Grace had recently returned to the town following her mother’s death.
Flick knew how it felt to have your future rewritten by others.
‘It was never my plan to run a B&B,’ Grace had told Flick, ‘but then neither was losing my mum when I was twenty-one. Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you need to fill your glass with more gin.’ The new Flick was very much on board with that mindset. Although she filled her glass with sparkling water, not gin.
While Grace was forthcoming about who she was, Flick couldn’t reciprocate. There was no mention of the restaurant she and her partners had spent seven years building into a successful business or of the family she had turned her back on. She said nothing of a man she’d never met who’d broken her heart nor the programme that had given her the opportunity to live again. And she certainly gave no clues as to what she carried inside her head.
Instead, Flick stuck to the script. She explained how she’d recently had a messy break-up from her long-term partner, and alluded to violence being a contributing factor. Karczewski explained that once people assumed domestic abuse had been involved, very few follow-up questions would be asked. With no reason to remain in her fictitious home of Stratford-upon-Avon, Flick revealed how she’d saved some money, given notice on her flat, quit her job in telesales and left to travel the country. Grace had no reason to doubt her.
That night and on Grace’s insistence, Flick had accompanied her to the Fox & Hounds pub in Aldeburgh’s towncentre, to participate in the weekly quiz night. She cast her eye around the busy room, first looking for potential escape routes and then for anyone who might be offering her undue attention. Regarding every stranger with suspicion until they proved they could be trusted wasn’t a normal way to live your life. But she and normal had been estranged for years.
Finally, after being served, they returned to Team Fish Smokers as the quizmaster read from a sheet of paper into a microphone.
‘Round three, question one,’ he began in a thick, east-coast accent. ‘Where was Diana, Princess of Wales, buried?’
Grace’s team bunched together and whispered.
‘On an island in the Althorp estate where she grew up,’ said one. ‘I went there with my mum when I was a kid.’
Flick shook her head. ‘No, it was actually …’ she began, picturing the church where Diana was entombed and not the shallow island in the centre of the lake the public had been told. She cut herself short. That was information others weren’t supposed to know. It was one of the many secrets she was keeping about the Royal Family, along with the much more explosive truth behind the night of Diana’s death.
Her face flushed. ‘Sorry, you’re right,’ she said. ‘It was Althorp. I was mixing her up with someone else.’
She bit her bottom lip and sank back into her seat, furious with her carelessness. Then she reminded herself of Karczewski’s warning that the human brain wasn’t infallible, despite the tweaks he had made to hers. ‘A mistake is likely to occur when you’re relaxed and least likely to expect it,’ he’d advised. ‘You’ll momentarily forget that it’s something that only you know. But it’s what you do in its aftermath that counts. You were chosen because of your ability to adapt, learn from your mistakes and put things right.’
For the rest of the evening, Flick remained at the table but consciously withdrew from offering suggestions despiteknowing the answers to almost every question posed. It would be the last quiz she participated in. ‘Can I get anyone a drink?’ she asked, and with Grace’s help she took a list of orders to the bar.
As she moved her credit card to the scanner to pay, a job vacancy for bar staff caught her attention.
‘Are you looking for some work?’ asked Mick, the portly landlord.
‘I’d not really thought about it.’
‘You ever worked in a pub?’
‘Not since the student union bar at catering college.’
‘That’ll do for me. What do you think? A couple of nights a week? See how you get on?’
Flick hesitated. She didn’t need to work. The funds she accessed could purchase his pub and several others in town. However, she couldn’t spend her days wandering around and looking for escape routes indefinitely. ‘If you’re going to hide, it’s best to do so in plain sight,’ Karczewski had advised. ‘While there are more people to assess, there are more directions to run if you’re cornered.’
What could be more plain sight than one of the town’s pubs?she reasoned.
‘Okay,’ she replied. ‘Let’s give it a go.’
Grace grinned. ‘Looks like you’re staying for a while then.’
‘It does,’ Flick replied. And she hoped that she wouldn’t live to regret it.
Chapter 22
CHARLIE, MANCHESTER
‘Good morning, One Step Farther Personal Mentoring, you’re speaking to Charlie, can I take your username and the first and last lines of your address, please?’
As a woman’s voice answered through his earpiece, Charlie inputted her details into the projected image of a keyboard. Inside his virtual-reality headset, a moving avatar she had chosen appeared in real-time, surrounded by her account details. Charlie skimmed through brief notes of their previous contact along with advice offered, goals reached and achievements left. Meanwhile she was viewing a synthetic version of him.
‘It’s nice to see you again, Steph, how can I help you today?’ he asked.
