The Beloved Girls

by Harriet Evans

Genres: Women's Fiction; Gothic

Synopsis

The outstanding new novel from the Sunday Times Top Ten bestselling author of The Garden of Lost and Found.

'It's a funny old house. They have this ceremony every summer . . . There's an old chapel, in the grounds of the house. Half-derelict. The Hunters keep bees in there. Every year, on the same day, the family processes to the chapel. They open the combs, taste the honey. Take it back to the house. Half for them -' my father winced, as though he had bitten down on a sore tooth. 'And half for us.'

Catherine, a successful barrister, vanishes from a train station on the eve of her anniversary. Is it because she saw a figure - someone she believed long dead? Or was it a shadow cast by her troubled, fractured mind?
The answer lies buried in the past. It lies in the events of the hot, seismic summer of 1989, at Vanes - a mysterious West Country manor house - where a young girl, Jane Lestrange, arrives to stay with the gilded, grand Hunter family, and where a devastating tragedy will unfold. Over the summer, as an ancient family ritual looms closer, Janey falls for each member of the family in turn. She and Kitty, the eldest daughter of the house, will forge a bond that decades later, is still shaping the present . . .

'We need the bees to survive, and they need us to survive. Once you understand that, you understand the history of Vanes, you understand our family.'

(P) 2021 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: May 10, 2022

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

When did it begin to fall apart? Afterward, she would look back to this point in time: the arrival back home, though she never knew precisely when the moment itself came, the tipping point, so that the weight of what she carried grew heavier and heavier, and the scales simply could not be balanced anymore.

“We should have just got the train,” said Tom, moodily pulling his backpack out of the trunk. “We’d have been home like, hours ago. Mum, next time, can you please make Dad take the train.”

“It’s nearly midnight, for God’s sake,” said his older sister, Carys, flicking through her phone as she stood on the front doorstep, chewing gum. She jerked her head back, letting her hoodie slide away and revealing a pink forelock that Catherine, getting out of the car, mentally reminded herself would have to be dyed back to its original blond before the school term started.

“You know what Dad’s like about the Eurotunnel,” she said, hauling her own bag smartly out of the car. “I can’t help you. You’re related to him by blood. Take it up with him.”

Tom laughed. Their father, Davide, paused, the front-door key in one hand, and then turned to address his bedraggled, exhausted family.

“The Eurotunnel,” he proclaimed, raising the key as if it were a baton, “is a miracle of engineering. To drive one’s car onto a train, and to be conveyed by that train into France, is a great privilege. It is the longest—”

“Submerged tunnel in the world,” Carys said, without looking up from her phone. “I know, Dad. But there’s also the Eurostar. You get on this strange thing called a ‘train’ and it takes you to, oh, I don’t know, about ten minutes from our own house without driving a carbon-polluting vehicle—”

“Irrelevant,” said Davide, inserting the key in the lock.

“And you don’t have to—oh, I don’t know,” said Tom, joining in with glee, “queue up for hours at Calais and dodge desperate refugees trying to cling on to your car and then drive for hours on the other end in almost solid traffic.”

“You cannot drive in solid traffic,” said Davide, his handsome face splitting into a smile. “Haha! There. A fact.”

“Oh my God. Mum,” yelled Tom.

Catherine just laughed. Across the road, their neighbor Judith was putting out her recycling. Catherine waved briefly at her.

“Welcome back,” Judith said. “Hope you had a wonderful time in France?”

“We did, thanks,” said Catherine.

Judith stood up and Catherine saw her face wore a frown of concern. “And did you relax, Catherine? Have a proper break after that awful trial?” She put her head on one side. “I hope you ignored the newspapers.”

Catherine smiled.

“I made her,” said Davide, intervening. “I took her phone away, we went on long walks, we ate and we drank. Good Burgundy will solve everything.”

“Oh, how nice,” said Judith. She fluttered her eyelashes at Davide, who gave her a polite nod and turned to go inside.

Stupid woman. Catherine smiled. “It was good to get away. It’s been fairly full on, as you say. Anyway—see you later.” She raised her hand.

Carys pushed past her father and went inside first, turning on the hall light. “I’m going out, I promised Lily I’d drop off the memory stick for her. Mum? Where shall I put these letters?”

“On the hall table, but Carys—”

“OK. I need to grab an envelope for it from your study. Mum, there’s a letter for you, on the top. Mum?”

But Catherine wasn’t listening. Pausing just a moment on the doorstep, she breathed in the evening air. It was that time of year when spring crept in on you suddenly, without warning, the scent of fresh-foul bulbs bursting through the wet, black earth. Paperwhite narcissi and grape hyacinths dotted their tiny front garden. She could smell new growth, perhaps even the first mown grass from Mr. Lebeniah’s neat rectangle, the spicy scent of box next door. Boscastle Road was quiet; a few peach-gold lights glowing in rooms along the black silhouetted street, with the not-quite-dark deep clear sky in relief behind it all.

It was good to be home.

The ice storm the papers had feverishly christened the “Beast from the East” had lingered well into March, and Catherine’s usually brisk walk into chambers in Holborn had been hampered for weeks now with frost and slushy brown snow. It seemed they were always in the hallway, struggling into layers of clothing. It had been a rotten Easter, freezing, sleeting weather.

But a few days into April the weather became deliciously warm. Waking up at her beloved in-laws’ house in Albi, in southern France, the sound of doves cooing in the dovecote in the garden, the fragile pale-blue skies carved up only with the occasional swallow heading back north, Catherine would check her phone, to see what it was like back in London, wondering why every morning she felt such dread at the prospect of going home again. Usually she loved spring. Not summer. Never summer.

They’d been visiting Davide’s family for just over a week and she hoped that a new chapter could begin now after their return. A new school term, the end of a long, brutal winter. The end of the Doyle case.

She shook her head, thoughts crowding in on her, the image of an inbox, filling up again. First, getting back into the swing of work, normal cases again. The prospect of visiting Grant Doyle in prison, not a welcome one. Then a visit to the care home. Then getting Carys to do some work for her exams.

“Catherine,” said Davide, as their daughter stomped upstairs. “Come inside, my love. Pour me a drink. I will bring in the rest of the bags from the car.”

“It’s all done,” said Catherine, briefly, smiling at him. She stepped over the threshold, inside the house, inhaling the old smell of home. Furniture polish and wood. The faintest scent of spicy sandalwood from a carved box on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, bought during their twentieth-anniversary trip to Marrakech.

“You confound me, woman,” said Davide. He gave her a small kiss. “Are you glad to be back?”

“Sort of.”

“Are you glad we went away?”

“Yes. Very.”

He stroked her hair, his dark eyes holding hers. “Well, I am glad.”

She caught hold of him for a moment. “Couldn’t we—just move to Albi, Davide? Wouldn’t it be nice?” He laughed, faintly uneasy.

“My love, live in the same place as my parents? And Sandrine? I don’t think so. What has brought this on?”

“The—being back in it all.” She let her shoulders slump. “What’s to come. Oh, I’m just being silly.”

“No, you have holiday withdrawal.” He kissed her forehead. “We discussed, didn’t we, the possibility of the weekend break, Catrine.”

She edged away from him, and took off her shoes. “Yes… but—”

And suddenly from upstairs there came a scream. “What the—oh fuck. Mum! Oh fuck. Someone’s broken in! They’ve been in your study!”

Catherine and Davide raced up the stairs to the study, a tiny room at the back of the house in between floors. Carys was standing just inside, her face white.

“The door was locked. I wanted an envelope so I unlocked it.” She was gabbling. “There’s glass all over the roof.”

“My God.” Davide pushed his daughter aside. “Have they been anywhere—else?”

“They must have come in and gone out through the window. The study was locked, Dad. I unlocked it. They couldn’t have got to the rest of the house.”

“They smashed the window?” Davide said, gazing round. “Oh no.”

Every surface was covered with papers. Years of work, diaries, memos. Someone had sliced into box files and taken them out. While most of the glass was on the roof outside, a couple of pieces of glass rested on the window sill, glinting in the evening light. A glossy magazine, the pages torn out, was scattered on the floor. One page was scrunched up into a ball, resting on the keyboard.

Catherine stared, her hands pressed to her mouth.

“Let me—” Carys said, moving toward the piles of handwritten documents, the balled-up piece of paper.

“No,” Catherine said, sharply. “There’ll be glass. Get away, darling.”

“Almost all the glass is outside actually, Mum. On the flat roof,” Carys said.

“Have they—been anywhere else?”

Davide was looking through the rest of the house, the top floor, the kitchen. “I don’t see anything,” he called up to her, after a minute. “I’m phoning the police.”

“No—” Catherine called down. “No, please don’t.”

“But of course, Catherine. They climbed in—”

Catherine put her hand on the desk, to steady herself. “Darling, do please get out of the way. Just in case.”

But Carys bent down and started picking books and papers and stationery off the floor. “I’m going to get a dustpan from downstairs,” she said, practically.

“Davide. Please. Please don’t call them,” Catherine said. “I mean it.”

Her husband appeared on the landing, the phone in his hand, and stared at her in surprise. “Why on earth not?”

“I know who it was.”

“What?”

Tom was at the bottom of the stairs. They were all watching her, the post-holiday bonhomie gone. She felt it, the ground shifting beneath her.

She thought of the article in the newspaper, found on the ferry back. How she had only seen it because she’d turned the page to avoid reading about Grant Doyle.

“It’s to do with Grant. It’s his sister. Or some friend. I know it is.”

“What?” said Tom.

“Catrine. Why?”

“He’s eighteen and he’s in prison, probably for most of the rest of his life,” said Catherine. “And he hates me. He sent some pal of his round to do it. Look. With the kitchen extension roof you can see how they’d get in. They climbed the wall on the street onto the roof and then it’s easy.” She was still staring round the room.

“Look what they did, though.”

Catherine paused, stepping out of the moment, as she had taught herself to do using one of those mindfulness apps. She breathed deeply. They mustn’t see how exposed she was. She gestured to the documents, the bundles of papers, scattered on the floor. “I know. I—maybe we should call the police. But I’d just rather not. Look. I’m going to see him soon. I’ll talk to him.”

“That sounds like a great plan, Mum,” said Tom. “Definitely, like, just ask a guy who’s been convicted of stabbing his pal to death with a kitchen knife… to stop it? Plan. Purrr-lan.” He swallowed, though, his eyes flicking from his mother to his father.

“This is not acceptable,” said Davide. “You must do something. If you don’t, I’ll call the police. Or Ashok, is that the lawyer? Get a cease and desist, you call it?” Their eyes met; a spring breeze, sharp and bold, rushed through the open window behind her, ruffling the papers, making the hairs on Catherine’s arms stand up. “You must act. Catrine.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, definitely—yes. I’m sorry.”

Davide’s voice was terse. “What are you sorry for?”

“Everything.”

Tom came up the stairs, gesturing to go into the study, and Catherine stepped past him out onto the tiny landing. But she underestimated the width of the door frame and stumbled slightly, hitting the side of her foot hard against the door. She had no shoes on and the pain of her little toe against the edge of the wood was greater than she’d have imagined.

“Jesus,” she said, shaking her head. “Jesus effing Christ, that hurts. What next?”

“Are you OK?”

“It’s fine. Banged my toe.” In fact she had felt a tiny crrack on impact, but she didn’t say anything—Davide was, in a very Gallic way, a great lover of a health complaint and would insist on her calling 999. Instantly the toe throbbed, as hot pain seemed to glow through her feet, up into her chest. She felt sick with the pain, then shook it away again. A toe! A tiny toe.

Behind her, she could hear Carys, talking to Tom. She was whispering something.

“Why wasn’t the glass all over the study? Why is it on the roof? If you break a window from the outside it goes inside, right?”

“What?” Tom was saying, still dazed, and she saw him glancing at her.

“Talk to Grant Doyle,” said Davide, shortly, turning and walking downstairs. “Promise me, my love.” She nodded, still wincing. “It isn’t right.”

Catherine looked back in at the study. She gazed down the stairs, into the warm light of the hallway, the collection of shoes, the photographs lining the walls, the notices on the cork board. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. When she did, everything had changed.

The café windows were steamed up with the heat from warm workers’ bodies. April rain streamed along the narrow lane outside which, at lunchtime, was rammed with Central London workers in black and gray, buying noodles and tacos and phos.

“What can I get you, bella?”

“The soup, please, Frankie.”

“Certo. One soup coming up. That foot, it is still painful? Franco! Una zuppa, pronto!”

Catherine gave a faint nodding smile and shifted the weight off her feet. The rain drummed down ceaselessly, and she frowned. Her colleague Jake Ellis, who had done his training the same time as her, twenty-five years ago now, was known to come in and cajole her, protesting, out into the fresh air for lunch.

“You’ll turn gray if you stay here, Catherine. No one else works this hard. Get a life.”

“I don’t want a life. I like this life,” Catherine would say, resisting him, sometimes seriously. But some days, today, she would come with him to buy sweet-and-sour noodles, or fried chicken, and sometimes they would walk down through Aldwych toward the river, the same walk they had done for decades now, feeling the pumping rhythm of the city, its fumes, its gray pavements and buildings, and every time she was reminded, just a little, of why she loved it here, never wanted to live anywhere else.

Fulton Chambers, where she and Jake worked, was in a tall Georgian building on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the Gothic fairy tale bulk of the Old Hall of Lincoln’s Inn itself in the background, Narnia-like lamp posts on the corner. Catherine’s narrow office, on the third floor, had one tiny window looking out over Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a public park with a café, a tennis court and views of lounging tourists, lawyers and lunch-break workers, whatever the weather.

Catherine had probably spent more time in that close little office than anywhere else, working till 2 a.m. before she had the children, poring over papers, taking notes, on the phone, then later gathering up box files and dashing out to make it home for tea and a bath after the children. She had been there on Sundays, birthdays and several times on New Year’s Day.

The humid warmth of the café was soporific. Jake was further down the lane now, queuing for pho, but Catherine had wanted soup, something comforting. She blinked, feeling she could just fall asleep here, in the warm fug. Her toe throbbed with a hot, urgent kind of pain. She imagined she could feel it growing, swelling inside her sneaker. Briskly, Catherine took out her phone and scrolled through her emails.

St. Hugh’s School

Notice for parents on upcoming school trip to Swanage

Boden

Enjoy 25% off this weekend with offer code G4G8!

Jenny Timms Cello Academy

Overdue invoice

Christophe, Davide

Weekend away?

Boden

Enjoy 45% off! Offer code H5H7!

Anna Murphy

invoicing Herbert Smith

Jake Ellis

Lunch old bean?

Anna Murphy

HMP/YOI Tavistock visit to Grant Doyle—PLS review ASAP

Boden

75% off this weekend only with exclusive offer code BUMS!

It was three days since they’d got back and her toe hurt most of the time. Catherine had strapped it up with some washi tape from Carys’s scrapbooking phase, and she’d iced it, and wore sneakers, but it was getting worse, not better. Thank God she wasn’t in court that week; no way could she have worn her black heels. She couldn’t walk in to work so she had to take the Tube, and was tired of the manspreading, the tinny music, the crowds. She was tired of it, most of all tired of the pain. It was embarrassing and silly. It was a toe, not an eye, or an ovary. It wasn’t important. She knew she ought to do something about it, and yet she didn’t.

The door of the café opened, the bell jangling, and Jake Ellis stuck his head in.

“Catherine? Hey! Catherine Christophe! You ready?”

Catherine’s eyes snapped open. “Oh.”

Jake came into the café. “Were you… asleep?” he said, mock-horrified.

“No! I was closing my eyes. Bit tired.”

“Why?”

Catherine rubbed her eyes. “Oh… nothing much. Stuff.”

“Tell me about it,” said Jake, with an exaggerated shrug. “I was at dinner last night with this woman… honestly, Cat, it was a tasting menu and it went on for hours. I didn’t get to bed till about two.”

“You poor man,” said Catherine, easing herself off the stool.

Single Jake was the same age as her and lived ten minutes away from her in Camden, but his life seemed wildly different to hers. His was a bachelor existence, where he fell madly in love with unattainable women who wore long, multi-layered skirts and silver jewelry. Usually, they abandoned him to live with wild horses in Patagonia. For a while Jake had been a little in love with Catherine, which had been awkward for both of them, until he’d fallen for a Russian countess called Sasha and gone back to coming into her office with a long, mooning face. “She said she loves me,” he’d told her once. “But then she said seeing the Plain of Jars in Laos was more important. I don’t know what to think.”

Now Jake looked at her in concern. “Are you OK to walk on that foot?”

“God, the fuss. I’m fine. Just a bit stiff.”

“One soup, here you go,” Frankie said. “Hey! Sir! Get her to see a doctor about that toe. Crazy woman,” he muttered under his breath, with a wink at her as she left.

Rage prickled across Catherine’s scalp, the rage she kept tamped down all the time. She smiled at them both. “Let’s go.”

They walked slowly back. She didn’t need to over-explain things to Jake; they’d known each other so long now. There were children who’d been born and graduated from university in the years since she’d joined Fulton.

Two years ago Jake had “taken silk” and been made a Queen’s Counsel or QC, which meant one was a senior lawyer with all the prestige and rewards that entails. “When for you?” Davide had said, furious on her behalf; he was outraged when Catherine was passed over but never liked to consider it might be sexism for that was all lies, he said, lies to make women angry and demean men and women together. Davide believed in love, he said, not hatred. How easy it must be, she’d think sometimes, being a man. Being Davide. When she had also taken silk the following year he had been so proud, but she noted he was also relieved—as if he didn’t have to worry about the idea that sexism might exist. As if all was well ordered in his life again.

“Want to sit in the square?”

“I ought to get on,” Catherine said, and, as she spoke, heavy dots of unpredictable April rain splattered the paving stones and they both laughed.

“How did you do it?”

“What?”

“The toe.”

“Oh. The frame of our bed sticks out. I wasn’t wearing socks and I hit it against the edge. So annoying.”

“Is it broken?”

“Hardly. I’m sure it’s not. It’s just bruised.”

“Shouldn’t you get it looked at?” said Jake, in a tone she found patronizing.

“I will. How’s the Turleigh case coming along?”

“Pre-trial hearing next week,” said Jake.

“Who’s the judge?”

“Wilkinson. Not hopeful.”

“Wilkinson’s all right,” said Catherine. “Don’t smarm, that’s all. He can spot it a mile away. Hide your deference. And he’s very hot on trial by jury, the role of the juror in democracy and all that. So don’t disparage the jury, even if some of them make you want to throw your chair at the bench.”

“Mm,” said Jake. He was silent, then said: “How’s your last client, by the way?”

“Grant Doyle? I’m supposed to be fixing up a visit.” She screwed up her nose. “I don’t want to go.”

“Will he appeal?”

“Unlikely. I just don’t think he has grounds.”

“Why are you going to see him, then?”

Catherine shrugged. “He’s eighteen. He’s in prison for murder. I couldn’t get him off. He asked to see me—Ashok rang me last week,” she said, trying to sound cool about it, “and it’s a day trip to Rochester, isn’t it?”

“I think the judge misdirected, Cat,” said Jake. “I’m sure you have grounds. Self-defense. He was a punchbag for that group of boys. Hammersley, was that the name of the victim? He sounds like a thug.”

“He was.”

“Arrogant little shit with a millionaire dad who thinks he can buy his way out of anything.”

“He couldn’t buy his way out of his son being murdered, to be fair.”

“Didn’t they say he locked Grant Doyle in a cupboard overnight at school, with a rat?”

“They did. Hammersley paid someone to catch the rat for him. He really did spend a lot of time thinking about how to terrorize him. But—” She narrowed her eyes, thinking of the days in windowless rooms spent with Grant, staring at her, never blinking, just smirking slightly. His mother’s whining voice, his sweet, furious younger sister’s anger. You were useless. Anyone else would have got the jury to understand what they did to him. What it was like for him. She grimaced. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“Look,” said Jake, at his most patronizing now. “I’m just saying, ignore what you read about it. And if you want me to—”

Her phone rang, shockingly loud. With some relief, Catherine answered it.

“Hello?”

“My chérie. How are you? How is the toe?”

Catherine raised an apologetic finger at Jake and moved under a portico out of the rain. “Fine. I’m just with Jake. What do you want, Davide?”

“Want? Oh, my. First—”

“I’m busy, darling—”

“Sorry.” She knew what he’d be doing—making a dramatic facial expression to one of his co-workers, for he had carefully curated the brand of Catherine to them, his fearsome, sexy, world-striding, ball-breaking English lawyer wife. Davide worked for an insurance company that specialized in transporting valuable works of art across the world: Banksys hewn from youth club walls and flown to Miami, gigantic equestrian portraits of Renaissance European kings precisely installed on white gleaming walls in desert palaces in Saudi Arabia. “Our discussion the other day leads me to ask you, Catrine: are we doing anything over the bank holiday weekend?”

“Bank holiday? Nothing. Why?”

“Ah bien. Are you available to go away that weekend, Mrs. Christophe? Just you and me? An early anniversary present?”

Jake was leaning against a newsagent’s window, studiously staring at his phone. “Oh… I’m… not sure. We’ve just got back, it’s only a couple of weeks away… Leaving the kids so close to exams—”

“Bof. Those children must learn self-discipline. They will cope for a weekend. Cousin François can visit and check all is well.”

“Well, we can discuss that.” Catherine’s mind began whirring with what would need to be organized if she left them for a weekend. “And… I was going to go to the care home for a visit then. I can’t go the previous week or the week after.”

“This Eileen.” Davide made a dismissive sound. “You have done enough for her already, Catrine.”

“She’s Janey’s mother, Davide. She’s on her own. There’s no one else.”

“You brought her back from Spain, chérie. You found her the home. Her stepchildren don’t email you once to ask how she is. Besides, she doesn’t even remember her own daughter, let alone you. It is… unforgivable.”

A jab of pain began between Catherine’s eyes as the rain started again, the pavement suddenly swelling with people walking faster, running. She pulled at the front of her hairline, a habit she had had as a child, and one which left behind a little baby-fluff fringe of dark hair. The truth was, Eileen probably wouldn’t notice if she didn’t come on a Friday. She wouldn’t notice if she never visited her again. “She doesn’t have anyone else.”

“But it’s not your responsibility.”

Catherine looked down at her feet in the neon sneakers, at the cooling soup in the soggy bag, the pockmarked newspaper. She closed her eyes as Davide said softly:

“A weekend away. Just us two. We will walk hand in hand. Feel some warmth on our shoulders. Drink a glass of crisp white Burgundy. Sit in a square, smell lavender, cigarette smoke, other places. Eat steak, ma chérie, chargrilled, rare steak, without Carys shouting at us about the baby cows.”

Imagine if she just relaxed, if she just gave in to it, for once?

“You have been working so hard this year. Up all night, in the study, scribbling away.”

“I’ve had a lot going on.”

“I know that,” he said, as if she thought he was an idiot. “I know the case was thrown into your lap, my love. Have you contacted his lawyer yet? Warned him to leave you alone?”

“No, Davide—”

His voice was soft, insistent. “You talk in your sleep, you know. Nursery rhymes. The same one, only I can never remember it in the morning. Do you know?”

“I’m asleep when I’m doing it, Davide.”

There was silence, both of them not sure what to say. Catherine looked out over the square, at the huge red cranes, building yet more gleaming skyscrapers. She smiled at Jake, hovering a little way ahead, not wanting to listen. Davide said:

“I have been worried about you.” His voice came closer to the phone. She heard his hesitation. “You—ah. You must know you’re—you’ve not been yourself. A little, Catrine.”

She bit her lip. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

He knew her. Sometimes, it made her feel warm, waves of calm emanating from her. Sometimes it was being trapped, and she could not catch her breath when she thought about what he did not know. Sometimes she told herself it was nothing. That if he knew he’d understand.

She had met him when they were both aged eighteen, in another country, in another life. He had been standing in a town square, arms folded, quizzical expression, watching as two of his friends played football with a screwed-up paper bag. It was late October, an early autumn evening in Toulouse. She had run away from her life in England, from tragedy, from the summer she lost all her family, her home and her best friend; he lived there. And he had looked up and said, in a voice of surprise: “Hello.”

She’d asked him later. “Why did you say hello? How did you know I was English?”

“I knew you,” he had said. And that was all.

“You should drink Armagnac here, not cider, mademoiselle,” he’d said, and she’d told him not to be ridiculous, that she was enjoying her cider, and he’d laughed.

“OK,” she said now. “Let’s do it. You’re lovely. Where will we go?”

“Wait and see,” Davide said, and his voice was lighter, and she knew he was pleased. “Don’t worry. It’s a place that’s OK for you. Will you try to look forward to it?”

Even in the midst of the rising panic she felt, she managed to smile at the idea the destination might be a mystery. It would be Paris, which was more than OK with her, but it was a family joke Davide never wanted to holiday anywhere except France. “Yes. I will.”

“Liar.”

Catherine laughed, and peered out of the portico again. It had stopped raining. She looked around her, but Jake had gone. A lump formed in her throat, unexpectedly. “I’d better go,” she said.

The lashing spring rain had suddenly eased, and a shaft of watery sunlight was hovering above the square, sewing silver seams onto the rainclouds. She was by the steps up to Fulton Chambers. Catherine stopped to check her phone again, to see if Grant Doyle’s solicitor had been in touch. (The solicitor was the lawyer who had handled the case for the client from the beginning, and who hired, or instructed, the lawyer known as the barrister—in this instance Catherine—who argued the case in court.)

There was a faint hum in the air, like an engine running. It grew louder and then louder.

She jumped, but not quickly enough. A bee, flying straight for her. First time this year. It was loud—it was always very loud.

Catherine’s head swam. The stairs up to the front door were narrow. Someone brushed past her; she jumped back. There was a charge in the air, suddenly.

Afterward she realized her body had understood it before her eyes had seen it. She looked back, staring across the road toward Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there she was.

A woman, standing on the edge of the freshly green lawn a few meters away, surrounded by the red and pink primula beds. She was staring at Catherine, patiently. As if she knew Catherine would eventually spot her. When their eyes met, she walked toward Catherine, and she smiled. It was a slow, curious smile.

“Hello there,” she said.

Her slender shoulders were enveloped by long hair, which hung around her like dull gold ropes, softly shining. Her eyes—oh God. Those eyes, unchanged through almost thirty years. Bright blue-green, sea-glass.

She wore a long floral dress, and biker boots. She wore these things, she looked normal. She was real.

Catherine couldn’t say anything. She just stared.

“I though