I am thrilled to be on the blog tour for Sweet Little Lies by Caz Frear. I must admit that it keeps making me sing the Fleetwood Mac song every time I pick it up, but I'm really enjoying it so far and you can look for my review in the next week or so.
For today's stop on the tour, I have a tantalising extract for you. Enjoy!
WINNER OF THE RICHARD AND JUDY SEARCH FOR A BESTSELLER COMPETITION
WHAT I THOUGHT I KNEW
Maryanne Doyle was never seen again.
WHAT I ACTUALLY KNOW
In 1998, Dad lied about knowing Maryanne Doyle.
Alice Lapaine has been found strangled near Dad's pub.
Dad was in the local area for both Maryanne Doyle's disappearance and Alice Lapaine's murder - FACT
Connection?
SWEET LITTLE LIES - EXTRACT
For a second I
don’t recognise her. She’s wearing a khaki funnel coat zipped up
to her nose and her hair’s scraped back tight, not swishing around
her shoulders in all it’s usual caramel and honey-blonde
loveliness. The frown-line gives her away though. That, and the
expensive shopping bags arranged neatly around her feet like pets -
Liberty, Symthson, Penhaligon, Cos.
She’s staring into space - completely oblivious to the shit-faced
chanteur
in the snowman onesie, now adding another charge to his sheet by
belting out a racist version of Deck the Halls, peppered with the odd
shout of ‘No Surrender to the IRA’. She startles when she sees
me, as if she’s forgotten where she is and why she’s here.
“Mrs Hicks.”
She stands up
quickly and the pull-down chair snaps back against the wall, making
her jump. She apologises, gathers up her bags, flustered.
“Gina,
please. I’m so sorry to drop in like this, are you busy?”
I swipe my
pass and push the door. “Of course not, come through.”
I try the
squishy room first - I’ve got a feeling this could be a squishy
room conversation - but there’s an engaged sign slapped across and
a horrible keening noise coming from inside. Some poor soul on the
rough end of something. I show her into one of the main interview
rooms and resist the urge to thank her for instantly making the room
smell nicer.
She takes her
coat off. Turns down an offer of tea.
“So what can
I do for you, Gina?” My mind’s throwing out a hundred
hypotheses, the main one being that she’s not a complete imbecile
and she knows it shouldn’t have taken her husband ten minutes to
steward us safely out of the main gates last night, and if she can’t
get answers from him, she wants answers from me. “I assume you
weren’t just passing?” I say, nudging the Smythson bag with my
boot. “Or is there any chance that’s for me? I’d die for one
of their notebooks.”
She glances
down. “Oh these.” Again that slight sense of disorientation.
“Have it. I’m serious. I’ve bought them enough already, more
than they deserve.” She actually lifts up the bag and offers it to
me. I shake my head a little embarrassed. “I just needed an
excuse to come into town. To come here.”
I say nothing
and study her face. It’s less remarkable than I’d built it up to
be. Attractive but in a commonplace way. The lighting in these
rooms are a great leveller.
She let’s
out a deep breath. “I knew her, you see. Alice.” She pauses,
rephrases. “Well I didn’t know
her, not really. Our paths crossed in the past – briefly but
intensely, you might say.”
Not what I was
expecting. There’s a pulsing at the top of my head. A frontal
lobe reminder that now’s the time to use good judgement and go and
get Parnell.
But she asked
to speak to me specifically.
I don’t want
to panic her before we’ve even got going.
It’s also
for that reason that I hold back the words, ‘lying
to a police officer,’ although
I do let her know I need to record everything and then I caution her,
in my least cautionary voice possible.
“God I don’t
know where to start.” She arches her head right back. I hear the
tension crunching through her neck. “I just tried to do a good
thing and now I’m caught up in all this. I’m so sorry I lied, I
truly am. I just...”
“Just start
at the beginning,” I say, my voice as soft as a coo. “It’s
fine, you’re doing the right thing, Gina.”
“Ok.”
She lays her palms flat on the table, steadies herself like it’s a
business pitch. “About four years ago, Nate and I were in a bad
place. Really bad. We’d been having IVF and it just wasn’t
happening and well, it was tearing us apart. I think it’s because
we’d both had kids with other people.” My face says it all. “Oh
right, sorry, Leo’s mine, Amber’s Nate’s. I mean, Amber was
only four when we got together and Leo was only seven so we very much
consider them our own.” She gives a sad little sniff. “Nate’s
wife died a year after Amber was born, you see. An undetected heart
defect.” Suddenly, her features harden. “And my ex is a
complete waster who’s never bothered with Leo so it was perfect, we
became an instant little family.”
“But it’s
natural to want children together,” I say.
She lowers her
gaze, nods at the table. “And we just assumed we would. Took it
for granted, as you do. And when it didn’t happen….well it’s
cruel and it’s not logical, but when you’ve made a baby with
someone else, but you can’t make a baby with your current partner,
it kind of does something. It makes you view them differently, view
your relationship differently. It did us anyway, I can’t speak for
everyone. But we ended up resenting each other, I suppose. It was
just an incredibly bad time.” She twists her wedding ring, a
surprisingly discreet gold band. “Anyway, Nate ended up burying
himself in work, which means burying himself in client dinners, and I
was on my own night after night with my grief.” Her eyes will me
to understand. “I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s what it
felt like, grief.”
“I
understand,” I say, as soothing as I can. “And Alice, where does
she come in?”
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