The July Girls Read online

  Copyright © 2019 Nicola Cloke

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

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an EBook in 2019 by WILDFIRE, an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 4927 2

  Cover design by Heike Schüssler

  Cover photograph © Paul Gooney/Arcangel Images (woman © Jordan Siemans/Getty Images)

  Author photograph by Tim Steele

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Praise for Phoebe Locke

  Also by

  Dedication

  2005: Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  2005: After

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  2008

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  2011

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  2014

  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

  2017

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for The Tall Man

  ‘This summer’s scariest thriller … an addictive blend of psychological suspense and spine-tingling chills’ – Stylist

  ‘So chilling I had to put it aside for the few days I was home alone … Genuinely scary, The Tall Man carefully walks the line between psychosis and the paranormal, never quite letting the reader know it’s truth’ Alison Floor, Observer

  ‘If you read just one psychological suspense novel this year, make it Phoebe Locke’sThe Tall Man . . . a brilliant summer thriller’ – Culturefly

  ‘A must-read summer chiller’ – Daily Express

  ‘A gripping blend of dark psychological suspense and spine-tingling chills’ – iNews

  ‘Outstanding. A chilling, relentless and needle-sharp thriller that will stay with you long after you reach the final page’ – Cara Hunter, author of Close to Home

  ‘From the second I opened this book, I wanted to know the truth about the Tall Man. . . I couldn’t put the book down until I knew. An unsettling, original page-turner you’ll still be thinking about long after you reach the end’ – Amy Engel, author of The Roanoke Girls

  ‘Do not use this book as a cure for insomnia. It turns shadows into threats. A brilliantly creepy, twisty story’ – Julia Crouch, author of Her Husband’s Lover

  ‘Brilliant, chilling and compelling. I can’t stop thinking about it!’ – Karen Hamilton, author of The Perfect Girlfriend

  ‘Mesmerizing and terrifying – The Tall Man more than lives up to the hype’ – Chris Whitaker, author of Tall Oaks

  Genuinely scary contemporary novels are rare but Phoebe Locke’s debut – a taut, complex but brilliantly constructed supernatural thriller – is not one to be read alone at bedtime ... The writing is deft, the twists unpredictable, the tension unrelenting. Recommended – Metro

  If you read just one psychological suspense novel this year, make it Phoebe Locke’s The Tall Man. A creepy legend, the disappearance of a young mother and a teenage girl acquitted of murder... think that sounds like a recipe for a brilliant summer thriller? You’re right. Simmering with eerie mystery and dark tension, it’ll have you checking under the bed before you turn off the light – Culturefly

  Chilling – Bella

  What a creepy and compelling debut – fantastic! – Fiona Cummins, author of Rattle

  So creepy and chilling. Loved it! – Laura Marshall, author of Friend Request

  Absolutely brilliant – bravo – Cass Green, author of In a Cottage in a Wood

  Spine-tingling … It cleverly veers between that which is real and imagined, leaving the reader to make their own mind up as to who – or what – is really behind this creepy tale of psychological suspense – Susan Swarbrick, The Herald

  A compelling story that is original, cleverly plotted and brilliantly told. I was totally hooked – Rachel Abbott, author of And So It Begins

  I absolutely smashed through this book. Terrifying and incredibly well written. If you’re in the mood for something truly unnerving, you HAVE to read this! – Darren O’Sullivan, author of Our Little Secret

  Loved this book. Utterly creepy and atmospheric – Colette McBeth, author of The Life I Left Behind

  I could not put this book down. A deliciously dark, twisty, absorbing plot which masterfully blurs the line between imagination and reality, this will stay with you long after you’ve read the final page – Lucy Foley, author of The Invitation

  A really superior, creepy, insidious thriller. I loved it – Hannah Beckerman, author of The Dead Wife’s Handbook

  This was so good, and the twists utterly brilliant! Loved it! – Amanda Reynolds, author of Close to Me

  Twisty, creepy and very, very unsettling, it was worth every minute of lost sleep! – Lisa Hall, author of Between You and Me

  Loved it! – Jane Fallon, author of Getting Rid of Matthew

  By Phoebe Locke and available from Headline

  The Tall Man

  The July Girls

  For my family

  There is a moment with each of them. A look in their eyes when they know that it’s over. He likes to watch that realisation finally dawn, see them accept that there is no escape. The feeling of it is electric. Each time, he holds them close to him. He cradles them, a calm taking over.

  It’s the calm, he thinks sometimes, that he truly craves. That second’s peace, the fury he feels suddenly silenced. It doesn’t last; it never lasts. And when the fury surges back, the hatred crackling through him, he will long for that moment. He will try to remember the way it felt as he killed them. Try to survive on it. But soon – too soon – he starts counting down, waiting through the cold months, the Christmas lights, the bleak early weeks and then the slow awakening of spring.

  Soon he begins to look forward to the day when he can take the next.

  2005

  Before

  1

  The summer I turned ten, everything started to change. We still lived in the same flat we’d always lived in, second floor of a block on Brixton Road, where I could sit out on the concrete balcony and watch the top decks of buses sail by. But that year it started to feel less like home. The stack of bills with their red letters, left in a pile on the scarred kitchen table. The fridge sad and empty, humps of ice sliding down its back wall. Dad out at work when I went to school and when I came back and all night too, waiting outside hospitals, bars, airports. Anywhere he thought someone might be just desperate enough not to care about the cracked wing mirror, the croaky engine. The Magic Tree hanging from the rearview mirror where his licence should have been.

  Jessie had started working more too. The wig shop was in one of the railway arches, trains thudding overhead, and Jessie had been helping out there since she was fifteen. She used to take me sometimes, if Laine was in a good mood, and they’d let me sit out the back, running my fingers through the boxes of acrylic hair until they crackled with static. It was Jessie’s job to unpack them from their plastic, to brush them out ready for Laine to display; white polystyrene heads lined up in the window and on the walls for the full wigs, glass cabinets and racks for the weaves. Laine had a soft spot for me. She saved old magazines for me and would sit and twist my hair into complicated styles, her long nails tickling my scalp. But she loved my sister more. It took me a long time to look back and realise that that shop was too small for two people to work in there as much as they did; that even before that summer, it was only ever us in there, never any customers. Laine didn’t need Jessie there, probably couldn’t afford to pay her most weeks, but she still kept handing her those little brown envelopes each Friday. She loved us, or she felt sorry for us – I’ve always found it hard to tell the difference.

  Often, after they’d closed up the shop, Laine would produce drinks from the locked cupboard under the till, and she and Jessie would sit on the display cabinet, legs swinging, and tell me to
try on wig after wig. I’d get braver after a while, parading back and forth in Laine’s heels, while they doubled over laughing. Laine was the only person, apart from Jessie, who could bring that out in me. But even that couldn’t stay the same.

  Her brother showed up one Saturday with a cardboard box, damp down one side, which he dumped onto the counter. I was sitting on my little stool in the tiny back room, but with the door propped open, and Laine was out getting lunch. It was Jessie behind the till, and I watched the way her hands went immediately to her hair, the way she pressed against the counter, one foot cocked onto its toes.

  His hair was darker than Laine’s dyed caramel; tight black curls which were shorn short all over. He was wearing mirrored aviators, blue and yellow tinged, and he tilted his head forward so they slid down his chiselled face and he could look properly at my sister.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, his voice smooth and low. ‘Laine in?’

  Jessie shrugged, her expression cool. But from where I was sitting I could see her foot tapping anxiously behind her. Her hair was growing out; mousy at the roots, yellowish white along the length, but Laine had been playing with her new straighteners and so it was shiny and smooth, no mean feat.

  ‘Gone out,’ she said, and then, to the box, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Product,’ he said, and he took his sunglasses off. ‘You’re Jess, yeah?’

  ‘Jessie.’ I was glad she said that; glad she corrected him. Dad called her Jess all the time, Jessica when he was teasing or drunk or annoyed, and she never corrected him. I didn’t like that. It was Dad who had chosen Jessica for her; Mum who had made it Jessie.

  ‘Right. Jessie. I’m Laine’s baby brother.’

  ‘Elliott. I know.’

  He looked at her differently then, a little smile starting at the corners of his mouth. It often surprised people, the hardness of her shell. ‘Nobody calls me that,’ he said.

  ‘Laine does.’

  Laine came in then, before he could reply, an open can of Coke in one hand, a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You’re early.’ And Jessie moved swiftly away, like someone almost caught doing something wrong. She started straightening the heads behind the till, brushing the hair, and so it was only me who saw the way he kept looking past Laine as she talked, his eyes drifting to Jessie.

  The first boyfriend I remember of hers had broken up with her a couple of months before. We’d been walking home after she’d picked me up from school, and she’d got the text. I can still remember the exact way she looked then; the cropped yellow T-shirt, the toned line of her belly. The purple Air Maxes, their laces fluorescent yellow. The knot of her hair, the darker roots and the fluff of the ends fanning out from underneath. Her nose ring was new and didn’t last long after that, and the third tiny hoop in her left ear was red-rimmed and crusted. She cared for me religiously; for herself, little. I remember the way she shrugged, shoved her phone back in her pocket. The way, a couple of minutes later, she hissed Twat under her breath.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, and she squeezed my hand once and let it go.

  ‘The only person you can trust is me, okay?’ she said. ‘Me and you, that’s it.’

  Dellar – and he was right; the only person who ever called him by his first name was Laine – came back a couple of days later. We were outside, Laine locking up the shutters, a stray acrylic red thread still stuck in my hair, a blue one sliding down the front of my school shirt. Jessie was laughing, her hand clawed up in front of her face as she told us a story about some guy she’d turned down the night before. It was weird, this aspect of our relationship: she was my mother figure but she was still seventeen. She was seventeen and she went out at night after she said goodnight to me and woke up in a single bed three feet from my single bed, make-up smeared across her face and her clothes abandoned in a trail from the door to her pillow. She was seventeen but she still woke me up for school, cooked me breakfasts – ‘A hot breakfast in your belly makes you always ready,’ she’d say, drumming up an omelette from the stray egg, the last piece of ham, and it’d be a year or two before she started adding, ‘That’s what Mum used to say, anyway.’

  As Laine clicked the final padlock shut, we heard footsteps behind us, their sound a slow, assertive beat against the distant chug of a train somewhere down the track above, the clatter of shutters from the butcher and the fishmonger across the street. We turned and watched him come towards us, the early summer sun sliding behind the arches, Atlantic Road its most attractive in subdued orange. His sunglasses were back on his face, the three of us framed small and blue-tinted in both lenses.

  ‘Hey,’ Jessie said, when he got close, and he just grinned at her.

  Laine tutted at him, but then she took my hand. ‘I’ll take Addie home.’

  As we walked, I snuck glances up at Laine. In profile, her face was softer, less intimidating. She was quieter, just the two of us, away from the shop.

  ‘Does your brother like Jessie?’ I asked, and she looked down at me.

  ‘Honey,’ she said. ‘Elliott likes everybody.’

  We crossed the road and cut into the estate. ‘She likes him,’ I said, testing, and when she didn’t reply, my heart sank.

  2

  After that, Dellar was always with us; he’d be there with Jessie, waiting for me after school. He was there, hanging around the shop while I sat in the store room, too shy to come out. And he was there, late at night or early in the morning, the blue hours in between, when I stirred in my sleep and saw not one but two bodies in Jessie’s single bed. His smell, sharp and clean and completely different to our father’s, soaked into everything.

  Surprisingly, Dad didn’t seem to mind – or didn’t notice – him being around. Those months in my memory barely feature Dad, though. He’d always worked nights and weird hours but these were longer, stranger shifts, where he’d work for two days straight, come home and sleep for a few hours while Jessie, Dellar and I watched Eggheads and Come Dine with Me, and then he’d be out of the door again. I knew then, in a vague sort of way filtered through Jessie and overheard conversations, that he’d had to return his black cab, that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble at work. I knew that he’d bought a car from a mate down the pub, a navy Ford Mondeo with soft grey seats and a thick smell of cigarettes which three and then four and then five Magic Trees couldn’t shift. I know now that he was driving it as a minicab illegally. I knew then that all of those bills that sat unopened were lettered in red, and that he only came home for those two or three hours of sleep when he started dropping off at the wheel. But I also knew – had always known – that we weren’t supposed to talk about money around Dad. It was better, really, if we didn’t talk at all. Safer.

  I should have been annoyed that I was suddenly having to share Jessie’s attention. For so long, I’d been all she cared about. What I wore, what I ate, whether or not I was working hard at school. She was the person who warmed a towel on the one radiator in the flat which gave off a decent heat, while I sat in the bath she’d run for me. She was the person who tucked me in, who told me she loved me just as I was floating into sleep. And then there was Dellar. There between us on the sofa, there beside me at the dinner table – his eyes firmly fixed on Jessie as she stirred a pan on the hob. There, waiting patiently in the lounge while she said goodnight to me and turned off my light, before going out into the dark with him.

  But he made it difficult to be jealous. He talked about the things I cared about, tipped off by Jessie: dinosaurs; space; mermaids; the various ways to eat a potato waffle. One night while Jessie was in our bedroom, drying the hair she’d just bleached for the first time in weeks, Dellar turned to me during an advert break. ‘What you reading?’

  I’d been lying in my dad’s chair, legs hanging over the arm with the book propped in my lap. ‘It’s called Charlotte’s Web,’ I said, showing him the yellowed, illustrated cover. It was one of a stack Jessie had dug out of a cupboard for me a few years before, each of them with our mother’s name pencilled in careful letters on the inside cover: Elizabeth Addison. It was the fourth or fifth time I’d read it and mostly I just liked having it around.

  ‘Oh I know that one,’ he said, surprising me. ‘That was Laine’s favourite when we were little kids. With the spider, right? And the pig?’