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Back The Favor Save as PDF
Chapters (78)
  1. Title Page
  2. Dedication
  3. Prologue
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-One
  25. Twenty-Two
  26. Twenty-Three
  27. Twenty-Four
  28. Twenty-Five
  29. Twenty-Six
  30. Twenty-Seven
  31. Twenty-Eight
  32. Twenty-Nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-One
  35. Thirty-Two
  36. Thirty-Three
  37. Thirty-Four
  38. Thirty-Five
  39. Thirty-Six
  40. Thirty-Seven
  41. Thirty-Eight
  42. Thirty-Nine
  43. Forty
  44. Forty-One
  45. Forty-Two
  46. Forty-Three
  47. Forty-Four
  48. Forty-Five
  49. Forty-Six
  50. Forty-Seven
  51. Forty-Eight
  52. Forty-Nine
  53. Fifty
  54. Fifty-One
  55. Fifty-Two
  56. Fifty-Three
  57. Fifty-Four
  58. Fifty-Five
  59. Fifty-Six
  60. Fifty-Seven
  61. Fifty-Eight
  62. Fifty-Nine
  63. Sixty
  64. Sixty-One
  65. Sixty-Two
  66. Sixty-Three
  67. Sixty-Four
  68. Sixty-Five
  69. Sixty-Six
  70. Sixty-Seven
  71. Sixty-Eight
  72. Sixty-Nine
  73. Seventy
  74. Acknowledgments
  75. About the Author
  76. Remarkable Praise for Nicci French
  77. Also by Nicci French
  78. About the Publisher

“We all know what Liam was like, what he was capable of. He was planning to kill the mother of his child. I think he was planning to kill you as well. Nobody knew you were there. Nobody knew he had met with you. You’d taken his luggage up to that cottage. That was all he needed from you. After that, it would be better if you were out of the way.”

For a moment Jude felt like the ground was moving beneath her. She looked back at that meeting with Liam. She tried to remember his demeanor, his tone. Could that really have been possible? Could Liam have been intending to murder her?

“No. I don’t believe that’s true.”

Vin gave a broad smile, the last of his smiles she would ever see.

“Maybe,” he said. “But you’ll never be sure.”

And he was the one who walked away, leaving her standing there.

Seventy

In the middle of October, on the day that Liam would have turned thirty-one, Jude walked from her flat in Bethnal Green to Walthamstow cemetery. It was a cool, windy day, and as she walked through Victoria Park and then on to the marshes, yellow leaves spun through the air and she felt a few drops of rain on her cheek.

It had been nearly a year since that day in early November when Liam had found her and asked her for a favor. One year. It made her almost dizzy to look back at that feverish time when it seemed her life had turned on its axis and her sense of who she was had buckled and broken.

She walked through the gates of the cemetery and at once saw that many of the gravestones were tilted at odd angles. A placid angel leaned at almost forty-five degrees, and headstones were toppling together. It was as if the ground, and all its cargo of bones, was sinking.

She had thought it might take her some time to find where Liam was buried, but the place was smaller than she had expected. In only a few minutes she was standing in front of a plain gray stone, with Liam’s name and his date of birth and death newly chiseled into it. Nothing else.

She remembered, with a sudden painful clarity, how, when they were lying in a field together, Liam had asked her to name the bones of the body. She had told him: talus, fibula, tibia, patella, femur, pelvis . . . She had put her hand on each bone as she spoke, holding his foot, placing her hand on his shin, his knee, his thigh, and at the end cradling his skull in her hands. Those beautiful bones were interred in this small space, all that was left of Liam Birch.