Chapter One
Camden, London, The Present
It had rained hard that lunchtime. There was still a damp, peaty smell rising up from the undergrowth in Regent’s Park, but the sharp scent of wet grass was fading as Ellie Cohen walked home from work. There was a luminescence to the early evening; soft and light, no crispness in the air. Ellie slipped off her jacket and hoped that the good weather would last until the end of the week when she was off to Glastonbury. Spending three rainy days battling the elements and trudging through squelching fields of mud with the risk of getting trench foot would not be fun.
Ellie would spend most of the week anxiously clicking refresh on the Met Office website, but now it was Monday evening, which was household chores night. Then, as a reward for their hard work, Ellie and her flatmates would watch trashy TV and eat like queens, courtesy of Theo, owner of the Greek restaurant downstairs, who needed to get rid of any food left from the weekend. The thought was enough to have Ellie quickening her pace as she left the park by Gloucester Gate and hurried towards Delancey Street.
Five minutes later she was outside her flat but before she could pull out her keys, the door opened to reveal Tess and Lola. For two women who had hummus, lamb kebabs, stuffed vine leaves and back-to-back episodes of The Only Way Is Essex in their immediate future, they didn’t look very happy.
‘Why are you both looking so grim?’ Ellie asked, as they made no effort to step aside and let her in. ‘Is it the thought of the pre-cleaner tidy-up? Come on, you know the thought of it is worse than the actual doing of it.’
‘We need to talk,’ Lola said soberly, and Tess nodded, not looking Ellie in the eye. Instantly Ellie was suspicious.
‘Why? What have you done? Have you broken something? Have you broken something of mine?’ Each thought was worse than the last. ‘Did you borrow something without asking and break it? Please don’t say it was my new hairdryer!’
‘It’s not about your new hairdryer. We haven’t broken any of your things,’ Tess added quickly as Ellie opened her mouth to fire off a new round of questions. ‘It’s about, well … first of all you should know that we’re not judging you. We love you, but it’s a case of loving the sinner, not the sin, you know?’
Ellie didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine what heinous act she’d committed that might warrant an intervention. ‘You’re going to have to give me a clue because I don’t remember sinning lately. Anyway, I’m not a Catholic, don’t they have the monopoly on sinning?’ she asked brightly to lighten the mood. It didn’t work.
‘Yeah, and you have the monopoly on bad boyfriends,’ Lola said. ‘After what happened on Saturday night, enough is enough.’
‘Richey is bad news. He’s the zenith of bad news,’ Tess elaborated, as she finally stopped blocking Ellie’s way and pushed her into the living room, then marched her over to the IKEA sofa. ‘Sit!’
It was the tone of voice tweedy women of a certain age used to discipline unruly dogs. Ellie sat. ‘OK, maybe things got a little out of hand on the weekend but Richey is not bad news, he just had a bad Saturday night.’
‘Not as bad as our Saturday night was having to deal with his crap,’ Lola said in a tight voice. They were both standing over her, hands on hips. It was Ellie who had brought the two of them together but they still hadn’t quite made the transition from roomies to friends. In fact they argued a lot, so how ironic that they’d finally bonded over the shortcomings of Richey.
Richey, Ellie’s latest boyfriend, was shaping up to be a fine boyfriend. A great boyfriend. He was very good-looking, almost model standard – not that Ellie was shallow – was gainfully employed as an assistant at a film production company in Soho, had a good sense of humour, didn’t feel emasculated that Ellie earned more than he did, and generally Ellie was starting to feel that the two and a half months that she’d been seeing Richey were turning into something. Maybe even quite a serious something.
‘… and really, Ellie, he’s awful. He’s not worthy of you. Not even close,’ Tess insisted so shrilly that Ellie stopped mentally listing all of Richey’s considerable plus points and frowned at her best friend.
Ellie loved Tess, and often referred to her as ‘my sister from another mister’. She’d bought Tess her first bottle of Chanel No 5 for her twenty-first birthday and had once endured three hours in Topshop as Tess tried on jeans and cried every time she swivelled round and looked at her bum in the changing-room mirror. There’d also been tough love, like the time she’d nursed Tess through an affair with a married man, or when she’d finally persuaded Tess to get her brown hair highlighted and to soldier through growing out her over-plucked eyebrows, and this was how Tess chose to repay her?