The Lies We Told

by Camilla Way

  “Where’s my brother?” he shouted. “Where’s Luke?” He propelled her now into the flat, the others on his heels. Clara felt around for a light switch, and the five of them flinched at the sudden harsh, cold brightness, blinking dazedly as they looked around themselves. The flat was small and dismal, in a similar state to the entrance hall with an added stench of decades’ worth of stale cigarette smoke. Off the narrow hallway was a living room, a tiny kitchen, and three more rooms, each with its door closed. “Luke?” Tom shouted. “Luke, are you here?”

  A loud thump came from the farthest room and Clara darted toward it. “In here!” she cried, but when she tried the handle, she found that it was locked. The thumping continued. She turned to Hannah. “Open it! Where are the keys?”

  When Hannah didn’t move, Oliver went to the door and tried the handle, putting his weight against it, but when it wouldn’t budge, he turned back to Hannah. “Give us the key,” he said.

  Her face stretched into a sneer. “Fuck you.”

  “Enough, Hannah!” Oliver shouted. “Enough! It’s over. Open the door.”

  “No, it’s not over,” she said. “It will never be over.”

  With a cry of frustration Clara went to one of the other doors and, finding it unlocked, switched on the light to find a bedroom with a mattress on the floor, a small wooden cabinet by its side, on top of which was a key. She snatched it up and went back to the locked door. Inserting the key with shaking hands, she turned it and pushed the door open. The room was in darkness, but when she found the switch, she cried out in horror. There was Luke, lying on the bed, gagged and bound with thick electrical tape, his eyes bulging at her as he let out a desperate, muffled cry.

  Clara stood frozen as Rose ran past her. Throwing her arms around her son, she cried, “Oh, my darling, my darling boy,” and then Oliver was there too, kneeling down and cutting Luke free with one of Mac’s knives before he, too, took his son in his arms.

  Luke coughed and spluttered when his gag was removed, crying out with desperate relief. He looked dreadful: thin and bruised, with blood all over his T-shirt, his eyes hollow in his pale, drawn face, his arms covered in knife wounds, some of them large and weeping. When finally Luke looked past his parents to where Clara stood, he said her name with such relief and longing that she jolted out of her paralysis and went to him, holding his thin body to her tightly, all the tension and confusion and fear of the past weeks surging out of her in one loud sob.

  Finally she felt him stiffen in her arms, and she turned to follow his gaze to where Hannah now stood just inside the door, her arms still held tightly behind her back by Tom, her eyes bright with excitement. Luke rose unsteadily to his feet and went to her, crossing the room in a burst of energy and fury. “You fucking crazy bitch,” he shouted, his face red with rage, “you fucking evil cunt!”

  Hannah laughed. “Temper, temper, Luke.”

  “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you!”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, stop whining,” Hannah said. “I fed you, didn’t I? Sometimes?” She raised her eyebrows. “Even took you to the potty when you needed it.”

  Clara saw Luke’s face burn with humiliation. And then she did something she’d never done before. She went over to where Hannah was standing and she hit her full in the face, so hard that the sound rang out into the room, her palm smarting with the force.

  Hannah gasped, her eyes flashing briefly with anger before she recovered and, setting her face in a sneer, said, “Well, look who’s found a pair of balls at last.”

  Clara looked at her in disgust. “What now?” she asked. “You’ll go to prison for this! What was the point?”

  “What was the point?” Hannah asked. “This.” She gestured toward Rose and Oliver, broken and desperate before her. “This was the point.”

  “You said you’d leave us alone,” Oliver said. “We paid you thousands to stay away from Tom, to stay away from all of us. You said that would be the end of it!”

  “Yeah, well. That was until I saw Luke again.”

  “Saw him where?” asked Tom.

  She shrugged belligerently. “I’d just come out of rehab, some bullshit thing the courts sent me on last time I got arrested, and I was begging outside Leicester Square station. There he was, larger-than-life, like a gift. I recognized him instantly.” Her face lit up as though she was revisiting a favorite memory. “So I followed him to work, and later I followed him home, and it all came back to me.” She glanced at Oliver. “What you did, how you gave me away. There I was, scrabbling about for money, fucking strangers to get by, no place to live, and I thought, I wonder how my dear old dad’s doing.”

  She paused, fixing Oliver in her gaze. “I got into the habit of keeping tabs on him, and then I discovered something.” She glanced at Clara and laughed. “Turned out lovely Luke isn’t such a nice boy after all, is he? Turned out he was fucking the office slapper. And I thought, wow, the old apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?” She turned her hard gaze on Oliver again. “I saw that he was just like you, pretending he was such a decent, stand-up guy while all the time he was just a disgusting, sleazy bastard. A dirty fucking user.” She smiled. “Like father, like son.”

  There was absolute silence. All the amusement drained from Hannah’s face as she continued to stare at her father. “And that really fucked me off,” she said softly. “Brought it all back. So I started sending him the e-mails, messing with him, showing I was watching him, that I knew what sort of man he was, and after a while I realized I could kill three birds with one stone: give Luke what he deserved, get some more money out of you, Daddy, but most of all—” She turned her gaze on Rose now, and the expression on her face, the icy hatred in her eyes, made Clara shudder. “Most of all, I’d give you, you murdering bitch, a taste of your own medicine.”

  Rose paled. “What are you talking about?”

  “I might have left you alone for a few years, but that doesn’t mean I ever forgot what you did. You killed my mother. You took her from me—why shouldn’t I take something from you? Why shouldn’t Luke die? It’s only what you deserved.”

  “You were going to kill him,” Clara whispered, the cold realization seeping into her, how close they’d been to losing him.

  Before Hannah could reply, Rose cried, “I had nothing to do with your mother’s death! She jumped!”

  “Bullshit.” Hannah’s face was still full of loathing. “She wouldn’t have left me. She wouldn’t. I was all she had. You were the last person to see her alive. You killed her.”

  Rose stepped toward her. “Listen to me! Your mother was angry—she was out of control! She was extremely ill and she jumped.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” Rose asked desperately then. “Do you know where she is, what happened to her? Tell me where Emily is, for God’s sake, tell me!”

  “She’s dead,” was the triumphant reply. “That’s right! She died the same way my mother did, booted into the fucking sea.”

  All the color and light drained from Rose’s face. “No . . .” She shook her head. “No . . . I don’t believe you. You’re lying. I know you are.”

  “I said I’d meet her up on the cliffs at Dunwich. Told her I wanted to go and remember my mother.” Hannah smiled mockingly. “She thought she was so noble going there with me, standing by the poor abandoned sister she never knew she had, cutting off her parents and striking out on her own to prove a point. My God, she was full of it, such a tedious, sanctimonious bitch—I was doing the world a favor, to be honest. But anyway, now you know. Beautiful, isn’t it”—she looked at Rose and Oliver—“that your daughter and my mother had the same resting place? Kind of poetic, don’t you think?”

  Rose stared at her in horror. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not true.”

  Oliver, who until then had been watching in stunned silence, suddenly cried
, “There was no body! If you were telling the truth, her body would have washed up sooner or later.”

  Rose looked round at him hopefully. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s right. There was no body. There would have been, wouldn’t there? There would have been a body!”

  Hannah laughed. “Yeah, well, maybe there’s a little pile of Emily bones on some faraway beach somewhere. Fuck knows, who cares?”

  “I don’t believe you!” Rose shouted again. “You’re lying. There would have been a body. There would have!”

  Hannah stared at her thoughtfully. “She cried out for you, you know. Just as she fell, just as she realized she was going to die. She cried out for her mummy, like a baby. Did I cry, Rose, when you killed my mother? Did I cry too?”

  Oliver’s face was full of hatred and despair. “She jumped. Your mother jumped!” He broke down in tears then, doubled over in pain, as Tom pulled out his phone and called for the police.

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE LAKE DISTRICT, 2017

  I live in a quiet village, more a hamlet, really, not far from Windermere. A remote and peaceful place, somewhere my past could not follow me, or so I thought. I moved here from Cambridgeshire after Doug and Toby died, to be near my elderly parents, and when they died, too, I stayed. I’ve built a simple, solitary life for myself, just me and my little dog, Rufus, and if the other inhabitants of this tiny community know my story, if they remember the grim details of my murdered family from the newspapers before I came to live amidst them, they’ve kept it to themselves, and for that, I’ve been grateful.

  But now Hannah’s face is once more front-page news, her trial a media circus, a tabloid editor’s dream. It has everything, after all: two beautiful teenage girls, an affluent, successful family torn apart by adultery, kidnapping, suicide, and murder—and not one of us who played a part in the whole awful business has escaped without blame. Each of our actions another scrutinized detail in the story that has had the nation gripped these past six weeks.

  Who knows what the outcome will be? Hannah will almost certainly be sent back to prison—there’ll be no wriggling her way out of this one. How she kidnapped Luke, how she confessed to Emily’s murder—though she’s denying that now, of course. But what of the rest of us? Oliver’s affair with Nadia, her death, the abduction of baby Lana. Such a tangled, complicated web.

  It’s become clear that Hannah’s allegations of her mother’s murder can’t be substantiated. After all, who would believe the desperate rantings of a proven liar, killer, and kidnapper, over someone like Rose, who’s presented herself so well throughout this trial? A gentle retired surgeon in her late sixties now, responsible for saving the lives of countless children, a long line of charity work to her name, beloved by her colleagues and community. A dignified, gentle soul. Yes, there’s a lot of public sympathy for Rose, a feeling that she’s suffered enough. That will please her, I’m sure—it always was so important for her to be liked.

  Oliver hasn’t come out of it quite so well. Because there were others, apparently, and plenty of them, all ex-students of his, before, during, and even long after his affair with Nadia, most of whom have come out of the woodwork telling their stories about how they, too, were victims of “cheating sex-pest prof”—providing the perfect combination of titillation and schadenfreude the British public so enjoy.

  As for my part in it all, my involvement in baby Lana’s story, the general feeling is I’ll get off lightly. I, too, have suffered enough will be the view: my murdered husband, my murdered child. Yet I should be punished; I want to be. I have carried the guilt for decades for what I did to Nadia’s grieving family. Her parents died without ever knowing the truth, and for that, I think I should pay.

  Still, by hook or by crook, the mess will be made sense of, people will be punished while others will go free, and the feeding frenzy will eventually die away until someone else’s tragedy replaces it. Of course, what almost nobody knows, what they will never know, is what Rose confessed to me the night of Nadia’s death, the night they brought little Lana to our door. They don’t know that when Doug took Oliver to the kitchen to make up the bottle of formula, Rose turned to me, her eyes wide with panic.

  “Beth,” she said, “Beth, I have to tell you something.”

  I looked at her stricken face in surprise. “What’s the matter? What is it, Rose?”

  And that’s when she told me. “I pushed her, Beth,” she whispered. “I pushed her.”

  I stared back at her in shock.

  “I arranged to meet her. I wanted to explain to her that she needed to stop, that she’d never have Oliver, that he was my husband and she had to stop her harassment. But she was so arrogant, so awful, taunting me, goading me, telling me how Oliver had pursued her, that he . . . that he slept with lots of his students. It was lies, all lies! I lost my head. I don’t know what happened—I just wanted her to stop. To stop talking, stop ruining everything. I thought of my darling little daughter and our lovely life and this girl, this silly, awful girl, was laughing at me, laughing at all of us, telling me I had no idea, that I was deluded, that everyone at the university knew what my husband was really like.”

  “Rose,” was all I could say, “oh God, no, Rose.” I didn’t want to hear any more; I wanted her to stop, to block my ears from hearing it.

  “I pushed her. Oh, Beth. I pushed her. I wanted her to die—just for a moment, I wanted it. Even as she fell . . . for a second I was glad.” She looked at me, her eyes full of horror. “Oh, Beth, what has happened . . . ? What has happened to me? What am I going to do?”

  I could hear Doug and Oliver talking in the kitchen. I had only seconds to decide. “Shush,” I said. “Shush, Rose. Stop and let me think.” She watched me anxiously, her eyes never leaving my face. “Rose,” I said at last, “you must never tell another soul about this. No one, not ever. Does Oliver know?”

  She shook her head. “You’re the only person I’ve told.”

  “Okay, good.” I could hear the others, about to come back in. “She jumped, Rose,” I said. “Okay? It wasn’t your fault.”

  She nodded, her frightened eyes wide. “Yes.”

  “It’ll just be our secret. No one ever has to find out.”

  “You’ll never tell anyone? Do you promise?”

  “I promise.”

  It’s a detail I’ve always carefully omitted over the years when I’ve told myself the story of how Hannah came into our lives. Because it casts a rather different light on things, doesn’t it? I wanted Lana for myself, you see. I knew it from the moment Rose appeared on my doorstep that night. If Doug had known the truth behind Nadia’s death, he would have gone to the police; I have no doubt about that. So when I promised Rose that I would keep her secret, it was myself I was thinking of, deep down. I can’t pretend otherwise anymore, no matter how hard I’ve tried to wipe it from my memory. It was so I could keep Lana for myself. Does that make me as bad as Rose? Yes, actually, I rather think it does.

  And so, of course, I did keep the promise I made to Rose that night. I didn’t tell another soul. In fact, neither of us spoke of it again, not even the day Hannah overheard us talking in the kitchen. All she heard was Rose saying she’d been the last person to see Nadia alive, that everyone would think she’d killed her, and Hannah, not wanting to believe her mother would abandon her by choice, put two and two together herself. So for years I kept Rose’s secret—until, that is, the day that Emily found me.

  It was seven years after the fire, seven years since Hannah told Emily everything, that she was her sister, and what her father had done. Seven years since the day she disappeared. I don’t know how she found me here in such a remote spot—my old neighbors, I suppose, or perhaps the clinic where I worked passed on my new address. She knocked on the door one afternoon out of the blue. I remember my stomach dropped like a stone to see her standing there—I recognized her immediately from the day I’d fol
lowed Hannah to Suffolk, when she was pretending to be Becky. “Emily,” I said, “you’re Emily Lawson, aren’t you? What are you doing here?” It was as though a ghost had appeared on my doorstep. Deep down I had always believed that, like Doug and Toby, she was dead too, another of Hannah’s victims.

  “May I come in?” she asked. She had Rose’s clear blue eyes, Oliver’s thick dark hair, such a very pretty girl, or woman, I should say—she was twenty-five years old by then.

  She said she knew who I was, that I was the woman who’d brought Hannah up, the woman whose husband and son Hannah had murdered. She told me she was living in France now, scraping by as a waitress in a hotel.

  Of course I invited her in, and we sat together in my kitchen. “Do your parents know where you are?” I asked. I had seen Rose briefly after the fire, before I moved up here, so I knew how desperate she was to find her daughter still, though I hadn’t spoken to her since, not once in seven years.

  Emily hesitated, and looked down at her hands. “No,” she said eventually. “I haven’t spoken to them since I left.”

  “Aren’t you going to see them? Aren’t you going to tell them where you are? That you’re okay?”

  She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears. “I miss them all so much,” she said. “But I felt I couldn’t go back, not after what my father did. I can’t go back and pretend it never happened, that I don’t know about Hannah, that I don’t know how he gave away his own baby. I couldn’t live with it, keeping their awful secret for them, letting my brothers grow up not knowing they had a half sister somewhere.”

  I nodded. After a moment I said, “Why are you here, Emily? Why have you come to see me after all this time?”

  “Because . . .” She glanced down and when I followed her eyes to the curve of her belly, the penny dropped.

  “You’re pregnant,” I said.

  She gazed at me with those beautiful blue eyes. “I was going to stay away. But it doesn’t feel right now. I want my family to know I have a child.” She began to cry.