Beautiful Liars_a gripping thriller about friendship, dark secrets and bitter betrayal

by Isabel Ashdown

  Sometimes, when I was very young, my mother would inform my father that she needed some ‘alone time’. There was no explanation required, for it invariably followed several days of oppressive sadness in our home, a wordless building of uncertainty, not unlike the roiling pressure of a thunderstorm in waiting. I have no memories of Dad railing against the demand, and, far from feeling rejected by these banishments, I would feel an inward excitement, anticipating an adventure of sorts on the horizon. Over the years, Dad and I visited all sorts of places for these mini-breaks, perhaps two or three times a year, free to leave on a whim, as a family unrestricted by the timetable of conventional education. It was at times like these that I truly valued the commitment my parents had made in home-schooling me, and in my father’s good company I didn’t miss the presence of other children even slightly. In fine weather we would camp where the walking was good – in the Lake District, the Highlands, the Pembroke coast, the South Downs Way. It seemed to me that Dad was excellent in a crisis, adept at thinking on his feet, because whenever Mum’s demands were voiced, he was ready, unfazed, and within hours we’d be bundling our tent and sleeping bags into the back of his van and heading on our way – journeying off to wheresoever he chose for us on that occasion.

  One of my favourite places was Uncle Richard’s smallholding near Burton, a ramshackle cottage in the countryside, set within an unkempt paddock on which he kept a donkey, two alpacas, a pair of pigs (pets, not bacon, he assured me) and more free-running hens than I ever managed to count. Uncle Richard had always lived alone and Dad said his house was ‘a health hazard’, so we would pitch our tent facing out towards the open fields, venturing inside only as far as the downstairs bathroom for our hasty ablutions morning and night. By day we would drive out to explore new hill walks, stopping en route at the village bakery for filled rolls and a sweet treat to picnic on, returning by nightfall to build the campfire and wrap up for an evening outdoors with Uncle Richard. Dad cooked over the open fire or a camping stove, and my uncle seemed always glad to join us, gleefully confiding that the only time he ate a square meal was when we came to visit. ‘What do you eat when we’re not here?’ I asked him one white misty morning in May time, as my dad served up bacon and eggs and sweet, milky tea. We were sitting around the camping stove watching the sun’s steady rise over the fields and hills, on faded canvas chairs that had soaked up the early dew. ‘Spaghetti hoops on toast,’ Uncle Richard had replied, and he’d laughed so uproariously that we couldn’t help but join in.

  When we returned from our travels, Mum would be a changed woman, transformed by her ‘alone time’. The smell of her baking was the thing I looked forward to the most. She’d always go to great trouble for our homecoming meal, and as we entered the hallway in our three-day-old clothes and unkempt hair, she’d fuss around us, kissing our foreheads and telling us to take baths before supper. It was like entering an entirely different home, a parallel universe of sorts, and I grew to love the going away for the sheer joy of the coming home. This home was a bright place, where my mother was more beautiful than the last time I saw her, a place where the colours were sharper, the passage of air smoother in my lungs.

  As a grown woman, I understand my mother’s need for ‘alone time’. Perhaps, after all, there’s a little of her in me. Much as I would like to have friends in my life, I too find it hard to be around people for anything more than short periods of time. Before long, the spectre of anxiety rears up inside me, the self-doubt whispering in my ear. Even when people are faultlessly kind to me I wonder: do they mean it? Behind their smiling eyes, are they actually mocking me? Are they thinking up horrible words to use against me? I’m not being hysterical when I consider these things, because they’re words I’ve heard before, insults I’ve taken, wounds I’ve had inflicted – not just from those early playground taunts but, more recently, from the cruel keyboards of chat-room trolls and haters. Fatty. Loser. Ugly bitch. It’s why I’ll never again use my real profile picture or name when interacting online, instead employing the reassuring mask of a cartoon avatar and a well-chosen pseudonym, something I can shut down at a moment’s notice if the situation demands it. Online, I can be whoever I want to be – Ruby-Boo, Susi-Lee, Marilyn2000, Sunny-Kay. I’ve tried so many names out, I’ve lost count! Online, I can interact with others on level footing, without the prejudice so readily aimed at the less-than-beautiful. Beautiful people, like Martha and Juliet and Liv, have no idea what the world feels like to people like me. No idea at all.

  Today I try out ‘DebbieT’ for size. I create a new profile, and within minutes I’m logging on to ‘MisPer’, a chat room dedicated to missing persons and their families. I’ve done this kind of thing many times before, so I know exactly what to do, exactly how to pitch it to get fellow users on my side. I click on the tab that allows me to start a new thread.

  Hi, I’m Debbie and I’m a MisPer newbie! I hope someone out there can help me? I’m looking for sixty-five-year-old David Crown, last seen in Hackney in January 2000. If anyone has any information regarding David and his whereabouts, I’d love to hear about it. I’m an old friend, and I know it would mean the world to David’s family to hear news of him. I’ve included a picture taken around the time he was last seen, when he was a group leader for Square Wheels charity. Any help or advice from you lovely MisPer peeps would be greatly appreciated – thank you! Xxxx

  There now, I think happily as I post the thread. There. I’m helping. With any luck I’ll be able to come back with some useful information in a day or two. I know I should probably stop all this Liv business right now, but perhaps if I can give Martha something new to focus on she might stick with me a while longer. Ignoring the growing number of impatient work emails that are now clogging my inbox, I decide to shave my underarms with the new razors I ordered along with my hair dye. I need to kill a bit of time before I log on again, and I want to be fresh for when Carl comes later in the week.

  Six hours later I log on to MisPer again, this time using another new profile ‘CrownieD’, claiming to be the missing man himself. I just need to get a good conversation going between Debbie and Crownie and then, somehow, I’ll pass the whole thing over to Martha.

  There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing, I’m quite certain. I’ve been reading and re-reading the articles about Juliet’s disappearance, and last night I sat studying the photographs of David Crown for several hours. He’s got such a kind face, and his life’s work was a testament to his goodness, and I’m more convinced than ever that he’s innocent of everything they say. Martha, the silly billy, is barking up the wrong tree, and if I can show her the error of her ways through these MisPer conversations, then I’ll be doing her a service. I’ll be doing everyone a service.

  Marvelling at the smooth texture of my freshly shaved armpits, I pull on my nightie and go to bed, imagining how it will feel to be interviewed by the newspapers: the upstanding citizen who saved an innocent man from a grave miscarriage of justice.

  15. Martha

  This afternoon Juney phoned to tell Martha that she’d finally managed to get hold of David Crown’s wife, Janet, and a meeting has been set up for her and Toby to visit tomorrow morning. They already know that she’s still living in the same house, as is so often the way in cases of missing persons, when families are fearful of moving away lest their loved one returns and finds them gone.

  After preparing a set of questions for Mrs Crown, Martha gets to bed late, and she lies awake for a long time, her mind racing as she tracks back over the years, trying again to visualise the places of her youth. Eventually, sleep eluding her, she gives up and heads to the kitchen to make a cup of cocoa. She can’t quite work out where the Crowns’ home is in relation to where she had lived at the time, and while the milk is warming she fetches a battered box from the top of her wardrobe, hoping to find an old street map she remembers picking up years back. Inside the box are all sorts of odd things, a dwindling collection of keepsakes that have accompanied her from place to
place over the years, seldom looked at, almost forgotten. There are no photo albums, but a dozen or more Kodak photo wallets containing pictures from the early eighties through to the end of 1999. She skips past the early childhood photos, going straight to the ones that might contain pictures of Liv and Juliet and her, though she knows there won’t be many. Liv was the one usually snapping the photographs; Martha could barely afford the film, let alone the processing costs. She picks out a picture of the three of them, a pre-mobile selfie, their faces not quite in frame, squinting against the sunlight. Liv’s blue eyes shine so brightly that they look unreal against her dark skin, and Martha recalls a time when Liv had a stand-up row with Miss Khan in Year Ten after the teacher had tried to give her a demerit point for wearing coloured contact lenses to school. Another is a picture of the three of them together in Juliet’s back garden, probably taken by Tom or one of her parents. They’re in school uniform, maybe aged fourteen or fifteen, Liv with her tie wrapped around her forehead, her socks pulled high, striking a dumb pose, her tongue pushed down between her teeth and lower lip. Juliet is blowing a kiss at the camera and Martha is bent double, laughing. There’s a jug of orange squash on the garden table behind them, and a tray of bourbon biscuits. She’d forgotten how often they were there. It was like a second home to Martha, wasn’t it?

  In contrast to Juliet’s comfortable home, Martha’s family lived in Stanley House, a block of flats within a wider warren of social housing that would some years later be razed to the ground following safety concerns. By the time the Benns had moved in, the area had already been classified a ‘problem estate’, with a good number of the buildings emptied for refurbishment, meaning direct neighbours were scarce and community spirit virtually absent. To young Martha, who had come from a ‘nice’ street half a mile away, the place appeared derelict, a concrete holding tank for those without choice. It was a shock, a slap of shame that never quite left her, after their own terraced house was repossessed, her parents having defaulted once too often on the mortgage repayments. ‘But isn’t your dad a copper?’ Martha was asked by schoolfriends more times than she’d care to recall. ‘Surely he can afford a better place than Stanley House?’

  Stanley House was meant to be a temporary stay, a ‘halfway measure’ while they got back on their feet again, while they ‘sorted stuff out.’ ‘Dad will get a promotion soon,’ Mum would tell her in the early days, her eyes spongy with crying. ‘And I’ll find something more up my street. Things will get better.’ But halfway morphed into full-stop over the ten years that Martha lived there, and in all that time she never viewed it as home. Stanley House was the hole Martha’s family disappeared down, and she cited their arrival there as the beginning of their end. It was there that her mother descended further into despair and her father nurtured his rage at his enforced early retirement from the police force. It was a place of chaos and uncertainty, of discomfort and lack. Ultimately it was the place Mum had run from. Are there any good memories from that time? Martha wonders. Any at all? She lies in her large bed, eyes anchored to the neon of her digital clock, straining to remember, when a picture comes to her, clear as a film scene, long forgotten: Liv, Juliet and her, stretched out beneath the stars on the flat roof of Stanley House, the heavy cloak of summer draped across the night. What had they been doing there, when Martha never brought friends home, never exposing herself to the shame within? Why were they there? Of course, she realises now. She’d had the flat to herself.

  They were just sixteen, and Martha’s mum had left in the spring, packing her bags and vanishing during school hours, never to return. She’d returned home to Scotland, she later had the goodness to tell Martha via a crappy postcard of the Forth Bridge, and she wouldn’t be coming home. Your dad and I are no good for each other, she’d written, and Martha had hated her for her cowardly words. You’re happy there, she wrote, by way of justifying why she hadn’t taken her daughter too, and Martha wondered exactly what planet her mother had been living on for the past few years. Happy?

  Fuck her, had been Martha’s overriding emotion, an emotion that got her through the toughest of times, when all she really wanted was her mother back. Not once did she allow herself to imagine Mum’s new life in the Scottish borders; not once did she allow herself to imagine a different place for herself. Her mother’s departure was a blessed relief, she told herself. She was a waste of space. One parent like that was enough, Martha reasoned as she hardened her shell. But two? No one should have to handle two drunks in so small a family.

  That starlit evening on the rooftop of Stanley House was a once-only moment in time, a simple day and night of joy and laughter, of sunbathing and secrets and dreamless sleep. Liv and Juliet had arrived in the afternoon, bringing with them sleeping bags, music, Bacardi Breezers and crisps. For the entire morning before they arrived, Martha had cleaned, prising open the rusted metal windows to air the damp flat, scrubbing and bleaching the toilet bowl and stained sinks, running a wet cloth over every city-blackened surface her friends were likely to see. She brushed and dusted and tidied and polished, and, even though she knew it still looked like a shitty little flat in a shitty estate, Martha thought the place had never looked or smelled better.

  But how was it she had come to be having her friends over? Where was her dad? Ah, yes. Her father had been admitted to hospital the night before, having taken a knife in his side while in pursuit of a thief. At least that was what he said in front of his stony-faced senior officer who was preparing to leave as Martha arrived. ‘It’s not life-threatening,’ the nurse told her, ‘but he’s lost blood and he needs to stay in another night.’ His face against the starched hospital pillow had been a lifeless shade of grey, and for a moment, before he’d opened his eyes and seen her there, she’d really believed him to be dead. ‘Bad luck,’ he called it when his eyes focused on hers, when he turned a blind eye to the unspilled tears she was fighting to contain. Pissed, more like, was her silent verdict, the words held captive behind clenched teeth. She had cycled away beneath a gathering cloud of loneliness, back home to an empty flat, where she’d slept on the sofa, fearful of the future, common sense telling her that this night must surely mark the end of her father’s career with the police.

  That night on the roof, Martha knows, she drank until she passed out, and the three of them slept beneath the stars, the summer warmth of their friendship strong enough to keep the cold away. Did Liv and Jules ever suspect the truth about her father’s absence? Did they ever suspect her of lying? Probably, Martha thinks now, as she places the photographs back in the box, returning it to the darkness of the wardrobe. Because that’s what true friends do: they recognise the lies that are important to you, and they let them slide.

  When Martha and Toby knock on Janet Crown’s door, they are shocked by the figure who answers. Mrs Crown is tall but slight, dressed in a crimson dressing gown and silk-screen-printed headscarf, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes show her to be a woman concerned with more than just the whereabouts of her husband. Her cheekbones are chiselled, and Martha can tell she was once beautiful, but now Janet Crown looks like a woman close to death. A painfully thin slick of bright red lipstick slashes across her mouth, and her hairless eyebrows appear drawn in with a shaky hand.

  ‘Come,’ she says with an elegant drift of her hand, leading them through her neatly conservative home, out to a small extension at the rear of the house, a sun-room furnished with wicker chairs and an abundance of glossy hanging plants. There’s a hint of cigarette smoke and mint in the air. Martha notices the terracotta ashtray on the garden table just beyond the glass door, a single lipstick-stained butt upended in its centre. On the wicker coffee table is an open lacquered box containing a stack of old postcards, the top one picturing the Eiffel Tower at night, beside which is a cigarette packet and a large silver lighter, the kind you might see in old movies. Unsmiling, Mrs Crown gestures for Martha and Toby to take a seat, and Martha is unsure whether her cool reception is a sign of resistance or upset.
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br />   ‘We’ll sit out here, if you don’t mind,’ she says, releasing a long, slow breath as she lowers herself into her own seat, placing her arms lightly on the wicker side rests. ‘It’s warmer. Since I’ve been ill, you know.’

  Martha sits forward, elbows on knees. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs Crown. May I call you Janet?’

  Janet Crown neither agrees nor objects, but merely raises her hand, fingers poised to join thumb and third finger in the unconscious pose of a smoker. ‘I understand you’ve been trying to contact me for a while now? Yes, I’m sorry I’ve been so impossible to get hold of. I don’t keep a mobile phone, and they only released me from hospital a few days ago. Cancer, dear,’ she says, dropping her voice to a whisper, as though her illness were some great scandal. ‘Isn’t it always, these days? Cancer, cancer, cancer. It’s everywhere.’ Janet addresses all this towards Martha, to the exclusion of Toby, who shifts in his seat, unaccustomed to being overlooked.

  ‘How is the treatment going?’ he asks, and Janet swivels her eyes towards him, as though surprised to see him there at all.

  After a beat, she replies. ‘Who knows? I’m a fairly hopeless case, if the truth be known. Apparently I’m tight within in its terminal grip!’ She laughs at this, her face at once radiant, and Toby starts in his seat, rattled. ‘Oh, ignore me!’ she says, and she smooths the velvet of her gown over the lengths of her skeletal thighs, easing out the material’s wrinkles.

  ‘Mrs Crown – Janet,’ Toby says, opening up his notebook, obviously trying to regain his footing. ‘I think our researcher explained on the phone why we wanted to meet up like this?’