Let Me Lie

  I wonder.

  She looks nothing like the few photos Mark has seen. She’s thinner, older; her hair is jet-black and cut in a way that changes the shape of her face.

  Could we?

  “And you’re sure you’ve never met him?”

  She raises her eyebrows at my abrupt questioning. “You know I haven’t.”

  “The police found one of Mark’s leaflets in your datebook.” I try to keep my tone neutral, but it still sounds like an accusation. “You made an appointment with him.”

  I take in her furrowed brow, the movement of her jaw as she worries at the inside of her lower lip. She stares at the wooden planks beneath our feet, at the swimmer, who cuts cleanly through the waves.

  “Oh!” She turns back to me, relief showing on her face now that she has solved the mystery. “Counseling services. Brighton.”

  “Yes. You made an appointment with him.”

  “That was Mark? Your Mark? God, how extraordinary.” She picks at a loose piece of skin around a fingernail. “It came through the door after your dad left. You know what I was like—I was in pieces. I couldn’t sleep; I was jumping at the slightest thing. I had no one to turn to, not really. I needed to tell someone—get it off my chest—so I booked the appointment.”

  “But you didn’t keep it.”

  She shakes her head. “I thought whatever I said would be in confidence. Like confession, I suppose. But when I looked through the small print it said that discretion couldn’t be guaranteed if the client’s life was at risk, or if they disclosed a crime.”

  “Right.” I wonder if Mark has ever betrayed a client’s confidence by going to the police, and if he’d ever tell me if he had.

  “So I didn’t go.”

  “He doesn’t remember.”

  “He must deal with a lot of people.” She takes my hands, rubs them with her thumbs. “Let me be part of a family again, Anna. Please.”

  A beat.

  “He’ll know it’s you.”

  “He won’t. People believe what they want to believe,” Mum says. “They believe what you tell them. Trust me.”

  I do.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-NINE

  True story: more people die over Christmas than at any other time.

  The cold weather gets them. Hospital resources fail them. Loneliness sends them reaching for the pills, a knife, a rope.

  Or they fall into a fist.

  I threw my first punch on 25 December 1996.

  Merry Christmas.

  Anna was five. Sitting by the tree in a sea of wrapping paper, clutching a Buzz Lightyear with undisguised delight.

  “They’ve sold out everywhere, you know,” Bill said, with more than a touch of smugness. “You wouldn’t believe what I had to do to get hold of that one.”

  Next to Anna, discarded on the floor, was a Barbie. It had hair that grew, eye shadow that changed color. Articulated bloody ankles. A Barbie I’d worked for, chosen, paid for. She’d looked at it once—seen how the hair could grow longer with the little wheel at the back—then she’d dropped it on the floor. I don’t think she picked it up again all Christmas.

  I poured my first drink then. Felt judgmental eyes on me as I knocked it back, so I poured another, just because. I sat. And I seethed.

  You messed up Christmas lunch. Overcooked the turkey, undercooked the sprouts. You’d had a drink yourself. You thought it was funny. I didn’t.

  You tried to make Bill stay. Didn’t want to be on your own with me. When he insisted, you walked him to the door and pulled him into the sort of embrace you never gave me anymore. I drank more. Seethed more.

  “Shall we ask Alicia to join us next Christmas?” you said. “Awful to think of her and Laura in that horrible flat.”

  I said yes, but I wasn’t so sure. If I was honest I couldn’t imagine Alicia here, in our house. She was different from us. She spoke differently; dressed differently. She belonged in her world, not in ours.

  We’d kept our own presents till last. Anna was in bed, and the turkey wrapped in foil (although it couldn’t have gotten any drier), and you made us sit on the floor like we were five ourselves.

  “You first.” I handed you a present. I’d paid for it to be wrapped, but you pulled off the ribbon without looking at it and I thought next time I wouldn’t bother.

  “I love it.”

  I knew you would. The camera had caught Anna just as the swing hit its highest point. She was laughing, her legs swinging and her hair flying. The frame was silver. Expensive. It was a good present.

  “Now you.” You put it in my hands. You were nervous. “You’re so hard to buy for!”

  Carefully, I peeled back the sticky tape, slid the package out of the red and white paper. Jewelry? Gloves?

  It was a CD.

  Easy Listening: A compilation of the world’s greatest hits. Just relaaaaaax . . .

  In the corner of the case was a sticky patch where you’d scraped off the label.

  It was as though someone had stolen two decades from me. Marched me into JCPenney and dressed me in beige trousers with an elastic waistband. I thought of my life before you; before Anna. Of the parties, the coke, the lays, the fun.

  And now, what was my life?

  An easy-listening CD.

  You’d think it would have happened quickly, but for me it was the reverse. Time slowed down. I felt my fingers curl into a fist; felt my nails in the soft flesh of my palm. I felt the shiver of tension run from wrist to shoulder, pause at the top, and then run back again. Building, building, building, building.

  The bruise ran from your temple to your throat.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I was. I was ashamed. A little frightened—although I’d never have admitted it—of what I was capable of.

  “Forget it.”

  I didn’t, of course, and neither did you. But we pretended we had.

  Until the next time.

  It scared me enough to make me stop drinking for a while. But I wasn’t an alcoholic, remember? That’s what I told myself. So there was no need to go cold turkey. A cool beer here, a glass of wine there . . . It wasn’t long before I needed the sun over the yardarm long before six o’clock.

  You never know what goes on behind closed doors. Out of every ten of your friends, two of them are in violent relationships. Two. How many friends did we have? We can’t have been the only ones.

  I found it reassuring, in a way. We weren’t unusual.

  We kept it a secret, of course. If we hadn’t, it might not have gone on for so long. But no one’s proud of a failed marriage. No one’s proud of being a victim.

  You didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

  I’d like to say I was out of control. After all, I only ever hit you when I was drunk; surely that absolved me of some responsibility?

  You never called me out on it, but you knew—and I knew—that I must have had at least a modicum of control. I never lashed out when Anna was in the room, or even—once she was old enough to understand the nuances of an adult relationship—when she was at home. It was as though her presence was a calming influence; a reminder of how a rational person behaves.

  That, and I was too ashamed to let her see me that way.

  Each time it happened I told you I was sorry. Each time I said it had “just happened,” that I hadn’t planned it, hadn’t been able to stop myself. I hate myself now, for the lies I told then. I knew exactly what I was doing. And after that first time, however drunk I was—however angry I was—I never again hit you where the bruise would show.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  MURRAY

  The High Tech Crime Unit was a mile from the nearest police station, in the middle of an industrial estate. Marked cars and uniformed officers were strictly forbidden, and nothing about Unit 12 suggested that
inside the gray concrete box were dozens of IT specialists taking apart laptops, analyzing hard drives, and extracting the worst kind of pornography from encrypted files.

  Today the car park was empty, save for one car. Murray pressed the buzzer and looked up at the camera.

  “What, no Santa hat?” came the disembodied voice, followed by a harsh buzzing noise and a loud click as the door released.

  Sean Dowling had the sort of personality that entered a room a second before he did. Broad-shouldered and stocky, he still played rugby every Saturday, despite pushing sixty, and today sported a deep purple bruise across the bridge of his nose. He shook Murray’s hand vigorously.

  “Could have used you against Park House the other week.”

  Murray laughed. “Long since retired, mate. I don’t know where you get the stamina.”

  “Keeps me young.” Sean grinned. He held open the door. “Good Christmas?”

  “Quiet. Sorry to drag you in over the holidays.”

  “Are you joking? Tracy’s mum’s staying—I was halfway out the door before you put the phone down.”

  They caught up as they walked, promising to get together for a beer and wondering aloud why they’d left it so long. It was so easy, Murray thought, when you were working on a case. So easy to socialize, to make new friends and stay in touch with old ones. By returning to a civilian job after retiring, he had hoped this element of the job he loved so much would have survived unharmed, but as more of Murray’s peers had retired, so the after-work beers had petered out. Murray doubted any of the officers at Lower Meads even knew their front-counter civvy had once been one of Sussex’s most respected detectives.

  Sean led Murray to the corner of a large open-plan room. Air-conditioning units—installed for the benefit of the myriad computers, rather than their users—rattled at either end of the room, and the floor-to-ceiling windows were obscured by blinds, preventing curious passersby from looking inside.

  Only Sean’s workstation was in use, a dark green parka hung over his chair. On the desk were three storage boxes, each filled with clear exhibit bags, their red plastic seals protruding at all angles. Beneath his desk were another two boxes, both full. In each bag was a mobile phone.

  “We’ve got a bit of a backlog.”

  “No kidding.”

  Sean pulled up a second chair and flipped open a large black project book. At the top of the page was the mobile number of the caller who had given the name Diane Brent-Taylor.

  “The SIM card was pay-as-you-go, so we’ll need to work on the handset itself. It was active for six months after the incident, although no calls were made.” Sean spun his pen like a baton through his fingers.

  “Is there any way of finding out where the handset is now?”

  “Not unless your witness—or whoever has it now—turns it on.” An overenthusiastic twirl sent the pen flying across the room, where it skittered under a filing cabinet. Absentmindedly, Sean reached for another pen and began the same well-practiced movement. Murray wondered how many pens there were under the cabinet. “Now, what we could do is extract the call data and find the IMEI—”

  “In English?”

  Sean grinned. “Every device has a unique fifteen-digit number: the IMEI. It’s like a fingerprint for mobiles. If we can trace your witness call back to the handset, we can work back from that to the point of purchase.”

  And from that, Murray thought, he might stand a chance of tracing the caller, particularly if they used a bank card to make the transaction. “How soon could you get me a result?”

  “You know I’m always happy to do a mate a favor, but . . .” Sean looked at the rammed storage boxes in front of them and rubbed his face, forgetting his bruise and wincing at the oversight. “What’s the big deal with this job, anyway?”

  “No big deal.” Murray spoke more casually than he felt. “The daughter came in to report some concerns over the verdict, and I’m looking into it for her.”

  “In your own time? I hope she appreciates it.”

  Murray looked at the desk. He was trying not to dwell on his phone call to Anna. He had caught her at a bad time; that was all. It was bound to be distressing; it was only natural she’d have doubts. Once he had hard evidence that something suspicious had happened to her parents, she’d be grateful he had pressed on regardless. Nevertheless, the sharp click as she hung up the phone still echoed in his ears.

  Sean sighed, mistaking Murray’s expression for disappointment in him. “Look, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “More important, get your datebook out, and let’s get that beer sorted. You know it’ll never happen otherwise.” Sean opened a calendar on his laptop, firing off dates, then instantly realizing they were already booked. Murray patiently turned the pages of his National Trust pocket schedule until Sean found a window; then he borrowed a pen and wrote on the pristine page.

  He hummed along to the radio as he drove away from the industrial unit, the winter sun low in his eyes. With any luck, Sean would get back to him later today. The holidays were providing a legitimate reason for Murray’s delay in writing up the job for CID, and if he could get a result on the phone before he did so, he might be able to hand it over with a suspect attached.

  Besides getting the phone looked into, there was something nagging him about his visit to Diane Brent-Taylor’s house. It wasn’t Diane herself—Murray prided himself on being a good judge of character, and if the twinset-and-pearls pensioner was a murderer, he’d eat his trilby.

  But there was definitely something.

  Something he’d seen on the noticeboard by the front door. A leaflet? A card? It was infuriating not being able to remember, and as Diane had been packing to go away the day Murray had visited her, there was nothing he could do to jog his memory.

  At home, he paused with his key in the lock, feeling the familiar anxiety fill his chest. The pause represented the last few seconds when life was under control; when he knew which way was up. On the other side of the door anything could be waiting. Over the years Murray had perfected a neutral greeting while he waited to see how Sarah was—what she expected from him—but he had never stopped needing those three seconds between the two halves of his world.

  “I’m home.”

  She was downstairs, which was an improvement. The curtains were still drawn, and as Murray pulled them open, Sarah winced and covered her eyes with her hands.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Tired.”

  Sarah had slept for twelve hours, but she looked as though she’d pulled an all-nighter. Heavy circles ringed her eyes, and her skin was gray and dull.

  “I’ll make you something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Cup of tea?”

  “I don’t want one.”

  Gently, Murray tried to take the duvet to shake it out, but Sarah clung on to it and buried herself deeper into the sofa. The television was on mute, playing a kids’ cartoon featuring animals in a zoo.

  Murray stood for a while. Should he make something anyway? Sarah sometimes changed her mind once the food was actually in front of her. Just as often, though, she didn’t. Just as often, Murray ate it, or threw it away, or covered it with cling film in the hope she might fancy something later. Murray looked at the pile of duvet, at his wife, who had maneuvered herself as far from him as it was possible to get without actually leaving the sofa.

  “I’ll just be through here, then. If you need anything.”

  There was no sign that Sarah had heard him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Murray brought in an empty recycling box from the garden. Methodically, he opened each drawer in the kitchen and removed the sharp knives, the scissors, the blades from the food processor. He took the kitchen foil from the cupboard and carefully pulled out the strip of se
rrated metal from its cardboard housing. He collected the caustic cleaning products from under the sink and the over-the-counter medicines from the dresser drawer. It had been a while since he had felt the need to do this, and he didn’t want to think about why it felt necessary now. Instead he mentally walked through his visit to Diane Brent-Taylor, in the hope he would remember what it was that had caught his eye on her bulletin board.

  The front door had been white rigid PVC, the external doormat a mix of coir and rubber. Inside, the hall floor was laminate, and deep red walls had made the already gloomy downstairs even darker. The bulletin board had been on the left, above a shelf with a motley collection of items. What had been there? A hairbrush. A postcard. Keys. He visualized each section of the shelf until the items took shape, a grown-up version of the memory game he had played as a child.

  Murray put everything in the recycling box and took it down to the bottom of the garden. He opened the shed and began burying the box beneath dusty drop cloths.

  As he did so, his thoughts returned to the board. What was on it? More postcards—at least three. One with Table Mountain on it (he remembered it because Cape Town was on his list of dream destinations). A leaflet for a beauty salon. A list of telephone numbers. Had he recognized a name on that list? Was that what had been nagging him?

  “What are you doing?”

  Murray hadn’t seen Sarah come into the garden, and the voice directly behind him made him clumsy. He collected himself before turning around. Sarah was shivering, her lips tinged blue after just a few seconds out of the warmth. Her feet were bare and her arms wrapped around herself, each hand tucked beneath the sleeve of the opposite arm. Her fingers moved rhythmically, and Murray knew she was scratching at skin already red and raw from the same action.

  He touched his hands on both of her upper arms, and the movement ceased.

  “I am hungry.”

  “I’ll make you something.”

  Murray led her back up the garden, found her slippers, and sat her in the kitchen. Sarah said nothing as he made her a sandwich with a blunt knife that tore at the bread, but she ate ravenously, and Murray counted that as a win.