The Surprise Party: An utterly gripping psychological thriller packed with secrets and suspense by Julia Crouch

Author:Julia Crouch [Crouch, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2024-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Eve closes the door behind Harry, who she has dosed up with sleeping tablets originally prescribed for Jess. It’s the second time in twelve hours that she has put him to bed in a state. She leans against the closed door outside his and Jess’s room. In the gloom of the marble-tiled corridor, she heaves a great sigh, closes her eyes and finally, finally acknowledges her own shock and grief.

Jess. Jess. She is more a sister to her than Lucy. Was. Eve never imagined a life without her. Even before Jess and Harry got the cottage fifteen minutes away from her and Will, they saw each other at least twice a month. Eve would go down to London to stay with Jess and James, her hapless first husband. Then, when Jess moved into the Chelsea flat after the brief and disastrous affair with a twenty-one-year-old that led to her divorce, she would bring Eve down from the Midlands for nights out on the town. Eve was always impeccably behaved and would often come home to Jess’s place alone, to be joined by her the next morning for a recovery breakfast at some chichi cafe on the King’s Road.

Jess still has that flat, but when she and Harry married, they moved to the cottage near Will and Eve, so their outings became more sedate, involving local pubs and usually their husbands. There was still the odd London nightclub blowout, when Jess took Eve down to London for some ‘girl time’ – a pretext for her continuing bad behaviour – but perhaps only once or twice a year. Out of the four of them, Will uses the flat most often, as a base for when he’s overseeing the increasing number of London window installations he’s doing these days. It was replacing the windows in Jess’s listed flat that started the London client run. He did a brilliant job for her, and her generous word-of-mouth brought in a steady stream of customers.

Their lives are so intertwined.

And now Jess is gone. The wooden detailing on the hotel door presses into Eve’s back as this realisation sinks into her. For the first time, she lets the tears come. She feels the loss almost physically, like something has been ripped from her side.

She assumed it was some awful accident. That Jess might have drowned. Or there is so much rock here, so many heights, so many ways of cracking a bone, twisting an ankle, falling, crashing and smashing. But the full horror is that if there is to be an inquiry, they must think that either someone killed Jess or she killed herself.

But how? And why?

It is too horrible even to think about.

Again the images come to her, terrible things she only half dares to imagine.

She looks at her hands. They are smoothing-down hands, loving hands, make-it-all-better hands. Not killing hands. No.

She pulls herself away from the door and slowly makes her way down to the hotel terrace, which is eerily deserted. Everyone must know, then. María – who has clearly been told – greets her with a comforting arm around the shoulder.

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