The Lies We Told

by Camilla Way

  “Then go to them,” I said.

  “I want the truth, Beth,” she replied. “I have to know.”

  “Know what?” I asked, playing for time, because I suddenly knew what she was going to ask me.

  She hesitated; then she looked me full in the face and said, “Hannah told me that my mother pushed Nadia. That she murdered her. Is it true?”

  “Murdered her?” I echoed. “Why do you think that?”

  “Hannah told me. She was so certain. So absolutely convinced of it. I need to know if it’s true, if my mother really did it. Because if she is capable of such a horrible, vile thing, then I know I can never go back, I never want to see her again.”

  I stared back at her for a long moment. And I still don’t know what made me say it, only that I was still overwhelmed with resentment and pain. I’d lost my family, and I admit I did blame Rose. It was all her fault that Toby and Doug were dead. Why should I lie for her? Why should I tell Emily her mother was innocent, let them be reunited, rebuild their perfect, charmed life, when mine was in tatters, when I had nothing left? I’d asked Rose for help once and she’d walked away—why should I help her now? So I said it. I told her the truth: I looked Emily in the eye and said, “Yes, it’s true.”

  She gasped, her face drained of color. “It is?”

  I wanted to take it back then and there, because I saw suddenly that Emily hadn’t really believed it, that she couldn’t believe her mother really had done such a wicked thing. I saw that she’d wanted me to tell her that of course her mother was innocent, so she could go back to her family, build bridges with her father, carry on with her life, and in a few seconds I’d just taken that all away. “Emily,” I said, “go and see your parents. They love you—whatever else, they love you very much. Go and see them. I’ve lost my family—don’t lose yours.”

  But she turned away from me. “I can’t.”

  “But where will you go? What will you do? Are you still with your baby’s father?”

  She shook her head. “We split up,” she said quietly. “He’s not interested. I don’t know what I’ll do now. I got friendly with a girl from Glasgow last summer—I still have her address. Maybe I’ll look her up, try to get a job up there.”

  “Will you be all right?”

  She looked at me sadly. “I guess I’ll find out.” She wiped her eyes. “Never tell them, Beth. Do you promise me that? Never tell my mother you saw me today.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  She nodded, and we looked at each other for a moment more before she got up and left, closing the front door softly behind her.

  I often think of her, and wonder where she is now, what happened to her. I like to think that she has her own family somewhere, a happy life, in Scotland maybe.

  Perhaps I should tell Rose; she still thinks her daughter is dead, another of Hannah’s victims. Telling her the truth would be the right thing to do. But then I think of that day in the kitchen, all those years ago, how she wouldn’t help me when I begged her to, after all I’d done for her. I warned her what Hannah was like, but she left me to it. And now Rose has come out of it all, the trial, everything, completely free of blame. Revenge is a strong word, but perhaps it’s a kind of justice for what she did, to Nadia, and all that happened, later, to my own child. And I suppose I liked the idea of Emily being free of it all, being free of Rose and Oliver, that she, at least, out of all of us, could have the chance to start her life again, somewhere else.

  THIRTY-THREE

  LONDON, 2017

  It was her final day of giving evidence, and as Clara walked from the courts, she turned to take one last look at the large white stone building she hoped never to step foot in again, and felt a euphoric surge of relief. It was early September, warm still, and breezy, the trees that lined the wide, bus-congested thoroughfare showering their first leaves upon the sun-dappled pavement. She pulled out her phone and, seeing that there were two missed calls from Luke, halted her step and stared down at it for a moment.

  Since being discharged from hospital, Luke had been living at the Willows while he recovered from his ordeal. She had made the journey to Suffolk to see him only once, when they’d walked across the fields behind his parents’ home, finally able to talk alone for the first time since they’d found him in Hannah’s flat. As they’d walked, she’d stolen little glances, and she saw how he was altered by what he’d been through. It wasn’t just the scars that were still visible on his arms; she noticed that his eyes, once so full of complacent good humor, belonged to someone more uncertain now. The easy smile that had once perpetually hovered around his mouth was long gone. She’d been conscious of his hand swinging by his side, painfully aware that once it would have snatched up hers without a moment’s thought.

  He told her that he’d met Hannah one night in a pub. “I was at the bar and she was standing next to me. She looked kind of lost, so I smiled at her, made some small talk, and she said she’d been stood up by her friend. So I bought her a drink.”

  “Right,” Clara said, keeping her gaze focused on the horizon as they trudged through a meadow full of cowslip. She had been determined that there would be no recriminations while she listened to his story, but now hurt and bitterness rose up inside her and she had to swallow hard to control it.

  Glancing at her, Luke’s eyes widened. “No, nothing like that, Clara, I swear! But . . . I don’t know—there was something about her. . . . I can’t explain it. It was like I knew her somehow, like I’d always known her. She was interesting. We talked about music and art and stuff; she’d been to the same festivals and gigs I’d been to, liked the same films, even been to the same exhibition I’d gone to the week before. Everything that came out of her mouth, all her opinions, were spot-on. I was . . . drawn to her, I guess. The conversation just flowed between us—she seemed so switched on, so interesting. You know what I’m like—I love meeting people, talking to new people. We hit it off, that’s all.”

  She nodded stiffly. “So what happened next?”

  “We said good-bye, and I put her out of my mind. I thought it had been nothing more than a pleasant evening. I certainly never thought I’d see her again. But as I was leaving work a month or so afterward, she pulled up beside me in this van. She called out my name and seemed surprised to see me, asked where I was going, and when I said I was on my way home, she told me she was heading east herself and to get in, that she’d give me a lift.”

  “And so you got in,” Clara said.

  He glanced at her. “Believe me, I have regretted it every minute of every day since. I was fucking stupid. It was pure impulse, spur-of-the-moment.” He shrugged. “I just thought, fuck it, why not?”

  “Christ, Luke!”

  “I know. I know. She had a bottle of that whisky I like on the passenger seat, and I was really surprised, because not many people know about it, and it’s my favorite. But anyway, when I mentioned how much I liked it, she asked if I wanted a bit, and it had been a long day, so I took a few swigs while we chatted. . . . The next thing I knew, I woke up in a pitch-black car park in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “The Downs.”

  “Right.” He stopped talking and she heard his breath catch in distress. “My wrists and ankles were bound. She had a knife. Told me to get out of the car, and when I wouldn’t, she cut me, said she’d do far worse if I didn’t do what I was told. I was still so groggy and confused. . . . She got me out of the car and there was another one parked a few feet away. She loosened the rope around my ankles just enough so I could shuffle and told me to get in it, and we started driving again.”

  “And you drove back to London?” Clara frowned. “Why did she do that?”

  “To confuse the police, I guess.”

  Clara tried to imagine how it must have felt to have been in that car, how terrified he must have been. As if reading her thoughts, Luke said, “I was scared witl
ess. It was surreal, waking up like that. I thought it was a joke, a prank, you know? And then she cut me, and I suddenly realized that I was in big fucking trouble, that she was completely off her head. The drive back to London, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness as she started talking about my dad, about Emily, but none of it made sense. I realized it was she who’d been sending me the e-mails and photos, and the more she talked, the more crazy I realized she was, and the more it dawned on me what deep shit I was in.

  “I still thought I’d be okay, though.” He laughed bitterly. “I mean, I’m tall and fit, you know? I thought that she’d take her eye off the ball and I’d escape somehow—I always am all right, aren’t I? I thought I’d get out of this okay in the end somehow too. But when we got back to London, we pulled up in a little car park outside her building. She had the knife, kept prodding me with it till I was bleeding all over, she’d gagged me so I couldn’t shout out, and then she made me get out of the car. When she opened the back door to the building and told me to go inside, I thought no fucking way, so I didn’t move.”

  “And then what?” Clara asked.

  “She told me that Emily was inside. That my sister was waiting for me in there. It was all so crazy that in my weird, drugged-up state I kind of thought it might be true.” He shook his head as he remembered. “And I was still so certain that I’d be able to just knock her out or something, so I thought, okay, I’ll go along with it, see if she really does know anything about Emily. I’d wondered for twenty years what had happened to her, and here was this nutter saying she knew something. I thought I’d still be able to get out later—she was just one skinny woman, after all. I don’t know—I was too cocky, too curious.”

  “So you went in?”

  He nodded. “My legs were still loosely bound so I couldn’t kick, but I could shuffle, so, yeah, I walked in.” He ran his hand over his face as he remembered. “Fucking idiot that I am.”

  Luke told her then that Hannah had pushed him into a pitch-black room, that he’d fallen to the floor and she’d locked the door. As he reached this part of his story, he had to choke back his tears. “She didn’t come back for two days. I just had to lie there, waiting. Pissing myself, not eating or drinking.” Angrily he swiped his tears away, his face burning at the memory. “She barely gave me any food or drink. I was always tied up, so I couldn’t even go to the toilet without her help.”

  “Oh, Luke.”

  “I still dream about it,” he said. “I dream about it all the time. Waking up in that car, the knife, that fucking room. I have flashbacks every day.” His voice broke and he began to cry. “I don’t think it’ll stop. I don’t think it’ll ever stop, Clara.”

  She’d put her arms around him and they’d stood for a long time, her holding him as he cried, the feel and smell and touch of him so familiar she had to fight hard not to give in to the sudden longing she felt.

  “You could have died,” Luke said. “She took my keys. I didn’t know she was going to go to the flat and look for those pictures of Emily. I don’t even know how she knew they were there.”

  “What did she want with them?” Clara asked.

  Luke shrugged. “I guess she wanted to make sure you didn’t figure out she wasn’t Emily. Or else . . . I don’t know—she seemed kind of obsessed with her; maybe she just wanted to destroy them. Fuck knows what was going on in her head. She came back saying she couldn’t find them, that if I didn’t tell her exactly where they were, she’d burn the place down. So I told her that they were in the filing cabinet, but she said she’d looked and they weren’t.” He shook his head. “And then she went back and set fire to the flat.” His face crumpled. “She came back that night stinking of smoke, crowing over what she’d done. I was so fucking scared that you’d been killed.”

  “They had slipped behind the drawer,” Clara told him. “I found them by accident.” She stared at him. “But I don’t understand why you never showed them to me.”

  “I rescued them from the house when Emily first disappeared, when Mum was hiding every last one of them away. I wanted to save them for myself. I never looked at them, though; I couldn’t bear to. Her going missing was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was just too painful to look at them, so I put them away out of sight.”

  A soft breeze swept across the fields and they walked on until they reached a stile, where they sat for a bit, looking out across the meadow. The hazy sky was streaked pink and gold as the day faded into twilight. It was perfectly still, perfectly silent, the smell of the earth and grass filling her nostrils, the dying sun warm on her skin. She would miss this place.

  “How are your parents doing?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer for a long moment, staring up at the sky, until at last he said, “Dad’s moved out. Mum, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want anything to do with him since all those other students came out of the woodwork.”

  Clara nodded. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  He was silent for a while. “What my mum’s had to put up with from him, lying and covering for him for so many years. I hate him for what he put her through.”

  “I know,” Clara murmured. Uneasily, though, her thoughts returned to that moment in Hannah’s horrible flat, to when Hannah had accused Rose of her mother’s murder. She had seen it, just for a second, Rose’s reaction, the flicker of guilt in her eyes, gone almost before it was there. She glanced back at Luke and firmly pushed the thought away.

  Suddenly he took hold of her hand. “I love you, Clara,” he said desperately. “I love you so much. Please don’t leave me. I can’t get through this without you.”

  “Why on earth would you want to stay with me. Luke,” she said, “when I was clearly never enough? When you slept with Sadie behind my back?”

  “But you are enough!” he cried. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. . . . Clara, I’ve always known that I’m a selfish idiot, that I do the wrong thing, that I hurt people. And then there you were, always so good, so decent and honest, and I wanted to be like you. I thought that maybe I could learn to be a better person if I was with you. Sadie was a mistake, a stupid one-off mistake. Please, Clara, give me another chance.”

  “But it wasn’t a one-off!” she said.

  “I slept with her once, I swear, Clara. I know that doesn’t make it okay, but it was a terrible, stupid mistake that I regretted immediately.”

  She thought about this. “I don’t believe you,” she said simply. “Mac told me that it went on for a while.”

  Luke shook his head, his face desperate. “But that’s not true. I don’t know why he would say that. I told him it was only once and that’s the truth!”

  But she had pulled her hand away. “And then there’s Amy, Jade, Ellen, the way you treated them.”

  His eyes widened. “I admit that I behaved terribly to Amy. I was so scared of letting my parents down; they were still so devastated over Emily. But Ellen was a complete nutcase. She lied, Clara, she fucking lied! I kissed her once, when I was drunk, when Jade and I were going through a rough patch. She wanted more, she wanted me to stay the night with her, and when I said no, she just . . . I don’t know—she started this vendetta. She made the whole thing up.” His face was pleading. “For God’s sake, Clara, I’m telling the truth!”

  Clara looked at him sadly. “But that’s the thing: I have no idea whether to believe you, and I don’t want to live like that, wondering whether I can trust you or not. I just can’t.”

  A miserable silence fell between them. At last Luke spoke. “Do you think I’m like him?” he asked. “Because of what happened with Sadie. Do you think I’m as bad as my father?”

  “I don’t think your father has anything to do with the mistakes you made, Luke,” she replied. “But I do think you can change. I think you can learn from this. I hope you can.”

  After a while they got up and continued walking, and by the time
they started to make their way back toward the Willows, they had both known it was over.

  When they got to her car, they stopped and faced each other.

  “I have something to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had a letter from my sister, from Emily.”

  Clara gasped, shock rendering her speechless for a moment. “Seriously?” she said at last. “I mean, my God! Are you sure it’s really her?”

  He nodded and smiled properly for the first time. “She sent a photo. She’s got a kid, a girl aged twelve. She’d seen the trial on TV, and now everything’s out in the open, she wants me and Tom to meet her.”

  “And your parents?”

  He looked down and shook his head.

  So Hannah had been lying about Emily after all.

  The sun slid lower, a throbbing red orb on the horizon now, and around them the summer evening was heavy with the sound of crickets, the scent of scorched grass. She glanced around at the beautiful view she knew she’d never see again. “I’m happy for you, Luke,” Clara said. “I really am. I’m glad that something good has come from all of this.”

  At last they’d hugged good-bye, and she’d seen that he was trying to be brave, that he was doing his best to let her go. She’d taken one last long look at the Willows before she got back in her car and drove away.

  * * *

  —

  Now, four months later, as she stood outside the courts, she put her phone back in her bag. The future stretched out before her and for the first time in a long while, she felt an undeniable feeling of hope. Everything had changed. She’d found a new, better-paying job and moved into a shared house with some friends in Greenwich, not too far from where Zoe lived. She’d even, in the odd snatched moments after work and at weekends, started jotting down the beginning of the novel she’d always wanted to write. She would be thirty later this month, and it felt as though her life were starting anew. It was a good feeling.