A gripping tale of revenge, loyalty, and the secrets hidden between the walls of the most beautiful home in town. Ellen Walsh has done something very, very bad. If only she knew what it was…
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Caz Frear’s Five Bad Deeds, which is available from December 5th.
Teacher, mother, wife, and all-around good citizen Ellen is juggling nonstop commitments, from raising a teen and two toddlers to job-hunting to finally renovating her dream home, the Meadowhouse. Amidst the chaos, an ominous note arrives in the mail, People have to learn there are consequences, Ellen. And I’m going to teach you that lesson. Right under your nose.
Why would someone send her this? Ellen has no clue. She’s no angel—a white lie here, an occasional sharp tongue there—but nothing to incur the wrath of an anonymous enemy. She’d never intentionally hurt anyone. But intention doesn’t matter to someone. Someone blames this supposed “good person” for all the bad they’ve experienced. And maybe they have reason to? Because few of us get through life without leaving a black mark on someone else’s. Could the five bad deeds that come to haunt Ellen explain why things have gone so horribly wrong? As she races to discover who’s set on destroying her reputation and her future, Ellen continues to receive increasingly threatening messages… each one hitting closer to everything she cherishes.
Three months after
The Meadowhouse went on sale this week. Twelve viewings already, I’m told. Although there’s probably more by now; I haven’t called home since Tuesday. No phone credit, you see. No deodorant either. Thank God it’s canteen day tomorrow. If I use my spends wisely, skipping all my old life essentials that in here we call luxuries, I’ll be able to purchase a few more minutes of agonising chit-chat with the people who still speak to me. Mainly Max and Kian, my four-year-old twins.
Four years old.
They were three when I last held them; I missed their birthday by two weeks. When the dreaded day came, I crooned “Happy Birthday” down the phone to them, inhaling the musty scent of hair grease on the receiver and ignoring the Code Red mayhem kicking off just behind.
Code Red: a bloodied brawl. Otherwise known as the matinee entertainment.
We made the decision early on—we being Adam, and almost certainly his parents—not to subject the boys to prison visits. Too traumatic, we decided. Too alien. Too counter to the plans we’d made for their curated little lives. I agreed, or conceded, on the promise that we’d discuss it again once I’d “settled in properly”—Adam prefers to talk like it’s my first term at boarding school—but I’ve been “settled in” now for months and he still refuses to sanction it. The women here say he’s punishing me, because that’s what men do, Ellen. But I try to believe he isn’t one of those men. That he could never be that cruel.
And I know I’m one of the lucky ones. A lot of the women here don’t have anyone to keep the home fires burning. No family or real friends to take care of their kids, pay the rent, store their possessions, and, in my cellmate’s case, feed their budgerigar. In losing their freedom, they lose everything.
Although not all deserve pity.
There’s a woman three cells down—Joy, could be Joyce; I’m too scared to ask for clarification—who tells anyone who’ll listen that she lost her kids over a Dyson hairdryer. It isn’t the full story, of course. It never is in this hellhole. She always neglects to mention the twenty prior “hairdryers” and the four previous jail sentences, or the fact she threatened to stab the security guy in the throat when he asked to search her bag.
Still, it makes a good sob story, and they’re stock-in-trade in HMP Holbeach.
Not that I have one to tell. Our story is pure spite.
I suppose it is harsh, though. Fifteen months for a hairdryer.
I mean, no one likes a thief. But at least no one died.
1
Ellen
Before
“Apparently, you’re fourteen per cent more likely to die on your birthday than any on other day of the year. Crazy, huh?”
And with that truly uplifting statement, my sister, Kristy, blows out her candles. Today is her thirty-ninth birthday, although on close inspection, the candles only number thirty-five. Orla, my eldest, is typically unimpressed. “Seriously, this candle ritual needs nuking. It’s, like, totally unhygienic. You might as well just spit all over the cake.” She picks a potato wedge off my plate—the massive crispy one I was saving—and breathes all over it. “See, would you want to eat that now? No, didn’t think so.”
Welcome to my life, which, so the story goes, is a happy one. And later, I’ll post a photo on Facebook to further back that story up. It’ll be all smiles and crumpled wrapping paper. Clinking glasses and soft filters. No mention of death, or germs, or the draughty table by the back door that they allocated us in the Cricketers pub, or the fact that neither the birthday girl nor the minimal number of guests particularly wanted to come. “Hey, remember what Dad used to say?” says Kristy, now marginally more engaged after two vodka Red Bulls. “‘You’re a great man the day you’re born, the day you’re buried, and on your birthday. Every day in between, you’re just a gobshite like everyone else.’”
Ah yes. The wisdom of Patrick J. Hennessey. Epic drinker. Average philosopher. I never did get around to challenging our not-so-dear departed dad about this and so many other of his lager-soaked theories, but I assume the same held for women. Not that Dad had much time for women. Not unless they were minding kids or handing out beer money.
He’d have been proud of me today, I think. Picking up the tab in the pub, three cranky kids in tow on account of it being Orla’s half-term holiday and there being no one to mind Max and Kian. No one I trust, anyway. Anyone brave enough to run that particularly dicey gauntlet—my friends Nush and Gwen, Adam’s parents, and Kristy (at a push)—is either here or, in my in-laws’ case, cruising around the Galapagos Islands on board the five-star Symphony of the Sea.
I wish I was on a cruise. Actually, I’d settle for a bus trip. Just some time to myself. To read and think and rest.
The thought’s been coming and going all morning, sharp as a menstrual cramp.
In truth, my hangover isn’t helping. Neither is Orla. “Y’know, even by Muriel’s standards, that cake is an atrocity,
Mum.” She eyes the vaguely rectangular slab like it’s a lump of rotten meat.
Gwen, usually kind to her core, agrees. “Yeah . . . I mean, I’m no Mary Berry, Els, but grey cake? It looks like a tombstone.”
“Yeah, a tombstone inscribed ‘Kirstie,’” says Kristy.
“I did ask for silver,” I protest, quickly glossing over the misspelling.
Nush sighs. “And yet I bet you said nothing, even though you were paying her.”
“Even though you can’t stand her,” adds Kristy.
“She didn’t say nothing, she said, ‘Wow, it looks amazing, Muriel. You’re a natural, so talented.’” Orla mimics me, her voice as sickly sweet as the hair-of-the-dog cava that Nush just foisted on me. “Seriously, Mum, you’re such a bloody hypocrite.”
Hypocrite, or just polite? I’m not certain there’s a difference. And anyway, firstly, the little ones will gladly wolf it—cake is one of the few things Max eats without morphing into the Antichrist, while Bella, Gwen’s daughter, and Kian eat everything. I once caught them licking a slug. But secondly, and more importantly, everyone knows it pays to flatter grumpy neighbours when you’re about to embark on a renovation, and ultimately I’m happy to lie about cake if it spares us a noise complaint.
I put my cava down untouched and stare across the table at Orla. “So what should I have said, smart-arse? ‘Jeez, Muriel, I’d rather staple my tongue to a moving train than take one bite of that shambles?’ It’s called manners. You used to have them, remember?”
Orla gives me the glare of a serial killer, all five-foot-nine of her bristling with adolescent disdain. Two can give good glare, though, and after a few seconds she tires of the stand-off and stalks off towards the bathroom, her spindly heels narrating her exit across the treacherous cobbled floor.
Mother Me wants to shout, “Be careful you don’t twist your ankle,” but mothering Orla these days is pure kamikaze, and in any case, my daughter isn’t the type to take a tumble. Orla has a solidity, a swagger. A watertight contract with the world that states she’s sixteen, she’s invincible, and she doesn’t have time for busted ankles.
She’s also taller than me already. Orla gets her red hair from Adam’s side and her height and bra size from mine. Everyone jokes that we’re in for a rocky few years.
The last few months haven’t exactly been peachy.
FIVE BAD DEEDS. Copyright © 2023 by Caz Frear
Reprinted here with permission from Harper Paperbacks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
