Everything Is Lies

by Helen Callaghan

  I rolled to my feet, my bag forgotten, the keys forgotten, and bolted for the open door, out into the blinding daylight.

  She was a mere second behind me, and I knew she would catch me. I screamed as her hand closed in my hair, jerked me back, and the knife came down, stabbing into my jacket, just missing my back.

  There was a roaring, and shadow, and suddenly Rowan was there in the truck. I had a glimpse of his amazed face through the windscreen as he pulled to a stop and leapt out. The knife sank down again, snagged in my jacket, then tore downwards along my back. I wriggled out of the way, my hair tearing out in her clutching hands, but still I felt it slit my skin. Rowan was running towards me, his eyes perfectly round and his mouth wide open, bellowing my name.

  The knife was suddenly under my chin.

  This was it, I realized. This was where she slit my throat, and I would die.

  I grabbed the blade with both hands, feeling it bite my skin, and Rowan rushed her.

  She shrieked with rage and a thin stream of terror, and suddenly she let me go, the knife sliding against my palms as she took it with her.

  ‘Soph!’ Rowan was on the ground, my hands in his. ‘Fucking hell! Stay here!’

  I don’t know where he thought I might go, but I stayed there while he called 999, and barked about a stabbing, yes, police, ambulance, yeah, whoever you can send, bring them along, and he was wrapping my hands in my slashed jacket and telling me everything was going to be fine, just scratched, I’d be fine.

  ‘Where did she go?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno. Forget about her … what the—’

  ‘She’s gone to my dad’s shed. They’re looking for something.’ My teeth chattered. ‘They’re still looking for my mum’s notebooks. They must be. She wanted t-to know where they were …’

  ‘Calm down, calm down, Soph.’ He stood up, raising his hand to shade his eyes as he looked towards the drive. ‘The ambulance will be here in a minute.’

  ‘No it won’t,’ I said. ‘We’re miles from anywhere out here.’

  He pretended not to hear this.

  ‘Help me up,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘It’s all right, it’s just cuts. It’s the shock, more than anything. Did she get me in the back?’

  He glanced around me. ‘A little. Just a cat scratch.’

  ‘Help me up.’

  He was reluctant, but he helped me to my feet and held me while I tried to get my bearings. Everything seemed unreal, and I felt cold, but I explained my morning – the CCTV and its revelation, my trip to the café, Monica’s strange words and violent reaction.

  ‘Why on earth did you come here and sit in the caff with some nutter?’ He shook his head. ‘I wonder about you, Soph. I really do.’

  ‘I thought we’d have customers! That it would be a public place! I’d be able to keep an eye on her and she wouldn’t do anything with witnesses there. I didn’t expect …’

  The memory of opening the laptop and the surveillance cams on it burned. How stupid can one person be?

  All was silent, except for birdsong and the faraway sounds of traffic, the breeze gently agitating the leaves in the trees. We contemplated it for a moment in silence.

  ‘Where do you think she’s gone?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea. Let’s go back to the truck and if she shows up again, we can drive away. I’m not really up for a round two.’

  I nodded. In my heart, though, I knew she had gone. She might have tried my dad’s shed again, but there was nothing in there.

  Rowan supported me as I stumbled back to the truck. The engine was still idling, and he handed me up into the passenger side.

  ‘She had a key,’ I said. ‘A key to the garden.’

  ‘What?’ Rowan was distracted, his face tight.

  ‘Monica had a key to our garden.’

  ‘I didn’t give her one,’ he answered, alarmed and stung – something of my suspicions must have showed on my face. ‘Mine’s …’ he started checking his pockets. ‘It’s not … oh, shit. Shit. I don’t have mine. I think I left it on the counter in the café this morning. Shit, Soph. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, weary and nauseous. ‘She didn’t get whatever it was she wanted.’

  ‘She’s left her car,’ said Rowan, pointing.

  I blinked. Indeed she had. The sporty red Yaris sat quiescent next to the fence.

  An alarming thought suddenly occurred to me.

  ‘Rowan, what if she goes after my dad?’

  He shook his head. ‘Why would she?’

  ‘Why would she go after me?’

  ‘Because you’d rumbled her. And even if she did go after Jared, she won’t get to the hospital before we do, not without a car or money. I’m more worried about the cottage. What if she takes it in her head that you’ve hidden the notebooks there and heads off that way? I’m not having Kayleigh and the kids come home to find her there – fuck knows what might happen. We need to wait here for the coppers,’ he said. ‘They’ll know what to do about this.’

  I nodded through my shocked fug.

  Rowan rang the police again, asking for Rob Howarth by name, and I listened to him explain everything that had happened that morning, while I sat on the dusty vinyl seat, staring vacantly through the window, crushing some unused fast-food napkins from the truck into my bloody palms.

  Tess.

  The thought was as swift as a lightning stroke.

  I need to tell Tess about this.

  Rowan had fetched my bag from the café, and with my bloodied, numb fingers I searched for and found my iPhone, punched in Tess’s number and held the phone to my ear.

  I got out of the truck, not wanting to talk over Rowan’s conversation. He had got hold of Kayleigh, and I could see he was getting emotional. I let my feet slide down to the tarmac, raising a placating hand towards his surprised face and furrowed brow. I wouldn’t be going far.

  I took a long nervous look around me. There was still no sign of Monica.

  Tess’s phone rang and rang and rang again. That said, something was different. There was a sort of weird echo, an ambient trilling …

  Her phone was ringing.

  Her phone was ringing nearby.

  I let the handset fall away from my ear, listening to the birds and rustling and faraway traffic of Eden Gardens.

  It was definitely a ringing phone.

  With a sick knot of horror, I realized it was coming from the boot of Monica’s car.

  ‘Rowan.’

  ‘Love, can you please just take the kids to your mum’s, just while we—’

  ‘Rowan …’ I repeated.

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry, but Sophia needs to go to A&E … no, no, she’s fine, but her hands have been cut.’

  ‘Rowan!’

  ‘Hang on a minute, love … bloody hell, Soph, what is it?’

  I didn’t reply, I just let the trilling speak for itself.

  His expression emptied as he realized where the sound was coming from.

  ‘Kayleigh, I have to go. I’ll call you right back.’ He looked at me. ‘Who are you calling?’

  ‘Tess,’ I said, unable to take my eyes off the red Yaris. ‘She’s a woman that left my mum’s cult, years ago. She got in touch last night and told me to be careful.’

  He had various tools in the back of the truck, but in the end he risked going back into the café, where he found Monica’s beige jacket while I watched hawkishly from the café door. Her car keys were in the pocket.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Tess could be in there, in the boot. She could be hurt.’

  ‘She could be in there,’ he replied evenly, though his face was deathly white. ‘As for the rest …’

  I knew exactly what he was thinking as we stalked up to the Yaris nervously, because I was thinking the same thing.

  And when he pressed the key to unlock the boot, while I kept nervous watch and the faraway howls of police sirens grew nearer and nearer
, I saw immediately, with a heart-stopping jolt of horror, that we were both right.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was the reporters who made it all happen in the end. It was they who brought out into the open what the passing decades had failed to expose.

  When the police arrived at Eden Gardens in a storm of sirens, we had been driven away and questioned separately – Rowan at the station, me in the A&E department at the hospital my dad was staying in, while my wounds were bandaged. My injuries looked much worse than they were, but my hands required an annoying level of gauze that made doing anything difficult.

  I handed over the login details to the cameras without demur. During the questioning, the detectives, a man and a woman, had been interested in what I had to say about Morningstar, and I had waxed lyrical, frequently gesturing at DI Rob Howarth, who had stood silently in the background, describing my mum’s notebooks, which I had already handed over.

  ‘Did the other notebook ever turn up, Sophia?’ he’d asked patiently.

  I shook my head. ‘No.’

  I made sure to tell them about Tess’s final phone call, and the warning about Wolf.

  Once they were done with me, I’d called Max right away and told him everything. A Morningstar true believer had inveigled her way on to the staff, had murdered Tess Hotchkiss and attempted to murder me.

  ‘You’re serious?’

  No, I thought with a flicker of pure frustration, I’m telling you all this for a dare.

  I swallowed and tried to pull myself together. It wasn’t his fault the whole story sounded so far-fetched.

  I was outside the Royal Suffolk’s A&E department, trying to hold my phone in my bandaged hands. ‘Yes, I’m serious.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. They’ve bandaged me up and—’

  ‘Bandaged you? You were injured?’ He sounded horrified.

  ‘I … a little. Look, it’s really nothing. A few defensive injuries; what are they between friends? And Rowan is fine.’

  ‘And they’ve caught this woman?’

  ‘No. That’s just it. They don’t know where she is. But she doesn’t have her car.’ I wiped at my brow with the back of one bound hand. ‘It’s … Tess was in it.’

  I thought back to what had awaited us in the boot as Rowan had opened it. Tess curled up on her back, her salt and pepper hair slicked and spiked dark red, her face misshapen with the ferocity of the blows, almost as though she was melting like candlewax; one snow-white hand, with a plain gold band on the ring finger, resting over her breast.

  Rowan had turned away and vomited near the front of the car.

  I hadn’t moved. I stood there, the lid of the boot like an awning, and made myself stare down at her.

  The second of the Morningstar Ascendants to end up dead in a month.

  ‘Tess Hotchkiss is dead?’

  ‘Yes.’ I held my breath, wondering how to say this. ‘You know, you might want to start thinking about your personal safety, too. This woman is still out there, and I think you, and probably everyone else at Paracelsus, might be vulnerable right now.’ I winced, sweat running into my wounds. ‘These people aren’t taking prisoners any more.’

  That did it for Max. He wanted me to come to London. He would put me up in a hotel, so we could talk about what to do next in terms of Nina’s book, but there was absolutely no way I was leaving. My life was here at the moment and I was going nowhere.

  I told him I’d be in touch soon.

  Despite his protestations, I hung up and went back into the hospital.

  * * *

  By the time I sat down with my dad as he gingerly tackled the small, bland dinner in his hospital room that evening, Rowan, Tess and I were the headline story on the news – one person dead, another injured at a garden centre in Pulverton. Karen Ince, who sometimes called herself Monica Hardy or Antonia Lister, was armed and potentially dangerous, we were told, and should not be approached.

  They even had a clip to accompany the news segment, and it wrung my heart to watch it. It was Monica, in the café, at about ten o’clock that morning, unaware of the internal camera, washing Tess’s blood off her hands. The reason she’d been tying on a new apron when I saw her was that she’d stuffed the bloody one she’d worn earlier in the café rubbish.

  As I watched her ball the material up and crush it down into the pedal bin on national television, I felt caught in a vast, obscene disconnect. I had been the crazy daughter in denial about my suicidal, mentally ill mother, blaming some cult, constantly asking for more time off work, nosing like a conspiracy theorist around the offices of the great and the good – a lone, isolated Sophia in my own paranoid, furious world. Now, in the blink of an eye, my personal tragedy was being consumed by millions as they sat down to their egg and chips, waiting for Strictly or The Great British Bake Off to start.

  ‘Both Theresa Hotchkiss and Karen Ince were former members of a group now called the Society for Spiritual Enrichment, an organization alleged to be a “dangerous cult”, led by a former musician called Aaron Kessler and based in his mansion in Kent …’

  The eyes of the various newsreaders glittered over the television – Cults! Rock stars! Murders! We’ve struck gold tonight, people!

  You’d have thought it would make me feel more believed, more grounded, but weirdly, it was the exact opposite. I felt more exposed and lonely than ever, even more of an outsider, and the only good that could come out of it was if this woman was captured quickly, before she could hurt anybody else.

  Terrible as Tess’s murder was – I saw her blood-spattered face every time I shut my eyes – it wasn’t even the most troubling thing on my mind at that moment.

  The thing that disturbed me most was this: how had the media found out about Morningstar? I certainly hadn’t mentioned it to any of the reporters who’d constantly been trying to contact me all day. I had stuck with the police’s recommended statement, as had Tess’s colleagues at the cult outreach project. When I’d spoken to Ebele, Tess’s co-worker at the church, I’d had the uncomfortable feeling that she thought I was the leak.

  Somebody was talking about Morningstar and my mum.

  My dad watched the TV digest of these events silently, picking through his beef pot pie.

  In my pocket, my phone buzzed. It had started to ring steadily throughout the afternoon, so I switched it to vibrate. Then Do Not Disturb.

  If I’d stood up now and left the ward, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the corridor without being tackled by a reporter. It was only the constable lounging on one of the chairs outside that kept them out of Dad’s room.

  I wondered if they were hacking my voicemails yet. How long before they got in touch with Amity? Before they started rooting through my love life?

  ‘This is a mess, right enough, Sophy.’

  My dad gazed up at the wall-mounted television, chewing slowly.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said wearily.

  He looked about to say more, but then gave up, simply sighing and shaking his head.

  ‘Look, Dad, Kayleigh’s found someone to clean the house when they discharge you, but I really think—’

  ‘I know what you think,’ he said. ‘But believe you me, everything will be better once I get home. That woman will never come back there now.’ He snorted. ‘She’s already done all the damage she can.’

  ‘I wish I had your faith.’

  He shrugged gingerly.

  ‘What do you think she wanted?’ I asked.

  ‘You know what she wanted,’ said my dad. ‘She was one of that cult. The ones you told me about. She wanted to intimidate your mum.’ He licked his lips and gestured at the television. ‘It was probably her that kept breaking into the house. Her or another one of them.’

  ‘Dad, Mum was already gone when I hired Monica.’

  ‘All right. Not just her. All of them.’ He wiped a little drool away from the corner of his mouth, his brow wrinkling in impatience. ‘They want to stop this book of your moth
er’s, whatever that is.’ He scowled.

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking of how miserable, desperate and despairing my mum must have been to contemplate such a horrible death, to attack my dad.

  ‘I know you don’t like to hear this, but your mum was … Christ, she was …’

  I waited in silence. I understood his anger, I just didn’t want to engage with it. Perhaps I was a little angry, as well, or it just hurt too much. Silence was all I had.

  He threw down the fork irritably. ‘Oh, forget it.’ He leaned back. ‘I just need to get home.’

  ‘There’s no rush. Anyway, you’re staying in this hospital until Tuesday, whether you like it or not.’

  He seemed about to say more, but something about my face must have given him pause. Instead he moved on to his little pot of fruit jelly, and the news moved on to tomorrow’s weather – hot again, with the possibility of summer storms over the weekend.

  * * *

  ‘Good morning, Sophia.’

  It was DI Rob Howarth, tapping tentatively on Dad’s hospital room door.

  I stirred in the chair, rubbing my eyes, all my bones aching. I had spent the night in my dad’s room, in the chair next to the bed, and the nurses had brought me a blanket and pillow.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’ Howarth appeared genuinely apologetic.

  I was starting to like him a lot more lately, now that he seemed to be taking me seriously.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I whispered, and yawned hugely.

  I looked over at my dad. He was fast asleep, but already I could see a big improvement, at least relatively speaking. His cheeks were pink, the remains of his springy hair somehow more vital.

  I reached over and kissed his bald brow.

  I got to my bare feet, still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, my cut hands bound in clean white bandages.

  ‘Let’s go out into the corridor,’ I said softly, forcing my feet into my sandals. ‘I don’t want to worry him.’

  Howarth nodded. ‘Yes. I have some things to tell you.’

  * * *

  In the corridor, we passed the constable who had kept watch overnight. He offered us both a pleasant nod.