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

by O. C. S. Francis

  Amber tries to find something meaningful to say to Kay. But there is nothing that can convey what she feels. Instead she demands the return of her phone.

  Expressionless, Kay gestures with her head, and Amber sees Kay’s bag lying a few feet beyond them. Keeping her eyes on Kay, Amber goes to the bag and pulls out her phone. She unlocks it with her thumbprint and calls Genevieve. It connects in no more than a couple of seconds.

  ‘You have to come back.’ She can’t find any words of explanation. Genevieve is already talking rapidly over her, saying she’s just got back into the house, how she drove to Radlow, then up and down the lanes, looking for Yvey.

  ‘It’s okay, she’s here, just come out towards the studio,’ says Amber, still unable to offer any sort of explanation. She looks over at Yvey, who has moved away, shaking her head, her hands going up to her face.

  Their attention is only off Kay for a second, but it’s enough. She is scrambling to her feet and running again, her feet slipping in the earth.

  ‘Kay, stop. This is pointless. Where are you going to go?’

  She doesn’t answer, just keeps running. Yvey is already after her, and Amber follows. Kay and Yvey are both faster than Amber, who is exhausted and still coughing, and soon the colours of their clothes are fading to grey in the enveloping darkness.

  Amber staggers on, and the quality of the gloom begins to change. She sees she is coming to the edge of the beech wood. It’s as she spots the small hut she found with Johnny, still stacked with wood, that she sees the shape of Yvey crunching into Kay, and them both fall to the ground.

  As Amber gets to them, Kay has managed to roll out from Yvey. Instead of attempting to run again, she goes for Yvey with a sudden ferocity. Like a trapped animal, she’s lashing out, punching. And she’s beating Yvey back — as if all the sinew in that tight athletic body is expending every last ounce of its strength.

  Amber glances towards the large heavy logs and sees the axe leaning up against them. But, no. Enough violence.

  ‘Stop it! Please!’ Amber screams the words as she fumbles out her phone to call the police.

  Kay steps back from Yvey, then goes towards Amber, who starts backwards. The phone slips from Amber’s cold hands down into the mulch. She reaches for it, but Kay is going for it at the same time. They are on their knees, wrestling for the phone, looking right into each other.

  Then Kay stops. Just stops. She releases her hands from the phone and sits down in the wet earth. It’s as if it has finally hit her – there is nothing more she can do. She can fight and she can run, but there is no place left to hide her secret. She pulls her knees in tight to her chest, and buries her face in them.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s over,’ Amber says. ‘For all of us.’

  Yvey’s form appears above her and Kay. Amber feels small with the girl looking down on them. This young woman, with the unnerving look of Benny about her, and the echoes of his gestures. Yvey gives what seems like a kindly smile, one of understanding. Perhaps one of forgiveness to Amber. But Amber is projecting. She does not know what the smile means.

  ‘Who knows you’re here?’ Yvey asks. Kay knows the question is aimed at her. She lifts her face towards Yvey.

  ‘No one,’ she says, frowning.

  Yvey nods to herself. There is something in her right hand, hanging down by her side. Then Amber sees. It is the axe from the pile of wood. And Amber sees too the single movement Yvey makes, pulling up sharply on the handle and catching it closer to the head. Both hands are on it, and it is up above Kay’s head in a great angry swing.

  ‘He was my dad, you bitch.’

  The axe is travelling what feels like a great distance, yet coming down fast. Kay barely even has a chance to make a noise before it embeds itself in her skull.

  Yvey’s hands fly away from the axe as if it is electrified. The blade stays for a moment in Kay’s head before the weight of the handle pulls it out. As the weapon falls, Kay’s body crumples forward onto the ground. She is completely still. The wound is a mess of red-black, half-covered in the leaves her head has fallen into.

  Yvey staggers back. At first, it looks as if she is smiling. But the wide, grinning mouth is divorced from the rest of her body and face. Gaping eyes, hands wringing themselves together, a strange grinding noise coming out of her throat.

  Then Amber runs. She doesn’t know why. It isn’t because she fears Yvey. It is just the pull of the urge to be anywhere but here. She runs in the direction of the house until she sees light flickering through the trees, and goes on towards it, like a deranged moth.

  The studio is transformed. Where before only smoke was rising from the broken window, now flames are tearing out of it. The soft glow in the glass extension has caught again as the fire has reached to consume the wooden structure in which the glass sits. It is flooded with flame. Like a lighthouse, a burning beacon in the darkness.

  There is a great crack as one of the sheets of glass splits in the heat just as Genevieve appears from the direction of the house. Her stricken face glows in the fire.

  ‘The archive!’

  Amber shakes her head. ‘Let it burn.’

  Genevieve stands speechless, her eyes wide.

  ‘I think you should follow me,’ says Amber, and she leads her towards the more terrible thing waiting in the darkness.

  62

  Amber

  Time passes in pulses and waves, not a steady forward movement. It is a period of collective shock. It feels like a group hallucination, none of it real.

  When Amber brings Genevieve to the scene of Kay’s body, she looks as if she wants to scream, but no noise comes out. Moments later, she throws up into the leaves at her feet.

  Yvey is shouting at her — She killed Dad, she killed Dad! — over and over, walking in deranged circles.

  Amber puts an arm around Genevieve’s shoulder, telling her she will call the police. But she feels a firm hand on her wrist and sees a desperate look in Genevieve’s face.

  ‘Wait. Let me think.’

  ‘What is there to think about?’

  The grip tightens. Genevieve shouts her daughter’s name, and Yvey is finally silent. Mother and daughter hold each other’s gaze. Yvey looks panicked, flittish, as if she might run off again. But under the power of her mother’s stare, she collapses to the ground. She looks like a child, entirely helpless and innocent.

  A change has come over Genevieve too. She is no longer displaying a face of shock. When she next speaks, she is back as the woman at the funeral: the one who hid her grief, the pragmatic widow asking Amber to come and visit her house. The woman bringing her unknowingly into all this.

  ‘Who is she?’ Genevieve asks Amber. ‘What happened?’

  In pausing gulps, Amber does her best to explain. She is still choking a little as she speaks, still trying to focus on whether she can detect movement inside her. She feels not quite present, not quite anywhere.

  When Amber finishes, Genevieve repeats Kay’s full name several times as if speaking a spell, and shakes her head. Then she turns directly to Amber and takes both her hands where they meet her wrists. She holds them firmly, pressing the fleshy pads beneath her thumbs, and brings them up in front of Amber. It was the way Benny had once done to her, the way Benny had probably done over the years to Genevieve. An act of discipline and control. But there is something else there. There is an element of pleading.

  ‘Amber, please, no.’ The look in Genevieve’s face seems to say she has lost her husband, and tonight she has even lost any sense of who her husband was. She is not going to lose her daughter too. Amber understands what is about to come next. The woman who brought her into all this is about to try to lock her into it.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ says Amber. ‘I know you want to protect Yvey.’ She looks at the girl on her knees on the ground and has that same desire. In that moment, Amber doesn’t care what happens to herself, but she sees the girl not much younger than she was when she killed Finn Gallagher, and wonde
rs for a second how much the truth would serve justice. But she also knows that to try to protect Yvey, to force her to carry the secret for the rest of her life, will be worse. ‘No, Genevieve. No.’

  ‘We can bury the body here. There’s so much land on the estate, places nobody ever goes.’

  Amber can’t find the words to answer. Yvey is silent too, looking up at Genevieve. The dynamic between mother and daughter has changed. It is as much from Genevieve’s attempt to take control as Yvey’s total submission: her need to be helped, to be saved.

  Amber finds herself thinking about the incident with the teacher and how Benny and Genevieve had persuaded her not to press charges. They had made it all go away. But this is not like that. This cannot be made to go away.

  ‘I won’t make you help me,’ Genevieve is saying to Amber. ‘You don’t need to be part of this, not again. You can walk away. You were never here.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. People will ask about Kay. It’s no secret she was my friend.’

  ‘Say what you need to. Just say you never came here.’

  ‘Sam was here. He saw me.’

  Genevieve pauses, but not for long, as if what she says next is self-evident, as if the reassurance has been tested before.

  ‘I told you, Sam’s been with us a long time. He’s extremely loyal.’

  Amber remembers that feeling she had when she first arrived at the house — the headquarters of the Bayard-Raine empire. Property, art, finance. She hears Kay’s withering certainty that Genevieve would want to protect her brand, and of all the things Freddie said about the Foundation’s opaque business dealings. All those practices that hover on the border of legality. What else was there, just a little deeper, that Sam had helped protect? But Amber shakes her head.

  ‘Whatever Sam’s done for you in the past, this isn’t the same. You do know that.’ Amber throws a hand at the woods, towards the glow of the burning studio. She doesn’t even need to speak about the fire. Even if Genevieve’s faith in Sam were to hold, Amber knows she does not hold such power over the people who work for her that they can simply sweep away evidence of the inferno. The arson will be plain to see, however much it could be wrapped up in a story of some unknown vandal.

  ‘I’m not asking you to do anything,’ Genevieve says, her face not given up on the idea. ‘I’m just asking for your silence. And whatever you need from me… from the Foundation…’ She leaves the phrase hanging in the air, but the meaning is clear. Amber could name the price of her silence. ‘Please, think. Beyond us, there is no one left alive who knows the truth — not all of it.’

  Amber looks down at the grazes on her hands, smells the smoke on her clothes, and thinks about Ed. She knows he will not stop looking into Finn Gallagher — because he is too good a journalist. The dots will all join up eventually. And more than that, Amber knows that even if she could lie to some people, she cannot lie to Johnny anymore.

  And it is clear now in Genevieve’s eyes that, deep down, she too knows it is all over.

  After that, Benny’s widow barely says a word. She takes Yvey inside to administer her a stiff drink and some Valium. Just enough to keep her calm, perhaps to make her sleep.

  It is the last Amber sees of Yvey, as she is guided away by her mother. Her hands are in front of her, and her head down, like a prisoner being led from the dock. Just before she disappears from view through the trees, she glances round at Amber. Her face is lost and still full of questions. Questions about the events that have led to these moments, about the act she has just committed, and about what is going to happen next. Teetering on a fulcrum between past and future. Then she drops her eyes. She knows Amber does not have all the answers after all.

  Yvey and her mother go on into the woods, and Amber turns back towards the glow of the burning studio.

  63

  Amber

  Four months later

  The shifting sound of the foetal heartbeat on the monitor strapped to Amber sometimes sounds to her like the echo of a siren, sometimes like distant galloping horses. It changes with her daughter’s movements and how well the monitor can hear her. Occasionally the rate drops right down, and a beeping alarm sounds. But it doesn’t panic Amber now — she has learnt it is just the monitor latching onto her own heartbeat instead of her daughter’s. Hers is the heart that beats at half the speed.

  She is being induced. Her daughter is overdue, not ready for the world. Amber does not feel ready for her, either, but it isn’t something you can prepare for, not really. Even so, she wants the process finally to start, so it can be complete. She feels trapped in a moment, full of all the things that have led to it and all those that will follow from it. Some of the mothers in the bays around her in the prenatal ward are like her, desperate for babies to come. Others are desperate for them to stay in a little longer.

  The staff are all masked, gloved and gowned, in their attempts to protect themselves and her against COVID-19. The last months have been strange and awful, the rising tally of dead sometimes making the dreadful violence of that night at the farmhouse recede in her mind, sometimes bringing it starkly to bear.

  She has been given the first round of drugs to induce labour, but nothing much has happened. She is waiting again. The last months have been full of waiting. Waiting for this new life, waiting for the next part of hers to start, waiting for justice.

  Amber did not need to call the police. Genevieve did that. They came quickly, their blue lights strobing through the trees from the road, and Amber finally walked back to the house.

  Genevieve calmly directed the police to the body in the garden as if they were contractors come to do some renovation on the estate. She informed them in a detached and efficient manner that her daughter had killed the woman who had murdered her husband and who had also tried to kill Amber.

  The policeman looked at Genevieve with a studied scepticism, then at Amber, her face still sooty. So Genevieve explained about the studio, again in as few words as possible. She said nothing about Finn Gallagher.

  Throughout this, Genevieve seemed half still in shock, half hanging onto the desperate pragmatism she had tried to bring to bear out in the woods. Whatever her mental state, there was certainly calculation in her words: just the simple and immediate facts, leaving all the space in the world for the more complex legal arguments that would need to follow.

  Amber understood, too, that her confession would need to wait until there was a lawyer present. Indeed, at every stage since she first sat down in the interview room at the police station, lawyers have supervised her. They are lawyers that Genevieve has found and paid for. They are not people Amber could afford. It seems the offer of whatever Amber needs from the Foundation has held strong despite the truth coming out.

  Amber is not entirely sure why she is being helped, and has not been able to ask. She has not spoken directly to Genevieve since that evening. Everything is conducted through the legal team. All she can suppose is Genevieve feels that throwing Amber to the wolves would not help her daughter. It is better if both Amber and Yvey are to remain as victims, unwilling executioners.

  Amber’s legal team have managed to convince the judge she is not a threat to anyone and have secured her a closely supervised bail. And they profess confidence — to her at least — that they have a reasonable shot with her case.

  The story they intend to tell is one of Amber as a coerced victim from the outset: manipulated, bullied and terrified into keeping a secret by a powerful man, then almost becoming a victim of his vindictive former lover. This version of herself without much agency or guilt is not one she can entirely believe or disbelieve.

  Or they can play safe and try to avoid the trial by getting the prosecutors to accept a plea of manslaughter, then attempt to bring all these mitigations to bear on the sentencing. But the legal punishment seems almost beside the point to her: no great or small amount of time in jail can wipe away what has happened.

  As for Yvey, a plea of diminished responsibility seems a lik
ely route: the sort of plea that works well for those with wealth and influence and a phalanx of psychologists and character witnesses to call on.

  Amber thinks about Yvey all the time: that final glance full of unanswerable questions, and the desolate space between her love for her father and the man he really was. Amber cannot begin to think how her unborn daughter will one day see her mother, and whether the love will one day be eclipsed by anger or disappointment.

  It is late in the prenatal ward. The curtain around Amber’s bed moves back, and there is Johnny, clutching coffees and pastries. He pulls his mask down and gives her his how’s it going? smile. But he says nothing and sits in the big armchair next to the bed. He sips his coffee silently and scrolls absently on his phone.

  There was no rage when he found out, partly because it took him a while to work out exactly what had happened. Then came a quiet astonishment, followed by a slow dawning that he had been a fool all this time. He tried to say he would have attempted to understand if Amber had told him the truth all those years ago, but they both knew those words were lies. She pressed him on it. It was important for him to be truthful now, as well as her.

  ‘Would you have stayed with me, then? If I’d told you about Benny and given myself up to the police?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know.’

  After that, there seemed no point for any further argument, any great declaration of blame and outrage. The truth was too seismic for that. He just shrank away, both from her and a little into himself. She knows they cannot go back. Circumstances will not allow it. It is not even about forgiveness. It is simply that the rupture is too large.

  There is one promise Johnny is determined to keep. He will be their child’s father, no matter what. He has been almost aggressive about that. Amber worries sometimes that he wants fatherhood too much, that the betrayal will grow inside him and become a hatred that he will use as a weapon to turn their daughter against her.