The First Cut Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Ali Knight

  About the Author

  Title Page

  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

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgements

  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

  Ali Knight

  www.hodder.co.uk

  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.

  ‘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 hers
elf 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.


  ‘They’ll be over in a flash to tell you to sit upright.’

  He leaned towards her conspiratorially. ‘I like breaking the rules.’

  She felt a flutter of excitement across her stomach. He was forward and daring and Nicky found herself hoping that a weekend trying to breathe life into a dying friendship could be redeemed with a little flirtation on the home leg. After all, where was the harm?

  He shuffled about trying to locate the seatbelt ends. ‘I think this bit’s yours.’ He held up the strap with the metal buckle for her. His gesture felt loaded with possibilities. A grin formed on her face and started to meander across her cheeks.

  A forceful gust of rain splattered the plastic window and they both stared out for a moment. ‘Typical. I came to Spain in the worst rainstorm for two years.’

  He blew air out of his cheeks. ‘Have a good time?’

  Nicky actually considered this question. ‘No.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘You know, I really didn’t have a very good time.’ Those eyebrows shot towards his hairline again. ‘Sorry, sorry, I—’

  He interrupted her. ‘Forgive me, I’m Adam.’ He held out his hand and she shook it.

  ‘Nicky. What should I forgive you for?’

  ‘Because I’m asking you questions and you don’t even know my name.’ Adam was distracted by a man slumping down in the aisle seat. They all shifted and rearranged themselves. Adam’s elbow slid over to her side of the armrest. ‘So, what went wrong in Spain?’

  She wondered where he’d acquired his manners and his confidence. Private school, maybe even boarding school? She reminded herself that he wasn’t long out of whichever institution it was.

  She waved her hand dismissively, thinking: don’t complain, don’t carp about life. Stay positive. After all, every day is precious. She’d learned that the hardest way possible. She had a running total in her head of the number of days she’d lived without Grace. Weeks would sometimes go by and she wouldn’t think about that total, but she could always recall it. When would that internal counter stop marking the death of her best friend?