The Last Days of Summer

Chapter 1

1

A s Cassie Scott stepped out of Finsbury Park station and into the light, she had no idea that she was about to have one of the worst evenings of her life.

After all, bad things should only ever happen in November.

November was miserable enough. A little more misery couldn’t hurt on top of those damp grey hours that gave way to darkness by four o’clock. Besides, there was always the promise of Christmas just around the corner with its glitter and presents and huge tins of Quality Street.

Yes, let November fold the bad things into the fabric of its bleak thirty days.

Bad things should never happen on a fiercely sunny Friday evening at the beginning of July when there were blue skies and the endless possibility of the long summer ahead.

Cassie was hot, sticky and bedraggled. Her loose, sleeveless maxi dress with its graphic black and white pattern had looked crisp and on trend that morning but was now clinging damply to her. Her feet in white Birkenstocks had collected a lot of city grime over the course of the day and though she’d washed and tonged her long, brown hair that morning to make the most of some very expensive honey-toned highlights, the loose waves hadn’t survived the tube journey into town. Her hair was now twisted in two space buns, secured with bright yellow scrunchies, while her thoughts were firmly fixed on the evening to come.

Truthfully, there was a small but very insistent part of her that would have quite liked to go straight home, shower, then sit in her pants in her tiny little garden with a Calippo for dinner, but it would be rude to cancel now. Also, there had been an email summons, which had been a slightly odd and formal way of arranging things. Cassie had even replied, ‘Could this email have been a WhatsApp?’

For one moment, almost as if she had an inkling of what was to come, Cassie stood motionless and in the path of the sweaty, irritated people who were trying to enter and exit the tube. But she was only wondering whether she should buy a bottle of wine. Instead she bought a large bag of cherries and a couple of punnets of nectarines from the fruit seller outside the station. Then she eyed up the long queue for the W3 bus, which was doubling back on itself.

She was the last person to squeeze onboard. It was standing room only and Cassie could feel the last of her make-up sliding off. She was just as grateful to get off the bus as she had been to get off the tube. Then it was a short walk along streets full of the imposing three-storey redbrick Edwardian houses that this part of north London did so well. The streets became narrower, the houses smaller until Cassie finally reached a terraced row of Victorian cottages that edged along the bottom of Alexandra Park. She could just make out the splendour of Alexandra Palace and the spindly radio-transmitter tower in the distance as she ambled slowly along the street.

Cassie was still preoccupied with the week that had just been. Fashioning work grievances into amusing anecdotes and wondering if it was even worth mentioning the Hinge date that had lasted only ten minutes.

She unlatched the gate and walked up the tiled path to the front door, which was painted a cheery egg-yolk yellow. The sight of it, and the memories of all the good times she’d had once she’d stepped through the door, never failed to lift Cassie’s spirits.

She rang the bell and waited for the sound of footsteps, a shadowy figure appearing in the door’s frosted-glass panels, but all was silent.

‘I’m here and melting on your doorstep,’ she messaged and when there was no response, Cassie messaged the other occupants of the house.

It was the law that a teenage girl could never ignore the ping of her phone. Not even a minute later, the door was opened by Joni and Fleur, fifteen and thirteen respectively. All gangly limbs, long hair and braces.

Cassie smiled in delight and, no matter that she was hot and unpleasantly moist, she opened her arms wide.

‘Bring it in, ladies,’ she said and the two girls launched themselves at her, the force of their connection almost rocking Cassie off her feet.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Joni mumbled into Cassie’s neck. There had been a time, not that long ago, when hugs had meant that the girls grabbed Cassie around the waist, but now Joni was so tall that she could rest her chin on the top of Cassie’s head. Fleur was also shooting up at an alarming rate and always insisted that they stood back to back so she could see if she’d overtaken Cassie’s five feet four inches.

‘Tall enough to join the police,’ Cassie said when the girls called her pocket-sized.

‘Why would you want to join the Feds?’ Fleur would ask, like she’d been brought up in a rough neighbourhood in South Central LA and not in a very leafy enclave of north London which local estate agents referred to as ‘between the parks’.

It was a very clingy hug and they seemed quite subdued compared to the last time that Cassie had seen them a couple of weeks before, when she’d taken them and her baby brother Ryan to see Taylor Swift at Wembley. It was undoubtedly the greatest work blag Cassie had ever pulled off, and the four of them had scream-sung to every song. For the rest of the week Cassie had sounded like she smoked thirty a day.

‘OK, you can let me go now,’ she said at last, but still had to disentangle Joni’s arms from around her neck. ‘Everything all right?’

Joni shrugged and Fleur gave a choked cry, then they disappeared up the stairs. Being a teenage girl was hard. Cassie would never want to relive her own adolescence. MySpace and Bebo had been bad enough; Instagram, TikTok and boys addicted to violent pornography were much, much worse.

She followed the same red and black tiles that had lined the garden path along the hall to the big open-plan kitchen at the back of the house, the patio doors open to the garden.

The door of the cream Smeg fridge was also open, obscuring Cassie from view as she looked around the kitchen at all the little details she loved: the rose-gold splashback and matching taps and handles, the bespoke cabinetry painted in Farrow it had been a very stressful time.

But it wasn’t just the colour scheme and the striking features in the kitchen that Cassie coveted. It was also the wall painted in blackboard paint with reminders about who was meant to be where and when and a list of things to be added to the supermarket order. It was the huge blown-up pic of the four of them, Fleur and Joni tiny, dressed up as KISS for Halloween. All the trappings of family life. Of someone finding their person. Of choosing them from all the other people in the world and creating something magical and everlasting with the love they had for each other.

The fridge door suddenly closed and both Cassie and her best friend Lucy gave a start to see the other one standing there.

Lucy ran a hand through her long blonde hair. She always said that she wished she was an ashy blonde rather than a yellow blonde, but Lucy wasn’t a cool-toned, ashy person. She was far more exuberant than that. ‘I was miles away. Didn’t even hear the doorbell.’

‘The girls let me in, then I was perving at your kitchen as per usual,’ Cassie said sheepishly.

‘Feel free to perv away.’ Lucy smiled and took a step towards Cassie, then stilled. There was something off with her. Like she was moving underwater. Everything about her slow and clumsy as she held up a bottle of wine. ‘Rosé?’

‘Rose, yay!’

Lucy smiled tightly at the very weak pun and Cassie felt a little ping of panic twang in her solar plexus.

Had she done something to piss Lucy off? Was that why she’d cancelled their Saturday plans two weeks in a row at very short notice? Was that the reason for a summons by email on Monday instead of their usual WhatsApps?

But they were sisters from different misters (a phrase that they both hated). They told each other everything.

It was a friendship of sixteen years which had started off in unlikely circumstances and flourished. At the tender age of twenty, after three years as office junior rising to office manager at a funeral director’s on the Holloway Road, Cassie was ready for a change. She’d signed up with a temping agency in the West End and her first assignment had been as illness cover for the assistant to the commercial director of an aspirational fashion and lifestyle magazine called Skirt .

After three years of having to wear a neat blouse and skirt, court shoes and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, Cassie had been lowkey terrified of the sophisticated, glossy women on the Skirt ad team. They all wore sleek black trouser suits and high heels, which they’d switch up to an evening look with the addition of a sparkly going-out top. Not that they were in the office much; they were usually out wooing clients at chic breakfast meetings and expensive lunches. When they did return to HQ, it was to have long shouty conversations on their company BlackBerries about double-page spreads, gatefold covers and the rate card.

It was a glimpse of another world. A world that Cassie desperately wanted to be a part of. Even though her out-of-work look was more indie sleaze than ad exec, she bought a black trouser suit in the Jane Norman sale and when the commercial director’s assistant didn’t return, Cassie had all but refused to leave. It helped that she could type eighty-five words per minute and survive on the tiny salary because she was still living at home.

Lucy was one of the ad girls. That is to say she was among them but not of them. Lucy didn’t wear sleek black trouser suits but flowery dresses and plimsolls, before flowery dresses and plimsolls were a thing. She rarely shouted on her BlackBerry because she tended to either lose it or drop it down the loo. In her first month at Skirt , Cassie had had to order Lucy not one, not two, but three replacement BlackBerries. Each one came with an increasingly dire warning about what would happen if Lucy lost or damaged the replacement.

Lucy would nod obediently and blink her big cornflower-blue eyes as if she was on the verge of tears. Then a week later, she’d sidle up to Tamara, the commercial director, and say, ‘Please don’t shout at me, Tammy, but my BlackBerry has had a little accident,’ in a voice that always managed to be both gravelly and squeaky at the same time.

Lucy rarely got a bollocking because she was the personality hire. She’d never once closed a deal, but she was instrumental in getting the deals in the first place. Her talent was for establishing a quick and easy rapport with even the most fearsome of account directors. Lucy was always losing things but she was great at remembering people’s birthdays and their favourite restaurants and the names of their children.

Now her innate super-connector skills were put to much better use in the charity sector where Lucy matched girls and women from disadvantaged backgrounds with mentors in the creative industries.

But back then, life on the ad floor wouldn’t have been quite so much fun without Lucy. Her spot on the big bank of ad girls’ desks was nearest to Cassie’s solitary one in front of Tamara’s glass-walled office. When everyone else was on appointments and it was just Cassie and Lucy in the office, Lucy could always be relied upon to disrupt Cassie’s contractually obligated duties.

‘Cassie, would you rather have your toes as fingers or your ears where your eyes should be?’

‘Cassie, Chandler, Joey and Ross. Shag, marry or kill?’

Then at five on the dot every afternoon: ‘Cassie, what are you having for dinner? It’s Thursday, isn’t it? Is that sausage casserole night?’

Cassie would try not to be distracted, but it was hard. The only distractions at the funeral director’s had been very sad, incredibly upsetting distractions like when relatives came to view the deceased.

‘I’m really busy, Lucy,’ she’d say very sternly.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lucy would say very sorrowfully.

Cassie would always relent. ‘Give me fifteen minutes to finish doing these expense forms then we’ll have five minutes to muck around, OK?’

The mucking around involved throwing Maltesers at each other and trying to catch them in their mouths, or sticking a song on and grooving at their desks. ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’’ had been a particular favourite.

Somehow mucking about in the office had turned into getting lunch together every week. Then a semi-regular cinema date. When the ad team hit their Q3 targets a fortnight ahead of schedule, they cemented their friendship during the mandatory team celebration at a Soho club that the ad girls loved because they served pitchers of Cosmopolitans and low-carb bar snacks. It was sparkly going-out tops a gogo.

Cassie drank so many Cosmos that Lucy had to hold her hair back as she threw up, then she took Cassie back to the Primrose Hill flat she shared with her fiancé (an academic away on a field trip) because she was too pissed to go home. She’d even phoned Cassie’s nan to say that they were having a sleepover and not to wait up. Though she ruined it somewhat by giggling, ‘She’s absolutely not drunk. I can’t stress that enough.’

They had been best friends ever since. Even though Lucy had grown up on a farm in Hampshire and Cassie had grown up on a sprawling council estate on the Caledonian Road that overlooked Pentonville Prison. Lucy had belonged to the Pony Club, while Cassie had been thrilled to get a My Little Pony for Christmas one year. Lucy had been going out with Russell, currently completing his PhD, who she’d met at Fresher’s Night during her first week at Durham University, for seven years and was now engaged. Cassie was dating a Polish plumber called Bogdan and even though they’d been seeing each other for six months, he still didn’t want to say that they were exclusive.

Despite the fact that they’d always had very different lives and very different life milestones, they’d remained best friends. Through all the drama and the drudgery, from dirty nappies and baby-led weaning to work catastrophes and broken hearts, their friendship had changed shape and weathered storms but it was absolute.

So Cassie was ninety-nine per cent sure that whatever was wrong with Lucy, it didn’t have anything to do with her.

‘Look, is everything all right?’ she asked, genuine concern in her voice. ‘The girls seemed upset. Did something happen at school?’

Lucy shook her head. Then she put the bottle down so she could hug Cassie. Or rather she slumped against Cassie until Cassie put her arms round her friend. Lucy was half a head taller than Cassie, but reed slim, so Cassie always felt that there was something insubstantial and fragile about her friend whenever they hugged. Then she’d remember that Lucy was one of the strongest people she knew. Not just mentally; she could hold a plank for over two minutes.

‘It’s been a long week,’ Lucy muttered.

‘Tell me about it,’ Cassie said with great feeling, pulling away from her friend and noting the shadows under her eyes, the tight lines of her normally cheery face. ‘I brought you something. It’s nothing, really, but the cherries won’t be in season for much longer and I know you love them.’

Cassie delved into her tote bag for the fruit, which Lucy received with barely a flicker of a reaction and dumped them on the counter. It was then that Cassie realised that usually when she came for dinner, she was greeted by the smell of something delicious cooking. Not this evening.

‘Too hot to cook?’ Cassie ventured. ‘Or is Russell going to fire up the barbecue?’

‘I suppose I could order a takeaway,’ Lucy said vaguely with an even vaguer shrug. After a brief pause during which Cassie looked at her friend with increasing consternation and Lucy gazed into the middle distance, Lucy came to and retrieved two wine glasses from the cupboard next to her. ‘We’re in the garden.’

Cassie thought that was a collective ‘we’, as in the three of them; she, Lucy and Russell – but as they stepped through the open doors, she saw that she wasn’t the only guest.

Sitting in one of the curved rattan chairs was the archest of all her nemeses, Marc Lacourt.