The last to disappear, p.1
The Last to Disappear, page 1
Also by Jo Spain
Inspector Tom Reynolds Mysteries
With Our Blessing
Beneath the Surface
Sleeping Beauties
The Darkest Place
The Boy Who Fell
After the Fire
STANDALONE NOVELS
The Confession
Dirty Little Secrets
Six Wicked Reasons
The Perfect Lie
This ebook published in 2022 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © 2022 Joanne Spain
The moral right of Joanne Spain to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52940 733 4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Ebook by CC Book Production
www.quercusbooks.co.uk
For Tommy, never forgotten
Contents
The Last to Disappear
Also By
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgements
Author's Note
Discover more from Jo Spain
Prologue
Koppe, Finland
1 November 2019
At first, white-hot agony.
She can’t think. Can’t react.
The ice-cold water paralyses every muscle.
Her entire body becomes one desperate plea: let it end.
Nobody can bear this and live.
Just when it feels as though she might die from the pain, the stinging needles recede, replaced with a deep ache as her cells attempt to adjust to the shockingly low temperature.
The surface. She needs to get to the surface. The thought crowds everything else out.
Survival instinct kicks in, over the fear, the denial, the incomprehension.
Her legs kick, her arms flail, seeking the hole through which she fell, the break in the ice.
Up, up, and her head is clear and she’s gasping for air.
The sudden intake of oxygen brings an explosion of adrenaline and now she knows what she has to do.
One. Fight the debilitating throbbing that could force her back under.
Two. Get out of the water and on to the ice.
Three. Find safe ground.
She’s lucky; this registers somewhere in the back of her brain. Some people go in and never find their way out. The last thing they see is a sheet of impenetrable ice, the promise of light on the other side. She has been trained for this. She, at least, has a chance.
Her hand throws itself on to the frozen surface, the section that hasn’t cracked, and splays there like a safety anchor.
She sees a figure; remembers who it is. She calls for help. At least, she thinks she does. Her mouth opens, but she’s not sure any sound is coming out. There’s so much to say.
You’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. I won’t tell anybody.
The figure just watches. There’s no offer of help. And now, the person is walking away.
The woman in the lake sees crimson splashed on the white snow that covers most of the ice, thick snow that lured her to the thinnest, most dangerous part of the lake. It’s so distractingly beautiful, red on white, that she almost forgets it’s her blood that’s been spilled. That the ragged line that trails towards the broken ice must have dripped from her exposed wound as she tried to run to safety.
Her hand reaches and slips and reaches and slips but finds nothing.
She tries to scream. It’s beyond her. The pounding inside her head and the stabbing sensation of the freezing water have stolen her voice.
Who’d hear, anyway?
She’s alone, trapped in a frozen lake, nothing but birch trees and forest animals for miles; a whole lot of white nothingness.
She’s not perfect. She’s done a lot of stupid things. Things she regrets.
But she doesn’t deserve this.
She didn’t see this coming.
There are so many people she wishes she could talk to one last time. So many people she loves, people she hasn’t told in a while.
She still thinks she’ll be okay. This doesn’t happen. Not to people her age. She can’t just die. Somebody will find her and save her.
Her body starts to go numb. Her thoughts drift. Her scrabbling hand falls still.
The last thing she sees before the icy water claims her is a new snowfall.
It’s breathtaking in its beauty.
Gentle, soft crystals fall on to her face. And fall and fall.
And fall.
London, England
Mid-December 2019
‘Your first mistake, Alexander, was bringing them to a chophouse for lunch. These bastards don’t want steak and ale, even if your hipster joint does serve chips in an aluminium basket and the table is reclaimed wood from the Tower of London. They want a Louis XIV dining experience: £400 bottles of port, ortolan birds eaten under white napkins, baba soaked in Armagnac.’
Alex stays mute as Charlie pauses his lecture to inhale a mound of Ossetra caviar, followed by a large gulp of Screaming Eagle wine.
‘Lucky for you, the project manager phoned me. I got them into the Connaught for the chef’s table. Focking steak. Christ, you’re an amateur. We want them to stay with us when they get the contract. They’ll need lobbyists all year round.’
Charlie claps Alex on the back with enough force – had Alex been choking – to dislodge the incriminating object.
‘Fucking steak, Charlie,’ Alex says, quietly. ‘It’s fucking with a U, not an O.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘And it was vintage côte de boeuf.’
‘Old steak. Bloody hell.’
‘The Cassidys will be lucky to get the contract, Charlie,’ Alex says. ‘I’ve thrown everything at it, but the government doesn’t know what it’s doing with the ports and it can’t afford the technology these guys want to sell.’
‘They’re going to have to do something to keep the beggars out, Alex. It’s the people’s will. The PM has to announce a plan to deal with Brexit customs checks. Why not the Cassidys? Magic, contactless customs. Bloody geniuses, those brothers.’
‘I think the PM’s budget stretches to cardboard signs and black markers,’ Alex retorts.
‘We need more lubrication, you dry sod,’ Charlie says, and stands up abruptly, off to locate Serena, the hostess.
Alex fills his glass with the dregs of the wine and surveys his work colleagues, all one hundred and twenty of them packing out the large, dimly lit cellar room of The Fig House. This is the annual Christmas party of Thompson, Mayle & Sinclair, or TM&S for those looking to save breath. But the only concession to Christmas the impeccably appointed Lebanese establishment has made is the table centre pieces: intricate berry garlands surrounding plain white candles. The room is still scented with the exotic musk of night-blooming jasmine; ornate copper amphora vases nestle beneath traditional arches, and the leafy plants lurking in corners are reminiscent of summers in cedar-lined gardens.
The firm’s event organiser has chosen The Fig House because it’s popular, not because it’s seasonal.
Fock Christmas anyway, Alex thinks.
He had assumed when he started working in the Regency-era building that houses TM&S that he was the only one who hadn’t come up through th e Eton, Balliol ranks. This was mainly because every single person in his office spoke in the dreary, uniform drawl of the upper classes. He’d been wrong.
Take Christian in auditing, a working-class lad from Leeds. Annabel in accounts was born in a regular middle-class suburb of Newcastle. Neither of them started out a million miles from Apple Dale village, where Alex grew up. Christian and Annabel, though, have battered any Northern melody out of their speech. Unlike Alex, who is still mocked mercilessly for his accent. His nickname around the office is Stainless Steel, in honour of Yorkshire’s gift to the industrial world and because Alex is not known for showing much emotion.
Charlie Mills’ family started off in a working-class block of flats in the East End of London. But Charlie, Christian and Annabel’s chameleon-like abilities serve them well in the business they’re all in.
Lobbying.
The great skill of pretending to know everything so you can convince others, who are also only pretending to know what they’re doing, that your way is best.
Alex is such a good lobbyist, he doesn’t need to fake an accent. He just fakes everything else. His sister Vicky once told him he was the living incarnation of Don Draper from Mad Men.
Vicky has always had an unerring talent for articulating Alex’s most secret fears.
Last month, Alex had been part of a team working on a contract for a private health insurance provider. Their job was to massage the figures in order to convince senior officials in the Department of Health that beds in the NHS were more costly to run than beds in private hospitals.
Alex, the son of a union-organiser postman and a village school teacher, had delivered the presentation smoothly. Only he could see his soul seeping out of his body as he spoke.
The Faustian bargain was signed when the department reps jumped all over the numbers, saying that they had been looking for exactly those kind of stats to back up a new policy direction. They’d all laughed and toasted their future partnership with coffee wheeled in by workers on minimum wage.
Charlie returns with an even more expensive bottle of wine.
While they don’t share the desire to piss money into the wind, Charlie is still one of Alex’s best friends. He’s an interesting character. Charlie spent his first six years in a tiny council flat with his four brothers and sisters, all seven members of the family squashed into three small bedrooms. His entrepreneurial father, a Del Boy-meets-Alan Sugar type, had managed to progress from bus driver to coach driver to coach owner to coach-fleet owner. Charlie’s father’s empire on wheels paid for Charlie to go to Trinity College in Dublin, which was much easier to get into than the top English unis but carried just enough elitist cachet to have TM&S recruiters overlook the obviously absent blue blood.
Charlie is still likeable, despite his new-found snobbery.
Alex likes Annabel, too, but he can’t stand Christian, who’s rumoured to have screwed one of the interns on a promise of securing her a full-time position. Only the partners get to choose which of the interns gets to stay and it’s rarely based on whether they’re a good shag.
‘You’re very subdued, Alexander,’ Charlie says.
‘You know I can’t stand these things, Charlie, mate,’ Alex says. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah were less hedonistic.’
‘That’s your problem, Alex. You just want to earn money. No idea how to spend it. So, what’s the plan for Christmas?’
Alex picks up his refilled glass of wine and drinks deep.
‘Home,’ he says.
‘Your lovely sister going to be about?’
‘You’ve only ever seen photos of Vicky,’ Alex says. ‘I don’t know where this obsession stems from.’
‘Photos of her sun-kissed on a beach in Morocco in a string bikini, man,’ Charlie says. ‘I’m only human.’
‘Put it like this – if she deigns to come home, I won’t be letting you near her.’ Alex swirls the wine in the glass. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what Vicky’s plans are. Haven’t talked to her in months.’
‘She’ll be home to keep the focus off you, don’t worry,’ Charlie says, but his thoughts are already elsewhere, on Serena, who’s gliding past them in her tight white blouse and short black skirt, en route to sell another overpriced bottle of wine to one of their foolhardy colleagues.
Alex doesn’t want to return to Apple Dale for Christmas. He’s been trying to come up with an excuse for months but, ironically, the man who essentially massages the truth for a living can’t conceive of anything credible enough to pull the wool over his parents’ eyes. Nor can he say, Folks, I can barely live with myself these days and I sure as hell can’t live with seeing myself reflected in Dad’s judgemental eyes over turkey and ham.
He’s simultaneously resigned to and bitter about the fact that Vicky is the shining light in the Evans household. Twenty-six-year-old Vicky, whose biggest achievement to date seems to be not getting pregnant while she screws her way around the world, and who only ever phones home to tap her family for cash.
Alex is the one who’s got the big city job and an apartment in Marylebone. Alex is the one who’s paid off his parents’ mortgage.
So what if he made a mistake, once, when he was only bloody sixteen and barely knew he was born, let alone supposed to be protecting his future?
So what? Except his father won’t ever let him forget it; then there’s the fact he’s only gone and become a sell-out, too.
Charlie pursues Serena for the rest of the night but it’s Alex who ends up taking her home. Charlie Mills is a cocky chap with plenty of money, but Alex has plenty of money too and, ultimately, he has five inches’ height on Charlie, his hairline isn’t receding, he weighs about three stone less and is a good deal better-looking all round.
When the phone rings at 5.30 a.m., Alex wakes thinking it’s his alarm. He’s forgotten it’s Saturday. He can’t remember why there are black, lacy knickers on the floor, and the rain is so loud against the window of his top floor apartment, he’s already talking himself out of his morning run.
Then he sees Ed’s name flashing and answers the call.
‘Dad?’
‘Alex?’
‘What’s up?’ Alex shimmies quietly into an upright position. Serena barely stirs. She’s just as beautiful sans make-up, so much so Alex can forgive the fact her Bobbi Brown foundation is now spread across his 500-thread-count white pillowcase.
‘You need to come home,’ his dad says.
Alex blinks a few times, then tenses.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks. ‘Is it Vicky?’
Of course he thinks of Vicky first. Why wouldn’t he? Vicky’s employment over the last few years has entailed bouncing from one dodgy tourist resort to the next. Vicky is the sort of person to see hitch-hiking as a cheap travel option, as though those nightmare stories involving missing backpackers could never apply to her.
‘Your mum’s in hospital. She’s had a heart attack.’
Alex inhales sharply.
Mum’s only fifty-five, he thinks. She’s too young to die.
‘Is she okay?’
Serena is waking now, her hand creeping across the sheet, trying to establish where she is without opening her eyes.
‘She’s fine. She’s stable. But you need to come up here. Now.’
Ed hangs up.
Alex stares at his phone.
Why the urgency, if his mother is okay?
There’s something Ed’s not saying.
Alex shivers.
Is his mother fine . . . for now?
As he dresses, he rings Vicky’s mobile. The line doesn’t even connect, just goes straight to voicemail.
‘Vicky,’ he says, once the automated message service plays out. ‘You have to come home. Mum had a heart attack. You need to get here, quick.’
He hesitates.
‘This is my new number.’
Please, don’t let me regret giving it to you, he thinks.
Koppe, Finland
‘He’s doing it again. Mom. Mom! He’s—’
‘I heard you!’
Agatha reaches into the glove compartment, rummages around until she finds some salted liquorice and tosses it into the back of the car. She turns her head to glare at all three children in the back.
