Cass Green - In a Cottage In a Wood

HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Copyright © Caroline Green 2017

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Mark Owen/Trevillion Image;

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Caroline Green 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 is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts 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, down-loaded, 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 e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008248956

Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008248963

Version: 2020-10-15

For all the orphans I know,

and the ones I’ve never met.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Cass Green

About the Publisher

Neve stares up at the nicotine-yellow ceiling and thinks about the long journey between here and her own bed. Or at least, the sofa bed in her sister’s flat.

She has a fierce longing for ice-cold Diet Coke and paracetamol. Her head is already starting to hurt and she hasn’t been asleep. She needs to pee, badly.

Squinting at the small travel clock that blinks with neon aggression on the bedside table, she sees it is 03:00. They got here about two. The sex had taken about fifteen minutes, tops. Maybe she had briefly fallen asleep after all.

Whatsisname sighs and gently farts in his sleep.

Christ.

He told her he had his own software company and was in London for a conference. But it didn’t ring true. Surely no one held conferences a few days before Christmas? Plus, he said ‘pacific’ instead of ‘specific’ and smiled in a glazed, uncomprehending way at a couple of her more acerbic comments. He didn’t seem bright enough to have his own company.

Now she slowly begins to extricate herself from the bed, placing her bare feet down onto the rough, worn carpet. It feels greasy and gritty. She curls her toes with a shudder and spots the squished comma of the condom lying next to the bed.

The air smells of hot dust from the ferocious radiator that’s within touching distance of the bed, with a base note of damp.

The outside of the hotel – which was grandly named the Intercontinental, London – had looked alright with its jaunty blue and white awning, potted plants and fairy-lit windows.

Neve has always been a sucker for fairy lights.

But the room, with its shabby MDF table and undersized kettle, feels like the kind of place travelling salesmen go to commit suicide. There’s a white extension cable snaking across the middle of the floor and she makes a mental note that she mustn’t trip over it on her way to the bathroom. The wallpaper is the textured sort popular in the 1970s, splashed lumpily with a jaundice-yellow emulsion.

Whatsisname’s (Greg? Gary? Something like that) wheelie case is sitting open on a chair next to the table. The arm of a jumper hangs languidly towards the carpet. She pictures him getting ready earlier, selecting a shirt that would mean the best chance of getting laid. Well, it had worked.

Self-disgust puffs through her like hot steam. She has somehow bypassed the numb, unconscious part of this scenario and gone straight to the hangover and guilt. She’s suddenly appalled by the idea of him waking and suggesting she come back to bed. Or, worse, wanting conversation.

This whole thing had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Her own office party – dinner in an uninspiring Italian restaurant, followed by drinks in a bar near Waterloo – had ended early because, in her view, her colleagues were a bunch of lightweights, all making excuses about babysitters or night buses or I’ve-had-quite-enough-haven’t-you? Well, no, she hadn’t, clearly.

Her usual ally and best friend, Miri, was too pregnant to last beyond eight p.m. and Neve’d had to work hard, again, not to make a wistful comment about the fun they’d once had on nights out. She knew that Miri might as well be emigrating to the other side of the world soon. Nothing was ever going to be the same again between them. Watching Miri expand and step tentatively into this new world, she felt jabs of real grief.

So when someone decent looking had come over and bought her another bucket-glass of Merlot, she hadn’t said no. Plus, she wasn’t wearing her contacts and was drunk enough that everyone looked quite attractive in their own way. And he was Irish and therefore exotic.

She can almost hear Lou saying, ‘You’re thirty now, Neve,’ in that mouth-like-a-cat’s-arse way she reserves for her only sister.

A wave of misery washes over her and she carefully gets up and starts to hunt for her knickers among the discarded clothes on the floor. She spots them lying in a forlorn figure of eight where she’d shucked them off earlier.

She’d already been thinking this was a mistake by then. The kissing – hard up against a doorway outside the bar – hadn’t been that promising. His tongue had been a muscular slug that poked and jabbed at the inside of her mouth as though on a mission to find something.

Now Neve fumbles for her bra and, once on, reaches for the gold silky top she’d bought especially for the night out. She’d been delighted with it at the time because it was half price, but wearing it she’d discovered that it made her sweat under the arms. She’d spilled red wine down it earlier too. She wrinkles her nose as she rolls the top over her head and down her body.