The Liars

by Naomi Joy

  First we saw her feet. They were sprawled out under the cubicle door, each one of her motionless sunshine-Shellaced toenails visible. I hurried towards her and tentatively pushed the door to the toilet open, its progress halted by Olivia’s body on the other side. Through the gap, I could see Olivia’s face smeared across the wall, legs apart, a flash of lace visible, powder on her top lip, the contents of her handbag dribbled on top of the black tiles.

  ‘Take her arm,’ I instructed Ava under my breath and we shuffled and squeezed into the cramped space together. A picture of a goddess with a finger to her lips hung on the toilet wall behind us. Under her gaze we counted to three. One, two…

  In that moment I thought it was true what they said about moving dead bodies, even Olivia, who couldn’t have been a pound above eight stone, weighed a tonne to manoeuvre and I broke a sweat just dragging her reluctant body from the floor and coercing her left arm over my shoulder. I felt Olivia’s heart thundering rapidly against my side as we carried her out into the night.

  ‘Don’t you – get – let cook know,’ she slurred nonsensically.

  ‘You’re not holding her high enough,’ Ava puffed, out of breath, as we carried Olivia in through the front door. Ava had her legs and I held Olivia under her shoulders, but she was slipping down and out of our grip and now her peroxide blonde curls scraped along the floor. It was all wrong.

  The taxi driver hadn’t batted an eye as we’d carried her out of the car, thankful that he’d managed to get a paralytic passenger home without redecorating his back seats with vomit, probably, but I hoped no one was observing this charade as we hauled Olivia’s body in over the threshold. This didn’t look quite so innocent. I lost my grip, my fingers unable to hold her weight any longer and Olivia’s upper body dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the marbled floor underfoot. A high-pitched crack followed as her skull made contact with the unforgiving surface.

  ‘Oh God,’ slurred Ava as blood started to drain from the back of Olivia’s head.

  I took a deep breath in, waterfalls of red running across the floor towards my high-heeled boots.

  ‘Step back,’ Ava said. Then she bent down next to Olivia and felt her pulse. ‘It’s rapid but it’s there,’ she said.

  She had a pulse. That was good. I didn’t need to hold my hand to Olivia’s mouth to see that she was breathing. Her chest was moving up and down, urgent and shallow, but moving. That was good, too.

  ‘Olivia?’ Ava asked her. ‘Is your head OK?’

  Olivia’s eyes rolled and she arched her back. ‘Don’t tell him, please,’ she said again.

  ‘Do you think she needs an ambulance?’ I asked after Ava had finished her rudimentary assessments, my face flushed with worry.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know,’ Ava replied. ‘But she’s breathing, and talking, and she has a pulse, maybe we should just monitor her for a few hours…’

  ‘What about her head?’ I asked, feeling guilty for making things worse.

  ‘It was just a knock. She didn’t black out or anything. She’ll be OK.’

  ‘Do you think David would fire us for letting her get like this? What if he blames us? What if he thinks we did the drugs with her? What about Josh? Wouldn’t he be mad, too? He’s dead against Olivia taking this stuff.’

  As I said the words, I knew these thoughts had more than crossed Ava’s mind. She knew this could get us fired. If not fired then at least disciplined, a black mark against our names for as long as we worked in the industry. David and Josh knew about Olivia’s habit but both abhorred it. Josh had been clean for years and, though neither Ava nor me knew David well, he was notorious for being fierce. How could we let something as stupid as this tarnish our reputations with him? Something that wasn’t even our fault.

  Ava nodded at me, then looked at Olivia and stroked her hair. Ava told Olivia everything was going to be fine.

  ‘Shall we take her to bed?’ Ava asked.

  I looked towards the staircase. ‘No chance.’ Navigating thirty odd steps was out of the question, so we settled for lying her on the sofa in the living room instead. Then we sat in near silence watching Olivia fade in and out of sleep, listening quietly as Olivia’s breathing stuttered and struggled.

  I spoke again. ‘What do we do now? I don’t fancy staying the night here, do you?’

  Ava looked torn. ‘Charlie will flip if I don’t get home.’

  ‘She’s going to be OK,’ I said, trying to convince myself.

  ‘David can’t know about this.’

  ‘Let’s text him, from her phone. Say something like, Dad I’m sorry, I took too much of something tonight…’

  ‘That way it’s not on us.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘At least we’ll have told someone.’

  ‘Should we tell Josh?’

  We took her phone and sent the message, then laid her phone on the arm of the sofa so she could call for help if she needed it. Then we left her in that cold room, barely conscious, and hurried home. We abandoned her when she needed us the most. We let her die to save ourselves.

  The next morning our worst fear came true: Olivia didn’t turn up at the office and Ava and I had to plan a way out of what we’d done. We whispered in the ladies’ toilets in the early morning. Neither of us had been able to sleep and my eyes were underlined with bright blue bags.

  I started. ‘We’ll give her until half nine. If she doesn’t turn up, you go to David and say you were meant to be meeting her.’

  ‘And what do we say if she’s…’ Ava could hardly bring herself to say it. ‘We have to tell the police exactly the same story.’

  ‘We went out with Olivia, we got drunk, Liv had too much so we took her home – that way the taxi driver can’t incriminate us – and, as soon as we’d got her inside, we left to go home. It’s basically the truth.’

  ‘We can’t say that, David will flip that we left her.’

  ‘OK, so we say we all got in the taxi and dropped her off on our way home.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What do we say about Charlie?’ I asked.

  ‘We have to leave him out of it. David will blame me by proxy if he knows it was Charlie’s drugs that killed Olivia.’

  ‘Fine. So we’re agreed. And, you know, it’s basically the truth.’

  Ava nodded. It was. Apart from the fact that we could have helped Olivia sooner and actively chose not to. Apart from that, sure, it was the God’s honest truth.

  I took Ava’s hands in mine. ‘Promise me that no matter what happens this secret stays our secret. No matter what.’

  ‘I promise.’

  54

  Ava

  It was pitch black.

  The room I was in seemed strangely familiar, as though I’d dreamt about it before, but I couldn’t tell if that was the effect of whatever drugs I’d been given or an actual, tangible, memory.

  I tried to sleep but my flashbacks were growing more and more powerful, pervading my thoughts and turning them into terrible nightmares, forcing me to live the horror all over again every time I closed my eyes.

  My waking mind wasn’t much better, determined to replay what had happened after I’d left Josh, trying to come up with a solution. How would I have escaped? What would I have done differently?

  I allowed myself to travel back to that moment.

  *

  I sit in the car, those urgent, full beam headlights shining on my rear-view mirror. I have my foot on the accelerator, one hand ready to free my seatbelt, the other on the central locking. A figure moves towards me through the lights: tall, muscular. He comes to my window, he knocks, once. Sheff. I don’t know his real name, he never told me, just wanted me to call him Sheff. Sheff the chef from Sheffield. Who looked more like a bodybuilder. Now I know why.

  *

  I lay on the bed in the same, ripped clothes I’d been living in since I was taken. My body might have been shutting down but my mind was still firing, tired and terrified, but sane. It was currently
preoccupied with the thought of how long it would take me to die of water deprivation. I was sure I’d read that it killed you faster than starvation, but I had no idea how long I’d been here for and I didn’t know if I’d been given anything to keep me alive whilst I had. I could have been out of it for weeks.

  I focused on my breath. If I could breathe I was fine. I listened to my heart pumping away. It felt tired. Like it wanted to stop.

  Then, through the stillness, a series of unfamiliar cracks and squeaks sounded.

  The door opened.

  It was a momentous occasion. And, even though I barely had the strength to angle my head towards it, my brain was crazy with questions. Who was there, what did they want, why was I here, was this the end?

  Sheff stepped into my line of sight, his cold eyes surveying me.

  I imagined running towards him, ambushing him and kicking him in the balls, flinging the door open as he sank in pain, and darting out into the world. I couldn’t, though, of course. Not only had my body entirely stopped obeying my brain, it was so weak it couldn’t have done anything about it even if the two were still linked.

  He put down a sandwich and a glass of water on the floor in front of me.

  Was it poisoned?

  I considered the worst-case scenario: if it was poison, I’d rather die of that than a prolonged starvation.

  It took every last drop of my energy to drag the meal towards me. I drank the water first, breathless between ravenous gulps, then ate the sandwich lying on my front, my hand reaching down from the bed to the ground to grab more when I was ready. At first, my mouth had forgotten how to chew and it took a while to get used to it again. Sheff’s face was blank, his expression empty.

  When I was finished I felt infinitely better, stronger, like my plight wasn’t entirely doomed. If I could just get him talking, maybe I could work all this out.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked through the cold silence, slightly surprised by the sound of my own voice.

  He shot a nervous look towards the ceiling and I followed his stare to a small, black circle in the corner of the room. A camera. Someone was watching.

  A crackling, then a clear command. ‘No questions.’

  I looked up, the sound was coming from some sort of intercom system, played into the room from somewhere else. The voice didn’t sound immediately familiar through the distorted transmission.

  Sheff leant down and picked up the plate, dropping crumbs onto the floor as he did. He left without a word.

  I picked at the crumbs when I was alone again, lying on my front, thoughts whirring.

  One particularly pertinent question stood out.

  I’d never actually checked with David that he’d sent a chef for me, had I?

  Who was this man?

  55

  Jade

  Time passed in the most unusual way on the ward: minutes felt like hours, but, by the end of the day, I’d wonder where all the time had gone. I’d been moved to my own room now, so at least I wasn’t a prisoner any more, but my surroundings were like a sad, soulless hotel room, or a boarding school for naughty teenagers, and I was angry with myself for my lack of progress. Baby steps. That’s what Barbara would say. Don’t try and do everything at once, give yourself time.

  The walls surrounding me were cream and empty. A single bed with a blue and pink duvet lay along one side of the room, the opposite wall featuring a simple pine desk, a flimsy wardrobe at the back. I lay on my bed and thought about Ava. What had happened to her? I hadn’t considered it fully, properly, meaningfully, until now. I thought back, maybe she had run away. I thought about her relationship with Josh. With David. Then, as though a lightbulb had just blown up inside my head, an image careered through my memory with such urgency I knew it couldn’t be ignored. I grabbed my phone, which had only recently been returned to me, and somehow, amazingly, remembered the pincode. I scrolled into my camera roll. I studied the photo I’d taken of her at the summer party in David’s country house, being carried into a room by him. The picture I’d tried to show Josh before he’d rejected me. I analysed it with a new intensity. Her arms were floppy by her sides, her head hung back in what I’d thought was laughter, but, looking closely now, perhaps better resembled a state of unconsciousness. And, just like that, I felt like I knew where she was. And who she was with.

  56

  Ava

  I raised my hand to touch the tender bruise where the cuff made contact with my neck.

  ‘Please take this thing off me. I’m not going anywhere, am I?’ I pleaded with the man who lurked behind the camera who could see and hear everything I did.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ the voice answered.

  I was feeling stronger thanks to the food Sheff had brought and I switched my attention to the rounded glass bowl, focusing on the flashing green light in the corner.

  ‘So why not?’ I retorted.

  ‘You lied to me,’ the voice replied.

  I still wasn’t sure who was behind the mask, the intonation was familiar but the tone was low and had been deliberately distorted to scare me. Outwardly, I remained impassive, but my insides ran riot. That revelation didn’t narrow it down, I’d lied to so many people, about so many different things in order to survive. Any one of them could have led me to this place.

  57

  Jade

  Josh had to see this picture. My motive for showing him was no longer revenge but genuine concern for Ava. We’d been so close before all this happened. I emailed him, reasoning it was the fastest way to get through.

  Josh, I took this the night of the summer party. This was the picture I wanted to show you. I thought she looked drunk but maybe she’d been drugged? Has David ever said anything about it? Why did he take her into that room?

  I waited the rest of the day for a reply but none came and by nightfall I was growing concerned.

  The windows were black, so I pulled the curtains to and got ready for bed. The other people that occupied the ward were winding down and late-night conversations were coming to a close. I waited until I’d counted all six bedroom doors shut. When I was sure no one was outside, I tiptoed across to the toilet. I shuffled along the corridor, the walls stark and angular, the floor freezing underfoot.

  The toilet seat was cold as I made contact with it, the window had been left open to air out someone else’s stink, and I pushed as hard as I could to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. I heard a noise from beyond the door, light footsteps tracing their way towards me. I wiped quickly and stood up, not flushing, not wanting to alert any attention to my presence here. I pressed my ear against the door but the sound had subsided. Perhaps I’d imagined it, and, after a few more minutes of icy silence had passed, I decided it was safe enough to head back to my room. No one was there when I stuck my head out of the cubicle and looked up the length of the corridor, so I shuffled as quickly and quietly as I could back towards my bedroom door, shutting it gingerly behind me and jumped into bed, pulling the covers up over me to form my foamy fortress.

  *

  The door mechanism sounded with a sudden snap. I stopped breathing and heard the unmistakable sound of those same soft footsteps I’d heard earlier as they crept through the entranceway into my room. I was no longer alone. I pressed my body deep into the bed, praying it was someone who’d opened the wrong door and would run right back out again as soon as they realised. I wasn’t sure whether to scream or play dead as the steps approached, drawing closer and closer. My eyes registered a shape in the darkness: a man.

  He stood over me with a syringe in his hand, full of murky liquid. He was surprised to find me awake and didn’t have much time to cover my mouth as my lungs screamed into action. I struck his neck and tried to rip the syringe from his grip.

  ‘Help!’ I cried out from between his fingers, crooked and weak. The word barely carried: my throat was constricted in shock, my call muffled by his grip. I swallowed and took a deeper breath, ‘Help!’ This time my cry was louder, and my
plea bounced off the walls that surrounded us.

  The man’s face stirred with fury and he lunged with a renewed determination, pressing the syringe deep into my arm. I wriggled and wrestled under it, trying to swat it away, willing my body to form a barrier against it. I felt the prick of the needle and the plunge of the fluid as it transferred from the vial into my body. I stared into him, his fierce glare focused on the needle and nothing else, concerned only with finishing the task.

  ‘They’ll assume you overdosed. Poetic, don’t you think?’ he said, still focused on the needle.

  Although part of me wanted to ask him why, with that line I knew exactly why he was here, what had happened, everything. It was crystal clear. This was revenge for what had happened to Olivia.

  A piercing sound cut through the strangely intimate moment between us as the main alarm was activated. Someone had responded to my yell. The man looked up abruptly, roughly removed the needle from my bruised arm and sprinted towards the window. I tried to move to stop him, but the world became a thick, melted mess of shapes and colours as the drugs clouded my senses. I tried to scream again but only a drooling slur of sound came out. He was fiddling with the window as voices neared. My neighbours, the people I’d gone out of my way to ignore, were now my only chance of survival. He managed to prise the clasp open. His gloved fingers clawed at the windowsill then he pulled himself up onto it, using the desk nearby as a leg up.

  ‘In here!’ a voice said.

  His body slid out through the frame and disappeared into the darkness.

  The last thing I remembered were the way his eyes caught the light as he fled.

  58

  Josh

  My heels pounded the streets as I made my way to the flat, my heart pumping hard as I thundered in through the doorway. Part of me was terrified that Crow was right about Ava. Why had she hidden the notes from me? What if he was right and she’d run away with Charlie? Would that be more difficult to recover from? At least the papers were applying some pressure to the investigation, a few reporters had even been in touch to let me know they were putting detectives of their own on the ground in Dublin to track Charlie down. I’d learnt a lot about their relationship since the news about him broke: the abuse he subjected her to, the way she’d felt trapped in her own home by him, that she felt she hadn’t any choice but to accept David’s offer of helping her out. I wish she’d let me in back then. I could have helped…