The First Cut: A compulsive psychological thriller with a shock twist that will leave you gasping

by Ali Knight

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

'Plunges an ordinary married couple into a steadily growing horror of past lies, fresh betrayals and murderous revenge' LISA GARDNER.

A gripping drama perfect for fans of Behind Closed Doors and While My Eyes Were Closed.

Nicky's had more than her share of heartache. Her best friend Grace was brutally murdered five years ago. Now Nicky is married to Grace's widower, Greg.

Greg is often away from home, leaving Nicky isolated. So when she meets Adam, an attractive young stranger, an innocent flirtation seems like it'll help her forget the past...and distract her from her loneliness.

Except what starts as fun soon turns into a nightmare, and it's not long before dark secrets are revealed. What happened to Grace, all those years ago? And how well does Nicky really know the man she married?

Nicky's about to discover that the scars of love can last a lifetime...

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Nicky gave a squeal as the lounger by the pool tipped a fraction too far and she landed on her back, feet pointing at the stars.

‘Look out, red-wine tummy wash,’ Grace giggled from the seat next to her.

Nicky groaned and reached out for a towel to wipe the mess off her T-shirt. ‘Urgh, it’s everywhere.’

‘Where’s the bottle opener?’ Sam called from the patio behind them. ‘Shit!’

They heard vigorous swearing as something smashed on the paving stones.

‘We’ll never get our deposit back on this place,’ Nicky said, staring up at the large house, its stone pale grey against the inky sky beyond.

‘Who cares?’ Grace murmured. ‘We’ve had such a laugh.’

Nicky smiled to herself. Grace was right, as always. It was one of the most fun holidays any of them could remember. Grace had found the house on the internet and a group of her friends had chipped in to hire it for her thirtieth-birthday celebration. Set in winding roads a short distance from Oxford it had a pool, a pizza oven, a ping-pong table and even a lake. It was much grander than they had expected and their lives seemed shinier and more exciting now they were here. Their August week was also a heatwave, which at times made them think they were in an enchanted foreign land where the sun always shone and evenings were always this balmy.

Grace sighed. ‘It’s such a shame Greg isn’t here. Bloody cameramen.’ Nicky caught her friend’s eye and they giggled again. Grace was the first one of their crowd to get married. Nicky had resigned herself to the fact that this would mean she would see less of Grace, but Greg’s work took him away a lot and if anything she saw Grace more now than when they had been dating.

‘God, I’m pissed,’ Nicky declared loudly, having to make a big effort to raise her voice as she heard screams from behind the bushes across the lawn. Someone was spraying the hose.

‘I need some water,’ Grace said, standing and stretching. She strolled to the patio where they had eaten earlier that evening, her black dress billowing out behind her.

‘Can you get me my smokes? They’re on the table.’ Grace turned and smiled, her blonde hair turned almost white from the sun and the chlorine. Greg was lucky to have her, Nicky thought. But then she would think that about any man. Grace was her oldest and closest friend. They were the same age, the same year at school, but Grace had always played the role of older sister, the sensible one, the smarter one. The successful and beautiful one, come to that. Nicky absent-mindedly fluffed her short hair into spikes. She didn’t mind. She heard Grace and Sam’s low voices. Water. That was Grace all over: a glass of water for every glass of wine. She was cautious and moderate, so unlike herself. She burped and watched a lilo drift in a slow circle in the pool. She’d go for a swim once she’d had her millionth fag of the day—

Her thoughts were obliterated by a shrieking car alarm from the front of the house.

Sam threw her hands in the air in a ‘that curse of a bloody car’ gesture.

‘Whose is that?’ Grace shouted.

‘Probably mine,’ Sam groaned. ‘God, where are my keys?’ She looked around half-heartedly in the gloom. The noise built in intensity, ricocheting off buildings and walkways. Nicky saw bodies running through the garden in the dark towards the gravel drive on the other side of the house, disconnected shouts and questions almost drowned by the noise. ‘My keys, my bloody keys . . .’

‘Try the kitchen,’ Grace said. ‘I think I left my bag on the lawn.’ She walked off beyond the pool.

Nicky stayed put. She’d got a lift to the house with Grace so there was nothing she could do. But a few moments later she stood, swaying uncertainly. That damned alarm was bringing on a headache. Another deeper siren joined the first, like a demented electronic chorus. She walked over to the table and found her fags, but there was no lighter. The spilled drink on her T-shirt was sticky; she felt hot and bothered. She looked back at the pool, the underwater lighting making the water glow a sickly green. A much better idea came to her. She walked across the lawn and crouched down by the row of thick bushes between the lake and the house and enjoyed a wee in the great outdoors – well, a wee in the manicured Cotswolds. She carried on to the lake. The alarms faded a little. She stood on the small wooden jetty and stripped down to her bikini, then sat and let her legs swish lazily in the coldness. It was much darker out here; the lights from the house and garden didn’t encroach this far. The water slap-slapped against the wood as she lowered herself into the inky water, too deep to feel the bottom, and struck out for the middle.

Nicky loved swimming at night. She liked the feel of water caressing her skin, the way sounds penetrated further and echoed longer. A muddy lake floor didn’t make her cringe, like it did to Sam; she enjoyed the squishy sludge between her toes. She dunked her head and swam a few breaststrokes below the surface, then emerged and lay on her back, kicking gently.

The car alarm stopped and silence dropped around her like a heavy curtain. She heard a splash.

‘Hello?’ she called out instinctively, but no one answered.

It was too dark to see the edge of the lake and it took her a few strokes to swim close enough to make out the blurry jetty and the bank. ‘Are you in? It’s lovely,’ she called.

There was no answer.

Tossers, she muttered to herself, sober now and ready to get out. Damn, she didn’t have a towel. Grace would have said that was just like her, starting something without being fully prepared. It would be a cold walk back to the house. She swam for the bank and saw an indistinct, dark shape floating in the water. For an instant she thought it was a tree trunk, and then she smiled. It was the giant plastic crocodile from the pool. Perfect. She reached out to jump on it and wrestle like she was an Aussie adventurer lost in Arnhem Land, taking on the fourteen-footer in a battle of life and death . . .

It was too solid. And it rolled.

Nicky’s weight took her and the object under the water. She was caught sharply unawares and scrambled to get back to the surface. She began to struggle as fronds of weed became entangled round her neck, touching her arms and face with tickly, unnerving edges. She broke the surface with a strangled groan as the object pitched this way and that with her splashes. It was so dark she couldn’t see the thing that still floated in front of her. A terrible panic took hold. The car alarm started again, wailing with renewed force. She scolded herself for getting the jitters and forced herself to put out her hand and make the shape real, understandable and unthreatening. The fronds brushed her hand again.

This time she knew for sure it was hair.

Nicky screamed as the moon came out from behind a cloud and bathed everything in a pale shimmer. The hair was long; the body floating face down in the lake wore a black dress. She screamed much louder, half sinking with the effort as she was unable to touch the bottom. She grabbed Grace and tried to turn her, shouting incoherently. She knew she was in a desperate race against time, that every second in the water pulled Grace further away from life. With ungainly, struggling strokes she fought for the bank and finally managed to touch the soft lake floor. With the extra traction she dragged Grace, still face down, towards the edge, desperate to get her the right way up, to stop her drowning, but Grace’s unconscious body made her too heavy.

Nicky shouted to be saved, hollering for the big boys in the house to come and help her. She flailed in the reeds, the car alarm shrieking unhindered, blocking the sound of her own desperate cries. She got both feet on the bank then put her hands under her best friend’s armpits and little by little managed to pull her from the lake, Grace half on top of her like a drunken lover. Nicky dragged her a few feet along the grass to where it was flat and dropped to her knees, turning Grace’s body by yanking at her shoulders. Her white hair was a dark halo round her head, the moonlight washing colours black or midnight blue. Only the wedding ring on her lifeless finger glinted dully. Nicky bent down, ready and pumped to give her the kiss of life, but the moon illuminated only the black stain of Grace’s blood, spreading relentlessly across her chest. Her neck had been slashed from ear to ear.

Sam had finally found her keys in her upturned bag next to the cooker and had tiptoed in a painful, bare-footed hobble across the spiky gravel of the drive. After much swearing and jabbing at her key fob she had got her car to stop making that insane racket, and had turned to go back to the pool and her bottle of beer. The noise that surrounded her, carrying over the rural silence, almost froze her blood. The screams couldn’t be coming from a human being. No one could possibly be suffering that much.

Nicky tried to ignore the man poking her in the arse with his bag as she watched the woman in front try to stuff a bag the size of a fridge in the overhead locker. Why were they called lockers anyway? They fell open if you hit turbulence, and – with the pelting rain outside that they were still trying to shake off after the ungainly sprint across the tarmac – their trip home was bound to feature a lot of that. She hoped she wasn’t the one to get bonked on the head by the leg of jamon bought in a fit of love for all things Spanish at duty-free.

‘Move along the aisle and take your seats, please,’ said a stewardess with an accent it was impossible to place – Moldova? Latvia? The man behind huffed as Nicky waited for the woman to finish pushing and shoving. They didn’t move an inch. The plane was filling up from the back door. She saw passengers surging forward, filling the window seats she wanted for herself. Finally the woman turned and did the squat-lean-hunch manoeuvre to get out of the way and Nicky slid past, eyes locked on the row where she would perform her own personal contortions to get into the doll-sized seats. Budget air travel was a blast.

‘You can’t sit here,’ a stern woman in the Day-Glo uniform of the airline said, her blood-red nails jabbing at the row Nicky had her eyes on.

‘Wing exit?’ Nicky asked.

‘You can’t sit here,’ was the reply. Nicky wasn’t going to argue. She wondered if the stewardess was a robot, programmed with only three sentences: ‘You can’t sit here’, which she’d already heard, ‘No’, and ‘That’ll be ten euros’ (without a please). She moved down the plane, her case bumping on the headrests, and began to stuff her own bag, the size of a cooker, into the locker.

‘Here, let me help.’ A broad and hairless hand reached out for the case and gave it a confident shove. The hand and hers managed to squeeze it into the unforgiving space and slam the door shut on it, like it was a tawdry secret they wanted to forget. ‘After you,’ she heard the man say to her neck. Nicky didn’t hesitate. She shuffled towards the window without even looking round. To hell with manners, it was everyone for themselves in here. She heard the squeak of the plastic beneath her thighs.

‘Thanks.’ She said it to the graphic of a woman crawling along a smoke-filled cabin, which was stuck to the seat back in front of her. They’d taken away the pocket that used to contain a dog-eared magazine, the sick bags and a piece of crinkly orange peel. She glanced over at the man, now sitting in the aisle seat.

‘We have a full flight today, so please use all available seats,’ the tannoy announced. The man looked over sheepishly and Nicky got her first proper look at him as he moved to the next seat along. She fought the desire to grin stupidly. Life always did that to her: stunned her with its ability to spring surprises when she was least expecting them – not all of them pleasant. The man sliding over the armrest was gorgeous, just peachy. He had dark hair that gleamed like a seal’s pelt, a strong profile and brown eyes that with one glance managed to suggest fun and a bit of danger. And he was young. Nicky saw a small knitted braid of something round his wrist. She had a sudden flashback to a holiday in Santorini with Grace – another lifetime ago – and dropped his age to the early twenties.

‘Sorry.’ He shrugged and fidgeted, glancing at her with one dark eyebrow raised. He seemed absurdly big for the seat, his shoulders pushing over the boundary into her space.

‘I think the owner of this airline is a dwarf.’

He turned to her fully now. ‘He’s keen to punish anyone over five foot six.’

‘Too selective. Anyone with a stomach. Have you tried the food?’

‘Of course. Cost me ten euros for a burger.’

Nicky tried to remember when she had last seen a smile that good. Probably not since she’d been married. Stop it, she told herself sternly. Naughty Wife was rearing her head. She watched him punching the recline button on his seat.

‘They’ll be over in a flash to tell you to sit upright.’

He leaned towards her conspiratorially. ‘I like breaking the rules.’

She felt a flutter of excitement across her stomach. He was forward and daring and Nicky found herself hoping that a weekend trying to breathe life into a dying friendship could be redeemed with a little flirtation on the home leg. After all, where was the harm?

He shuffled about trying to locate the seatbelt ends. ‘I think this bit’s yours.’ He held up the strap with the metal buckle for her. His gesture felt loaded with possibilities. A grin formed on her face and started to meander across her cheeks.

A forceful gust of rain splattered the plastic window and they both stared out for a moment. ‘Typical. I came to Spain in the worst rainstorm for two years.’

He blew air out of his cheeks. ‘Have a good time?’

Nicky actually considered this question. ‘No.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You know, I really didn’t have a very good time.’ Those eyebrows shot towards his hairline again. ‘Sorry, sorry, I—’

He interrupted her. ‘Forgive me, I’m Adam.’ He held out his hand and she shook it.

‘Nicky. What should I forgive you for?’

‘Because I’m asking you questions and you don’t even know my name.’ Adam was distracted by a man slumping down in the aisle seat. They all shifted and rearranged themselves. Adam’s elbow slid over to her side of the armrest. ‘So, what went wrong in Spain?’

She wondered where he’d acquired his manners and his confidence. Private school, maybe even boarding school? She reminded herself that he wasn’t long out of whichever institution it was.

She waved her hand dismissively, thinking: don’t complain, don’t carp about life. Stay positive. After all, every day is precious. She’d learned that the hardest way possible. She had a running total in her head of the number of days she’d lived without Grace. Weeks would sometimes go by and she wouldn’t think about that total, but she could always recall it. When would that internal counter stop marking the death of her best friend?

Nicky fiddled with her shoulder-length hair. ‘I guess I realize that I’ve grown apart from someone I used to be close to.’ The flight attendant slammed shut the plane door and pinned an orange strip of material across the window. Nicky was unsure how that tiny piece of material would help in an emergency. She saw Adam was watching her intently with those dark eyes. He seemed to be really interested in what she was saying. Nicky wondered with a jolt of loss whether she used to be like this all those years ago – curious, excited by the new.

‘Go on.’

Nicky took a deep breath. ‘I went to see an old friend for the weekend. She’s married with two kids and living in Bilbao. We had absolutely nothing in common any more. Her interests were all about her kids; mine lie elsewhere. And that was kind of that.’ How simple our complex stories can be made to sound, Nicky thought. Sam. The legendary party girl – until that night. Their relationship had not survived Grace’s death. That tragedy had changed them all in different ways. Sam had run away to Spain, married a doctor, become teetotal. Nicky envied Sam’s ability to escape her past, to create a new identity. She would never be able to do the same. Grace was the sister she never had. Their relationship had withstood the teenage years, separation at university, a string of boyfriends and periods of work overseas, yet had still held strong, through Grace’s marriage to Greg and beyond. They had been blessed with an unshakeable bond and they had blithely assumed it would go on like that for ever, right up to the same old people’s home when their husbands were long dead and their children grown, still gossiping, still laughing, still friends.

How wrong they were.

Grace had never seen past her thirtieth birthday. Nicky felt the familiar rage build in her chest and pushed her knees against the plastic seat in front. She refocused on Adam, who was looking at her, waiting. ‘What were you doing in Spain?’

‘Seeing my friend Davide.’ He paused. ‘So what do you do for a living, Nicky?’

‘I write obituaries, for my sins.’

‘Wow! That sounds really great!’

Nicky couldn’t resist a smile. He was so young! So enthusiastic! So unlike the jaded and cynical person she had become, her heart crusted over with grief and questions that would never be answered. ‘I like it, which is a bit of luck since I do it every day. I’d say having done what you liked is pretty high up the list of people’s wishes at the end.’

Adam leaned back into his seat. ‘It’s funny how people only sum up their life at the end of it. How they unburden themselves as it all draws to a close. My aunt is dying, basically.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She meant it. She knew she didn’t have a monopoly on suffering or grief, though it sometimes felt like it.

He waved her sympathy away. ‘She’s led an interesting life. Maybe that’s all we can ask for. But when she’s lucid she spends her time looking back and she seems so full of regret. The past haunts her.’ He shook his head. ‘I think it’s important throughout your life to close the chapters as you go.’

Nicky considered this. It would be a mistake to think that just because he was young he was naive. She put her hands in her lap and looked out of the window. Closure. Such an American word, but, like a lot of Yank ideas, catching. Her wedding ring was cold against her fingers. A lack of closure on Grace’s death was causing big problems in her marriage.

She turned back to him as they taxied to the end of the runway. ‘So, what do you do?’

‘Oh . . .’ He tailed off. ‘You know how it is with young people today. Not in education, not in training.’ He flashed her a devastating smile. ‘I went to circus school for a while. Learned to fly trapeze, juggle, that kind of thing.’

Their conversation was interrupted as the roar began underneath them and they were sucked back against the seats. Nicky found take-off a thrill.

She heard Adam mutter a low ‘Christ.’

She saw his hands were white with the effort of gripping the armrests. ‘Flying not your thing?’

‘No, no, it’s not that. I’m claustrophobic. I don’t like crowds. Being all thrust up against other people.’ He shuddered a little.

The plane eased to horizontal as they left the ground.

‘Take-off inevitably makes me think of what it would be like to crash-land with all this lot right around you.’ He cocked his head to indicate front and back. He gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘At least if you die you know you don’t go alone.’

‘Shoulder to shoulder with your fellow passengers.’ He groaned.

‘They say it’s the safest form of travel.’

‘That doesn’t help, I’m afraid. My fear’s not rational. Like so much of what we do, it’s irrational. I wonder if it’s the loss of control I can’t stand. Maybe I’m a control freak.’

‘Your fate in someone else’s hands.’

He cocked the eyebrow at her again. ‘Indeed. Someone who’s been on a three-day bender with five Thai prostitutes and chooses landing time to catch up on his lost sleep.’

‘You know, I once read an article about plane crashes, which claimed that the reason most people die is that they assume they’re going to die on impact, and so they don’t make the effort to get out. They passively await their fate.’ He was nodding, looking at her intently as she spoke. He had dark hair that sat up in a cute tuft at the front and he looked like he was listening to a private joke. ‘The ones who fight, survive.’

‘Would you be like that?’

‘You bet! I think at that moment all my worst character traits would come out. I’d be climbing over people to escape, chewing off limbs.’

Now it was his turn to laugh. She saw more of those perfect teeth and his eyes that crinkled up at the corners. The lines disappeared the moment he stopped, his skin with its lovely texture springing back to its correct shape instantly.

‘Remind me not to be in front of you come the first day of the sales.’

Good-looking, and fun too. Life is for living, Nicky thought. God, would she fight, fight for every day that was afforded her. Had Grace fought? She shuddered. They told her the death was quick, that she was dead before she hit the water, but there was still so much they didn’t know. Nicky would be trapped for ever in the purgatory of what ifs and why.

‘You can rest assured I’d get to the widescreen TV before you.’ She was flirting and she didn’t care.

Adam threw his hands out in a gallant gesture of defeat. ‘It’s all yours, Nicky, all yours.’ He paused. ‘At least you’re honest. I like to think I’d be the hero, running across the tarmac with twin babies under my arms, saving them from the big explosion behind me.’ He narrowed his eyes and looked at her and she felt the shards of physical attraction pierce her. ‘The gap between our hopes for ourselves and the reality is pretty big. We’d all love to be a hero, but in the end we probably just save ourselves.’ Adam leaned towards her. ‘Gosh, this is a DMC.’

‘A what?’

‘A deep and meaningful conversation.’ Nicky laughed. ‘You know something else? They say that twenty per cent of all couples meet on a plane.’

Nicky gave him a look of mock horror. ‘That is not true.’

Adam continued. ‘Sitting side by side for hours, far from home. You can think about the big things in life – and have a drink.’ They both looked towards the galley where an air steward was pulling out the drinks trolley. ‘Beer or wine? Plain or salted peanuts?’

When they landed the sun was shining, the robot from Bulgaria was smiling and no one shoved her. She floated down the plane steps on warm good feeling and walked across the tarmac with a swagger. Luton’s beautiful, she thought. The customs channel was as far as they could go together, because beyond that she was headed for the car park and he to the train. She kept their goodbye light as they formally shook hands before she continued across the concourse. She couldn’t resist turning round and there he was, staring after her as she’d suspected he would be. They smiled at each other and for a glorious moment she saw her younger, carefree self burst through the shell she had erected around herself in the aftermath of Grace’s murder. Thank you, Adam, she said to herself.

I was always intrigued when a real bobby-dazzler walked into my office and asked for my help. It proved yet again that no one is immune from betrayal – no matter how rich, famous or physically blessed, every walk of life needed my services: a husband watcher. I was a snooper, a sex detective, a marriage doctor, a destroyer of dreams, a killer of happy-ever-afters. I had spent my career down amongst the grubby pain of love betrayed, of lies exposed. Beauty wouldn’t save you, money couldn’t insulate you from it. The woman in the doorway proved just that. She smelled rich and she was a babe.

‘Don’t be shy, come on in,’ I said. I was in a good mood, joshing and joking with Simona, the studious young Italian who worked for me.

The woman in the doorway was blonde, casually dressed, hard to put an age to but somewhere just north of forty, and scared as hell.

She stepped uncertainly into the room and Simona jumped up and closed the door behind her. ‘Please, take a seat,’ she said, holding out her hand towards the sofa.

The woman declined our offer of coffee or tea so Simona gave her a glass of water.

The woman perched on the edge of a small sofa near the window, her ankles and knees clamped together in a pose that the royals used to guarantee no knicker shots. Her blue eyes roamed over the three desks in the room, mine, Simona’s and Rory’s, over my retro filing cabinet and the pot plants and the black fan that only gets used on the three hottest days of the year. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed by my stripped wood floors or my linen blinds, but I was. I loved my office and I loved my job. ‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

There was silence for a moment. The woman looked at her hands helplessly, twiddled with her wedding ring and gripped her bag. ‘God, this is so embarrassing.’ She tailed off, her voice was quiet. She conjured up English country gardens and mellow stone walls, scones and cricket matches and all that Olde English stuff.

Simona gave me a conspiratorial look and made herself scarce by heading into the small kitchen off the main room to make fresh coffee and pull out some little Italian cakes that always oiled the wheels when a client came in. ‘OK, let’s start at the beginning,’ I said. ‘I’m Maggie Malone, I run the Blue and White agency, and I’m going to find out if he’s cheating on you. I’ll tell you who he’s cheating with, where and how, I’ll show you the video, pi. . .