A Double Life. Charlotte Philby

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

       Chapter 67: Gabriela

       Chapter 68: Gabriela

       Chapter 69: Isobel

       Chapter 70: Gabriela

       Chapter 71: Isobel

       Chapter 72: Isobel

       Chapter 73: Gabriela

       Chapter 74: Gabriela

       Chapter 75: Gabriela

       Chapter 76: Gabriela

       Chapter 77: Isobel

       Chapter 78: Gabriela

       Chapter 79: Gabriela

       Chapter 80: Isobel

       Chapter 81: Gabriela

       Chapter 82: Gabriela

       Chapter 83: Isobel

       Chapter 84: Gabriela

       Chapter 85: Isobel

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Also by Charlotte Philby

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

       The woman’s lips were blue, the same shade as the evening sky that shone in through the window, calm and unbroken.

       The knot around her neck had been pulled tight. The note, propped against the hallway table, was short.

       ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. I love you both, please forgive me.’

       Chapter 1

       Gabriela

      It is hardly warm enough to warrant an evening in the garden, but something about the house is pushing her out. After all these years, and all the memories she made here in her teens and early twenties before Tom had so much as set foot inside its four walls, their home is already taking his side. So when he goes out for a smoke, savouring the single roll-up he still allows himself each day now that he is staring down the barrel of forty, she follows him into the starless night.

      Pulling on a jacket, she brings with her the slightly too warm bottle of Sauvignon she picked up at the off-licence near Dartmouth Park Hill on her way home, partly to calm her nerves, partly for the excuse to partition off this section of her life, to annex it safely away from the day she has just left behind. The beginning of the end.

      ‘Ten ninety-nine?’ Tom takes a swig of his beer, incredulity written in the lines above the bridge of his nose. She follows his gaze to the bottle she is clutching by the neck and for a moment she feels herself on the cusp of laughter that will mutate into sobs if she is not careful. Screams that will reverberate through the house where their children sleep.

      How the hell are they talking about the price of a bottle of wine? But he has no reason to suspect this is anything but an ordinary evening, the end of a day just like any other.

      ‘How was work?’ he asks as she takes a seat beside him on one of the worn garden chairs. It shifts precariously on cracked paving, the same shoddy stones that have been there since her father first bought the place, more than two decades ago. The memory of those days, however complicated they might have seemed at the time, soothes her briefly.

      ‘Work?’ she repeats, buying herself time, wondering if Tom notices her bristle as she pictures her desk; the job she fought tooth and nail to get and then to keep.

      Before she can answer, he continues, uncharacteristically forthright. ‘I’m worried about you, Gabs. This case. Ever since you came back from Moscow …’

      ‘Jesus, Tom, it’s not supposed to be easy,’ she snaps, immediately holding out her hands by way of apology. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just tired.’

      It is true, she thinks: I am so tired. It is not the whole truth but what more can she tell him? She is bound to secrecy, her lips have been sewn shut. As he watches her from across the lopsided plastic table, she registers the sound of a car moving too fast on the street outside. She imagines the needle pushing through the skin at the edges of her mouth. Instantly, she is transported to the bedroom upstairs, just a few weeks after she and her father had moved in. She and her best friend Saoirse in matching crop-tops, kneeling on the floor, her head level with the mattress, her earlobe flat against the CD case, which Saoirse has placed on the bed.

      ‘You’ve burnt the needle properly, right?’

      ‘Obviously,’ Saoirse says as she clamps Gabriela’s shoulder with one hand and with the other removes the ice cube she has been holding against her skin. Cold water trickles down Gabriela’s neck. As her friend breathes in sharply, Gabriela feels the remaining ice slide to the floor, Saoirse holding her shoulder a little too tight as she pushes the pin through the soft nub of flesh.

      More than twenty years later, she touches her earlobe. The memory of her own cries of pain, tinged with defiant euphoria, ricochets around her head as she looks up to the window of that same room, where now stands the goose-shaped lamp that keeps guard on Callum’s windowsill. The lamp which, now that he is five years old, her son claims to have outgrown, though he never pushes the point. Secretly, she knows he is no more keen to grow up than she is to lose him to the girls and then the women or the men who will inevitably step in to claim him. The hands that would have taken him from her even if she hadn’t already made it possible for them to be torn apart.

      Sadie is in the kitchen, already dressed in school uniform, fastening the clips on the violin she chose for her most recent birthday, when Gabriela heads downstairs the following morning. Seven years old: how the hell did that happen? Briefly, she wonders what the fall-out will be for Sadie, after all this. Will it send her over the edge? But there is no point trying to second-guess her daughter, whose emotions are always more nuanced, less discernible than her own at the same age. There is an air of pointedness about Sadie’s refusal to cause trouble for them in the way that Gabriela is prepared for that she finds unsettling. No, she reprimands herself, her fists tightening – it is not Sadie whose behaviour she needs fear.

      ‘Mum, have you seen my sheet music?’

      As her daughter speaks, Gabriela’s eye catches the wine glasses from the night before, which stand marooned on the table where she is packing her school bag.

      ‘This what you’re looking for?’ Tom squeezes past cradling a cup and drops the pristinely kept wad of paper onto her school СКАЧАТЬ