The Secrets of Happiness Read online

  Her finger hovered over the Facebook link next. That really would be snooping, of course, if she started going through her sister’s messages and posts. The two of them were technically ‘friends’ on Facebook, but while Becca happily splurged every detail of her life online to anyone who cared, Rachel was rather more guarded about what she posted publicly. Barely anything, actually, now she came to think of it. Perhaps Rachel had filed her stepsister in an outer circle of friends, only letting the in-crowd see photos and news. It wouldn’t exactly come as a shock if so. For as long as she could remember, Rachel had never asked her opinion or advice, never shared any confidences. She had chosen friends to be her bridesmaids, rather than her own flesh and blood (step-flesh and blood. Whatever).

  Just as Becca was resisting the urge to go snooping anyway (ha! You can’t hide your secrets from me any more, love), the landline trilled, and her hand flew away from the keyboard as if it was lava-hot, as if it was Rachel herself ringing to say, Don’t you DARE, Becca Farnham, I know what you’re up to!

  Banishing her stupid guilty thoughts, she hurried to answer the phone. Was this news at last? Maybe the policeman had made a match on the database. I’m sorry to inform you that . . . No, she thought, picking up. Please don’t let this be something horrible, please.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello there, I’m ringing about your flier?’ said a man in a husky Welsh accent. ‘Came through my door last week. The one that says Can I Help?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Flier? Becca’s adrenalin subsided again, tension whistling out of her in a sigh. Another false alarm.

  ‘Yes, because you see, I do need help. And especially as your name is Rachel!’ His voice cracked suddenly; there was a shake in it that made him sound emotional. ‘That was my wife’s middle name, see. Christine Rachel Jones. We were together forty-five years and never once had an argument, can you believe. She died in February, and I still miss her so much.’

  Becca bit her lip, not entirely sure why this sad-sounding Welshman was ringing her sister’s number. She remembered the lady who had called earlier that morning, too. Was Rachel moonlighting as some sort of Help the Aged counsellor? ‘I’m sorry to hear about your wife,’ she said politely.

  ‘I’d give anything to have another plateful of her Irish stew, you know. Anything. Not much of a cook myself, see, I don’t half miss her dinners. So when your flier came through the door, Rachel, it was like a sign, a message from her. My Christine sending you along to me: Can I help you?’ He gave a wheezy chuckle, clearly brightening at the thought. ‘So that’s why I’m ringing. Yes, love. Yes, you can help me. I just want to taste a good Irish stew again. I want to learn how to make it for myself, now that she’s gone.’

  ‘I see,’ Becca said, feeling sorry for him, but still drawing a complete blank. Was Rachel giving cookery lessons on the side? Maybe it was some kind of voluntary work she had been doing. She felt a pang for this poor lonely widower; her grandad had been just as helpless when her grandma Edie died back in the day. At least he’d had Wendy fussing about him and driving over with Tupperware-packed dinners every other evening. By the sound of it, this man was quite alone. ‘I’m afraid Rachel’s not actually here right now – I’m her sister, Rebecca – but I can take down your details and get her to call you back, how does that sound?’

  ‘Bless you, love, that would be smashing. It’s Michael Jones, on . . . wait, what’s my number again? Let me find my glasses, hold on.’

  She wrote down his details and ended the call, then stared doubtfully at her own messy writing. Could this be right? Rachel had always been so brisk and – well, not cold, exactly towards Becca and her mum, but unfriendly anyway. Yet here she was offering help to complete strangers, by all accounts. On top of a full-time job, and being a single mother to three children! The woman was a saint. It made Becca feel positively slovenly in comparison.

  Still, something was niggling at her. Something didn’t quite add up. Why was Rachel giving out fliers, offering to help random people, when she was a top-ranking business exec with a flash company car and an enviable salary, according to Wendy? Was it some altruistic whim of hers, some new do-gooding resolution, maybe? You’d have thought if someone was trying to be nicer, they could have started with their own family.

  (Stepfamily, Rachel’s voice said in her head. We’re not related.)

  Yeah, yeah. So you keep saying.

  Talking of Rachel’s amazing career, Becca should probably let the company know that their star businesswoman had gone missing, she realized. They were surely wondering why she hadn’t come in to work that day. They might even know something about the disappearance.

  She would kill two birds with one stone, she decided in the next moment, looking online for the sports chain’s website and contact details. The police officer had asked for specifics of Rachel’s car, as well as her work number, hadn’t he? Someone at her office would know the registration details. She found the number and dialled.

  ‘GoActive, this is Lacey speaking, how can I help you?’

  ‘Hi, could you put me through to Rachel Jackson’s assistant, please?’ Becca said, pen and paper ready.

  There was a pause. ‘Er . . . I’m afraid Rachel doesn’t work here any more,’ came the reply after a moment. ‘Should I transfer you to someone else in the department?’

  ‘Oh.’ Becca was flummoxed. ‘She doesn’t work there? Since when?’

  ‘Let me think . . . Just after Christmas, I believe. Oh yes – that’s right. Definitely after Christmas, because . . .’ A gossipy tone entered the receptionist’s voice before she abruptly fell silent, professionalism winning out just in the nick of time. ‘Well. Anyway. Should I put you through to the management team?’

  Becca stared out of the window at the lush, leafy garden, trying to absorb this new information. ‘No, it’s okay, thanks,’ she said distractedly. So as well as her marriage breaking up, Rachel also had neither job nor company car any more, it seemed. Things were not stacking up all that brilliantly for her, you had to say. And what on earth had happened at Christmas that had stuck in the receptionist’s head so vividly?

  Still, it perhaps explained the fliers, as well as the clients that Mabel had mentioned, at least. Hanging up the phone, Becca tried to remember the exact words her niece had used that morning. Fitness clients . . . something about boot camps? But how did that tie in with lonely old widowers wanting cookery lessons?

  Two miles away, in a brightly lit reception area at the GoActive head office, Lacey Turner put down the phone, popped a mint humbug into her mouth and went back to her game of Candy Crush. Rachel Jackson, eh! She hadn’t thought about her for a few months ever since she’d had to leave the company, immediate resignation. No surprises there, obviously. Like anyone could carry on with their job after that little performance! It had made it into the local press and everything: PR disaster or what? Samantha Tyning, the big cheese of the entire company, had gone ballistic, according to Josie, her secretary, and of course poor old Craig had ended up in hospital for two nights, as well.

  The phone rang again and Lacey shifted her mint into the side of her mouth. ‘GoActive, this is Lacey speaking, how may I help you?’ she said on automatic pilot, clicking to switch a jelly bean with a lemon drop on her screen. Yes! She was doing well on this level, it was a really difficult one too.

  ‘Hi, I’ve been given this number as Rachel Jackson’s home – is that correct?’

  ‘Er . . . no,’ said Lacey, distracted as she spotted a colour bomb appearing in her game. Wait – Rachel Jackson again? What the hell . . .? ‘No, this is GoActive, we’re a chain of sports centres,’ she went on, wondering whether or not to mention that Rachel had once worked there. Not, she decided after a moment. People got funny about you giving out their personal information on the phone – fair enough – and besides, after the Christmas party debacle, she doubted any of the senior management team wanted Rachel’s name bringing up again to members of the public.

  There wa
s a pause. ‘So this is definitely not her home number?’ the woman said, sounding dismayed. ‘It’s just – I’m a nurse at Manchester Royal Infirmary, she’s a patient here, and she gave this number as one to call.’

  ‘It’s definitely not her home number,’ Lacey said, with a last triumphant click to win her game. Congratulations! it said on screen, and she did a little air-punch.

  ‘Oh,’ the nurse replied. ‘I don’t suppose . . . The thing is, she’s a bit concussed and I’m trying to contact her family, so . . .’

  Lacey tuned out just then because her favourite motorbike courier had chosen that particular moment to walk into the building – sexy Rick, with melty brown eyes who always took off his helmet and shook out his lovely shoulder-length sandy-coloured hair like something from a shampoo ad as he approached the desk. She had dreamed about that head-shake numerous times, often to the soundtrack of ‘Je T’Aime’ in the background. Corrr. Yep. Here he was again. He must have a fit body under those leathers, she thought, trying not to lick her lips as he strode towards her.

  ‘Hello? Did you hear me?’ the woman on the phone was saying, sounding a bit impatient by now. Rude.

  ‘Sorry, she doesn’t work here,’ Lacey said, smiling flirtatiously at Rick as he put a parcel on the desk for her to sign. She leaned forward to pen her signature, jutting her boobs out, just in case he happened to be looking for a Thursday morning thrill. ‘Thanks,’ she mouthed, gazing up through her eyelashes as she had practised.

  ‘Cheers, darling,’ he said, turning and walking away.

  Darling. Get in. Lacey gazed at his bottom and allowed herself a momentary fantasy where she vaulted over the desk and grabbed it with both hands before the woman on the phone cut into her thoughts again. ‘So you don’t have any contact details for her?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, no,’ Lacey replied, feeling irritated to have been denied a proper chat with her current crush. ‘Wrong number, goodbye.’

  Hanging up the phone and crunching through her mint, she remembered the awful moment at last year’s Christmas do when Rachel’s husband had burst into the Left Bank restaurant halfway through the dessert course. Lacey had always thought he was quite handsome and sexy whenever she’d glimpsed the two of them around town together, but that night he had been red-faced, his eyes bulging as he yelled out all sorts of rude things about Rachel before going on to throw a punch at poor Craig Elliot.

  Lacey wriggled gleefully in her seat, remembering the absolute uproar: the screams, the crash of crockery as a table was knocked over, the police arriving and everything. Nobody could believe it. Best. Christmas. Party. EVER!

  Chapter Ten

  Nice as everyone was being to Rachel, pleasant and professional as they all seemed, it was frightening being wheeled into the anaesthetic room and seeing the doctors and nurses gowned up like that, masks over their faces, ready to get stuck in. This was routine to them, she had to remind herself. This was bread and butter, what they did, day in, day out. They had worked hard through college to get here; they were trained, intelligent people whose job it was to fix bodies and make them better. They were good.

  That said, God, she was terrified. Her heart thudded, her mouth was sandpaper-dry, her mind a choppy sea of fears. Because mistakes happened, didn’t they? Things went wrong. She had never been under general anaesthetic before, and had no idea how her body would react. People died sometimes, she knew. It was a slim chance, sure, but the stats were there: people died. Ordinary, everyday people like her; their hearts stopped, the damage was done, end of story. (End of life.) However rationally you looked at it, there was no getting away from the fact that these masked faces might be the last ones she ever saw, this air the last she ever breathed. She pictured her children, small and black-clad, weeping at her funeral, and felt like leaping off the bed and running out of there, injuries or not. Could she really take the risk?

  But she’d already signed away her decision, of course. It was too late to turn back. By this point someone was measuring the dose of anaesthetic and attaching the syringe to the cannula in her hand. And then, before she could say stop, I’ve changed my mind, a doctor was pushing down the plunger and asking her to count backwards from twenty.

  ‘Twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . .’ she began, obedient to the last, ‘ . . . seventeen . . .’ And then it was washing through her, a huge deep blackness and the last thing she heard herself whimper was ‘Mummy . . .’

  Rachel couldn’t remember all that much about her real mother, just a few fluttery flashes of memory that vanished if you tried to hold them too close. A sweet perfume. A low, musical laugh. A glossy sheet of chestnut hair cut with a severe fringe, and a cool, comforting hand in Rachel’s. My little Dandelion!, she’d written on the back of a photo of Rachel as a newborn baby, no doubt because of the fluff of bright yellow hair around her infant face, but Rachel had no memory of her ever saying the words out loud.

  Emily Durant, that was her name: a smiling, beautiful woman with coltish legs and dancing green eyes. Emily Durant, who’d doted on her little dandelion and adored her handsome husband Terry, but who had been taken from them when Rachel was just two and a half. A rare and terrible form of bone cancer, apparently, although Dad hadn’t liked to talk about it. Rachel always thought longingly of that hand in hers, that melodic, rippling laugh, when she saw dandelion seeds floating by on a breeze.

  Glancing through the photograph album, they seemed the perfect couple, Emily and Terry. Every picture showed them smiling, holding hands, leaning against each other comfortably. Teenage sweethearts at the school disco. Getting married when they were barely in their twenties. Him posing in front of their first car, a red Datsun, with a look of intense pride. Her in bell-bottom trousers and wedge heels, a psychedelic-print scarf in her shining hair. And then baby Dandelion to complete the family a few years later, a cute pink bundle propped on Emily’s hip. Smile for the camera, Dandelion!

  Rachel had been born in the North, but she and her dad had moved to Birmingham when the tragedy struck – a brave new start, she guessed, picturing Terry driving away, the Datsun loaded with boxes, little toddler Rachel kicking her plump legs on the back seat, oblivious to the tears rolling down her father’s cheeks. ‘Just you and me now, kiddo,’ she imagined him saying, puffing on one of his Silk Cut (although carefully blowing the smoke out of the window, she hoped). ‘You and me against the world, right?’

  That was the version of events she’d always been given, anyway. The ballad of Emily: the heartbreaking story that had lain in Rachel’s subconscious all these years, an undertow of sadness. Her childhood had been suffused with condolences: sympathetic faces from the teachers, other mums giving her extra cuddles, clasping her to their bosoms whether she wanted to be clasped there or not. (Not, generally.) Oh dear, you don’t have a mummy, you poor little poppet, how awful.

  She remembered finding it confusing as a girl, this expectation that she was to be pitied when in fact she considered her childhood to be an extraordinarily happy one. Sure, having Mum around too would have been even better but Terry was a brilliant dad: kind, funny, practical. He was always the only bloke at ballet rehearsals, watching as she spun and jumped, his old brown shoe tapping time to the piano music in the dusty church hall, his big strong hands clapping louder than anyone else’s when the pink-leotard-clad ballerinas made their curtseys at the end. The other mothers were kind to him, respectful, although sometimes she noticed one or another leaning a little too close, a friendly hand on the arm. I don’t know how you do it, Terry, I really don’t. But do it he had – and well, too. He taught her to ride a bike and make scrambled eggs and bowl a cricket ball, and they had muddled along together perfectly fine until she was nine, and Wendy came along. And that, of course, was when everything had changed.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Oh my goodness. She’s still not back? I did wonder when I saw the car wasn’t there this morning but I just assumed . . . Oh gosh. Come in. Come in!’

  Sara Fortescue loo
ked as if she’d been snipped straight out of Perfect Wife magazine, with her spotless white chinos, little pink T-shirt and cork-heeled wedge sandals. She even had a feather duster in her hand as she opened the door wide, ushering Becca to come in.

  ‘What do you think has happened?’ she went on breathlessly, leading Becca through the house to a spacious, gleaming light-filled kitchen which had a pastel blue plaque on the wall proclaiming this to be ‘Mummy’s Kitchen’. ‘Can I make you a tea or coffee? My goodness, you must be so worried. Those poor children! I mean, where could she be?’

  Becca felt scruffy and unkempt in her sister’s clothes and her own smelly trainers beside the fragrant, pristine Sara in her Ideal Home kitchen. Every surface sparkled. There was not so much as a crumb to be spotted, even under the toaster. ‘I was hoping you might shed some light on the whole thing,’ she confessed. ‘I don’t really know much at all, to be honest.’ She sat down at the table, which was covered in a pale blue polka-dot oilcloth, and propped her chin in one hand. ‘Being here . . . I mean, it’s made me realize that actually I’m a bit out of the loop in terms of my own sister. Stepsister. Where is she even working these days, for starters?’

  Sara put the feather duster away in a cupboard and briskly made them coffee, explaining as she did so that Rachel had recently set up her own business. ‘She’s ever so brave, isn’t she? Good for her, I say. I mean, most of the mummies around here – well, we’re just mummies and we’re happy to stay at home with our children. I certainly wouldn’t have the first clue about business matters! But I guess after Lawrence left . . .’ She gave a tragic sort of smile. ‘Well, the poor thing, between you and me, he hasn’t been very generous, by the sound of it. And she was such a career woman, wasn’t she? So successful! Goodness, I don’t know how she managed it, with three children to look after too. Although, well . . . I’m not saying corners were cut, exactly, but there were times when I did wonder if the little ones were very happy, you know, about going to the childminder and . . .’