Just between us, p.1
Just Between Us, page 1
ADELE PARKS MBE was born in North Yorkshire. She is the author of 22 bestselling novels including the recent Sunday Times bestsellers Both Of You and One Last Secret. Over four and a half million UK editions of her work have been sold and her books have been translated into 31 different languages. Adele’s Sunday Times Number One bestsellers Lies Lies Lies and Just My Luck were shortlisted for the British Book Awards and have been optioned for development for TV. She is an ambassador of the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency: two charities that promote literacy in the UK. Adele has lived in Botswana, Italy and London and is now settled in Guildford, Surrey. In 2022 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.
Find Adele on Twitter @adeleparks, Instagram @adele_parks, Facebook @OfficialAdeleParks, TikTok @Adeleparksauthor or visit www.adeleparks.com.
Also by Adele Parks
Playing Away
Game Over
Larger Than Life
The Other Woman’s Shoes
Still Thinking Of You
Husbands
Young Wives’ Tales
Happy Families (Quick Read)
Tell Me Something
Love Lies
Men I’ve Loved Before
About Last Night
Whatever It Takes
The State We’re In
Spare Brides
If You Go Away
The Stranger In My Home
The Image Of You
I Invited Her In
Lies Lies Lies
Just My Luck
Both Of You
One Last Secret
Short story collections
Love Is A Journey
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Dublin 1, D01 C9W8, Ireland
This edition 2023
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2023
Copyright © Adele Parks 2023
Adele Parks asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008395674
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2023 ISBN: 9780008395667
Version 2023-07-06
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008395674
For Diana Stewart and Jonathan Douglas,
who work tirelessly to nurture the next generation of readers.
And for Annabel Spooner
who is simply the most wonderful fun.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
March 2020
1. DC Clements
2. Daan
3. DC Clements
4. Mark
5. DC Clements
June 2020
6. Stacie
7. Stacie
8. Stacie
9. Stacie
Ten Years Ago
10. Stacie
11. Stacie
Friday 3 July 2020
12. Fiona
13. Mark
14. Daan
15. Stacie
16. Daan
17. Daan
18. Stacie
Saturday 4 July 2020
19. Oli
20. Stacie
21. Stacie
22. Seb
23. Oli
24. DC Clements
25. Fiona
26. Stacie
27. DC Clements
28. Oli
29. Fiona
30. DC Clements
31. Fiona
Sunday 5 July 2020
32. Stacie
33. Stacie
34. Stacie
35. Daan
36. Mark
37. Fiona
38. Kylie
39. Oli
40. Kylie
41. DC Clements
42. Kylie
43. Kenneth
44. Daan
45. Oli
46. Fiona
47. Kylie
48. Fiona
49. Oli
50. Kylie
51. Daan
52. Kylie
53. DC Clements
54. Kylie
55. Daan
56. Kylie
57. Fiona
58. Kylie
59. DC Clements
60. Daan
61. Mark
62. Kylie
63. Kylie
64. Kylie
Acknowledgements
Extract
Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Leigh
About the Publisher
March 2020
1
DC Clements
There is no body. A fact DC Clements finds both a problem and a tremulous, tantalising possibility. She’s not a woman inclined to irrational hope, or even excessive hope. Any damned hope, really. At least, not usually.
Kylie Gillingham is probably dead.
Statistically speaking, it’s not looking good for her. The forty-three-year-old woman has been missing nearly two weeks. Ninety-seven per cent of the 180,000 people a year who are reported missing are found within a week, dead or alive. She hasn’t been spotted by members of the public, or picked up on CCTV; her bank, phone and email accounts haven’t been touched. She has social media registered under her married name, Kai Janssen; they’ve lain dormant. No perky pictures of carefully arranged books, lattes, Negronis or peonies. Kylie Gillingham hasn’t returned to either of her homes. Statistically, it’s looking very bad.
Experience would also suggest this sort of situation has to end terribly. When a wife disappears, all eyes turn on the husband. In this case, there is not one but two raging husbands left behind. Both men once loved the missing woman very much. Love is just a shiver away from hate.
The evidence does not conclusively indicate murder. There is no body. But a violent abduction is a reasonable proposition – police-speak, disciplined by protocol. Kidnap and abuse, possible torture is likely – woman-speak, fired by indignation. They know Kylie Gillingham was kept in a room in an uninhabited apartment just floors below the one she lived in with husband number two, Daan Janssen. That’s not a coincidence. There is a hole in the wall of that room; most likely Kylie punched or kicked it through. The debris created was flung through a window into the street, probably in order to attract attention. Her efforts failed. Fingerprints place her in the room; it’s unlikely she was simply hanging out or even hiding out, as there is evidence to suggest she was chained to the radiator.
Yet despite all this, the usually clear, logical, reasonable Clements wants to ignore statistics, experience and even evidence that suggests the abduction ended in fatal violence. She wants to hope.
There just might be some way, somehow, that Kylie – enigma, bigamist – escaped from that sordid room and is alive. She might be in hiding. She is technically a criminal, after all; she might be hiding from the law. She can hardly go home. She will know by now that her life of duplicity is exposed. She will know her husbands are incensed. Baying for blood. She has three largely uninterested half-brothers on her father’s side, and a mother who lives in Australia. None of them give Clements a sense that they are helping or protecting Kylie. She will know who abducted her. If alive, she must be terrified.
Clements’ junior partner, Constable Tanner, burly and blunt as usual, scoffs at the idea that she escaped. He’s waiting for a body; he’d settle for a confession. It’s been four days now since Daan Janssen left the country. ‘Skipped justice’, as Tanner insists on saying. But the constable is wet behind the ears. He still thinks murder is glamorous and career-enhancing. Clements tries to remember: did she ever think that way? She’s been a police officer for nearly fifteen years; she joined the force straight out of uni, a few years younger than Tanner is now, but no, she can’t remember a time when she thought murder was glamorous.
‘He hasn’t skipped justice. We’re talking to him and his lawyers,’ she points out with what feels like the last bit of her taut patience.
‘You’re being pedantic.’
; ‘I’m being accurate.’
‘But you’re talking to him through bloody Microsoft Teams,’ says Tanner dismissively. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘The future.’ Clements sighs. She ought to be offended by the uppity tone of the junior police officer. It’s disrespectful. She’s the detective constable. She would be offended if she had the energy, but she doesn’t have any to spare. It’s all focused on the case. On Kylie Gillingham. She needs to remain clear-sighted, analytical. They need to examine the facts, the evidence, over and over again. To be fair, Constable Tanner is focused too, but his focus manifests in frenetic frustration. She tries to keep him on track. ‘Look, lockdown means Daan Janssen isn’t coming back to the UK for questioning any time soon. Even if there wasn’t a strange new world to negotiate, we couldn’t force him to come to us, not without arresting him, and I can’t do that yet.’
Tanner knocks his knuckles against her desk as though he is rapping on a door, asking to be let in, demanding attention. ‘But all the evidence—’
‘Is circumstantial.’ Tanner knows this; he just can’t quite accept it. He feels the finish line is in sight, but he can’t cross it, and it frustrates him. Disappoints him. He wants the world to be clear-cut. He wants crimes to be punished, bad men behind bars, a safer realm. He doesn’t want some posh twat flashing his passport and wallet, hopping on a plane to his family mansion in the Netherlands and getting away with it. Daan Janssen’s good looks and air of entitlement offend Tanner. Clements understands all that. She understands it but has never allowed personal bias and preferences to cloud her investigating procedures.
‘We found her phones in his flat!’ Tanner insists.
‘Kylie could have put them there herself,’ counters Clements. ‘She did live there with him as his wife.’
‘And we found the receipt for the cable ties and the bucket from the room she was held in.’
‘We found a receipt. The annual number of cable ties produced is about a hundred billion. A lot of people buy cable ties. Very few of them to bind their wives to radiators. Janssen might have wanted to neaten up his computer and charger cords. He lives in a minimalist house. That’s what any lawyer worth their salt will argue.’ Clements rolls her head from left to right; her neck clicks like castanets.
‘His fingerprints are on the food packets.’
‘Which means he touched those protein bars. That’s all they prove. Not that he took them into the room. Not that he was ever in the room.’
Exasperated, Tanner demands, ‘Well how else did they get there? They didn’t fly in through the bloody window, did they?’ Clements understands he’s not just excitable, he cares. He wants this resolved. She likes him for it, even if he’s clumsy in his declarations. It makes her want to soothe him; offer him guarantees and reassurances that she doesn’t even believe in. She doesn’t soothe or reassure, because she has to stay professional, focused. The devil is in the detail. She just has to stay sharp, be smarter than the criminal. That’s what she believes. ‘She might have brought them in from their home. He might have touched them in their flat. That’s what a lawyer will argue.’
‘He did it all right, no doubt about it,’ asserts Tanner with a steely certainty.
Clements knows that there is always doubt. A flicker, like a wick almost lit, then instantly snuffed. Nothing is certain in this world. That’s why people like her are so important; people who know about ambiguity yet carry on regardless, carry on asking questions, finding answers. Dig, push, probe. That is her job. For a conviction to be secured in a court of law, things must be proven beyond reasonable doubt. It isn’t easy to do. Barristers are brilliant, wily. Jurors can be insecure, overwhelmed. Defendants might lie, cheat. The evidence so far is essentially fragile and hypothetical.
‘I said, didn’t I. Right at the beginning, I said it’s always the husband that’s done it,’ Tanner continues excitedly. He did say as much, yes. However, he was talking about Husband Number 1, Mark Fletcher, at that point, if Clements’ memory serves her correctly, which it always does. And even if her memory one day fails to be the reliable machine that it currently is, she takes notes – meticulous notes – so she always has those to rely on. Yes, Tanner said it was the husband, but this case has been about which husband. Daan Janssen, married to Kai: dedicated daughter to a sick mother, classy dresser and sexy wife. Or Mark Fletcher, husband to Leigh: devoted stepmother, conscientious management consultant and happy wife? Kai. Leigh. Kylie. Kylie Gillingham, the bigamist, had been hiding in plain sight. But now she is gone. Vanished.
‘The case against Janssen is gathering momentum,’ says Clements, carefully.
‘Because Kylie was held captive in his apartment block.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is right on the river, easy way to lose a body.’
She winces at this thought but stays on track. ‘Obviously Mark Fletcher has motive too. A good lawyer trying to cast doubt on Janssen’s guilt might argue that Fletcher knew about the other husband and followed his wife to her second home.’
Tanner is bright, fast; he chases her line of thought. He knows the way defence lawyers create murky waters. ‘Fletcher could have confronted Kylie somewhere in the apartment block.’
‘A row. A violent moment of fury,’ adds Clements. ‘He knocks her out cold. Then finds an uninhabited apartment and impetuously stashes her there.’
Tanner is determined to stick to his theory that Janssen is the guilty man. ‘Sounds far-fetched. How did he break in? This thing seems more planned.’
‘I agree, but the point is, either husband could have discovered the infidelity, then, furious, humiliated and ruthless, imprisoned her. They’d have wanted to scare and punish, reassert control, show her who was boss.’ They know this much, but they do not know what happened next. Was she killed in that room? If so, where is the body hidden? ‘And you know we can’t limit this investigation to just the two husbands. There are other suspects,’ she adds.
Tanner flops into his chair, holds up a hand and starts to count off the suspects on his fingers. ‘Oli, Kylie’s teen stepson. He has the body and strength of a man …’
Clements finishes his thought. ‘But the emotions and irrationality of a child. He didn’t know his stepmum was a bigamist, but he did know she was having an affair. It’s possible he did something rash. Something extreme that is hard to come back from.’
‘Then there’s the creepy concierge in the swanky apartment block.’
‘Alfonzo.’
‘Yeah, he might be our culprit.’
Clements considers it. ‘He has access to all the flats, the back stairs, the CCTV.’
‘He’s already admitted that he deleted the CCTV from the day Kylie was abducted. He said that footage isn’t kept more than twenty-four hours unless an incident of some kind is reported. Apparently the residents insist on this for privacy. It might be true. It might be just convenient.’
Clements nods. ‘And then there’s Fiona Phillipson. The best friend.’
‘Bloody hell. We have more suspects than an Agatha Christie novel,’ says Tanner with a laugh that is designed to hide how overwhelmed and irritated he feels. His nose squashed up against shadowy injustice, cruel violence and deception.
‘Right.’
‘I still think the husband did it.’
‘Which one?’
‘Crap. Round and round in circles we go.’ He scratches his head aggressively. ‘Do you want me to order in pizza? It’s going to be a long night.’
‘Is anyone still doing deliveries? I don’t think they are,’ points out Clements. ‘You know, lockdown.’
‘Crap,’ he says again, and then rallies. ‘Crisps and chocolate from the vending machine then. We’ll need something to sustain us while we work out where Kylie is.’
Clements smiles to herself. It’s the first time in a long time that Tanner has referred to Kylie by name, not as ‘her’ or ‘the bigamist’ or, worse, ‘the body’. It feels like an acceptance of a possibility that she might be somewhere. Somewhere other than dead and gone.
Did she somehow, against the odds, escape? Is Kylie Gillingham – the woman who dared to defy convention, the woman who would not accept limits and laughed in the face of conformity – still out there, somehow just being?
God, Clements hopes so.
2
Daan
Daan Janssen is volunteering to cooperate. He is not under arrest. A fact his lawyers tell him repeatedly (in calm, confident tones that maybe makes them think they are justifying their exorbitant fees), and a fact that the police officers inform him of at the beginning of each meeting (spat out by rote in a bored manner that somehow suggests the word ‘yet’ is floating across the video call). It is the fact he reminds himself of with increasing regularity as he tries to go about his day. When he dresses in the morning. When he is eating. Cleaning his teeth, listening to music. Whatever.
