Joanne Sefton Book 2

The skies were threatening rain and Alex led the way purposefully. Karen, who had long legs and a graceful stride, kept up easily, but Misty found herself distracted at every turn. There was so much to look at as they hurried through streets lined with medieval colleges that looked like castles, and passed rosy pub windows and clothes shops that Misty had heard of but never seen on any high street she visited.

‘Your parents are academics then?’ Karen addressed her question to Alex, but didn’t wait for a response. ‘Didn’t you want to go away to university? Why not Oxford?’

Misty’s ears pricked. Getting away had been her dream for as long as she could remember, but then she’d never really thought about people who lived in places like this already – who didn’t need to escape to them.

Side-on, in the street light, she could see that Alex made a face, but wasn’t sure exactly what her expression meant.

‘It’s a bit complicated,’ she said, eventually. ‘My mum would say I need looking after. I would say she does.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘You two have waved your parents on their merry way, haven’t you? I’d swap places with either of you if I could.’

Misty felt taken aback, as if Alex could read her mind. Only a moment ago she’d been thinking about how Alex’s life seemed impossibly charmed. But it didn’t appear that Alex felt that way.

‘We’re here anyway,’ Alex announced. ‘Not the best restaurant in Cambridge. But one of the closest. And just in time.’ She stuck her hand out, and, sure enough, there were fat raindrops starting to plop from the sky. They hurried through the doorway.

Once they were seated at a generous table by the window, a waiter brought menus and Alex announced, ‘We’ll have a bottle of house champagne.’ Panicked, Misty gave a small cough. Splashing out on a ‘cheap’ meal was one thing; this she hadn’t bargained for.

‘Please don’t worry, darlings.’ Alex lowered her voice. ‘My dad’s always in here; he’s got an account. This is my treat – or should I say his.’ There was a giggle and a glint in her eye, as if they were all up to mischief together.

That was the thing about Alex, as Misty would quickly come to learn. Although the way she acted and the things she said should have felt objectionable, or condescending – should have been, in fact, everything that Misty would have expected to despise – they somehow weren’t. Alex had a wonderful warmth, a gift of drawing people in, of making them see the world from her perspective. Misty would soon discover that the world, from that vantage point was a much more colourful and exciting place than she’d previously imagined.

Chapter 4 (#ulink_9411cf6d-a15f-5c5a-b631-afd05962c61f)

Tasha

2019

Tasha knew that whoever invented Valentine’s Day must have been a wanker. A sadistic wanker with a hatred of teenagers. It comes at the worst time of the year. When Christmas is over, but it still won’t be warm for ages and the teachers are doling out crap results from crap mock GCSEs. It creeps up on you – you’d forget it was coming and then you’d be in town and see a card shop window stuffed with red heart-shaped balloons and your stomach would jump up and crash down again leaving you feeling queasy.

Tasha estimated that around two per cent of the girls in school actually liked Valentine’s Day. They were the fit ones with boyfriends, or at least boys who would admit to liking them. If it wasn’t for them, everyone else could just ignore it and forget about the whole thing. But they wouldn’t let that happen. Girls like Lola Shirini and Nadya Bansal. They’d been going on about it for ages. The main WhatsApp group for the girls in Tasha’s year was full of messages from them debating which boys were going to get them cards or presents and who else wasn’t going to get anything.

Her friends Claire and Sonal felt exactly the same. The three of them were moaning about it at lunchtime, eating their packed lunches in the music quad. It was freezing, but still better than eating inside and contending with a zoo of screaming Year 7s and 8s and their stinky sandwiches. Sonal was in a bad mood to start with because she’d got a Grade 7 in her history mock. She was expecting an 8 and Tash knew she was hoping for a 9 in the real one, even though she wouldn’t admit it. Tash had got an 8 so Sonal was being a bit pissy with her, even though Tash’s actual mark was only three higher than Sonal’s own.

Claire didn’t do History and didn’t get any marks back that day so she was keeping quiet, but then Claire was a real-life genius anyway and Tash just knew she was going to get a 9 in everything without even trying. Mr Taylor had already told her he thought she’d have a good shot at Oxford or Cambridge. Claire had been on at Tasha’s mum to give her a practice interview, because she’d been to Cambridge herself. She apparently hadn’t paused to think that it did a fat lot of good for Karen. But then perhaps geniuses weren’t renowned for common sense.

Sonal was going on and on about Charles de Gaulle and how she’d been unfairly marked down because she’d forgotten when he died. Then Claire told her to shut up and said that when Sonal and Tash had been in History, she’d been in Geography and Lola had been nudging loads of the girls and getting them to look at something ‘secret’ in her bag. When the bag got passed to Claire, she saw a box of Lindt chocolates and a charm bracelet in a Pandora box. No wonder Lola was pleased with herself. Everyone knew that Pandora bracelets started at £100 or something and apparently this had three or four charms on it already.

After Sonal had whinged about her exam and Claire had told the others about Lola’s bracelet, a Year 7 kid came up out of nowhere and said, ‘Are you Tasha Neville?’ She obviously didn’t have a clue which one of them actually was Tasha, because she was talking more to Claire when she said it. So, Tasha butted in to say she was the girl was they were looking for and the Year 7 shoved this giant pink envelope at her and then ran off sniggering like a fruit loop.

‘Well, open it then!’ Claire and Sonal were all over her. So, she did, and it was aValentine’s card. It had a pair of those hideous grey teddies that are meant to be cute with massive hearts between them and part of her head was thinking about how it was possibly the worst card that had ever been printed and how she’d be embarrassed to buy it. But at the same time another part of her mind was thinking that this was the first Valentine’s card she’d ever got. Claire and Sonal were obviously mad with jealousy and, after all, it wasn’t like anyone would expect a boy to have good taste in greetings cards so they all decided they could probably overlook the bleurgh grey teddies. For Tash, the amazing thing was that someone actually liked her and wanted to tell her that on Valentine’s Day with a big showy card at school.

She flicked the card open then shut it immediately. But not quick enough to stop the rush of blood in her cheeks. There had been some printed writing – she’d not had the card open for long enough to read it – then, at the bottom, just one word ‘Stanno’ and one crossed kiss.

Tasha had fancied him since Year 8. Thinking about it, she probably would have had more chance with him then, because ever since then he’d just got more fit and more popular whereas she’d, well, not. But they did still get on. He only lived a street away from her and sometimes they would walk home together off the bus. Maybe she’d made more of an impression than she’d thought.

‘Oh my God.’ She turned to her friends. ‘It’s Dylan Stanton. It’s actually him. He likes me. OM-fucking-G. What the fuck am I going to do?’

And the girls were hyped, because they knew she liked Stanno, although she would never have told them quite how much. Claire’s face lit with excitement and happiness for her, and then, just as suddenly, it crumpled.

Tash’s stomach turned to ice. She turned, following Claire’s gaze, to look over her shoulder. Lola Shirini swooped like a vampire bat, her glossy Kate Middleton hair swinging and her phone thrusting into Tash’s face as her laughter ripped through the quad.

‘She actually fell for it. Look at her! Little Miss Boffin-Head is in luurve with Dylan Stanton. Can you imagine it? Like he’d send a card to her – as if!’

The three or four worker bees she’d brought along for the ride swayed around laughing, making out like they were pissing themselves or unable to stay upright. The blood that had rushed to Tash’s cheeks a few moments earlier was now joined by what felt like the rest of the blood in her entire body and an army of fire ants. Her face was blazing like an exploding oil tanker.

She stood up and shoved the card into Lola’s free hand.

‘Take it back then – it’s not like I care.’ She choked out the last couple of words in a sob, aware even as she said it that it was a pretty pathetic effort at a comeback.

Of course, when she was stewing at home that evening, she came up with about seventeen razor-sharp ripostes that would have left Lola for dead. But none of those were featured on the video that was instantly being shared all over WhatsApp and Snapchat. Tasha knew that even kids in other years who wouldn’t have had a clue who she was that morning would be pointing and laughing when she went back into school the next day.

She wondered if it was true that Saint Valentine lived in Italy a zillion years ago and they made him a saint because he married couples so the husbands wouldn’t have to go to war. Woot woot for them. She would bet he didn’t realise the depths of misery he was storing up for generations of innocent schoolgirls, did he? Wanker.

Chapter 5 (#ulink_605110e7-f89d-508c-b328-e3c99c311efb)

Karen

2019

They’d eaten the Crespelle con Pollo after all. She’d changed her clothes, cleared up the smashed mixing bowl, and mopped the gloopy batter from the floor tiles. There was plenty of flour and eggs in the house, so the whole episode only set her back twenty minutes or so. But the joy had gone out of it. The pancakes were greasy and slightly too thick. She burnt her hand being careless with the saucepan for the béchamel. Her mind was no longer on the food, but on the memory of the woman she’d once called her best friend.

When Tash came home with her friend Claire, they’d gone straight to the den. Barely a word, and they refused her offer of hot drinks and home-made flapjack. Callie had trooped through the door a few minutes later, proclaiming herself so exhausted that she needed to lie down before ballet. With the chicken in the oven, and an uneasy restlessness still troubling her, Karen picked up her phone and scrolled through reports about the bombing. There were plenty of pictures, but no more of the woman who looked like Alex.

Listlessly, she checked her email and immediately wished she hadn’t bothered. More troubling news from her solicitor. She closed the email down; she wasn’t in the mood to worry about money just now. In fact, all she wanted to do was tell someone what she’d seen. But who? Jonathan, said a voice in her head, and the familiar stab of pain twisted in her guts. Her husband had died in a boating accident in 2008. It did get easier, but it never got easy. She’d long got used to taking out the bins and making the big decisions about mortgages and schools on her own, but still the grief broke the surface from time to time, shattering her equilibrium, often when she least expected it.

Don’t get maudlin,she told herself, sternly, and then another thought popped into her head. She could phone Andrew Dyer. With a renewed energy, she thumbed through her contacts.

‘Hello, Karen? What’s up?’

‘Hi, Andrew. I …’ How to say it? She hadn’t thought of this before picking up the phone. ‘Um. I wanted to talk about Alex, actually, if you’ve got a few minutes.’

‘Right.’

Even from that one word, she could tell he was taken aback, but there was something else there too.

‘I’m actually wrapping up a meeting just now. Err … do you want to meet up, maybe go for dinner? We’ve not caught up in a while.’

‘Yes, okay. As long as Tash is in to keep an eye on Callie, I can do most nights. When were you thinking? Later this week works.’

*

He’d picked an upmarket Thai place, which boasted pale wood and expensive-looking art in place of the usual rhinestones and buddhas. The front of the restaurant was crowded and bustling, but a waitress had led her to one of the high-backed upholstered booths that lined the back wall. It had been a bit of a trek for Karen to come so far east, but it was near his offices. Andrew had set up an online furniture retail business years ago, and after steady initial growth it had exploded in the last couple of years. It seemed impolite to ask in anything but the vaguest terms but, given that the TV ad was now appearing all over the evening schedules, she could only assume that business was booming.

She saw him come through the door and took a moment to observe him whilst he waited to speak to a member of staff. There was a trace of the old jazzman cool about him. He had remained slim and a charcoal grey suit fell sleekly from his elegant frame. The silver showing in his dark hair did nothing to detract from his svelte good looks, but where she remembered a tanned complexion his face now carried the pallor of someone who spent little time outdoors.

When she’d seen enough, she waved him over, accepting his kiss on the cheek and his flustered apology for being five minutes late.

‘Will you have a drink?’ he said, pushing the wine list across the table. ‘I always go for lager with anything spicy, so don’t worry about me.’

‘Actually, I think I’ll join you. It’s been ages since I had a nice cold beer.’