Let Me Lie

by Clare Mackintosh

  “We need to think logically,” Sarah said. “Why do people fake their own deaths?”

  Nish laughed. “Do a Reggie Perrin, you mean? You make it sound like it happens all the time.”

  “There was the canoe man,” Murray said. “That was an insurance job. And that politician in the seventies—what was his name? Stone something.”

  “Stonehouse. Left his clothes on a beach in Miami and ran off with his mistress.” Years of watching daytime quiz shows had made Sarah an expert in trivia.

  “Sex and money, then.” Nish shrugged. “Same as most crimes.”

  If only one of the Johnsons had disappeared, Murray might have placed more importance on the former, but as Caroline had followed in Tom’s footsteps, it was unlikely that Tom had run off to be with a lover.

  “Tom Johnson was worth a lot of money,” Murray reminded her.

  “So Caroline stayed to claim the life insurance, then joined Tom in Monaco? Rio de Janeiro?” Nish looked between Murray and Sarah.

  “She claimed the life insurance all right, but she left Anna the lot. If she’s living the high life somewhere, she’s doing it on someone else’s dime.”

  “Either they wanted to escape for some other reason,” Sarah said, “and Anna’s reward was the money, or the three of them agreed to split the cash, and she’s just sitting tight till the dust has settled.”

  Murray stood up. This was pointless—they were going around in circles. “I think it’s about time I paid Anna Johnson another visit, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SIX

  ANNA

  We stand and survey the garden: the piles of leaves, ready for the bonfire; the neatly fleeced bay tree; the lopped roses.

  “It doesn’t look much now, but you’ll really see the benefits come spring.”

  “I wish you were going to be here to see it.”

  She puts an arm around me. “Why don’t you put the kettle on? I think we deserve a cuppa, after all that.”

  I leave her standing in the garden, and it’s only when I’ve kicked off my wellies, and the door is closed, and the kettle is whistling on the Aga, that I look out and see that she’s crying. Her lips are moving. She’s talking to her plants; saying good-bye to her garden.

  I’ll look after it, I tell her silently.

  I let the tea brew, and give Mum the solitude she so clearly needs. I wonder if she will go back up north or if she’ll find somewhere new to settle. I hope she has a garden again, one day.

  I fish out the tea bags, drop them into the sink, and pick up the mugs awkwardly in one hand, leaving the other free to open the door.

  I’m halfway across the kitchen when the doorbell rings.

  I stop. Look through the glass doors at Mum, who shows no sign of having heard the door. I put the mugs down, slopping the contents onto the table. A dark stain seeps into the stripped pine.

  The doorbell rings again, longer this time, the caller’s finger pressed hard against the buzzer.

  Go away.

  It’s fine, I tell myself. Whoever it is can’t know anyone’s home, and you can’t see into the garden without walking down the side of the house. I keep an eye on Mum, to make sure she stays out of sight. She bends down and pulls out a weed from between two paving stones.

  The bell rings again. And then I hear footsteps, the crunch of gravel.

  Whoever it is, they’re walking around the house.

  I run to the hall, tripping over in my haste to get there, and yank open the door. “Hello?” Louder. “Hello?” I’m about to run outside in my socks, when the crunch of footsteps comes back toward me, and a man appears from the side of the house.

  It’s the police.

  My chest tightens, and I can’t think what to do with my hands. I clasp them together—my thumbnail digging into the palm of the opposite hand—then pull them apart and thrust them into my pockets. I feel acutely aware of my face; I try to keep my expression neutral but can’t remember how that might look.

  Murray Mackenzie smiles. “Ah, you’re home. I wasn’t sure.”

  “I was in the garden.”

  He takes in my mud-spattered jeans, the knee-length woolen socks that fit under my boots. “May I come in?”

  “It’s not a good time.”

  “I won’t stay long.”

  “Ella’s about to go down for a nap.”

  “Just a moment.”

  Throughout our brief exchange he has been walking toward me, and now he’s on the bottom step, the middle, the top . . .

  “Thank you.”

  It isn’t that he forces his way into the house, more that I can’t think of a way to refuse him. Blood sings in my ears, and the tightness in my chest makes my breath come fast and shallow. I feel like I’m drowning.

  Rita pushes past me and onto the drive, where she squats for a pee, then sniffs at the marks left by unseen cats. I call her. The lure of the cat is stronger, and selective deafness takes hold.

  “Rita—get here now!”

  “Through here?” Murray’s on his way into the kitchen before I can stop him. There is no way he won’t see Mum. The back wall of the kitchen is an almost unbroken sheet of glass.

  “Rita!” There are cars on the road—I can’t leave her. “Rita!” Finally she lifts her head and looks at me. And then, after a pause long enough to make it clear that the decision to come inside is hers, she trots back into the house. I push the door hard, leaving it to slam on its own while I run after Murray Mackenzie. I hear a sharp sound—an exclamation.

  Not now. Not like this. I wonder if he will arrest her himself or wait here for uniformed officers to arrive. I wonder if he’ll let me say good-bye. If he’ll take me, too.

  “You have been busy.”

  I move to stand next to him. Our neat pile of leaves and prunings is the only evidence that anyone has been in the garden. A finch flies across the patio to the fence, where Mum has replenished the bird feeder. It hangs upside down, pecking at the ball of peanut butter and seeds. Aside from the birds, the garden is empty.

  Murray walks away from the window. He leans against the breakfast bar and I keep my gaze steadily on him, not daring to glance again at the garden. This man is too perceptive. Too shrewd.

  “What was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

  “I wondered how many mobile phones you had.”

  The question takes me off guard. “Um . . . just the one.” I slip my iPhone out of my back pocket and hold it up in evidence.

  “No others?”

  “No. I had a second phone for work, but I handed that back when I went on maternity leave.”

  “Do you remember what the brand was?”

  “Nokia, I think. What’s all this about?”

  His smile is polite but guarded. “Just tying up some loose ends from the investigation into your parents’ deaths.”

  I go to the sink and start washing my hands, scrubbing at the dirt under my fingernails. “I told you I’d changed my mind. I don’t think they were murdered. I told you to drop it.”

  “Yet you were so adamant . . .”

  The tap runs hotter, burning my fingers until I can hardly bear to hold them under the water. “I wasn’t thinking straight.” I scrub harder. “I’ve just had a baby.” I add using my daughter as an excuse to my mental list of things to feel guilty about.

  There’s a noise from outside. Something falling over. A rake; a spade; the wheelbarrow. I turn around, leaving the tap running. Murray isn’t looking outside. He’s looking at me.

  “Is your partner at home?”

  “He’s at work. It’s just me.”

  “I wonder . . .” Murray breaks off. His face softens, losing the sharpness that makes me so uneasy. “I wonder if there’s anything you want to talk about.”

  The pause stretches intermi
nably.

  My voice is a whisper. “No. Nothing.”

  He gives a brief nod, and if I didn’t know he was a police officer, I might have thought that he looked rather sorry for me. Disappointed, perhaps, not to have found what he was looking for.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I walk him to the door, then stand with one hand on Rita’s collar while he crosses the road and gets into an immaculately polished Volvo. I watch him drive away.

  Rita pulls away, complaining, and I realize I’m shaking, holding her collar too tight for comfort. I drop to my knees and give her a fuss.

  Mum’s waiting in the kitchen, her face ashen. “Who was that?”

  “The police.” Articulating it makes it even more frightening, even more real.

  “What did he want?” Her voice is as high-pitched as mine, her face as drawn.

  “He knows.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-SEVEN

  MURRAY

  Nish was still talking to Sarah when Murray returned home.

  “That didn’t take long.”

  “She wasn’t exactly hospitable.” Murray was trying to pinpoint what had been wrong with the scene at Oak View. Anna had been jumpy, certainly, but there had been something else.

  “Did you ask her outright?”

  Murray shook his head. “At this stage, we don’t know whether she’s only recently found out her parents are alive, or if she’s known from the start. If she’s guilty of conspiracy, she needs to be interviewed under caution by a warranted officer, not questioned in her kitchen by a has-been.”

  Nish stood up. “Much as I’d like to stay, Gill will be sending out a search party if I don’t get back soon—we’re supposed to be going out later. Let me know if you turn anything up, won’t you?”

  Murray walked her to the door, and joined her outside as she found her car keys in the depths of her bag.

  “Sarah seems to be doing well.”

  “You know what it’s like: two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes the other way around. But yes, today’s a good day.”

  He watched Nish drive away, raising a hand as she turned the corner.

  Back inside, Sarah had spread out Caroline Johnson’s bank statements. They had been examined at the time of Caroline’s apparent suicide, a summary note on file concluding they held nothing of interest. There had been no large payments or transfers immediately prior to Caroline’s apparent suicide, no activity abroad that might hint at a preplanned hideaway. Sarah moved her finger down the rows of figures, and Murray settled on the sofa with Caroline’s appointment book.

  He marked with Post-it notes the period in the datebook between Tom’s disappearance and Caroline’s. Did the pair meet up? Make arrangements? Murray scoured the pages for coded reminders but found only appointments, lists of things to do, and scribbled reminders to buy milk or call solicitor.

  “A hundred quid’s a lot to take out of a cashpoint, don’t you think?”

  Murray looked up. Sarah was running a neon pink highlighter across a statement. She lifted the pen, moved it a couple of inches lower, and carefully highlighted a second line.

  “Not for some people.”

  “Every week, though.”

  Interesting. “Housekeeping money?” It was a bit old-fashioned, but some people still budgeted that way, Murray supposed.

  “Her spending’s more erratic than that. Look, she uses her card all the time—Sainsbury’s, Co-op, the petrol station—and takes out cash with no obvious pattern. Twenty quid here, thirty quid there. But on top of that, every seven days in August, she took out a hundred quid.”

  Murray’s pulse quickened. It could be nothing. Then again, it could be something . . .

  “What about the next month?”

  Sarah found September’s statement. There, too, among ad hoc cash withdrawals and card payments, were weekly withdrawals—this time for a hundred and fifty pounds.

  “How about October?”

  “A hundred and fifty again . . . No, wait—it goes up halfway through the month. Two hundred quid.” Sarah rifled through the papers in front of her. “And now three hundred. From mid-November, right up to the day before she disappeared.” She dragged the tip of the highlighter across the last few lines and handed the sheaf of statements to Murray. “She was paying someone.”

  “Or paying them off.”

  “Anna?”

  Murray shook his head. He was thinking about the 999 calls that had been made from Oak View; the pocket notebook entry describing Caroline Johnson as “emotional” following the report of a domestic from the next-door neighbor, Robert Drake.

  The Johnsons’ marriage had been a tempestuous one. Possibly even a violent one.

  Ever since Murray had realized the Johnsons had faked their deaths, he had been looking at Caroline as a suspect. But was she also a victim?

  “I think Caroline was being blackmailed.”

  “By Tom? Because she’d cashed in his life insurance?”

  Murray didn’t answer. He was still trying to work through the possibilities. If Tom had been blackmailing Caroline, and she had been paying up, that meant she’d been scared.

  Scared enough to fake her own death to get away?

  Murray picked up her datebook. He had already been through it several times, but back then he had been looking for leads on why Caroline had been at Beachy Head, not where she’d gone afterward. He scoured the leaflets and scraps of paper tucked into the back, hoping he’d find a receipt, a train timetable, a scribbled note with an address. There was nothing.

  “Where would you go if you wanted to disappear?”

  Sarah thought. “Somewhere I knew, but where no one knew me. Somewhere I felt safe. Maybe a place I knew from way back.”

  Murray’s mobile rang.

  “Hi, Sean. What can I do for you?”

  “It’s more what I can do for you. I’ve had the results back on a reverse IMEI search on that handset of yours.”

  “Which tell us what, exactly?”

  Sean laughed. “When you brought me the job, I checked the networks to see what handset that SIM card had been used in, right?”

  “Right. And you traced it back to Fones4All, in Brighton.”

  “Okay, so the same thing can happen in reverse; it just takes a bit longer. I asked the networks to tell me if that handset has appeared on their systems at any point since the witness call from Beachy Head.” He paused. “And it has.”

  Murray felt a surge of excitement.

  What is it? Sarah mouthed, but he couldn’t answer—he was listening to Sean.

  “The offender put a new pay-as-you-go SIM card in it, and it popped up on Vodafone back in the spring.”

  “I don’t suppose—”

  “I know what calls were made? Come on, Murray—you know me better than that. You got a pen? Couple of mobiles, and a landline that might just give you a location for your man . . .”

  Or woman, Murray thought. He wrote down the numbers, trying not to be distracted by Sarah, who was flapping her arms at him, demanding to know what had gotten him so excited. “Thanks, Sean. I owe you one.”

  “You owe me more than one, mate.”

  The call finished, and Murray grinned at Sarah and filled her in on what the High Tech Crime officer had told him. He spun his notebook around until the list of phone numbers faced Sarah, and he marked an asterisk beside the only landline.

  “Do you want to do the honors?”

  Then it was Murray’s turn to wait, while Sarah spoke to an inaudible voice on the other end of the line. When she’d finished, he held up his hands.

  “Well?”

  Sarah put on a posh voice. “Our Lady’s Preparatory.”

  “A private school?” What did a prep school have to do with Tom and Caroline Johnson? Murray wondered if th
ey were heading up a blind alley. The fake witness call, allegedly from Diane Brent-Taylor, had been made last May, ten months before the mobile had been used again with a different SIM card. It could have passed through any number of hands in the meantime. “Where’s the school?”

  “Derbyshire.”

  Murray thought for a moment. He turned over the datebook in his hands, remembering the photos that had fallen out from between the pages when Anna Johnson had handed it to him: a youthful Caroline, on holiday with an old school friend.

  Mum said they had the best time.

  They had been in a pub garden, a wagon and horses on the sign above them.

  About as far from the sea as you can get.

  He opened Safari on his phone and Googled “wagon and horses pubs UK.” Christ, there were pages of them. He tried a different tack, looking up “farthest point in UK from the sea.”

  Coton in the Elms, Derbyshire.

  Murray had never heard of it. But a final Google search—“wagon and horses Derbyshire”—gave him what he wanted. Tarted up since the photo, and with a new sign and hanging baskets, but undeniably the same pub that Caroline and her friend had visited all those years ago.

  Luxury B&B . . . best breakfast in the Peak District . . . free Wi-Fi . . .

  Murray looked at Sarah. “Fancy a holiday?’

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-EIGHT

  I grew up with sand in my socks and salt on my skin, and the knowledge that when I was old enough to decide where I lived, it would be miles away from the ocean.

  It was one of the few things we had in common.

  “I don’t understand why people obsess over living near the sea,” you said when I told you where I was from. “I’m a city dweller, through and through.”

  So was I. Escaped the first chance I had. I loved London. Busy, noisy, anonymous. Enough bars that being kicked out of one didn’t matter. Enough jobs that losing one meant finding another the next day. Enough beds that sliding out of one never left me lonely.