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

by O. C. S. Francis

  Afterwards, we lay feet apart in the bed. There didn’t seem anything left to say. I played the day in my head. Amber’s words before we’d had sex crept in, and her suspicion about Gen. I tried to push the intruding thoughts away, but they nagged at me. I wouldn’t put it past Gen to send someone to spy on me. But they would be someone discreet, and I’d never know about it until I got the divorce letter from her solicitors.

  That thought itched from time to time. When I scratched it, it showed me the financial hole I’d be in without my wife’s money to keep me afloat. It reminded me how tightly I was tied to her.

  But that wasn’t what was really bothering me about the man we had seen. I tried to put the thought out of my mind. The world was silent and dark. I was alone with Amber. Alone for possibly the last time.

  I looked over at her. She had fallen asleep, the sheet pulled lazily across her. So much of her was in shadow, but the white of the sheet over her torso glowed in the moonlight through the window.

  That desire to capture her came back, to possess a part of her forever. Tonight I could do what I was too drunk to do last night.

  I said her name gently, but she didn’t stir. I got very slowly up off the bed and eased towards where I had left my camera on the chest of drawers.

  I took more care with the settings this time, thinking about a shutter speed that wouldn’t shake, an aperture that would capture all of her laid out there on the bed. As I took the first picture of her, her body became in my mind a corpse laid out under a shroud. I shook the thought away and inched towards her.

  I took an edge of the sheet in my hand and pulled it very gently towards me. It crept off her, showing her to me and my camera. She gave the tiniest twitch, and I stopped, heart in my throat, the sheet as far down as the bottom of her thighs. Then she was still again, fast asleep, oblivious.

  I took another photograph. I moved in closer. Another photograph, and another, possessing each part of her in turn. I stepped back to take in all of her again, and in that moment, she was only mine.

  I took another. And another. And another.

  24

  Amber

  A wind is winding up across the meadow, and the horses are running again. A low black cloud crawls along the horizon. Amber walks back home the way she was walking when she read the news about Benny.

  She stops for a moment and looks again at the photos on her phone. She’s never liked looking at pictures of herself and has never been a good photographer’s subject. It is impossible to spend so much time scrutinising other people’s faces through a lens and not feel an unbearable pressure when it is turned on you. These images are especially disconcerting. She looks at herself from outside and across all the years and feels disassociated from her own body and perception.

  Her memories of that night in the cottage do not quite fit the pictures. But it has always been hard to pull apart what she felt during the evening, and what she felt after what happened later that night. The whole trip is stained with how it ended.

  She remembers telling Benny off when he took the picture of her by the window, but it felt more like an annoyance — Benny’s camera as a buzzing insect to be swatted away — than any sort of threat. And her mind was muddled, still caught between her desire for Benny and her worries about the man, the car, the near-miss.

  The pictures look different now. They only conjure a single feeling. Now, when she looks at herself, standing by the window and fast asleep, she feels violated. Violated then by Benny, and violated now by the person sending these photos to her.

  She feels a rising sickness. She looks at the words in the message again.

  What happens next?

  The next thing she remembers is waking, the room cold around her. Benny was passed out on the bed next to her. She got up and pulled on a jumper that lay on one of the chairs and went straight back to bed. Then the next memory, being woken by the noise downstairs in the cottage, and everything that followed from that.

  But what about those sleep-dark times in between? What happened then? She feels tendrils of discomfort, like cold hands on her naked skin.

  She wants to be inside, warm and with Johnny. At the same time, she doesn’t want to be near him. She doesn’t feel she can look at him and keep the truth inside her anymore. Over the years, the lies she has told him have settled and been covered by all the layers of time and their memories together. But now, they are scratching their way to the surface and crawling towards her.

  She leaves the meadow over the bridge and follows the towpath past the boatyard and sailing club. Then left, along a wide track and past the pub, and she is on their lane. She walks past the sporadically placed houses until she gets to the large one clad in scaffolding next to theirs. A piece of sheeting is loose, flapping like the wing of a giant, injured bird. She hurries to her front door, almost tripping on a small pothole, and lets herself in.

  The house is full of music — the hurried syncopation and blaring brass of Buddy Rich. Maybe Johnny doesn’t hear her enter, because she finds him standing in the front room, his hand in his back pocket, as if he has hurriedly got up from the sofa and put his phone away.

  ‘Didn’t expect you back so soon, babe,’ Johnny says. Amber thinks she catches something forced about the easy cheer in his voice, but she shoos the feeling away. ‘How was Kay?’

  ‘Same as ever.’ She doesn’t want to dwell on the conversation she has had. ‘I should get some work done.’

  ‘Yeah, me too. Don’t really feel ready for the session. You’re still cool if I go up to Manchester?’

  ‘Of course I am. Why would you not go?’

  Johnny comes towards her and wraps his arms around her. She feels strangely suffocated by his embrace.

  ‘You sure?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Just checking. You seem a bit…’

  She should smile and brush this off, but she reacts with automatic annoyance. ‘A bit what?’

  ‘Honestly, babe, you seem a bit stressed out.’

  ‘I’m fine, J, I’ve just got a lot to finish up this week so I can get started on the Raine job.’

  His embrace loosens. ‘I thought you said you weren’t going to do it?’

  ‘Yeah, I…’ She has been meaning to tell Johnny about her decision — or a version of it — but couldn’t find the words or the moment. She is glad it’s out in the open now, but at the same time she feels transparent again. ‘Talking to Genevieve before we left, I just… I felt I owed it to her, y’know.’

  ‘You shouldn’t do things because it makes other people feel better,’ he says severely.

  ‘Better give up on the music, then.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Do I? Look, I won’t stay at it long. There’s a lot of donkey work they can hire someone else to do. I just want to get a decent first look at the collection. There’s some really powerful stuff in there.’ She feels the weight of the double meaning in her own words.

  ‘You said you’d rather be taking your own photos.’

  A wave of annoyance washes over her. ‘I know what I said,’ she snaps before she can think about it. She recognises this feeling — a hyperarousal of her anxiety, the internal fight or flight struggle escaping as anger. ‘But I know what I want to do, okay?’

  ‘Sure thing.’ He smiles kindly, but he backs away and holds his hands up.

  ‘J, please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘It’s fine, babe.’ He kisses her on the forehead and, changing the subject, asks what she wants for dinner. He steers her towards takeaway because he knows it’s his turn to cook.

  This sort of diversion is his mechanism to deal with moments like this. He’s always hated confrontation, that’s who he’s always been by nature. He’s relaxed, he’s warm, he can find the humour in anything. There were times, early on when they were together, when she wished he would lean into an argument, not slip away from it. But later, it might have been part of what saved them —
and saved her from the sort of arguments that end in confessions. Arguments that end in endings.

  Amber realises she is scratching the scar on the palm of her hand again.

  25

  Amber

  The paperwork sits on the desk, full of bureaucratic malevolence. Amber is catching up on admin, trying to sort through her receipts and accounts. She thought it might provide a mundane distraction from the messages on her phone, but she can’t focus on it. She gets that same feeling she did when she was sat in school exams, knowing she was failing, the numbers chaotic on the page in front of her. She hears Johnny moving around in the house, metres from her and a hundred miles away.

  She gives up on the admin and attempts to return to her photographic work, but quickly feels oppressed by the obligation she has to deliver. The benefit of the small amount of work she does for the press agency is that it’s quick. There is no time to dwell on an image. Take the shots, pick the best ones, send them in. And when she’s working on features, there is the guiding pressure of collaborating journalists and editors to bring it all together. But her longer-term projects have a habit of festering while her feelings about the images wax and wane.

  She looks through a portrait series she’s in the middle of, for one of the grander Oxford colleges. They’re not portraits of the Master and the dons, or even the students. They are the porters, the cleaners, the gardeners, and all the other people who keep the college ticking over. It’s been a really scrappy year for work, and she was glad of the commission, but looking at some of the photos now, she feels there’s a dishonesty about them. They grant these people a status that their employer doesn’t give them in their day-to-day lives. A PR job. But who is she to criticise anyone for the gap between what they are and what they seem?

  She reads Ed Kapoor’s email again and thinks about calling him, but maybe not to talk about his feature idea. Ed the journalistic bloodhound, Ed who has never met the Raines and doesn’t know anything about Amber’s history with them. Ed and Amber don’t even really socialise, and he has only met Johnny twice. Ed is all work. It’s one of the reasons she likes collaborating with him. He lives in a tidy corner of her world insulated from the messy rest of her life. That and the professional trust they share, the understanding that sometimes you don’t need to ask questions, just follow the other’s lead.

  Amber’s phone buzzes. She jumps like she’s been electrified. She sets it to silent before she even checks who’s messaged.

  It’s just Kay:

  Nice seeing you today. Hope you’re ok. You can talk to me whenever, hope you know that. xx.

  Amber doesn’t reply, and puts the phone down. Then she moves it out of her eyeline. She listens to the house for a moment, making sure she cannot hear Johnny approaching, then fishes her keys out from her bag. She unlocks a sturdy drawer in her desk. It was the drawer she went to the day they came back from the farmhouse. It still doesn’t feel the safest place to hide something, but the lock is strong, and Johnny would never have any reason to look in there. But there is still a moment of anxiety, before she opens the drawer, that the brown envelope with the negatives and pen drive will be gone.

  It is still there, stuffed under various poorly ordered bits of paperwork. She pulls out the pen drive, shoves it quickly into her computer and reformats it, erasing the scanned copy of the images. She is about to take a cigarette lighter to the negatives themselves, but she has the same feeling she had in Benny’s studio, and stops.

  She examines the negatives against the light, feeling that if she looks closely enough, they might be able to tell her a secret. That something in them might betray the person who left them in that box, who copied them, who sent them to Amber.

  But, of course, there are no clues. They just preserve a moment that, if unphotographed, would have disappeared forever. Nothing that has happened since they were taken and developed can help her.

  She shoves them roughly back into the envelope, and the envelope into the drawer. Then she reaches for her phone and stuffs that in there too, so she won’t even catch it out of the corner of her eye.

  It means she doesn’t see the messages from Yvey until a couple of hours later, when she gingerly fishes the phone out again. It’s a short string of single lines — hitting send after every thought in that unexamined way. Not like the slow, overanalytical manner in which Amber approaches every communication.

  She can hear Yvey’s voice in the girl’s thread, saying how much she enjoyed meeting Amber, and could they hang out the next time she is in Oxford? It makes her smile initially, but then gives rise to an uneasiness she cannot quite pin down. Perhaps it is the teenaged gush of the messages, the eagerness to be liked and approved of, and the slightest hint of infatuation with an older mentor. But she is projecting again.

  Amber is glad she didn’t have text messages as a teenager. She is glad, in fact, that there weren’t mobile phones or social media at all when she was growing up, with that indelible mark left on the internet from every bad opinion and misjudged joke. Even 2001 was a different age for that, her life not yet a trail of digital footprints. She wonders if these days she’d be able to conduct an affair like she did back then, or whether technology would betray her.

  Amber looks again at Yvey’s messages, and the girl’s uncertainty about Genevieve’s theory of Benny’s death comes back to her.

  She messages Yvey back, thinking hard about what words to use. She is friendly, but a little formal, and non-committal. Then she turns off the phone. As the screen goes black, she can imagine for a moment that if she never turns it on again, she can be protected from all this. Her secrets will stay hidden. The sender of the messages will just disappear.

  Before long, she gives up on her work, closes everything down and goes to drink tea in the kitchen in silence. Time slides by underneath her until Johnny comes into the kitchen carrying bags of takeaway triumphantly, as if they are the heads of vanquished foes, shouting, ‘Tonight we feast!’

  Silly, irrepressible, cheerful Johnny. She sometimes thinks she has married a permanent teenager, but wouldn’t have it any other way.

  I don’t deserve you, my love, she says silently to herself. I don’t think I ever have.

  She persuades him they should eat in front of Netflix so she doesn’t have to try to make conversation, then crawls to bed early. She pretends to be asleep when he comes in, but she feels a million miles from it. She is just lying there, rigid, hyper-aware of her heartbeat, her breathing and the strange popcorn of the baby’s movements inside her. When unconsciousness finally creeps across her, she dreams, and when the dream ends, it throws her into the strongest sleep paralysis she has had in years. Awake, but unable to move, her whole body crushed and bound. She wrenches herself from it and blinks at the dark room.

  She plays the familiar dream back to herself. She is in the open, empty, colourless space. She is alone apart from the other figure in the distance. But there is something different. The figure is not following her. She is following them. And she feels something in the dream very strongly. She knows that the person she is following is in danger. She is certain that, even against her own intention, she is going to cause them harm.

  26

  Amber

  For a moment when she wakes, everything is fine. Her mind is blank of all the fears of the previous days. She is cosy in her duvet and can hear music. A warm, familiar smell is wafting up from the kitchen.

  Then it all comes rushing at her. She feels her heart jump and run. Her neck is hot as the blood surges, and she feels queasy. Even the smell in her nostrils doesn’t feel right — as if it’s something burning.

  Disoriented, she reaches for her phone. Where is it? And where is Johnny? She lurches out of bed and runs down the stairs. He is in the kitchen, calmly flipping bacon in the pan, peering into a saucepan where eggs are poaching. And her phone is just where she left it before she went to bed. Switched off on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Morning, babe. Good timing. Thought I�
�d make us a proper breakfast.’

  ‘It’s Tuesday.’ Amber’s mind is flipping between the sick panic of what she felt upstairs and the comfort of everything she can see in front of her.

  ‘I can’t make my wonderful wife her favourite breakfast on a Tuesday?’

  He is right. It is her favourite. It’s perfect. Bacon with the fat trimmed off and left to crisp up in the pan, slightly hard poached eggs with bread so fresh he must have snuck out early to go and get it, slices of avocado and tomato. And she clocks now what the music is — it’s a Spotify playlist that they’ve each added tracks to over the years in a game of musical Consequences.

  For a few moments, as they sit and eat in companionable silence, everything is okay again. But she feels queasy soon after finishing. She manages to wait until Johnny is playing his keyboard loudly in his foam-soundproofed studio to rush into the bathroom and vomit.

  She brushes her teeth furiously to take the taste out of her mouth and cover any hint on her breath that Johnny might detect. But she knows he will have already noticed something is wrong. And before long, he will ask her again about it. He will dig deeper, not just try to patch over the spaces it is leaving between them. And she will have to lie to him again.

  The hardest lies to tell are pure invention. The easiest ones are malleable on the outside but with a hard centre of truth. They are not paintings; they are doctored photographs. They work because you can half-believe them yourself.