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

by O. C. S. Francis

  ‘No, fine, normal. It’s all been normal.’ Normal. Nothing feels normal anymore.

  ‘And is everything else all right… at home, work and so on?’ She can see the squint in the doctor’s eyes, as if he has been able to read a piece of her mind with his ultrasound probe. ‘Can I ask where Dad is tonight? Your notes said…’

  She cuts him off. ‘He’s away for work.’

  But she feels again that the doctor doesn’t fully believe the story she has concocted about the fall — putting out the bins and tripping in the dark. And why would he? She feels that lunatic edge to her thought again. ‘Look, it’s all fine. I’m sorry if I overreacted.’

  ‘No, you did the right thing.’

  Amber tries to tell him again about the strange pains and vigorous movement she’d been feeling before the fall, and how she took the lack of pain afterwards as a bad omen. She gets muddled in her words and feels foolish.

  ‘The sensations you’re describing sound very normal.’ He gives a small frown. ‘But perhaps it’s worth booking you in for a routine follow-up. And in the meantime, perhaps keeping a diary of movement and any pains might be helpful. But the main thing now is that…’ He starts to make a sh shape with his mouth, but stops himself. ‘Baby’s fine.’

  But she’s already heard it. She’s already heard him say She’s fine. A daughter. And she doesn’t mind that she knows. She is glad. She clings onto this new thought, and another wave of relief floods over her. It makes her start talking at speed about how long it has taken for her to get to this point, how frightened she is of losing the baby.

  The doctor listens, giving reassuring nods, but she can tell his attention is already elsewhere, that he has other emergencies that require him. She feels small and alone again, her own crisis just a tiny wave in a great storm of humanity.

  As she walks out of the hospital, a blurred line of sunrise is showing at the edge of the sky, like light that has bled through the cracks of an old camera onto a roll of film. She checks her phone, hoping to see some signal from Yvey that she has got home safely, but there is nothing. In the cab she sends her a brief message:

  Everything fine here. Thank you for waiting with me. Hope you got home. A.

  The words feel heavy with everything unsaid.

  The reply doesn’t come through until she is letting herself into her house. It feels even more perfunctory and evasive than her own message.

  thanks am home please don’t tell mum

  Amber goes to bed and wraps her duvet around herself, thinking of Johnny’s arms enfolding her like great branches. She sobs and does not sleep.

  After a rain-soaked night, it is a clear morning. The sun comes up and strikes her window, pushing shards of light through the gap in the curtains. She goes down to the kitchen and makes strong, real coffee. The pot feels heavy in her hand.

  She sits looking out of the kitchen window. She knows it is early, and Johnny will be sleeping off his hangover, but she calls him anyway. He answers groggily at first, but realising it is Amber, a note of bewildered alarm comes into his voice.

  ‘It’s fine, J, everything’s fine. I just didn’t sleep well. I missed you. I wanted to hear your voice.’

  ‘Missed you too, babe,’ he says automatically.

  ‘And I’ve been thinking about what you said, what we both said. About my dad, about this job and Benny, and… I just want… we’re going to have a baby, J, and I want it to be a new start for us. I want to forget about the past. The only thing that matters is what happens next. And whatever happens, however hard it gets, we’ll be okay, won’t we?’

  There is silence on the line, and she feels Johnny is very far away from her, further than she will ever be able to reach. What she has said to him is the truth. Behind all the lies and secrets, she has tried to find the truest sentiment she can express to him.

  ‘Babe, of course we will. What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve just been trying to clear the nonsense in my head.’ The return of the lie cuts into her. She cannot tell him everything she is thinking — that the fate of the child inside her is just a piece of the great puzzle of all her fears — but she still needs to hear his reassurance. She still needs to know that if all her nightmares follow her into her waking world, that he will not abandon her. ‘It’s just nice to be reminded that there will always be us. Promise me that.’

  ‘Babe, from the moment I met you, there was only ever going to be us.’

  She closes her eyes and imagines his arms around her again. All the strange dark doubts she felt the previous day evaporate for a moment. She doesn’t doubt his words. She has never doubted any of his promises, but she also knows the emptiness at the heart of them. He might have meant his words, but they weren’t real if they weren’t made in the presence of the truth. All the times he’s stuck by her, he’s been protecting a lie without even knowing it. His devotion and her betrayal burn in her core.

  39

  Benny

  Sunday, 11 November 2001

  Neither of us really spoke as we carried out the task — just my instructions to Amber, who silently complied. I knew I was taking advantage of her state of shock, but I didn’t have a choice.

  I had already bound the dead man’s neck tightly to keep as much blood inside him as I could. After that, all I could find to wrap him in was the large roll of bubble wrap from the cottage attic. He crackled and squeaked as we rolled him into it. I placed some large stones from the beach into the last layer before binding the package up with parcel tape. I knew I would have to replace all these things, along with the sheet, the towels, the mop, the dented coffee pot. Cover every trace.

  I was glad of the modern flooring in the kitchen and extension. There is a lot of blood in a human, and it would have stained stone or wood. We would have had no chance. But as we dragged the body out onto the decking, I looked back at the remaining bloodstains and thought we might just have a chance.

  The moon had set now. It was just the stars and the angry hiss of the sea. After we dragged the body to the small boat tied to the post near the groyne, I walked back, scuffing up the sand.

  I thought I’d need to row out on my own, so I was surprised that once we’d hauled in the body, Amber joined me in the boat. Perhaps it was a sense in her that she had to see it through. I held onto that thought. It felt like a guarantee of her future silence.

  The sea was bigger than it had seemed from the shore, and the boat pitched and rolled queasily. Amber sat white and trembling as I rowed, watching the dim light from the cottage disappear. I had a vision of not stopping, of rowing us all out to our ends in the middle of the North Sea.

  Amber interrupted my thoughts: ‘Isn’t this far enough?’

  So we heaved the body over the side. It sank immediately down into the darkness. We looked at each other, sharing the knowledge that this moment would lock us together forever.

  40

  Amber

  After speaking to Johnny, Amber crashes out and sleeps until late morning, her phone switched off. The sound of a far-off siren disturbs her sleep. She has the sense of someone next to her, but she wakes with a start to an empty bed and a burning appetite.

  She heaps leftovers onto a plate and flops down in front of the news. It thumps its drum of impending pandemic doom louder now: images of shoppers hoarding food and toilet paper. She shovels the food into her mouth as if consumed by a need to fatten herself up. She thinks of her half-empty food cupboard, how Johnny and she have always lived day-to-day, week-to-week. Her brain still cannot process what is rolling inexorably towards everyone. It gives her a momentary sense of calm that it will be everyone’s crisis, not simply her own.

  For years she has wanted to block away completely what happened to her — what she did. To forget, to imagine that it didn’t happen at all. Sometimes she has managed to feel that it happened to someone else. Or to an earlier version of her, an Amber from a parallel life, a shadow, a fleeting reflection caught in a moving mirror. But she jus
t needs to look at that scar on her hand to know it was real.

  The intruder was already moving towards Benny as she pressed the shutter on his camera. Then she saw Benny crumple from the punch, and the man was advancing towards her.

  After that, it is a series of stuttering blanks in her memory, images interspersed with black frames. She remembers being down on her knees, trying to grab the intruder’s knife, then the pain in her hand. Then she had the big chrome coffee pot, and she was smashing down on the man’s hand. The knife was free.

  She could have acted differently. She could have taken the coffee pot to the back of the man’s head. Or slashed the knife at his back, or stabbed his legs. But she didn’t. She saw the knife, saw Benny, and saw the soft vulnerable flesh of the intruder’s neck.

  The next moment that is completely clear to her is sitting on the floor, holding the dying man’s head in her lap, the life draining from him, a look of lost confusion on his face.

  She doesn’t know why she can remember the man’s expression but not the face itself. She has played and replayed to herself that night over and over until she stopped trusting her memory of it. Because memory isn’t burned with the precision of a photograph. It is soft, it changes, it rebuilds itself again and again. And all that has really stayed with her, all that she really trusts, is the look of those strong blue eyes.

  She felt hollowed out as Benny dropped her off at Norwich train station the morning after. It was partly to avoid any risk of being seen together, but it was also that they couldn’t be in each other’s company any longer. There was a repelling force between them: at the same moment that they both realised they were tied together forever, they knew also that they had been splintered apart.

  She let herself into Johnny’s flat, where she’d been living since she graduated, feeling deeply grateful that he was away on tour. As she fell onto her bed, she did not feel panicked, just exhausted, empty and numb. And in the familiar confines of the cosy space she shared with her boyfriend, already the sense of it all having happened to someone else was forming. She realised starkly in that moment that this was how she had maintained her affair with Benny. She hadn’t been unfaithful; she had merely partitioned one part of her life away from the other. And now, rather than letting the lie collapse, rather than letting all the guilt flow in, she felt she had to keep it separate forever.

  She found herself drifting into a thick, blank sleep, as if in a drugged state. When she woke, she ventured towards her bag and slowly unpacked it as if it was full of toxic material.

  At the cottage, they had put all the clothes, sheets and towels through the washing machine to get the worst off. Then Benny had put most of them in his car to dispose of elsewhere and replace later. He had asked Amber to get rid of her jumper. He said it reduced the risk for him not to have anything of hers in the car. The jumper still had a great dark stain across its middle. She had wrapped it carefully in a plastic bag and put it at the bottom of her luggage.

  She finally got to it now and was gripped by an illogical feeling that she should hold onto it. It was a sense that she needed proof about what had happened, even though that proof was dangerous.

  In the end, without removing it from its bag, she simply stuffed it deep down in the black plastic rubbish bag that filled the kitchen bin. She put the bag in the wheelie bin, and the next morning watched the dustmen flip the contents into the rubbish truck. Landfill seemed as sensible a place as any, just a tiny speck of rubbish among the millions of tonnes of London waste.

  It was another two weeks before Johnny came home from his tour. In the meantime, Amber took a few days sick off work and avoided seeing anyone. It gave her enough space to construct what she thought was a secure place in her mind to store what had just happened to her — what she had just done.

  ‘What did you do to your hand?’ Johnny asked, almost the first question after he’d come in through the door. The wound was getting better, but she still had to wear a dressing, because every time she moved her hand, the skin would reopen. She should have got stitches. If she had, she might not have that light scar still there.

  ‘I got bored and went ice skating,’ she said, having decided on something prosaic. ‘That open-air one at Somerset House.’ A small embellishment to make it ring true. ‘Got a bit run over.’

  He took her hands and kissed her fingers the way Benny had at the cottage. She did her best to repress a shudder, but some of it came through. He didn’t really pick up on it, just hugged her as if she might be cold.

  ‘You should be more careful, babe,’ he said, and that was all the lie she needed to tell that day. It was only in the months that followed that she had to steadily construct her latticework of deception. And as the flashbacks worsened, the nightmares became more frequent, so the need to isolate herself from Johnny grew. It was then she fell back on that primal trauma of her father’s death.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m broken,’ she would say, until it became a refrain.

  ‘You’re not broken,’ he would reply. ‘No more than anyone else.’

  Even so, there were times she believed he was on the verge of leaving her. There were even times she told him he should. There were times she nearly left herself. Times she disappeared for a day or two just to be on her own.

  And, just as when she saw Genevieve after the cottage, each time she didn’t tell Johnny the truth, it became harder to break down that wall. Each lie compounded and reinforced the one before it. But just as the burden of the lie became bigger, so did her love for Johnny. The fact he was determined to stay with her despite all this bound her to him.

  Eventually, in a way she did not fully understand or want to examine too closely, it all began to recede. The memories of the cottage became less fierce, the physical symptoms less debilitating. There was a hardening that formed within her centre, and a shell that grew around her.

  There were still questions to be asked: about what really happened that night, about who that intruder was, and why he had been there. But as much as Amber wanted to know the truth, she also needed to bury the event completely. Those two feelings fought in her each time she turned a paranoid eye to the news and police reports from the local area.

  It was months after the weekend that she saw the short news report on the primitive website of the local Norfolk paper. Remains washed up on a beach near Cromer, fifty miles or more north of the cottage. Badly decomposed, said the report, and not yet identified. Police were making enquiries.

  The only other thing Amber wished she could know was who owned the cottage. The Land Registry would have the information, but an anonymous enquiry was impossible. So after finding the news of the remains, she stopped searching. But for a year or more, each time the doorbell sounded, she had a flash of the police at the door. But they never came.

  And now, it isn’t the police who have come for her. It is someone unseen, unknown.

  She finishes her food and turns the television off. She showers for a long time, feeling for those moments protected by the water cascading over her body, curving its way round her changing shape. That maternal instinct swells again, stronger this time, more certain. Less dominated by fear, more by determination. A desire to protect. A desire that she will not let what is happening destroy everything she has.

  She repeats to herself the words she said to Johnny: the only thing that matters is what happens next. She cannot run from the past, always following her across the great empty space of her life, and she cannot let it catch her. She must catch it and stop it. There can be only the future now.

  41

  Amber

  Showered and dressed and sitting at her desk, Amber turns on her phone almost more in expectation than fear. But she finds nothing new from that grey, unfeatured face. Silent, waiting.

  As she is holding it, her phone starts to buzz, and she answers it like a reflex. She wishes she hadn’t. It’s Kay. Amber doesn’t want to speak to her now.

  ‘Hello, sweetie. Weren’t we supposed to meet
this morning?’

  ‘Were we?’

  ‘Yes, you said you could do Thursday?’

  ‘Did I? Sorry, I… Look, Kay, I’m sorry I’m a bit flaky right now. I’m just going through a rough patch.’

  ‘I understand. You just let me know if there’s anything old Kay can help with.’

  ‘Thank you, I will.’ For a moment she contemplates again bringing Kay into her confidence, but once again draws back, settling on a weak promise to catch up.

  Amber hangs up and tries to refocus, knowing she must keep going or the relentless dread will be upon her.

  Before she got in the cab to the hospital, she had the presence of mind to do one thing. She took the picture that had been stuck to her window, and locked it in the drawer where she had stowed the negatives.

  Now she retrieves the photo and forces herself to look at her unconscious, naked form laid out on the bed. Her sense of violation feels oddly deadened. As much as she is repulsed by the photograph, she is also fascinated by it. It is a window into a moment she does not remember, and might hold a key to things she cannot see.

  A feeling she had before about the negatives comes back to her. It is the sense that if she looks closely enough, they might be able to tell her a secret.

  It’s then she sees it. This photo, scanned and printed, has something those negatives did not. And it is something that was too small to recognise in the pictures on her phone. But it is clear now, an artefact in the image where the white of the moonlight bleeds against the shadow of the room. There is a slight banding where the brightness ends, and a halo that extends beyond it into the darkness. She has seen that effect before. It is the error Mika made on the scanner.