The Guilty Friend Read online

  The Guilty Friend

  JOANNE SEFTON

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

  Copyright © Joanne Sefton 2019

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock

  Joanne Sefton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © June 2019 ISBN: 9780008294465

  Version: 2019-05-10

  For my family.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Karen

  2019

  The recipe book was well thumbed throughout, but there was one page that it naturally fell open to every time: Crespelle con Pollo. The Italian chicken pancake dish had been a family favourite for years. So much so, that Karen only really used the book out of habit – if needed, she could have made it blindfolded. The recipe took some time, granted, what with having to make the thin pancakes, cool them, and then stuff them with the chicken mixture, before pouring over the cream sauce and baking in the oven. She enjoyed cooking, though, and she particularly liked meals like this, which she could put together during the peaceful daytime hours. When the girls came back from school, she could focus on them, drinking her daughters in just as enthusiastically as they would inhale the tantalising, savoury aroma that would, by that point, be filling the kitchen.

  A glance at the wall planner told her that Tasha’s friend Claire would be coming over. Just as well she checked so she could bulk up the quantities a bit and make a generous salad and then Claire could stay if she wanted to. She probably would. Karen prided herself on the fact that both Tasha and Callie’s friends seemed to enjoy spending time in the house. Her eldest daughter, Evie, was at university now, but she would doubtless bring a whole new set of friends home come the holidays.

  Tasha and Claire would do their homework together and then probably hang out upstairs; their GCSEs were looming in a few months and they were both conscientious girls. Callie would get home around the same time as her older sister, but then would need a lift to her dance class after dinner. Karen frowned. There was little point in coming home during the class, and she always intended to kill the time by going for a run, but now, halfway through February, her January fitness resolution was fading fast, and she’d never really liked running in the dark.

  She always found herself getting impatient at this time of year. Although the days were creeping longer, it felt like they’d never actually get to spring. Perhaps she’d just take her book instead. The reception area was comfortable enough, and you could glimpse the girls through the glass door. It was sweet that Callie still liked to catch her watching and would happily break her drill to give Karen a cheery wave and a grin full of braces. Yes, that’s what she’d do.

  The TV on the wall wittered on as she collected the ingredients for the pancake batter. She didn’t listen really, but she liked something on in the background. She considered turning it off but checked the clock and realised it would be the lunchtime news in five minutes so decided to leave them be. Without really thinking, she whisked together her eggs and milk and methodically weighed the flour, adding a pinch of salt. The key was to add the liquid gradually and beat it well; that way you avoided lumps. As the opening notes of the news programme sounded, she picked the bowl up, nestling it in one arm while she whisked with the other, taking a few steps across the kitchen to catch the headlines.

  It was clear from the newsreader’s frown and sombre tone that something bad had happened.

  A bomb on a tube train.

  She put the bowl down for a moment, to notch up the volume, then picked it up again. She resumed her stirring automatically as she listened to the report.

  ‘… an incident was first reported on the Northern Line, between Highgate and East Finchley, at around half past nine this morning.’

  The presenter in the studio handed over to a windswept journalist standing in front of the station. An ‘East Finchley’ sign, with the distinctive, round London transport logo, was prominent in the background.

  ‘… several injured but no reports of fatalities on this quiet service, which was travelling out of central London. We can only speculate on how much more serious this incident could have been if the device had detonated earlier, on the train’s inbound journey, at the peak of rush hour. The police have made no comment yet, but there is clearly conjecture that we are dealing here with a terrorist incident, which has – thankfully – not gone according to plan. Nonetheless, we saw scenes of panic as the train was evacuated at East Finchley station earlier this morning. This footage and photography comes from public mobile phone recordings, so we apologise for the quality, but it gives a sense of the scale of the incident here earlier today …’

  The visuals cut again, this time to a jerky recording of people fleeing the station. The whole place was filled with smoke and debris, along with people running, seemingly in every direction. The phone had captured cries and shouts. Karen wondered who would pause to start recording in such a moment, but then there was always someone.

  Briefly, she set the bowl down to add a splash more milk, then picked it up again. In her head, she ran through whether anyone she knew would be on that train at that time. She didn’t think so. It made her shudder, nonetheless. The coverage went
back to the studio now, where someone had taken the best of the amateur camera shots and turned them into slick backgrounds to head up the various aspects of the report. As the presenter commented on ‘The Emergency Response’, there was a picture of an ambulance crew arriving, one paramedic frozen in mid-air, jumping from the vehicle in his rush to get to the scene. The next segment was ‘The Injured’ and a different picture flashed up. This one showed a woman leaving the station building, a white burn mask covering her face and another paramedic guiding her by the shoulder. Karen took a sharp intake of breath at the scene; the bomb might have done less damage than those responsible had hoped for, but it didn’t look great for that poor soul.

  As the presenter continued to talk, striving to eke out a paucity of information into something that was meant to sound meaningful and authoritative, Karen squinted at the screen. There was someone else in the picture, just behind the woman in the burn mask. At first glance, this other figure, darkly clothed and covered in dust, almost merged with the background, but, as soon as Karen turned her attention away from the arresting image of that mask and really looked at the rest of the picture, the second woman jolted into focus.

  With a clatter, the glass mixing bowl dropped out of her hands, slopping creamy mixture down her dress and all over her suede slippers. For a long, frozen moment, Karen stared at the screen, ignoring the slow drips of batter sliding from her hem to the floor.

  The other woman in the picture was Alex.

  Chapter 2

  Misty

  2019

  She’d been doing the job for twenty-two years, but the sting when they lost someone never hurt any less.

  The couple sitting in front of her – knees touching, hands clasped – had strong rural accents that sounded out of place in the busy London clinic. They were from somewhere in darkest Dorset, driven here by desperation and internet research that had given them a glimmer of hope that, here, something could be done to help their precious Bella.

  Over the last few months, Misty had come to like them, which wasn’t always the case. She respected Alan, with his weathered farmer’s hands and the pressed cotton handkerchief he put in his jacket pocket for trips up to town. His wife Ruth, with her wide, disarming smile and her scent of freesias, inspired a feeling of warmth that Misty knew was shared by all the staff who’d worked with Bella. Today, though, they were visiting for the last time.

  ‘I never believed it would come to this.’ Ruth sniffed, and Alan squeezed her hand where it lay in his. ‘I knew it in my head, but I never believed it in my heart.’

  Misty nodded, careful to allow the woman have the space she needed to speak.

  ‘She was such a live wire, you know, when she was a little one. I wish you could have known her. These last few years, it’s been like a flame going out. Maybe she was just too bright for us … too bright for this world. She just faded away, and there was nothing we could do to keep here … nothing … nothing we could do.’

  The short speech subsided into sobs and she leant into her husband’s embrace, knocking awkwardly against the small cardboard box of Bella’s things they’d already collected from the ward staff. Misty fought back a lump rising in her own throat.

  People quite often talked of it in that way, their daughters fading away. It sounded quiet, almost holy, echoing the legacy of those wretched Italian heroines who starved themselves to sainthood in the Middle Ages. But Misty knew only too well that the fading was only a part of the story. Even as her patients’ bodies diminished, so the presence of their disease grew – it entrenched itself in families, sucking up everything they had to give and more. Daily routines would turn into battlegrounds, education and prospects would be devastated, siblings would be left confused and neglected, marriages would founder. Anorexia was a tyrant. And, in the case of Bella Durnton, a killer.

  After today, she wouldn’t see Alan or Ruth again. They had declined, with their usual dignity, the clinic’s offer to send staff to the funeral. Lyme Regis was too far, they said, it wasn’t right to keep the staff from their work, far less to encroach on their time off. Misty knew that the funerals were often lavish and well attended, the privilege of those who die young.

  What would come after that for Ruth and Alan? They had the farm – two hundred head of rare-breed cattle, as Alan had told her proudly when they first met two years earlier, and also the farm dogs that slept in the kitchen though they should be outside. Both were from families long established in the area. There were plenty of relatives scattered around, but no other children. Misty imagined Ruth doing flowers for the church and spoiling nieces and nephews. She wasn’t the sort to let her tragedy define her, but, as Misty knew only too well, it would always be there. Would they blame her? She’d probably never know.

  *

  By the time the Durntons left for cardboard coffee at Waterloo and a lonely journey on the crowded train home, her afternoon ward round was still waiting for her and she had at least four emails to reply to that wouldn’t wait until tomorrow. It was nearly 8 p.m. when she finally said her goodbyes to the night sister, collected her things, and made her way outside.

  The chill evening air bit at her cheeks. It was February, the time of year when winter has long lost its glamour and spring seems little more than a fairy story. There had been an attempted terror attack earlier in the day – she’d caught bits and pieces of it on the news and on her phone through the day. A man with a homemade bomb in a plastic paint container tried to blow up a tube train on the Northern Line. No fatalities, thank God. There had been sporadic alerts and closures on the tube, which wouldn’t affect her directly but meant the bus would probably be even busier than usual. She hoped the Durntons had got to Waterloo without disruption; they didn’t need travel chaos to deal with on top of everything else they’d been through today.

  There was a crowd at the bus stop and she decided to walk, at least the first part. The streets seemed to have a skittish, febrile atmosphere as they always did on such days. But then, perhaps it was nothing more than her imagination, filling in what she expected to see. In the waiting room of the clinic, she’d noticed more people watching the twenty-four-hour news channel on the overhead TV than on a normal Tuesday afternoon. The screen showed familiar faces intoning sombre thoughts in front of police cordons and rolled shaky mobile phone footage of smoke and dust and a small crowd rushing from the doors at East Finchley. It was the parents in the waiting room, mainly, looking at the screen. The kids beside them were locked into their phones, so not everything was different.

  She strode briskly, shoving her bare hands deep into her pockets, and the bite of the cold weather receded a little. They’d had a mild spell, but it was definitely back to gloves for tomorrow. Still, it was nice to be outside. The air in the hospital always felt stale. She worried that it clung to her – that she had a hospital smell that other people could detect, like some people smelt of their dogs. London air was never fresh but, in the cold, you could at least imagine it might be. It would be more pleasant to walk than get the bus, she decided. It might take forty minutes but it wasn’t as if she was rushing home for anyone.

  She lived in Kennington, in a street of rather twee Victorian terraced cottages, which did their best to ignore the roar of the traffic and the ugly jumble of the city that had grown up around them. It was pleasant and convenient and still more affordable than similar spots north of the river. The street housed young professionals and gay couples and a few older residents. The sort of people who bought these houses moved further out if they had children.

  Except for the scattering of junk mail by the front door, everything in the house was as she had left it that morning. Eusebio was on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for a week or two. There were some leftovers from a pasta she’d done last night. That would do, with a bit of chopped-up tomato and cucumber she could call a salad. She didn’t like to open wine on a weeknight, but the conversation with the Durntons had taken its toll, so maybe tonight would be an exception.
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  An hour later she was sipping a pinot in front of a rolling news channel, the debris of her meal still littering her coffee table. It was all about the bombing, of course. There was a still photo of woman in a burn mask leaving the scene. Misty leant forward and squinted at the screen. They’d been using the image a lot, but this time, without her food to distract her, something else caught her eye. That woman in the background.

  ‘Alex?’

  The word escaped her lips even though there was no one to hear it. It was the first time she’d spoken that name aloud in years.

  Her mind flashed back, suddenly flooded with images of glossy black curls, champagne, rebellion, extravagance and that million-dollar smile. Alex was the reason she was doing this job, the reason she was living this life. Every time she helped someone recover, it was a temporary salve on the unhealable wound that was Alex Penrith. Every time she lost a girl like Bella Durnton, it was like losing Alex all over again.

  The woman fleeing the attack – the dust and filth-covered woman with her determined eyes, frozen in an instant as the backdrop to a horror story – was an uncanny fit with Misty’s images of Alex fast-forwarded through three decades. This woman was older than the Alex she remembered – although the grime and dust that flattened her features made it impossible to tell how old. She shared Alex’s distinctive curly hair, her elfin features and something about the way she held herself. The essence of Alex sang out from the screen. But despite the likeness, it couldn’t be her.

  Because Alex had been dead for almost thirty years.

  Chapter 3

  Misty

  1987

  Misty blinked and blinked again. She’d waited for this moment for two years, perhaps for her whole life. After pouring so much energy into hoping and fantasising and anticipating she was finally here. In her tiny bedroom at home, or out walking through the scrubby fields with Mack, her dog, there had been no space in her imaginings for even the slightest whisper of doubt. Only now, sitting on a narrow lumpy bed, next to the suitcase and two cardboard boxes that contained her possessions, did the doubt start to creep in.