Seven Lies (ARC)
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attending tap dancing classes and she’d uploaded several videos of a
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troupe of six all spinning and clacking and moving with frenzied feet as
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though their limbs were elastic. Her work was perhaps the easiest of all: 29
the previous entries on her website, none of them nearly as tantalizing
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as the one she’d written about us.
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I didn’t think then to retrace her steps through the previous
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decades— that came later— but I was still astonished by the volume of
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data available literally at my fingertips, with just a few clicks. It fright-03
ened me to know that I was just as visible, that my life could be so eas-
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ily penetrated. I watched her in the intervening weeks, as she uploaded
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images of her whereabouts with the locations tagged and posted about
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her plans and wrote a roundup of upcoming events in the area.
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I felt sure that she was watching me, too.
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Maybe the furor would have quieted if we’d waited a few more
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weeks. But Marnie didn’t. She couldn’t. The fiction written online was
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intensifying within her: the murder, the drugs, his death. It seemed
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more likely every day. She slept with it at night as it staged itself in her 12
dreams. She was by turns listless then restless, only ever sleeping briefly 13
before the nightmare began again. She could remember dropping the
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tablets into his coffee. She could picture herself standing on her tip-
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toes, reaching for the packet in the cupboard above the sink and pop-
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ping the pills from their blister packs and poisoning her husband. And
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then, when she hadn’t slept in days, she started experiencing strange
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hallucinations and wondering if maybe she’d pushed him after all. Had
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she been there all along? Had she stood behind him at the top of the
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stairs? She could see it: the prints hanging framed on the wall and the
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carpet beneath her feet and she knew what it felt like to touch him, to
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run her fingers between his shoulder blades, to lay her palm flat against 23
his spine. She wasn’t eating; although she was drinking. She wasn’t
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sleeping; she was frantic and feverish. She needed to state the truth as
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she knew it before the lie consumed her.
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“It wasn’t for me,” she said afterward. “I didn’t do it for me. I could
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have lived with it. But Charles? He would never have married the
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woman they said that I was. They’ve all made him seem so naive and so
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stupid and he was never those things. I couldn’t let that become the
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story that defined him.”
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And so she met with Valerie just two weeks after that first piece was
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published. She exhumed the newspaper from the recycling bin and she
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searched for the journalist’s name and she went back to the website and
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she sent an email. And received an offer of a breakfast the following
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morning at the café on the ground floor of my building.
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If I had known, I could have stopped her. But by the time I woke up,
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her spot beside me was cold.
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Valerie was, I imagine, rather disappointed by Marnie. I suppose she
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had been hoping for sordid details and revelations and something that
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confirmed her version of events. Marnie might have confessed to doling
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out the tablets that morning, to not checking the instructions quite
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carefully enough, or perhaps not at all, to being overwrought and over-
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worked and overestimating the quantities in her haste. But, of course,
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she didn’t.
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I can only guess that the story was unexpectedly dull. Marnie would
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have gone on and on about Charles’s migraines. She would have said—
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at least twice— that she’d been worried that he might have a brain
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tumor. But the doctor— and he was a nice man, a good doctor, they
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trusted him— had always been insistent: just migraines. And when they
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came they were pretty severe; they always had been. She should have
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stayed at home. She could have looked after him. She’d have brought
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him a glass of water, or a sandwich, or whatever it was that he’d wanted.
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She could have saved him.
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Valerie would have looked at Marnie— slight and fair, her hair un-
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brushed, the dark circles pooling beneath her eyes, the almost impercep-
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tible trembling— and would have known that her piece, as entertaining
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as it was, simply couldn’t be true. This woman— sniveling into her cof-
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fee, so bloody frail and broken— was incapable of murder.
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I wonder if Valerie felt frustrated. She had hoped, I’m sure, for
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something else. She wanted Part 2 to build on Part 1: more detail and
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drama and excitement. And instead she had a contradiction, an accusa-
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tion that wouldn’t survive scrutiny.
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She must have been livid. But she was also smart. And so she
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worked with what she had. She manipulated their conversation— the
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little revelations, the snippets that she’d wrung from a grieving widow—
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to expose a more interesting update.
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Marnie returned to the flat with fresh croissants— they’d been our
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weekend treat in the Vauxhall flat— and I assumed that this marked a
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change in her outlook, the beginning again of striving for a new normal.
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I didn’t suspect anything until the following morning when I received a
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call from Emma. She had registered for updates from Valerie’s website
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and had received an email in the early hours informing her that a new
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post had been uploaded. The email said
that Valerie had revised her
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earlier piece as a result of some “new evidence.” She had— this time—
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uncovered the real truth, a much darker truth and one that revealed not
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only the relationships that these two women had with their late hus-
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bands, but also more detail about their relationship with each other.
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I opened the page on my laptop.
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Valerie had written that I was jealous. She said that Marnie had
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been happy— unexpectedly so— and that I couldn’t stand to see her so
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content with somebody else. I had committed a murder for her—
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apparently— and I was horrified when she then wouldn’t do the same
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for me. The piece was long and convoluted, and almost all of it was
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nonsense. But the main point she wanted to make, it seemed, was that
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the blame rested solely with me. Marnie had been unable to kill Charles,
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because “perhaps she really loved him,” Valerie had written. And so I
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had taken the necessary steps to ensure that she couldn’t renege on the
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original deal. I was the puppeteer of the entire dastardly scheme. I was
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the true antagonist. I had killed him.
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And while Marnie Gregory- Smith has an alibi, the same cannot be
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said for best friend Jane Black. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions,
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Valerie had written. But it seems to me that the clouds are beginning to
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part over this mystery.
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Do you know how it feels to be accused of a murder you’ve commit-
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ted? It’s incredibly frightening.
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What?
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Why are you looking at me like that?
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Oh, I see. You want me to acknowledge that she’s far closer to the
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truth than any of the others: the police, the pathologist, our friends and 04
our families. And you’re wondering if she was right. Had she found a
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small piece of the truth? You want to know if I was jealous of Marnie.
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No. I can confidently say that I was never jealous, not of her life, not
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of the trinkets that decorated her day- to- day. I was occasionally envious 08
of her self- confidence, her warmth, her kindness, but those are very
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different things. Does that answer your question?
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But the one that you should have been asking is whether I was jeal-
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ous of Charles. And I suppose that I was. It sounds childish, and per-
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haps I don’t mean it as it sounds, but he had something that belonged
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to me, a love that had once been mine, a love that had chosen me.
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She didn’t specify that she’d spoken to Marnie. But somewhere be-
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tween the new evidence and her description of a teary widow clasping
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her cold coffee to her chest and unable to balance her breathing suffi-
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ciently to actually take a sip, I realized what had happened.
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I went into the living room and found Marnie sobbing on my sofa,
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her laptop open in front of her, apologizing in heavy, breathy gasps.
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“I’ve made it worse,” she said. “I’ve made her turn on you. It’s all my
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fault. She’s written that you did it. Have you read it? I’m so sorry, Jane.
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I’m so, so sorry.” She closed the lid of her laptop and lowered it onto the 23
coffee table. “I thought she’d see that I was telling the truth. I wanted 24
her to see that she’d been wrong, and— I’m so bloody stupid— I thought
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she’d publish a retraction or something and that it would all go away. I
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didn’t realize that she was recording me.” She dropped her head into
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her hands. “I thought she might say sorry,” she said, her voice muffled
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by her palms.
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“This isn’t your fault,” I replied, although I should admit now— in
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the spirit of honesty— that I was a little frustrated. I’d told her what we S31
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needed to do, and she’d blatantly ignored my instructions. But her in-
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tentions had been good; she’d thought she could unwind the web. “You
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weren’t to know,” I said.
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I tried to stay calm. I looked at her flannel pajamas turned up at the
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ankles, her legs crossed on the sofa. The buttons of her shirt were un-
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done at her neck and her chest, and red hives were flourishing across
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her skin. She needed me to be strong, to look after her.
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The truth is that I hadn’t expected repercussions. And with the
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autopsy and the funeral, this assumption had begun to feel more con-
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crete. The police and the coroner had no reason to look beyond the
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facts as they first found them. But I knew that there were other pieces
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of the truth still hidden elsewhere. And this strange woman— who had
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appeared in our lives unexpectedly— seemed determined to dig and
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pick and claw until she found something that felt more authentic.
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I had hoped that Valerie’s version of events would quickly be over-
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taken by gossip and news and other lies. But after the second article? I
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couldn’t be so sure. I didn’t know how far she might go in pursuit of
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the truth.
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I wanted to send her a message, confronting her, arguing that her
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behavior was simply unacceptable. But I knew that if I provoked her,
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there was a reasonable risk that she would grow more determined
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rather than less.
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I took a deep breath. I knew what we needed to do. We needed to
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trust in the absence; to let it widen over the next few weeks, until it was 25
the only thing still standing, until mine was the last possible truth,
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until an accidental fall down the stairs was the only thing left.
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And, in that moment, I was so focused on fixing the situation with
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Valerie that I failed to notice another problem expanding.
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Marnie has always bee
n one of the brightest, most intelligent, most
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dynamic people and the tears and the grief and the chaos changed none
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of that. She has always had a marvelous ability— it’s something cre-
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a jigsaw from the disconnected pieces. And I could suddenly see that
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she was doing just that.
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“I should never have approached her,” Marnie continued, the pitch
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of her voice shifting with each word. “I should have known that she
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couldn’t be trusted. I don’t know why I expect better from people.
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Why is that?”
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“Stop it,” I said, sitting down beside her and taking her hands in
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mine. “You’re only making yourself feel worse and it’s done now; there’s
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no point.”
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“And it doesn’t even make sense,” Marnie continued. Her cheeks
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were lined with tears. “How exactly does she propose that you mur-
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dered Charles? At least her first post was theoretically possible. I could 12
have drugged him. I mean, I didn’t, but I could have. But you weren’t
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even in the building when he died. You didn’t hear anything. It’s just
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nonsense.”
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“Marnie, stop it,” I said. “Let it go.”
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“What did you do? Push him down the stairs and then go home?
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And then what? Return to the flat later that evening? You didn’t even
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know that he was sick. You’d have thought that he was at work.”
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“Exactly,” I said, although my heart was beginning to beat a little
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faster and I was finding it difficult to swallow. At the back of my mouth, 21
my tonsils felt swollen and dry; they were obstructing my throat and
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restricting the air to my chest. I could feel my hands growing clammy
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around hers.
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“And why would you bother? I mean, I know you weren’t exactly
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the best of friends— maybe that’s a slight understatement— and I know
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that things had been particularly bad— that big misunderstanding—
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but even so, it’s just not feasible.”
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Her voice was getting louder, starting to shake and stretching into
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shrill. Her gestures were manic, her hands waving wildly. Her cheeks
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were flushed, rosy and enraged.
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