T-shirt. With no air conditioning, a window that’s so rotten it only opens a fraction of an inch, and curry-scented steam filling the room, it’s sauna-hot in here. Raj was already in the kitchen when Shona, one of the community members, shepherded us in. After Raj told us what he wanted us to do, he squatted down on the stool and started on the potatoes. This is the first time he’s spoken since, and the sound of his voice makes me relax, just the tiniest bit. There’s something very disconcerting about chatting away with someone sitting silently beside you, observing everything but not saying a word. There’s a lot of that here – community members drifting around, carrying bundles of God knows what from room to room, cleaning, meditating in random places, pausing in doorways. They rarely speak to us but they’re always watching, always listening. I can’t shake the feeling that they’re waiting for us to do something, but what, I have no idea.

“And you do this every day?” I ask. “Work in the kitchen?”

“Of course. It’s my job.”

“You wouldn’t rather be out in the garden, tending to vegetables, getting fresh air?”

Raj drops a peeled potato into the bucket at his feet and looks up at me, the knife dangling loosely from his hand. “I just told you, Emma. It’s my job.”

A bead of sweat appears in his hairline. It rolls down his forehead and disappears into the thick, bushy arch of one eyebrow. His nostrils flare, pulsing as though to a silent beat, as he continues to stare at me.

“Can we get some water?” Daisy asks, just when I can’t bear the weight of Raj’s gaze a second longer. “I’m gasping.”

“There’s water in the tap.” He gestures towards the sink. As he glances away, I feel unshackled.

“Ewwww.” Daisy wrinkles her nose. “You haven’t got any bottled stuff, have you?”

“Nope.” Raj shakes his head. “We’re running low on supplies. Ruth and Gabe, two members of the community, have gone to Pokhara to stock up. They should be back soon.” The tiniest of smiles lifts a corner of his mouth then vanishes. “Apparently.”

Standing outside one of the huts, I stifle a yawn. We were just preparing to crawl into our sleeping bags and pass out after kitchen duty finally ended, when Cera drifted into the girls’ dorm and told us that the huts had been prepared for our complimentary massages. None of us were going to turn that down, no matter how tired we were, so Al, Daisy and I dragged ourselves outside and down to the huts. Leanne stayed behind to attend a talk Isaac was giving on detoxing your mind. I think Al’s exact words to describe that decision were “fucking mental”.

“Hi, Emma.” Kane greets me as I yank open the wooden door to the hut and step inside. Not that there’s far to step. The hut can’t be much more than seven feet long and four feet wide. Everything is white – the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the pile of blankets fashioned into a narrow bed in the centre of the room. Even the candle, the solitary source of light, burning on a table in one corner of the room is white. The only things that aren’t white are the two circular metal rings screwed into the far corners of the hut. It seems I’m about to have a massage in what used to be a goat out-house.

Kane stands opposite me, his legs spread wide, his arms crossed over his broad chest, shadow obscuring half of his face.

“Come in, close the door behind you. Take a seat.” He gestures at the pile of blankets.

I do as I’m asked but I don’t pull the door fully closed. The air is thick with the scent of jasmine incense. It fills my throat, the smoky fragrance so cloying I can taste it. I eye Kane warily as he takes a seat himself, sitting cross-legged opposite me.

“Hi! I’m Kane.” He holds out a meaty hand for me to shake. He’s only an inch or two taller than me, and probably a couple of years younger, but with his shaved head and weighty frame, his presence dominates the hut.

“Emma.”

He smiles broadly as I shake his hand. It transforms his face. His heavy brow lifts and deep dimples appear on either side of his wide mouth, and any worries I may have had about sharing such a small space with a complete stranger dissipate.

“Have you ever had reflexology before, Emma?” he asks.

When I shake my head, he explains to me how all the parts of the body are connected to the feet and how, if I have a blockage in any particular area, he’ll be able to sense it.

“I’ve helped a lot of people,” he continues. “They’ve come to me with back pain, skin conditions, depression, IBS, the lot, and, with a course of treatments, I’ve helped them. Really helped them. Look at this …” He slides a book across the floor to me. “These are testimonials from the people I’ve treated. Have a look.”

I flick through page after page, words like “improved”, “transformed”, “magical” and “healed” jumping out at me. I’m just about to tell him about my panic attacks when he holds up a hand.

“Don’t tell me what’s wrong with you. I’ll know as soon as I touch your feet. Lie down for me, Emma, and slip off your flip-flops. I’ll begin by cleansing your feet.”

I close my eyes and try to relax as Kane rubs my feet with what feels like cold, wet towels and then slathers them with oil. I feel terrified and excited at the same time. Terrified that Kane may be able to sense why I have my panic attacks, and excited that he may be able to do something to relieve them. Now this is what I imagined when Leanne first mooted the idea of a retreat in Nepal – holistic treatments, massages and relaxation – not early starts, peeling potatoes and strange, staring men.

“You’re a kind person.” I jump at the sound of Kane’s voice and open my eyes. He’s still down at the other end of the hut, on his knees, pushing his thumbs into the balls of my feet. “You care about others but you feel taken for granted, sometimes.”

I try to reply but he shakes his head.

“I don’t want you to talk. You carry a lot of pain around with you but you don’t talk to anyone about it,” he continues as he presses his fingers into the pads of my toes. “You feel like you deserve to hurt, but you’re wrong. You must forgive yourself for what you did, Emma.”

I want to tell him that he’s full of shit, that he’s got the wrong person, but I couldn’t speak even if I wanted to. I’m floored by what he’s just told me. I don’t know how he’s picked up so much about me, but it’s all I can do to keep breathing.

“Okay.” He waggles first my left foot, then my right foot, from side to side. “Now let’s see what’s physically wrong with you. Tell me if anything I do hurts. If it does, don’t worry, that just means there’s congestion that needs to be cleared.

“How about this?” A single tear winds its way down the side of my face as he presses into the ball of my right foot, but the pressure has nothing to do with the reason I’m crying.

I shake my head to indicate “no”.

“This?”

He slides his fingers to the side of my foot, but there’s no pain so I shake my head again.

“How about here?”

I feel him jab at my ankle. “No.”

“Here?”

“No.”

Kane inhales noisily through his nose and my first thought is that I’m doing something wrong. I’m not responding as I should. Why doesn’t anything hurt?

“Here?”

I yelp as he prods a tender spot under my ankle. I spoke too soon.

“Family history of diabetes?”

I nod my head, astonished.

“And here?” I twitch as he rolls my calf under his hand. “Problems with your lungs?”

I nod again. He must have picked up on the fact I feel like I can’t breathe when I have a panic attack.

“And here?” His fingers dig into the soft, fleshy instep of my right foot. “Digestive problems,” he says, his tone jubilant, and I wince as he presses the same spot again. “Diarrhoea. Food passes right through you.”

“Ummm … not really.”

“Are you sure? Because I can definitely feel some tenderness here.”

“Well, sometimes, I guess.”

“And difficulty sleeping? You suffer from insomnia.”

I shrug. I don’t want to say no. He was doing so well.

“I can sort it.” He continues to knead the sore spot with his fingers. “If we do a couple of sessions a week, you’ll be good in no time. Now, if you’d like to strip down to your knickers, we can get started with your massage. There’s a towel to your right. If you lie on your front and pull that over you, I’ll turn my back. Shout when you’re ready.”

He turns and stands with his back to me, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his shorts. Do I really want his hands all over me? Having a massage from a woman in a beauty salon or spa is one thing, but letting some random man massage you? Kane clears his throat. If I wanted to, I could gather up my clothes and slip out of the shed. I could be back in the house before he even knew I’d left. I glance back at the door, at the thin shaft of sunlight illuminating my blanket bed, and I yank off my T-shirt and shorts and flip over onto my stomach. I pull the towel over me so it covers my knickers.

“Ready?” Kane asks.

“I’m ready,” I say.

The massage stops and the cool breeze from the half-open door tickles the top of my scalp. My limbs are dead weights and my thoughts are jumbled, dancing on the edge of my subconscious as I fight sleep. I part my lips to ask Kane if I should leave now, but I’m so tired I can’t open my eyes.

“Ssssh,” Kane soothes as he places his hands on my shoulders again. He presses the base of his palms into my flesh and circles them around slowly, sliding his hands over my oiled skin, then presses his thumbs into my tight muscles. They click and clunk as he rubs out months of tension, and I groan with relief.

I mentally will him to work on my neck, sore and stiff after four nights sleeping on a thin mattress, but his hands remain on my back – slipping and sliding over my skin, skimming my shoulders. His touch is lighter now, his fingertips barely grazing my body, and a shiver runs through me. It feels sensual, like I am being caressed rather than kneaded, but I don’t fight it. Instead, I wait for him to continue to pound my knotty muscles.

Kane’s hands slip down to the base of my spine and his fingers wrap around my hips then slide over my waist, and I gasp as he strokes the sides of my breasts as his hands travel back to my shoulders. Suddenly I am hyperaware, my body prickling, anticipating where his fingers will go next.

“Sssssh.” His hands move to my shoulders and, as his thumbs rub at the tight knots above my shoulder bones, I force myself to relax again. It was an accident. He didn’t mean to do that. I’m being oversensitive.

His hands slide back down my sides, pausing as they reach the curve of my breasts, and his fingers brush my nipples.

“Kane!” I flip over onto my side, one hand covering my breasts, but Kane isn’t the man massaging me.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.