Let Me Lie

by Clare Mackintosh

  My chest is too tight. Each breath is smaller than the last. My eyes are locked on my mother’s, and although the phone is by my ear, I can’t hear what Murray is saying. I can’t speak. Because I realize there’s only one reason she would know Dad was in the septic tank.

  Because she put him there.

  PART

  THREE

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-FIVE

  ANNA

  My mother’s eyes flick between me and the motorway. I remain frozen, the phone clamped to my ear. Murray Mackenzie is still talking, but I’m not taking anything in. Mum moves into the fast lane again and we overtake the same couple in the beat-up Astra. Still happy, still singing.

  “Miss Johnson? Anna?”

  I’m too scared to answer. I’m wondering if there’s any chance my mother might not have heard what Murray had to say—might not have guessed from my expression what I’ve heard—but the look in my mother’s eyes tells me it’s all over.

  “Give me the phone.” Her voice shakes.

  I do nothing. Tell him, a voice inside screams. Tell him you’re on the M25 in a Volkswagen Polo. They have cameras, motorway patrols, response officers. They’ll get to you.

  But my mother speeds up. Cuts back into the lane sharply and without warning, the driver behind us pressing violently on the horn. The volume of traffic that had earlier felt comforting now feels terrifying; every car is a potential collision target. Ella’s car seat, once so robust, now appears flimsy and insecure. I tighten the seat belt around it; pull on my own. Murray’s no longer talking. Either the line’s dropped out or he’s ended the call; assumed I’ve hung up on him again.

  “Who was that in the Mitsubishi?”

  Nothing.

  “Who was that chasing us?” I scream it, and she takes a breath but ignores my question.

  “Give me the phone, Anna.”

  She’s as terrified as I am. Her knuckles are white with fear, not anger; her voice shakes with panic, not rage. The knowledge should make me feel safer—stronger—but it doesn’t.

  Because she’s in the driver’s seat.

  I give her the phone.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SIX

  It was an accident. That’s what you have to understand. I never meant for it to happen.

  I didn’t hate you. I didn’t love you, but I didn’t hate you, either, and I don’t think you hated me. I think we were young and I was pregnant, and we did what our parents expected us to do, and then we were stuck with each other, like a lot of people in relationships.

  It’s taken a while for me to understand that.

  For all of our marriage I was either drinking, or recovering from drinking, or thinking about drinking. Rarely enough to be drunk; rarely so little as to be sober. On and on, for so many years that no one who had never seen me sober would ever know that I wasn’t.

  I blamed you for cutting short my freedom, never seeing that what I had in London wasn’t freedom at all. It was just as much a cage, in its own way, as marriage was: a never-ending cycle of working, boozing, clubbing, looking for a one-night stand, slipping away in the early hours.

  I thought you trapped me. I never realized you were actually saving me.

  I fought it. And I went on fighting it for twenty-five years.

  On the night you died I was halfway down a bottle of wine, with three G&Ts under my belt. With Anna away I didn’t have to hide anything—I’d long since stopped pretending in front of you.

  Not that I’d ever have admitted I had a problem. They say that’s the first step. I hadn’t taken it—not then. Not till afterward.

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” You’d had a drink, too. Otherwise you’d never have dared. We were in the kitchen, Rita curled up in her bed. The house felt empty without Anna, and I knew I was drinking more because of it. Not just because I could, but because it felt strange. Unbalanced. The way it did when she was at university. Then, I had a glimpse of how life would be when she moved out for good, and I didn’t like it. Our marriage was built around our daughter; who were we without her? The thought unsettled me.

  “Actually, I think I’ll have another one.” I didn’t even want it. I poured the rest of the wine into a glass meant to be more empty than full. I held the empty bottle upside down by its neck. Taunting you. “Cheers.” A dribble of red wine ran down my sleeve.

  You looked at me like you were seeing me for the first time. Shook your head, as if I’d asked you a question. “I can’t do this anymore, Caroline.”

  I don’t think you’d planned it. It was just one of those things you say. But I asked what you meant, and it made you think, and I saw the moment the decision made itself in your mind. The decisive nod, the firmness in your lips. Yes, you were thinking, this is what I want. This is what’s going to happen.

  “I don’t want to be married to you anymore.”

  * * *

  • • •

  As I said: my trigger is alcohol.

  I was drunk the first time I hit you, and I was drunk the last time. It’s not an excuse—it’s a reason. Did it make a difference to you that I was sorry afterward? Did you know that I meant what I said, that each time I vowed to myself it would be the last? Sometimes the apologies came late; sometimes they came right away, when the sudden release of pent-up anger sobered me as surely as if I’d slept it off.

  When the police came, you lied with me. Nothing to see here. After the 999 calls, we said it was a mistake. A child messing with the phone.

  You stopped saying you forgave me. You stopped saying anything at all; just pretended it hadn’t happened. When I hurled Anna’s clay paperweight at you, and it ricocheted off you and broke against the wall, you picked up the pieces and glued them back together. And you let Anna think you’d broken it.

  “She loves you,” you said. “I can’t bear to think of her knowing the truth.”

  That should have stopped me. It didn’t.

  * * *

  • • •

  If I hadn’t been drinking that last night, I might have gotten upset rather than angry. I might even have nodded, thought: You’re right—this isn’t working. I might have realized that neither of us was happy, and maybe it was time to call it quits.

  I didn’t do that.

  Before the words were even out of your mouth, my arm was moving. Hard. Fast. Unthinking. The bottle smashed against your head.

  I stood in the kitchen, the neck of the bottle still in my hand, and a carpet of green glass at my feet. And you. Lying on your side. A glossy pool of blood beneath your head, from where you’d hit the marble worktop on your way to meet the tiles.

  Dead.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  MURRAY

  Murray pressed redial, but Anna Johnson’s phone went straight to voice mail.

  “I don’t want the daughter knowing anything till we’ve got a positive ident,” DS Kennedy had said when he’d called to say that Murray had been right, there was a body in the septic tank, and early indications suggested it was Tom Johnson.

  Murray had considered what to do. The detective sergeant was right, of course. It couldn’t possibly be anyone other than Tom Johnson in the septic tank, but until the body had been recovered and identified, information should be on a strictly need-to-know basis.

  But surely Anna did need to know? And at the earliest opportunity. It had been Anna who had insisted the police look again at her mother’s suicide; Anna who had been abandoned when her parents disappeared within months of each other. She deserved to know that there was a very high probability her father had been murdered, and his body hidden in his own septic tank.

  As Murray scrolled through his phone for her number, he ignored the voice in his head that said he was calling as much for his own benefit as for hers. You carried on digging after she told you to stop
, the voice said. Now you want to show her you were right to have done that.

  Only Anna had hung up on him again. And now her phone was switched off. She was in shock, of course. People did strange things at times of crisis. But even so, Murray had a horrible feeling he had done the wrong thing by calling her.

  Sarah pulled up on the driveway. Murray was feeling deflated, not just from Anna’s reaction, but from suddenly having nothing to do on the investigation in which he had been so heavily invested. He recognized the feeling from his time as a uniformed response officer, when the rush of picking up a juicy job was swiftly followed by the anticlimax of handing it over to CID. Never knowing what the suspect had said in the interview; sometimes not even knowing who had been charged, or what sentence they’d received. Seeing someone else get the pat on the back, when you were the one who’d torn your trousers in a rugby tackle, who’d pulled out a child from a drink-drive wreck.

  “You should go.” Sarah was resting one hand lightly on the gear stick, looking totally at home behind the wheel now. It had been a long time since Murray had been a passenger, and when his battery had died, and he could no longer make calls, he had rested his head against the seat and watched his wife’s confidence grow by the mile. It occurred to him that his efforts to protect Sarah’s comfort zone over the years might sometimes have been better spent helping her climb out of it.

  Murray got out of the car. “James is there. It’s his job now.”

  “It’s your job, too.”

  Was it? If Murray went inside and put on his slippers, stuck something on the TV, the police world would keep turning. James had the scene under control; officers were out looking for Caroline Johnson. What could Murray do?

  And yet there were loose ends that were frustrating him. How had Caroline managed to get Tom—by no means a small man, the case files confirmed—into the septic tank? Had someone helped her? Who had sent the anniversary card that suggested Caroline Johnson hadn’t really jumped?

  “Go.” Sarah pressed the car keys into his hand.

  “We were going to see in the New Year together.”

  “There’ll be other New Years. Go!”

  Murray went.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Cleveland Avenue, police tape surrounded Oak View. Music was playing from a neighbor’s house, and partygoers—already half-drunk—stood with their drinks by the gated park and gawped at the comings and goings. Murray ducked under the blue and white tape.

  “Excuse me. Can you tell me what’s going on?” a man called out to Murray from behind the railings that separated Oak View’s driveway from the one next door. He wore faded red chinos and a cream blazer with an open-neck shirt. He was holding a glass of champagne.

  “And you are?”

  “Robert Drake. I live next door. Well, here, actually.”

  “Ready to ring in the New Year, I see.” Murray motioned to the champagne.

  “It’s supposed to be Mark and Anna’s party. But I just sort of”—he searched for the term—“inherited it!” He laughed, pleased with himself, then stopped, suddenly serious. “Where are they? Mark texted everyone. Said he and Anna had to go to London and the party was off. Next thing, the whole street’s cordoned off.” His eyes filled with alarm. “Good God. He hasn’t murdered her, has he?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .” Murray walked away. So, that was Robert Drake. Murray should have thanked him, really. If it hadn’t been for his more-money-than-sense extension plans, Tom Johnson’s body might never have been discovered.

  How must Caroline have felt when she realized the construction would mean digging up the septic tank? Assuming she killed Tom the day of his supposed suicide, and disposed of him straightaway, Tom would have been in the tank for a month before Drake announced his plans. Her own written objection had been lengthy, and judging by the number of identical complaints from elsewhere in the town—although not from Cleveland Avenue residents themselves, Murray had noted—Caroline had provided cut-and-paste letters for serial zoning objectors who could always be relied on to stick in an oar or two.

  By the time Drake had finessed his application and reapplied, Caroline had already disappeared, fooling her family, the police, and the coroner into believing she had committed suicide. Had she kept tabs on the zoning site, just in case? Her objection—made in the name of Angela Grange—had been logged with an address of Sycamore, Cleveland Avenue. No one had noticed. No one had checked. Why would they?

  So, according to Robert Drake, both Mark and Anna were in London. Neither car was in the driveway, so the couple must have traveled separately. Murray tried to remember whether Anna had told him her plans. No—only that her friend had been driving. It was good that she had people with her, Murray thought. Nothing like the discovery of a body to put a dampener on your New Year’s Eve plans.

  In the center of the garden, where the patio met the grass, was a white tent. DS James Kennedy stood by the entrance, through which the ghostly figures of two crime scene investigators could be seen.

  “It’s him,” James said, as Murray joined him. “Signet ring matches the description on the original missing person report.”

  “Rookie error,” Murray said wryly.

  “The body’s well preserved—the tank’s dry and underground, and with the entrance sealed, it was a pretty good makeshift morgue—and he’s got a hefty head wound. Hit over the head, perhaps? A domestic gone wrong?”

  “There are several jobs logged against the address over the years,” Murray said. “Dropped calls on the nines, and a fear for welfare from the neighbor, Robert Drake, after he heard shouting coming from the address.”

  “Did we attend?”

  Murray nodded. “Both Johnsons denied any domestic had taken place, but Caroline Johnson was described as being ‘emotional’ by the attending officer.”

  “You think this could have been self-defense?” James said. Inside the crime scene tent, the manhole cover had been bagged and tagged, and the narrow neck of the tank could just be seen. Tom Johnson’s body had already been removed from the tank by the Specialist Search Unit and transported to the mortuary, ready for the postmortem that would hopefully tell them exactly how he died.

  “Could be. Or could be she’s the violent one,” Murray said. It never paid to assume. People taking things at face value was precisely how Caroline Johnson had gotten away with her crimes in the first place. “Who’s looking for her?” He wondered if she’d head back toward Derbyshire, not knowing that Shifty had already sold her out.

  “Who isn’t? Her photo’s been circulated, and there’s an all-ports warning out for both Caroline Johnson and Angela Grange, although for all we know she’s been using other names, too. We’ve got CCTV of a woman matching her description arriving at Eastbourne train station late on the twenty-first, and a taxi driver who thinks he might have dropped her off at the Hope hostel that night but can’t be certain.”

  “What have they said at the Hope?”

  “What do you think they said?”

  “Get to fuck?” Staff at the Hope were fiercely protective of their residents. Great when a victim was housed there; less helpful when there was a suspect in their midst.

  “Pretty much.” James rubbed the side of his nose. “Derbyshire have lifted your man Shifty, but last I heard he’d gone no-comment throughout.”

  No surprise there, thought Murray, particularly given the snippet of intelligence with which landlady Caz had provided him when he and Sarah had checked out of the Wagon and Horses.

  “It’s not only flats he hooks people up with, you know.”

  Murray had waited.

  “Weed. Coke. Crack.” She’d ticked off the items on her fingers as though she were checking off groceries. “Guns, too. Just be careful, duck—that’s all I’m saying.”

  “The super’s auth
orized a road check on all routes out of Eastbourne,” James said, “but no joy so far. Mark Hemmings has followed his partner to London—he’s not answering his phone, so presumably he’s still driving. As soon as I have an address, I’ll get a Met unit around there to debrief them. Find out if Caroline’s been in touch, get hold of a list of people she might have made contact with.”

  Murray wasn’t listening. Not to James, at any rate. He was listening instead to the replays in his head of the conversations he’d had with Anna Johnson, Mark Hemmings, Diane Brent-Taylor . . . He was responding to the misgivings in the pit of his stomach, to the prickle on the back of his neck.

  As far as they knew, Caroline Johnson had arrived in Eastbourne on 21 December, the anniversary of her supposed death, and the day Anna Johnson had gone to the police with claims that her mother had been murdered. She’d been adamant that Murray reopen the case, yet less than a week later she had screamed at him to drop it. Murray had attributed the change of heart to the swinging emotions of a grieving daughter, but it now felt horribly, dangerously clear that he’d been wrong. Finally, he pinpointed what had struck him as odd when he had visited Anna at home to ask about her mobile phone. She had been home alone, she’d told him. Yet there had been two mugs of tea on the kitchen table.

  I’m in the car. My . . . A friend’s driving, Anna had said earlier.

  That hesitation—why hadn’t he picked up on it earlier? He had been so intent on being the one to tell Anna her father’s body had been found, so keen to prove that he was still a detective at heart.

  “We need that Putney address,” Murray said. “And fast.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ANNA

  I think back to all the action films I’ve seen, in which someone is in a car against their will.