All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end

by O. C. S. Francis

  Then Amber places the feeling she had when she arrived — the sense of familiarity to this place. She quickly scrolls through EV’s images, and now she can see in the pictures fragments of the farmhouse and grounds. She scrolls back up to the latest post, one she hadn’t seen before. It is taken at night in the studio clearing. The lights of the studio are full on, and the magic glass is open. The camera moves around the clearing in a sweeping motion, accelerating and decelerating in bursts. The shot is overexposed so the studio is white-bright at the centre of the image. Like a lighthouse, a burning beacon in the darkness.

  9

  Amber

  Yvey sits cross-legged on the floor, looking out at the clearing, throwing questions at Amber as she sorts through another box file. How did she get started in photography? What advice does she have? Should Yvey stick with going to university? Should she take a year out and go to art school?

  Amber finds herself not able to give advice. In part because of how changed her professional world is from when she started, but mainly because her thoughts keep looping round to when she left college and Benny became her mentor, then her lover. And about how her career was nearly destroyed before it had begun by her mental collapse after the end of their affair. And how Genevieve’s unwitting generosity was part of her salvation.

  She tries throwing the questions back at Yvey, asking what she enjoys about her studies. She is in her final year at school, eighteen in the summer. But Yvey doesn’t much want to dwell on talk of her current school, which she only moved to last year. She makes a glancing reference to the move being unexpected, and Amber detects something in her voice that implies it was against her will, the result of something she doesn’t want to talk about.

  Finally, stuttering and uncertain, Yvey asks about Benny. Amber knows these questions have been coming. She knows this girl might want to connect with someone who knew her father.

  ‘What was my dad like when you knew him?’

  Unlike when she looks at Genevieve, Amber can see the grief in Yvey’s eyes. She remembers being Yvey’s age, only a few years after she lost her own father. Almost the age she was when she met Johnny. Just a few years younger than when she was with Benny.

  That thought feels shocking. Yvey seems still so much like a child. But Amber remembers how mature she felt she was at that age. How finally confident that she was ready for the world. It felt like such a time of possibility. Before everything had narrowed, broken her a little.

  ‘Your dad was…’ She struggles to find the right answer. She wants to be able to speak honestly, but is caught between two sentiments. She wants to be kind to Yvey, and to be able to talk about the talent and charm Benny had. Because despite everything, she can still make herself remember those things.

  But the other feeling is there too, with its different set of answers. She wants to warn Yvey against men like her father. She wants Yvey to understand that sometimes you have to know the hard truth about the people you love.

  Amber sticks to her script. She tells the simple story she tells anyone who asks about her and Benny: about his mentorship, about the generosity of the Bayard Foundation, about how they gradually lost touch. She has got it down pat. But it still hurts a little to lie to Yvey.

  ‘When did you see him last?’ Yvey asks.

  ‘Years ago.’

  Yvey looks disheartened, as if she had hoped that Amber might be able to give her something else, something recent, to hold onto. As if there are bits of Benny’s memory scattered around the world, and she can collect them. Amber knows the feeling; she remembers that part of grief.

  ‘I’m really sorry. I wish there was something I could say.’

  ‘S’okay. I know you get it. Your dad died when you were young, didn’t he?’

  The question is jarring. ‘Yes, how did you know?’

  ‘Uh… dunno. I read it in a profile of you, I think.’

  Amber doesn’t remember talking about it publicly, but maybe the fact made it into someone’s write-up. Not that she has given an interview in years. Her years of bright young promise feel a long way behind her.

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He drowned,’ Amber says simply, and the feeling of that day is right there in the room with her. It was one of those childhood holidays that Amber was too old for. She didn’t want to go to Cornwall with her bickering parents. She wanted to be with her mates.

  She remembers not blaming her dad for going swimming rather than sitting on the beach being nagged. She had begun to suspect he only took up triathlon to have more time away from her mum. They didn’t hate each other, but they didn’t love each other either. They had married too young. They were staying together for the sake of the children, Amber could already see that. But she was fourteen; her brother was eleven. Her parents didn’t need to do that. She just wished they would end it, go their separate ways. She loved them both all the same, especially her dad. His size and strength. His compassion. His determination.

  He was a good swimmer, confident in the sea. He knew what he was doing when he went out beyond the shallow of the bay, past the craggy headland. He wouldn’t have put his life in danger like that. He wouldn’t leave her like that.

  But they said he must have underestimated the tide.

  She remembers running up and down the beach, calling out at the sea. Then shouting, then screaming. The sky seemed to fall in on her, the rocks around tumble and crush her.

  They didn’t find his body for three days.

  And the memory mingles now with a later one. This time she is on the ocean herself, tipping in a small boat in heavy darkness. Her hand is still bleeding into the makeshift bandage she has wrapped around it. She is keeping her eyes on the dark horizon. She is being sick over the side into the black water. She knows she has to go through with it, but she still can’t bring herself to look down into the boat.

  Yvey’s voice cuts into the memories. ‘I’m sorry to bring it up. I just thought you were someone I could talk to about this. I’m sorry, it’s just I miss my dad and…’ She sniffs back tears and stands up with a quick spring of the legs.

  ‘It’s okay. I understand, I really do. I know you want to be able to change what happened. I know you’re probably angry.’

  ‘Dad was sick, you know. He tried to pretend he wasn’t. But I know it was really bad.’

  ‘Sick?’

  Yvey doesn’t answer. She is looking at a faint shape moving behind one of the panes of glass that Amber has switched to opaque to block out the glare. The glass slides back a little way, and Mika comes in.

  Was he dying? Amber wants to ask Yvey. She sees Benny in her mind, not as she remembers him, but in that last interview. Physically reduced, his voice tired and cracking.

  Yvey is standing now, looking away from Mika. They don’t say anything to each other. It’s as if they can’t even make eye contact, just as Mika was with Yvey’s mother. Yvey gives Amber a thin smile and slips out into the clearing.

  Amber goes to the glass and watches as Yvey walks away. The silver birches around the entrance to the tunnel through the woods stand like the ghosts of trees. Yvey disappears into them, back along the path to the house.

  10

  Amber

  Johnny is holding Amber’s hand as they walk between the trees. The ground underfoot is soft and mulchy. They come to the edge of the beeches and find a small hut surrounded by stacks of wood ready for chopping with a heavy old axe leaning against the logs. They stand in the slanting sun, their silhouettes stretching out with the trees onto the open field.

  Johnny arrived late in the afternoon, driving one of those rental cars you book on an app, and Sam showed them both to their bedroom. Johnny sat on the edge of the bed and bounced a few times, but it didn’t creak. Then he nosed around the en suite, which was full of huge mirrors and a big bath. He came out, making his eyebrows dance at Amber. He grabbed her for a kiss, which lengthened and deepened. Then she pulled back.

  ‘Sorry, you probably need to g
et back to work.’

  ‘No, let’s just go for a walk.’ She’d had enough of craning over negatives. Her back was sore, and she was starting to get a headache. She did want to be with Johnny, just not somewhere she could feel Benny’s shadow falling across her. So they walked the extent of the grounds and ended up at the edge of the beech wood.

  Watching their shapes in the sun, she squeezes his hand. Then she pushes her body into his, letting him wrap himself around her.

  ‘I love you, Johnny Copeland,’ she says.

  ‘I love you too, Amber Ridley,’ he replies, reciting his half of their little in-joke about their names. It had never occurred to either of them that Amber should change her name when they were married, but members of their family still sent letters to Mr and Mrs Copeland.

  ‘How is Lump?’

  ‘Lump is fine.’

  ‘Are we really going with Lump?’ says Johnny, popping the p of the word. ‘Can’t we do better than Lump?’

  Amber doesn’t answer, just hugs Johnny tightly. She knows the dehumanisation of her pregnancy is a survival mechanism. They don’t even know the sex of the baby; they have chosen not to. She has chosen not to. Johnny would have been happy to know. He says he doesn’t mind what it is, but Amber knows he wants a boy. He probably wants at least three boys so he can start a band, but it’s a little too late for that.

  Being a dad is something Johnny has always craved. More than Amber craves motherhood, she sometimes suspects. Maybe her desire for a child has been chipped away at, failure after failure. But if the life inside her makes her fear as much as hope, with each passing day it has brought her closer to Johnny. She is glad they have stuck at it despite her doubts.

  She saw what happened to her parents, marrying young, marrying too soon. She hadn’t wanted to be like them — to stick with the first man she fell in love with when she was barely twenty. But she had. She sometimes wishes she met Johnny ten years later. Then she could have delayed falling for him, and avoided betraying him. Even if the betrayal, and everything that flowed from it, was what made her realise just how much she loved him.

  ‘How’s the archive?’ asks Johnny, sensing her reluctance to talk about the baby.

  ‘It’s interesting. I’m not sure I’ll take the job — I’d rather be taking my own photos than sorting someone else’s.’

  ‘Okay,’ Johnny says simply, as if he has decided not to fight her about this. ‘There’ll be other work.’

  She feels relief and is decided. She’ll do what she can this weekend, give Genevieve some initial thoughts, recommend someone else for the job, and that will be the end of it. This will be the last time she has to think about Benedict Raine.

  ‘I’d like to do a little more this evening. Then I’ll come in for dinner. There’s a grand piano in the house. I’m sure Genevieve wouldn’t mind if you…’

  ‘I found it. Sexy little Bosendorfer.’ He grins and wiggles his fingers.

  They walk back to the clearing together, and Johnny heads down the tunnel of trees towards the house. The path is lit now, a line of LED lights along the ground snaking into the thicket.

  Mika is leaving the studio as Amber comes in, togged up in his bike leathers.

  ‘Cool to meet you, yeah,’ he says. ‘You coming again?’

  ‘Not sure. Probably not. Unlikely before you’re off.’

  ‘Well, good luck, yeah. Don’t let Genevieve be too much of a bitch to you, will you?’

  And he slips out through the crack in the glass, bouncing his helmet in his hand.

  Amber sits back down at the table with the lightbox where she has been reviewing negatives. She has a file open she’d been working on when Johnny arrived. It’s really early material, from when Benny was just starting out in the late seventies, and a lot of the negatives are in poor condition. But there’s a beautifully bleak sequence of a vanished English industrial landscape: grime and soot and hard, lined faces. And another from a similar period taken in Belfast. Kids playing feet from the rifles of British soldiers. Angry young men throwing rocks and bottles. Hard eyes staring out from under balaclavas.

  She goes down another layer of envelopes in the box. There is a free-floating strip of negatives sandwiched between envelopes. She picks them out.

  Immediately it is clear these are not like the others. They are not as old and of a different film stock. Black and white, Ilford 3200. A fast film: one you would use for shooting in low light.

  Holding the strip up to the light, Amber can see it’s from the beginning of a roll of film, partially blacked out, with only two and a half clear frames. She lays it out on the lightbox and bends over it with the magnifier. The first image is unclear, half-burnt out by exposure outside the camera. It looks like the blur of someone’s hand half-covering the lens. The owner of the hand is not in focus, indistinct in the background.

  The next two are clearer.

  She feels her breath tighten as she sees what they are. She doesn’t want to believe it. She glances around her. The studio is silent and empty. She takes the strip of negatives to the scanner and loads it in. The machine clicks and whirrs, gives a small beep, and the images materialise on the monitor.

  There are two pictures, almost identical. They are of a figure sitting in profile, framed in the rectangle of an open sliding door. It is a woman holding a wine glass. Even in negative Amber can see who it is.

  Blood swirls in her ears. Her chest is constricted.

  The photos are of Amber sitting outside the cottage by the sea, framed in the open doorway.

  Just some photos of her, she tells herself. That’s all they are. A couple of lost pictures in the wrong box, that’s all. They don’t say much, not on their own. Not without the rest of the film.

  The rest of the film.

  She plunges back into the box file, emptying its contents out onto the table. She opens every envelope, holds every strip up to the light. But there is nothing more.

  She stands and looks out into the clearing. The light is fading fast. She flicks the switches, turning the remaining transparent windows to opaque, as if she can shut out the world. As if she can imprison in here all the secrets that these photos hold. Not just what they show, but what came next.

  11

  Benny

  Saturday, 10 November 2001

  I drank too much that first night to do what I’d planned. We stumbled upstairs and had hungry, clumsy sex, as if we had only freshly discovered each other’s bodies, but were losing faith in our own.

  I wasn’t in bad shape back then, but I knew I couldn’t match that lithe hardness I had seen in Johnny Copeland. And I could sometimes sense Amber’s disappointment in my body. It was something she could get past, not embrace. Her body, I wanted every piece of that.

  I slept in very late the next day. I was shattered and only just letting myself acknowledge that. I had been in Afghanistan for weeks. Shells and IEDs were still going off in my dreams. I woke and came downstairs to find Amber padding around in my slippers and one of my shirts.

  ‘Fetching.’

  ‘This floor is cold.’

  I kissed her and ran my hands up under her shirt. She let them stay there for a little while, then slipped away from me.

  I remembered then the first thing she had said to me that had crossed the line, that had confirmed that we were going to be more than friends. I love your hands, she had said, watching them move as I spoke. It was late and we were drunk. Nothing else happened that night. Nothing happened for weeks after that night. But I knew then that it would.

  ‘I should get dressed.’ She trotted upstairs, and I went to the window, watching the ripple of the water caress the sand.

  It was a cold, still day, the air hazy and damp. We stayed in the cottage till it started to clear, then drove along the coast to where my face was a little less familiar. Amber decked herself out in one of those furry-hooded parkas, so her face was buried in there whenever we were outside. It was a shame, I wanted to look at it more. We found a
dreary little café and had tea and cake. I felt as if we were somewhere back in time, conducting a black-and-white affair from an old film.

  We walked a little way inland and found the ruins of an old chapel. A young family was there, and a toddler ran up and down the mossy ground, her shadow flickering in and out of the pools of light cast by the sun streaming through the empty windows. I had started to wonder if I would ever have children. Gen had never really shown much interest in the idea. I could imagine having them with Amber.

  We made our way across fields back to the beach. A pair of skeletal horses slouched away from us. It was cuttingly cold as we stomped down through the marram grass onto the beach, and Amber huddled into me. The hazy sun was setting in a grainy sky, but there seemed to be no colour to it. The afternoon existed in monochrome, the sands stretching out with intermittent stripes of the groynes reaching in from the sea.

  I felt Amber pull away from me a little. She was craning her neck to look back in the direction we had come from. A couple of hundred yards back from us was the silhouette of a man, the dying sun over his shoulder. I felt Amber shudder, and she pressed into me again.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Dunno. I thought… nah, doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What?’

  She looked back over her shoulder, and I did the same. The figure wasn’t there anymore, just the long grey beach, the rippling dune grass, and a piece of stray plastic billowing in a gust of wind.

  ‘Can we go back now?’ said Amber.

  We turned off the beach and walked back along a sandy path, looking for a different route back to the car park. The path ended in a track, which then opened up into the road. I suggested we retrace our steps rather than walking along a road in the gloaming. I started to turn back, but Amber slipped her hand out of mine and went on forwards.