Five Hundred Miles From You: the brand new, life-affirming, escapist novel of 2020 from the Sunday Times bestselling author Read online

  Praise for Jenny Colgan

  ‘This funny, sweet story is Jenny

  Colgan at her absolute best’

  Heat

  ‘She is very, very funny’

  Express

  ‘A delicious comedy’

  Red

  ‘Fast-paced, funny, poignant and well observed’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Sweeter than a bag of jelly beans . . . had us eating up every page’

  Cosmopolitan

  ‘Will make you feel warm inside – it makes a fab Mother’s Day gift’

  Closer

  ‘Chick-lit with an ethical kick’

  Mirror

  ‘A quirky tale of love, work and the meaning of life’

  Company

  ‘A smart, witty love story’

  Observer

  ‘Full of laugh-out-loud observations . . . utterly unputdownable’

  Woman

  ‘Cheery and heart-warming’

  Sunday Mirror

  ‘A chick-lit writer with a difference . . . never scared to try something different, Colgan always pulls it off’

  Image

  ‘A Colgan novel is like listening to your best pal, souped up on vino, spilling the latest gossip – entertaining, dramatic and frequently hilarious’

  Daily Record

  ‘An entertaining read’

  Sunday Express

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Amanda’s Wedding

  Talking to Addison

  Looking for Andrew McCarthy Working Wonders

  Do You Remember the First Time?

  Where Have All the Boys Gone?

  West End Girls

  Operation Sunshine

  Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend The Good, the Bad and the Dumped Meet Me at the Cupcake Café Christmas at the Cupcake Café Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams Christmas at Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop The Christmas Surprise The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris Little Beach Street Bakery The Christmas Surprise Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery The Little Shop of Happy Ever After Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery The Summer Seaside Kitchen The Endless Beach

  An Island Christmas

  The Bookshop on the Shore A Very Distant Shore By Jenny T. Colgan

  Resistance Is Futile Spandex and the City

  Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous bestselling novels, including The Little Shop of Happy Ever After and Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, which are also published by Sphere. Meet Me at the Cupcake Café won the 2012 Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance and was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller, as was Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams, which won the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year Award 2013. Jenny was born in Scotland and has lived in London, the Netherlands, the US and France. She eventually settled on the wettest of all of these places, and currently lives just north of Edinburgh with her husband Andrew, her dog Nevil Shute and her three children: Wallace, who is fourteen and likes pretending to be nineteen and not knowing what this embarrassing ‘family’ thing is that keeps following him about; Michael-Francis, who is twelve and likes making new friends on aeroplanes; and Delphine who is ten and is mostly raccoon as far as we can tell so far.

  Things Jenny likes include: cakes; far too much Doctor Who; wearing Converse trainers every day so her feet are now just gigantic big flat pans; baths only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun and very, very long books, the longer the better. You can find Jenny on Twitter as @jennycolgan or on Facebook and Instagram as @jennycolganbooks.

  SPHERE

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Sphere Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Colgan The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’: Words and music by Craig Morris Reid and Charles Stobo Reid, Zoo Music Ltd (PRS) by kind permission.

  All rights administered by Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

  ‘Sunshine on Leith’: Words and music by Charles Stobo Reid and Craig Morris Reid, Zoo Music Ltd (PRS) by kind permission.

  All rights administered by Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

  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.

  ISBN 978-0-7515-7203-2

  Sphere

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  To everyone who has their organ donor card

  There are two teachers in the school, One has a gentle voice and low,

  And smiles upon her scholars, as She softly passes to and fro.

  Her name is Love; ’tis very plain She shuns the sharper teacher, Pain.

  Or so I sometimes think; and then, At other times, they meet and kiss, And look so strangely like, that I Am puzzled to tell how this is,

  Or whence the change which makes it vain To guess if it be – Love or Pain Susan Coolidge, from ‘In School’, What Katy Did

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  PART THREE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chap
ter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  It should have started with ominous dark crows; great murmurations and flutterings; bad omens taking to the sky; great storm clouds rolling in; clocks striking thirteen.

  In fact, it started with an extremely undignified argument with an old lady over a bar of chocolate.

  ‘But you have a bar of Dairy Milk right there in your hand!’

  Mrs Marks looked up at her, heavy and glowering, from the cracked brown leather sofa.

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘Behind your back!’

  Like a tiny child, Mrs Marks refused to remove her hand, just shook her head mutinously.

  Lissa Westcott put down the medical equipment she’d been packing away and strode back into the centre of the room, exasperated.

  ‘You thought I’d gone! You thought I was leaving the room and you were making a grab for a hidden Dairy Milk!’

  Mrs Marks fixed her with beady eyes.

  ‘What the bleedin’ hell are you then, the chocolate police?’

  ‘No. Yes!’ said Lissa rather desperately. She held out her hand. Mrs Marks finally handed the chocolate over. It was, in fact, a bar of Bournville.

  ‘Ha!’ said Mrs Marks.

  Lissa looked at her.

  Old Mrs Marks lived on the fourteenth floor of a South London tower block where the lifts were often broken. Her foot was gradually giving in to diabetes, and Lissa was trying her absolute hardest to save it. She glanced out from the dingy, fussy room with its dusty fake flowers everywhere, towards the beautiful views over the river to the north: the great towers of the City were glinting in the light, bright and beautiful, clean and full of money, like a vast array of glittering palaces, completely out of reach, less than two miles away.

  ‘We’ve just been talking about your diet for twenty minutes!’ she said to the poor woman, who was practically a shut-in, with only her daughter to visit her. Watching EastEnders with family bars of choccie was one of the few pleasures she had left, but it wasn’t doing her any good.

  ‘I don’t want to have to be coming up here one day and finding you in a coma,’ said Lissa as severely as she dared. Mrs Marks just laughed at her.

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry about me, duck. Whatever will be will be.’

  ‘That’s not how health care works!’ said Lissa, glancing at her watch. She was due in Peckham in twenty minutes. Driving in London was an absolute fool’s errand but she didn’t have any choice; she couldn’t carry drugs on the tube.

  Lissa was an NPL: a nurse practitioner liaison. She followed up on hospital discharges who had trouble attending outpatients departments in the hope that they wouldn’t become readmissions. Or, she said in her more cynical moments, she did half of what community nurses used to when they still had the budget, and half of what GPs used to do when they could still be arsed to leave the office. Originally trained as an A&E nurse, she loved her job – which involved rather fewer drunks spewing up on her than casualty did – particularly the bits of it when she got chocolate.

  Her hopes, though, in Mrs Marks’s case, were not at their highest.

  ‘You’re not exactly a sylph yourself,’ said Mrs Marks.

  ‘You sound like my mum,’ complained Lissa, who had inherited her curvy frame from her mother, to said parent’s alternately vocal or silent disappointment.

  ‘You take it then,’ said Mrs Marks grudgingly. Lissa made a face.

  ‘I hate dark chocolate,’ she said. But she took it anyway.

  ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘Please. I’d hate them to admit you again. Next time you might lose your foot. Seriously.’

  In response, Mrs Marks sighed and indicated the entire old brown three-piece suite. Lissa put her hands down the back of the cushions and found chocolate bars behind every single one.

  ‘I’m donating them to a food bank,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to buy them off you?’

  Mrs Marks waved her away.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But if I do end up back in that place again, I’ll blame you.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Lissa.

  It was chilly for early March as Lissa left the tall building, but the sun was shining behind a faint cloud of smog, and she could sense spring coming, somewhere on the horizon. She prayed, as she always did, that nobody would have seen the medical personnel sticker on her car and attempted to break into it in case she’d left any drugs in there. She also contemplated the new Korean barbecue place she was due to meet some friends in later. It looked good on Instagram, but this wasn’t necessarily a good thing – sometimes quite the opposite if it was just full of people photographing cold food.

  She noticed boys loitering in the stairwell, which was nothing unusual. It was hard to tell with some teenage boys whether they should be at school or not; they were so big these days. The best thing to do was keep her head down, hide her ringletty hair in a tight braid or a scarf and just keep moving past them. She remained profoundly glad of the unflattering green trousers she wore as part of her uniform that rendered her practically invisible.

  These boys, however, weren’t interested in her; they were arguing with one another. Just the normal teenage beefs, showing off, puffing out their chests with peacocks; a mix of races, tiny little wispy beards and moustaches, lanky legs and elbows too pointy, a strong smell of Lynx Africa and massive trainers the size of boats. It was slightly endearing in its way, watching them try to pretend they knew how to be men. But intimidating too, and she was about to give them a wide berth when she realised she recognised one of them. The fact made her wince. It was one of Ezra’s cousins. Ezra, beautiful Ezra, whose graceful body and lovely face made him irresistible whenever he messaged her. Unfortunately, Ezra was well aware of this, which was why he felt obliged to spread himself pretty thinly all around South London. Every time he ghosted her, Lissa swore blind she’d never fall for it again. She was not much better at keeping that promise than she was about not eating Mrs Marks’s leftover chocolate.

  But she’d met Kai – by accident; Ezra had never introduced her to the rest of his family – down Brixton Market one morning when they were grabbing breakfast supplies. He was a bright, mouthy fifteen-year-old and should, Lissa thought with a sigh, really be in school. She wouldn’t mention that.

  ‘Kai!’ She raised her hand.

  Just as she did so, he turned to face her, his open mouth already starting to grin as he recognised her, and then, out of the blue on a chilly spring day, there was a sudden horrifying tear of an engine braking, a screech of brakes, a sudden glint in the sky as something was thrown, crashed down, and an intake of breath, and a sickening roar.

  Chapter Two

  Five hundred-odd miles north by north-west, in the small village of Kirrinfief, on the shores of Loch Ness, a cool March wind was blowing off the water, rippling the white tops of the little waves; and the clouds were hanging heavy off the tops of the purple mountains.

  Cormac MacPherson, the town’s NPL, glanced at his watch. Joan, the GP, had been over the other side of the moor te
nding to a hiatal hernia. In a human, Cormac assumed, although with Joan it could be hard to tell. She rarely travelled anywhere without being surrounded by a dust-cloud of wire fox terriers. So Jake, the local ambulance man, had corralled him in to help with a DNR on a very old lady. Jake knew Cormac could never say no to someone in distress and took wide advantage of his soft nature. They had sat with the family, made sure Edie was made as comfortable as possible to the end, in the little cottage and the bed she’d been born in ninety years before. As these things went, it had not been bad.

  Now they were heading out for a well-deserved pint.

  ‘Not a bad way to go,’ said Jake philosophically as they headed down the cobbles, the air cool on their faces.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Cormac, glancing at his phone.

  ‘Emer on you again?’ Jake glanced over.

  ‘Aw crap, she came over to make me a surprise dinner.’

  ‘That’s terrifying.’

  ‘It’s not terrifying,’ protested Cormac weakly. ‘It’s sweet.’

  ‘She must know you’re out on calls all the time.’

  ‘I said I was off duty.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Jake, not looking remotely embarrassed. ‘Might as well have a pint now though.’

  Cormac glanced at his watch and shook his head just as a door opened from the little row of terraced houses (the sitting rooms came straight on to the street) they were passing.

  ‘Jake! Cormac!’ came a soft voice. ‘I didnae want tae—’

  ‘—bother the doctor,’ finished Jake for them. ‘Yup, we know.’

  Chapter Three

  A glint of something in the air. An incredible cacophony of sound.

  She had only caught it briefly out of the corner of her eye while she had been watching the boys, gauging with that innate city sense whether or not they were dangerous or whether it was likely to escalate – Lissa had a good antenna for trouble, having mopped up the effects of so much of it – when she heard what sounded like a car speeding.

  At first, she’d ignored it, but then she realised that rather than slowing down as it had rounded the corner into the estate, it had sped up. She had turned instinctively to where her own car was to make sure it didn’t crash into it, and by the time she turned back, there was a huge howling screech from the engine as the vehicle mounted the kerb – deliberately mounted the kerb – and she saw . . . the only thing she saw was the glint of a phone, bouncing up in the air, spinning, catching the light, almost lovely, so slow . . .