Let Me Lie

by Clare Mackintosh

  But the police didn’t come.

  The weeks went by and you were declared dead, and no one pointed a finger or asked a question. And although I saw Laura often, and although we’d never agreed on it, we never spoke of what had happened. What we’d done.

  Until your life insurance paid out.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-SIX

  ANNA

  I pull myself up to a sitting position and get clumsily to my feet. The ringing in my ears hasn’t lessened but Ella’s screams have become whimpers. What will this do to her? She won’t remember this night, not consciously, but will something be buried deep in her subconscious? The night her grandmother held her hostage.

  Laura.

  I didn’t know he’d need to dig up the sewers, Mum said in the car, otherwise we’d never have . . .

  Laura knew. Laura helped her.

  The two women stand facing each other, Laura’s hands on her hips. Mum glances to the table, where the gun lies innocently where she left it. She’s too slow. Laura follows her gaze, moves fast.

  Fear pounds in my chest.

  Laura pulls her sleeve over her hand, wrapping the fabric around her fingers as she picks up the gun. She’s methodical. Careful.

  Terrifying.

  “I didn’t double-cross you.” Mum’s defensive. I want to tell her to calm down, but I can’t find my voice.

  “You owed me, Caroline.” She walks to the sofa and sits on the arm, the gun held steady in her hand. “It was all quite simple. If I hadn’t been there you would have been charged with Tom’s murder. I saved you.”

  “You blackmailed me.”

  Pieces of the story slot into place.

  Not Dad threatening Mum, but Laura. Not Dad who tracked her down. Laura.

  “You?” I can’t comprehend it. “You sent the anniversary card?”

  Laura looks at me for the first time. She takes in Ella, my disheveled hair, the shock that must surely register on my face. “You were supposed to dismiss it as a crank. Nothing more sinister than the crackpot letters you got when Tom died.” She shakes her head. “It was a message for Caroline, really, to make her realize who she was up against. I sent her a copy.”

  “And I suppose the rabbit was a message, too, was it? And the brick through the window? You could have killed Ella!”

  Laura looks momentarily confused; then she smiles. “Ah—I think you’ll find that came from a little closer to home.”

  I follow her gaze, to where Mum has her face in her hands.

  “No . . .”

  “I just wanted you to stop digging into what had happened to us. I knew that if you found out the truth, she’d come after you, too, and—”

  “You threw a brick through the nursery window? Onto your own granddaughter’s crib?” The words sound as though they’re coming from someone else, hysteria making them shrill and uneven.

  “I knew Ella was downstairs—I’d seen her from the garden.” One arm outstretched, she takes a step toward me, but Laura moves faster. She stands, holding the gun in front of her. She jerks it to the left. Once, twice. Mum hesitates, then steps back.

  Who are these women? My mother, who could hurt her own daughter? Her own granddaughter? And Laura—how can you know someone all of your life, yet not know them at all?

  I turn to Laura. “How did you know where Mum had gone?”

  “I didn’t. Not at first. I just knew she hadn’t killed herself.” She looks at my mother, who is sobbing noisily. “She’s very predictable.” Her tone is patronizing, scathing.

  A wave of revulsion hits me as I think of the way she consoled me after his death; how she helped me through the memorial service. Dad might have died at Mum’s hands, but it was Laura who hid his body; who masterminded the suicide scheme; who concealed the crime. I remember her insistence that I go through Mum and Dad’s study—her generous offer to do it for me—and realize now that she was searching for clues to where Mum had gone.

  “I’ve got a copy of that photograph, too, you know. You and Mum, in that shitty B and B in the arse end of nowhere.” Just for a second, there’s a crack in Laura’s voice. The tiniest hint that underneath this steely control is something more. “She never stopped talking about it. How much you’d laughed. How it was a world away from real life. From her life. She loved it.” Her shoulders slump. “She loved you.”

  Slowly, she lowers her arm. The gun hangs loosely by her side. This is it, I think. This is where it stops. Everyone’s said what they need to say, and now it ends. Without anyone getting hurt.

  Mum takes a step toward her. “I loved her, too.”

  “You killed her!” Instantly, the gun is raised. Laura’s arm is ramrod straight, her elbow locked in place. The glimpse of vulnerability I saw has vanished. Her eyes are narrow and dark, every muscle rigid with rage. “You married money and you left her in that damp shit pit of a flat and she died!”

  “Alicia had asthma,” I say. “She died from an asthma attack.”

  Didn’t she?

  I feel a flash of panic that this, too, is a lie, and I look to my mother for reassurance.

  “You didn’t even go and see her!”

  “I did.” Mum’s close to tears again. “Maybe not as often as I should have done.” She screws up her eyes. “We drifted apart. She was in London; I was in Eastbourne. I had Anna and—”

  “And you didn’t have time for a friend with no money. A friend who didn’t speak like your new friends did; who didn’t drink champagne and drive a posh car.”

  “It wasn’t like that.” But her head drops and I feel a wave of sadness for Alicia, because I think it was. I think it was like that. And, just as with the way she treated Dad, she’s seen it too late. I make a sound—not quite a cry, not quite a word. Mum looks at me, and everything I’m thinking must be written in my eyes, because her face crumples and she’s begging silently for forgiveness. “Anna and Ella should go. They’ve got nothing to do with this.”

  Laura gives a humorless laugh. “They’ve got everything to do with it!” She folds her arms across her chest. “They’ve got the money.”

  “How much do you want?” I don’t mess around. Whatever she wants, she can have.

  “No.”

  I look at Mum.

  “That money’s for your future. Ella’s future. Why do you think I ran away? Laura would have taken it all. Maybe I deserved that, but you didn’t.”

  “I don’t care about the money. She can take it. I’ll transfer it all to whatever account she wants.”

  “It’s simpler than that.” Laura’s smiling.

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up, a prickling sensation creeping down my spine.

  “If you give me all your money, people will ask questions: Billy, Mark, the Inland bloody Revenue. I’d have to trust you to keep quiet, and if I’ve learned one thing from this”—she glances at Mum—“it’s that you can’t trust anyone.”

  “Laura, no.”

  I look at Mum. She’s shaking her head, one step ahead of me.

  “As far as anyone else is concerned, I came here to save you and Ella,” Laura says. “Mark helpfully told me where you’d be when he canceled the party, and my sixth sense told me you were in terrible danger.” She widens her eyes as she acts out her pantomime, hands raised, fingers splayed on the hand not wrapped around the gun. “But when I arrived, I was too late. Caroline had already shot you both and killed herself.” She pushes the corners of her mouth downward in mock dismay, then turns to me. “You’ve seen Caroline’s will. You were there when it was read. ‘To my daughter, Anna Johnson, I leave all financial and material assets, to include all property in my name at the time of my death.’” She quotes verbatim from Mum’s will, spitting out the words.

  “Mum left you money, too.” Not a fortune, but a healthy inheritance that honored Mum’s long-stand
ing friendship with Alicia; her duty to Laura as godmother.

  Laura continues as if I haven’t spoken. “‘In the event that Anna has passed away before the execution of this will, I leave all financial and material assets to my goddaughter, Laura Barnes.’”

  “It’s too late,” Mum says. “The will’s been read—Anna’s already inherited.”

  “Ah, but you’re not dead, are you?” Laura smiles. “Not yet. The money still belongs to you.” She raises the gun; points it at me.

  My blood freezes.

  “If Anna and Ella die before you, I inherit the lot.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  MURRAY

  Hard as Nails.

  Sarah would have gotten it sooner. She’d have noticed the name in a way that Murray hadn’t; would have stopped to read it out. To talk about it.

  What a terrible name for a salon.

  He imagined her jabbing a finger at the pocket notebook entry that meticulously noted the names of those present when police broke the news that Caroline’s husband had killed himself.

  Laura Barnes. Receptionist at Hard as Nails.

  I hate it when businesses try to be funny . . . Murray could hear Sarah’s voice as clearly as if she were sitting in the car with him. You may as well call it No More Nails, just because it’s catchy and it has “nails” in it, and that would be a ridiculous name, too . . . Murray laughed out loud.

  He caught himself. If talking to oneself was the first sign of madness, where did holding imaginary conversations rank?

  Still, Sarah would have remembered the name. And if she had talked to Murray about it, he would have remembered it, too. And then, when he’d left Diane Brent-Taylor’s house, wondering who had stolen her name, the flyer on her bulletin board would have leaped out at him, and he would immediately have made the association between Laura Barnes and her former place of work.

  In Murray’s experience, inventing an alias was surprisingly difficult. He used to laugh at the green kids from the estates, looking like rabbits in headlights as they tried to come up with something convincing. Invariably they’d use a middle name, the name of a kid at school, the name of their street.

  Laura had panicked. Hadn’t bargained on having to give a name at all, perhaps; thought she’d just ring on the nines and report a suicide, and that would be that.

  What’s your name?

  Murray could picture the call taker, headset in place, fingers hovering over keys. He could picture Laura, too: out on the cliffs, the wind whipping the words from her mouth. Her mind a blank. Not Laura—she wasn’t Laura. She was . . .

  A customer. Picked at random.

  Diane Brent-Taylor.

  It had almost been perfect.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Murray pulled onto his street, it was half past eleven. Just enough time to find his slippers, pop the champagne, and sink onto the sofa with Sarah in front of Jools Holland and his hootenanny guests. And at midnight, as they welcomed in the New Year, he would tell Sarah that he wouldn’t be going back to work; that he was retiring again, and properly this time. He remembered an old detective inspector who worked his thirty years, then worked another ten. Married to the job, people used to say, although he had a wife at home. Murray had gone to his retirement party—when he’d eventually had one—had heard all the DI’s plans to travel the world, learn a language, take up golf. Then he’d died. Just like that. A week after he’d turned in his ticket.

  Life was too short. Murray wanted to make the most of it while he was still young enough to enjoy it. A fortnight ago Murray had been feeling every bit deserving of his bus pass; today—even at this late hour, and after the day he’d had—he felt as spritely as the day he’d joined the job.

  Someone on the next street was letting off fireworks, and for a second the sky was lit up with blues and purples and pinks. Murray watched the sparks burst outward and then fade to black. The cul-de-sac split into two at the end, and Murray slowed down before he turned left onto his section of the road. His neighbors were mostly elderly, and unlikely to be celebrating New Year’s Eve by dancing in the street, but you never knew.

  There were more fireworks as he turned the corner, the sky glowing blue and—

  No. Not fireworks.

  Murray felt ice in his stomach.

  There were no fireworks.

  It was a light, revolving silently; bathing the houses, the trees, the people who stood outside their houses, in soft blue.

  “No, no, no, no . . .” Murray heard someone talking; didn’t realize it was himself. He was too intent on the scene unfolding in front of him: the ambulance, the medics, the open front door.

  His front door.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  ANNA

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Laura raises an eyebrow. “That’s a brave challenge for someone on the wrong side of a gun.” She screws up her face. “Can’t you stop her crying?”

  I rock my arms from side to side, but Ella’s too fractious and I’m too on edge to make the movement smooth, and it only serves to make her cry harder. I lay her horizontally across my body and lift my top to feed her. The room goes mercifully quiet.

  “She’s just a baby.” I try to appeal to Laura’s maternal side, although to my knowledge she’s never wanted children. “Whatever you do to me, please don’t hurt Ella.”

  “But don’t you see? That’s the only way it works. You and Ella have to die first. Caroline has to kill you.”

  Somewhere in the depths of the building I hear a dull thud.

  “No!” Mum’s been quiet until now, and the sudden shout makes Ella start. “I won’t.” She looks at me. “I won’t. She can’t make me.”

  “I don’t have to make you. I’ve got the gun.” Laura holds it aloft, the fabric of her shimmery top still wrapped around her fingers. “It’s got your prints on it.” Slowly, she walks toward Mum, the gun pointing directly at her. I look at the door; wonder if I’d make it. “No one will ever know it wasn’t in your hand the whole time.”

  “You won’t get away with this.”

  She raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

  There’s a roaring in my ears. Ella feeds hungrily.

  “As it happens, I have an insurance policy of my own.” She smiles. “Should the police be suspicious, I just have to point them in the right direction. I’ll remember that I overheard you both talking about Tom’s life insurance policy; that you clammed up when you saw me coming. The two of you were in it together from the start.”

  “They’ll never believe that.” There’s more noise from somewhere inside the building. I listen for the ping of the lift, but this is something different. Something rhythmic.

  “And when they dig a little deeper, they’ll discover that the phone used to report Tom’s suicide was bought in Brighton”—she pauses for effect—“by none other than Anna Johnson.”

  The rhythmic sound grows louder. Faster. I stall for time. “I always saw us as family.” I move slowly across the flat until I’m standing next to my mother. Facing Laura.

  “The poor relation, I suppose.”

  I know what this noise is.

  Laura’s consumed with anger, spitting out thirty-three years of resentment. “It was just normal for you, wasn’t it? Big house, clothes allowance, skiing in the winter, France every summer.”

  The noise is that of feet, running on stairs. Police boots. Stopping two floors below and continuing more quietly than a lift that announces its arrival.

  Laura’s eyes snap to the door.

  I start to shake. It was Mum who bought the gun; who brought Ella and me here. Mum who murdered Dad and hid the body. They don’t even know Laura’s involved. Why wouldn’t they believe her story? She’
ll get away with it all . . .

  “That’s not my fault, Laura. And it isn’t Ella’s.”

  “Just like living on benefits in a damp flat with a sick mother wasn’t my fault.”

  Outside the door, there’s a whisper of a noise.

  Laura’s hand moves. Just a fraction. Her finger, closing around the trigger of the gun. Her face is pale, a pulse throbbing in the side of her neck. She’s scared, too. We’re all scared.

  Don’t do it, Laura.

  I strain my ears and hear the quiet shuffle of feet outside the door. Will they burst through, the way they do in films? Shoot first, ask questions later? Adrenaline’s coursing through me and, as Ella pulls away, I feel my whole body tense.

  My mother is breathing hard. She’s cornered; nowhere left to run, no more lies to tell. She backs slowly away from Laura, away from me.

  “Where are you going? Stay where you are!”

  Mum glances behind her, at the unguarded balcony with its seven-floor drop. She looks at me with eyes that plead for forgiveness. Like a television playing mutely in the corner of a room, my head fills with scenes from my childhood: Mum reading me stories; Dad teaching me to ride a bike; Mum at dinner, laughing too hard, too long; shouting downstairs; Dad shouting back.

  What are the police waiting for?

  A rabbit on the doorstep; a brick through the window. Mum holding Ella. Holding me.

  Suddenly I know what she’s thinking, what she’s going to do.

  “Mum, no!”

  She carries on walking. Slowly, slowly. From the apartment next door comes a burst of shouting, as the party guests count down to midnight. Laura looks wildly between the front door and Mum, distracted by the shouting, not knowing what to do, where to look.

  “Ten! Nine! Eight!”

  I follow Mum onto the balcony. She knows it’s all over. She knows she’s going to prison for what she’s done. I think what it will be like to lose my mother for a second time.