The Ice Cream Girls Read online

  CONTENTS

  Also by Dorothy Koomson

  The Ice Cream Girls

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Serena

  serena

  serena

  Poppy

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  Part Two

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  Part Three

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  poppy

  poppy

  Part Four

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  poppy

  poppy

  serena

  Part Five

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  poppy

  poppy

  serena

  serena

  Part Six

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  Part Seven

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  Part Eight

  serena

  serena

  poppy

  serena

  poppy

  Marcus

  marcus

  Also by Dorothy Koomson

  The Cupid Effect

  The Chocolate Run

  My Best Friend’s Girl

  Marshmallows for Breakfast

  Goodnight, Beautiful

  The Woman He Loved Before

  The Rose Petal Beach

  THE

  ICE CREAM

  GIRLS

  Dorothy Koomson

  LITTLE, BROWN

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  Copyright © Dorothy Koomson, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN 978 0 748 11548 8

  This ebook produced by M Rules

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  thank you . . .

  I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in this novel:

  My family. Ever-growing and ever-wonderful, thank you for your unwavering love and support.

  My agents. Ant and James, you’re true diamond geezers. And, Ant, I forgive you for the newspaper article.

  My publishers. Jo, Jenny, Caroline, Emma, Nikola, Kirsteen and everyone else who has had a hand in bringing The Ice Cream Girls to the shelves, thank you, thank you, thank you.

  My friends. You know who you are and you know how much I love you.

  MK2. You helped to make writing this book possible.

  You, the reader. Thank you for taking the time to read my book. I hope you enjoy it.

  And, to G: Thank you for being you.

  For My Little Angel

  You make everything worthwhile

  part one

  serena

  AS COLD AS ICE CREAM?

  Serena Gorringe, one half of the so-called Ice Cream Girls duo accused of killing popular teacher Marcus Halnsley, is expected to take the witness stand today in her murder trial.

  Gorringe, 19, is the older of the two and is widely thought to have been the driving force behind the pair’s cold-blooded plot to seduce, torture and murder her former History teacher.

  Although Gorringe and her accomplice, Poppy Carlisle, went to the police after the murder claiming there had been an accident in which Halnsley was stabbed, evidence at the scene suggested he had been subjected to torture before he later died from a stab wound to the heart.

  Both Gorringe, pictured eating ice cream and wearing a string bikini, right, and Carlisle deny torture and murder. They also both deny being the assailant who ultimately delivered the fatal blow to Mr Halnsley.

  Daily News Chronicle, October 1989

  serena

  ‘Serena Gorringe, I love you.’

  Oh my God! It’s going to happen. It’s really going to happen. After nearly 15 years of wanting this, hoping for this, praying for this, it’s going to happen. He’s going to propose.

  Or, maybe he isn’t. Maybe I’m having one of my ‘moments’ where I’ve so completely immersed myself in a fantasy, it seems real.

  I glance around, searching for proof in my surroundings that I’m not making it all up. We’re at a table for two outside our favourite Brighton restaurant – a small, family-run Mexican cantina that sits on the edge of the beach. It’s a clear, warm night and the sky is teeming with stars. The rhythmic ssshushing of the dark sea mingles gently with the loud music spilling from inside the restaurant, while the smell of spicy food fuses deliciously with the salt air. To my left Brighton pier is adorned with hundreds upon hundreds of lights, and to my right Worthing pier’s lights seem more demure than its more famous cousin’s but are still pretty. This is such a perfect setting for a proposal, it can’t possibly be real, I must be dreaming.

  I focus on Evan again. He is down on bended knee, staring at me with a serious expression on his face. This is no fantasy. It can’t be. Because in all my imaginings, Evan has never been prostrate in front of me – it’s so far removed from his normal behaviour, I’ve never been able to conjure up what he would look like doing it. Big gestures with him are so few and far between that this one is like seeing a unicorn walking down Brighton seafront – I could only believe it if I saw it. So this must be real, because I am seeing it.

  ‘Serena Gorringe, I love you,’ he repeats, and I know this is definitely real. Only the real-life Evan would know that I would have flitted off into one of my ‘crazy worlds’ as he calls them, as soon as he got down on one knee and started speaking. Only the real-life Evan would know that I’d need to go into one of my crazy worlds to double-check this was actually happening. And only the real-life Evan would know that when I returned to this reality, he would have to continue by starting again.

  ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ He reaches out and takes my left hand in both of his large hands, holds on to me tenderly but securely. ‘I don’t normally say things like this, so when I tell you that you’ve made my life so much more than it would have been and I never want our time together to end, you know I mean it. So, would you do me the honour of marrying me?’

  ‘We’re already married,’ I
reply.

  My husband’s face softens from his serious expression into a huge, warming smile. ‘Again,’ he says. ‘Will you marry me, again?’

  I slide slowly and gently into silence to savour this. This proposal. I was robbed of this last time around. And this finally proves he wants to be with me for ever. Yes, he’s already committed to it by marrying me, but he actually wants to do it. Last time it was all rather ambiguous and necessary when we decided to do it.

  May, 1996

  We lay fully clothed, side by side on the bed in his small London flat, staring at the ceiling. I’d just told him that the morning-after pill I’d taken after the condom split hadn’t worked and I was pregnant. A missed period and three tests had told me so. (I’d waited until we were horizontal to break the news because I suspected he’d fall over.) ‘Oh, OK,’ he said, before sighing a deep, slightly mournful sigh of resignation and defeat. I sighed, too, knowing what he meant, how he felt. It wasn’t terrible news, it wasn’t even bad news, it was just lifechangingly unexpected. I wasn’t ready, I was sure he wasn’t either. But here we were, ready or not. A baby was on its way.

  ‘We should probably get married,’ I stated.

  ‘To stop our parents freaking out,’ he replied.

  ‘Because they would,’ I said.

  ‘Freak out. Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Evan didn’t realise that when I said ‘should probably’, I meant ‘have to’. If it was just about me, I wouldn’t have cared, I wouldn’t have minded not getting married. But after what had happened to our family a few years earlier, what I had put my parents through, I could not do this to them as well – I could not add ‘unmarried mother’ to my list of crimes . . . I had to show them that I wasn’t who the world thought I was, I was a respectable girl and I could do things the right way. I had to get married.

  ‘It’s not as if we weren’t going to get married at some point, anyway,’ Evan said, trying to rally, trying to rescue the situation by sounding positive. ‘We might as well do it now.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I replied. And six weeks later we were married and that was that. No romance, no story to tell and retell, there wasn’t even an engagement ring to show off.

  Ever since then, I’ve had a niggling doubt about where we would be if we hadn’t been married at the wrong end of a shotgun. Without doubt, if he knew Serena Gorringe at the end of the eighties, if he knew the person who was all over the papers and who had been accused of something terrible, he would not have married me. But he did not know her. He met and got to know the real me. And I’ve always wondered if the real me was good enough. If the real me was the person he wanted to marry, instead of had to marry simply to satisfy ultratraditional parents.

  ‘Last time, we didn’t get the chance to do it properly,’ Evan says. ‘I want that for us this time. I promised myself on the day we did that we’d do it again properly. Since our first wedding, I’ve been putting money aside so we could do it. Big church, white dress, huge party, honeymoon – the lot. We can have everything that we couldn’t afford or didn’t have time to do before, including . . .’ He reaches into the inside pocket of his favourite suit jacket and pulls out a small, blue velvet box. He opens it up to show me and there, languishing on a silk bed, is a large, many-faceted, square-cut diamond on a silver band.

  The air catches in my throat.

  ‘An engagement ring. This time, an engagement ring as well as a real proposal.’

  ‘Is that a real diamond?’ I can barely form the words to speak in its presence let alone think about touching it.

  ‘Of course. We can afford it now. And it’s on a platinum band, from the same place where we got our wedding rings.’

  My hands fly up to my face as tears fill my eyes and swell in my throat. He’s thought about it, he’s planned it and has done it all because I am good enough: he does want to be with me. He does want to be married to me, just as much as I want to be married to him.

  I’ve never wanted to be with someone as much as I want to be with Evan. ‘What about you-know-who?’ whispers my conscience. It is the part of my conscience that lives in the past; it worships the past, clings to it, is always determined to drag the past into the present. ‘Wasn’t you-know-who the love of your life?’

  My conscience is wrong, of course. Evan is The One. He’s the only one.

  ‘Are you sure, Serena?’ mocks my conscience. ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

  I’m sure, I’m one hundred per cent sure. There really is no one but my husband for me. What I had with you-know-who wasn’t love, it wasn’t like what I have with Evan. It wasn’t even the same creature, how could it have been?

  ‘Babe?’ Evan says, in a way that suggests he has called me a few times.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘miles away.’ Another life away.

  ‘I’m getting a cold knee and a little nervous,’ he says.

  ‘Nervous? Why?’

  ‘You haven’t actually said yes.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’ I ask.

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He grins that grin of his. ‘Do you want me to ask you again?’

  I nod eagerly. Just one more time, especially now I know there’s a ring involved.

  ‘OK,’ he says with a slight, mock-exasperated shake of his head. ‘Serena Gorringe . . .’ He pauses to slip the ring halfway up my finger, and I hold my breath, trying to remember every detail because I will recreate it for the kids, for my sisters, for my parents, for anyone who cares to listen. ‘Will you make me the happiest man on earth by marrying me and becoming Mrs Gillmare all over again?’ He pushes the ring into place beside my wedding band.

  I almost forget to breathe as I examine the two rings. They slot together almost seamlessly, and they look like they were made for each other. Like nothing will ever tear them apart.

  ‘Of course I will,’ I say and leap up as he struggles to his feet. ‘Of course I’ll marry you again.’ I throw my arms around his neck and he grins at me before he scoops me into his arms and then dips me backwards for a deep, show-stopping, movie-style kiss. Another unicorn-on-Brighton-seafront-type gesture. He is full of them tonight.

  I immerse myself in it all. In the kiss, the proposal, the man. I’m only vaguely aware that we’ve had an audience and now the air around us is full of the sound of people clapping.

  I’m going to hang on to this moment. I have to. I know how easily everything can be taken away. Everything is fragile, when you’re like me. Very few things are permanent. I live on a precipice of falling into my past, of people finding out what I have been accused of, how I was publicly branded, and being judged all over again on that. I live with the constant fear that someone or something is going to tip me over the edge.

  But not tonight, eh? Not right now. Right now, I am the woman who Dr Evan Gillmare wants to spend the rest of his life with.

  Right now, I am the happiest woman on earth and nothing bad could possibly happen to me.

  serena

  I’m walking around my kitchen, opening cupboards and appliances, looking for the knives.

  The dinner knives are safe but the sharp ones, the ones that can do serious damage, seem to be missing in action. Admittedly, that’s my fault: I hid them last night, and I can’t quite remember where. It wouldn’t be a problem if the house wasn’t minutes away from becoming a chaos of breakfast and day-organising and the usual family pandemonium. It wouldn’t even be a problem if Evan hadn’t made me promise not to do this again.

  My fingers reach for the oven door for a third time and I yank it open really quickly, hoping that the knives will have materialised in there, the original hiding place, the favourite hiding place.

  Every night, before bed, I used to collect all the sharp knives and put them on a baking tray and put them in the oven – just in case someone broke in while we were asleep and decided to use our own cutlery against us. Then I started doing it before we settled down to watch TV in the ev
ening, in case someone broke in the back door while we were lounging in the front room. And then it was just after washing up because it was easier. After a while, I realised that hiding the knives in the same place every night, night after night, might not be a good idea if we were being watched, so I started hiding them in all sorts of ingenious places, places that a burglar with ill intentions would never think to look. Turns out, I wouldn’t think to look there either because I’m constantly doing this: looking for the knives.

  Evan, Verity and Conrad used to be very nice about it, accepted it as one of my little quirks, even though they had to hack away at cheese and tear bread some days because Mum couldn’t find the knives. Then, Evan discovered them in his gym bag – at the gym – and had a total understanding meltdown. He came storming through the kitchen door, and started shouting at me in front of the kids. ‘I could have been arrested for carrying multiple dangerous weapons, Sez!’ he’d screamed. ‘And what do I tell them, I’ve got a crazy wife who hides the knives and then forgets where she’s put them?’ I’d been so tempted to say, ‘Yes, because that’s the truth’, but decided not to push it. I had to leave him alone for his temper to subside and then tell him I was sorry. After that, he made me promise that if I insisted on hiding the knives, I’d write down where they were so it wouldn’t happen again.

  Obviously I’d crossed my fingers behind my back when I agreed because, come on, that would defeat the whole point, wouldn’t it? I’ve been pretty good since then at remembering. But after last night, and the champagne and the celebration at home, my head is fuzzy, my senses are blunted and I can’t remember much, least of all where I stashed the sharp stuff. Could’ve sworn it was the oven, would have put money on it.

  I snatch the stainless-steel door open, for a fourth time, just in case. No. Nada. Nothing. Damn it!

  Something being shoved loudly through the letterbox makes me jump. ‘Shhh,’ I hiss at the door as I leap over the creaky floorboards, mapped out like uncracked paving stones in my mind, to collect the morning paper. ‘Do you want to get me in trouble?’ I suspect Evan will take back the proposal, change his mind about wanting to marry me again, if he finds out that I can’t locate the knives again. It’s one of my many little foibles that niggle him.