Let Me Lie

by Clare Mackintosh

  “Anna, don’t.” Billy starts walking back toward the car park.

  I run to catch up. “Don’t you want to know what really happened?”

  “No. Give me the keys—I’ll drive back.” The rain has pasted Billy’s hair to his head. He holds out his hands, but I stand still, defiant, the keys between us.

  “Don’t you see? If Mum and Dad were killed, it changes everything. It means they didn’t leave us; they didn’t give up on life. The police will look for their murderer. They’ll find answers for us, Billy!”

  We stare at each other, and then to my horror I see Billy is crying. His mouth works without words, like the TV on mute, and then he turns up the sound and I wish with all my being I’d driven toward Hastings instead.

  “I don’t want answers, Annie. I don’t want to think about how they died. I want to think about the way they lived. I want to remember the good times and the funny times, and the nights in the pub.” His voice gets gradually louder until he’s shouting at me, the wind whipping the words straight at me. The tears have stopped, but I’ve never seen Billy like this before. I’ve never seen him out of control. His fists are tightly balled and he shifts from one foot to the other as if he’s spoiling for a fight.

  “Mum was murdered! Surely you want to know who did it?”

  “It won’t change anything. It won’t bring her back.”

  “But we’ll have justice. Someone will pay for what they did.”

  Billy turns and walks away. I run after him, pulling him back by the shoulder. “I just want answers, Uncle Billy. I loved her so much.”

  He stops walking, but he won’t look at me, and in his face is a mixture of grief and anger and something else, something confusing. Understanding comes a split second before he speaks, so quietly the wind almost takes it away without me hearing it. Almost, but not quite.

  “So did I.”

  We sit in the car park, watching the rain on the windshield. Every now and then a strong gust of wind rocks the car, and I’m glad we came down from the cliffs when we did.

  “I remember the first time I saw her,” Billy says, and it should feel awkward but it doesn’t because he’s not really here. He’s not sitting in a Porsche Boxster at Beachy Head with his niece. He’s somewhere else entirely. Remembering. “Tom and I were living in London. Tom had done some big deal at work and we’d gone to Amnesia to celebrate. VIP passes, the lot. It was a big night. Tom drank champagne all night; spent the whole time on the sofa with a string of girls. I think he thought he was Peter Stringfellow.” Billy gives me a sidelong glance. He flushes, and I worry he’s going to clam up, but he keeps talking.

  “It was 1989. Your mum was there with a friend. They didn’t give a second glance to the VIP area—they were on the dance floor all night. She was stunning, your mum. Every now and then some guy would come up to them and make a move, but they weren’t interested. Girls’ night out, Caroline said later.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “Not then. But I gave her my number. I’d been plucking up the courage all night; then suddenly it was last orders and everyone was leaving, and I thought I’d missed my chance.”

  I’ve almost forgotten that he’s talking about my mother. I’m captivated by the expression on Billy’s face; I’ve never seen him like this before.

  “Then there she was. In the queue for the cloakroom. And I thought: if I don’t do it now . . . So, I did. I asked if she would take my number. Give me a call. Only I didn’t have a pen, and she laughed and said was I the sort of bloke who would forget his wallet, too, and her friend found an eyeliner pencil and I wrote my number on Caroline’s arm.”

  I can see it so clearly. Mum in her eighties finery—big hair and neon leggings—Uncle Billy gauche and sweating with nerves. Mum would have been twenty-one, which would have made Billy twenty-eight, Dad three years older.

  “Did she call you?”

  Billy nodded. “We went out for a drink. Had dinner a few days later. I took her to see Simply Red at the Albert Hall; then . . .” He stopped.

  “What happened?”

  “I introduced her to Tom.”

  We sit in silence for a while, and I think about poor Uncle Billy and wonder how I feel about my parents breaking his heart.

  “I saw it straightaway. She’d had a laugh with me, but . . . I went to get the drinks, and when I came back I stood in the doorway and watched them.”

  “Oh, Billy, they didn’t—”

  “No, nothing like that. Not for ages. Not till they’d both talked to me, and apologized, and said they never meant to hurt me. But they had this connection . . . I already knew I’d lost her.”

  “But then you all worked together. How could you bear it?”

  Billy gives a rueful laugh. “What was I supposed to do—lose Tom, too? By the time your granddad got ill and Tom and I took over the business, you were on your way and it was water under the bridge.” He shakes himself and turns to me with his trademark jollity. Except that I know it’s an act, and I wonder how many other times I’ve been fooled.

  I wonder if Mum and Dad were fooled.

  “I love you, Uncle Billy.”

  “I love you, too, sweetheart. Now, let’s get you back to that baby of yours, shall we?”

  We drive back sedately, Billy cornering the Boxster like he’s in a Toyota Yaris. He drops me off outside Oak View.

  “One more sleep!” he says, the way he used to when I was a kid. “I’ll see you first thing in the morning.”

  “We’ll have a great Christmas,” I say. I mean it. Billy didn’t let his past dictate his future, and I can’t, either. Mum and Dad are gone, and whatever the circumstances of their deaths, nothing’s going to change that.

  Joan isn’t due back with Ella for another hour. Ignoring the damp seeping through my running clothes, I put on an apron and make two batches of mince pies. I fill the slow cooker with red wine, orange slices, and spices, pour in a generous slug of brandy, and turn the heat on low. The doorbell rings, and I rinse my hands and look for a towel. It rings again.

  “All right, I’m coming!”

  Rita barks, just once, and I put my hand on her collar, half to chastise, half in reassurance. She lets out a series of miniature growls like a revving engine but doesn’t bark again. Her wagging tail tells me there’s nothing amiss.

  Our front door is painted white, with a stained-glass panel across the top half that catches the afternoon sun and throws colors onto the tiled floor. When visitors arrive, their silhouettes stretch out across the floor, interrupting the rainbow. As a child, I would tiptoe around the edges of the hall when I answered the door. Stepping through someone’s shadow felt like walking on a grave.

  The winter sun is low, and the visitor’s outline stretches thin like the reflection in a carnival mirror, his or her head almost touching the base of the banister. A child again, I skirt the wall toward the door. Rita has no such qualms. She bounds across the shadow, her claws skittering, and comes to a skidding halt by the front door.

  I turn the key. Open the door.

  And then the world falls silent and all I can hear is the blood pounding in my head. I see a car pass on the street but it makes no noise because the drumming in my ears beats faster and faster, and I put out my hand to steady myself but it isn’t enough and my knees are buckling beneath me, and it can’t be—it can’t be.

  But there on the step. Somehow different. And yet the same.

  There on the step, undeniably alive, is my mother.

  PART

  TWO

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ANNA

  I have lost the power of speech. I have lost the power of thought. A thousand questions race around my head and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone mad. If I’m imagining that my mother—my dead mother—is standing on my top step.

  Her hair—l
ong, and kept ash-blonde for as long as I can remember it—has been dyed black, the length cropped harshly to above her chin. She wears unflattering wire-framed glasses and a shapeless, baggy dress unlike anything I’ve ever seen her in.

  “Mum?” I whisper it, afraid that speaking out loud will break whatever spell has been cast, and that my mother—this odd new version of my mother—will vanish as quickly as she appeared.

  She opens her mouth, but it seems I’m not the only one lost for words. I see the tears build above her lower lashes, and as they fall I feel wetness on my own cheeks.

  “Mum?” Louder, this time, but still hesitant. I don’t know what’s happening, but I don’t want to question it. My mother has come back to me. I’ve been given a second chance. Pressure builds in my chest and it seems impossible that my ribs can contain the thumping coming from my heart. I let go of Rita because I can’t breathe and I need my arms free; I need to put my hands on my face, to feel that I’m real, because this can’t be happening.

  It can’t be happening.

  Rita springs forward and jumps at Mum, licking her hands and weaving between her legs, whining and wagging her tail furiously. My mother, whose frozen stance has until now mirrored mine, bends to fuss her, and the familiar movement releases an involuntary gasp from within me, as though I’m emerging from water.

  “You’re”—I drag each word out into the world as if using them for the first time—“actually here?”

  She straightens. Takes a breath. Her tears have stopped, but there’s such anxiety in her eyes it’s as though she’s the one mourning me. Life is moving like sand beneath my feet and I don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. I’m seized by paranoia. Has the last year been a nightmare? Could it have been me who died? It feels that way. My head spins with a light-headedness that makes me sway, and my mother steps forward, one hand outstretched in concern.

  I step back, confusion making me frightened, and she takes her hand away, hurt in her eyes. I’ve started to cry noisily, and she glances over her shoulder toward the road. Every movement she makes is achingly familiar. Every movement makes this harder to understand because it means this isn’t my imagination. I haven’t conjured a vision of my mother; I haven’t gone mad. She isn’t a ghost. She’s actually here. Living. Breathing.

  “What’s happening? I don’t understand.”

  “Can I come in?” My mother’s voice, low and calm, is the voice of my childhood. Of bedtime stories and post–night terror reassurance. She calls the dog, who has tired of running circles around her and is sniffing the gravel at the bottom of the steps. Rita obeys instantly, trotting inside. My mother takes another cautious glance around. Hesitates on the threshold, waiting to be asked.

  I have imagined this moment every day for the last year.

  I have dreamed about it. Fantasized about it. Coming home and finding my parents going about their business as though nothing had happened. As though the whole thing had been a terrible dream.

  I’ve imagined getting a call from the police to tell me my father had been swept out to sea. That he’d been rescued by a fishing boat; lost his memory. That my mother had survived her fall. That they were coming back to me.

  In my dreams, I throw myself at my parents. We cling to one another fiercely; hugging, touching. Making sure. And then we talk, words tumbling over one another. Interrupting, crying, apologizing, promising. In my dreams there is noise and happiness and sheer joy.

  My mother and I stand silently in the doorway.

  The grandfather clock whirs in the prelude to the hour. Rita, who has never liked the sound, disappears to the kitchen, having presumably satisfied herself that her mistress is here. Is real.

  The chimes ring out. When my father brought home this clock, bought at auction the year I started secondary school, the three of us looked at one another as it rang the hour.

  “We’ll never sleep through that!” my mother said, half laughing, half appalled. Even the ticking was intrusive, echoing each passing second in the empty hall. But sleep we did, and before too long I noticed the clock only when the mechanism had stopped, and the absence of ticktock, ticktock made the house feel empty.

  Now we look at each other, my mother and I, as each hour echoes into the space between us. Only when it has stopped, and the final peal has faded, does she speak.

  “I know this is a shock.”

  Was there ever more of an understatement?

  “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  I find my voice. “You didn’t die.” There are so many questions, but this one—the fundamental truth—is the one with which I am struggling the most. She didn’t die. She isn’t a ghost.

  She shakes her head. “We didn’t die.”

  We. I hold my breath. “Dad?”

  A beat. “Darling, there’s a lot you have to know.”

  Slowly, I make my brain compute what I’m hearing. My father is alive. My parents didn’t die at Beachy Head.

  “So it was an accident?”

  I knew it. Was certain of it. My parents would never try to kill themselves.

  But . . . an accident. Not murder; an accident.

  Two accidents?

  A ticker tape runs through my head as I apply this new narrative to the scenes I never have understood. Two accidents. Eyewitnesses mistaken. Falls, not jumps.

  Identical falls?

  The tape stops.

  A sigh from my mother. Resigned. Tired. She fidgets, pushing one black strand of hair behind her ear in a gesture futile now that it is so short. She nods toward the kitchen.

  “Can I come in?”

  But the ticker tape has jammed. It twists into knots in my head because what I’m imagining doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up.

  “Dad sent you a text.”

  The longest of pauses.

  “Yes.” She holds my gaze. “Please—can we sit down inside? It’s complicated.”

  But suddenly it seems simple. And the shifting sands beneath my feet grow still, and the tilted world starts to spin again. There’s only one explanation.

  “You faked your deaths.”

  I observe my calmness as though standing in the wings; congratulate myself on my presence of mind. Yet even as I say it—even as I know without any shred of doubt that I’m right—I pray that I’m wrong. Because it’s preposterous. Because it’s illegal. Immoral. But more than that, because it’s cruel. Because their leaving me broke my heart and has continued to chip away at it every day since, and to know that my parents did that deliberately will shatter it completely.

  My mother’s face screws up like paper. Tears splash onto the stone step.

  A single word.

  “Yes.”

  The hand I move could belong to someone else. I touch the edge of the door, lightly, with two fingers.

  And I slam it hard in her face.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  MURRAY

  The second floor of the police station was deserted. Most of the back-office staff didn’t work weekends, and those who did were already on leave. Only the superintendent’s office was occupied, with the boss himself on a call, and his PA typing a report without a single glance at her fingers.

  She had tinsel in her hair and was wearing bauble earrings that flashed distractingly. “The super needs case papers typed up,” she had explained, when Murray had wondered what she was doing at work on a Sunday morning, and Christmas Eve, to boot. “He wants everything shipshape before the break.”

  “Doing something nice tomorrow?” she said now.

  “Just a quiet one at home.” There was a pause. “You?” he added, when it became clear she was waiting for the question.

  “Off to Mum and Dad’s.” She stopped typing and leaned her folded arms on the desk. “We all still have stockings, even though my brother’s twe
nty-four. We open those first; then we have smoked salmon and scrambled eggs with Buck’s Fizz.” Murray smiled and nodded as she took him through the traditions of her family Christmas. He wondered how long his chewing out was going to last.

  The office door opened.

  “Murray! Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “No problem.” Murray omitted the sir. Not only because he was a civilian now, and no longer bound by rank, but because when Leo Griffiths had been a probationer, and Murray his tutor constable, the younger man had been a Grade A turd.

  There were two easy chairs in Leo’s office, but the superintendent sat at his desk, and so Murray took the wooden chair across from him. An expanse of polished wood lay between them, on which Leo pushed around the paper clips that justified his salary.

  Leo laced his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. “I’m a little confused.” He wasn’t, of course, but the superintendent liked to show his workings out, which tended to draw out the process somewhat. “Night turn attended an incident just before midnight last night, where they spoke to a Mr. Mark Hemmings and his partner, Miss Anna Johnson.”

  Ah, so it was indeed about the Johnson case.

  “A brick was thrown through a bedroom window. It had a threatening note wrapped around it.”

  “So I heard. A few of the houses in that street have their own security cameras. It would be worth—”

  “All in hand, thank you,” Leo interrupted smoothly. “I’m more concerned about the fact that Miss Johnson reported the incident as part of an ongoing series.” He paused for dramatic effect. “An ongoing series being investigated by . . . you.”

  Murray said nothing. You could tie yourself up in knots, saying something for the sake of it. Filling gaps. Ask a question, Leo. Then I’ll answer it.

  The pause went on forever.

  “And what I’m confused about, Murray, is that I was under the impression you were a station duty officer. A civilian station duty officer. And that you retired from CID—and indeed from the police service—several years ago.”