Broken Flowers

by Kate McQuaile

Genres: Family Life; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A TWISTY PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF WHAT SHE NEVER TOLD ME ********** Your mother. The one person you trust. What if you're wrong? Widowed Nan is on her way to her beloved son's wedding. She should be excited, but she is dreading her return to Paradise Place - a small area of Notting Hill that she hasn't dared set foot on for decades. Nan had arrived there as a young girl in the late seventies, desperate for freedom and a career as an artist. But, drawn into a dark obsession that spun out of control, Nan was forced to flee. And while the only thing seemingly connecting her son's wedding and her old secret life is Paradise Place, Nan quickly gets the impression that someone is watching her every move . . . someone she thought was dead. ********** PRAISE FOR KATE MCQUAILE 'Elegant, clever and totally convincing' Sunday Mirror 'Everything you want in a thriller' Emma Flint 'A fast-paced read' Prima 'A twisty tale' Good Housekeeping

Release date: April 16, 2020

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 220

Sample

Now

Between lifting the poker and smashing it down on his head, there must have been a moment when I thought about what was going to happen, about the consequences of a heavy metal object making contact with flesh and bone. But if there was such a moment, I don’t remember it. Nor do I remember having had any sense of a line about to be crossed, a line separating innocence and murder. The fact is that I have no memory whatsoever of that single moment – if it ever existed.

I’ve been good at shutting the memory of that night out of my mind – or, at least, good at slamming some cerebral door against it when it has pushed too far forward.

But there have been times when I’ve allowed the guilt to wash over me like a tidal wave until I think I’m going to drown. And there will be in the future. Maybe I’ll see someone who reminds me of him, and for a fraction of a second my heart will pound faster and I’ll feel my stomach churn. Or I’ll hear a voice that sounds like his. And then there’s that much deeper thing I dare not acknowledge. It lies below the surface. It will always be there.

I’ve rebuilt my life, reinvented myself. I’ve lied and I’m still lying. I no longer know the difference between what’s true and what’s false, what’s real and unreal.

But I know that I have rebuilt my life on an illusion, a pack of lies I told myself. I invented a new truth because it was the only way I was able to survive.

I realise that now as I walk down the short, narrow passageway that leads to the house I left four decades ago. The house where I became a murderer. Number 4 Paradise Place.

Earlier that day . . .

I’m sick with nerves and with longing. I haven’t seen him for two years, two long years, and now I’m on my way to London to see him marry a woman I’ve never met. The conflicting emotions that threatened to drown me when I first drew the stiff white card out of the envelope are back. They batter my heart and my stomach as every swerve of the speeding train takes me closer to my son, my beautiful, angry son who walked out of my life on the day we buried his father.

He has found love, and I should be happy for him. But I’m overwhelmed by a sense of grief and loss at having been excluded from all the events of the past two years that have led to his present happiness.

I wish I had been part of his getting to know this woman.

Over the years, I had glimpses into his romantic life. Sometimes he brought girlfriends to stay for weekends, and I saw several come and go. I liked most of them, and some of them I liked very much. But they rarely lasted longer than a few months and Chris and I began to wonder if we would ever see him settled.

The wedding invitation stands to attention in my open handbag. My hand slips into the bag and into the torn envelope. My fingers feel their way across the embossed wording that I now know by heart, the names that are etched into my brain. Arnaud and Alice Thomas. Marie-Laure Thomas.

Who are these people? How did Ben meet them? How much do they know about me? Has he told them why he hasn’t spoken to me for two years? Perhaps he hasn’t told them anything about me at all. My name is on the invitation, written in a hand I don’t recognise.

I shiver and turn my face to the window, relieved that the seat booked for me is one of two facing the direction in which the train is travelling, and hoping the man sitting next to me won’t notice that I’m crying.

He does notice, though.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks. His voice is quiet, kind.

This unexpected show of kindness from a stranger makes me even more emotional. I can’t speak because there’s a great big lump in my throat and it’s choking me. So I give my head a series of tiny shakes. They’re meant to tell him that I’m fine and I don’t need or want to talk. He produces a packet of tissues and hands them to me. Then he says something I don’t hear properly because I’m blowing my nose loudly, and he disappears through the carriage. When he comes back a while later, he’s carrying a small brown paper bag from which he takes two paper cups.

‘I thought you might like some tea,’ he says, putting both cups on to the tray in front of me and sitting back into his own seat. ‘Milk and sugar, if you want them,’ he adds, producing several small plastic containers of milk and a few paper tubes filled with sugar.

There’s the hint of a soft country burr to his accent, though it’s not very strong. It reminds me of Eddie – no, I won’t allow myself to go there. I’ve been good at shutting out certain things, but every now and again something random breaks through my guard, so I concentrate on the tea, sipping it slowly. I smile occasionally at this kind stranger, whose rugged face and thick thatch of grey hair suggest he’s somewhere in his mid-sixties. His eyes are a soft brown and when he smiles they shine brightly out beyond the wrinkled skin that frames them.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Things have been a bit difficult lately. It all got a bit too much for me back there, but I’m fine. I am, really.’

I don’t mean to engage in any further conversation, but it’s not easy to tell someone who has been so kind that I would prefer to put a barrier between the two of us for the remainder of the journey. So I let him talk away about his visit to Yorkshire to see his daughter and her family, and I smile and nod where I think it’s appropriate, and after a while I begin to be grateful that he wants to talk to me, that he’s giving me a respite from my own tormented thoughts. But the respite comes to an end all too quickly when he asks me why I’m going to London.

I could make something up, but I tell him I’m going to my son’s wedding.

‘Oh, very nice,’ my travelling companion says.

I look at him, into his kind eyes, and I keep talking.

‘To tell you the truth,’ I tell this man I’ve never met before and will never see again, ‘I’m not . . . in a good state about this wedding.’

Not in a good state is an understatement. I feel angry and sad at the same time. The first I knew of this wedding was when the invitation came in the post just a few weeks ago. I’ve been summoned. I haven’t been consulted. I’ve been sent a train ticket and details of where I’m going to stay. My son has decided these things without speaking to me. He has decided I’m going to spend a week in London, presumably getting to know his fiancée and her parents and God knows who else. He isn’t even going to be at the station to meet me; he can’t be bothered. So he’s sending a driver. The instructions were delivered in a short, unsigned note that accompanied the invitation.

The man says nothing, but there’s a sympathetic look on his face and in his eyes, and, in spite of the guardedness that I’ve preserved for so long, I find myself confiding in him. I don’t tell him everything, of course. I don’t tell him why Ben and I quarrelled. I skirt around that and he’s too polite to ask questions. He just nods, occasionally pressing his lips together and widening them in an expression that seems to say he understands why I’m feeling anxious about the whole thing.

When the train eventually pulls in to King’s Cross, the man stands up and takes his bag and coat down from the overhead rack. I’m almost tempted to remain in my seat and wait for the train to reverse and move north again.

The man has put his coat on and he’s ready to go.

‘I hope everything goes well,’ he says.

‘You’ve been very kind. It really has helped to talk to you.’

*

I walk through the gates towards a man in a dark suit who’s holding up a big white piece of card with my name on it. All around me, passengers are hurling themselves into the arms of their lovers, their parents, their friends, their children. Desolation and grief overwhelm me.

How different it would be if I were walking through these barriers with Chris. It would be hard, but Chris would soothe and comfort me, promise that everything would be all right and that he would look after me as he had always looked after me. I had always been his priority, the most important thing in his life. Now I was no one’s priority.

‘Mrs Brown? Please come with me.’

I walk behind the driver to a street bordering the station. He has taken my wheelie case and is striding ahead of me. It’s raining and I struggle to keep sight of him as I weave through a sea of umbrellas. Finally, seated in the back of the car, a large black Mercedes, I try to engage him in conversation. He’s polite in that he answers my questions, but he’s far from friendly. He tells me in short sentences that he’s taking me to a hotel in Canary Wharf and that a different driver will collect me later this evening.

The hotel is ultra-modern. The staff on reception are sleek and fashionable. They seem friendly, too, but only on the surface; their smiles don’t extend to their eyes. I’m sure they’re looking down on me, because, in spite of my new clothes, I feel shabby, not quite good enough to stay in this place whose staff look like fashion models.

My room is what I suppose would be described as minimalist, with hardly any furniture apart from the huge bed, and the walls and carpet in shades of white, cream and grey. The only vibrant colour in the room bursts from the huge abstract paintings on the walls. I look at them closely and see that they’re actual paintings rather than reproduction prints.

I have several hours to kill before the car picks me up. I could go for a walk, now that the rain has stopped and the weak winter sun seems to be trying to break through the grey clouds. I became a great walker after Chris died and I sold the garden centre. There was nothing else to do, no one to talk to. Not that I wanted to talk to anyone. So I walked and walked, for hours and hours, miles and miles. I was trying to walk away from myself and I’m still doing it. If I have a day without walking at least five miles I feel that things aren’t quite right.

But I don’t feel like walking through this part of London that seems like a grown-up version of Lego only less friendly. When I lived in London for that short time in the late 1970s, I knew only West London and the West End, and I didn’t even know those areas very well. I can’t remember ever having visited the East End or even anywhere east of Tottenham Court Road.

I look out of my window on to an almost empty street, grey and bleak under the mass of cloud, and the granite-coloured water beyond it. I wonder whether Ben lives in this strange and sterile business kingdom, whether he looks out over the same stretch of the river from an apartment in one of those tall towers. Wherever I look, left or right or straight ahead, I see cranes reaching into the sky. I can’t imagine him wanting to live in such a place.

And then, as if by magic, I begin to understand the beauty and drama of the shifting light on the water as the clouds part and come together again, creating pictures as stunning and beautiful as any moorland landscape. In the far distance, windmills stand out like giant angels keeping watch over a brave new world.

The next few hours drift by slowly. I think about visiting the hotel spa and having a massage and facial but remembering how I felt so intimidated by the reception staff, opt instead for a long, slow bath. And then, although I don’t mean to, I fall asleep on the huge bed.

When I wake up, the room is dark, save for a weak glow from the lights outside, and for a few moments I’m not quite sure where I am. I panic, afraid that I’ve slept through the evening, and that I won’t see Ben, that he’s going to be angry with me for missing the dinner. My panic subsides when I see the time shining eerily from the digital clock beside the bed. It’s only six o’clock and the car isn’t coming until seven. I have an hour to get ready.

You don’t need a glamorous wardrobe when you live in the country and do the job I do, or, rather, the job I used to do. A couple of reasonably smart outfits and a pair of low-heeled shoes will see you through several years of social occasions. The rest of the time it’s jeans, with jumpers and flat boots in the winter, T-shirts and trainers or plimsolls in the summer and wellingtons when it’s raining, which is often.

I’ve had to buy new clothes for this trip to London, including a black dress that Ilaria made me buy. I lost a lot of weight when Chris died two years ago. Clothes that had once been snug now hang off me. The dress disguises my thinness. It even hints at curves I no longer have, despite my being a size ten, the size I was forty years ago. That’s the only comparison between the eighteen-year-old girl I was then and the fifty-eight-year-old woman I am now. My hair, once the darkest brown, is now a bright silvery white.

I stopped colouring my hair when Chris died. I just didn’t think about it. He lived for several days after the accident, drifting in and out of consciousness. I begged God to make him better, but his injuries were too much for him. The doctors said it was a miracle he’d lasted even those few days and that at least we’d been able to talk to him. By the time of the funeral, my grey and white roots ran along the top of my crown, an ugly stripe that showed how much I’d neglected myself.

Perhaps if Ben and I hadn’t quarrelled I might have gone back to caring about my appearance. But we did quarrel and he walked away. And after that I had no interest in keeping up any kind of appearances. I looked old and worn and ragged, and as time passed I looked even older and more worn. I was depressed and sad. I’d lost my husband, and now my son was so angry with me that he wanted nothing to do with me.

People were kind. They rallied around, bringing cooked meals for which I had no appetite, leaving cards and notes to show their concern. But I couldn’t confide in them. I couldn’t tell them Ben had walked out. I left them to find out for themselves, and when they did they knew better than to ask me about it.

A few days after Ben left, Ilaria called me from Florence. We talked on the phone every so often. We saw each other every couple of years when she came to stay for a few days, sometimes with her husband, Matteo, sometimes by herself. Chris and I didn’t travel. I hadn’t told her about Chris’s accident and death. I hadn’t even thought of telling her because I was floundering and sinking in a pit of despair and had lost the track of my life.

‘I’m coming tomorrow,’ she said as soon as she heard what had happened.

She came for three weeks that time. And she came again, just a fortnight ago, to help me prepare for the wedding.

‘I’m taking you to the hairdresser’s,’ she told me the day after she arrived. ‘Get your coat on. We have an appointment at two in Leeds.’

‘Leeds? What’s wrong with here?’

‘We have other things to do.’

The hairdresser chopped at my hair, which I’d allowed to grow so long that I now mostly wore it tied back and pinned in place here and there with clips. Ilaria gave me the odd anxious look, checking how I was coping as the scissors snipped away lock after lock of dull, ugly hair. If only she knew that I didn’t care one iota, I thought at the time. The hairdresser could have shaved my head and I wouldn’t have objected.

As we emerged from the salon hours later, Ilaria was overjoyed.

‘Bellissima!’ she exclaimed, bringing her hands together with a clap and then throwing her arms around me. ‘You look wonderful! She has taken years off you.’

I had to admit that I did look good. The hairdresser had practised her magic and my long, drab, multicoloured hair was now a silver pixie cut.

Over the next couple of hours, Ilaria dragged me into one boutique after another until she was satisfied that I had all the clothes I needed for London and the wedding.

‘But I’ll never wear these clothes and shoes again,’ I protested after I had mentally totted up the amount of money I had spent. ‘They’re ridiculously expensive! You know I have no need for black cocktail dresses and high heels up here.’

‘No matter,’ Ilaria said, batting away my protests. ‘You can afford it. These things are what you need for London, not your old-lady shoes and your safe little jackets and skirts and blouses and your jeans that are too big and too short and without any shape.’

She paused, pursed her lips and began to speak again.

‘I don’t want to be unkind, but you look, well, not very good. I think you have removed yourself from this life that is the only one you have. Chris would not want you to do that. So, please, even if it is only for a few days, make the most of yourself. Bring out that beautiful girl you were when I first knew you all those years ago, that beautiful girl you have locked away under your terrible clothes.’

I stared at her, shocked, not knowing what to say. She had never spoken to me in this way. Her words stung and stimulated at the same time. Why would I want to bring out the girl I was when we first knew each other in London? That girl had got me into trouble and I was well rid of her. And yet something in me responded to the idea that I could, even if just for a short while, be attractive, that I could dare to be what I no longer was. Attractive, feisty, brave.

Our last stop was at a department store, where the glamorous young woman on one of the make-up counters picked out a range of cosmetics to go with my new look and gave me a lesson in how to apply them. Another small fortune. She ran the various products we had bought through the till, but stopped when she came to the lipstick.

Looking at me with a very serious expression on her face and holding up the lipstick as if it were some kind of talisman, she said, ‘The red lipstick. Very important for this new look of yours. If you’re pushed for time, just go for the lipstick.’

So now, I’m waiting in my room for the call from reception that will tell me the car is waiting for me. I’m wearing my black dress and the silver earrings that go well with my silver hair. And I’m wearing my red lipstick like a badge of courage.

Then

It was the autumn of 1977, and Nan’s life was beginning in earnest. She had grown up on the outskirts of a tiny village in the north of England and now she was in a different kind of village, one of those London villages that had joined seamlessly together to form a sprawling city. She was living in Notting Hill and she was overwhelmed by just about everything.

Pembridge Road on a Saturday afternoon was like Oxford Street, except that the steady but disorganised stream of mostly young people was heading for the second-hand clothes shops and stalls of Portobello rather than the Etams, Jane Normans and Chelsea Girls of the British high street. She revelled in joining the stream, happy to look like everyone else, the young people, the tourists, making their pilgrimage to one of the most famous streets in the world. But she felt special, because she knew she wasn’t like the tourists, who stood out. She was living here, actually living in this place she had only read about in the papers and in magazines.

Punks were everywhere, some strangely glamorous, some just plain weird, jostling for space with the longer-established hippies. They seemed to have put a great deal of effort into the outfits they wore, although Nan suspected the electric kettle she saw one young woman carry as a handbag had been inspired by a sense of fun rather than a desire to be subversive. The hippies looked less contrived, less put together, in their floaty cheesecloth and cotton, their clogs and open-toed sandals and their long hair.

On Moscow Road, an artery of Greek restaurants and Middle Eastern cafés that joined Pembridge Square to Queensway, there were long queues outside a public telephone kiosk as word spread about the fault it had developed that meant cheap calls across the world; she usually called her parents from there because. . .