Good Bad Girl: a Novel by Alice Feeney

Author:Alice Feeney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Frankie

Frankie has texted her daughter back ten times already but there is no reply. According to her own phone, the messages haven’t even been read. She must have dialed Nellie’s number fifty times but it goes straight to voice mail. And it is just a generic recording, not her daughter’s voice, a sound she misses so much. She keeps wondering if she imagined receiving the text but it’s still there, every time she checks: HELP ME MUM.

Frankie has a pain in her chest and feels as though she can’t breathe. She remembers this feeling. The first time her daughter disappeared—in a supermarket of all places—she was still so small. It doesn’t matter that she is eighteen years old now; the sense of panic and the overwhelming fear feel exactly the same. Frankie’s little girl needs her and she doesn’t even know where to start looking. She puts some cash on the table for the breakfast she no longer has an appetite for, then leaves the café. She hurries back to the van—twenty-four steps—and sees a yellow parking ticket on the windscreen. She snatches it, stuffs it inside her bag, and looks up just in time to see them: the owner of the gallery and the woman from the pink house. Together. Standing in front of a narrow alleyway.

They walk toward the gallery and Frankie sees that the sign on the door still says Closed, even though it is now late morning. Jude Kennedy checks that the door is locked, then he walks away down the cobbled street toward Trafalgar Square. The woman in the pink house walks away in the opposite direction. They don’t hug or say goodbye to each other. They look like strangers and the whole scene seems a little off, so Frankie decides to investigate the alley they just emerged from for herself.

Covent Garden is heaving with tourists and shoppers, but life has taught her that people are generally too preoccupied with themselves to notice what someone else is or isn’t doing. There are forty-eight steps from the van to the alleyway. At first, it looks like there is nothing there—just some bins and cardboard boxes left out for recycling—but then she spots the door at the side of the building.

Picking locks is surprisingly easy. It’s one of the first things an inmate at HMP Crossroads taught her to do. Lazy Jane—as she liked to be known—was genuinely shocked by how much Frankie once paid a locksmith when she lost her door keys. Jane—who was a workaholic on the outside and inside, not lazy at all—taught her enough so that she’d never need a man to unlock a door again. Modern locks are a little more tricky, but the basic kind, the variety you’ll find on most doors, are simple to open when you know how. Frankie has a tool on her key ring and she’s inside in less than thirty seconds.

The view that greets her is disappointing, just stairs. A lot of them. One hundred and twenty-three steps in total, she discovers when she reaches the top.

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