She gets a quick spasm of muscles across her body, reflexively putting a hand to her belly. She checks the suspicion. This doesn’t feel like proof: any number of people might be able to use that scanner imperfectly. But that figure running away from her house — she is sure it was a man. Someone short and slim, moving with the speed and energy of a young person.
What would Mika want from her, though? Who the hell even is he? Just a cocky kid, hired through an agency. And now he’s off somewhere else, absenting himself from the scene of all this.
He is a blank in her mind. No, not quite a blank. His face is there. Boyish, handsome, tanned. Those piercing blue eyes. Lots of people have blue eyes, she says to herself, pushing away the ideas of that connection. Be logical about this.
As she fishes out the business card Mika gave to her at the farmhouse, she remembers she gave him hers too. Which means he has her mobile number.
She looks at his card. Mika Vilander. What is that name? Scandinavian? His accent wasn’t anything other than English. But what does that tell her?
She opens a browser and tries a few searches. There’s nothing obvious on social media, but then who uses their real name anymore? He must have a portfolio. You don’t get to be Benedict Raine’s assistant from nothing. Finally she finds it, a white, sparse website, with a few galleries of grungy images. Aggressive, lenses right up in people’s faces. Bright, distorted colours. Almost a violence to them. Nothing about their aesthetic has any kindred spirit with Benny’s work. But aesthetics isn’t an assistant’s job. It is to fetch and carry, sort and organise, and find your way round an archive. To know where everything is. Even the images that have stayed hidden for years.
She pictures Mika and Genevieve and the hostility that lay between them. Was that a front, a deliberate show put on for Amber’s benefit? A bluff to cover their true allegiance?
And what about Yvey and Mika? What was that cold suspicion she seemed to have for him? She trusts Yvey’s reaction more, as much as she trusts anything. She is still troubled by the convenience of Yvey being at her house when her tormenter came for her. But Amber believes the fear she saw in her face, and the sense that she too is looking for the truth about Benny. And anyway, Amber was looking right at the girl when the first WhatsApp message arrived. Unless a co-conspirator sent it.
This last thought conjures a twisted image of everyone in it together, each suspect taking a turn at plunging the knife. Mika, the son of the murdered intruder; Genevieve, the betrayed wife; Sam, the dark fixer; Yvey, the innocent foil. A cabal intent on dismantling her.
But why stop there? Perhaps she is looking too closely at the people she can see, not imagining all those she cannot. Who else is lurking just out of view? Beyond the opaque glass, in amongst the trees. The man in the green overalls, his expressionless stare as she left the farmhouse.
She shuts her eyes, trying to stop chasing her thoughts in circles, trying to pull herself out of the mire of supposition and paranoia.
She takes another look at that picture of her asleep, exposed. Then she is on YouTube, digging out that last interview of Benny’s, the one she watched on the day she learned of his death. She watches it again, inspecting and measuring each of his words.
I think it’s time to tell it all. Let it all out into the open.
She hears in her head Benny’s words at the cottage about all the people who wanted him dead, and is certain now she believes Yvey’s unstated suspicion of murder much more than Genevieve’s theory of suicide.
What was it Benny wanted to tell? Was it just what happened at the cottage, or something else? And who might have wanted to stop him from saying it? A man tried to kill Benny years ago, and someone has now succeeded.
That man at the cottage also tried to kill me. Did someone want me dead then? Does someone want it now?
Amber knows there is a key to this, locked in her memory. Those strong blue eyes and the forgotten face. She tries to remember the intruder again, but nothing new comes. Because her memory won’t simply submit to willpower. It cannot be cajoled and blackmailed into giving up its secrets. But the face is not just locked in her memory. It was also captured on film. Her only hope of understanding all this is the same thing she fears seeing.
She picks up her phone again and stares at the little empty white box in the messaging app, the smiley emoji button gloating at her.
Why has her tormenter not sent the photograph of the intruder? Why, for that matter, have the photos not all come at once? She still cannot fully grasp the psychological calculus of the campaign against her. Perhaps the torment itself is simply the point.
Unless they don’t have the photo. Does it even exist? Did it come out?
She types:
Do you have it?
She deletes the words. No, she can’t show any doubt or allow any ambiguity. There is a sequence to the photos she has been receiving, and she knows how it ends. At its core, her persecution by this faceless stranger cannot be about her infidelity, or about her naked body, violated by Benny’s camera. This must be about the man who bled to death on the cottage floor, and the photo she took of him. A photo not only of a moment, but one that holds in it all the things that led to it and everything that followed.
This game has to end.
I know you have the photo of the intruder. What is it you want from me?
She hits send, and she waits.
42
Amber
The brightness of the morning is short-lived, a veil of cloud swallowing the blue sky. Out of the window above her desk, Amber can see nothing but an expanse of fields. The view is textureless and almost monochrome in the flat grey light.
When her phone gives its short buzz of a new message, and she sees it is from that blank grey face, she almost feels relief. It is a sense, at least, that she is getting closer to something and is exerting the smallest touch of control on the situation.
It is just an image, no words.
The first thing she sees is that the photo is overexposed, a whiteness bleeding from the kitchen lights, giving the image an almost ethereal quality.
In her instinct to take it, she hadn’t thought to play with the settings on the camera, just glanced down where it sat against her hip, and squeezed the shutter button.
Now she knows the camera had been set to take pictures in the moonlight — those pictures of her. But the overexposure has an advantage here. It means the shadowed face of the intruder is perfectly visible. The hat is down to his eyebrows, but the rest of the face is clear.
There is no colour in the photo, so she cannot see those blue eyes the way she saw them back then. But she can see a well-structured jaw and cheekbones, a mouth puckered in uncertainty. Perhaps he looks a little fearful too, realising the weight of what he is there to do.
The full extent of the picture is also different from her memory. In her mind, this photo has always been a close-up of the intruder. In fact, from where she was standing, it is a wider shot. Benny is there, right at the edge of the frame. He is looking back towards Amber. What does his face say? It shows surprise, a little confusion, and something else perhaps. A hint of anger?
After a few minutes, a text message follows.
What do I want? I want you to stop lying. It’s time to tell the truth. All of it.
She looks at the words and tries to hear a voice behind them. She feels like responding: I don’t know the truth. I wish I did.
She looks again at the face of the man in the picture. Not just a fragmented memory, but a staging post on the way towards the truth. She has to have the courage she didn’t have before to find out who he was.
She starts with what she knows, finding the local paper that reported the body found near Cromer. But there is nothing to see — no online archive beyond the last few years. Following the links around the edges of the page, the paper seems to have been bought recently by a large news network. She can imagine the newsroom now as a shadow of its former self, decimated by cut after cut. Pe
rhaps she is glad of that, glad there are no longer banks of eager local journalists chasing stories about mysterious bodies.
Looking beyond the paper, the online trail appears at first cold. Rather than narrowing down towards her target, the search spreads out in front of her on the screen. The web is full of stories of bodies washed up on the Norfolk shores. Most have been identified, and most weren’t treated as suspicious by the police. Suicides and accidents. Perhaps men in their prime, going for a swim, their daughters waiting for them on the shore.
Then she is in the official Police Missing Persons website, with its pages and pages of unidentified bodies, full of stark details of fatal injuries and states of decay. Severed limbs washed ashore, burned torsos in derelict houses, decomposed remains dredged up in fishing nets. There are lists of distinguishing features, hair and eye colour, clothing, possessions, false teeth, jewellery, tattoos. Some have photos, others police sketches, some just blank silhouettes. The records go back to the 1960s, body after body after body.
People who died, and no one has claimed them, no one has mourned them. Amber finds herself gently crying, all her own losses welling up inside her and pouring silently out. She blinks away the tears and tries to find a way to narrow her search to the Norfolk area, but the website won’t let her do that. So she arranges all the cases by date and slowly zeros in on the months after that weekend at the cottage.
She props her phone up next to the computer and pinches in on the photo of the intruder so she can see it as she flicks through the entries.
There are no faces that match, but there is something. There is a case with the right dates for the body found at Cromer. As she starts to read the entry, it looks like so many of the bodies that have washed up on beaches over the years. There is no photo or sketch, and the description talks of remains rather than a body.
As she reads, Amber feels cold and sick. She wonders about the knife wound in the intruder’s neck. But there is nothing that suggests the police know how this man was killed. Nor have they obtained a DNA match with any records, or any other distinguishing features. But the estimated age, height and weight of the man match Amber’s memories and the photograph.
There is a link at the bottom of the page:
I may know this person: Click here to contact the Missing Persons Unit with details about this person.
She backs away from the computer, her breath beating up and down as if she has been exercising. She tries another tack — in part to pull herself away from that glowering police contact link — and finds the main missing persons charity website. Even filtering by gender and when they went missing, she still has to scroll through pages and pages of entries. People’s sons, fathers, brothers. Lost and troubled faces. The face of a toddler, clear-eyed and innocent. She thinks of the people who reported their relatives and friends missing, and wonders who the important people in the intruder’s life were.
Then, there he is. She looks to her phone and back to the screen, back and forth, again and again. But she can’t avoid it. It’s him. She clicks on the face, and his page appears.
Finn Gallagher.
A colour passport photo, almost like a police mugshot. A hard unhappy frown on his face.
Age at disappearance: 32
Missing from: Peckham, London
Missing since: 08 Nov 2001
There’s a reference number and white writing on a magenta square:
Finn, we are here for you whenever you are ready. We can listen, talk you through what help you need, pass a message for you and help you to be safe. Call. Text. Anytime. Free. Confidential.
And that’s all it says. A link sits underneath:
Report a sighting.
Amber flicks back to the tab with the police website.
I may know this person.
She finds herself clicking the link. A form appears in front of her. She could do it. She could tell the police everything and send them the photograph of Finn that sits on her phone. She could bring it all crashing down around her.
It feels like the times she would stare at her stockpiled sleeping pills, wondering if she had the courage to down them all with an old bottle of brandy. Courage or cowardice? Or the times she thought about disappearing herself. Walking out through the door and never coming back.
She says his name out loud: ‘Finn Gallagher. Who were you?’
But the way towards the answer is a vast empty darkness, like the night and the sea stretching out in front of her.
43
Amber
The only results for Finn Gallagher lead back to the missing persons page Amber has just been looking at. She thinks again about the time before we all left our footprints everywhere we went online. But the web only goes so deep. She needs help.
It’s time to take a risk. It feels like a crazy thing to do, but there’s nothing sane left. She knows she is hastening her own exposure by doing this, but that destination seems inevitable now. The car is hurtling towards the wall. She just wants to be in control of it.
But she will split her risk, place different parcels of trust with different allies. She makes a phone call. It’s to Ed Kapoor. The bloodhound and people finder who lives in that insulated corner of her life. It is time to break the seal.
‘Ed, hi.’
‘Amber, long time no-speaky. You get my email?’
‘Yeah, Ed, sorry, been hectic. Need to ask you a fave.’ Her tone is matching his as she forces a casual air into it.
Before she called, then as the phone rang, and as they exchanged pleasantries, she has been constructing a fiction to couch her request in. It will be an idea for a retrospective, some research on a photographic subject from long ago. But as she opens her mouth, the pretence falls away.
‘I need you to find out about someone for me.’
‘Umm… what’s this about?’
‘Can we do this on a no-questions-asked basis?’
‘Uh… sure. You okay?’
‘Yeah. I’ll tell you someday. There’s a guy I photographed when I was just finishing college. And I recently came across him on a missing persons website. He disappeared not long after I snapped him.’
Ed cuts her off with his sharp, barking laugh. ‘What, you want me to find him? You need a private dick, mate.’
‘No… not that. I just want you to find out what you can about him. Anything.’
‘Anything?’
‘Yeah, background. Family? Any kids, say? And maybe any priors. Any trouble with the law?’
‘Not a nice person, you’re saying?’
‘No questions asked, Ed. Please. Trust me.’
‘But you’re all right? Sorry, that was a question.’
‘I’ll allow it. I’m fine, really.’ And for a brief moment, she feels it. She feels not entirely alone.
It doesn’t last. She hands over Finn Gallagher’s name and promises to send Ed a link to the missing persons page. It feels like handing over a loaded weapon, and for a second she feels Ed is going to sniff her out. She imagines him making a great and sudden deductive leap and accusing her of murder. But he just gives a grunt to say he’s got the name written down.
‘As soon as you get anything, can you let me know?’
‘I’ll do what I can.’
And he is gone. Amber wants to vomit.
She sucks the feeling down and moves on to the second request for help she know she needs to make. This one is a much bigger ask, a bigger risk.
She bounces her phone in her hand, takes two slow breaths and dials Kay’s number. The phone rings and rings. Finally, Kay’s voice is there.
‘Hello, sweetie. Still alive, then?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve been hopeless. Look, are you free?’
‘For you, always.’
‘Do you think you could pick me up? My car’s out of action. I need a lift somewhere.’
‘Sure. What’s this about?’
‘I’ll explain when I see you.’
She hangs up, and a hot flush ru
ns across her cold core.
44
Amber
The sky is crushing down now, a pall of dark grey cloud. Amber climbs into the passenger seat of Kay’s car.
‘So, where are we going? Road trip? Rob a bank?’
‘I was hoping you could drive me to Benedict Raine’s house.’
‘Oookay. What happened to your car?’
Amber ignores the question. ‘I thought maybe we could talk on the way.’
‘What’s this about?’
‘I can trust you, can’t I?’
‘Of course you can.’
‘I mean, I can tell you things, and you’re not going to tell anyone?’
‘We really are going to rob a bank, aren’t we?’
There is something forced about Kay’s jollity. It feels like compensation for Amber’s mood — heavy, sombre, frightened. Kay reaches down for the handbrake, and the car moves off. Amber takes a breath.
‘When I saw you last, and I wouldn’t tell you what was really up. That I’d been thinking about what happened to Benny and…’ She pauses and weighs the words in her head before she says them. ‘What if I told you I’m pretty sure he was murdered?’
Kay laughs, hard and staccato.
‘This is serious.’
Kay rearranges her face into a frown.
‘I know we never talk about Benny,’ says Amber. ‘I know this is my fault, because I’ve always been ashamed of the affair. But, can I ask you, how much did you really know about him?’
Kay just shrugs, driving a little too fast down the narrow lane.
‘Ever since we first met, and you guessed about me and him… It’s clear you didn’t like him.’
All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end Page 16