‘God, you really are unbelievable.’ Daniel’s voice is harsh.
It’s like being awoken from a dream, and something snaps inside me. I stand up, move away from her, out of her orbit, towards the door.
‘I thought you were dead. I thought I was never going to see you again. Have you got any idea what that’s been like?’
‘I know, I know.’ There are tears in her eyes, but I won’t let myself soften towards her. ‘Will you let me explain?’
I should walk out. There is nothing she can say that will make any of this OK. But I don’t. I stay, and I let her tell me, because there is a stupid, pathetic part of me that wants to hear something that will make this better.
‘Oh, please do,’ says Daniel, voice dripping with sarcasm.
‘I know it was stupid, but when Karina turned up outside work and told me she’d seen Daniel, I panicked. And when she said she’d lied at the trial, that Daniel hadn’t raped her, I felt sick. It was as if I’d lost my mind. All I could think was that I had to get away. All those years I thought I had done the right thing.’ Daniel makes a noise, an involuntary grunt, and she looks at him pleadingly, as if her eyes can melt him. ‘I did. I know I lied, but I thought Karina was telling the truth. I thought I was helping her. Ellen said she heard you with Karina. I believed that was true. That’s why I’ve kept Ellen so close all these years: I thought she was telling the truth, and that made my lie OK. I didn’t know she was lying too.’ She puts her hand on my arm again, and again I shake her off, appalled at how easily she can shrug me off in trying to appease Daniel.
‘I wasn’t lying,’ I say. ‘It was Nicholas I heard with Karina in Daniel’s bedroom, but I believed it was Daniel. I made a mistake. It was you and Karina that lied, not me.’
‘Well, I didn’t know that. I thought if you’d heard that, then Karina must be telling the truth. And if she was, Daniel deserved to be punished.’
‘For what? Cheating on you?’
‘No! For what he did to Karina.’ She has lied to me so much that I have no idea what the truth is. I probably never will.
‘So you lied in court?’ says Daniel. ‘You allowed me to be sent to prison?’ I can hear behind his words what he has suffered, things I can’t even begin to imagine. She looks at her hands, which are clasped together in her lap.
‘Where have you even been?’ I ask. ‘I’ve been looking for you… I went to your mum’s flat.’
‘You’ve been to see Alice?’ There is ice and fire in her voice, but I don’t care any more if it’s a taboo subject. She can’t dictate to me what I can and can’t say, not after what she has done.
‘Yes. I was desperate. You don’t seem to have any idea what you’ve put me through. I was right to go, anyway. You’d obviously been there, although she wouldn’t tell me anything.’
She smiles slightly at this, and Daniel gives a disbelieving laugh.
‘I’m glad you’re finding something to smile about. Fucking hell, Sasha.’
‘Why did you go to her?’ I persist. I will not allow her to deny me the answers I’ve been seeking.
‘She owed me,’ she says simply. ‘After what she did to me, what she put me through. I needed somewhere to go, and I knew she’d know somewhere. She’d always found a way to let me know where she was living.’ I think of Olivia’s address book. Alice kept her updated too. Maybe she cares more than she lets on. ‘It cost me, of course.’ Sasha goes on. ‘She needed to get away from her boyfriend; things had been… difficult.’ I think of the suitcase in Alice’s flat, and the devastation I saw when I went back there. ‘So I gave her some money to go back to Hebden Bridge – she’s got friends there still,’ she goes on. ‘She called a friend of hers who has a flat in Worthing that she doesn’t use very much. It was available, and she said I could stay there for a bit. I couldn’t risk telling anyone where I was. I needed to get my head down. I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘It didn’t occur to you that the police would get involved?’ enquires Daniel coldly. ‘That they might question me, having been told I was back in London? And that this would be the very last thing I needed, after everything you’d already done to me?’
‘You have to forgive me,’ she says. ‘Both of you,’ she adds, looking at me beseechingly.
‘Why did you come here first?’ I say slowly.
‘What do you mean?’ Her composure falters, as if it’s a question she wasn’t expecting.
‘If you’re so anxious for me to forgive you, if lying to me was the worst bit, why didn’t you call me to tell me you were coming back?’
‘I didn’t think I could explain properly over the phone. I needed to see you.’
‘Why are you here, then? Why aren’t you at our flat?’
‘I thought…’ She trails off.
‘You’ve seen on the news that Nicholas has been arrested, realised what his role was in the whole thing, and thought it lets you off the hook. But it’s Daniel you’ve come for, isn’t it? Oh, I’m sure you would have made your way round to me eventually, but I could wait. Good old Ellen, dependable old Ellen, she’ll be all right. What is it – are you frightened of Daniel, still thinking he’s going to make you pay for what you did, like in his letter? Or is it something else? Are you still in love with him?’
She flinches.
‘Oh no,’ I say with brutal satisfaction. ‘He’s your half-brother, isn’t he?’ She flushes. I sneak a glance at Daniel. He’s like stone. ‘Well, you know what?’ I feel like Nicholas with his knife, swiping and slashing. ‘Daniel already knows this, so I’m sure he won’t mind me telling you. You and Karina weren’t the only liars back then. Olivia lied too.’
‘What do you mean? Lied about what?’ she whispers.
‘Tony’s not your father. She made it up because she didn’t want you fooling around with her precious son, messing up his music career.’
‘What?’ Her knuckles clasp the sofa’s edge, bleached white with the pressure.
‘Yep, the whole thing was a lie. If you’d bothered to challenge her on it, you could have found out. You and Daniel could have stayed together, and he would never have slept with Karina.’
‘Fucking Olivia.’ The venom makes me draw back.
‘Don’t you dare.’ At last, Daniel is roused into speech. ‘Don’t you dare blame Mum. Yes, she told a stupid, unforgivable lie, but you know what? She was right about you. You are a poisonous, selfish bitch.’ I catch a glimpse of the man who spent five years in prison. ‘You say you were scared of what I might do to you – but what about Karina? What about Ellen? You didn’t give a shit about them. You just went running off, leaving them to face whatever was coming.’
She looks at him and her mask drops for a second, and I see what’s left of her love for him, and fear, and hatred too. She knows he is completely lost to her, that there’s no way back for her with him. She turns to me, and it’s so calculated I almost can’t believe it, but I have to because she takes my hand and squeezes it, imploring me with her beautiful eyes.
‘Ellen, you have to forgive me. You have to understand. You remember how scared we were when we got those letters.’ Daniel has the grace to look ashamed. ‘When Karina told me she’d seen Daniel, I destroyed them in a panic. I didn’t know what he was going to do. He was angriest with me; I knew he was. Because we’d been… together, you know? I knew he wouldn’t be so angry with you.’
‘What about Karina?’ I say coldly, withdrawing my hand. ‘Surely he’d be angriest of all with her? She was the one who started it all. Or did you not care about her?’ She had never cared about Karina; I can see that now. Karina was too sarcastic, too spiky. Not enough of an acolyte. Not like me.’
‘Of course I cared about her,’ Sasha says. ‘But not as much as I care about you. We’ve got something special, haven’t we? Please don’t throw it away, Ellen.’
‘How many times did you sleep with Leo?’ I ask conversationally.
If she’s taken aback by the sudden change of pace, she hides i
t well. ‘Only two or three times. You don’t mind, do you? It was nothing serious.’
‘I couldn’t give a shit if you were swinging from the chandeliers with him on a daily basis.’ This is a lie, of course, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of knowing it hurt me. ‘What bothers me is that you had me thinking he might have hurt you, killed you, even. Did you tell him at the time that you’d seen Karina in Café Crème?’
‘I might have mentioned it, yeah. I think I saw him the next day. I didn’t tell him what she’d said, though.’
‘Even today I was questioning how he knew you’d seen her; I was looking at him with suspicion. That’s what you’ve done: you’ve made me into this anxious, fearful person who can’t trust anyone. God, I even suspected Matthew from work of doing something to you, just because he was at the studio having a meeting. You want me to forgive you but it’s too late, Sasha. It’s you who’s thrown our friendship away, not me.’
Her face drops and I feel a throb of triumph at having the upper hand. For a second I consider letting her back in, just to experience what it would be like to have something over her for ever. It’s only fleeting, though. The prize wouldn’t be worth the pain, the loss of self-worth.
‘I think you’d better leave now,’ Daniel says to her. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again.’
At the door, she halts. ‘You’ll change your minds,’ she says, but with an unfamiliar uncertainty. ‘You’ll be back.’
We hear her footsteps on the broken glass and then the smack of the door as she slams it behind her. Daniel and I look at each other in the space she leaves behind.
‘Karina’ll be here soon,’ I say. ‘Don’t be too hard on her, will you?’
‘I’ve been so angry with her for so long,’ he says. ‘Sometimes, in prison, it felt like my anger was the only thing keeping me going. But now I know what Nicholas did to her, well… she’s been through enough. I won’t make it any worse for her. What she really needs is a friend.’
‘So do I.’ I’ve been dependent on Sasha for so long. I have felt cut adrift without a rudder this past week, and that hasn’t gone away, but now I also feel strangely weightless, with a sense of limitless possibilities opening up ahead of me. The thing I feared most when she disappeared was that she was gone, that I’d never see her again. I know now, in this moment, that I was right. I will never see her again.
I am free.
Ellen
January 2018
The flat is tiny, the kitchen and living area all in one, and it takes me about half an hour longer to get to work, but it’s light and airy – and it’s ours. I can just about cover the rent and bills on my own. I’m happy for Karina to contribute as and when she can.
There’s a chance she’ll be facing another trial, but if she does, at least this time she will be telling the truth, and there is a freedom in that. Her fate is in the hands of the Crown Prosecution Service, who are currently deciding whether she should face prosecution on charges of perjury and perverting the course of justice. We’ve been unofficially told that there’s a good chance they’ll decide not to prosecute, given the abuse she was suffering from Nicholas at the time of the trial, and her resultant mental state, but it’s by no means set in stone.
I keep remembering all the ways in which we were friends, before the arrival of Sasha and the Monktons; how we would laugh until our stomachs hurt. Sometimes I can make her laugh now, and although she’ll never be the same, she already looks younger than she did the day she opened the door to me a few months ago, a cornered animal. She says she’s prepared, as much as she can be, for the possibility of a prison sentence. If the worst does happen, I’ll be here when she comes out, in our little flat. Our home.
Sasha is living alone now, and I wonder how she finds it, with no one to make her look good, no one to bolster her opinion of herself, no one to play games with. I hope she’s struggling. What Karina did was terrible; I can’t deny that. But at least there were mitigating circumstances – she was being abused, after all, just not by Daniel. Sasha, though – what’s her excuse? Was she punishing Daniel for sleeping with Karina? I guess I’ll never know.
As for Daniel, he’ll never get those lost years back, but I hope he can find some peace, rebuild his life, mend the relationships that were shattered all those years ago. At least Tony knew the truth before he died.
We’ve been warned that Daniel has the option to sue Karina, but he says he has no interest in punishing her. What matters to him is that his conviction has been quashed. That he is innocent.
I can hear Karina now through the paper-thin walls, clattering up the stairs and bursting through the door.
‘Mum’s agreed to pay for it!’ she says, practically dancing with delight.
‘Your training?’ Karina wants to train as a counsellor for people who have suffered abuse, but has been struggling to find the money for the course.
‘Yes. She hasn’t said so, but I think it’s her way of acknowledging what he did… my dad, I mean.’
I know Karina was hoping for more from Dilys, for her to admit she had done her daughter a terrible wrong in not believing her, but maybe fully admitting the truth would just be too hard for Dilys to live with.
‘That’s fantastic. I’m so happy for you.’
‘Thanks. I know it’ll be years before I’m able to practise, if I ever can at all, but at least I’m working towards something, something that could make a difference. All these years I’ve been treading water, stuck. I thought that was it for me; that was how I’d always be. At least now there’s a chance of something better.’
Telling the truth has set Karina free and I need to learn from that. I may not have lied at Daniel’s trial, but I’ve been lying to myself for years about my relationship with Sasha. Pretending the way we were with each other was normal, that it was OK to be so over-involved in each other’s lives. Pretending she cared about me as much as I did about her. Well, I can’t pretend any more. The only reason she kept me around was because it validated her lie. As long as I had heard Karina and Daniel together, what she did was all right, but the moment she knew the truth, she was gone. All she thought about was saving her own skin. She never cared about me, and telling myself she did was the biggest lie of all.
It’s so easy to lie to yourself, because you’re never going to get called out on it. No one’s ever going to say: hang on, that’s not right. There might be a small voice in the corner of your mind that speaks in the dark of the night, when all the other noise has died down, but it’s easy to ignore, especially when the sun comes up and the world starts again. You fill your days with work, family, friends, hobbies, socialising, and soon you can’t hear the voice at all. I can blame Sasha as much as I like, but I also have to acknowledge the part I played in our dysfunctional relationship.
I turn my attention back to Karina, who is still babbling excitedly about the course. I want to freeze this moment for her, because it feels like the first time in forever she’s been happy, looking forward to the future, and I fear what’s to come for her if the CPS does choose to prosecute. I take my lead from her, though, smiling and chatting as though my life depends on it, and perhaps it does.
Maybe that’s all we have to do, all we can do: face the truth of our lives with equanimity and grace. Karina, Olivia, Sasha – they’re all living with the consequences of their lies. Now I have to find a way to live with the truth.
Acknowledgements
It takes so much more than just a writer to make a book. Immense thanks are due to the following people:
To my super-agent Felicity Blunt, for her unfailing support and dedication. Felicity, I can’t believe how lucky I am to have you in my corner. Also thanks to the brilliant Melissa Pimentel and the foreign rights team at Curtis Brown.
To my amazing publishing team at Sphere, especially my editors Lucy Dauman and Lucy Malagoni, as well as Cath Burke, Kirsteen Astor, Emma Williams, Thalia Proctor, Sara Talbot, Rachael Hum and the whole team who have worked so h
ard and been so supportive.
To Ognjen Miletic for his patience in the face of my dim questions about all things legal, and going above and beyond with his incredibly helpful suggestions as to how to tell the story I wanted to tell without making any glaring errors. If I have made any such errors, they are mine and mine alone!
To Robin Nickless, for his invaluable advice on police matters. Again, any inconsistencies are entirely down to me.
One of the most surprising and wonderful things about my midlife career change has been the unexpected new friends I have made. It turns out crime writers are the nicest people. To my squad, aka the Ladykillers – Steph Broadribb, Fiona Cummins, Emily Elgar, Caz Frear, Karen Hamilton, Jo Jakeman, Jenny Quintana, Amanda Reynolds, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, Laura Smy and Caz Tudor – for the support, the wine, the lunches and so much more. It means so much to have you as fellow travellers on this crazy journey.
Three Little Lies Page 29