Let Me Lie

  * * *

  • • •

  In the park Mark pushes Ella’s pram, and I tuck my hand into the crook of his arm.

  “You haven’t had a call from the police, have you?”

  I look at him sharply. “What do you mean? Why would I have had a call from the police?”

  Mark laughs. “Relax. I don’t think the FBI have caught up with you just yet. The guy from CID said he’d ring today to let us know if they’d managed to get any DNA from the rubber band. I’ve had nothing on my mobile, and I thought they might have tried the house phone.”

  “Oh. No, nothing.” The pram’s wheels leave puddle tracks on the path. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that and I . . . I think we should drop it.”

  “Drop it?” Mark stops short, and I walk into the pram handle. “Anna, we can’t drop it. It’s serious.”

  “The note said no police. If we drop it, they’ll stop.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  I do. I take my arm from Mark’s and begin walking again, pushing the pram away from him. He runs to catch up.

  “Please, Mark. I just want to forget about it. Start the New Year off on a positive note.” Mark is a big believer in fresh starts. New chapters. Clean pages. Perhaps all counselors are.

  “For the record, I think it’s the wrong thing to do—”

  “I want to move on from what happened to my parents. For Ella’s sake.” I look down at her, as much to hide my face as to reinforce my point, feeling guilty for using her as emotional collateral.

  He nods. “I’ll tell them we’re dropping it.”

  “Thank you.” My relief, at least, is genuine. I stop again, this time to kiss him.

  “You’re crying.”

  I wipe my eyes. “It’s all a bit much, I think. Christmas, New Year, the police . . .” Mum. I get as close to the truth as I dare. “I’m really going to miss Angela.”

  “Did you spend much time together when you were younger? You never talk about her; I didn’t realize you knew her that well.”

  The lump in my throat hardens, and my chin wobbles as I try my hardest to stop myself from sobbing. “That’s the thing about family,” I manage. “Even if you’ve never met before, you feel as though you’ve always been together.”

  Mark puts one arm around me, and we walk slowly back to Oak View, where twinkly lights around the porch mark the start of New Year’s Eve, and the beginning of the end of this terrible, wonderful, extraordinary year.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mum’s in the garden. I slide open the glass door and she jumps, panic on her face until she sees that it’s me. She’s not wearing a coat, and her lips are tinged with blue.

  “You’ll catch your death,” I say, with a wry smile she doesn’t return.

  “I was saying good-bye to the roses.”

  “I’ll look after them—I promise.”

  “And make sure you put in an objection to—”

  “Mum.”

  She stops, midsentence. Her shoulders sag.

  “It’s time to go.”

  Inside, Mark’s opened a bottle of champagne.

  “An early New Year.”

  We clink glasses and I fight back tears. Mum holds Ella, and they look so alike I try to fix the moment in my memory, but it hurts so much. If this is what it’s like to lose someone slowly, I would pray for a sudden death every time. A sharp break to my heart, instead of the slow splintering I feel right now in my chest, like cracks crazing across a frozen lake.

  Mark makes a speech. About family and reconnecting; about new years and new starts—this last with a wink in my direction. I try to catch Mum’s eye, but she’s listening intently.

  “I hope the year brings health, wealth, and happiness to us all.” He raises his glass. “A very happy New Year to you, Angela; to my beautiful Ella; and to Anna, who I am hopeful might this year say yes.”

  I smile fiercely. He will ask me tonight. At midnight, perhaps, when my mother is on a train to heaven knows where, and I’m grieving on my own. He will ask me, and I will say yes.

  And then I smell something. An acrid burning, like melting plastic, teasing my nostrils and catching the back of my throat.

  “Is there something in the oven?”

  Mark is a second behind but quick to catch up. He moves swiftly to the door and into the hall.

  “Jesus!”

  Mum and I follow. The smell in the hall is even worse, and below the ceiling hangs a mushroom of black smoke. Mark is stamping on the doormat—black fragments of burned paper fly out from beneath his feet.

  “Oh my God! Mark!” I scream, even though it’s obvious that whatever flames there were have been extinguished, the cloud of smoke already dissipating.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay.” Mark’s trying to stay in control, but his voice is a notch higher than normal, and he’s still stamping on the doormat. It’s the rubber surround I could smell, I realize. Whatever was put through the letterbox has disappeared; would probably have burned itself out even without Mark’s input. Paper kindling designed to frighten us.

  I point to the front door. Sweat trickles down the small of my back.

  Someone has written on the outside of the stained-glass panels on the upper section of the door. I see the block capitals, distorted by the different thicknesses of glass.

  Mark opens the door. The letters are written in thick black marker pen.

  FOUND YOU.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-ONE

  MURRAY

  It was dark before they hit the motorway. Murray had made one phone call after another once they’d left the bedsit, and when it was obvious he wasn’t going to be free to drive anytime soon, he had handed the keys to Sarah.

  “I’m not insured.”

  “You’ll be covered under mine.” Murray mentally crossed his fingers and hoped he was right.

  “I can’t remember the last time I drove.”

  “It’s like riding a bike.”

  He shut his eyes as they joined the M42, Sarah pulling out in front of a ten-ton truck amid a cacophony of horns. She settled into the middle lane at a steady seventy miles per hour, ignoring the cars that flashed her from behind to move over, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.

  Murray hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone at the Eastbourne borough zoning office, and he didn’t have the authority to call someone out. Before he found someone who did, he needed to get his facts right. He smoothed out the papers he’d found in the garbage can of the bedsit. It was a printout of Robert Drake’s zoning application, crumpled and stained, but still readable.

  There had been many occasions over Murray’s thirty-year career when a gut feeling had provided the key to an otherwise frustrating investigation. He might be a few years out of date with the latest legislation and procedure, but instinct never retired. Drake had something to do with his neighbors’ disappearances; Murray was sure of it.

  Murray skimmed over the objections, interested not in the content but in the details of the complainants. Next, he worked his way through the supporting documents. He scanned the elevation drawings and compared the proposed footprint with the existing one. It was a huge extension; Murray wasn’t surprised by the number of objections.

  He looked at the next page, reading through the long list of building materials, techniques, and suggested methodology for the extension. He couldn’t have explained what he was looking for, only that he felt certain the key to this case lay with Robert Drake.

  He found it buried in a paragraph halfway down the final page.

  Murray looked up, almost surprised to find himself still in the car. In his head he’d been in the CID office, amid the hustle and bustle of a dozen live cases, the good-natured ribbing between colleagues, and the continual fallout of office politics.
r />   There was no time to ponder on how life had changed. No time to do anything other than finally call in the job he’d been sitting on since Anna Johnson first walked into Lower Meads Police Station.

  “Hello?” Detective Sergeant James Kennedy did not sound like a man on duty. He sounded, in fact, like a man who had the good fortune to be off for a couple of days after a Christmas on call and was settling down with a beer, his wife, and his kids for a quiet New Year’s Eve in. Murray was about to change all that.

  “James, it’s Murray Mackenzie.”

  A brief pause before James feigned enthusiasm. Murray imagined him glancing at his wife, shaking his head to indicate that no, it’s nothing important.

  “Remember I mentioned the Johnson suicides when I swung by last week?” Whether James did or didn’t, Murray didn’t wait to find out. “Turns out they weren’t suicides.” Murray felt the familiar buzz of a job gaining momentum; heard his voice assume the energy of younger years.

  “What?”

  Murray had his attention now. “Tom and Caroline Johnson didn’t kill themselves. The suicides were faked.”

  “How do you—?”

  It didn’t matter that Murray was going to get another arse kicking from Leo Griffiths. What did he care? He was going to resign anyway. He took another glance at Sarah, her knuckles still white on the steering wheel, and decided it might be better if he did the driving in the new motor home.

  “On the twenty-first of December—the anniversary of Caroline Johnson’s death—the Johnsons’ daughter, Anna, received an anonymous note suggesting the suicides weren’t straightforward. I’ve been looking into them since then.” Intercepting James, he kept on talking. “I should have handed it over, but I wanted to give you something more concrete to go on.” And I didn’t think you’d take it seriously, he wanted to add, but didn’t. Neither did he add that the case had given him a focus; that it had given him and Sarah a distraction from their own lives.

  “And now you have?” Murray heard a door being closed, the background sounds of James’s children fading away.

  “The witness call on the nines, saying Tom Johnson had gone over the cliff, was a fake. It was made on a mobile phone bought by the Johnsons the day Tom allegedly died.”

  “Hang on—I’m making notes.” There was no hesitation now, no question lingering in James’s voice about the validity of Murray’s claims. There was no pulling rank, no insistence that Murray go through proper channels.

  “No one saw Caroline jump. The chaplain was a credible witness because he really did see Caroline on the edge of the cliff, appearing as though she was going to jump.”

  Murray remembered the young chaplain’s statement, his angst that he hadn’t been able to save Caroline Johnson. When all this was over Murray would find the poor chap and tell him what had really happened. Give him some peace of mind.

  “There’s a zoning application in with Eastbourne Borough Council,” Murray went on. If James was surprised by this apparent change of tack, he didn’t let on. “I can’t get hold of anyone in the office. We need access to the back end of the zoning portal and the IP addresses of everyone who lodged an objection to an extension proposed for the house next door to the Johnsons’.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Confirmation. One of those objections will be from an IP address in or near Swadlincote, Derbyshire, from a woman using the name Angela Grange.” Murray was certain of it. Caroline had been just as determined to stop that extension as Robert Drake had been to push it through. If she didn’t regret that already, she soon would.

  “I’ll put in a call.”

  “The anonymous note Anna received was intended to flush Caroline out, and it did just that. She left Derbyshire on the twenty-first of December. It doesn’t take a genius to guess where she went.”

  “The family home?”

  “Bingo. And if we don’t get there soon, someone’s going to get hurt.”

  “Why will . . . ?” James broke off. When he spoke again it was more urgent, more serious, as though he already knew the answer to his question. “Murray, where’s Tom Johnson?”

  Murray was as sure as he could be, but he still hesitated. Within seconds of putting down the phone, James would be picking it up again. Requesting resources, calling officers in from home, CSI, detectives, warrants, a method-of-entry team—the full major incident machine.

  What if Murray was wrong?

  “He’s there, too.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-TWO

  ANNA

  Mum and I look at each other, horror freezing our faces into identical masks.

  “He knows you’re here.” It’s out before I can stop it.

  Mark looks between us. “Who does? What’s going on?”

  Neither of us answers. I doubt either of us knows how.

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “No!” In unison.

  I glance outside. Is he there? Watching us? Seeing our reaction? I shut the front door, pull the chain across with fingers that shake so much I drop it twice. Buying myself time.

  Mark picks up the phone.

  “Please don’t.”

  I should never have gone to the police station when the anniversary card arrived; it only made things worse.

  “Why on earth not? Anna, someone just tried to set fire to the house!”

  Because my mum will go to prison. Because I’ll be arrested for hiding her.

  “First a brick through the window, now this . . .” His fingers hover over the keys. He stares at me, reading my expression, then looks between me and my mother. “There’s something I don’t know, isn’t there?”

  My dad isn’t dead. He sent the anniversary card because he knew my mum wasn’t either, but when he realized I’d gone to the police, he tried to stop me. He put a dead rabbit on our doorstep. He threw a brick through our daughter’s bedroom window. He’s unstable, and he’s dangerous, and he’s watching the house.

  “Yes . . .” I look at Mum. I have to tell him. I never wanted to drag him into this mess, but I can’t lie to him anymore—it isn’t fair. I do my best to convey this to Mum, who steps forward, one hand in front of her, as though she can physically stop the words leaving my mouth.

  “I haven’t been honest with you about why I’m in Eastbourne.” She speaks quickly, before I’ve even managed to formulate the explanation Mark is long overdue. She holds my gaze. Please.

  It’s all too much. Helping Mum pack; preparing to lose her for the second time; Murray Mackenzie stopping just short of accusing me of conspiracy.

  Now this.

  It feels as though my nerve endings are outside my body, each revelation a series of electric shocks.

  “Then you better explain. Now.” Mark moves the phone from one hand to the other and back again, a call to the police just seconds away. The coldness in his eyes makes me shiver, even though I know it is only worry putting it there. I take Ella from Mum, for the reassurance of her weight in my arms, the feeling of a warm body against mine.

  Mum glances at me. She shakes her head almost imperceptibly. Don’t.

  I keep quiet.

  “I’m running away,” she says. “My marriage broke down last year, and I’ve been hiding from my husband ever since.”

  I keep my eyes trained on Mark. There’s no sign that he doesn’t believe Mum, and why wouldn’t he? It’s the truth.

  “Just before Christmas he found out where I was living. I didn’t know where to go. I thought if I laid low for a bit . . .”

  “You should have told us, Angela.” The words are admonishing, but Mark’s tone is soft. Many of his patients have come from—or are still in—abusive relationships. Perhaps some are abusers themselves; I’ve never asked, and Mark would never say. “If there was a chance he could follow you here—that you might put us at risk
, too—you should have told us.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “I suppose it was him who put the brick through the window?”

  “I bought a train ticket online. He must have looked at my e-mails; it’s the only way he would have known where I was headed. Caroline’s was the only Eastbourne address in my contacts.”

  Mark looks at the phone in his hand, then back at the door, where the letters show back to front. “We need to tell the police.”

  “No!” Mum and I, together.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know what he’s like. Who you’re dealing with.”

  Mark looks at me. “Have you met him?”

  I nod. “He . . . he’s dangerous. If we report him to the police we can’t stay here, not when he knows we’re here. He could do anything.” I’m still shaking. I rock Ella from side to side, more to expel some of the adrenaline coursing through my veins than to soothe her. Mark paces the hall, tapping the phone against his thigh as he walks.

  “I’ll go.” Mum has her bag in her hand. “It’s me he wants. I should never have come here—it’s not fair to involve you.” She takes a step toward the door and I grab her arm.

  “You can’t go!”

  “I was leaving anyway. You knew that.” She takes my hand off her arm and gives it a gentle squeeze.

  “It’s different now. He knows where you are. He’ll hurt you.”

  “And if I stay, he’ll hurt you.”

  It’s Mark who breaks the ensuing silence. “You both need to go.” He’s decisive, rummaging in the dresser drawer for a set of keys he hands to me. “Go to my flat. I’ll wait here and call the police.”

  “What flat? No, I can’t involve you both in this. I need to go.” Mum tries to open the door, but Mark’s quicker than her. He puts one hand flat against the door.