The Favor

by Nicci French

Genres: Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

In this twisty new stand-alone novel from internationally bestselling author Nicci French, a young woman agrees to do a favor for her first love—but when things go horribly wrong, one small task turns into a murder investigation that completely upends her life, ensnaring her in a deadly web of secrets and lies.

It’s a simple enough favor.

Jude hasn’t seen Liam in years, but when he shows up at her work asking for a favor, she finds she can’t refuse. All Jude has to do is pick Liam up at a country train station—without telling anyone. So what if she has to lie to her fiancé? Jude is still committed to him and their imminent wedding, even if she and Liam were in love once.

She owes him.

After the car crash that changed everything years ago, bright, ambitious Jude went to medical school, back on the path she had planned before meeting moody, artistic Liam. Meanwhile, he never fully recovered from the dark stain the accident left on his record.

Now he’s gone.

When the police show up at the station instead of Liam, Jude realizes that she knows nothing about the man he’s become. Now she’s tangled up in his life, the last person to have seen him, and maybe the only one who can uncover the truth about what went wrong—even if she destroys her own life in the process.

Release date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 432

Sample

Prologue

A scream ripped through the air. She didn’t know if it came from her, or from him as his hands flew up to cover his face, or from the car itself as it left the road with a screech of tires on tarmac. Then silence, the tree filling the windscreen, its leaves black in the headlights. A crunch of metal and the lights went out. Her face rammed hard against something, pain flowered in bright colors inside her skull. She tilted her face and opened her eyes, seeing blues and reds and nasty purples. There was a silence in the car. Terror washed through her, and the terror was bigger than the pain.

“Please help me,” Jude said to no one at all.

They had been driving back from a party in Liam’s rusty old Fiat, with one of its wing mirrors held in place by tape and an ominous rattle on steep hills. Jude and Liam were in the front, Yolanda and Benny in the back, though Benny was passed out, his head on Yolanda’s shoulder and his mouth open, and Yolanda was also fast asleep. Jude looked at the clock on the dashboard: it was two in the morning, but still warm after a sweltering day. It felt like the sky might split open at any moment and a flood of rain would soak into the parched, cracked earth.

It had been a hot summer. Jude thought of sitting her A levels in May and June, the sun glaring through the large windows and her fingers slippery on the pen, beads of sweat on her forehead and damp patches under her arms. That seemed like another world away because since the middle of June she had been in love. Stupid and dizzy and glorious with love, in love as never before. Her body ached with it. She could feel where his fingers had touched her; her lips were sore. At the party he had taken her into the garden and kissed her until she would have lain down on the lawn in full sight, but he’d whispered, “Later,” his breath hot in her ear. And now it was later: they would drop off Yolanda, haul Benny out of the car and onto his front steps, and drive into the woods. He had a blanket in the boot of his car. She didn’t mind if it rained; she imagined their wet bodies pressed against each other and a shiver of anticipation rippled through her.

She looked over at him and he felt her looking and put his hand on her thigh, through the thin material of her dress. Liam Birch: not her type at all. Liam was not on track; Jude was. She had known she was going to be a doctor since she was at primary school and she had worked for years to get there, never letting up. She had a place at medical school and as long as her results were all right, and she was sure they would be, in six weeks she would be heading to Bristol.

Liam didn’t know what he was going to do next. He was good with his hands. He could fix almost anything and he could pick up a pencil and in a few strokes create something vivid, startling. Jude had said he should go to art school and he would shrug his shoulders and say he would see what happened—as if it wasn’t really his decision to make, as if life just rolled him over and carried him along. Maybe he would go traveling, he said; get away from this medium-sized town in the middle of England where he had lived all his life with his parents and his little brother. She looked down at the hand that lay warm and heavy on her thigh. What would happen when she went to university? They hadn’t talked about the future, just as they hadn’t talked much about the past. She didn’t know a great deal about Liam’s family, his childhood, his previous relationships. What mattered was now, and here, and the lovely loosening of her body when he touched her, when she thought of him touching her, and the way he looked at her and said her name.

They hadn’t been at the same school. Liam had gone to the large sixth-form college on the outskirts of the Shropshire town they both lived in, Jude to the comprehensive. But she had been aware of him, a tall lanky figure with dark hair that needed cutting and clothes that never looked new: ripped jeans, T-shirts with mysterious words on them, a weird green jacket that on someone else would have looked terrible but he carried it off. She had seen him over the past two years, walking along the streets in a group of other teenagers, smoking, swigging from cans, looking cool and impossibly worldly.

A few days after her last exam, a friend introduced her to him at a party. She waited for him to say, “Hey, Jude,” and laugh at his own wit, but he didn’t. She waited for him to turn away and go back to his gang, but he didn’t do that either. He told her about a baby fox he had run over that day, how he’d thought at first it was a little child who’d run into the road. The fox was still alive and squealing piteously and passersby had quickly gathered to watch. He’d had to kill it, he said, smashing a stone from the curbside against its head, and then take the body and dump it in the woods. He had carried it for almost half an hour, hot and rank in his arms. He was a bit stoned. His pupils were large; his eyes dark, almost black, in the dim light. Jude was surprised by how friendly he seemed, and how young. Almost—well, almost ordinary. Just a handsome boy.

For the first few weeks, it had been a gorgeous secret that she hugged to herself. She didn’t tell her friends, because she didn’t want them rolling their eyes or saying anything that would make it seem unimportant or too important or too surprising. She didn’t want to hear that one of them had been with him, or knew of someone who had, or had heard something about him, about his recklessness and his sudden inexplicable bursts of anger. She didn’t want anyone to say: “You need to watch out for that one.” Even now, she was reticent about telling people. Every so often they went to parties together, like tonight, and only yesterday they had spent the day by the river with a group of friends. She had talked about him to Rosie, lying in the long grass by the river and speaking to the blue sky. But she hadn’t told her parents: she knew they would be alarmed by Liam, who smoked weed, took pills, sometimes looked a bit unwashed, and wouldn’t be going to university. Maybe that was the attraction: he was someone her parents wouldn’t approve of. In any case she was leaving for Bristol in September. He was her in-between time, her summer, her escape.

“I feel a bit sick,” said Yolanda, half-waking in the back of the car.

“Wind down the window,” Liam said.

“I might be sick.”

“Not in my car, you won’t.”

“It won’t be long till we’re at your house,” said Jude. “Tell us if we should pull over though.”

But Yolanda didn’t answer because she had fallen back to sleep. A gurgling snore came from her, then a grunt.

Jude felt a bit tipsy herself. Liam had drunk a lot, too, and taken who knew what else? But it was only a short journey. A few large drops of rain landed on the windscreen. She put a hand up to touch his face and felt his lips smile.

Then: “Fuck,” he said, or shouted.

Because there was a sharp bend in the road but the car sped onward, off the road, toward the tree. Terrible slow motion. Terrible clarity of disaster, and a world that would never be the same again.

A scream ripped through the air.

Jude couldn’t tell which way her body was facing. Her head rang with pain, one side, then the other. Yolanda was sobbing wildly in the back. Benny wasn’t saying anything at all.

“Are you hurt?” said Liam urgently in the darkness.

“I can’t see.” Jude put up a hand and found her face, which was warm and sticky. “I’m bleeding,” she said.

“Can you get out of the car?” said Liam.

“I don’t know. Yolanda? Benny? Are you okay? What’s happened? What’s going to happen?”

Liam climbed out, came round to her side, helped her out too. She couldn’t stand, her legs were shaking too much, and he sat her on the grass bank. She could make out his pale face. He returned for Yolanda, who stumbled away from the car and was violently sick on the road. Jude heard the splatter of vomit.

It started to rain. She heard Liam talking to Benny.

“Is he breathing?”

“Yeah, he’s breathing. He needs help, though. I’ll make a call.”

“Do you have to?”

Liam squatted beside her and wiped the blood from her face with the hem of his T-shirt. He seemed remarkably calm, almost nonchalant. “It’ll be all right.”

Tears and rain were stinging her face. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. “This is a nightmare.”

Liam was talking into his phone. How could he be so calm? Jude leaned forward and cradled her face in her hands. She heard Yolanda sobbing and the wind blowing in the trees and somewhere an owl out there in the wet darkness.

Then from far off a siren.

The ambulance arrived first and, a few minutes later, a police car, then another, blue lights flashing on woods and on the car’s bonnet buried in the tree, on the pale scared faces of its four passengers. The paramedics lifted Benny onto a stretcher and he opened his eyes at last.

“Get off, will you?” he said. “What’s going on?”

A woman bent over Jude speaking in a kind voice, but Jude couldn’t make out the words. There was a roaring in her head. But she heard the words a police officer spoke to Liam, asking if it was his car.

He said it was. She lifted her head and he looked at her and smiled. As if it was a joke, thought Jude. As if none of this really mattered: just one of those things.

He was asked if he had been driving, whether he had been drinking, whether they had all been wearing seatbelts. He was told that he was going to be tested.

She saw Liam shrug. The blue light flickered over his face. Everything became confused once more until she saw him being led toward the open door of one of the police cars. He looked round at her and lifted a hand in what looked like a gesture of farewell.

That was the end, really. The end of Liam and Jude and the glorious agony of first love, the end of her summer, the end of her childhood.

Jude stayed in hospital for two days. She had received a head injury and they wanted to keep her under observation. She had a broken nose that the young doctor assured her would mend and leave no scar. A gash in her forehead needed twelve stitches. The day after the accident, she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror, her face swollen, her skin all purples and deep browns and murky greens.

“You could have been killed,” said her mother.

“What were you thinking, getting in a car with someone who was drunk?” said her father.

Her parents looked at each other and asked about Liam. Who was he? Why had she been in his car?

Jude winced. “He’s just a boy I know,” she said.

Just a boy. Her boy. She tried calling him and he didn’t pick up. She sent a text, several texts, saying she urgently had to see him, and he wrote back saying things were a bit complicated, but not to worry about him. He was fine. He probably wouldn’t be going to prison, just have to do a bit of community service. “Travel plans on hold,” he wrote.

Prison. The word made her feel sick.

When Jude got out of hospital she went to his house. The door opened and she felt a sudden rush of panic and excitement at the sight of Liam but then saw it wasn’t Liam. It was someone who looked like Liam but was younger, less formed, less assured. He said that he was Liam’s brother, Dermot. He said that Liam wasn’t there, that nobody was there. Apart from you, Jude said, and he blushed. She asked if Liam was all right and Dermot said he was all right, a bit shaken up.

She looked at this boy—what was he? Fifteen? Sixteen?—and asked him to tell his brother that she wanted to see him. No, she corrected herself: she needed to see him. She added with a shake in her voice that it mustn’t be like this. Please, she said. Please. The words hung in the air between them. Liam’s brother looked for a moment as if he wanted to say something, but instead he simply nodded and she turned and left.

For several days, she sat listlessly in the living room at home, a blanket over her in spite of the heat, her head throbbing and her face turning to mauve and yellow, and watched daytime TV. Friends came to see her, exclaiming over the exciting awfulness of what had happened. She tried to smile and tried to talk. They brought body lotion and brownies they’d baked. Rosie gave her a vast potted plant which she said Jude should take to university with her, but which died within a week.

The crash was like a garish nightmare, remembered in fragments. Liam was like a figure in a fading dream. Sometimes she woke in the early hours and found she was crying.

She collected her results, which were better than predicted. So she would go to Bristol and she would become a doctor. Her life was still on track.

Liam’s life was still not on track. Benny told Jude that his results weren’t great. “He knew they wouldn’t be,” he said, as if that was a comfort. “He’s not that bothered. You know what he’s like.”

What was he like?

For weeks she thought about him all the time and then, bit by bit, it was easier not to think about him.

It had only been three months of her life: three intense, giddying months that had burned a hole in her life.

A few days before she was due to leave for Bristol, she saw him in the street with a girl. They were walking away from her, but she would have recognized him anywhere: the tall figure in tatty jeans; the slightly loping walk as if he couldn’t be bothered to lift his feet; the dark, unruly hair. She started to cry, thick tears sliding down her cheeks that weren’t bruised anymore, into her mouth. But she didn’t try to catch up with him; instead she turned away and walked in the other direction.

She thought that she would never see him again.

One

It had been a routine night shift. Jude had been called down multiple times to the casualty department. Three women in their eighties, one woman in her nineties. Three had fallen. One had been brought in unconscious. Two were severely confused. The wards had been quiet. Not literally quiet. A patient with dementia was calling for her mother over and over again. A male patient woke up repeatedly and shouted something unintelligible in a frenzied tone and went back to sleep and then woke up again and shouted the same fearful words. Jude had talked to the duty nurse about his medication but decided to leave it as it was.

Years before she’d had a placement in an A & E department at a hospital in south London. Friends of hers who had done that job said they enjoyed the adrenaline, the sense of not knowing what you would be doing in five minutes’ time. Jude had never felt that. She didn’t feel much adrenaline in treating the drunken fights, the drunken accidents, the drunken car crashes. You would fix them and send them away. Or you couldn’t fix them and you would send them on to someone who could fix them. And sometimes, horribly, there were the mangled dead or the dying and she never got used to that.

When she chose geriatrics, her friends seemed surprised. Didn’t she find it depressing? No, she didn’t. She did the things other doctors did, making diagnoses, prescribing drugs, ordering tests. But she also felt like a doctor from an earlier age, when sometimes all one could do was to sit with a patient, hold their hand, talk to them, listen to them, attend. Behind everything, the mask of old age, they were as funny and complicated and fucked up as everyone else. Every time she was able to send a patient home, a little better than when they came in, without pain perhaps, able to walk unaided, it felt like a victory.

She looked at her phone. The 94-year-old woman should be having her X-ray. Jude made a mental note to check up on her before she left. Then she got cross with herself and made a real note. Mental notes were useless.

She looked at the board on the wall next to the nurses’ station. Nothing she hadn’t dealt with. She walked across to the nurse behind the desk and asked if anyone had called from A & E.

The nurse shook her head. “They’re terrible down there. They never get back to you. They never return calls.” She tapped her finger on the desk. “But then as soon as they want something.”

“I know,” said Jude. “Tell me about it.”

These shared complaints about the inefficiency and the arrogance of other departments—that was how they bonded.

“Someone called for you,” said the nurse.

“Did you take their number?”

“No, I mean called. Came here. Asked to see you.”

“Which department?”

“I don’t think he’s from the hospital. I said you were working. He said he’d wait downstairs.”

Jude was puzzled. Who would come to her work? In the middle of the night?

“That’s weird. Was it something serious?”

The nurse shook her head.

“I don’t think so. He just said he’d wait. It didn’t seem so urgent. He’s down at the main reception.”

Jude looked up at the clock. Six-thirty. Half an hour left, and this was often the busiest part of her shift. She had to carry out all her usual duties while preparing to hand over to the incoming registrar and then actually handing over. At times it felt that some vengeful God sent in a really tricky case just as she was preparing to leave. The unconscious woman was proving complicated. It was probably a stroke but the woman had a multitude of other conditions and after a confusing and inadequate conversation with the carer, an inconclusive examination and a series of phone calls, Jude looked up and saw it was twenty past seven.

She walked into the little office where she kept her coat and her bag and her keys and, as she always did, she took a moment, letting her thoughts settle. Was there anything she might have missed? She couldn’t think of anything.

She got out her phone, looked at it and blinked. There was a faint aura around it as if it was glowing. Sometimes this was just tiredness but usually it wasn’t. Usually it was the sign that a migraine was coming. It almost never happened during work. It was as if her brain was politely waiting until she did what she had to get done. It would give her enough time to get home and then the headache would start. Sometimes the medication would stop it, if she took it in time. She started to check her messages.

She and Nat had a wedding to prepare. Often she wished they could have simply gone to the register office the two of them, with a couple of friends for witnesses. But Nat had said that it was a great excuse for a party and his mother would never forgive him if her son didn’t have a proper wedding and from there it had grown like a fungus. It had taken months to settle on the right venue and now that that was settled, there was the catering and the flowers and checking the numbers and there was her dress. The gathering migraine sent out a little flash of pain as Jude allowed herself to think about that. She didn’t wear long dresses and shoes with heels; she wore men’s suits from charity shops, jumpsuits, jeans, walking boots and sandals and pumps, anything that made her feel agile, ready for a quick getaway. But Nat wrinkled his nose when she said that and then laughed anxiously, trying to make it into a joke. He wanted her to be a bride; he was anticipating her in soft focus, wearing something pale and feminine as she looked at him with tenderness and said, “I do.”

She felt guilty complaining, even to herself. Nat was doing the hard work. Every so often he would come to her with a choice. Would she like this or that? This food? That wine? This decoration?

Her phone rang and she knew who it was before she even looked. When she worked nights, it was as if she and Nat were in different time zones, even though they were living together. She would get home, exhausted, just as he was leaving for his office in Lambeth, where he worked as a public health project officer. Sometimes she would miss him altogether.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Any dramas?”

“Just the usual.”

The events of the night were already fading, like when she woke after a deep sleep and could feel the memories of her dreams slipping away.

“Shall we meet for breakfast? I can set off in a few minutes.”

“Lovely. Usual place then.”

Normally she left the hospital by the side entrance, but when she reached the ground floor she turned and headed for the main entrance.

In the reception area, there were a number of people around, sitting on benches, clustered in groups, talking, reading, waiting.

“You look different,” said a voice. “But you also look exactly the same.”

Jude had forgotten that someone was waiting to see her.

She turned her head and there he was: he was tall, about her own age, dark tangled hair, bearded, eyes that were almost black. He was dressed in jeans and a battered gray jacket. He had a richly patterned cotton scarf knotted around his neck.

“You’re hard to track down,” he said.

She didn’t recognize him.

And then she recognized him.

“You’re kidding,” she said, a smile forming.

It was Liam.

Two

“You’re a doctor.” And Liam smiled that soft slow smile that brought the past back so vividly that Jude felt it in her stomach.

She looked around, as if she needed to reassure herself that this was true, that she really was a doctor and this really was a hospital.

“Yes, yes, I am. Just about.”

“It was what you always wanted.”

It was impossible to exchange small talk with this ghost who had come out of her past.

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Yes, I know,” he said slowly. “I mean, I don’t exactly know. But it was complicated.”

She looked at him and couldn’t look away. She didn’t know what to say.

“Can we get a coffee?” he said. “Unless you’ve got somewhere to go.”

“I’m on my way home. It’s my bedtime.”

“Maybe decaffeinated coffee, then.”

She shook her head and smiled. “Nothing keeps me awake after a night shift. I’d like to have coffee.”

They left the hospital and crossed Whitechapel Road and Jude led them up Brick Lane to a small café that had recently opened, all soft chairs and rough wooden tables. She suddenly remembered Nat, about to set off to the hospital to meet her—she hoped he hadn’t left by now. She took out her phone and texted him: Sorry! Emergency. Can’t do breakfast. See you this evening. xxxx

They faced each other across the table. Jude felt giddy with the strangeness of it.

“Do you want breakfast?” she asked. “Eggs or something?”

He shook his head and ordered coffee for them both. Her hunger had vanished. As the young woman behind the counter prepared the drinks, Jude and Liam simply looked at each other without speaking. The silence didn’t feel strange or embarrassing.

When the coffee arrived, Jude took a packet from her pocket, extracted two pink pills and swallowed them with a gulp of coffee. Liam looked quizzical.

“I’ve got a migraine coming on. This sometimes stops it.”

“You never used to get them, did you?”

“No. They began shortly after . . .” She stopped. After the crash; that was when they had begun. “I get them a lot. Colors start looking strange and then I go to bed for a few hours.”

“Anyway, congratulations,” said Liam, holding up his coffee cup.

“What about?”

“About your upcoming marriage.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Someone told me. When I was tracking you down.”

Jude laughed. “Tracking me down? What are you, a private detective?”

“Just an old friend.” He sipped his coffee. “A doctor, like you always said you’d be. You did it.”

Jude’s throat felt tight. She had thought she would never see Liam again, and yet over the years she had imagined meeting him: by chance, on a bus, on a street, in a crowd of people, walking in the Clee Hills by her parents’ house in Shropshire. Because there were things that she needed to say, had needed to say for over a decade, although now the moment had actually come she didn’t know how to start saying them.

“I should be the one tracking you down,” she said, haltingly. “I know that you . . .” She stopped. “I’ve never forgotten.”

He frowned, as if he was considering this. When he spoke, he didn’t seem angry or even sad. Just reflective, as if he were talking about someone else.

“I made some choices,” he said. “Not always good choices. You probably heard about how I messed up my exams, on top of everything else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. It happens. And things are better now, on the whole. I’ve got some stuff to sort out but I’m fine.” He paused a beat and then smiled—not ironically or one of his knowing half-smiles, ...