The July Girls

by Phoebe Locke

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

Each year, on the same night in July, a woman is taken from the streets of London. Gone without a trace; snatched by a killer who moves through the city like a ghost.

Lex's wife is missing. She left for work on the morning of the July 7th bombings, and no one's seen her since. But was Olivia really among the attack victims? Or did she meet a different fate, like three other women on July nights before?

Addie has a secret. On the night of the bombings, her dad came home covered in blood. At first she thought he was hurt in the attacks — and then her big sister Jessie found a woman's purse hidden in his room. The name on the driver's license? Olivia.

Jessie says she wants to help. That's why she's taken a job as a nanny at Lex's house, looking after his baby. But she's keeping quiet about what she and Addie know. And she's getting a little too comfortable living Olivia's life....

Release date: June 27, 2019

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 352

Sample

 

Praise for The Tall Man

‘This summer’s scariest thriller … an addictive blend of psychological suspense and spine-tingling chills’ – Stylist

‘So chilling I had to put it aside for the few days I was home alone … Genuinely scary, The Tall Man carefully walks the line between psychosis and the paranormal, never quite letting the reader know it’s truth’ Alison Floor, Observer

‘If you read just one psychological suspense novel this year, make it Phoebe Locke’sThe Tall Man . . . a brilliant summer thriller’ – Culturefly

‘A must-read summer chiller’ – Daily Express

‘A gripping blend of dark psychological suspense and spine-tingling chills’ – iNews

‘Outstanding. A chilling, relentless and needle-sharp thriller that will stay with you long after you reach the final page’ – Cara Hunter, author of Close to Home

‘From the second I opened this book, I wanted to know the truth about the Tall Man. . . I couldn’t put the book down until I knew. An unsettling, original page-turner you’ll still be thinking about long after you reach the end’ – Amy Engel, author of The Roanoke Girls

‘Do not use this book as a cure for insomnia. It turns shadows into threats. A brilliantly creepy, twisty story’ – Julia Crouch, author of Her Husband’s Lover

‘Brilliant, chilling and compelling. I can’t stop thinking about it!’ – Karen Hamilton, author of The Perfect Girlfriend

‘Mesmerizing and terrifying – The Tall Man more than lives up to the hype’ – Chris Whitaker, author of Tall Oaks

Genuinely scary contemporary novels are rare but Phoebe Locke’s debut – a taut, complex but brilliantly constructed supernatural thriller – is not one to be read alone at bedtime ... The writing is deft, the twists unpredictable, the tension unrelenting. Recommended – Metro

If you read just one psychological suspense novel this year, make it Phoebe Locke’s The Tall Man. A creepy legend, the disappearance of a young mother and a teenage girl acquitted of murder... think that sounds like a recipe for a brilliant summer thriller? You’re right. Simmering with eerie mystery and dark tension, it’ll have you checking under the bed before you turn off the light – Culturefly

Chilling – Bella

What a creepy and compelling debut – fantastic! – Fiona Cummins, author of Rattle

So creepy and chilling. Loved it! – Laura Marshall, author of Friend Request

Absolutely brilliant – bravo – Cass Green, author of In a Cottage in a Wood

Spine-tingling … It cleverly veers between that which is real and imagined, leaving the reader to make their own mind up as to who – or what – is really behind this creepy tale of psychological suspense – Susan Swarbrick, The Herald

A compelling story that is original, cleverly plotted and brilliantly told. I was totally hooked – Rachel Abbott, author of And So It Begins

I absolutely smashed through this book. Terrifying and incredibly well written. If you’re in the mood for something truly unnerving, you HAVE to read this! – Darren O’Sullivan, author of Our Little Secret

Loved this book. Utterly creepy and atmospheric – Colette McBeth, author of The Life I Left Behind

I could not put this book down. A deliciously dark, twisty, absorbing plot which masterfully blurs the line between imagination and reality, this will stay with you long after you’ve read the final page – Lucy Foley, author of The Invitation

A really superior, creepy, insidious thriller. I loved it – Hannah Beckerman, author of The Dead Wife’s Handbook

This was so good, and the twists utterly brilliant! Loved it! – Amanda Reynolds, author of Close to Me

Twisty, creepy and very, very unsettling, it was worth every minute of lost sleep! – Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me

Loved it! – Jane Fallon, author of Getting Rid of Matthew

The summer I turned ten, everything started to change. We still lived in the same flat we’d always lived in, second floor of a block on Brixton Road, where I could sit out on the concrete balcony and watch the top decks of buses sail by. But that year it started to feel less like home. The stack of bills with their red letters, left in a pile on the scarred kitchen table. The fridge sad and empty, humps of ice sliding down its back wall. Dad out at work when I went to school and when I came back and all night too, waiting outside hospitals, bars, airports. Anywhere he thought someone might be just desperate enough not to care about the cracked wing mirror, the croaky engine. The Magic Tree hanging from the rearview mirror where his licence should have been.

Jessie had started working more too. The wig shop was in one of the railway arches, trains thudding overhead, and Jessie had been helping out there since she was fifteen. She used to take me sometimes, if Laine was in a good mood, and they’d let me sit out the back, running my fingers through the boxes of acrylic hair until they crackled with static. It was Jessie’s job to unpack them from their plastic, to brush them out ready for Laine to display; white polystyrene heads lined up in the window and on the walls for the full wigs, glass cabinets and racks for the weaves. Laine had a soft spot for me. She saved old magazines for me and would sit and twist my hair into complicated styles, her long nails tickling my scalp. But she loved my sister more. It took me a long time to look back and realise that that shop was too small for two people to work in there as much as they did; that even before that summer, it was only ever us in there, never any customers. Laine didn’t need Jessie there, probably couldn’t afford to pay her most weeks, but she still kept handing her those little brown envelopes each Friday. She loved us, or she felt sorry for us – I’ve always found it hard to tell the difference.

Often, after they’d closed up the shop, Laine would produce drinks from the locked cupboard under the till, and she and Jessie would sit on the display cabinet, legs swinging, and tell me to try on wig after wig. I’d get braver after a while, parading back and forth in Laine’s heels, while they doubled over laughing. Laine was the only person, apart from Jessie, who could bring that out in me. But even that couldn’t stay the same.

Her brother showed up one Saturday with a cardboard box, damp down one side, which he dumped onto the counter. I was sitting on my little stool in the tiny back room, but with the door propped open, and Laine was out getting lunch. It was Jessie behind the till, and I watched the way her hands went immediately to her hair, the way she pressed against the counter, one foot cocked onto its toes.

His hair was darker than Laine’s dyed caramel; tight black curls which were shorn short all over. He was wearing mirrored aviators, blue and yellow tinged, and he tilted his head forward so they slid down his chiselled face and he could look properly at my sister.

‘Hey,’ he said, his voice smooth and low. ‘Laine in?’

Jessie shrugged, her expression cool. But from where I was sitting I could see her foot tapping anxiously behind her. Her hair was growing out; mousy at the roots, yellowish white along the length, but Laine had been playing with her new straighteners and so it was shiny and smooth, no mean feat.

‘Gone out,’ she said, and then, to the box, ‘What’s that?’

‘Product,’ he said, and he took his sunglasses off. ‘You’re Jess, yeah?’

‘Jessie.’ I was glad she said that; glad she corrected him. Dad called her Jess all the time, Jessica when he was teasing or drunk or annoyed, and she never corrected him. I didn’t like that. It was Dad who had chosen Jessica for her; Mum who had made it Jessie.

‘Right. Jessie. I’m Laine’s baby brother.’

‘Elliott. I know.’

He looked at her differently then, a little smile starting at the corners of his mouth. It often surprised people, the hardness of her shell. ‘Nobody calls me that,’ he said.

‘Laine does.’

Laine came in then, before he could reply, an open can of Coke in one hand, a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’ And Jessie moved swiftly away, like someone almost caught doing something wrong. She started straightening the heads behind the till, brushing the hair, and so it was only me who saw the way he kept looking past Laine as she talked, his eyes drifting to Jessie.

The first boyfriend I remember of hers had broken up with her a couple of months before. We’d been walking home after she’d picked me up from school, and she’d got the text. I can still remember the exact way she looked then; the cropped yellow T-shirt, the toned line of her belly. The purple Air Maxes, their laces fluorescent yellow. The knot of her hair, the darker roots and the fluff of the ends fanning out from underneath. Her nose ring was new and didn’t last long after that, and the third tiny hoop in her left ear was red-rimmed and crusted. She cared for me religiously; for herself, little. I remember the way she shrugged, shoved her phone back in her pocket. The way, a couple of minutes later, she hissed Twat under her breath.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, and she squeezed my hand once and let it go.

‘The only person you can trust is me, okay?’ she said. ‘Me and you, that’s it.’

Dellar – and he was right; the only person who ever called him by his first name was Laine – came back a couple of days later. We were outside, Laine locking up the shutters, a stray acrylic red thread still stuck in my hair, a blue one sliding down the front of my school shirt. Jessie was laughing, her hand clawed up in front of her face as she told us a story about some guy she’d turned down the night before. It was weird, this aspect of our relationship: she was my mother figure but she was still seventeen. She was seventeen and she went out at night after she said goodnight to me and woke up in a single bed three feet from my single bed, make-up smeared across her face and her clothes abandoned in a trail from the door to her pillow. She was seventeen but she still woke me up for school, cooked me breakfasts – ‘A hot breakfast in your belly makes you always ready,’ she’d say, drumming up an omelette from the stray egg, the last piece of ham, and it’d be a year or two before she started adding, ‘That’s what Mum used to say, anyway.’

As Laine clicked the final padlock shut, we heard footsteps behind us, their sound a slow, assertive beat against the distant chug of a train somewhere down the track above, the clatter of shutters from the butcher and the fishmonger across the street. We turned and watched him come towards us, the early summer sun sliding behind the arches, Atlantic Road its most attractive in subdued orange. His sunglasses were back on his face, the three of us framed small and blue-tinted in both lenses.

‘Hey,’ Jessie said, when he got close, and he just grinned at her.

Laine tutted at him, but then she took my hand. ‘I’ll take Addie home.’

As we walked, I snuck glances up at Laine. In profile, her face was softer, less intimidating. She was quieter, just the two of us, away from the shop.

‘Does your brother like Jessie?’ I asked, and she looked down at me.

‘Honey,’ she said. ‘Elliott likes everybody.’

We crossed the road and cut into the estate. ‘She likes him,’ I said, testing, and when she didn’t reply, my heart sank.

After that, Dellar was always with us; he’d be there with Jessie, waiting for me after school. He was there, hanging around the shop while I sat in the store room, too shy to come out. And he was there, late at night or early in the morning, the blue hours in between, when I stirred in my sleep and saw not one but two bodies in Jessie’s single bed. His smell, sharp and clean and completely different to our father’s, soaked into everything.

Surprisingly, Dad didn’t seem to mind – or didn’t notice – him being around. Those months in my memory barely feature Dad, though. He’d always worked nights and weird hours but these were longer, stranger shifts, where he’d work for two days straight, come home and sleep for a few hours while Jessie, Dellar and I watched Eggheads and Come Dine with Me, and then he’d be out of the door again. I knew then, in a vague sort of way filtered through Jessie and overheard conversations, that he’d had to return his black cab, that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble at work. I knew that he’d bought a car from a mate down the pub, a navy Ford Mondeo with soft grey seats and a thick smell of cigarettes which three and then four and then five Magic Trees couldn’t shift. I know now that he was driving it as a minicab illegally. I knew then that all of those bills that sat unopened were lettered in red, and that he only came home for those two or three hours of sleep when he started dropping off at the wheel. But I also knew – had always known – that we weren’t supposed to talk about money around Dad. It was better, really, if we didn’t talk at all. Safer.

I should have been annoyed that I was suddenly having to share Jessie’s attention. For so long, I’d been all she cared about. What I wore, what I ate, whether or not I was working hard at school. She was the person who warmed a towel on the one radiator in the flat which gave off a decent heat, while I sat in the bath she’d run for me. She was the person who tucked me in, who told me she loved me just as I was floating into sleep. And then there was Dellar. There between us on the sofa, there beside me at the dinner table – his eyes firmly fixed on Jessie as she stirred a pan on the hob. There, waiting patiently in the lounge while she said goodnight to me and turned off my light, before going out into the dark with him.

But he made it difficult to be jealous. He talked about the things I cared about, tipped off by Jessie: dinosaurs; space; mermaids; the various ways to eat a potato waffle. One night while Jessie was in our bedroom, drying the hair she’d just bleached for the first time in weeks, Dellar turned to me during an advert break. ‘What you reading?’

I’d been lying in my dad’s chair, legs hanging over the arm with the book propped in my lap. ‘It’s called Charlotte’s Web,’ I said, showing him the yellowed, illustrated cover. It was one of a stack Jessie had dug out of a cupboard for me a few years before, each of them with our mother’s name pencilled in careful letters on the inside cover: Elizabeth Addison. It was the fourth or fifth time I’d read it and mostly I just liked having it around.

‘Oh I know that one,’ he said, surprising me. ‘That was Laine’s favourite when we were little kids. With the spider, right? And the pig?’

‘Yes!’ I sat up straighter and looked at him properly, the book hugged close to me. ‘It’s so good. But it’s really sad at the end.’

‘Yeah, I remember.’ He laughed. ‘Our mum used to cry when she had to read that bit to us.’

I was interested in this, in imagining him tucked up in bed with a younger Laine, the two of them cuddling into a mother whose face I couldn’t see. It made me like him more but it didn’t make me jealous. Because it had been Jessie who had read stories to me before I could read them for myself, the two of us hiding under a duvet with her torch. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it better.

‘What else did you like reading?’ I asked, and he smiled and stretched, settling himself more comfortably on the worn sofa.

‘That’s quite a long list,’ he said. ‘You ready?’

A couple of Sundays after that, the three of us were sitting in our usual places on the sofa, the plates from our breakfast still on the floor though it was past noon. I was working up the courage to tell Dellar what I’d thought of one of the books from his list – Matilda, which I’d loved more than anything I’d ever read before – when we heard the click of Dad’s door opening, his stumbling footsteps down the hallway. I glanced at Jessie but she was staring determinedly at the TV. I could see the corner of her mouth twitching. She hadn’t expected him to get up yet.

We were all silent, listening to him mutter to himself as he clanked the oily frying pan into the sink, shoved a plate in after it. The fridge opened and then slammed shut and I clenched my hands into fists to stop myself from flinching.

‘Jessica!’ His footsteps thundering back down the hallway. ‘Where is all the fucking food?’

Jessie looked at Dellar and then jumped up and went out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I heard her say, her voice small as if that might lure his down, too. ‘I’ll make you something. I’ll tidy up.’

‘Too fucking right you will!’ There was the slam of a cupboard, a hollow rolling sound as something was knocked over. ‘Don’t think you get to sit around here all day—’ His voice was muffled suddenly, Jessie closing the kitchen door. He wouldn’t like that, I realised. Her tidying him away, embarrassed in front of her guest. There was another dull thump as he smacked the counter, his growled words impossible to make out, and I did flinch, then.

When I glanced at Dellar, he was watching me, his mouth set tight. ‘Want to go for a walk?’ he asked, and I nodded.

We left the flat just as a glass shattered, Dad’s voice lower again now in a way that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. We were quiet as we walked down the high street, past a crowd trying to push their way into Brixton station, its gates shuttered halfway across, and crossed the road at the corner where McDonald’s was.

‘Want a McFlurry?’ Dellar asked, hands thrust into his pockets. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt even though the wind was cool, and he looked like a model. I nodded again. ‘Come on then,’ he said, and he pushed through the double doors.

It was busy – it was always busy in there – and we stood in the queue, Dellar’s hands by his side now. I kept my eyes on the menu boards and didn’t say anything. I wondered what was happening in the flat, wondered if she had managed to defuse things the way she usually did. Dad rarely got mad at me. But it was different with Jessie, who seemed to always disappoint him in ways I couldn’t understand. And though she was harder to scare than me, it didn’t always stop him trying.

Dellar glanced down at his trainers. ‘You and Jessie, you’re good friends, huh?’

I nodded. ‘We’re best friends.’

‘You know she loves you, right?’

I nodded again, but this time I looked away.

He put a hand on my back, his touch cool and soft. ‘I just want you to know that I’m not gonna change that.’

I glanced back up at him, but I still didn’t say anything.

‘I just figured,’ he said, ‘if it’s okay with you – maybe we could all be friends together?’

Just then the family in front of us moved away with their brown bags of food clutched in fists, and so we stepped forward before I had to answer him. But as we walked away from the McDonald’s, my ice-cream cup dampening in my hand and the Smarties from it gritty in my teeth, I felt warmer.

It was little things, really, but Dellar and Laine had a seven-year-old half-brother, Lloyd, so they both knew that it was the little things that counted. How he turned up one night with the first three Harry Potter books, the pages soft and curling, full of the dusty library smell I loved. How he fixed our DVD player and sat and watched all three Jurassic Parks with me while Jessie tutted and fidgeted and was pleased. How he always remembered what I was doing at school, remembered to ask. And he could draw, that was the most important thing. His drawing was entirely effortless, like everything he did, but there was a precision to it, a change in the way he looked as he did it, that made it special. He loved it, though he thought it was useless, and if Jessie was getting ready to go out, hair straighteners smoking, he could be easily persuaded to pause a DVD and sketch me Spider-Man or Nemo – or the Terminator, on the evenings when Jessie wasn’t paying enough attention to what we were watching. I kept those pictures in a pile under my bed, and as the stack grew, so did how much I liked Dellar, until, one day, on a rare occasion when it was Jessie and me at home for a. . .