The One You Really Want Read online

  There was no one better.

  Turning, Rose said happily, ‘And what did Jonathan get you for Christmas?’

  Nancy swallowed. ‘A lawnmower. The kind you sit on. It’s out in the garden.’

  ‘A sit-on lawnmower? Oh my word, how marvellous! I say, darling, you’ll be able to ride around on it like the Queen. What fun!’

  Forcing a smile, because she was unsure how often the Queen actually rode around on a lawnmower, Nancy said, ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s Jonathan for you, isn’t it? So original. He always knows exactly the right thing to buy.’

  Other people might have mothers in whom they could confide every tiny detail of their lives, but Rose wasn’t that kind of mother. She needed to be cosseted and protected from details that would only upset her.

  Nancy knew she couldn’t tell her the truth.

  Chapter 2

  It was six in the evening when Carmen Todd let herself back into her empty house. She’d been helping out at the shelter for the homeless in Paddington since ten o’clock, serving up plates of Christmas dinner and pouring endless mugs of steaming hot, conker-brown tea. Nobody at the shelter knew who she was, which suited Carmen just fine. Now, reaching her bedroom, she stripped off her bleached blue sweatshirt and old jeans and chucked them into the laundry basket. They’d been clean on this morning, but you never wanted to stay in the clothes you’d visited the shelter in.

  In the bathroom, Carmen switched on the power shower and examined her face in the bathroom mirror while she waited for the water to heat up. Her short black hair was tousled and spiky, as if she’d spent ages faffing it about with gel and mousse - except she hadn’t. Her dark brown eyes stood out against the pallor of her face and her slanted eyebrows were more like the ticks made by a teacher with a fat felt pen, in a hurry to finish marking. She knew she could look better than this, but no one at the shelter was all that bothered when it came to make-up. So long as she slipped them a few extra cigarettes, that was all they cared about.

  Oh well, maybe next Christmas would be better for both them and herself.

  The doorbell rang just as she was about to climb into the shower. Hesitating, Carmen wondered who on earth it could be at six o’clock on Christmas night. Not carol singers, surely. She certainly wasn’t expecting any visitors.

  But not answering the door - or at least speaking into the entryphone - was beyond her capabilities. Hurriedly wrapping a daffodil-yellow towel round herself - not that anyone could see her, but old habits died hard - Carmen padded through to the hallway and pressed the button on the speaker.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Carmen Todd, this is the police. Open the door please, we have a warrant to search the premises.’

  Breathless with disbelief, Carmen said cautiously, ‘Rennie? Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me! Open the door this minute, woman, before my feet freeze to the pavement. And you’d better put some clothes on before I get there.’

  Startled, Carmen leapt back from the entryphone. ‘How d’you know I’m not dressed?’

  ‘I’m a man. It’s my job to know these things. Superman isn’t the only one with X-ray vision, let me tell you.’ Rennie cleared his throat with characteristic impatience. ‘By the way, I wasn’t kidding about it being bloody cold out here.’

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ Hastily Carmen buzzed him in, before racing through to the bedroom to swap her bath towel for a parrot-blue velour dressing gown. By the time she’d finished fastening the belt - tied with a double knot in case Rennie got boisterous - he’d arrived at her front door.

  ‘It’s really you! I can’t believe you’re here.’ Thrilled to see him, she hurled herself into his arms. ‘I thought you were in Alabama or Mississippi or somewhere . . .’

  ‘Somewhere with lots of vowels,’ said Rennie, hugging her hard in return. ‘I know, we were. Well, Illinois, same difference. They had to cancel the rest of the tour. Dave’s been hitting the bottle again and Andy’s snorting coke like a human Dyson. Neither of them were capable of doing their stuff on stage, and seeing as there was a drying-out clinic handy, Ed packed them both off there. So that’s it, I flew back last night. Thought I’d come and see how you’re doing. Now, stand back and let me take a good look at you.’

  Ditto. Smiling, Carmen took in the almost shoulder-length dark hair, the deep tan, a wicked grin and those glittering dark-green eyes that always looked as though they were ringed with eyeliner - except they weren’t, that was just Rennie’s impossibly thick eyelashes. He was wearing a tan leather jacket, crumpled cream jeans, a faded brown polo shirt and the kind of hideous brass-buckled belt that only a cowboy would wear. But he was looking lean and fit, as ever. For as long as Carmen had known him, he’d exuded an air of health. The whites of his eyes were a clear blue-white, his tongue raspberry pink, his stomach washboard flat. The cowboy belt let the overall effect down badly, but Rennie wouldn’t allow that to bother him. If he liked something, he wore it, and that was that.

  ‘Stunning as ever,’ he pronounced at last, his brown hands on Carmen’s shoulders. ‘Anyway, I thought this was a respectable street.’

  ‘It’s a dressing gown! It’s completely done up,’ Carmen protested.

  ‘I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the street. I thought it was supposed to be dead posh around here.’

  What with his touring commitments, combined with the fact that he’d spent the majority of the last three years out of the country, Carmen forgave him. Just.

  ‘Actually, it is dead posh.’

  ‘Sorry, it’s gone right downhill since I was here last. Rear Admirals, QCs, the silver spoon brigade - more pompous gits than you could shake a stick at in the good old days. Call the police as soon as look at you, they would. Answer the door to a stranger? Good grief, you must be joking.’

  Patiently Carmen said, ‘Is there a point to this, or is it just a general off-the-cuff rant?’

  ‘Sweetheart, of course there’s a point.’ Heading through to the kitchen, Rennie opened the fridge and seized a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. ‘OK to open this?’

  She hesitated. The bottle had been there for over two years. She’d bought it on the first anniversary of Spike’s death, along with several packets of paracetamol and Nurofen. The plan had been to spend the night at home alone, just for a change, and give herself until midnight to carefully think things through. If, when the clock chimed twelve, she decided there was no point in carrying on, she would finish the bottle of champagne then swallow the painkillers.

  At eleven o’clock, with the bottle chilling nicely in the fridge, she had opened a writing pad and begun to compose a suicide note.

  By midnight the wastepaper bin was piled high with scrunched-up sheets of paper. Mortified, Carmen had discovered that suicide notes weren’t as easy to write as she’d recklessly imagined. Everything she put down sounded ridiculous when she tried reading it aloud, like one of those really bad plays in the Morecambe and Wise shows Spike had so loved to watch on cable TV. Increasingly self-conscious and frustrated, Carmen realised how embarrassed she would be to leave behind the kind of suicide note people might secretly snigger at.

  Furious with herself, she’d ended up putting the unopened bottle back into the fridge and making herself a cup of tea instead. Since flushing the painkillers down the loo would have been nothing but a criminal waste of painkillers, she’d stacked them in the bathroom cabinet to use in the recommended dose when her next period arrived.

  Waste not, want not.

  Well, if she was going to carry on living, she’d need them.

  The champagne she’d left there in the fridge, however, as a salutary reminder.

  What the hell. Carmen gestured at the bottle. ‘Good idea. You open it, I’ll get the glasses.’

  ‘And I’ll get back to my point,’ said Rennie, ‘which is that I arrived here two hours ago. You were out.’

  ‘I was at the shelter.’

  ‘That explains the smell.’ Rennie had never
been one to keep his innermost thoughts to himself. Catching the look on Carmen’s face he grinned and said, ‘OK, OK, and it’s very noble of you to do your bit, but I’m just telling you, you do smell.’

  The trouble was, she knew he was right. Exasperated, Carmen headed for the bathroom. ‘Open the bottle. I’ll be back in five minutes.’

  Helpfully Rennie said, ‘Want a hand?’

  ‘You’re hilarious. Go and sit down in the living room. And don’t eat all my Thornton’s truffles.’

  As she shampooed her hair and soaped her body in the steaming shower, Carmen marvelled at Rennie’s attitude to life. He had more energy than anyone she’d ever known, working hard and playing harder, always joking, incapable of not flirting with practically any girl who happened to cross his path. And, being Rennie, an awful lot crossed his path.

  Rennie Todd, her brother-in-law. Spike’s younger brother. Apart from their smiles, no two brothers could have been less alike. Closing her eyes as rivers of shampoo cascaded down over her face, Carmen pictured Spike, her beloved husband, with his sparkling grey eyes, dark blond hair and tendency towards pudginess. Whereas Rennie crackled and fizzed with energy, Spike had always been the quieter, calmer member of the band, the couch potato physically. He’d thought more deeply about things, written songs with profoundly meaningful lyrics. Rennie, Carmen was fairly sure, had never had a profound meaningful thought in his life.

  And he was still alive, that was another pretty significant difference between the pair of them. Rennie was dazzlingly alive and Spike was dead.

  Chapter 3

  Out of the shower, Carmen roughly towel-dried her hair and wrapped herself back up in her dressing gown. With a bit of luck she now smelled of Jo Malone tuberose rather than Eau de Shelter.

  In the living room, predictably, Rennie had made himself entirely at home. Stretched out across the navy sofa, he was busy finishing off a tube of Pringles, flicking through TV channels and simultaneously chatting on his mobile. Grinning across at Carmen, he said into the phone, ‘Sorry, darling, have to go now, the nurses are bringing my grandmother in to see me . . . hello, Granny, you’re looking well . . . OK, I’ll give you a ring, bye now.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Reaching over, Carmen snatched the remote control from him, because Rennie could flick channels for England and it drove her insane.

  ‘Sorry.’ He grinned up at her, unrepentant. ‘Her name’s Nicole, but the lads call her Clingfilm. She was desperate to spend Christmas with me. I had to come up with a decent excuse.’

  It wasn’t only where TV programmes were concerned that Rennie had the attention span of a gnat.

  ‘Couldn’t you just have told her you were visiting your tragic old sister-in-law? Wouldn’t that have been boring enough?’

  ‘You’re joking. Nicole was a huge Spike fan. She’d have wanted to come along and meet you,’ said Rennie. ‘That’s why I invented a granny-in-a-nursing-home in Stockton-on-Tees. That’s better.’ He sniffed approvingly as Carmen shoved his feet to one side and sat down. ‘Same stuff Spike used to buy you.’

  ‘It’s my favourite,’ said Carmen. ‘Unlike some people, I don’t get bored of something after three days and rush off to try something new.’

  ‘Touché. And if I wanted a big lecture I could have stayed in Illinois and listened to my manager. Anyway, it’s Christmas and we mustn’t bicker. Guess what I did this afternoon when I came here and discovered you were out?’

  This was one of those completely unanswerable questions, so Carmen didn’t even attempt to answer it. With a lazy shrug she said, ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Sat down on your front step.’ Rennie raised his eyebrows at her, miming outrage. ‘Now, bearing in mind that this is Fitzallen Square in the very poshest part of Chelsea, I’m sure you’ll agree that this is an appalling thing to do. I fully expected to be harangued by retired brigadiers, ordered out of the square by SAS troops swinging down from helicopters - Jesus, I’ll never understand why Spike wanted to live in a place like this.’

  He did, though. It had been that very air of pompous gentility that had attracted Spike, the thought of shocking the residents and sending them into a blind panic at the prospect of sharing their elegant Georgian square with a member of a heavy rock band like Red Lizard. The sunny, seven-bedroomed property, arranged on four floors and immaculately renovated throughout, was the last place anyone had imagined they’d choose to settle.

  It had appealed to Spike’s sense of humour. He’d bought the five million pound house as a joke. But within a few months he and Carmen had both fallen in love with it.

  ‘So the SAS swooped in,’ said Carmen.

  ‘No, they didn’t. That’s just it. One of your neighbours opened their front door and asked if they could help me.’

  ‘Thinking you were about to launch into a spot of breaking and entering.’

  ‘Absolutely. I told them you were out, and said I’d wait on the step until you came back. So they said I couldn’t possibly wait outside and why didn’t I come over and join them for a drink? Well, at this point, obviously, I thought I must be having some kind of hallucination,’ said Rennie. ‘What were these posh people thinking of, for crying out loud? Didn’t they realise what they sounded like? Poor people, normal people, that’s what. And here they were behaving as if they lived on a . . . a . . . council estate!’

  ‘OK, calm down. In that case I’ll hazard a guess that it wasn’t the Brough-Badhams at number sixty-two.’

  Brigadier Brough-Badham and his wife, the Hon. Marjorie, had been so horrified when they’d first heard four years earlier who their new neighbours were to be, that they had started a petition. Neither of them had ever spoken a word to their deeply undesirable residents; the Brigadier bristled his moustache and the Honourable Marjorie looked down her anteater nose at Carmen whenever they passed each other in the square.

  Actually, it was the thought of allowing the Brough-Badhams to think they’d won that had stopped her from moving away after Spike died.

  ‘It was your other neighbour, the one on this side.’ Rennie jerked his thumb to the right. ‘Number fifty-eight.’

  ‘Funny name for a neighbour.’

  ‘Been reading Christmas cracker jokes again?’ Digging her in the ribs, Rennie said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve never met him. What a great bloke. When he invited me in, I thought you must know each other but he says not. He reckons you’ve been hiding from him.’

  ‘I have not,’ Carmen protested with a fraction too much denial. ‘He only moved in three months ago, then he was off again, then I was away for a fortnight when I took Mum to Cyprus. You know how it is around here,’ she ploughed on. ‘People are busy, out at work - our paths just haven’t crossed, that’s all. I haven’t been hiding.’

  This was true. More or less. Well, not counting the couple of times she’d seen her neighbour climbing out of his car and had ducked away from the window before he could catch a glimpse of her and wave.

  ‘His name’s Connor O’Shea,’ said Rennie.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Then again, I thought you might have known that, after he pushed that note through your door inviting you to his house-warming party.’

  Bugger. The blood rushed to Carmen’s pale cheeks.

  ‘So you see, it rather looks as if you have been hiding from him after all.’

  ‘Don’t start nagging,’ she said self-consciously.

  ‘Come on,’ Rennie argued. ‘Someone has to. Sweetheart, it’s been three years now. The old Carmen would have jumped at the idea of a party.’

  ‘But I’m not the old Carmen, am I? I’m the new Carmen now. And it’s not as easy as you’re making out.’ She paused and watched him expertly remove the cork from the bottle of Veuve Cliquot - with a discreet hiss, just like a wine waiter. In the old days they’d opened bottles of champagne like racing drivers - it was a wonder there’d ever been any left to drink.

  ‘Great new neighbour. Friendly invite to a house-warming. I don’t see the pro
blem.’

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? Because you’re you.’ Carmen sipped the champagne she’d been saving for her suicide attempt. Actually, it was really nice. ‘But I was married to Spike and now I’m not. He’s gone and I’m the one that’s left. The one nobody’s interested in.’

  ‘Oh, come on, that’s—’

  ‘Don’t shout at me. I’m not fishing for compliments or going for the sympathy vote. It’s just that whenever I meet new people and they find out who I am, all they want to talk about is Spike and what it was like being married to him. They think I’m lucky, because he left me everything in his will, which is pretty weird because I don’t feel lucky. So that’s why I didn’t go to the house-warming party. And I know I should have at least replied to the invitation but I didn’t and that’s that. Sometimes I have the manners of a pig.’

  ‘OK, now I get it,’ said Rennie. ‘That’s why you spend all your time at that damn shelter. Nobody knows who you are, do they? Nobody there has any idea that you live in a place like this, that you were married to Spike Todd. They think you’re just a normal girl in jeans and a sweatshirt who travels there on the tube.’

  ‘So? Is that so weird? They treat me like they treat anyone else,’ said Carmen. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘You mean they’re just as happy to pee on your shoes as anyone else’s? I can see how nice that would be. If I came along with you, would they pee on my shoes too?’