The Hidden Women: An inspirational novel of sisterhood and strength
About the Author
KERRY BARRETT was a bookworm from a very early age and did a degree in English Literature, then trained as a journalist, writing about everything from pub grub to EastEnders. Her first novel, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, took six years to finish and was mostly written in longhand on her commute to work, giving her a very good reason to buy beautiful notebooks. Kerry lives in London with her husband and two sons, and Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes is still her favourite novel.
READERS LOVE KERRY BARRETT
‘All Kerry Barrett’s books are brilliant.’
‘I’d highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’
‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked.’
‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won’t want to put it down.’
‘Loved the whole story, couldn’t put it down.’
‘Will definitely read more from this author.’
Also by Kerry Barrett
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
I Put a Spell on You
Baby It’s Cold Outside
I’ll Be There For You
A Spoonful of Sugar
A Step in Time
The Forgotten Girl
The Girl in the Picture
The Hidden Women
KERRY BARRETT
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Kerry Barrett 2019
Kerry Barrett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008318529
Version: 2018-11-29
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Readers Love Kerry Barrett
Also by Kerry Barrett
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
The Next Book From Kerry Barrett Is Coming in 2019
Extract
Dear Reader
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For Petrova Fossil, the original Attagirl
Prologue
Helena
April 2015
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said, watching Greg’s stony face for any sign of happiness.
‘Well I’m not.’ His expression softened, just a bit, and he sat down next to me on the sofa and took my hand.
‘It’s just too soon,’ he said.
‘We’ve been together for five years, Greg,’ I snapped. ‘It’s not like we just met.’
He had the grace to look at least slightly ashamed.
‘I meant for me, not us,’ he said. ‘It’s too soon for me. And you. We’re still young. We should be out having fun, not at home with a squawking baby.’
‘We’re in our thirties; we’re not kids,’ I said, resting my head against the sofa cushions. I felt sick and I didn’t think it was just because of my unexpected pregnancy.
I’d done the test that morning, and showed Greg the unmistakeable dark line as he brushed his teeth.
‘It’s positive,’ I’d said, feeling a tiny shiver of excitement mixed with fear. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Greg had glanced at the plastic stick and then kissed me, his breath minty fresh.
‘I need to run,’ he’d simply said. ‘We’ll chat tonight.’
And now we were chatting and it wasn’t going the way I’d thought it would.
‘I thought we were set,’ I said. ‘I thought we were a team.’
‘We are a team,’ Greg said. ‘You and me.’
‘You and me and our baby,’ I said.
Greg winced. He tried to cover it up by pretending to cough, but I’d seen it.
‘I don’t want to have a baby, Helena,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.’
I couldn’t speak.
‘There’s a clinic,’ Greg said. ‘Max at work told me about it. His girlfriend went there a while back. He gave me the card, hang on …’
He dug about in his pocket while I let my fingers drift down to rest on my stomach.
‘I need some air,’ I said, ignoring his outstretched hand clutching a business card. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
I grabbed my jacket from the arm of the sofa, and stumbled my way out of the front door.
‘H,’ Greg said. ‘Don’t be like this. It’s hormones; you’re not thinking straight.’
I didn’t answer. I walked a little way down the road and then I sat at a bus stop and took my phone out.
‘Miranda?’ I said, when my sister answered. ‘I need your help. I’m having a baby and I think I’ve just left Greg.’
Chapter 1
Helena
May 2018
‘Here?’ I said, staring at my boss Fliss in astonishment. ‘Jack Jones is coming here?’
‘Yes, here,’ she said, resting her hand on her computer keyboard as though to warn me I was about to lose her attention. ‘Apparently he’s very interested in social history and he wants to know how you work. It’s no biggie.’
‘But I’ve got a system,’ I said, knowing it was no good protesting when Fliss had decided something. ‘I don’t want him to mess it up.’
‘He’s not taking over, Helena, he just wants to know how you’re getting on.’ Fliss sounded impatient. ‘He’ll be here after lunch.’
I forced a smile. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get some stuff together.’
I wandered back to my desk feeling wrong-footed.
‘What’s with the face?’ asked my colleague Elly as I sat down. ‘Did Fliss tell you off?’
I wiggled my mouse to wake up my screen. ‘No,’ I said gloomily. ‘She told me Jack bloody Jones is coming in this afternoon to see how I’m getting on with my research.’
‘Shut. Up,’ said Elly, spinning round in her chair to face me. ‘Shut. Up.’
I blinked at her. Did she really mean me to be quiet?
‘Jack Jones is coming here? THE Jack Jones? We never get to meet the celebs,’ Elly was beginning to babble. ‘I’ve worked on this show for five years and I’ve never met one single person whose family history I’ve researched. Have you met anyone?’
‘No,’ I said. She was right. I’d not worked on Where Did You Come From? as long as Elly had, but I’d researched the family trees of lots of celebrities and not been so much as introduced to anyone.
‘And it’s Jack Jones?’ Elly went on. ‘Jack. Jones.’
I nodded. ‘It’s an interesting one, actually. His great-grandfather was at the Somme …’
I trailed off as Elly waved her hand to shush me.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Properly handsome. And I’ve heard he’s going to be in that new superhero film soon so he’ll be a massive Hollywood star.’
I nodded again. I knew who Jack Jones was of course – star of the latest Sunday night detective drama that was wowing audiences, and tipped for superstardom – and Elly was right, he was gorgeous. In any other circumstances I’d love to meet him. But I had a certain way of working, and a system, and a process, and I didn’t appreciate interference or anyone checking up on me, however handsome they were.
‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Elly. ‘To the meeting?’
She gaped at me. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘The meeting with Jack Jones?’
I couldn’t help laughing at her face. ‘Yes, the meeting with Jack Jones,’ I said. ‘I could do with the help.’
Elly was getting up from her chair. She pulled on her coat and picked up her bag as I looked on in confusion.
‘Is that a no?’ I said.
‘It’s a yes,’ she threw back over her shoulder as she headed for the lift. ‘I’m going to buy a new top and get my hair blow-dried.’
Chuckling to myself I turned back to my screen. We worked on more than one celebrity story at a time and I was currently tracking the maternal line of a breakfast TV presenter. I’d got right back to the early 1800s and I thought I might be able to go further if I was clever about it.
I clicked on to the census web page I used, intending to get back to work, though I couldn’t concentrate on Sarah Sanderson properly with the news that Jack Jones was coming into the office weighing on my mind. I absolutely loved my job and I considered myself to be really lucky that I’d landed this role on Where Did You Come From? Social history may have been my passion but it wasn’t exactly well paid – so making the jump into television was brilliant for me – and I enjoyed the research as well as seeing the process of the show being made. My colleagues were lovely, and Fliss was very understanding when it came to having to rush off on time each evening to collect Dora from nursery, or working from home when she was ill.
Spinning round in my chair, I surveyed my shelves of neat brown folders, each with the name of the celebrity written along the spine and arranged in alphabetical order. I ran my finger along them until I found J and pulled out the Jack Jones file. I’d found out quite a lot about his family already so I had things to tell him. But today I was supposed to be working on Sarah Sanderson’s family history. Giving up an afternoon to Jack Jones was going to throw everything out.
I opened the folder and looked at the picture of him clipped to the front cover. I liked to have a photo of each person so I knew whose family I was researching – especially for those celebs I didn’t really know much about. It helped them become real for me, and then their families became real, too.
Elly was right, Jack Jones was really handsome. He had glossy brown hair that was longish and curlyish and flopped over his forehead, and a smile with a hint of mischief. I felt a brief flicker of excitement. Though I wasn’t a massive fan of the whole celeb thing – I couldn’t name the Kardashians or the members of One Direction – I had really enjoyed the detective series that Jack had starred in. I wondered if it would be weird to discuss the cryptic ending with him and decided it would be a bit fangirl. Mind you, I thought, not as fangirl as Elly getting her hair done.
I picked up my phone, smiling at the picture of Dora wearing my sunglasses on my home screen, and took a photo of Jack’s picture, then added it to my siblings’ group chat.
‘Guess who I’m meeting this afternoon …’ I typed.
Almost straight away, my baby sister Imogen replied. ‘OMG!’ she wrote. ‘Is that Jack Jones? I love him!’
I grinned. Before I could reply, a message arrived from my other sister, Miranda. ‘I have no idea who that is,’ she wrote. ‘But he’s easy on the eye.’
I smiled again. My sisters were nothing if not predictable.
‘Has anyone heard from Andy?’ Another message pinged through from Miranda. ‘I can’t see if he’s getting these. Immy manages to reply all the way from Africa and he can’t be bothered to keep in touch from Scotland.’
I made a face at my phone. I adored my big sister Miranda but she could be a bit of a mother hen. Not surprising, I supposed, when you thought about what she’d had to take on when we were kids, and I’d never forget how she’d been there when I needed her when Dora was born.
‘He’s probably not on Wi-Fi,’ I typed. Andy was on an archaeological dig somewhere on a windswept island in the North Sea – hardly hanging out in a coffee bar in Glasgow as Miranda obviously thought. ‘He’ll check in when he can.’
I threw my phone into my bag and pulled out my make-up. If Elly was dolling up to meet Jack Jones, then perhaps I should do the same.
Chapter 2
Jack Jones was nothing like I’d expected. For a start he arrived by himself. No entourage, no publicist, not even a driver. He just got off the tube and sauntered into the office, scruffy bag thrown over his shoulder and hair unwashed. Elly was not impressed by his distinctly un-starry appearance. She went down to reception to meet him, giddy with excitement, while I went into the meeting room, laid out some biscuits on a plate and made sure the coffee machine was working.
I put my folders of research on to the table and waited for them to arrive, nervously tapping my fingers on my knee. What if he messed up my notes? What if he questioned my methods? I wasn’t comfortable about this at all.
‘This is your researcher, Helena Miles,’ Elly said, standing at the door of the room and ushering Jack Jones inside. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
I stood up.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I lied, holding out my hand for Jack Jones to shake. Wait. Elly was leaving us to it? What? I caught her eye over Jack Jones’s shoulder. She wrinkled her nose up at his back and flicked her newly blow-dried hair in a disdainful shrug. Jack Jones obviously didn’t live up to her expectations. Horrified at the idea of entertaining a bona-fide celebrity by myself, I widened my eyes pleading with her to stay, but she spun round and headed back to her desk.
‘Is everything okay?’
I dragged my eyes from Elly’s retreating back and looked at Jack Jones, who was still holding my outstretched hand.
‘Oh,’ I said, awkwardly, dropping his hand like it was hot. ‘Sorry, Mr Jones. Sorry.’
Jack Jones smiled at me. ‘Call me Jack,’ he said. ‘Is it okay if I call you Helena?’
I liked the way he said my name in his clipped, period-drama accent.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He smiled at me again, a sort of wonky, half-smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He looked straight at me and I looked back and my stomach flipped over. He was gorgeous. At least his face was. For the first time I took in what he was wearing – scruffy jeans, battered trainers and a scuffed leather jacket. His brown canvas bag was slung across his body and his hair was a mop of dirty curls, very different from the hair that artfully fell across his forehead in the picture at the front of his file.
Unable to help myself, I glanced down at the photo on the folder. Jack saw me looking and grinned again.
‘Photo shoot Jack,’ he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. ‘Not my real self.’
Embarrassed that he’d caught me looking and still feeling weak at the knees thanks to his smile, I collapsed into the chair next to him and moved it ever so slightly further away.
‘So,’ I said, all business. ‘I understand it’s your dad’s family you’re interested in?’
He nodded. ‘I didn’t really know them,’ he said. ‘My dad was around a bit when I was little, and apparently I did meet my grandparents a couple of times, though I don’t remember. But they’ve passed away now, and then Dad died last year – though I’d not seen him since I was ten.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. His story sounded painfully familiar to me, making me think of Greg and how he’d not seen Dora more than a handful of times.
Jack shrugged. ‘He was like a stranger to me,’ he said. ‘It was just me and Mum when I was growing up.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’ I asked. Again I was struck by how similar his story sounded to Dora’s – and how different it was from my own chaotic, busy childhood home.
He shook his head. ‘Just me.’
I looked at his impish face, and felt so sad for the little boy he’d once been that I almost threw my arms round him and hugged him. My sister Imogen would have done. But thankfully, I remembered I was Helena Miles who did not do things spontaneously, unless you counted walking out on my boyfriend when I was pregnant.
Instead I opened the folder and showed Jack his rough family tree.
‘So, this is your dad’s family,’ I said, tracing the line with my forefinger. ‘Your grandfather was a pilot in World War Two, and your great-grandfather fought at the Somme.’
Jack was looking at me in wonder. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Tell me more.’
Putting all thoughts of Sarah Sanderson’s maternal line out of my head, I sat with Jack all afternoon and explained what I’d found out so far. I always did the initial research, then passed my findings on to specialists – in Jack’s case we’d send him off to speak to an expert on World War One about his great-grandfather. And I was in the process of tracking down someone to speak to about his grandad too, who’d been too short-sighted to join the regular air force but who’d flown for the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting planes from factories to airfields all over Britain. It was a great family story all round.
Jack was thrilled. He asked all the right questions and wrote endless notes in his scrawling handwriting, on a notepad he pulled from his tatty bag. At one point, he got so excited talking about the trenches that he threw out his arm and knocked over his cup of coffee. I leapt for the folder he had been reading and got it out of harm’s way just in time.
He was very sweet and enthusiastic and every time he smiled he made my hands tremble. But oh my goodness, he was the clumsiest, scruffiest, bulldozer of a man I’d ever met. My carefully ordered notes were pulled out of the folders and spread across the table as the edges of the papers folded over and curled. There was the coffee incident, as well as biscuit crumbs scattered everywhere, and a similar hairy moment when Jack’s biro leaked all over his hand and he left sticky blue fingerprints on a photocopy of his great-grandfather’s service record.
Eventually, to my absolute relief, Jack looked at his watch – which appeared to have Mickey Mouse on it – and stood up.
‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘I have to dash.’
‘Okay,’ I said, possibly a bit too eagerly. ‘I’ll show you out.’
Jack pulled on his leather jacket and surveyed the table, which was covered in notes and screwed-up tissues where he’d wiped the biro off his fingers, and biscuit crumbs.
‘God what a mess,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you clear up.’
‘No need,’ I said, desperately wanting him gone. ‘I’ll do it.’
But I was too late. He was already scooping up all my notes – no longer in any sort of order – and stuffing them back into a folder.
‘Really,’ I said, gritting my teeth. ‘I can do it.’
I went to take the folder from him and there was a small tug-of-war as we tussled over it for a second, then it fell to the floor scattering papers everywhere.
I closed my eyes briefly and when I opened them, Jack was on his hands and knees picking up bits of paper.
‘Ooh look,’ he said, flinging one sheet at me from his position down on the floor. ‘This says Lilian Miles on it. Have you been doing your own family tree and got them mixed up?’
I looked at the paper he’d given me. It was a document about the Air Transport Auxiliary.
‘No, it’s yours,’ I said, bristling at the suggestion that I’d get papers muddled. ‘Frank Jones is mentioned – look.’
I pointed at the bottom of the page, where I’d highlighted Jack’s grandfather’s name.
‘It’s saying he’d been cleared to fly the class of planes that included four-engine bombers,’ I said.
‘And so had Lilian,’ Jack said, showing me the name at the top of the page. ‘No relation of yours?’
I chewed my lip, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. Then I shook my head. ‘It must just be a coincidence.’
Which was exactly what I said to my parents about what I’d seen at our regular Friday evening family dinner.
‘And there, right at the top, was the name Lilian Miles,’ I said, helping myself to more pilau rice – we always got takeaway on Fridays because neither of my parents could cook and Miranda, my sister who’d done all the cooking when we were growing up, was usually knackered from work.
‘I thought it had to be a coincidence,’ I carried on. ‘But isn’t it strange?’
Dad shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Like you say, probably just a coincidence.’
‘But what about Great-Aunt Lil?’ Miranda fixed Dad with a look that told me she wasn’t impressed with his response.
Mum smiled at the mention of Lil. She was very fond of her.
‘Yes, what about Lil?’ she said.
‘What about her?’ Dad asked, snapping a poppadom in half with a crack and scattering crumbs across the table. I fought the urge to sweep them up with my hand.