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Darling: The most shocking psychological thriller you will read this summer
Rachel Edwards
I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her. I felt it as she stood in the doorway that day: disaster. Not just because she was so different, that skin and that hair, as different from me as it’s possible to be. There was something wrong about her. Wrong for us. It was never going to work.Now she is dead and only I am left to love him. She is dead, and it’s all my fault.
(#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
Copyright (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018
Copyright © Rachel Edwards 2018
Cover image © Margie Hurwich/Arcangel Images
Design by Heike Schüssler
Rachel Edwards asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008281113
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008281137
Version: 2018-07-06
Dedication (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
To Peter
and
Patricia, darling Mum
Epigraph (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Contents
Cover (#u229a0ce9-4c36-5b96-99eb-455ea7a47534)
Title Page (#u7e7d6e1a-7898-5452-9971-11fb8e16ecc1)
Copyright (#uc3fadf6f-a762-57ad-8f61-7261d61f522e)
Dedication (#u1bfcfadf-1783-5b78-bcf3-38c3a23349bb)
Epigraph (#ub330b6c6-4240-5f43-843d-10829e05e300)
What’s Done is Done (#u194e5cab-99e7-502f-8de8-9574a333c05c)
PART I (#u48e5c250-52f9-504d-97d8-f87515893020)
Darling (#u34c4ba3a-c2a6-5cb1-bec7-caf342567ad5)
Lola (#u2a71208f-12fd-5d9e-8c42-98667726d87f)
Darling (#u7a354177-40de-5268-bf00-1909cf39eebe)
Lola (#u98f2e6cb-1ff6-5852-bc5f-125e9c751b7b)
Darling (#u8b2f8a79-9ed1-5ad8-8b5d-8f2a8bcc3e11)
Lola (#ua572ab54-cd09-55ab-86f8-954014d61446)
PART II (#uedb85652-a117-5909-ade2-8c59028d1be9)
Darling (#ua1aa2bc9-05ba-5499-aaca-c2492485b67c)
Dark (#u99603670-535b-5fb7-909f-0231917ee407)
Lola (#ub4705c86-fa14-5b9a-80f9-5d756af2440a)
Darling (#ucf772ce7-7f67-5ca3-85c5-e3ceb599e64b)
Lola (#ue554ad35-9343-5889-b2cc-53ef022adb71)
Darling (#u98247fd6-9df4-5f24-af2f-01b651787fce)
A Thing or Two (#u55687be9-e2ab-5ebc-8c6f-57b5d157dce9)
Lola (#u2f222927-27ed-5f7f-9c9e-0fe3289913de)
Darling (#u39faeaf6-d736-5dac-98d9-20d371a4005a)
Lola (#u3df8ff70-a87c-5c92-bad3-7b478edffd82)
PART III (#u4b843324-3ca3-51c8-80da-f8ca733fc6c8)
Darling (#u072590a5-27b8-5f37-9bce-d2f4a8d6171f)
Red Flowers (#u4aed6925-6e13-57ed-b899-c81748322a5c)
Lola (#u4d8028dd-eb75-57c8-be5e-ded98116558a)
Darling (#u2ce273b9-8fbd-5045-a74e-322a5f2012c0)
Lola (#u88c1037b-bc8e-52a8-b40b-a323bdce43f7)
Darling (#uaa07efa9-656d-52e0-836f-9592af525e47)
Lola (#uae210a0d-a498-56c7-80a5-16ca0c32a39b)
Darling (#ubb05eab4-15d2-5429-894c-44db1b1f6633)
What’s Done is Done (#u17dab290-c05e-5d05-b6f2-5cc3a1ac87c0)
Acknowledgements (#ua2a7a108-4006-536d-a690-b1d136d5e85e)
About the Author (#u5c2c93a9-44a5-507f-950f-3eb351d1ce1d)
About the Publisher (#u02be0e81-0ef2-5c41-89bc-75c4edd6588b)
What’s Done is Done (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
It took less than six months for everything to fall apart. Six months of fighting, competing, whispering, each of us trying to be better, to love him better.
I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her. I felt it as she stood in our doorway that day: disaster. Not just because she was so different – that skin and that hair, as opposite to me as it’s possible to be. More than the way she always looked through me, right past me, straight at him. There was something wrong about her. Wrong for us. We would never fit. It was never going to work.
I did try. I tried more than anyone will ever know, in my own way. I tried to welcome her. Tried to meet her halfway, like he said. Didn’t get stressy when he locked himself away with her for hours on end, even though I needed him too. Even when I started to get suspicious, when her lies built up around her, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. But before the Christmas storms – over the top, like the crappy clichéd ones they teach you about at school – before the rain and the branches and the roof could fall on the four of us, she was dead.
She is dead.
Now only I am left to love him and it’s all my fault.
PART I (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
Darling (#u20f182fe-03b7-5dab-90fd-2cc3e7fb2f8c)
FRIDAY, 24 JUNE 2016
I ran. Ribcage, feet and thoughts pounding, I ran and ran and kept on running.
What had we done? Why had we?
Blue, blue, blue, blue, yellow, yellow, a whole buggeration of blue: on and on the results had flashed up, all the live-long night, and now we were out.
Fuck it. Brexit.
Now I needed a fag, I needed my dead mum and I needed a new passport, in that order. The latter two were out of the question, so I had bolted to the supermarket for cigarettes.
When I reached the doors, I eyed myself in the glass. My lips were mud red. I was puffy, my eyes salt-stained and dry; worst of all I was panting in public. Over-exercised, out-voted, thwarted and screwed, but alive and still here, wherever here was now.
On the bright side, nothing made you appreciate a fag like a good sprint.
Two people had arrived before me. There was an old lady wrapped in thick, well-cut mustard – years of knowing that summer mornings could be chilly in this corner of the European Union – tying up her spicy little terrier. And him.
The woman blanked our smiles but he and I met each other’s eye. I was ready:
‘Not long now …’
He was too:
‘Here’s hoping …’ His first words.
A pause; we were taking our time. I could see up close those cuffs that commanded a second look, the sun-starved wrists, the moon rising from each cuticle. The hair, organised, showed more salt than pepper in that still-shocked light. But these were unimportant details. All I could feel was the pressure, building in the nothing between us. With pressure like that you just knew that the universe, or the Almighty, or whatever the hell, was getting ready to give one mother of a push.
6.58 a.m. Friday 24 June 2016.
‘I’m here for my daughter,’ he began at last. ‘She’s turning sixteen and wants me to get “a tonne of good stuff”, whatever that might mean …’
‘It’s her party?’
‘Only the sleepover tonight, the main party next week, but I have no—’
‘Oi-oi!’
Just as he was about to tell me what he did not have, we heard it: the unmistakable cadence of trouble. A heap of a man was arriving, belly first; lumping his way down from the high street, prickled scalp tilted high. From where we stood you could see he was a meeting of both triumph and disaster.
‘Out! Out!’
The red face, the glittering glare: joy gone bad. He was coming closer.
‘Enger-lurrnd!’ he sang, as three more prickleheads straggled around the corner behind him. ‘En! Ga! Lund!’
More fat than muscle but still, he was big.
Then he was nearly upon me, blue marble eyes swivelling, ready to bash at this other thing, this other thing, this dark blot on his brand-new swept street, his clean sheet. A black woman wearing rushed make-up and a look of contempt for his playground punch-up politics.
He spoke:
‘We voted Leave, love. Outcha go!’
I gaped, eye-level with the chest of this sweaty fiasco. Tattoos all over his thick neck.
