The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  ‘You’re asking for my forgiveness but it’s not mine to give. It’s the others, whose lives you’ve taken, that you must ask forgiveness from.’

  Connie’s thrashing intensified as every sinew in her body strained to cling onto life for a few more seconds.

  ‘Only God can judge you, Connie. Good luck with that.’ Nicky turned her back and headed for the door.

  Adam cried out in agony as Connie went into cardiac arrest. He grabbed the emergency call button and the buzz of the alarm exploded in the room as the door sucked itself closed behind her. She walked away down the corridor while an untidy line of nurses and doctors ran past her to force Connie back to life.

  56

  Nicky bent down in front of the grave and arranged the flowers in the pot. A weak sun shone through the bare branches of the large trees that dotted the cemetery, crunchy autumn leaves swirled in the light eddies. It was so peaceful here. It was a good place to end up, she thought, all things considered. She was trying to be positive, but it wasn’t really working. It had all been too soon, so desperately early in the course of a life. She leaned forward and brushed some dust from the grooves of the letter F. ‘For ever in our hearts’ it said. She stood back but she didn’t cry. Not this time.

  ‘Revenge is cleansing,’ Lawrence had said before he’d thrown himself out, but Lawrence had been wrong. Resolution was what had helped; getting answers was the salve to the nightmare that had started all those years ago on a hot night in Tangiers, that had carried on through that evening she wrestled with Grace’s body in the lake, to her capture at Hayersleigh and the plane ride to hell.

  It was cool up here on the hill. Nicky leaned over and caressed the top edge of the gravestone: Grace Peterson, 1976–2006.

  She felt a hand close over her own and squeeze. ‘You ready?’ Greg asked.

  She nodded. He handed her a trowel. His leg was still in plaster – he had broken it when landing the plane – and he had difficulty moving, so she bent over and dug a hole in the soft grass. He handed her Grace’s wedding ring and she held it in her palm for a minute, watching the light bounce off its smooth edges, before she buried it in the soil. She stood as Greg gently trod on the dirt to fix it all together again. She reached out for his hand and felt his warmth radiate back to her.

  Greg turned to her and gave her a weak smile. He had a scar on his forehead now, still purple but beginning to fade. In some ways he had aged terribly in the last two months, but in others the weight had lifted from him and even with his injuries and his crutches he seemed years younger than she had ever known him. He was going to counselling and the nightmares had stopped. His sleep was free of the terrors that had dogged him most of his adult life.

  Nicky stood still and looked at him for a moment. He was not perfect; he had made mistakes. But she understood that she too had made bad choices and stupid decisions, and that he was perfect for her. They turned away and walked slowly up the hill towards the cemetery gates, Greg’s crutches tapping out a plaintive note on the concrete path. The road curved away in front of them. Nicky didn’t know where it led, but she was happy to be on the journey with him.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the great team at Hodder for all their help on this book and for their enthusiasm, insight and guidance: Carolyn Mays, my editor, Francesca Best, Jaime Frost and Clare Parkinson. A big thank you also to my agent, Peter Straus, and to my family.

  Also by Ali Knight

  Wink Murder

  About the Author

  Ali Knight has worked as a journalist and sub-editor at the BBC, Guardian and Observer and helped to launch some of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard’s most successful websites. She lives with her family in London.

  THE FIRST CUT

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Ali Knight 2012

  The right of Alison Potter to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 71539 2

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 71537 8

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Stephen, my partner-in-crime, with all my love

  Prologue

  Nicky gave a squeal as the lounger by the pool tipped a fraction too far and she landed on her back, feet pointing at the stars.

  ‘Look out, red-wine tummy wash,’ Grace giggled from the seat next to her.

  Nicky groaned and reached out for a towel to wipe the mess off her T-shirt. ‘Urgh, it’s everywhere.’

  ‘Where’s the bottle opener?’ Sam called from the patio behind them. ‘Shit!’

  They heard vigorous swearing as something smashed on the paving stones.

  ‘We’ll never get our deposit back on this place,’ Nicky said, staring up at the large house, its stone pale grey against the inky sky beyond.

  ‘Who cares?’ Grace murmured. ‘We’ve had such a laugh.’

  Nicky smiled to herself. Grace was right, as always. It was one of the most fun holidays any of them could remember. Grace had found the house on the internet and a group of her friends had chipped in to hire it for her thirtieth-birthday celebration. Set in winding roads a short distance from Oxford it had a pool, a pizza oven, a ping-pong table and even a lake. It was much grander than they had expected and their lives seemed shinier and more exciting now they were here. Their August week was also a heatwave, which at times made them think they were in an enchanted foreign land where the sun always shone and evenings were always this balmy.

  Grace sighed. ‘It’s such a shame Greg isn’t here. Bloody cameramen.’ Nicky caught her friend’s eye and they giggled again. Grace was the first one of their crowd to get married. Nicky had resigned herself to the fact that this would mean she would see less of Grace, but Greg’s work took him away a lot and if anything she saw Grace more now than when they had been dating.

  ‘God, I’m pissed,’ Nicky declared loudly, having to make a big effort to raise her voice as she heard screams from behind the bushes across the lawn. Someone was spraying the hose.

  ‘I need some water,’ Grace said, standing and stretching. She strolled to the patio where they had eaten earlier that evening, her black dress billowing out behind her.

  ‘Can you get me my smokes? They’re on the table.’ Grace turned and smiled, her blonde hair turned almost white from the sun and the chlorine. Greg was lucky to have her, Nicky thought. But then she would think that about any man. Grace was her oldest and closest friend. They were the same age, the same year at school, but Grace had always played the role of older sister, the sensible one, the smarter one. The successful and beautiful one, come to that. Nicky absent-mindedly fluffed her short hair into spikes. She didn’t mind. She heard Grace and Sam’s low voices. Water. That was Grace all over: a glass of water for every glass of wine. She was cautious and moderate, so unlike herself. She burped and watched a lilo drift in a slow circle in the pool. She’d go for a swim once she’d had her millionth fag of the day—

  Her thoughts were obliterated by a shrieking car alarm from the front of the house.

  Sam threw her hands in the air in a ‘that curse of a bloody car’ gesture.

  ‘Whose is that?’ Grace shouted.

&n
bsp; ‘Probably mine,’ Sam groaned. ‘God, where are my keys?’ She looked around half-heartedly in the gloom. The noise built in intensity, ricocheting off buildings and walkways. Nicky saw bodies running through the garden in the dark towards the gravel drive on the other side of the house, disconnected shouts and questions almost drowned by the noise. ‘My keys, my bloody keys . . .’

  ‘Try the kitchen,’ Grace said. ‘I think I left my bag on the lawn.’ She walked off beyond the pool.

  Nicky stayed put. She’d got a lift to the house with Grace so there was nothing she could do. But a few moments later she stood, swaying uncertainly. That damned alarm was bringing on a headache. Another deeper siren joined the first, like a demented electronic chorus. She walked over to the table and found her fags, but there was no lighter. The spilled drink on her T-shirt was sticky; she felt hot and bothered. She looked back at the pool, the underwater lighting making the water glow a sickly green. A much better idea came to her. She walked across the lawn and crouched down by the row of thick bushes between the lake and the house and enjoyed a wee in the great outdoors – well, a wee in the manicured Cotswolds. She carried on to the lake. The alarms faded a little. She stood on the small wooden jetty and stripped down to her bikini, then sat and let her legs swish lazily in the coldness. It was much darker out here; the lights from the house and garden didn’t encroach this far. The water slap-slapped against the wood as she lowered herself into the inky water, too deep to feel the bottom, and struck out for the middle.

  Nicky loved swimming at night. She liked the feel of water caressing her skin, the way sounds penetrated further and echoed longer. A muddy lake floor didn’t make her cringe, like it did to Sam; she enjoyed the squishy sludge between her toes. She dunked her head and swam a few breaststrokes below the surface, then emerged and lay on her back, kicking gently.

  The car alarm stopped and silence dropped around her like a heavy curtain. She heard a splash.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out instinctively, but no one answered.

  It was too dark to see the edge of the lake and it took her a few strokes to swim close enough to make out the blurry jetty and the bank. ‘Are you in? It’s lovely,’ she called.

  There was no answer.

  Tossers, she muttered to herself, sober now and ready to get out. Damn, she didn’t have a towel. Grace would have said that was just like her, starting something without being fully prepared. It would be a cold walk back to the house. She swam for the bank and saw an indistinct, dark shape floating in the water. For an instant she thought it was a tree trunk, and then she smiled. It was the giant plastic crocodile from the pool. Perfect. She reached out to jump on it and wrestle like she was an Aussie adventurer lost in Arnhem Land, taking on the fourteen-footer in a battle of life and death . . .

  It was too solid. And it rolled.

  Nicky’s weight took her and the object under the water. She was caught sharply unawares and scrambled to get back to the surface. She began to struggle as fronds of weed became entangled round her neck, touching her arms and face with tickly, unnerving edges. She broke the surface with a strangled groan as the object pitched this way and that with her splashes. It was so dark she couldn’t see the thing that still floated in front of her. A terrible panic took hold. The car alarm started again, wailing with renewed force. She scolded herself for getting the jitters and forced herself to put out her hand and make the shape real, understandable and unthreatening. The fronds brushed her hand again.

  This time she knew for sure it was hair.

  Nicky screamed as the moon came out from behind a cloud and bathed everything in a pale shimmer. The hair was long; the body floating face down in the lake wore a black dress. She screamed much louder, half sinking with the effort as she was unable to touch the bottom. She grabbed Grace and tried to turn her, shouting incoherently. She knew she was in a desperate race against time, that every second in the water pulled Grace further away from life. With ungainly, struggling strokes she fought for the bank and finally managed to touch the soft lake floor. With the extra traction she dragged Grace, still face down, towards the edge, desperate to get her the right way up, to stop her drowning, but Grace’s unconscious body made her too heavy.

  Nicky shouted to be saved, hollering for the big boys in the house to come and help her. She flailed in the reeds, the car alarm shrieking unhindered, blocking the sound of her own desperate cries. She got both feet on the bank then put her hands under her best friend’s armpits and little by little managed to pull her from the lake, Grace half on top of her like a drunken lover. Nicky dragged her a few feet along the grass to where it was flat and dropped to her knees, turning Grace’s body by yanking at her shoulders. Her white hair was a dark halo round her head, the moonlight washing colours black or midnight blue. Only the wedding ring on her lifeless finger glinted dully. Nicky bent down, ready and pumped to give her the kiss of life, but the moon illuminated only the black stain of Grace’s blood, spreading relentlessly across her chest. Her neck had been slashed from ear to ear.

  Sam had finally found her keys in her upturned bag next to the cooker and had tiptoed in a painful, bare-footed hobble across the spiky gravel of the drive. After much swearing and jabbing at her key fob she had got her car to stop making that insane racket, and had turned to go back to the pool and her bottle of beer. The noise that surrounded her, carrying over the rural silence, almost froze her blood. The screams couldn’t be coming from a human being. No one could possibly be suffering that much.

  1

  Five Years Later

  Nicky tried to ignore the man poking her in the arse with his bag as she watched the woman in front try to stuff a bag the size of a fridge in the overhead locker. Why were they called lockers anyway? They fell open if you hit turbulence, and – with the pelting rain outside that they were still trying to shake off after the ungainly sprint across the tarmac – their trip home was bound to feature a lot of that. She hoped she wasn’t the one to get bonked on the head by the leg of jamon bought in a fit of love for all things Spanish at duty-free.

  ‘Move along the aisle and take your seats, please,’ said a stewardess with an accent it was impossible to place – Moldova? Latvia? The man behind huffed as Nicky waited for the woman to finish pushing and shoving. They didn’t move an inch. The plane was filling up from the back door. She saw passengers surging forward, filling the window seats she wanted for herself. Finally the woman turned and did the squat-lean-hunch manoeuvre to get out of the way and Nicky slid past, eyes locked on the row where she would perform her own personal contortions to get into the doll-sized seats. Budget air travel was a blast.

  ‘You can’t sit here,’ a stern woman in the Day-Glo uniform of the airline said, her blood-red nails jabbing at the row Nicky had her eyes on.

  ‘Wing exit?’ Nicky asked.

  ‘You can’t sit here,’ was the reply. Nicky wasn’t going to argue. She wondered if the stewardess was a robot, programmed with only three sentences: ‘You can’t sit here’, which she’d already heard, ‘No’, and ‘That’ll be ten euros’ (without a please). She moved down the plane, her case bumping on the headrests, and began to stuff her own bag, the size of a cooker, into the locker.

  ‘Here, let me help.’ A broad and hairless hand reached out for the case and gave it a confident shove. The hand and hers managed to squeeze it into the unforgiving space and slam the door shut on it, like it was a tawdry secret they wanted to forget. ‘After you,’ she heard the man say to her neck. Nicky didn’t hesitate. She shuffled towards the window without even looking round. To hell with manners, it was everyone for themselves in here. She heard the squeak of the plastic beneath her thighs.

  ‘Thanks.’ She said it to the graphic of a woman crawling along a smoke-filled cabin, which was stuck to the seat back in front of her. They’d taken away the pocket that used to contain a dog-eared magazine, the sick bags and a piece of crinkly orange peel. She glanced over at the man, now sitting in the aisle seat.


  ‘We have a full flight today, so please use all available seats,’ the tannoy announced. The man looked over sheepishly and Nicky got her first proper look at him as he moved to the next seat along. She fought the desire to grin stupidly. Life always did that to her: stunned her with its ability to spring surprises when she was least expecting them – not all of them pleasant. The man sliding over the armrest was gorgeous, just peachy. He had dark hair that gleamed like a seal’s pelt, a strong profile and brown eyes that with one glance managed to suggest fun and a bit of danger. And he was young. Nicky saw a small knitted braid of something round his wrist. She had a sudden flashback to a holiday in Santorini with Grace – another lifetime ago – and dropped his age to the early twenties.

  ‘Sorry.’ He shrugged and fidgeted, glancing at her with one dark eyebrow raised. He seemed absurdly big for the seat, his shoulders pushing over the boundary into her space.

  ‘I think the owner of this airline is a dwarf.’

  He turned to her fully now. ‘He’s keen to punish anyone over five foot six.’

  ‘Too selective. Anyone with a stomach. Have you tried the food?’

  ‘Of course. Cost me ten euros for a burger.’

  Nicky tried to remember when she had last seen a smile that good. Probably not since she’d been married. Stop it, she told herself sternly. Naughty Wife was rearing her head. She watched him punching the recline button on his seat.