Let Me Lie

  I took them on holiday. We spent three nights in a B and B in Derbyshire, sharing a double bed, with Laura in between.

  “We should get a place together,” Alicia said on the last day. “We’d have the best time.”

  How could I tell her that wasn’t what I wanted from my life? That I’d been careful not to fall pregnant; that I loved my single life and my friends and my job? How could I tell her that I didn’t want to live in a damp flat, and that—however much I liked spending time with her and Laura—I didn’t want to live with someone else’s baby?

  “The best,” I agreed, and then I changed the subject.

  I should have helped more.

  * * *

  • • •

  Anna kneels on the carpet and pulls open the bottom drawer of the desk. It comes out with more force than she expects and she falls back, the drawer on her lap. I see Laura look up to check she’s okay; watch Anna laugh at her own clumsiness. Laura goes back to the pile of my datebooks, and Anna lifts the drawer to slot it back into the desk, but something stops her. She’s seen something.

  Anna sets the drawer to one side and reaches a hand into the base of the pedestal. I see her glance at Laura to check she isn’t watching, and as Anna’s eyes widen I know, as clearly as if I could see it, that her hand has closed around the smooth glass of a vodka bottle.

  There’s disappointment on her face.

  I know that feeling, too.

  She pulls out her hand, empty. Pushes the drawer back into the desk and leaves the bottle in its hiding place. She says nothing to Laura, and the feeling of exclusion disappears, thanks to this small complicity Anna isn’t even aware of. Some secrets shouldn’t be shared outside the family.

  Others shouldn’t be shared at all.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  ANNA

  I catch Laura looking at her watch. She’s working her way through a stack of papers, heaping half of them onto a pile for the shredder. It’s making me itch. Anything relating to the business should be in the showroom, but what if she accidentally destroys something important? I’m a director of the business—albeit a somewhat passive one. I can’t just throw paperwork away without checking what it’s for.

  The weight of my gaze makes Laura look up. “All right?”

  “You should get off. Mark’ll be back soon.”

  “I promised I’d stay till he got back.” She puts another sheaf of papers on the shredding pile.

  “Blame me.” I haul myself to my feet and hold out a hand to help Laura up.

  “We haven’t finished sorting this lot.”

  “We’ve done loads. It’s practically finished.” It’s a gross exaggeration. Laura’s piles of “things to keep” and “things to throw” have merged, and I’m no longer sure whether I’m keeping a giant ball of rubber bands because I’m sentimental, or because they’re useful, or because they’ve slid from one pile to the other.

  “It’s a mess!”

  “That’s easily solved.” I pick up Ella, usher Laura out of the room, and shut the study door. “Ta-da!”

  “Anna! I thought we agreed that wasn’t the way to deal with things?”

  You agreed, I think, then immediately feel I’m being unfair. It was my idea to sort through my parents’ study. I who asked Laura to help. “I’m not ignoring it because it’s upsetting, though. I’m ignoring it because I don’t want to tidy anymore. Completely different.”

  Laura narrows her eyes at me, unconvinced by my breezy tone. “What are you going to do about the card?”

  “You’re probably right. Some sick joker with an ax to grind.”

  “Right.” She’s still not sure if she should leave me.

  “I’m fine. I promise. I’ll call you tomorrow.” I find her coat and wait patiently while she looks for her keys.

  “If you’re sure . . .”

  “I am.” We hug, and as she walks to her car I stand at the door, one hand on Rita’s collar to stop her running after phantom squirrels.

  Laura’s car gives a splutter, then cuts out. She grimaces. Tries again, revving hard to keep it from cutting out, and backs out of the driveway, waving from the open window.

  When I can no longer hear the sound of her car, I return to the study. I survey the piles of papers, the birthday cards, the pens and paper clips and Post-it notes. There are no answers here, only memories.

  Memories I want to keep.

  I take the lid off a box of photographs and sift through them. On top are six or seven photos of Mum and Laura’s mum, Alicia. In one they’re in a sunny pub garden, in another a café, having a cream tea. Another photo has been taken from an angle, as though the camera was propped up and slipping to one side. Mum and Alicia lie on their stomachs on a bed, Laura between them. She’s perhaps two years old, which makes Mum and Alicia no more than eighteen. Just kids themselves.

  There are dozens more photos in the box, but all—as far as I can tell—of Dad, the showroom, me as a baby.

  I have lots of photos of Dad, but hardly any of Mum. Always behind the lens, never in front of it—like so many women once they have a family. They’re so intent on documenting their children’s lives before they grow too old, it doesn’t occur to them to document their own. That one day, their children will want to pore over photos of a time they were too young to remember.

  In the short time between Mum going missing and her suicide being established, I gave the police the only clear photo I had of her, which lived in a silver frame on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. They circulated it immediately, and when news of her death broke, the papers used the same photo to accompany the story. The police gave me back the framed picture, but every time I looked at it, I saw the headlines. Eventually I had to put it away.

  Apart from their wedding photo, where she’s hardly visible beneath the floppy hat that was all the rage at the time, there are no photos of Mum on display. I put the ones of Mum and Alicia to one side so I can have a couple framed.

  I open Mum’s 2016 appointment book. It’s a fat A4 book, with each day over two pages: appointments on the left and space for notes on the opposite side. It’s nothing fancy—a corporate gift from a car manufacturer—but I run my fingers over the gilt-embossed logo and feel the weight of the pages as it falls open in my hands. The datebook is filled with Mum’s writing, and the words are illegible until I blink hard to stop them swimming. Every day is full. Meetings with suppliers. Repair visits booked for the photocopier, the coffee machine, the water cooler. On the right-hand side, that day’s to-do list, with items neatly scored through when complete. If you want something done, ask a busy person—wasn’t that what they said? Mum couldn’t have fitted more into her life if she’d tried, yet I never heard her complain she had too much on her plate. When her own mother—a crotchety woman who rationed her affection like wartime sugar—was admitted to a hospice, Mum drove each day from Eastbourne to Essex, returning only once Granny was sleeping. It was only afterward Dad and I found out about the lump Mum had found in her own breast; the anxious wait she’d had for the all clear.

  “I didn’t want to worry you,” was all she’d say.

  * * *

  • • •

  The mix of work and home in the datebook blindsides me. Adele tickets for A’s birthday? is sandwiched between a reminder to call a Katie Clements back about a test-drive, and the phone number for the local radio station. I press the heels of my palms into my eyes. I wish I’d looked through Mum and Dad’s things earlier; I wish I’d known on my birthday what she’d thought of as a present.

  I can’t help myself—I turn to 21 December and look at the day she died. There are two appointments and a list of tasks left incomplete. Tucked into the back of the datebook are a handful of business cards, leaflets, and scribbled notes. The datebook is a cross section of Mum’s life, as illuminating as an autobiography and as pe
rsonal as a journal. I slip the photos inside and hug the book to my chest for a moment, and then I start to put everything back where it came from.

  I replace the desk organizer, and with it the paperweight I made from clay and painted when I was in primary school. It used to live on the dresser in the kitchen, holding down the myriad classroom letters.

  I run my finger over the superglued crack that divides it neatly in two, and I have a sudden, sharp memory of the sound it made when it hit the wall.

  There were apologies.

  Tears. Mine. Mum’s.

  “Good as new,” Dad said, once the glue had dried. But it wasn’t, and neither was the patch of wall where he filled the dent and painted over it in a shade that didn’t quite match what had gone before. I wouldn’t talk to him for days.

  I pull out the bottom drawer of the desk and retrieve the bottle of vodka. It’s empty. Most of them are. They’re everywhere. At the back of the wardrobe; in the toilet tank; wrapped in a towel in the depths of the airing cupboard. I find them, I pour away the contents, and I push the glass to the bottom of the recycling bin.

  If there were bottles before I went to university, they were better hidden. Or I didn’t notice them. I returned home to a life that had altered in my absence. Were my parents drinking more, or had I been swayed by a world beyond the narrow scope of my childhood? After I found the first bottle, there seemed to be hundreds—like learning a word and then seeing it everywhere.

  An involuntary shiver tickles my spine. Someone walking over your grave, Mum used to say. It’s dark outside. I catch a glimpse of something moving in the garden. My heart thumps, but when I look properly, it’s my own pale face staring back at me, distorted by the old glass.

  A noise outside makes me jump. Pull yourself together, Anna.

  It’s this room. It’s full of memories, not all of them good. It’s making me jumpy. I’m imagining things. A ghostly figure in the window, footsteps outside.

  But wait: I do hear footsteps . . .

  Slow and deliberate, as though the owner was trying not to be heard. A soft crunch of gravel underfoot.

  There’s someone outside.

  There are no lights on upstairs, and none down here, save for the desk light in the study. From the outside the house will be in near darkness.

  Could it be a burglar? This street is filled with high-value properties, crammed with antiques and paintings bought as much for investment as for show. As the business grew, my parents spent their money on beautiful things, many of which could be easily seen through the downstairs windows. Perhaps someone came by earlier, when Ella and I were at the police station, and decided to return under cover of darkness. Maybe—a hard knot of fear forms in my throat—maybe they’ve been observing for a while. All day I’ve been unable to lose the feeling I’m being watched, and now I wonder if my instincts have been correct.

  As a child, I knew the code for the burglar alarm long before I could memorize our telephone number, but it hasn’t been set since Mark moved in. He wasn’t used to living in a house with an alarm. He’d set it off every time he came home, cursing in frustration as he fumbled with the keypad.

  “Rita’s enough of a deterrent, surely?” he said, after telling the alarm company that, yes, it was another false alarm. I’d fallen out of the habit of setting it myself, and now that I was home all day with Ella, we had stopped using it entirely.

  I consider setting it now, but I know I won’t be able to fathom how to zone it in the dark, and the thought of being there, by the front door, as a burglar tries to get in, brings goose bumps to my arms.

  I should take Ella upstairs. I can pull the chest of drawers in her room across the door. They can take what they want from down here—it doesn’t matter. I assess the sitting room with an objective eye, wondering what they’re after. The television, I suppose, and the obvious things, like the silver punch bowl that once belonged to my great-grandmother and now holds African violets. On the mantelpiece are two porcelain birds I bought for my parents on their anniversary. They aren’t valuable, but they look as though they could be. Should I take them with me? If I take the birds, what else should I take? So many memories in this house; so much I would grieve over. Impossible to take it all.

  It’s hard to work out exactly where the footsteps are. The quiet crunch of gravel gets louder, as though the prowler walked first to one side of the house and is now returning to the other. I take up my mobile, lying next to the baby monitor. Should I call the police? A neighbor?

  I scroll through the numbers on my mobile phone until I find Robert Drake’s number. I hesitate, not wanting to call him but knowing it makes sense to do so. He’s a surgeon; he’ll be good in an emergency, and if he’s still at home next door he can come out and take a look, or just turn on the outside lights and scare off whoever’s out there . . .

  His phone is switched off.

  The crunch of footsteps on gravel gets louder, competing with the rush of blood singing in my ears. I hear a dragging noise. A ladder?

  To the side of the house, between the graveled front drive and the landscaped back garden, is a narrow strip of land with a shed and a log store. I hear a dull bang that could be the shed door. My heart accelerates. I think of the anonymous card, of my haste to take it to the police. Did I do the wrong thing? Was the card meant as a warning—that whatever happened to Mum could happen to me, too?

  Maybe it isn’t burglars outside.

  Maybe whoever killed my mother wants me dead, too.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  MURRAY

  Tom Johnson had been missing for fifteen hours when his wife, Caroline Johnson—at forty-eight, ten years Tom’s junior—called the police. She hadn’t seen Tom since they’d had what she called a “stupid spat” as they’d left work the previous day.

  “He said he was going to the pub,” her statement read. “When he didn’t come home I thought he’d gone to his brother’s to sleep it off.” Their daughter, Anna, who lived at home with them, had been away at a conference in London with the children’s charity for which she had worked since leaving university.

  Tom Johnson hadn’t turned up for work the next day.

  Murray found the statement from Billy Johnson, Tom’s brother and business partner, who had been unconcerned by Tom’s absence.

  “I assumed he had a hangover. He’s a partner. What was I supposed to do? Give him a final warning?” Even in the dry black and white of a witness statement, Billy Johnson came across as defensive. It was a natural reaction for many people; a way of defusing the guilt they felt at not seeming to have cared enough when it mattered.

  The MISPER report had been completed by Uniform and graded as low risk. Murray looked at the officer’s name but didn’t recognize it. None of the information at that stage had suggested that Tom Johnson had been vulnerable, but that wouldn’t have stopped questions being asked when his suicide was reported; it wouldn’t have stopped that officer questioning their own judgment. Would grading Tom as high risk have changed anything? It was impossible to know. Nothing about Tom Johnson’s disappearance had given rise to concern. He was a successful businessman, well-known across the town. A family man with no history of depression.

  The first text message had come at nine thirty A.M.

  I’m sorry.

  Ironically, Caroline Johnson had been relieved.

  “I thought he was apologizing for the row we’d had,” she said in her statement. “He shouted at me—said a few things that had upset me. He had a temper, but he always said sorry afterward. When the text came, I thought at least he’s okay.”

  He had a temper.

  Murray underlined the words. How much of a temper had Tom Johnson had? Could he have argued with someone at the pub that night? Got into a fight? Inquiries at Tom’s usual haunts had drawn a blank. Wherever he’d gone to drown his sorrows the night befor
e he died, it hadn’t been his local.

  A request by the attending officer to trace Tom’s phone had been refused, as at that stage there had been no evidence of a threat to life. Murray winced on behalf of the senior officer who’d made that call. It was a decision that had swiftly been reversed when Caroline had received a second text from her husband.

  “I think he’s going to kill himself . . .”

  Murray listened to the recording of Caroline Johnson’s 999 call. He closed his eyes, feeling her distress pulse through him as though it were his own. He heard her read out the message she had received from her husband; noted the calm response from the operator as she asked Caroline what was her husband’s number and could she please keep that text message?

  I can’t do this anymore. The world will be a better place without me in it.

  He couldn’t do what?

  It was the sort of heat-of-the-moment comment anyone might make. It could mean nothing, or it could mean everything.

  I can’t do this anymore.

  Stay married? Have an affair? Lie?

  What had Tom Johnson been doing that had led to such an outpouring of guilt?

  There had been no further texts. Tom Johnson’s mobile had rung out. Triangulation placed it near Beachy Head. ANPR cameras pinpointed the car he’d taken from work heading toward the same location and officers were dispatched. Even though Murray knew the outcome of the job, he felt a pounding in his chest as he read through the pages of the log, imagining how it would have felt for the police officers involved in the race to save a life.

  A call from a member of the public—Diane Brent-Taylor—reported seeing a man put rocks into a rucksack. It had struck her as an odd activity for a man in a suit, and she stood and watched as he made his way to the edge of the cliff. Horrified, she saw him remove his wallet and phone from his pocket before taking a step forward and disappearing. Murray read the transcript of the call.