The Lies He Told
Valerie Keogh
Copyright © 2021 Valerie Keogh
The right of Valerie Keogh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be
reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in
writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the
terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.
www.bloodhoundbooks.com
Print ISBN 978-1-914614-15-6
Contents
Love best-selling fiction?
Also by Valerie Keogh
1. Misty
2. Misty
3. Misty
4. Misty
5. Misty
6. Misty
7. Misty
8. Misty
9. Misty
10. Misty
11. Gwen
12. Gwen
13. Babs
14. Misty
15. Misty
16. Misty
17. Gwen
18. Gwen
19. Babs
20. Babs
21. Babs
22. Dee
23. Gwen
24. Gwen
25. Gwen
26. Misty
27. Gwen
28. Dee
29. Misty
30. Dee
31. Gwen
32. Misty
33. Misty
34. Misty
35. Dee
36. Dee
37. Misty
38. Misty
39. Misty
40. Dee
41. Misty
42. Misty
43. Misty
44. Misty
45. Misty
46. Gwen
47. Gwen
48. Gwen
49. Gwen
50. Gwen
51. Gwen
52. Gwen
53. Babs
54. Misty
55. Misty
56. Misty
57. Misty
58. Gwen
59. Babs
60. Babs
61. Babs
62. Babs
63. Misty
64. Gwen
Acknowledgements
A note from the publisher
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Also by Valerie Keogh
The Dublin Murder Mysteries
No Simple Death
No Obvious Cause
No Past Forgiven
No Memory Lost
No Crime Forgotten
No Easy Answer
Psychological thrillers
The Three Women
The Perfect Life
The Deadly Truth
The Little Lies
For Jenny O’Brien
Great nurse… writer… friend.
1
Misty
Toby Carter stood in the open doorway and waved to get my attention.
I dragged myself away from the characters that were coming to life under my fingers, took off the headphones I used to shut out the world when I was working and dropped them on the desk.
London had been struggling in a heatwave for over a week but Toby looked cool in his summer-weight suit, his white shirt still as crisp as when he’d left early that morning, his tie still in the Windsor knot he preferred. As always, his fringe fell across his forehead in an artfully casual way that I knew cost him a fortune to maintain.
I was stressed with a looming deadline but, as ever, the sight of him was the perfect antidote and as my tense shoulders slumped, the corners of my lips tilted upward in an automatic smile.
‘Hi, have you been home long?’
‘I don’t love you anymore.’
The words were said without inflection and for a second I thought I’d misheard. I had to have done… we were perfect together. A tinny, demented bumblebee buzz came from the discarded headphones. I wanted to be distracted, so picked them up and stared at them, anything rather than look across the room, anything rather than try to make sense of words that were baffling.
‘I don’t love you anymore,’ he repeated, a little louder, each word clearly punctuated.
I dropped the headphones, my eyes sliding reluctantly across the room. It was the bulging holdalls bracketing his shiny shoes that I saw first. I stared at them so that I wouldn’t have to look at his face and see the truth written in his eyes.
‘I’m sorry.’
Sorry. Was that what it came down to – a reduction to that one damn, miserable, pathetic word?
I was still staring at his bags as if the answers were in them struggling to get out. Maybe they were. Maybe he’d packed up all the answers… I should rush over and release them.
But before I could move, he bent and slipped his fingers through the handles. Long, strong fingers that had worked their magic on me so many times. He was taking them away… his fingers, the bags full of dreams, hopes and promises. All of it. Leaving me.
It was only then that I looked up and met his blue eyes. Startlingly blue and intense. Coloured lens. I discovered this the first night he’d stayed over and taken them out, the real colour an unremarkable pale blue. It was a touch of vanity that had amused me. I’d thought it had shown his vulnerability and had found it endearing. Now, I wondered if they were as fake and unreal as his promise to love me forever.
‘Here’re your keys.’ He held out the key ring I’d bought him. The one I’d had made for him. Our initials cut into stainless steel. M and T entwined together and designed to last forever. Like we were supposed to.
Two keys. One for the back door, one for the front. Lying together, as we’d done. Fitting neatly, as we had.
If he didn’t have the keys, he couldn’t come back. Couldn’t slip in beside me in the quiet of the night the way he’d done recently when he’d been delayed by meetings at work. Slip in beside me, wrap an arm around my waist, deliberately disturbing me so that I’d turn in his arms and he’d make love to me when I was barely awake, knowing the buttons to press to make me moan.
Couldn’t come back and surprise me in the middle of the day when he’d insist I needed to eat. He’d lure me away to a restaurant where we’d eat and drink and the remainder of the day would be lost in lust and love.
Couldn’t arrive home unexpectedly, open the door of my office quietly and slip across the room to wrap his arms around me, making me shriek in fright and dissolve in laughter as he howled with glee having caught me out again.
I stared at the keys and wanted to tell him to hold on to them… in case he changed his mind… in case he remembered the words he’d whispered, the ones where he swore he loved me and couldn’t live without me.
Instead, I held out my hand in an automatic response.
My chipped nails were a stark contrast to his perfectly manicured ones. Was that it? Had I let myself go? To
o busy to be the perfect woman he’d met that first night… the successful, almost-famous girlfriend. Perhaps he’d finally realised that success… like fame… cost. My approaching deadline had meant longer hours recently, fewer expensive dinners out and weekends away. I’d explained and thought he’d understood. Perhaps he hadn’t… or maybe he had and decided the cost wasn’t worth his effort.
He dropped the keys into my outstretched hand, taking almost exaggerated care not to touch me as if afraid I’d grab him in a final desperate attempt to hold on. The entwined M and T were cold. I curled my fingers around them.
‘I’m moving in with a friend. I’ve sent the address to your mobile so you can forward any post, okay?’
Okay? Did he expect me to say yes, that everything was hunky-dory? I suppose he expected me to say something though, not simply sit there staring at the keys, the metal cold and hard, like the weight in my chest.
I was a bestselling author. One of my books optioned for a movie, another for a TV series. Words… they were my forte. But for the life of me I couldn’t find one appropriate thing to say bar the one word I refused to utter, the plaintive pathetic why I knew would release a dam of tears and recriminations.
Better to say nothing rather than that, to remain quiet rather than to beg him to reconsider and stay with me. Anyway, I could see by his set grim face that no words of mine no matter how suitable or erudite were going to change his mind.
The next few seconds were blank and numb. Only the pain from the keys and entwined-forever initials pressing into the soft flesh of my palm brought me back. The marks remained long after the echoes of his leaving had faded – the leather soles of his shoes slapping on the wooden hallway, the clunk of the front door as it shut behind him.
The words came then. A string of invectives and derogatory terms I usually reserved for the use of the worst of my fictional characters. The words echoed around the room and bounced off the walls, deafening and futile. I shouted until I was hoarse, then I released my clenched fist and threw the keys and the now-redundant key ring across the room. They crashed against the wall and slinked to the floor, landing beside the chunky glass paperweight I’d been given by my publisher the previous year.
What that was doing on the floor, I couldn’t think. But then nothing was the way it was supposed to be.
Leaving the keys and paperweight on the floor, I put my headphones back in place, turned the music up so loud it drowned out everything and went back to my book, to my characters, to playing God in a world where I had control.
2
Misty
It took me several hours to get back to my work after Toby cracked my world apart. Hours when I came up with the perfect words I could have said to him, words that would have sliced him and made him bleed. All too late, of course, the way those words frequently are.
The shade of my desk lamp was a green glow in the dark room, the light it threw over the keyboard a cold yellow. It would have made sense to get up and turn on the main light but I was afraid if I did, I’d not sit down again. And I needed to finish this book. It was due in by 8am and I’d hoped to have had it done hours before. Instead, it was almost 7.45 before I reached the last word, my eyes gritty with tiredness and the tears that had come after he’d left. Not before. I’d taken some pride in that.
Needles of pain pricking my right shoulder told me I’d been hunched over my keyboard for too long. I lifted my arm, rolled it and felt the muscles and tendons crunch. Today, along with all the other million and one things I’d been promising to do for the last few weeks, I might try to fit in a massage.
But first, I needed to send this manuscript to my publisher. It took a minute to frame a brief friendly email apologising for the very-last-minute delivery then, with the completed manuscript attached and after a few second’s hesitation where, as with every book to date, I wondered if I’d done enough, if I should maybe change the last paragraph, the first paragraph, the characters, the whole damn thing because I knew this time the book was rubbish, I hit send. And that was it. My eighteenth novel was done.
With a weary sigh, I dropped my headphones and glasses on the desk, switched off the computer and lamp and struggled to my feet feeling stiff from too many hours in one position. Too tired to do anything else, I left the small bedroom I used as an office and went next door to the room that had euphemistically been described as the master en suite in the sales details. Reality was a room swamped by a king-size bed and an en suite that was too small to be anything other than adequate.
Built-in wardrobes covered one wall. I’d made space at one end for Toby’s clothes, pushing mine to the far side. My clothes had become squashed, his taking up more space as the weeks had passed and he’d added to his extensive wardrobe on each of our frequent shopping trips. I’d considered buying a wardrobe for the spare bedroom but hadn’t got around to it. Luckily. I tried to sneer but failed and pressed my lips together to stop the tremble that would make me feel even more pathetic.
Toby had left the wardrobe door hanging open, the empty hangers inside a testament to my newly single status. Single… again. A slam of the wardrobe door set the hangers rattling. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sound so lonely.
I was dressed in what I referred to as my writing garb… a loose, comfortable kaftan which didn’t constrict as I hunched over the keyboard. I didn’t bother to remove it and dropped onto the bed behind. It was exhaustion that was turning me maudlin, making everything feel worse than it was. After a few hours’ sleep, I’d be saying ‘Toby who?’
With that optimistic thought in my head, I shuffled up the bed and dragged the duvet around and over me. Covering my head with it, cocooning myself. Tears prickled when I remembered other nights when I’d slept wrapped in Toby’s arms. I don’t like to let you go, he’d said. And I’d thought how lucky I was to meet a man so honest, so loving.
Now it was the weight of the duvet rather than his arms that comforted me and, despite everything, I drifted off to sleep.
It was the shrill ring of the phone that woke me, the sound only slightly muffled by the duvet. It took a few seconds to untangle an arm to reach the phone, searching fingers pulling it off the stand and under the covers to my mouth. ‘Hello.’
‘You got it done?’
It was Ann, my older sister. I pushed the duvet off my face and pulled a pillow down to prop up my head. ‘I did, with minutes to spare.’
‘As long as it’s gone. Welcome back to the land of the living.’
If it was the land of the living, why did I feel so dead inside? My head might have been hoping for Toby who? after a few hours’ sleep but my heart was still crying for loss it didn’t understand.
‘Hello, earth to Misty!’ Ann’s laugh tinkled down the line.
‘Sorry, I’m not quite awake yet.’
‘Get yourself into a cold shower, that’ll do it. It’s almost twelve. Lunch at two? Ursula is free, too, so we can do a big catch-up.’
I never argued with my sisters. There was no point, they were unstoppable forces, I never won. Agreeing to meet at our usual lunchtime haunt, I hung up.
Ann and Ursula, my sisters, were my best friends. Married in their early twenties to decent, hardworking, kind men who still adored them, they lived only a short drive or a long walk from my home in Hanwell. They tethered me to the normality I craved when, before Toby, I’d buried myself in my writing, living a fantasy life populated by make-believe characters. I’d argued with my sisters that it was safer, that the real world could be viciously painful.
But then I’d met Toby.
I curled up, pulling the duvet over my head again. I hadn’t really wanted to prove myself so spectacularly right. The real world was both vicious and painful.
‘Toby Bloody Carter.’ I almost spat the words out as I threw back the duvet and scrambled from the bed. It was good to have a reason to get dressed otherwise I’d have stayed in bed drowning in self-pity.
The frantic and always last-minute rush to get
a manuscript completed by deadline was generally followed by a certain lassitude that would be harder to shake now that I was alone again. Alone. What a horrible word.
A minute later, I was under the shower, water as hot as I could stand it beating down from the large square shower head. Built for two. Toby’s words were so clear, I switched off the shower to listen for him, shivering foolishly as water cooled on my skin and memories of our naked entwined bodies floated on the steam.
‘It’s a cliché,’ I’d said to him the first time when he suggested joining me. ‘Every second-rate romance story has the couple showering together whereas the reality can’t possibly be romantic.’
He’d laughed and taken great pleasure in proving that cliché or not, sex in a shower with the right man was a magically unforgettable experience.
The right man.
The Lies He Told: a gripping psychological suspense thriller Page 1