24
couldn’t believe that I had existed on the periphery of such a horrible,
25
desperate man for so many weeks and hadn’t realized it.
26
I thought I knew what was going to happen. Marnie was going to say
27
all the things that I was thinking: that he was selfish and egotistical and 28
that unless he changed his attitude then they wouldn’t be living to-
29
gether ever thank you very much and how could he
possibly—
30
seriously?— ask her to put him first when we had been friends for
S31
years— years— did he not realize what an impossible ask that was?
N32
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 174
11/6/19 4:33 PM
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 175
11/6/19 4:33 PM
176
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
I pictured us laughing about it later that evening. My anger would
02
have been quickly quashed, but the storm of it would have reignited
03
something within me. It would have been refreshing, a palate cleanser,
04
to experience something other than exhaustion and sadness and panic.
05
Except that wasn’t how the conversation unfolded. I heard her mur-
06
muring, not shouting— not really angry at all— and quiet but not quite
07
quiet enough.
08
“I know,” she said. “I know. And I want to live with you too. You
09
know that I do. This isn’t what I’d planned either.”
10
The following evening Marnie cooked me dinner. She explained
11
that on the night my husband died she had been helping her new boy-
12
friend pack up his flat. And the following morning, they’d started to
13
sort out this one. She acknowledged they hadn’t been together for long,
14
but she had seen how happy Jonathan and I had been, and that had
15
started quickly, hadn’t it? They had put an offer in on a place on the
16
other side of town. It had only been a few months but when you know
17
you know; that’s what she said. And it was on a whim; they’d seen the
18
apartment from the outside when they’d walked past and the real es-
19
tate agent was there— he’d just shown another couple around the
20
building— and so they went inside, and they didn’t think their offer
21
would be accepted— it was low; too low, really— but it was and every-
22
thing happened so quickly after that. She’d been planning to call me to
23
share the good news. She’d wanted to invite us to dinner, to be their
24
very first guests. It was a lovely flat. Or at least it would be eventually.
25
I’d like it, she said.
26
Things had been put on hold— of course they had; she wouldn’t
27
have had it any other way— because of everything that had happened.
28
But it was time to start thinking about the next steps for both of us. She 29
was struggling, she said, to pay both the rent on the flat and her share
30
of the mortgage on the new place and, anyway, it was right for her to be
31S
thinking about moving in there; there was so much work to do and
32N
nothing was getting done. Perhaps I was interested in taking over the
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 176
11/6/19 4:33 PM
S E V E N L I E S
177
lease here? But maybe not— and that was fine, too— she’d help me find
01
somewhere new if that was what I wanted instead.
02
I suppose I had known that she would fall in love at some point and
03
want to leave the flat. And yet I felt shocked. I hadn’t believed that it 04
would happen so soon. And certainly not like that.
05
I left the flat that afternoon and I went to stay with Emma. But her
06
strange world was too strange for me: the empty fridge, the odd rules.
07
And so I rented my own flat: my first time living alone. The building
08
had been constructed a decade earlier, and each apartment was a per-
09
fect square: a bedroom, bathroom, and living space Tetrised into posi-
10
tion. The previous occupant had been permitted to paint the walls: a
11
dark blue in the bedroom, orange in the bathroom, and a yellow wall
12
behind the sofa. The flat was in a good location and it was affordable
13
and it was entirely inoffensive. But I hated being there. I wanted to be
14
with Marnie. And so I cursed Charles constantly. I blamed him for
15
everything— my loneliness, my sadness, my grief— partly because I
16
could and partly because, frankly, I thought then and still think now
17
that he was really, truly guilty of a great wrongdoing.
18
If I had known then what I know now— that very soon my life would
19
exist again without him in it— would I have hated him quite so much?
20
Would I have found comfort in the knowledge that the scales do bal-
21
ance themselves eventually?
22
I might have found things to thank him for. It is true, I suppose, that
23
he forced me to find my feet again. I hadn’t worked for nearly two months 24
and his selfishness pushed me to find a strength that I thought I’d lost. I 25
hadn’t spent a night on my own in years— most of my life, in fact— and
26
yet he took my companion and forced me out. My champions, my cheer-
27
leaders, my counselors were gone. There was no one to look after me, no
28
one whose love was absolute and unreserved, no one to whom I was cen-
29
tral. Not without Jonathan. And certainly not without Marnie.
30
S31
N32
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 176
11/6/19 4:33 PM
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 177
11/6/19 4:33 PM
01
02
03
04
05
Chapter Twenty- Three
06
07
k
08
09
10
11
12
13
14
I would later learn that the mysterious woman from the funeral was
called Valerie Sands. She was thirty- two years old, divorced, and a
journalist. She had been working for the local paper for a decade while
15
simultaneously running her own, often libelous, website and she was
16
determined to find a real story, something powerful, somethi
ng true—
17
something that could change her reputation.
18
19
LESBIAN LOVERS KILL THEIR HUSBANDS
20
21
That was the headline she chose. She used capital letters and dark
22
red type, like blood inked against the white background of her blog. We
23
didn’t know it was happening— that it was going to be published online,
24
that she was even investigating us— until it had already happened. We
25
discovered the post about two weeks after the funeral, when “fine” was
26
finally feeling like something that one day, someday, might again be
27
possible for Marnie. Things had been easing, the weight of the grief
28
spreading, yes, but thinning, too, like syrup diluted, and we had laughed 29
once or twice. I had been flitting between absolute calm, because there
30
was no way to identify my involvement, and palpating panic, because
31S
what if there was? And yet, as the first weeks became the funeral week,
32N
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 178
11/6/19 4:33 PM
S E V E N L I E S
179
and the subsequent weeks elapsed, I felt more measured in general and
01
the panic peaked only intermittently.
02
There hadn’t been many questions— a few at first, but nothing
03
significant— and everyone had accepted the most obvious version of
04
events as synonymous with the truth. Charles had been suffering with a
05
migraine and, dizzy and confused, had tumbled down the stairs, break-
06
ing his neck as he landed and dying almost immediately. And Charles did
07
have a migraine that morning; Marnie had confirmed it in the presence
08
of the paramedics. And Charles’s migraines were often characterized by
09
light- headedness, fuzzy vision, and occasionally vertigo, too.
10
The questions that everyone was asking— her friends and family, ac-
11
quaintances, those who didn’t know us at all but were simply shocked—
12
were more questions of faith than questions of fact. How could a young
13
man fall to his death in such a violent way? What did he feel as he fell?
14
What were the chances? Weren’t there many other ways in which he
15
might have fallen, a million other stumbles that he might have survived?
16
But I knew that the questions of fact were inevitable, and the initial
17
answers that came from the autopsy thankfully supported all the theo-
18
ries. The postmortem revealed that he’d eaten very little that day: some
19
coffee and a few tablets— in quantities slightly higher than prescribed—
20
for his recurring vertiginous migraines. He was obviously badly injured—
21
the broken ankle, the dislocated shoulder— but it was the peg fracture
22
at the back of his neck that proved fatal. He was very bruised, too, and
23
it transpired that his cheekbone was fractured, they assumed from a
24
knock on the way down. But they found nothing suspicious, so they
25
stitched him up and ferried him to the funeral home and they all con-
26
cluded that it was just a very unfortunate accident and very sad indeed.
27
If anything, I became less afraid. I wasn’t thinking about the police
28
or a prison or the truth. Because none of the authorities— not the para-
29
medics or the pathologist— were in any way imaginative. Isn’t that curi-
30
ous? I mean, I shouldn’t argue. But it wasn’t until later, after the funeral, S31
N32
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 178
11/6/19 4:33 PM
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 179
11/6/19 4:33 PM
18 0
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
after that article, that the fear began to simmer within me again. Be-
02
cause here was someone who seemed determined to interrogate the
03
facts, who asked questions, who saw something darker blossoming in
04
the account of this death.
05
Valerie had been looking for a story to alter the trajectory of her
06
career. I don’t imagine she disliked writing for the local newspaper ini-
07
tially, but she had been working there too long, a decade, and she was
08
always assigned menial community events— dog shows and charity
09
bake sales and occasionally stints tracking down celebrities at fancy
10
waiting- list restaurants. I suppose she wanted something more. She
11
must have been delighted when her story walked through the front
12
door one evening and sat down on the sofa beside her.
13
Valerie had been living with her roommate, Sophie, for three years.
14
She’d left her husband at a train station after years of not unhappiness
15
exactly but simply emptiness. She’d found a room to rent and the two
16
women had quickly become friends. Sophie was training to be a para-
17
medic and Valerie loved to be regaled with stories of life and death and
18
gore: the most extreme moments of a human life.
19
Sophie might have said that she’d spent the day with a crew of two
20
men, one who was older and rather overweight, and another who was
21
younger. They’d been to an accident at a posh block of flats— I imagine
22
this was how she described it; it’s what I’d have said— in which a young 23
man had fallen down the stairs and his wife and her best friend had ar-
24
rived to a twisted body sprawled in the hallway. And there was some-
25
thing strange, she might have said, about these two young women.
26
Valerie was intrigued.
27
She took her curiosity and tried to convert her suspicions into a
28
story. Because she knew that if this was going to transform her career,
29
then she needed to find some answers, to ask the right questions to the
30
right people, and unearth all the nasty details and the gritty truths.
31S
And yet, at first, she found nothing. She attended the funeral and
32N
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 180
11/6/19 4:33 PM
S E V E N L I E S
181
noticed nothing untoward. She initiated a conversation with Charles’s
01
secretary and Debbie unwittingly confirmed that he did indeed suffer
02
with migraines. She loitered at the front of Marnie’s building— Jeremy
03
spotted her on the CCTV— but Marnie wasn’t living there then and
04
there was nothing much for her to find. The most obvious truth was
05
still the most probable truth.
06
I suppose it was when she had finished examining Marnie that she
07
started to look a little more closely at me. I saw her once at the front
08
desk of my office building, chatting with the security guard manning
09
the reception area. He was an older man, balding with a paunch, and
10
she was so much younger and taller with her short hair and sharp
11
cheekbones. I remember her leaning over the countertop, her low- cut
12
sweater gaping as she laughed excessively. Her mouth was stretched
13
wide to reveal straight white teeth, and I recall wondering what it was
14
that she wanted from him.
15
Other than that, I didn’t notice her prying into my life, but that’s
16
not to say that she didn’t. There was so much online that she could have
17
found had she looked in the right places— which she probably did.
18
There were articles I’d written for the university magazine and several
19
pieces about Jonathan: on his death, on his marathon run, and the foot-
20
age recorded afterward was still available. And there were one or two
21
articles on my company’s website that used my name and discussed
22
improvements in customer service.
23
She must have found something in among all of that to inspire her.
24
Perhaps she really thought she’d solved a mystery. But the piece on her
25
website put forth yet another lie. It said that I had murdered Jonathan,
26
pushing him into the path of an oncoming vehicle. I had then sold his
27
apartment, making a substantial profit, and scooped up his life insur-
28
ance policy. I had made a fortune— her words, not mine— by murder-
29
ing my husband.
30
But that wasn’t all. Her piece continued, espousing bullshit backed
S31
N32
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 180
11/6/19 4:33 PM
9781984879714_SevenLies_TX.indd 181
11/6/19 4:33 PM
182
E L I Z A B E T H K AY
01
by no evidence and no sources whatsoever. She claimed that Marnie
02
and I— malicious vixens and secret lovers— had found our strategy so
Seven Lies (ARC) Page 25