Let Me Lie

  Briefly, Murray pictured Sarah sitting in the audience. She’d be wearing one of her brightly colored, voluminous linen dresses, a scarf draped around her neck or tied around her head. She’d be grinning fit to burst, looking around the room, wanting to catch someone’s eye, to share her pride with them.

  His eyes were stinging. He turned the commendation around and held it away from him so he could look at it, blinked hard until there was no more risk of his eyes watering. He had been picturing Sarah on a good day, he reminded himself. There was every chance that Sarah might not have been in the room at all; that she’d have been at Highfield, or at home under the duvet, unable to face accompanying Murray today. To his final work commitment.

  C6821 Murray Mackenzie is commended for the dedication, tenacity, and investigative skills that ensured the detection of the murder of Tom Johnson, and the identification of both suspects. His contribution is an exceptional example of supporting force values.

  The identification of both suspects. It had been carefully worded. Murray felt a twinge of regret that they’d been unable to bring Caroline Johnson to justice. She had jumped from the balcony of Mark Hemmings’s seventh-floor flat, landing in front of a crowd of onlookers who would forever be haunted by the sight of her body hitting the ground, taking with her any secrets that hadn’t already been shared with her daughter.

  Laura Barnes was on remand pending trial. She had made no comment during interview, but the body cams worn by the arresting officers had recorded a series of admissions made by her in the heat of the moment. The recordings, together with the case DS James Kennedy and his team had built against her, meant Murray was confident of a guilty plea. Laura had covered her tracks well, but ANPR showed her car in Brighton at the time of the Fones4All purchase. A voice recognition specialist had confirmed that the call to control room from “Diane Brent-Taylor” matched Laura’s voice, and the specialist would appear in court as an expert witness to that effect.

  Not that Murray would be around to see it.

  The applause had died away. Murray gave a nod of appreciation to the audience, then stepped off the low stage. As he made his way back to his seat, to listen to the chief make her closing address, he saw Sean Dowling sitting with their old DS—now a colleague of Sean’s at the High Tech Crime Unit. As one, the two men stood up. They began clapping again, slowly this time. The rest of their table joined them. And as Murray walked down the center of the room, there was a scraping of chairs and a swell of movement as, one by one, the friends and colleagues he had worked with over the years gave him a standing ovation. The drumbeat of clapping sped up, faster than his footsteps but not as fast as his heart, which was bursting with gratitude for the people in this room.

  His police family.

  By the time Murray reached his seat, he was blushing hard. There was a final cheer, and then more shuffling of seats as the chief wrapped up. It was a relief to have all eyes looking somewhere other than at him, and he took the opportunity to read his commendation again. It was the third he had received in his police career, but his first as a civilian. His first and last.

  “Well done, mate.”

  “Nice one.”

  “Beer sometime?”

  Dismissed from the formal part of the evening, Murray’s former colleagues were heading for the buffet table at the back of the room, clapping him on the back as they passed. It was rare to see food at an internal function; police nature to make the most of it when it happened. Nish pushed through and put her arms around him, whispering so only he could hear.

  “She would have been so proud.”

  Murray nodded fiercely, not trusting himself to speak. Nish’s eyes were shining.

  “If I could cut in for a moment . . .” Leo Griffiths, in uniform and holding a Diet Coke. A fleck of sausage roll pastry on his tie suggested he’d been first in line for the buffet.

  Murray shook the hand Leo proffered.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “This is quite some do.” Leo looked around the room. “The last commendation ceremony I attended served warm orange juice and a strict limit of one biscuit each.”

  “It’s a joint do. Part commendation, part retirement. Economies of scale,” Murray added solemnly, using one of the superintendent’s favorite buzz terms. Nish suppressed a laugh.

  “Quite. Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Economies of scale?”

  “Retirement. I wondered if you’d seen the advert for civilian investigators on the Cold Case Review Team?”

  Murray had. In fact, no fewer than seven people had pointed it out to him, including the chief constable.

  “Right up your street, I’d have thought,” she’d said. “A chance to put those investigative talents of yours to good use, and skill up some of the less experienced members of the team. Officially, this time,” she’d added, with a pointed look. The positive outcome of the Johnson job had meant that Murray’s breaches of protocol had been glossed over, but he had been left in no doubt that—had he wished to stay in post—they must never, ever happen again.

  Murray didn’t wish to stay in post. He didn’t want to stay in the force at all.

  “Thanks, Leo, but I’ve handed in my ticket. I’m going to enjoy my retirement. Do a spot of traveling.” Murray pictured the shiny new motor home on which he had paid a deposit and which he would be picking up the following week. It had swallowed a large chunk of his pension but was worth every penny. Inside there was a kitchen, a tiny bathroom, a double bed, and a comfortable living area with a foldaway table, plus a huge steering wheel that made Murray feel like he was driving a truck.

  He couldn’t wait. His police family had been good to him, but it was time to cut the apron strings.

  “Fair enough. You can’t blame us for trying to keep you, though, can you? Where are you off to?”

  In the weeks since Murray had shared his plans for retirement, several people had asked him this question. Murray’s answer hadn’t changed. For years he had lived his life by someone else’s clock. Sarah’s spells at Highfield. Her good days; her bad ones. Early shifts, lates, nights. Overtime, weekend working. Briefings here, briefings there. In Murray’s retirement plans, there were no clocks. No calendars. No plans.

  “Wherever I feel like going.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-TWO

  ANNA

  The smell of freshly mown grass fills the air. It’s still cold, but the promise of good weather is just around the corner. I’ve swapped Ella’s pram for a stroller, and she babbles happily as I strap her in. I call Rita and put on her lead.

  “I’m going to get out of your way. I’ll be on my mobile if you need me.”

  “No worries, love. Anything in the kitchen you want us to leave out?”

  Oak View is a hive of activity. There are five moving men, each in a different room, and there’s a mountain of boxes already packed.

  “Just the kettle, please.” In my car is a box of essentials—tea, loo roll, a few plates and mugs—to save unpacking when we get to the new house.

  I chat to Ella as we walk, pointing out a cat, a dog, a balloon caught in a tree. We pass the forecourt of Johnson’s Cars, but pause only to catch Billy’s eye. He waves and I lean forward to take Ella’s hand to wave back. He’s busy speaking to a new rep, and I don’t want to disturb him.

  The forecourt looks good. The Boxster sold with the first hint of spring. It’s been replaced by two other sports cars, their tops optimistically down and their hoods gleaming. Uncle Billy finally let me bail out the business, so I put in a cash injection that will keep the wolf from the door for a while, at least. Mark thought I was mad.

  “It’s a business, not a charity,” he said.

  Only it isn’t just a business. It’s my past. Our present. Ella’s future. Granddad Johnson took ove
r from his father, and Billy and Dad took over from him. Now it’s down to me and Billy to keep things afloat till business picks up. Who knows if Ella will want to continue the tradition—that’s up to her—but Johnson’s Cars isn’t going under on my watch.

  We walk along the seafront. I look at the pier and think about walking here with my parents, and instead of the anger that has filled the last three months, I simply feel overwhelmingly sad. I wonder if that’s progress and make a mental note to mention it in my next counseling session. I’m “seeing someone” again. Not someone from Mark’s practice—that would have felt too weird—but a thoughtful, gentle woman in Bexhill who listens more than she talks and leaves me feeling a little stronger each time we meet.

  Down a side street, leading away from the seafront, is a row of small terraced houses. The stroller bumps on the uneven sidewalk, and Ella’s babbling increases. She’s making noises that sound almost like speech now, and I remind myself to write down each milestone, before I forget it.

  We stop at number five, and I ring the bell. I have a key, just in case, but I’d never use it. I’m already bending down to take Ella from the buggy when Mark opens the door.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Organized chaos. I know we’re early, but we were getting under their feet, so . . .” I give Ella a kiss, holding on to her for as long as I can, before handing her to Mark. I’m still not used to it, but every time feels a little easier. There’s nothing official, no every-other-weekend-and-a-day-in-the-week arrangement. Just the two of us, still parenting jointly, despite our separate lives.

  “It’s no problem. Do you want to hang out here for a bit?”

  “I’d better get back.”

  “I’ll drop her off at the new place tomorrow.”

  “You can have the grand tour!”

  We lock eyes for a second, acknowledging everything that’s happened, how new and strange this feels; then I kiss Ella again, and leave her with her dad.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was easy, in the end.

  “Will you marry me?”

  I didn’t speak. He waited, expectantly. Hopefully.

  I imagined standing at the altar with him, Ella a toddling flower girl. I imagined turning and looking at the congregation, and I felt fresh loss at the absence of my father. Billy would give me away, I supposed. Not my dad, but the nearest thing I had to one. I was lucky to have him.

  There would be friends, neighbors filling up the pews.

  No Laura.

  I felt no grief about that. Her trial date had been set, and although the thought of testifying against her was already giving me nightmares, Victim Support had talked me through the process. I’d be alone on the stand, but I knew there was a team of people behind me. She’d be convicted—I was sure of it.

  She’d written a couple of times, begging forgiveness. Remand prisoners were forbidden from making contact with trial witnesses, and the letters had come via a mutual acquaintance, too blinded by friendship to believe Laura had truly done the things of which she’d been accused.

  The letters were long. Effusive. They played on our shared history, on the fact that we had only each other. That we’d both lost our mothers. I kept them as insurance, not out of sentiment, although I knew I’d never show them to the police. Laura was taking a risk, writing to me, but it was a small one. She knew me too well.

  I felt no grief, either, that my mother wouldn’t be at my wedding. Thinking of her forms a hard ball of hatred in my heart that no amount of counseling will lessen. But it isn’t Dad’s murder I hate her for—although that is where it starts. It isn’t even for the lies she told in faking her death, in abandoning me in my grief. It’s for the ones she told afterward; the story she spun from the half-truths of her marriage to my father. It’s for making me believe that he was the alcoholic; that it was he who hit her, not the other way around. It’s for making me trust her again.

  “Well?” Mark had prompted. “Will you?”

  I realized the “no” on the tip of my tongue had nothing to do with who would or wouldn’t be at our wedding.

  “If we hadn’t had Ella,” I said, “do you think we’d still be together?”

  He paused—a fraction too long. “Of course we would.” I held his gaze and for a moment we stayed that way. He broke away, gave a tiny smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Maybe.”

  I reached for his hand. “I don’t think maybe’s enough.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Oak View sold quickly, to a family with three children who accepted the house’s history in exchange for a price far below market value, and who will, I hope, fill the rooms with laughter and noise. Mark’s Putney flat is on the market, and for now he’s staying in Eastbourne, so we can continue to bring up Ella together.

  I cried when the Sold sign went up, but only for a moment. I had no desire to stay on Cleveland Avenue, where the neighbors looked at me with morbid fascination, and tourists went out of their way to walk past the house and gawp at a garden they couldn’t even see.

  Laura and Mum had disposed of the broken glass in the septic tank, along with Dad’s body. Mum’s prints were on the neck of the wine bottle, Laura’s on the pieces of glass she’d so carefully picked up and thrown in the tank.

  The tank is long gone. Robert’s extension is under way, his thirty-grand sweetener a carrot dangled before the new owners in exchange for the inconvenience. They don’t plan to replace Mum’s rose beds, though; a soccer goal and climbing frame are on their shopping list instead.

  I walk back toward Oak View, my hands feeling empty without a buggy to push. Rita strains at the lead as a black-and-white cat crosses my path, and I just manage to stop myself from pointing it out to an absent Ella. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to her not being with me all the time.

  The house I’ve bought is as different from my family home as it is possible to get. A neat modern box, with three bedrooms and an open-plan ground floor, where, as Ella starts to crawl, I can keep an eye on her from the kitchen.

  Back at Oak View, they’re loading the truck. They’ll leave my bed, and Ella’s crib, and tonight we’ll sleep in a near-empty house, ready for the big move tomorrow. It’s only a mile down the road, but it feels so much farther.

  “Nearly done, love.” The moving man is sweating with the effort of heaving furniture into the van. I’ve left the heavy wardrobes, the long kitchen table, and the big hall dresser for the new family, who were delighted to be saved the expense. The furniture is too big for my new house, and too tied up in memories I no longer want. The moving man wipes his brow with the back of his hand. “Post came. I popped it on the side for you.”

  It’s on the dresser. Hand-delivered by Laura’s friend, again. I wonder if she’ll still be so supportive after the trial, once all the evidence has been laid out for the world to see. The charges stack up. Concealing a crime; hiding Dad’s body; threatening me and Ella.

  The envelope prompts unwanted images. Laura with a gun in her hand. My mother, edging closer to the edge of the balcony. I shake myself. It’s over. It’s all over.

  I pull out the letter. A single sheet. None of the effusive apologies of her previous letters. My failure to respond—to withdraw my support for the prosecution—has clearly hit home.

  I unfold the paper, and suddenly there’s a buzzing in my ears. Blood singing; my pulse racing.

  A single line, in the center of the page.

  Suicide?

  The letter shakes in my hand. Heat envelops me and I think I might pass out. I walk through the kitchen—among the boxes and the moving men hustling like worker bees back and forth from house to van—and open the back door.

  Suicide?

  I walk into the garden. Make myself take deep, slow breaths until I’m no longer dizzy; only the buzzing won’t leave my ears, and my ch
est feels tight with fear.

  Because this time I don’t need to look elsewhere for the answer.

  It wasn’t suicide this time, either.

  My mother didn’t jump.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like many people around the world, I was gripped by the apparently miraculous reappearance in 2007 of John Darwin, who, five years previous, had been declared dead after what was believed to have been a canoeing accident in northeast England. His wife, Anne, later confessed that John had continued living with her in the family home, before the couple embarked on a new life in Panama.

  I was fascinated by the story, and by the sheer audacity of John Darwin, who had adopted a disguise in order to move undetected around his hometown, and who had frequently eavesdropped on his two grown-up sons as they visited their supposedly distraught mother. I wondered how it must feel to discover your parents had deliberately caused you the pain of bereavement, and how you would begin to rebuild a relationship with them. I found it hard to understand how any parent could treat their children in such a callous manner.

  As I wrote Let Me Lie, I found the following publications particularly valuable for the detail behind the Darwins’ extraordinary story: Up the Creek Without a Paddle (Tammy Cohen) and Out of My Depth (Anne Darwin); however, the events and characters in Let Me Lie are fictional, products of my imagination, and not based on any stories I have read or heard about.

  In researching suicides at Beachy Head, I was very moved by Life on the Edge (Keith Lane)—the autobiography of a man whose wife jumped to her death from the Sussex cliffs. Keith Lane dedicated the next four years of his life to patrolling the cliffs, preventing twenty-nine people from taking their own lives.

  The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team provides more than one hundred hours of patrol on Beachy Head each week. They support the police and coast guard services in search-and-rescue endeavors, and they specialize in suicide and crisis intervention; they have saved around two thousand people since their inception in 2004. The team relies entirely on public support, so please do follow them on Facebook at @BeachyHeadChaplaincyTeam and support their work if you can.