The Liars

by Naomi Joy

  He lay there, convulsing.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I said out loud, my legs shaking. My stomach lurched at the sight of blood and brain matter expanding beneath his head.

  63

  David

  Josh.

  Of all people.

  After everything you’ve done for him.

  You watch him from the end of the corridor as he staggers out of the stairwell, face as white as chalk. Your likeness reflected in the various bones of his face. Your family.

  You’d gathered from the shouts and crashes that he’d dispatched of your bodyguard. Part of you was impressed, your own flesh and blood physically out-matching Sheff was no mean feat.

  You don’t want to kill him. But you’re wary.

  You can’t take too many chances. You keep the knife in your grip and unlock the door to Ava’s room. You have to neutralise him, then you can explain. Once you tell him what she’s done, the way she betrayed you both, Josh would have to understand.

  64

  Josh

  I hurtled towards the door ahead and my stomach flipped in on itself as I bent over, dry-gagging as the revolting props that lined the walls wriggled their way into my consciousness. It was a sight I’d never be able to erase. The room I was stood in was covered in torture devices, laid out like a museum, as if they should have little tags next to them telling visitors what they were used for and where they were found. There were clubs and spikes and pliers and clips… There were words too, the same six repeated over and over again in big angry scribbles:

  Betrayal, Disloyalty, Lies. Revenge, Retaliation, Demise.

  A large screen sat on a white desk in the middle of the room and played an image of a girl, skin and bones and blonde hair, heaped on the floor. It took me a second to know for sure, but it was her, it was Ava. I gasped. Ava had a chain round her neck and lay motionless on the floor, foam round her mouth.

  Was I too late?

  I ran up to the screen and locked my hands round it, wanting to be close to her. A metal loop with a set of heavy-duty keys lay on the desk next to the screen, the only thing in here out of perfect alignment. I picked them up and looked round. On the right side of the white surveillance room was a door, even more secure than the one I’d just entered through, the keys clearly designed for it. I rushed towards it, my only focus on getting to her. She was so close. There were five locks but, as I fit what was clearly the largest key into the main central lock, I discovered they were all open.

  Dread swamped me.

  This was a trap.

  65

  David

  You hear Josh fit the key into the lock and can almost taste his uncertainty as the door opens excruciatingly slowly. Of course he wasn’t going to run away once he’d seen her, you know him well, you can predict him, which is why you know this will be difficult. You hear the creak of the floorboard underfoot as he shifts his weight forward, ready to rush towards his girl. He takes his first step into the room and, as though he’d put his foot into a bear trap, you snatch him. You lock your arm round his neck and force your knife up against his windpipe. He opens his mouth and starts to shout. Or croak, rather. The force you have round his windpipe is crushing his voicebox.

  ‘Don’t fight, Josh,’ you demand.

  His eyes are glued on the girl. The life left in her body is duelling with death. The pill you’d made her take is a lethal dose of cocaine mixed with a powerful horse tranquiliser. A truly toxic and yet wonderfully tidy way to exact the justice you deserve. Just because the world wouldn’t believe someone like Ava would take an overdose doesn’t mean you can’t kill her in the way you’ve become so fond of! You love to watch the drugs take hold: the slow demise, the futile struggle.

  ‘David, let me help her, whatever you’ve done, it’s forgiven, we have to save her before it’s too—’

  You bring your arm tighter round his throat and kick the back of his knees in so he falls to the floor.

  ‘That girl.’ You bring the knife away from his throat and point it at Ava, sending an invisible beam between his line of sight and her frail body. ‘Betrayed us both.’

  You feel him relax, the tension in him not so palpable.

  ‘She’s a snake, Josh, she used us… Listen, Ava and I slept together the night of the summer party. We were in a relationship. But it was all a lie, an act to get Olivia’s house, to get ahead at work, to live off my money, my kindness, my generosity. And, all the while, she was seeing you behind my back. You don’t know this woman, you don’t know the first thing about her.’

  ‘What?’ Josh stumbles and stutters, you can hear the cogs in his brain whirring.

  ‘It happened in this very building, our first night together.’

  He’s foaming at the mouth, angry despite the truth you’ve told him.

  ‘You sent me away that night, the night of the summer party, you planned to do something, you wanted me gone. I think you were to blame, not Ava, I think you forced yourself on her.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you about it though, did she?’ You’re goading him. You’re hitting him where it hurts. ‘If you’re so convinced it was my fault then why didn’t she say something? Why did she keep working for me?’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to break your heart.’ Your voice is soft and calm and, gently, you release your grip, moving your arm from a choke hold to a comforting grip round his shoulder. It won’t be easy for him to understand.

  What happens next you don’t expect: in one swift motion, Josh’s elbow expels the air from your lungs as it connects with your chest, crushing you. You can’t stand upright, you think maybe he’s broken one of your ribs. Your fury intensifies. He wriggles free and heads towards the girl.

  ‘Did you know she was engaged to Charlie?’ You rattle out, wheezing through the pain.

  His face falls as he unties her knots.

  ‘No—’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about her.’

  Josh scowls, but brings her onto her back anyhow, pumping her chest with his hands, trying to conjure life from thin air.

  ‘It’s done,’ you rasp. He hurls himself at you, screaming like a banshee, but you’re too quick and you grab the knife from your belt. As he approaches you, you stab him instinctively, piercing him deep in the gut. You intended it as a flesh wound, but his howl and the way his hands scramble to stem the blood bursting from it, tell you you’ve inflicted real damage.

  You retreat, watching him writhe in pain, clutching his middle. Regret. You don’t want to kill him, you just want him to understand.

  The look he gives you communicates that you have failed.

  He slumps back against the wall and thick, dirty blood spills from his middle. Your blood. You have to put the regret to one side. The plan has changed so you must change with it.

  You stagger away from him just as a cacophony of sound clatters into the tiny room, a rush of voices and noises and boots on the ground.

  ‘Freeze! Hands up! Get up! Now!’

  A police officer points a weapon directly between your eyes. They’d approached silently and now there was no way out.

  Josh must have led them here. Or picked up a tail. They probably had a whole unit on him with instructions to follow wherever he went: just in case he led them to her.

  Think.

  You lunge for the lights in the room and smash a hand against their switches, casting the room into darkness. Josh cries out like he’s been shot and something fires that sounds more like a starter pistol than a gun. These noises mix with the darkness and trigger chaos and violence which immediately engulf the room. You feel another person barging in, weapons drawn, but take advantage of the confusion by dropping to your hands and knees, heading for the doorway you’d entered through, the one that leads to the surveillance room – the only way out.

  You make it into the second room and out into the corridor.

  You climb to your feet, s
tealing a glance behind you as a voice cries out.

  ‘Stop or I’ll shoot.’ The warning was fierce and final. You’d rather take the chance than face the rest of your life behind bars.

  You don’t stop.

  Three more steps.

  Two.

  On—

  Bullets pierce your torso.

  Crimson spreads across your shirt.

  You’d been stunned by the sound and speed of the gunfire, breathless from its impact, too shocked to register pain.

  You fall to your knees, your patellas taking the impact as they smash to the floor, clutching your chest, your face twisted in hate.

  Maybe people will write about you, after all.

  One Week Later

  THE WASP’S NEST

  Ava Wells, a missing person presumed runaway – now in intensive care – was freed from her captor last week in a dramatic rescue operation. But a botched police investigation and a trudge of fake news hampered her recovery and only now is the truth starting to emerge. In an attempt to better understand the events surrounding Ava’s abduction, we’ll bring together the evidence that has come to light and begin to explain how Ava’s captor was able to evade authorities for so long.

  David Stein, infamous PR guru behind Watson & Stein Partners, had access to a huge network of media contacts: this was the single most effective tool at Mr Stein’s disposal for hiding in plain sight. In fact, when revisiting reports of Ava’s disappearance Mr Stein is conspicuous in his absence, but his office was behind almost all of the ‘evidence’ that linked to Ava’s disappearance. W&SP were responsible for leaking Ava’s supposed trail to Ireland – perhaps David believed once the media had reported on the direction the investigation was taking, police would be reluctant to backtrack and admit they were chasing a red herring. Ava’s plane ticket was paid for by a company card, which David applied for. The woman who boarded the aircraft with Ava’s passport, wearing thick sunglasses and a baseball cap to alter her appearance, is rumoured to go by the name of Oxana, a woman David pays for consultancy at his PR offices. The CCTV network in the house Ava was living in before she was taken was owned by David and yet the footage was never recovered by police, with Mr Stein managing to convince investigators the cameras had been inactive for a number of months. In addition, Georgette Giani has come forward to say she was ‘pressured’ by David to speak out against Jade Fernleigh in what she believes now was a textbook smear campaign. When Jade was exonerated, W&SP sources pointed the finger next at Ava’s ex-partner Charlie Munk. Police are yet to locate Charlie, but it seems the more we tug on the threads associated with David Stein, the more bodies we uncover. Perhaps Charlie has met a similar fate.

  Diving deeper into the tale, David Stein’s pattern of abuse may have started many years ago. His former wife, Kate Watson, and their daughter Olivia both died of apparent overdoses brought on by years of addiction. Neither death was treated as suspicious at the time, however, David’s actions have put the cases back under the spotlight and investigations into both may yet reopen. Adding weight to the serial-killer theory, Ava Wells was poisoned by a similar cocktail of drugs that ended the lives of both Kate and Olivia, and former partners of David Stein have come forward in the aftermath of this tragedy to support the idea that Ava wasn’t his first victim. One woman, who did not want to be named, stated, ‘He never showed any genuine sadness after Kate died. He moved on with me very quickly and refused to talk about her. I put it down to the different ways people deal with grief but now I think it’s because he was culpable.’

  Another victim in this saga was Jade Fernleigh, colleague of Ava’s and one-time suspect in her disappearance as orchestrated behind the scenes by David Stein, but, in a rapid turn of events, Jade appears to have set the wheels in motion that led Josh, Ava’s boyfriend and Stein’s adopted son, to David’s country house and to Ava’s subsequent rescue. Jade was murdered with near-identical amounts of cocaine and tranquiliser in her system as Ava was given, however, police believe a different man: a contract killer nicknamed Sheff, who’d worked with David for a number of years, was responsible for Jade’s death. Which begs the question: just how many people had David instructed this professional to assassinate over the years?

  Ava was drugged and beaten by Stein during her abduction and, when she arrived at hospital, doctors said she was ‘minutes from death’. Details into the full extent of her injuries have not yet been released. Sadly, Josh Stein died at the scene: killed by a single stab wound inflicted by his adopted father shortly before officers arrived. David Stein and his contract killer Sheff were also killed during the raid.

  Ava’s family have released a short statement. ‘We ask only for privacy whilst we try to heal from this experience.’ Sources close to the investigation say Ava herself is ‘distraught’ and ‘devastated’.

  The case, increasingly referred to as The Wasp’s Nest, has highlighted serious shortcomings in a number of ways this case was handled, from our own media coverage down to the police handling of the disappearance, from start to finish. Both our paper and the police are planning ‘major’ investigations into what went wrong. We’ll bring you more on Ava’s recovery as we get it.

  66

  Ava

  The doctor told me I died in that room. My heart stopped and, if the police hadn’t started CPR when they did, I would never have woken up from the brain damage I would have sustained. When I came round the first person I asked for was Josh.

  ‘Josh isn’t with us, he didn’t make it.’

  That news made me wish I was still asleep. I’d died in that room with him and part of me would never understand how I was brought back to life when he wasn’t.

  *

  A nurse gave me a few newspapers one morning, the ones with more measured reports of what had happened, to help me understand what I’d been through. David was being branded a serial killer, a maniacal egomaniac with a God-complex and pathological desire for control. They raided the W&SP offices: the entire place was rigged up with cameras and surveillance. Stories came out about bribes and blackmail. It seemed it wasn’t just Olivia, or me, who he’d wanted to control but numerous members of staff, rivals, and girlfriends, over the years.

  In the raid on Olivia’s flat they’d found video footage of David entering and leaving Olivia’s apartment the night of her death – he hadn’t set up CCTV especially for me, he’d had cameras there all along – and this footage, along with the diversions the force had found – the ticket to Ireland, the cash withdrawal, Oxana posing as me – had all led back to David. These pieces of evidence were enough to have the public convinced he’d killed his only daughter and, as it had been almost twenty years to the day that his wife had died, there wasn’t anyone who didn’t believe he hadn’t done that, too.

  Sheff had died of blunt force trauma to the head and a single hair, dropped from his arm, had tied him to Jade’s ward room. He’d paid a cleaner to let him in after visiting hours and had administered her a lethal cocktail of drugs. The papers said she only died because of the picture she’d taken and sent to Josh. She’d cracked the case. She’d worked out all roads lead to David and had put Josh onto him. If she hadn’t sent the picture to Josh’s work email account – David intercepted any messages with his name in them – she might have survived. But, as soon as David realised Jade knew more than she should, he’d sent his trusty bodyguard to despatch of her. Presumably he’d hoped he could talk Josh into believing I was a willing participant in our ‘relationship’. I will never know for sure what Josh died believing but I hope, with all that I have left, that he didn’t spend his final moments doubting that I loved him. Because I did, I do, and will always.

  One Year Later

  67

  Ava

  The salty sea air dances round me as I lie on the balcony of my new seaside home. The sun drenches me in its rays, the cool breeze a welcome relief. You could say I’ve run away from my problems by moving down to the coast and away from the city, and I suppose th
at would be true, but no matter how far I travel from London the nightmares follow.

  I think about Jade the most. I regret pushing her away after Olivia died and building walls between us instead of bridges. I regret everything about the night Olivia died. I regret ever asking David Stein for help. I regret putting my career before my happiness and my health. I had such a one-track mind about working there, it’s only now I realise there’s no point in a ‘dream job’ if it turns the rest of your life into a nightmare.

  I hope one day I will be happy again and that, if I can’t ever move on, at least be able to make peace with the fact that I survived when so many others died.