Laying the Ghost Read online

  About the Book

  Have you ever wondered what your ex is up to?

  When Nell was a student, she and Patrick were a serious item. Nell really thought Patrick was The One, despite their often tempestuous relationship. But then Alex came along. He seemed the safer, more restful option, and thanks to her over-controlling mother Nell opted for him instead.

  Now nothing is going right. Alex has left her to live in New York with a younger, blonder woman. Escaping to the Caribbean for a recuperative holiday, she is mugged at Gatwick and her bag is stolen. It’s crisis time – and she makes two decisions:

  First – she will take lessons in self-defence.

  Second – she will try and find Patrick again.

  Is she trying to put the past behind her – or setting out to ruin her future?

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  1. Four Seasons in One Day

  2. Changes

  3. No Surrender

  4. Heroes and Villains

  5. Time is Running Out

  6. Sunday Girl

  7. The Kiss

  8. Wishing Well

  9. Change the Locks

  10. Manic Monday

  11. Sweet Wine

  12. Midnight Rambler

  13. Big Wheel

  14. Angels with Dirty Faces

  15. Weekend without Make-Up

  16. Don’t Look Back in Anger

  17. Castles Made of Sand

  About the Author

  Also by Judy Astley

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Massive thanks to the following people for top-of-the-range friendship, invaluable research help, gossipy lunches and shared secrets. This book couldn’t have happened without you:

  Chris Chesney

  George (sleuth) Edwards

  Linda Evans

  Katie Fffffforde

  Rebecca Gregson

  Michelle (rock chick) Hurst

  Nicola Joss

  Frané (hacker) Lessac

  Rory MacLean

  Rowena (Rosie) Milne

  David Snelling

  Terry Whitworth

  Barbara Williams

  Laying the Ghost is entirely fiction. Nobody I know or have ever met is in this book; not even you. In fact – especially not you.

  My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

  Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

  But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

  And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

  For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

  Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

  ‘The Rolling English Road’

  G. K. Chesterton

  1

  Four Seasons In One Day

  (Crowded House)

  COMFORT FOOD. NELL savoured the words and felt her taste buds sparkle. What a delicious, creamy, heart-warming phrase. Some women (and although Nell wasn’t one of them, she could sympathize here) hit the bottle when their life partner leaves them for the kind of glamorous new love interest that they naively imagine will never – even in the far-ahead fullness of time – require them to unblock a drain at midnight or dig deep enough in a frost-hardened garden to bury a run-over cat. But Nell had recently discovered that she was one of the other sort: those who take joyfully to food as their new soulmate. If she were to be photographed now with the current love in her life, she would be snuggled up beside her fridge; possibly almost inside her fridge, fondly embraced by its door, and as close as she could get to the chocolate supply she kept beside the butter. She was well aware that either of the drink/food options had the dangerous potential to turn her into the kind of vast, unkempt bloater that much reduced the chances of filling that recent, and still lividly scarred, love gap in her life, but at least this way she wouldn’t morph into a pissed-up wreck with a shot liver. Food as solace didn’t cost you your driving licence, did not leave you with a lingering whiff of stale wine or have you wondering what it was you’d said (and, oh Lord, where and in what circumstances) that was making the leery man from no. 13 ask if you’d got the purple ones on today. She thought of this now as she contemplated with deep and true affection the food on her plate: her choice was, given where she was, possibly the most unlikely item on the menu.

  ‘You’re not going to eat that?’ Great, Nell thought, loaded fork halfway to her mouth. Along came the eternal family critic just as she was about to savour a truly memorable feast.

  Mimi glared across the table at her mother’s lunch choice as if she’d never seen anything so completely crazy presented as foodstuff in her entire life. How does a fifteen-year-old girl do this, Nell wondered. How could Mimi twist her face into something that so clearly expressed incredulity, disdain, disgust – all at the same time and all without losing her essential clear-eyed beauty? Anyone over twenty would look demented. This must have been what Picasso had been going for when he first painted two eyes on the same side of a woman’s head. That would be it: cubism kicked off with nothing more mysterious than the great artist capturing the expression of a teenager in a full-scale adolescent strop.

  Mimi’s nose was sugar-mouse pink from the fierce sun and beginning to peel, but in the interests of enjoying a final peaceful lunch on this too-brief one-week escape, Nell decided this wasn’t the moment to nag her yet again about sunblock. Or to tease her that if she kept that face on, the wind would change and she’d stay with that look for ever. A row would follow. Lunch would be rushed and ruined. Only a few hours from now they would be at the airport, checking in for the homeward trip and smoothing out the creases on snuggly coats in which to greet the freezing early-morning Gatwick air. The chance of another shot of blazing heat would be months away, if not years. This impulse trip to avoid being around to watch Alex moving his possessions out of the family home had wiped out his Air Miles account very satisfyingly but with Alex no longer keeping it topped up for their use, future holidays would have to be within driving possibility and could even (and Nell would prefer not to consider this), if more profitable work wasn’t forthcoming, involve tents.

  ‘What’s wrong with shepherd’s pie?’ Nell asked. ‘You like it OK when I make it.’

  ‘That’s in winter, at home,’ Mimi growled.

  ‘It is winter,’ Nell pointed out. ‘You can’t get much deeper winter than February.’

  Mimi now gave her the sneering derrr look, the one that comes free (and so very, very frequently) with every teen girl. ‘Like cold winter? Like, not here in this heat? You’re mad.’ She instantly cut off and started on her salad.

  ‘Mad.’ So. The usual verdict then. Not even remotely a surprise. And yes, I probably am mad, Nell thought, tracing her initials (newly single EJW, not her twenty-years-married EJH) across the mashed potato with her fork. Possibly her scorching hot shepherd’s pie at the beachfront Lone Star restaurant, Barbados, wouldn’t be everyone’s automatic selection from a menu that also offered tuna tartare or – Mimi’s choice – lobster and prawn salad with papaya salsa and cucumber mint dressing. But when the perfect comfort food was so conveniently available at a moment when you very much needed comfort, nothing else would do.

  Nell would need all the help she could get, from every possible source, to survive the moment the next day when she arrived home and opened the front door on to the still, silent space left by her newly absent husband. It was going to be the major moment in the start of the rest of her life. There should be a sort of ceremony involved here. On the drive home from the airport she’d phone and run that one past Kate. Wasn’t that wha
t your best friends were for? To be ready with the bottle of fizz (or in this case, given the early hour of the day, tea and a bacon sandwich) in times of stress?

  Strange, in the last year during Alex’s so-frequent business trips (‘business’, ha! Definitely a loose term in this case. Under ‘business’, see ‘pleasure’) she had barely missed him. Coming home to an empty house had had a certain luxury to it. She and Mimi and Sebastian had crashed around in a state of amiable domestic anarchy. But how different would it now be, not only with Sebastian away at the college in Falmouth but never expecting Alex back at all? Would having lots of wardrobe space and no one to complain about your shoe collection be any compensation for the long lonely evenings and Nell’s nagging fear that she could end up as one of those women with seventeen cats and a hallway heaped with old newspapers? No – that wouldn’t happen. It was Alex who had left home, not Nell’s fully functioning brain cells. But all the same, in the jet-lag pre-dawn hours during this lovely tropical escape, she had sometimes wondered …

  Nell watched as Mimi picked up a prawn between her perfectly (and expensively) manicured nails and shelled it as neatly and delicately as an otter before biting it cleanly in half with her perfectly (and expensively) straightened teeth. Her perfectly (and expensively) streak-blonded hair wisped in the breeze and Nell wondered how this overindulged daddy’s girl would survive without all the princess accoutrements she’d been so used to, now that her father had found another princess to cherish.

  ‘Mum?’ Mimi looked anxious, her face losing six years and reverting almost to little-girl again. The perfect nails tore a rocket leaf to shreds and laid them out evenly like petals around the edge of her plate.

  ‘If Dad comes home to see us, will he … will he, like, bring her with him? Will I have to meet her and be nice?’

  Nell thought about this for a moment, picturing them all trying to do the ‘let’s be civilized about this’ thing, all doing too much icy smiling in a restaurant where you could see that the sharp-eyed waiters were canny enough to be taking bets on who’d be first at your table to crack and break into an entertaining full-scale tantrum. She promised herself then and there never to get into that scenario.

  ‘There’s no “if” he comes to see us … well, to see you and Seb anyway, he’s promised he will …’ Nell wavered, wondering what, exactly, to say next. There’d been a lot of promises over the years, starting with the ones about for richer for poorer, and till death us do part. All the best ones had been broken. Alex wouldn’t be back on the British side of the Atlantic for a long time to come; New York was now his home. A fat-mouthed redhead, name of Cherisse, was now the woman he was promising eternal love and loyalty to, unless New York thirty-somethings were content to settle for much less when it came to a man moving in.

  ‘But I don’t know … I suppose it’ll be up to you in the end, whether you want to meet his new …’ Nell hesitated. Perhaps she should say ‘Your new’? Mimi’s new what? Would Cherisse become Mimi’s stepmother? Quite possibly, quite likely, one day. Very determined, New York women. Cherisse was thirty-one, and in the photo Nell had unearthed from feverish and furious delving down the back of Al’s Haliburton briefcase, possessed broad, Channel-swimmer’s shoulders, a terrifying set of all-American cheerleader teeth and that peculiar over-bouncy long hair that made you suspect the daily use of Carmen rollers. Some kind of corporate lawyer (wasn’t everyone, over there?), she wasn’t going to let the ink dry on the decree absolute before whizzing Alex down to Connecticut to the family clapboard/picket-fence villa for a gilt-chairs and floral-bower wedding ceremony. She would almost certainly get Alex to email Mimi to say that it was all right, she understood how uncool being a bridesmaid could be when you’re a teenager and she’d Respect Her Feelings by not asking her, instead surrounding herself with an array of spooky mini-me beauty-pageant infants and a no-competition pair of diet-failure contemporaries in unflattering peach satin.

  ‘Because I, like, really don’t want to meet her.’ Mimi stripped another prawn and bit it clean through its middle. ‘I don’t want Dad getting the idea that I’m ever going to think it’s OK for him to go off and be with someone else. And suppose …’ She looked at her next prawn as if she’d just noticed something truly bizarre about it. ‘Suppose …’ she hesitated again. ‘Oh God, do you think they might …?’

  Nell couldn’t eat any more, not without choking anyway. What a waste – only half of this delicious food gone. It was now too much to ask even of shepherd’s pie to provide comfort here. For this was the big question, wasn’t it? Would Alex and Cherisse make beautiful New York babies together? How long would it take Nell to get to the point where that kind of question, any kind of question about Alex, simply didn’t matter? They didn’t tell you the answer to that one in After He’s Gone, the Brown-Owl-brisk, faux-jolly guide to post-divorce life that so-efficient, so-helpful Kate had provided as essential holiday reading. On balance, Nell thought she’d have preferred some blood-curdling thriller-chiller.

  ‘You know what, Mimi? I can’t even begin to guess what they might do,’ Nell told her, adopting the book’s recommended rise-above-it attitude. ‘I don’t want to think about any of it – not until we get home anyway, and even then I think we should all get going on the moving-on stage. Let’s just enjoy these last few hours here, shall we? We don’t want to lose sight of what this week was all about. It’s been about us and about having a good, fun time. But right now it’s only about lunch, OK?’

  She could feel her voice becoming artificially bright. She’d even been that close to saying the tritest thing, that schmaltzy ‘And whatever’s happened between Alex and me, he’ll always be your dad.’ There’d been a lot of that brightness lately; a lot of trying on a ‘make-the-best-of-it’ tone so that Mimi wouldn’t sink into a depression. Seb didn’t agonize – or didn’t seem to. He just did that boy thing, that ‘Please don’t make me talk about feelings’ look of dread whenever such a possibility loomed. His idea of a bad day wasn’t his dad leaving to shack up with a floozie on the far side of an ocean, but his mum dragging him and Mimi into the kitchen and saying, ‘Let’s have a group hug.’ Not that Nell would, she’d known better than that since they’d stopped falling over in the playground and grazing their knees. And besides, she didn’t fancy the group-hug thing either. It would be one more all-American irritating item to add to the list.

  Anyway, Seb was away now, on an art course in Falmouth where he could shut down completely from home concerns and simply get on with becoming whatever he wanted himself to be. His opting out was so absolute that he had completely immersed himself in surf life and spent every spare weekend in the sea. Still teen-selfish, he made it pretty clear on his few home visits that, fond as he was of his home and family, each second spent in south-west London would be better spent in south-west England. Where did ‘divorce’ come on that well-known scale of the most traumatic life events? For the absent Seb it might rate no worse than maybe a flat tyre, but for Nell, well, she’d read that it was rightly considered one down from a family death, but was it above house-moving and giving birth, or maybe between the two? And at what level was it going to be for Mimi?

  Mimi had finished her prawns, rejected a little heap of tomatoes and was now digging her fork into the demolished remains of Nell’s mashed potato.

  ‘Have I got time for another swim before we go?’ she asked. She was already looking out at the ocean, then at herself reflected in the big mirror placed beside the restaurant so diners could always get a sea view; maybe she was watching to see if a turtle might be swimming close to shore so she could go and float lazily beside it. How lucky it was for teenagers that their attention flittered about like a bee on buttercups. Nell had been looking forward to a dreamy couple of hours on a beach lounger, thinking of nothing but what colour to paint the kitchen. She now had a horrible feeling that while considering some fancy contrast tones for the ceiling, she might also be wondering which shade of white (creamy, or bluish, or hint-of-jas
mine) would also look OK for the bridal lace of her replacement.

  ‘You can swim if you wait fifteen minutes for your lunch to go down first and so long as you won’t complain about spending the night on the plane with cold wet hair.’

  Mimi sighed, scowled and growled. Nell didn’t blame her – she didn’t like her own bossy tone either. She’d stopped short of reminding Mimi how much she’d feel the cold in the early Gatwick morning after the blazing heat of this week, but all the same, Nell was fully aware she was going to be the only Bad Cop in the family from now on. How very, very dispiriting.

  Nell saw the boy waiting on the pavement as she and Mimi dragged their bags off the Gatwick car-park courtesy bus. From years of living with a football nut, she recognized his top as Manchester United’s current away strip. He was leaning on the side of the bus shelter, chewing his thumbnail and breathing thick drifts of mist into the freezing early air. It was much later when it crossed her mind that not only was the name ‘Callaghan’ beneath the no. 8 on his shirt back in the place where surely ‘Rooney’ should have been, but that with no baggage (not even a coat, and it was freezing), and no in-charge adult, he definitely didn’t look as if he was somewhere between parking a car and boarding a plane.

  ‘I’m so cold,’ Mimi wailed as they crossed the road. It was barely light; the rows of tightly parked cars were silvered by frost and all looked the same – line after line of unidentifiable sparkly greyish lumps. Where was the bloody Golf, Nell wondered, knowing that if Alex had been with them he would, by now, have been marching firmly in the right direction, having had the exact location logged into his Blackberry. Also, he wouldn’t have left the car-park ticket carelessly exposed on the car’s dashboard to show a potential TWOC-er that escape from the car park would present no difficulty. And of course, unlike Nell, he’d have prepaid online, triumphantly saving several pounds, via the right website. A long, long time ago he’d found Nell’s scattiness amusing. Over the past year he had simply found it annoying, clucking and sighing at every small evidence of inefficiency. ‘How can you draw so meticulously,’ he’d said once after she’d left a casserole in the oven for seven flavour-draining hours while she worked on a last-minute alteration to a double spread for Pond Life (third in an educational series, sales rivalling Dan Brown’s in thirty countries), ‘and yet be so bloody disorganized?’ He was probably right, she now thought as she peered through the blue-grey half-light in the remote hope that her car would get out of its line and come to greet her.