Extract: That Night by Gillian McAllister

What would you do to protect your family?

ANYTHING.

During a family holiday in Italy, you get an urgent call from your sister.

There's been an accident: she hit a man with her car and he's dead.

She's overcome with terror - fearing years in a foreign jail away from her child.

She asks for your help. It wasn't her fault, not really. She'd cover for you, so will you do the same for her?

But when the police come calling, the lies start. And you each begin to doubt your trust in one another.

What really happened that night?

Who is lying to who?

And who will be the first to crack? . . .

Read an exclusive extract of That Night by Gillian McAllister below!

‘Help me, please help me,’ I say into the phone.

‘What?’ My sister has panic in her voice, her usually muted tone immediately alert. ‘What?’ The second what? is resigned, a full, heartbroken glob of a word, like syrup falling off a spoon.

The line crackles as if paper is being brushed across the mouthpiece, the signal poor. ‘Please help,’ I say.

It’s night-time, but there’s still just a hint of lightness at the edge of the horizon where the sun set hours ago, like somebody has torn a seam in the sky, just at the edge there. Otherwise, it’s completely black, the air scented with summer hay and the final embers of barbecues. ‘Please come,’ I add, though I know she will. This is what family means. This is what our family means anyway.

She doesn’t say anything back, but that silence contains her agreement, I know it does.

I move my gaze away from the sky and stare downwards, lighting up the ground with a torch which illuminates dust motes dancing in the air.

I slowly run the torch over it. Over the body.

Cathy only answers the phone call that comes in the middle of the night because she is awake, working. Chasing up bloods for a Labrador that she’s concerned about. The results are already late, and the unreliable holiday Wi-Fi keeps cutting off just as she tries to send the email. Frannie. Slide to answer. Cathy’s eyes flick to the top of the screen to check the time. It’s 1.25 a.m. The room is com- pletely dark around the blue bubble of light the phone creates. All she can see is her sister, calling her in the small hours. Calling Cathy because she knows Cathy will be alone, because Cathy is always alone, whether on holiday or at home. She sits up in the bed and swipes to answer. The sheet falls away from her. She’s wearing pyjamas even in the Italian heat. It seems somehow wrong to sleep naked. That particular luxury, for Cathy, is reserved for the future, she hopes, with some as yet unknown man.

‘Help me, please help me,’ Frannie shouts as soon as Cathy answers. Electricity shoots across Cathy’s chest and down her arms.

‘What? What?’ Cathy says. Sweat forms on her upper lip and between her breasts.

‘Please help me,’ Frannie says. ‘Where are you? Are you safe?’

‘Please come. I’m on the road. Turn right off the track road and then left. Half a mile, tops,’ Frannie garbles.

Cathy waits. For Frannie to start making sense.

‘It’s him. The man from the market,’ Frannie says, and then rings off.

Him. Shit.

Cathy gets out of bed and starts scrambling around for clothes to throw on. She finds a pair of pink shorts she bought in Verona a couple of days ago and pulls them on, the price tag scratching against her lower back.

Why didn’t she stay on the line? Cathy tries to call back, but it rings out.

She rams her feet into her dusty flip-flops and grabs her bag. As she leaves the silent villa, not thinking to wake anyone, the closing of the large wooden door behind her sounds like a gunshot in the night.

The outskirts of Verona are completely black at this hour. Even after a week and a half, Cathy still isn’t used to it. Struggling to see her own feet as she walks.

The only light comes from her bedroom window in the villa behind her. It projects a neat rectangle of light on to the patio. And then: nothing, like she might be at the edge of the world.

Frannie sounded so scared. She tries to call again, but this time it goes to voicemail. Maybe she is exaggerating. Cathy hopes so. She’s always enjoyed the drama of Frannie’s hyperbole, the way she tells a great story. She’s the family dreamer. ‘There were literally fifty dogs in the waiting room today,’ she once said. She’s the receptionist at their family veterinary practice. She had refused to con- cede when Cathy probed. ‘Yeah, actually fifty,’ she’d said, and Cathy had thrown her head back and laughed. ‘You must have had to sit some behind the reception desk,’ she had said, while Frannie nodded emphatically.

Cathy rushes, the long, tough grasses whipping and snapping around her ankles like snakes, muttering point- less prayers out loud. Please be okay. Please don’t be hurt, or frightened. As she reaches the end of the drive, she turns and sees headlights in the distance.

It must be their hire car, the Land Rover none of them likes driving. ‘It feels like a bus,’ their brother Joe had said on the first day.

She breaks into a proper run down the road. Right and then left, just like Frannie said. It’s him. The man from the market.

It’s him.

Cathy’s pace slows when she sees the silhouettes. She would know them anywhere: her siblings. Joe, standing by the Land Rover, his hands on his hips. And Frannie, kneel- ing down, her hair and long limbs illuminated by the headlights. She is so beautiful, has always been so. A wide nose. Cat eyes. A mane of dark, shiny hair.

Why is she on the floor? Cathy stares, then takes a breath, just one. She breathes it out as slowly as she can. This is . . . she stares at the shadows and the lights. A sweep of fear covers her shoulders. She starts to go cold. She knows, somehow, that if she walks forwards, something is going to happen.

Joe has evidently just arrived too, from his end of their large, shared villa, and he paces across the lights, in and out of shadow, like a flickering bulb. Cathy wraps her arms around her middle. A bad feeling settles over her, like she is being watched. A small, unsavoury part of her is disappointed that Frannie called Joe before her. Cathy would certainly not call Joe first in a crisis – she might not call him at all.

She turns on the torch from her phone and shines it along the pale, dusty ground in front of her. Around them are the smells of Verona: dry heat, parched grass. It’s been the hottest July on record. They had to buy after-sun most days. They’ve been through bottles and bottles of it. All of Cathy’s clothes are oily at their hems.

She can hear only the car’s engine and the cicadas.

Cathy moves towards them and sweeps the torch slowly over Frannie, who is still kneeling. And that’s when she sees it. Frannie is leaning over, staring at the ground. Cathy stops walking but can’t stop looking at Frannie. She has something – a t-shirt? – in her hands. As Frannie stands up, Cathy realizes, stunned, that she’s taken off her top, that she’s in just her bra.

In the glare of the headlights, Frannie lifts up her hands. Red drips run down her wrists. Her stomach is streaked with blood. It’s dried, burgundy, the colour of red wine. She is a terrible tableau. Nausea rises up through Cathy. ‘Fucking hell,’ she whispers to nobody.

Joe is leaning over her now. Frannie extends her hands to Cathy and shouts: ‘Help me.’

The headlights are a Venn diagram of light, a portrait of her sister, and a body lying at her feet.