Cover

Praise

PRAISE FOR THE LAST STAGE

‘Such a great concept. Enthrallingly gripping – and those twists! A must read’ Angela Clarke

‘Superb, like an episode of Midsomer Murders written by Gillian Flynn’ Mark Edwards

‘Her best yet. A superb read’ Cass Green

‘A compelling descent into darkness’ Ed James

‘A captivating mystery that kept me guessing right up to the end. Beautifully written and refreshingly different for the genre, this is another fantastic read from a masterful writer’ SJI Holliday

‘A rollercoaster ride of twists and turns. Highly recommended’ Jane Isaac

‘Voss knows how to create a dark atmosphere and build tension, which makes this an exciting read … gripping and perfect for the beach’ New Books Magazine

‘The Last Stage confirms Louise Voss is the queen of the psychological thriller and I cannot recommend it enough!’ From Belgium with Love

‘A taut progressive thriller with sharp edges! Fantastic. Brilliant. Unpredictable. Clever’ Book Obsessed

‘Twisty thriller plot and quaint British setting … It’s funny, smart and highly entertaining!’ Off-the-Shelf Books

‘Grippingly taut read that captivated me until the very last page … and even afterwards, the writing is superb, gritty and absorbing from page one!’ The Reading Closet

PRAISE FOR THE OLD YOU

‘I loved the subtlety and style of Louise Voss’s writing; the slow reveals and hints at the darkness to come … impossible to put down!’ Sarah Pinborough

‘A cracking page-turner that sucks you straight into the dark heart of human behaviour. I couldn’t put it down!’ Marnie Riches

‘A twisty, thrilling read with engaging and complex characters!’ Sarah Ward

‘There are plenty of twists, lots of emotional insights and enough tension to please even the most demanding reader. A superior slice of domestic noir. I loved it’ Paul Burston

‘The Old You is a tense, super-twisty, well-written page-turner … Fab read’ Amanda Jennings

‘The way the plot unfolds, unfolds – and unfolds again – is brilliant. Poignant, clever and terrifically tense’ William Shaw

‘A top-notch thriller, with seams of doubt and illusion sewn through the plot with total skill. I love books where you wonder who to trust, and keep changing your mind’ Hayley Webster

‘If I’m looking a bit sleep-deprived right now it’s because this one is keeping me up way past my bedtime. A really original and compelling story from Louise Voss that will keep you turning the pages’ Howard Linskey

‘A disturbing, brilliant tale of lies and psychological manipulation, with a gutsy, believable heroine’ Kate Rhodes

‘Brilliantly unsettling, a gripping, clever novel where nothing can be taken at face value’ Jane Casey

‘This novel was so creepy it kept me awake. I was guessing right to the end’ Katerina Diamond

‘Grippy and twisty, this one will keep you guessing’ Mel McGrath

‘A unique vibe that makes it stand out, and also a truly twisty yet believable tale with memorable characters and a cleverly woven atmospheric narrative’ Liz Loves Books

‘Filled with jaw-dropping revelations, I had no idea where the book was heading and I was certainly surprised as I followed this twisty rollercoaster journey’ Off-the-Shelf Books

‘Throughout much of the story, readers will feel like Lynn, off balance as certainties evaporate, but they’ll be relieved when she finally stops being a victim and goes on the attack … an expert piece of contrivance’ Publishers Weekly

‘An addictive thriller with a damaged and relatable heroine at its centre, The Old You is an original novel that is both shocking and touching’ Foreword Reviews

‘Tantalising, irresistible and extremely satisfying novel. I loved it and will be shouting about it for a long long time!’ Random Things through My Letterbox

‘Compelling. Dark. Mysterious’ Ronnie Turner

‘A tale of manipulation, deception, secrets and lies … it’s a total triumph’ Short Book and Scribes

‘Domestic Noir with a little je ne sais quoi! Sit back and enjoy the read folks, this one is a cracker!’ Chapter in My Life

‘It’s an intriguing account of a marriage full of secrets and lies but with a sinister undertone that slowly drags you under until you’re completely immersed in the menacing atmosphere’ My Chestnut Reading Tree

‘An excellent psychological thriller and one of the best books I have read so far this year’ Donna’s Book Blog

‘Filled with anxiety, understated danger, and delivered with well-timed surprises and finesse. Fans of Clare Macintosh and B.A. Paris should add to their must-read list’ Murder and Moore

‘Fantastically clever and has certainly raised the game in the world of domestic noir’ My Bookish Blogspot

‘Intensely suspenseful and gripping tale that kept me guessing until the end’ Novel Deelights

‘A real page-turner; the characterisation is stunning and there are some really ingenious and original twists’ Hooked from Page One

‘The plot is compelling and keeps the readers on their toes. It’s a psychological thriller that will leave your mind reeling and your heart craving for more from the author’ Book Worldliness

‘This is such a wondrous blend of poignant reflection, dark-rooted secrets and cunning deception with a tense and twisted heart-thumping conclusion’ Jen Meds Book Reviews

‘Vivid characters, cleverly plotted’ Where the Reader Grows

‘An absolute cracker’ Me and My Books

‘Original and compelling’ The Shelf of Unread Books

‘A truly excellent and well-written story that will leave you gasping and desperate to read everything Louise Voss has ever written!’ Broadbean’s Books

‘A gripping story full of twists and turns. It will grab you by the neck and won’t let you go until the very end’ A Lover of Books

‘Louise has crafted a completely different but intriguing read that really got under my skin. An absolutely incredible read’ Katie’s Book Cave

‘A skilfully crafted masterclass in writing and I loved being so confidently led through the beautifully woven and elaborate plot’ Hair Past a Freckle

‘A superb read and seriously the best domestic thriller I have read this year. Unnerving, compelling and just phenomenal’ Crime Book Junkie

‘Tense, chilling and cleverly plotted’ Bloomin’ Brilliant Books

‘Gripping plot, well-rounded (and unreliable) characters, twists, turns and revelations – all along the way rather than just at the end’ Crime Squad

‘Haunting, intense, and riveting’ Book after Blog

‘Voss has written a page-turner with strong character development and compelling emotional resonance’ Crime by the Book

‘Tense, propulsive, compelling, Louise Voss has created a spellbinding tale of deceit, lies and betrayal that had my brain whirling and my attention focussed throughout’ Live and Deadly

PRAISE FOR LOUISE VOSS

‘Storytelling at its best’ Now

‘Compelling stuff’ Heat

‘It is Louise Voss’s voice that you remember at the end: contemporary, female, authentic’ Independent

‘An exhilarating ride’ New Woman

‘Strong characters, a meaty plot and a satisfyingly unexpected twist’ Woman and Home

‘It’s brilliant … Funny, smart, believable, honest, moving … a lovely book’ Phill Jupitus

‘My favourite book this year. A beautifully written story which I didn’t want to end’ Cerys Matthews

The Last Stage

Louise Voss

Dedication

This one’s for Adrian, with love.

Contents

1. Title Page
2. Dedication
3. Prologue: 1995
4. 1: 2017 – Meredith
5. 2: One Year Later – Meredith
6. 3: Graeme
7. 4: Meredith
8. 5: Meredith
9. 6: Graeme
10. 7: Pete
11. 8: Meredith
12. 9: Meredith
13. 10: Meredith
14. 11: Meredith
15. 12: Meredith
16. 13: Meredith
17. 14: 1983 – Meredith
18. 15: Present Day – Emad
19. 16: Present Day – Emad
20. 17: 1983 – Meredith
21. 18: 1983 – Meredith
22. 19: Present Day – Meredith
23. 20: Meredith
24. 21: Meredith
25. 22: Pete
26. 23: Pete
27. 24: Pete
28. 25: Gemma
29. 26: 1983 – Meredith
30. 27: 1983 – Meredith
31. 28: 1983 – Meredith
32. 29: Present Day – Meredith
33. 30: 1984 – Meredith
34. 31: 1984 – Meredith
35. 32: 1984 – Meredith
36. 33: 1984 – Meredith
37. 34: Present Day – Gemma
38. 35: 1992 – Meredith
39. 36: Present Day – Gemma
40. 37: 1995 – Meredith
41. 38: Present Day – Gemma
42. 39: 1995 – Meredith
43. 40: Present Day – Gemma
44. 41: 1995 – Meredith
45. 42: Present Day – Gemma
46. 43: Pete
47. 44: Meredith
48. 45: Pete
49. 46: Graeme
50. 47: Emad
51. 48: Meredith
52. 49: Meredith
53. 50: Meredith
54. 51: Gemma
55. 52: Meredith
56. 53: Gemma and Emad
57. Epilogue: A year later – Meredith
58. Acknowledgements
59. About the Author
60. Copyright

Prologue

1995

At first, you think you’re imagining it. An old house, but new to you, one whose soft grunts and shifts you’re still becoming acclimatised to; of course there’ll be the occasional rumble in the radiators or protest from a floorboard. It’s a big house, a proud Georgian beast of a house, bought with the collective pocket money of more than a million teenagers.

But why would a floorboard creak, without a foot putting pressure on it, at three in the morning, and loud enough to wake you from a deep sleep?

Wide awake now, everything tensed, listening so hard it hurts. Nothing. You switch on the bedside lamp, leap out of bed and lunge for the key in the lock, turn it silently. Thank God for the lock on the door.

Then a soft noise on the other side of the door: half swallow, half gulp.

Then the sight of the slow dip of the door handle as someone turns it…

1

2017
Meredith

‘Meredith Vincent, you’re a hard woman to track down,’ said an accented voice Meredith vaguely recognised as belonging to someone she disliked.

‘Who is this?’

A laugh. A smoker’s cough. She thought, Ah no, not him. Please say it’s not him.

His next words confirmed it: ‘It’s Iain McKinnon from Big World.’

Meredith couldn’t speak. ‘The Pointless I’, she and her fellow band-members used to call him, a play on the unnecessary vowel in his first name as well as his capabilities as a marketing manager.

‘Merry, are you there?’

‘Don’t call me that. It’s not my name,’ she managed.

‘Sorry, Meredith. Long time, no speak, hey?’

She had forgotten how affected his South African accent sounded. Why did he even still have an accent? He’d lived here since before apartheid was abolished.

‘How did you get my number?’

He laughed again. ‘It wasn’t easy, hey. I had to get a private detective on the case!’

He pronounced it ditictive.

‘You did what?’

‘Yah. It took him a good few weeks. Hiding in plain sight, you are. We thought you’d left the country! In a million years I’d never have thought you, of all people, would end up working in a shop. I mean, it’s not like you need the money!’

‘I’m the manager,’ Meredith said, immediately hating herself for it. She did not have to justify herself to Iain McKinnon, the lecherous creep. He represented everything that she had eventually come to loathe and detest about the music industry, with his fake, smarmy smiles and assumption that every woman wanted to rip off his clothes … And when he discovered that she didn’t, he’d threatened her.

‘You know where I work?’ She felt as if the walls of her living room were folding in on her, one at a time, bang, bang, bang, bang, squashing her beneath them.

‘I know where you work, I know your address and home phone number, I know where you buy your groceries, where your brother lives … the detective guy was top notch. Cost an arm and a leg,’ he said proudly, as if she should be congratulating him instead of feeling that it wasn’t just her room that had collapsed, but her whole world.

She had been found, by a man she wouldn’t trust further than she could throw.

He seemed to read her mind: ‘Merry, I’m not the guy I was back then, I swear. Obviously you know I never had anything to do with … what happened to you … I was just a pushy bastard who wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

‘You blackmailed me, Iain.’ Nausea bubbled in her gut.

He coughed. ‘Well, I think that’s too strong a word … I just suggested that it might not be a good thing for it to be made public knowledge…’

She noted that he knew exactly what she was referring to.

‘It’s sad,’ she said, her hands shaking, ‘when I think how worried I was back then. I thought I had to do what you said. But I was naïve if I thought you had my best interests at heart. Because if it had been this big scandal – which I don’t think it would’ve been anyway; so what if I was sleeping with a woman? – you thought it would have harmed you as well. You were our label manager. If Big World hadn’t re-signed us because I was in a relationship with a woman, you’d have lost your most successful act.’

She was trying to act blasé, but in truth she was worried – more than worried. Not about him, not anymore, but because she’d been unearthed. Dug up like a hibernating mole, blinking and afraid. Neither she nor the police had ever been able to prove that what had happened to her back then was connected to him – to his blackmailing her – but it would forever be linked with him in her memory.

‘Actually, no biggie,’ he said airily. ‘It wasn’t like I was on commission. They’d have just assigned me to another band. But that’s not the point. I shouldn’t have got involved in that way. I was … wrong.’

The last word was extruded with difficulty, as if he had speech constipation.

‘Is that why you’re ringing me now? What do you want?’

She would have to move. Leave the country, start again.

‘Right, so, I have something amazing to tell you! You gonna be so psyched. Are you still in touch with the other guys?’

‘If you mean Cohen, then no. They hate me, if you remember.’

Meredith had read enough bitter interviews with her former band members over the years to know this was true. After her sudden and inexplicable defection in ninety-five they had laid low for a while, then employed a short-lived series of alternate female lead singers, none of whom had set the charts alight for them. They’d eventually disbanded a couple of years later. She knew she’d hurt them, personally as well as professionally – they had been such good friends – but she hadn’t ever dared contact any of them again, or even try to explain, for fear of discovery.

He made a ‘pffft’ noise. ‘Ah, that’s all in the past!’

The man was unbelievable.

‘Iain, it’s all in the past. I don’t know what you want from me, but if it’s anything to do with the band, the answer is a definite “no way”. I don’t care what it is.’

‘We should meet for a drink, so I can explain it better.’

‘Not happening.’

‘Don’t be like that! Don’t you want to make half a million quid this year?’

‘No.’

He laughed. ‘Come off it! I don’t believe you. That’s what you’d get for a reunion. Only has to be three weeks, headlining one of those retro eighties tours. The promoters are desperate to have Cohen top the bill, how about that! You don’t even have to leave the UK.’

‘Iain, I’m hanging up now, and if you ever contact me again, I’m going to report you to the police for harassing me.’

‘Wait! You can’t. I mean, you can’t want to say no to that, surely?’ He tried another tack. ‘Even if you don’t need the money, you must have charities you support. Think what they could do with five hundred grand!’

He found me, he found me, he found me. The panicky voice inside her head swelled, drowning out his words, and she only heard ‘charities you support’. It took all her effort to keep her tone low and calm.

‘So, you’re suggesting I quit the job I love, get in a tour bus with a load of blokes who hate me for ruining their careers, stand on a stage in black PVC – when I’m over fifty – and not even keep the money? Plus, have the world’s press looking for all the skeletons in my cupboards, demanding to know why I quit in the first place. Are you off your head? I mean, you of all people should know why I’d never in a million years contemplate it, not for all the money in the world.’

‘What do you mean, me of all people?’

She tried not to snap at him. ‘You know, Iain. You know what happened to me: why I left the band the first time. You talked to me right before—’

‘Yah, and the police talked to me! Grilled me for hours, they did. Where was I? Who was I with? What was I doing? Yadda yadda.’

She maintained a stony silence. She couldn’t just hang up and block him, it was too risky. He knew where she lived now, and he didn’t give up easily. Everything was ruined.

‘What do you want, Meredith?’

Perhaps it was because his voice suddenly softened, or perhaps it was the directness of the question – one she asked herself a lot but that nobody else ever had, not even Pete – but her throat tightened, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.

She tried to deflect it: ‘Right now, I want you to go away and swear you won’t tell anybody where I live or what I do.’

‘No … I mean, what do you want out of your life? You don’t have a husband – or wife – or kids. How do you want people to remember you?’

‘Well, it’s sure as hell not by having a comeback on some shitty eighties reunion tour.’

Iain sighed, and she could tell he’d lost patience. ‘Right. I’m trying to help, Meredith. I thought you’d be interested, hey. It could change your life for the better. But never mind. I’ll text you my number in case you have a change of heart.’

I’ll delete it straight away, she thought. And then change my own number. ‘Swear you won’t tell anyone where I am,’ she begged.

He promised, but she didn’t believe him.

When the call was finally over, Meredith sat down slowly in the big wingback chair overlooking the garden. Two blackbirds pecked at the early blackcurrants beginning to ripen on the bush outside the window. She watched the cat, Gavin, unsuccessfully stalking them, weaving around the budding canes.

She believed she had – eventually – got what she wanted from her life. A home, a job she liked, friends, and over the years a gradual lessening of the excruciating fear and paranoia. But Iain’s call made her realise that in an instant she could be right back to where she’d been, twenty-two years ago, and it was a place she never, ever wanted to revisit.

2

One Year Later
Meredith

The security camera’s lens had been poked out, and it had been twisted off its perch above the till, leaving it hanging limply, a useless appendage. But it was a while before Meredith noticed it, her horrified gaze being first drawn to the shelf of Minstead House-branded pottery, now at a forty-five-degree angle, its contents in a smashed pile on the shop floor. Plates, mugs, tea sets, each with its own delicate line-drawn silhouette of Minstead House, now all in a jumble of shards. Who would do this?

She scanned the rest of the shelves, taking a hasty mental inventory of the shop’s stock, but nothing actually seemed to be missing, not even the more expensive jewellery in the glass display case. No money had been taken. They always cashed up and put it in the safe when they closed the shop at night; the safe, hidden behind a painting, was still locked and untampered-with. So strange that there was no sign of a break-in. Someone must have had access to the keys.

Footsteps coming up the stairs. The door handle slowly turning. A heavy black boot through the locked bedroom door. Warm urine tickling my thigh as the panel splinters and shatters and I wait, paralysed.

Stop. Focus. Call security.

‘George, it’s me, Meredith. The shop’s been broken into, but nothing seems to have been taken, just some stuff smashed and the security camera broken.’

‘Hey, love, don’t sound so upset … I’ll call the police and check the exterior CCTV. Leonard didn’t mention anything, useless old bugger. Get the kettle on and I’ll be over in two minutes.’

Leonard was night security at the house, and was older than some of the antique furniture. He and George had a decade-long simmering feud as to which of them was the more efficient – or as everyone else had long ago decided, the least useless. Nobody could understand why the Earl kept them on. He must have promised them both jobs for life, preferring for his own reasons to update the security technology rather than the technicians themselves. Ralph, as estates manager, was always grumbling about both of them.

Meredith sat down behind the counter, still feeling shaken and a bit nauseous. She gulped in air, then picked up the internal phone again.

‘Hi, Ralph. Some shit’s broken into the shop and smashed it up a bit, but nothing seems to be missing. George is calling the police.’

‘What? Good grief. I’ll be right down,’ he said immediately, and she felt a tiny bit better. There were people who cared, about her and the shop. People she could ring and who would come, even though they didn’t know what had happened to her before.

There’d been nobody I could ring that night and nobody to come.

Ralph arrived before George, panting slightly from sprinting down the stairs in the main house and across the wide cobbled courtyard. Through the plate-glass window, Meredith saw him just about avoid crashing into the iron racks of pot plants for sale outside the shop door, such was his haste. He came in and walked straight over to the counter, almost knocking down a hat stand draped with hand-dyed silk scarves, and gave Meredith a huge avuncular hug, wrapping his arms around her and pressing her face into his barrel chest so she could barely breathe.

‘Well, this is all a bit shit, isn’t it? Who the hell would do this and not even bother to nick anything? Are you sure nothing’s gone?’

He sounded jovial, but Meredith, once she’d extricated herself from his embrace, could see from his eyes that he was worried. Despite the combined age of its security guards, Minstead House had never been burgled before.

‘I’ll have to have a word with the Earl,’ he said, his voice now sombre, and she knew he meant about Leonard.

‘Maybe Horace is back,’ she said, turning her back to him as she went to make tea. Horace was the house’s once-active poltergeist. She wasn’t joking – she did hope it was him. The thought of a ghost was a lot less unnerving than a human intruder.

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