Her Last Lie

by Amanda Brittany

  The officer was about to get into her car, when headlights illuminated the area and, with a skid across the ice, a car came to a halt.

  A man was driving, and a wide-eyed woman was in the passenger seat. Two young children in bobble hats sat in the back. They all climbed out, the man and woman looking concerned as they approached, the children picking up snow and throwing it at each other.

  ‘Can I help?’ the man said, banging his gloved hands together. ‘We’re renting the place.’

  ***

  ‘The police have gone now, Sally,’ Roxanne said later, her phone pinned to her ear as she headed down the hill in the back of the taxi. ‘Isla had never been there. A family have been renting it out for over a week, and they haven’t seen her.’

  ‘What will the police do now?’

  ‘They’ll search the area. They seem to be taking it seriously. But there’s nothing suspicious up there.’

  ‘What made you think she was there?’

  Roxanne sighed. ‘Somebody overheard the name of the lodge – and, they thought it was Isla.’ It suddenly seemed far too vague, and she began to doubt whether it had even been Isla. ‘We will find her.’

  ‘I keep clinging to that thought.’ Sally paused for a moment. ‘We’ve had so many lovely messages of support from family and friends. Millie’s put an update on Facebook. Not about Isla’s email, of course, but the fact we’re searching for her. “Has anyone seen her?” That kind of thing.’ She was talking too fast, almost manic. ‘It’s had lots of shares. And Abigail’s tweeted about it. I didn’t even know she had a Twitter account. It helps to know people are supporting us.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘We had a charming email from Sara Pembroke. She said you told her what had happened.’

  ‘Yes, sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . ’

  ‘No, don’t worry. She sounded lovely. Said she and Isla are good friends, and she wants to help. I suggested she does what she can on social media. That’s all anyone can do.’

  Roxanne felt suddenly agitated. Sara and Isla weren’t good friends, were they? ‘Listen, I’ll leave you in peace, and talk to you later.’

  ‘OK, we should be there soon.’

  Roxanne ended the call, and looked out of the taxi window. It was snowing again, stunning to the eye, yet so dangerous if you get on the wrong side of it.

  A tear rolled down her cheek.

  Where are you, Isla?

  Back at Camp Arctic, Roxanne hammered on Alex’s door. ‘I need to talk to you. Are you in there?’ she called, pushing her face against the door.

  Finally, the door flung open. It was Maddie, her dark hair damp and tied into a messy bun, a flimsy robe almost covering her body. ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘Alex sent me on a wild-goose chase,’ she said. ‘I need to talk to him.’

  He appeared behind Maddie, wearing red silk boxers, his chest toned and tanned. ‘What’s up?’ he said, sipping dark spirit from a tumbler.

  ‘This woman you spoke to.’ Her face tingled as the heat of the lodge hit her, her snowsuit far too warm. She unzipped it, and wiggled it from her shoulders. ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘Jesus, here we go again,’ Maddie said, flinging her arms in the air, eyes rolling. ‘We’re trying to enjoy our honeymoon, but you keep turning up, giving us the third degree like some out-of-work Sherlock wannabe.’

  Years ago, Roxanne might have decked Maddie, but now she bit down on her anger. ‘You know what it’s about. I can’t find my friend.’

  ‘Well, maybe you should get yourself one of those little beepers you can attach to keys.’ It was clear by her slight slur, she’d been drinking, and it suddenly hit Roxanne how young Maddie was. ‘Very careless, losing a friend,’ she went on, ‘you should be more . . . ’

  ‘Maddie, please,’ Alex cut in. ‘Have a heart.’

  ‘Yeah, well it’s so fucking cold here, my heart’s frozen,’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t we have gone to Barbados, like I suggested?’

  ‘What did the woman look like?’ Roxanne was breathless, her eyes on Alex. ‘Her hair colour? What was she wearing?’

  ‘Dark hair,’ Alex began. ‘And when we saw her she was wearing a bright blue snow jacket with a mountain scene on the back. I remember because it was unusual.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘About thirty.’

  ‘Did she approach you?’ Roxanne asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said.

  ‘And you told her about Isla.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went.’

  ‘So did you see the woman at the sky station on Friday?’

  ‘No . . . no I don’t think so,’ said Alex, a slight irritation in his voice. Maddie moved in, took his arm and began tapping her fingertips up and down his chest. ‘Listen, we really need to get on.’

  ‘You know, I’m beginning to think this woman used you both to send me to the wrong place,’ Roxanne said.

  ‘Great, well that’s sorted, then,’ Maddie said. ‘Now bugger off, and leave us in peace.’ And with that, she slammed the door.

  Roxanne clenched her fist and raised it to knock once more. But she knew there was nothing more they could tell her.

  As she headed back to her room, she pulled out her phone. She needed to update the police.

  Chapter 44

  Isla

  ‘I feel such a fool,’ Isla said, as Sara handed her her snowsuit.

  She’d screamed. Worked herself up to such a point. She hadn’t even known who was opening the bedroom door. How stupid was that? But then as Sara had pointed out, Isla wasn’t herself at all, her nerves in shreds.

  Sara had rushed to hold her close, soothed her. ‘There, there, sweetie.’ Told her she would take her back to Camp Arctic. She could manage the roads from Resan Slutar Lodge, if it meant Isla would be happier – feel safe – be OK. It would be silly for her to stay with her at the lodge in the state she was in. She would help her pack her case, and take her to the airport, where she could catch the next flight back to England – be with her loving family.

  ‘Wash your face, and get dressed,’ Sara had said in a motherly tone, and Isla had done just that. Sprinkled her face with ice-cold water, trying to force herself fully awake. But still she’d felt odd, unstable – those wretched memories hiding somewhere inside her head.

  Sara had been sitting on the bed when she’d returned to the bedroom.

  ‘I found Trevor Cooper’s phone,’ Isla had said. And together they’d searched for it, Sara pulling back the duvet, looking under the bed.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Sara had said eventually. ‘I can’t think of a single reason why it would be here. Maybe you imagined it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Isla had said, resigned to the fact that something was wrong with the workings of her mind.

  ‘You’re not well,’ Sara had gone on, handing her a tissue. ‘Let’s get you back to Camp Arctic, and perhaps call a doctor before you travel home. We need to get you well so you can enjoy life, Isla. You’re a long time dead, as my mother used to say.’

  And now, as Isla stepped into her snowsuit and zipped it up, things were so very wrong. She’d attempted to take her own life. Sara was right, and Jack too. She needed help. She needed to go home.

  Sara grabbed her snow jacket – blue with a mountain scene on the back and sleeves – and tugged it on. She held out her arm to Isla, and Isla latched on to her gratefully, like an elderly woman. As they left the house, Sara steadied her, taking part of her weight, as she led her towards the car, aided by the strong beam of her phone torch.

  Once on the road – Sara concentrating on driving through the inky darkness – Isla spoke, her voice small: ‘I thought I saw someone.’ She almost wanted to bite back her words. It would only compound what Sara must be thinking. That she was losing her mind. There had been nobody at the lodge. Sara would have mentioned it.

  ‘When?’ Sara said, braking as she hit a slippery spot and skidding slightly.r />
  ‘Earlier. Back there.’ Isla glanced over her shoulder, unease crawling down her back. ‘I think it was my imagination.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was. I didn’t see anyone.’ She effortlessly came out of the skid, and carried on along the road. ‘I wonder if your hallucinations are due to the trauma you went through in Australia.’ She paused, glancing briefly at Isla and then back to the road ahead.

  ‘But that was a long time ago. Why now?’

  ‘Perhaps something triggered it. The appeal, perhaps?’

  ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Or it could have been something small. But then I’m far from qualified to analyse you.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Isla asked, as Sara pulled off the road near snow-covered trees, and turned off the engine. She left the lights on.

  ‘Oh, Isla.’ She leant into the side well of the car and pulled out a needle. ‘You are so pathetically stupid.’ Brightness had left her voice. Her perpetual smile vanished. It was as though someone had flicked a switch in her head. ‘I’ve played you like a triangle. It was that simple. But then I knew it would be.’

  Before Isla could react, Sara plunged the needle into Isla’s hand and pressed down hard on the syringe. The pain was intolerable, and further weakness of her limbs was almost instant.

  ‘It’s a trial anaesthetic I’ve been working on at Tomlins Pharmaceuticals. It causes short-term amnesia, and leaves you unconscious for absolutely hours. In fact, I injected you after we’d had a few wines on Friday. You slept until Sunday. I hadn’t expected that.’

  Recollections of meeting Sara at the bottom of the chairlift pushed their way in. The way Sara had cried, ‘My dad died.’ The way she’d begged her to come back with her. ‘I need a friend.’

  Isla knew now she had gone with her on Friday, drank wine, comforted her.

  Sara smiled at the tears filling Isla’s eyes. ‘It will take a little while for the drug to fully get into your bloodstream,’ she said.

  ‘You won’t get away with it,’ Isla managed, squeezing her hand in an attempt to ease the pain, trying to understand why Sara seemed to hate her so much. ‘They’ll find the drug in my blood.’

  Sara thought for a moment. ‘Why would they do an autopsy, Isla? Why would they suspect anything, when you’ve announced your suicide?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s virtually undetectable.’ She seemed so sure, so pleased with herself.

  Isla’s head swam with confusion. ‘But why?’

  ‘You really don’t know what you’ve done, do you?’ Sara gave an enormous sigh, and looked at her watch. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got time to explain. I really need to string you up.’

  With what was left of her energy, Isla grabbed the handle of the door. It opened and she fell out onto the snow, and began crawling away. It was a pathetic action. Sara was beside her in seconds, dragging her back, and opening the boot. She grabbed a rope and looped it around Isla’s neck twice, before jerking it hard. Isla cried out in agony.

  ‘When I was at university with you, Isla,’ Sara said, her voice harsh and breathless as she dropped down on the ground beside her, ‘Trevor and I became friends. You had no idea how much I loved him. Why would you? I barely registered on your spectrum. He only had eyes for you, of course.’

  Isla’s head pounded as she began to sob.

  ‘I went through years of agonising plastic surgery so I could look like you – the woman who broke his heart. Two years ago, I got a job where he was working at Tomlins, and things moved fast. We went out. He said he needed me – wanted me.’ She paused. ‘He looked at me in that way he’d always looked at you.’

  ‘Please stop.’ Isla let out another wail, as tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped off her chin as though trying to escape.

  ‘We moved in together. Everything was perfect. And then he saw you on the train.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Nothing! He came home and told me how awful things were for you, that there was an appeal and you didn’t want to know the outcome, and then he told me he’d never stopped loving you. He left me, Isla. He left me because of you.’ Her voice was manic and disjointed. ‘I’d known about what happened to you. Everyone knew. So it didn’t take long to find you on the Internet. It was easy tormenting you, once I started researching, especially once I got a copy of the biography Carl Jeffery’s sister wrote.’ She smiled. ‘Have you read it?’

  Isla shook her head feebly.

  ‘There’s so much about you in there. You should probably sue. No wait, you can’t, you’ll be dead.’

  ‘We just talked on the train, that’s all.’

  ‘And exchanged numbers.’

  ‘But I love Jack.’

  Sara got to her feet, and pulled Isla along the ground. Isla struggled to crawl behind her, as she ploughed through the snow towards a clump of trees. ‘Even though you broke his heart into teeny tiny pieces, he kept on loving you. Who’d have thought it?’

  Fear thudded painfully, as snow soaked through Isla’s snowsuit, the cold seeping into her bones.

  ‘Well you can imagine how I felt.’ Sara stopped and looked up at a thick, snow-covered branch, the car headlights lighting the area. ‘I stole his phone the night you met him on the train, so he couldn’t contact you. I even sent a few messages to you pretending to be him, just to unnerve you. You were so easy to wind up – like one of those toys where you turn the key and let go, and they manically whiz all over the place bashing into things.’

  She laughed again. ‘I admit I went a bit crazy with my fake Facebook message from Trevor. I’d had a few wines. I should have known you would block the profile, and I wouldn’t be able to see you any more. And I needed to see your every move, Isla. Fortunately, for me, no harm was done, as you added me around the same time. Anyway all of it was just passing time, waiting for the moment I could remove you. Eliminate you. Paint over you.’ She yanked Isla to her feet with a single jerk. ‘He will never love me if you’re in the picture.’

  ‘Has it always been you?’ Isla whispered, everything hitting her so painfully, as the pieces fell into place.

  ‘Of course. I enjoyed stalking you. I even used Trevor’s sports car that day at Millie’s party. He left it in the garage when he took off. And I called the tapas bar too, so you’d walk home alone, but you ran too fast across the park. I didn’t have time to reveal myself. Did you like the flyer – and what about the butterfly? The bloke in your apartment upstairs happily let me in when I said I was there to bring you a gift.’

  Isla shuddered, her eyes on the tree, fear thudding in her chest. She’d never felt so helpless. Not since the day Carl Jeffery attacked her.

  ‘I think hanging is quite apt in the circumstances,’ she said. ‘Carl Jeffery hanged his victims, didn’t he?’ She paused and stared deep into Isla’s face, long and hard. ‘Did you know that a year ago, my father killed himself?’

  ‘But you said he’d just died. You talked about him. Texted him.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. He’d been dead a long time when we met in Wetherspoon’s.’ She paused. ‘I had no idea he was suicidal. Apparently he couldn’t live without my mother. His note didn’t even mention me. Do you know how painful it is to lose someone you love like that? To accept that they didn’t care about you enough to even mention your name in their final goodbye?’

  She paused, and her face stretched into a cold smile. ‘Your family will feel that pain. They’ll think you didn’t care about any of them at the very end, that the only person who meant anything to you was Andy. Just like my father only cared about my mother. Just like he never cared about me.’ There was nothing behind her eyes as she slung the free end of the rope over the branch with a chilling thud. Had Sara put Isla’s head in that noose back at the house, almost killed her? How did she expect to get away with any of it?

  Tears kept coming. But they would stop. They would stop soon.

  ‘Why didn’t you kill me the first chance
you had? Why pretend to be my friend?’

  ‘Oh, Isla, where would be the fun in that?’ She tugged hard on the rope, levering Isla off her feet. The pain in her windpipe was intolerable. And, as Isla rose up, clawing at the rope, desperately trying to loosen it, her legs moving like a child doing doggie paddle, the life she was clinging to began to fade.

  ‘Sara!’ Someone approached – Isla knew the voice. Was it in her head? Was he really there?

  The figure was a blur, black and misshapen in the light.

  And as consciousness left her, she thought she saw his face.

  Jack.

  Chapter 45

  Roxanne

  Roxanne sat by the window in reception, waiting for Sally and Gary, fumbling open Sara’s email on her phone.

  Hi Roxanne,

  Of course I remember you. Lovely to hear from you, although the circumstances are totally awful – you and Isla were inseparable at university, if I remember rightly.

  I’m shocked and truly upset to hear about Isla. She seemed great when I saw her, and we’ve exchanged a few emails since then and met up in Hitchin. She did mention Andy at the reunion. In fact, she wouldn’t stop talking about him. I didn’t mind, it was nice to see her so in love.

  If there’s anything I can do, please just shout. Keep me updated.

  Love Sara x

  It didn’t make sense. Had Isla confided in Sara about Andy, and not her?

  Her thoughts whirred as she opened up old emails from Isla, trawling through their daft exchanges, trying to find something Isla said that would give a clue to her state of mind – her whereabouts. But there was nothing.

  It was as she closed the final email that – like a bullet from a gun, about to blast everything she’d seen and heard up until that moment into a thousand pieces – it hit her.

  She fired off a message to Sally asking her to forward Isla’s final email. And waited.

  She’d never fully understood why Isla hadn’t mentioned Gary or Millie in her email to Sally. She’d idolised her dad and sister, and even if it was over between her and Jack, surely she would have said sorry for the pain she’d caused him. Isla was a good person. Wasn’t she?