The Beach Road

by Sarah Diamond

Genres: Friendship; Women's Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

' Well written and evocative...once you start reading, you won't be able to put it down ' 5* Review * * * * * * * To the casual eye, teenagers Jane and Beverley are opposites. Wealthy, beautiful and clever, Beverley seems to have everything. But disturbed and lonely Jane has just seen her mother die in appalling circumstances, and has been sent to live with her grandparents in the same small town as Beverley - by the sea in Underlyme, Dorset. But Beverley's life isn't as perfect as it seems...Behind the glossy façade, it's anything but. And when something terrible happens, she finds there's nobody left to turn to - except Jane. Initially, Beverley finds solace in Jane's total adoration. But gradually she begins to realise there is something different, something dark about Jane. Little does she know just how different, and just how dark she may be...

Release date: June 11, 2020

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Sample

A murder was committed in the alleyway outside Maxine’s nightclub, on Christmas Eve, 1998. Flats faced on to the alley, and the screams brought people running: the cynical look-the-other-way ethos of the big cities didn’t exist in sleepy small-town Underlyme. The killer was arrested almost immediately.

The story was sold to the British public like a big-budget Hollywood movie. The tender ages of its central figures recalled De Palma’s prom-queen telekinetic; the provincial setting evoked Twin Peaks. Style of murder owed rather more to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than to Seven, but the case made up in spectacle what it lacked in sophistication. In Brixton and Golders Green, in Richmond and Moss Side, popcorn was cracked, boyfriends cuddled close and eyes opened wide in horrified fascination. It was a good show.

Like something that shines brightest just before it goes out, the height of the murder’s notoriety marked the end of it. Time passed, and extracts from a book about the case were moved from the centre pages, then tailed off abruptly. Soon after, Liz Hurley was snapped in a new kind of lipstick, and another IRA bomb went off in Manchester. Life moved on. In national terms, the Underlyme murder was yesterday’s news, and yesterday’s news doesn’t sell papers.

But in Underlyme, Dorset, the memories stay alive.

The seaside town of Underlyme (pop. approx. 20,000) isn’t as small as it seems. To judge by the little town centre or the one-horse railway station, you’d think it wasn’t much more than a village, but from where you’re standing you can’t see the full view: the two comprehensives, the three council estates, the sprawling prosperous area in the suburbs. Literally and figuratively, there’s more to Underlyme than meets the eye.

If you take the beach road out from the town centre today, you’ll be hampered at first by the weight of the traffic. The tourists like Underlyme in July. But if you’re patient and keep going, you’ll find it clears as miraculously as heavy congestion often does, evaporates into thin air at a crossroads further up. This is the point where the blurred line between tourists and residents ends. No more cheap cheerful shops with rubber dinosaurs hanging outside and rude mugs in the windows: you pass nothing but four-square respectable houses, getting a little more luxurious every minute you’re behind the wheel. Cars parked in driveways give way to cars parked in garages, then garages become detached, cartwheels and coachlights grow on elongating gates. Occasionally, far away in the sunlight, there’s the glint of an outdoor pool. A few minutes more, and you’ll be in the part of Underlyme where the wealthy live.

If you stop at 20 Goldcroft Drive, your idle-sightseer status instantly switches to that of ghoul. Drive on, sicko. The once-famous murder didn’t even take place here. What exactly are you expecting to see?

Oh, all right, then. If you must.

Since you’ve come this far, the bushes round the back won’t deter you, and you’ll probably be able to sneak round and peer through them without being noticed. You’ll see a wide flat carpet of daisyless green bisected by a meandering stone path, stone bird tables, a kidney-shaped outdoor swimming-pool with candy-striped loungers ranged round it. But there’s nobody in the pool and nobody on the loungers, and the garden’s as silent as a graveyard. Far away, there’s the distant hum of a lawnmower.

About a hundred metres down from your vantage-point, through the garden, past the patio, you can see the rear windows of the house, uncurtained in self-conscious reference to the seclusion of the area. You see a clearly focused photograph of a dream kitchen cut off at odd places. Occasionally it’s disturbed by the movement of a woman. She’s blonde, slim, attractive, wears a red-and-white-striped apron so the olive oil won’t splash on her blouse. At first, you think there’s something oddly familiar about her. But perhaps it’s just the resemblance to a girl who appeared two years ago on the front page of three tabloids at once.

On the side-table under the corkboard, there’s a silverframed photograph. From this distance it’s hard to make out properly, but you think you can see a flash of bright blonde hair, and your imagination fills in the lovely laughing face beneath it. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps it is the same snapshot that once smiled out from the Mail and the Sun and the Mirror, all on the same morning.

I think it’s best if you moved on now, left the blonde lady to her cooking, the garden to its silence.

If you return to your car and take the beach road into the town centre, all you need to do is turn left at the first roundabout you come to, then right at the lights and right again, and you’ll be entering the Darlington Estate. Funny how twenty minutes behind the wheel can change the world. The Darlington Estate’s as half-hearted a nod to genuine poverty as were the suburbs you’ve just left to genuine wealth. The occasional graffiti’s perfunctory and harmless, and you don’t need to check the bushes to be sure there are no used needles lurking. Number 3 Spring Lane is easy to find in the neat grid of connecting streets, easier than it has any right to be.

There’s an old man walking out of the front door, along the three-foot-long path that runs through the unfenced postage-stamp of lawn and leads straight on to the pavement. You look at him with some disappointment. Even though he was a peripheral, rarely mentioned figure in the case, you’d expected something more than that. He’s shabbily respectable, balding, perhaps seventy-five. He could be anyone. His head’s bowed, and he looks down as if there’s something on the pavement that interests him. He’d never admit it to his wife, but he gets scared himself these days …

Drive on. There’s nothing for you here. Leave the old man in peace. If you take the main road from the suburbs, you should be back at home by five at the latest. It’s a lovely summer’s day, and you can leave the roof down while you’re driving. You’ve seen all there is to see in Underlyme.

It’s funny, now there’s nothing left to see but the ashes, that people try to work out how it happened.

When the fuse was burning slowly away into nothing, nobody noticed anything at all.

Jane had not expected such beauty. The perfection beyond the car window held her hypnotised.

‘It’s a nice little town, Underlyme,’ said her grandmother, from the passenger seat of the elderly Ford. ‘You’ll be ever so happy here, Jane, dear.’

Jane barely heard her. Her eyes were wide and dazed. The melting summer afternoon, the chuckling radio and the nauseating smell of fabric upholstery had stopped mattering. This beauty dwarfed it all – the rolling green lawns and the wrought-iron gates, the tantalising glimpses of tall ivy-veined houses and other people’s happiness. A young man in cut-off shorts washed a car in a driveway, and the picture was as perfect as a still from an advert. ‘Well, we’re in the suburbs,’ said her grandfather, from the driving-seat. ‘What do you think, love?’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured. She looked and looked, soaking in every detail of a beauty that had come out of nowhere. ‘It’s so beautiful.’

‘Well, the estate’s not quite up to this standard,’ said her grandfather, with a vast and hollow joviality, ‘but it’s as good a place to live as any. Isn’t it, Mary?’

‘It is that,’ said her grandmother. ‘We’ve got your room done up lovely for you, Jane, dear. You’ll be all settled in in no time.’

Jane barely heard her. It was like the hunger after a fast: she gorged herself on honey-coloured brickwork and glittering window-glass and ivy, on shadows in the windows that hinted at the real lives behind them. People were in there somewhere, as tangibly solid as she was herself, and she found the thought somehow thrilling. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ she said. ‘Not in Streatham. Not ever.’

‘Yes, it’s a lovely little town,’ said her grandmother cosily, turning to smile at Jane over the passenger-seat. ‘We’ll be at the estate soon.’

Jane watched the suburbs fading like a dream around her – she twisted in her seat, and her eyes shrieked goodbye to something beautiful. It felt like her second bereavement in as many weeks. Her mother had died eight days ago.

Although Emma had been to Bev Green’s house countless times since the two of them had met in the playground three years ago, she always felt vaguely awkward walking up the drive. It was just the way the house towered above her, reminded her how small-scale her own life was by comparison. The Green home was a three-storey mock-Tudor affair, nestling in Underlyme’s wealthiest street, complete with an outdoor pool and every mod con. Bev’s father made a pretty good living for a second-hand car-dealer.

Emma walked up the sloping driveway, seeing what she always saw: the tall tree in the weedless front garden, the intricate, mullioned windows glittering in the light. As usual, a kind of self-conscious inadequacy gripped her at the sight, and she saw herself in her mind’s eye – a dark-haired, sensible-looking teenager with freckles and nice eyes, perfectly suited to the little semi five minutes’ walk away from school, utterly out of place in the here and now. She wondered what it must be like to be Bev Green, with the perfect house, the perfect family, the perfect life.

When she reached the house, she raised the big iron knocker and banged it down. She heard muffled voices through an open window – ‘I’ll get it, Mum,’ Bev was calling, ‘it’ll be Em’ – and then Bev was there.

‘All right, Em?’ asked Bev. ‘Come on in.’

In the bright summer light, it was like looking straight at the sun. It wasn’t hard to see why the boys at school regarded Beverley Green as a kind of movie star, or why she’d received the record total of eight Valentines last February. Golden and glorious were the only words that really fitted – a thick cascade of gleaming blonde hair, smooth tanned skin without a hint of pink, startlingly blue eyes. The perfect figure, of course. Sometimes, Emma almost hated her well-liked best friend. ‘You started packing yet?’ she asked, as Bev closed the door behind her.

‘Only just. Shit, we’re flying out first thing tomorrow. You don’t mind giving me a hand with it, do you, Em? We can sunbathe after we’ve finished.’

‘Sure. Whatever,’ said Emma, and they started up the stairs.

Up in Bev’s room, they packed shorts and T-shirts and bikinis and crop-tops, and talked mainly about boys. They discussed the boys at school Bev didn’t fancy, and the couple Emma did, and the ones in the public eye they both agreed on, and the music from Bev’s stereo pounded out cheerfully, like their voices. Melting summer flooded the room. ‘I bet you get off with an amazing lad out in Florida,’ said Emma, folding a nightshirt. ‘American lads sound well tasty.’

‘As if. I’m not exactly going to get off with someone with Mum and Dad and Toby hanging round me the whole time.’

‘You might.’ Emma squashed the nightshirt down atop a mountain of clothes. ‘You’re going to have a wicked time out there, anyway. Wish I could go away one summer.’

‘You went to France last year. You said you loved it.’

‘I suppose.’ Emma remembered the ugly little bed-and-breakfast overlooking the sea, her father’s woefully inadequate French, her mother looking dowdy and embarrassed in a pink-flowered swimsuit. Somehow, she couldn’t reconcile it to the perfect tan suitcases overflowing on Bev’s stripped-pine floor. ‘It wasn’t the same, though.’

‘Don’t see why not. A holiday’s a holiday,’ said Bev, easily. ‘God, I’m thirsty. Let’s go down and grab a milkshake.’

From the kitchen, vast windows faced out on to the pool. Bev’s cool, tasteful mother sat talking with two cool, tasteful friends, and their conversation broke off as Bev and Emma came in. ‘Hello, darling,’ said Mrs Green. ‘Oh, hello, Emma. How are you?’

Emma always felt slightly awkward in Mrs Green’s presence – she remembered her own mother’s middle-aged spread and fondness for silly jokes. ‘Hi, Mrs Green,’ she said, as Bev mixed strawberry milkshakes at the counter. ‘I’m fine. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you.’ Bev’s mother smiled her polite indifferent dismissal, and returned to her friends. ‘Anyway, Betty,’ she said, ‘Trisha and Martin are redoing their house from top to bottom, and …’

Emma felt the cold weight of the glass in her hand, and followed Bev back through the shadowed hallway with an inexplicable sense of reprieve. ‘I never know what to say to your mum,’ she said, when the two of them were back in Bev’s room. ‘Or your dad. Haven’t they ever embarrassed you or anything?’

‘How do you mean?’

Emma thought of drawing Bev’s attention to her own father’s entire wardrobe, but loyalty stopped her. It was true, she thought, Bev really didn’t know what she meant. Even Bev’s little brother was perfect, in his dumb, skateboarding way. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m just being silly.’

‘They’re not that scary,’ said Bev. ‘They’re just people.’

Emma looked at Bev. Like hell they are, she thought.

And, looking at Emma, Bev thought, Please God don’t let her go too soon. Please let her stay for a little while longer.

As the car slowed down and parked, Jane experienced an overwhelming disappointment. She’d hoped for more than this – this dowdy, well-scrubbed little terrace, with its net-curtained windows and tiny front lawns. She’d dreamed of so much more.

‘Well, Jane, dear,’ said her grandmother Mary, ‘welcome home.’

The three of them stepped out into intense heat and an almost absolute silence. A bird shrieked far away, and the sound seemed to echo.

‘We’d best get you unpacked and all,’ said her grandfather Alf, as he hoisted her suitcases out of the boot. ‘We’ve got all new furniture in the spare room for you, love. You’ll be right at home in no time.’

Inside, the little terrace smelt clean and false and impersonal; the sun cast neat squares across the carpet, and china dogs stared down from the sideboard with empty eyes. Jane remembered dark rugs peeling away from ancient lino back in Streatham, and a sense of loss touched her deep inside. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, realising she was expected to say something, ‘really lovely.’

‘We’re glad you like it, dear,’ said Mary. ‘After all, it’s your home now.’

In the bedroom, fussy faux-princess frills adorned the single window, and the pink duvet cover was turned back to reveal pink-flowered sheets. ‘Well, here we are,’ said Alf, puffing as he set down Jane’s suitcases on the bed. ‘I’ll leave you girls to unpack, then. I’ll be out in the garden, if you want me.’

Jane stood awkwardly, and watched her grandfather’s departing back. ‘Does he do a lot of gardening?’ she asked eventually.

‘Oh, he loves his garden, your grandad.’ Mary walked over to the window, and pulled the net curtain aside. ‘Look.’ Jane looked. She saw a neat little fenced-in back garden beneath an empty blue sky, garish flowers in orderly, serried ranks. ‘He’s got an allotment, too,’ said Mary, ‘just up the road. He grows vegetables.’

Jane’s eyes fixed on the garden outside. She remembered the third-floor flat in Streatham, and the strange greasy cooking smells that lingered on the stairs. Homesickness gripped her like a cramp. ‘I never had a garden before,’ she said, and then, ‘It’s really nice.’

‘Oh, Jane, dear,’ said Mary, ‘if only we could have had you sooner.’ She put an arm round Jane and hugged her awkwardly. Jane breathed a cloud of scent as bright and false as air-freshener. ‘We’d best unpack your things, anyway,’ she said. ‘Get you settled in.’

Something stiffened inside Jane. A new and sudden apprehension overcame her. ‘No, Nan, really,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to bother. I don’t mind unpacking on my own.’

‘Well, if you’re sure, dear.’ Mary moved over to the door. ‘I’ll leave you to get settled in on your own for a bit, then.’

Jane stood in the too-hot little bedroom and listened to her grandmother descending the stairs. When she was sure Mary wasn’t going to pop back up for something, she opened her suitcase. The small package she’d wedged in right at the bottom was easy to find. Her eyes scanned the unfamiliar room for a possible hiding-place. Finally, she stuffed it under the mattress. As she stepped back from the bed, her breathing came quick and shallow. It felt exciting to have a secret, something that would shock other people, something that they wouldn’t understand at all. Something in the world that really felt like her own.

But even her small nervous high couldn’t last long here. She folded her few clothes neatly, and was left far too soon with nothing to do. A memory of beautiful houses haunted and mocked her. Outside, the sun blazed down.

She’s going to say it any second now, thought Bev. She and Emma had finished the packing about an hour ago, and were now lying on the poolside loungers, soaking up the last of the afternoon’s rays. Any second. Bet you.

‘Oh, God, I’d better go,’ said Emma, looking at her watch. ‘My mum’ll kick my arse if I’m late home.’

As always, the attempt to keep the sunlight, even as she saw the clouds moving overhead. ‘You can stay, if you want. My mum could call yours. You could stay for dinner.’

‘I’d love to,’ said Emma regretfully, ‘but I can’t. Listen, have a wicked time in Florida, yeah? And remember to send me a postcard.’

‘Sure. I’ll call you as soon as I get back.’

Emma rose from the lounger, and Bev rose with her. They came into the house via the kitchen. Bev saw her mother’s friends were gathering their things together, too. ‘My God, it’s a mass exodus,’ said one, and the three women laughed.

At the front door, Emma said, ‘See you later, then, Bev. Have a great time,’ and then she was walking away. Bev stood and watched her retreating back for long, slow seconds. She thought how Emma didn’t really look like she belonged here, in this tasteful stage-set of a home. She thought she envied Emma for it.

She wished she could talk properly to Emma. But she couldn’t. She just hadn’t been brought up to talk about the things that mattered. It had been with her from her earliest days – the constant training in sweeping things under the carpet and pretending that they weren’t there. Now she came to think about it, the only real bollockings she’d received from her mother had come when she’d forgotten to do that, when she’d let too much slip out without thinking.

One time, when she’d gone round to Emma’s house for dinner, she’d wondered if maybe it was the same with Emma’s family, after all. She’d carved her gammon steak and sipped her Diet Coke with her mental antennae on elastic, exquisitely attuned to the possibility of undercurrents. But it had been like running a radio dial through dead silence. There wasn’t any tension here at all, she’d realised – Emma’s mother placidly gathering up the plates, Emma’s dad telling some long story about a recent coach-trip to Cherbourg, Emma herself contriving to look both bored and horribly embarrassed. It had occurred to. . .