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TWENTY-NINE

Where are you off to?” Ash asks her mum on Saturday morning.

Nina is wearing a huge raincoat and full makeup and sliding her feet into chunky walking boots.

“Nick’s taking me to look at something.”

Ash’s stomach turns. “To look at what?”

“I don’t know. He just called. Said to dress for the weather. I’m meeting him in Bangate, near the beach.”

“Bangate Cove?”

“Yes.”

“But there’s nothing in Bangate. It’s literally just a pub and some houses.”

“Well, apparently not.”

Ash glances at her mum from where she stands halfway down the stairs, still in her pajamas. “Can I come?”

“What?” Nina sounds annoyed. “No,” she says. “I’m already late as it is.”

“I’ll be, literally, like a minute and a half. I just need to throw on some clothes. Please. I want to come.”

“But why?”

“I just do. I want to see whatever the thing is. I like surprises!”

Ash does like surprises, but that’s not why she wants to come.

She wants to come because she keeps picturing Nick Radcliffe throwing one of his fancy silk ties around her mother’s neck and pulling it harder and harder until she is dead.

And what better place to do that than the windswept nothingness of Bangate Cove?

“Well, please, just be quick. I should have left ten minutes ago.”

“I will. I promise!”

Ash hurtles back to her room; pulls off her pajamas; throws on joggers and a T-shirt, old high-tops, a fleecy hoodie; tucks her hair into a plastic claw; and runs back down to where her mother waits outside in the car, staring at her phone.

Nina doesn’t make eye contact with Ash as she jumps into the passenger seat, just puts the car into drive and pulls away.

It’s still raining when they pull into the tiny car park by the cove forty minutes later, and the graveled surface is pitted with deep puddles.

Nick is already there and climbs loftily from the low seat of some kind of performance car that Ash didn’t know he owned.

He wears a waxed jacket that Ash hates on sight and opens a fancy golf-type umbrella as he walks toward them.

He leans to kiss Nina tenderly on the cheek and then he looks at Ash, unfazed by her unexpected presence.

“Hello, you,” he says. But he doesn’t lean in to kiss her, and Ash is relieved.

“Lovely day.” He eyes the heavy, wet skies facetiously and smiles, and his face does that infuriating thing it does when he smiles of looking kind and handsome and just the sort of man you’d wish for your beautiful, recently widowed mother.

He looks nothing like a necktie-strangler as he leads them genially across the scruffy car park and down toward the beach.

It’s empty, of course, at eleven forty-five on a dour Saturday morning and the sea is a heavy, dank gray as it hits the pebbled beach.

There are a few forlorn beach huts on one side of the cove, not like the ones on the beach in the village where Ash and Nina live, which are all well maintained and painted perfect ice cream shades, strung with fairy lights and lanterns; these are peeling and weather-beaten, all of them abandoned.

As they move around the cove, Ash sees an old pavilion, clapboard-clad and falling apart.

An old Wall’s ice cream board sits outside, sun-bleached and attached to the railings with rusty chains, and Ash’s mind, yet again, flits to thoughts of cable ties and gags, and God, why does her mind work like this?

But then she remembers the wedding ring, the Zippo in the pink box, the slippery response to her question about dogs.

She glances at her mother, sees her doing that thing she does around Nick, the elongation of her neck, the slight pout of her lips, jut of her hips.

She does not look anxious at all. Her thoughts are not dark.

“So,” says Nick, turning half a circle on one foot to face them both, “this little gem is up for sale. What do you think?”

Ash and Nina exchange looks. Nina laughs lightly. “Think of what?”

“Of Paddy’s next venture.”

The sound of her father’s name on Nick’s tongue makes Ash shudder. “What?”

“A fourth restaurant in the chain. I mean, it’s ripe, isn’t it?

Imagine this…” He strides up the two steps to the front terrace.

“Outdoor seating. A canopy. Maybe just lunchtimes to start with. Pop-up dinner nights in the summer months. Boardwalk to the car park. Fairy lights. An upturned fishing boat just here—lanterns, rope, the works. Come on, tell me you can’t see it.

Paint it white and Aegean blue—it would be like a little slice of Santorini. Yes? Yes?”

His face is aglow with his vision, but a pendulous silence hangs in the air.

“Er,” Nina replies eventually. “I mean, God, yes, obviously it could be adorable, I can see that. But Bangate—I mean, it’s just not that sort of location. It doesn’t have that kind of, you know, appeal .”

“You mean it isn’t middle-class?”

“Well, yes, basically. It’s kind of the forgotten village.”

“Exactly!” Nick snaps his fingers. “That’s exactly it.

You’ve got this string of pearls on this stretch of the coast—Paddy’s already has stakes in three of the best locations.

You have a brilliant, brilliant brand. I mean, of course you have, it’s Paddy’s baby and the man was a genius.

I always knew he would do something incredible, and he has.

But why stop now? I mean, Padstow wasn’t chic when Rick Stein opened his first restaurant there.

Rick Stein made it chic. Paddy’s will bring people here.

I promise. And see these.” He points at the abandoned beach huts.

“All for sale too. You could turn them into boutique accommodation. Get them wired up, plumbed in, little wet rooms in each one. Seriously. And the whole thing under the well-loved Paddy’s brand name. How amazing would that be?”

Ash can see her mother softening for a minute, her eyes misting over as she pictures the chichi wet dream of a mini resort that Nick has just painted. But then she shakes it away and says, “You’d never get planning permission.”

“Well,” says Nick, smiling, “that might not be true. I know someone on the council, or at least my colleague knows someone on the council, and they are planning to regenerate this area. They’re investing.

Heavily. You could probably push this through in record time.

You might even get a subsidy. Worth a shot, huh? ”

“What are they asking for it?”

Nick eyes the pavilion and says, “Two hundred for that, another one fifty for the huts.”

“So, three fifty in total. Plus renovation, etc.”

“Yes. But we could probably get them down from that, I reckon. I mean—look at the place.”

They all turn to look at the place. A huge gust of wind blows a sheet of rain at them, the ice cream board rattles on its rusty frame, the whole building creaks a little.

Nina smiles and says, “It’s amazing, Nick. But I don’t have that kind of money.”

He nods, smiles. “Sure,” he says. “I didn’t expect you would. But you have something else. Assets. You could borrow against things. Just like Paddy was doing. Like Paddy would have continued to do. That’s how businesses grow, Nina.”

His eyes are so bright they look like they could set fire to something; there’s an urgency, a crazed energy about him.

It reminds Ash of her dad, the way he would be when he was starting something new.

But this man is not her dad; this man is a stranger, and he’s using the word “we” in relation to her mother’s money.

“Mum,” she says. The word comes out as a whisper.

Nina turns to her, looks at her inquiringly.

Ash shakes her head. “Nothing.”

She waits until they are on their own in the car a few minutes later, then she looks at her mother and she says, “You’re not going to do it, are you?”

“What? Buy that wreck?”

“Yeah.”

Nina laughs drily. “No, of course I’m not!

Bloody hell. We’re this close to having to shut down the new branch and the last thing I need right now is more debt, more risk, more stress.

No. But Nick can buy it, if he likes.” She pats Ash’s knee and smiles widely into the small blade of sun just breaking through a crack in the clouds.

Ash swallows up the moment: the sun, her, her mother, just the two of them; Nick being othered, painted as an outsider.

Good, she thinks. Good.