Lie to Me: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist

by Jess Ryder

  I wave the beam across the garden fences, of various heights and colours, with strong wooden gates no doubt padlocked on the other side. A few brown wheelie bins, numbered roughly in white paint, are hanging around like bored teenagers. I stare up at the back windows – bedrooms and bathrooms, some dark, some illuminated – hoping that one of them will speak to me, but they stare back blankly. Which gate did she unbolt? Which direction did she run in? Where exactly did she fall?

  I wish I’d taken Eliot’s briefcase. I need to look at the photos again, examine the maps and the ground plans, I want to know where X marked the spot. But I’ve only got my instinct to go on. I stop moving and listen. I can just about hear the black cab purring in the distance – thank God he’s still waiting for me. A car drives past. The undergrowth moves and I jump back. My heart’s galloping like a runaway horse and I press on my chest to soothe it.

  I try to take myself back in time. It was a hot night, the middle of a heatwave. Becca had a row with Dad and left the house to get some fresh air. So they must have lived nearby. Why choose such a creepy place, though? Perhaps it wasn’t so overgrown back then. There was a boathouse – I’ve seen it in photos – a large wooden shed painted dark green with small white-framed windows and a pitched roof. No sign of it now, but I think it was on the far side of the pond, a dead end, hidden by bushes and trees. That was where Jay cornered Cara; where Becca found her.

  I step over more broken glass, following the path around the water to where the building must have been. The overgrown, leafless trees form a spiky archway above me, glimmers of the polluted grey-orange sky peeping through. A few yards further on, I find a large square of concrete, crumbling in patches, stained with the charred remains of old bonfires, littered with empty beer cans and cheap vodka bottles. The boathouse foundations. A wooden bench, covered in bird shit and graffiti, lies on its side, and the torch beam catches something shiny on the back of the seat – a small brass plaque. I hover the light over the words and whisper the inscription:

  In memory of

  Cara Jane Travers 1960–1984

  Love you forever,

  Isobel

  Something stirs close by. A fox? My grip tightens on my phone as I beam the light into the corners. There’s a dark mound on the ground. The shape of a human body. My heart jumps out of my chest and the past and present instantly collide in my brain. I see Cara lying there, covered by a blanket, her limbs sticking out awkwardly. She moves slightly, withdrawing her arm, tucking back her legs. She’s breathing, still alive… I creep forward, the phone outstretched, my hand trembling, my whole arm shaking. She moves again, this time twisting to one side and rising to her knees. Her head jerks up and the light finds the curves and edges of her face.

  ‘Who told you I was here?’ She hurriedly gets to her feet and sticks her hands on her hips. I step back, confused. This isn’t Cara. Her hair is dark and her features are sharp and rat-like; black jeans slashed at the knees, a dark bomber jacket, and three or four scarves wound around her neck. She walks towards me, jerking her head. ‘You come to pick up?’

  ‘No – I… er, sorry… I didn’t realise…’

  ‘Then fuck off.’ Two loud beeps pierce the air and she flinches. ‘I said. Fuck. Off.’

  I turn and run, back along the path, skirting the water’s muddy banks, stumbling over the roots and broken glass, scratching my face and hands on the brambles. I run and run, back to the road, the pavements, street lamps, houses, parked cars… The taxi’s still there, humming impatiently, its headlamps glowing warmly in the darkness. I fling open the door, hurling myself onto the back seat.

  The driver tuts again, then does a three-point turn, and we head back the way we came, away from Darkwater and back to the light.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jay

  Jay fixes the Waterstones publicity leaflet to the wall with four small pieces of sticky tape. Isobel’s face grins out at him and he has a sudden impulse to blacken her teeth with a biro, but he leaves her be, noting with some satisfaction that she looks old enough without his childish embellishments. Compared to the photo next to it, taken from the programme of a play she directed ten years ago, she’s looking positively ropy. No amount of make-up can fill in the heavy wrinkles around her eyes – crow’s feet, his mother used to call them. She looks like an old hag, even more so with that bottle-black hair.

  He trolleys back in his office chair to get a better view of the whole piece. Creepy, yes. But strangely beautiful. A work of art. Such a pity he can’t invite anyone around to see it. They wouldn’t understand. They might think it’s a shrine, and it’s definitely not a shrine. It’s the opposite of a shrine, if there is such a thing.

  He leans back and laughs to himself. Pretentious tosspots would probably call it an installation, implying that Christopher Jay, the artist, was making some kind of statement about the cult of celebrity. They might also think that the materials – sorry, the exhibits – had been chosen and assembled deliberately, curated, in fact, to make some kind of sociopolitical point. But they’d be so very wrong. It started out as a dartboard, expanded a bit, and then kind of took on a life of its own. He can’t control it any more; it’s like a monstrous alien that has to be fed human flesh.

  The original image still occupies a central position, from which everything else radiates. Randomly. It’s still his favourite: a black-and-white photo of Isobel from The Stage that he enlarged on the department photocopier and then pinned to the cork noticeboard, in between his teaching timetable and takeaway menus. Those were the days… when he used to sit at this cheap old desk in the box room, marking coursework and preparing lessons, rising every so often to stretch his legs and throw a few arrows. You can still see the pricks on her face, like intense acne. But he doesn’t work in this room any more. One, because he doesn’t prepare or mark unless he can help it. And two, because the installation, or whatever you want to call it, has taken over. The room is the installation now.

  It’s taken several years to amass all this material: photos snipped from newspapers, programmes, theatre reviews, billings in the Radio Times. Anything that mentions her name, in fact, which he usually underlines in red felt pen. Now that she’s become a middle-class celebrity, features constantly appear in the quality Sundays and those tedious lifestyle magazines – ‘A Day in the Life of’, ‘My Book at Bedtime’, ‘Holiday Hideaways’, ‘How We Do Christmas’. There’s very little he doesn’t know about where she lives and what she likes to do. It makes him feel sick, reading about her charmed, privileged existence, but he resolutely tears out the pages and sticks them up. Got to feed the monster.

  The corkboard has long since disappeared from view, but it’s still there somewhere beneath the vast ocean of paper. It quickly filled up, so he had to spread out, attaching each piece of paper to the next to make an enormous collage. Now it takes up the entire side of the box room and is threatening to colonise the adjoining wall. It seems to breathe. If you open the door too quickly, the draught from the corridor makes the whole thing shiver like a giant jellyfish. Sometimes he dreams that all the images of Isobel come to life and chase him around the flat, or that every surface – walls, floors and ceilings – is covered in her grinning, self-satisfied mug, like a plague of cockroaches. He’s thought about taking the installation down, cutting up the images and burning them ceremoniously in the bath. That would be the sane thing to do. But instead he keeps adding to it.

  He looks at his watch. It’s gone eight o’clock; he can’t put it off any longer. If he doesn’t leave for work now, he’ll be late. Again. He still hasn’t forgiven his students for the mess-up at the theatre – if they hadn’t turned up late for the minibus, he would have made it to the drinks reception. Even they seem to be on Isobel’s side – her unwitting guardian angels, protecting her from harm. He hates the lot of them.

  The bus trundles down the Camden Road, lurching forward a few yards at a time, so slowly he has half a mind to get off and face the rain. How many years
has he been doing this journey? He’s considered buying a bike, but he’s frightened of being run over, his epitaph a bunch of dead flowers tied to a lamp post. Not that he has any friends who’d care enough to pop to Tesco for a £5 bouquet. They seem to have drifted away over the years.

  The same irritating voice announces the stops, as if everyone didn’t already know. ‘Her Majesty’s Prison, Holloway,’ it says in its clipped RP, taunting him. Why does his journey to work have to involve passing a prison? Is God trying to make some joke? A reminder, a little dig? He watches a few people getting on and off at the stop and wonders whether they work there. It’s too early in the day for visiting. Mum was the only person that visited him while he was in Winson Green – only on remand, but that was bad enough. He loved her for that, God rest her soul. Four months he was there awaiting trial; it was a revolting place. He would never have survived a life sentence.

  Jay has never been inside Holloway, but he’s got a pretty good idea what it’s like. Some nasty types in there, that’s for sure; really rough women. Drugs. Violence. That’s where Isobel should be, making up for lost time. He checks himself. Got to stop thinking about her or he’ll go insane. It’s like being madly in love, except the feelings are the opposite. Negative instead of positive. He keeps thinking about seeing her, planning what he’ll say, what he’ll do. Plotting ways he could harm her and get away with it. Piccadilly Waterstones is his next chance, although that’s not for a while. Isobel’s launching her latest book on directing there. It’s a public event, anyone can attend, and this time he’s not going to cock it up.

  The college sits at the fork of three roads, a few stops further down. Jay cuts through a side street and crosses over. It’s a large glass-walled building with concrete steps and a wide pavement, where the students regularly hang out, smoking, talking, eating crisps or takeaway chips, absorbed in their phones. There are often more standing outside than there are in the building. They do a lot of gesticulating and shouting at each other; it sounds like they’re arguing, but Jay’s come to learn that it’s just the way they are – they shout because they’re anxious that nobody is listening. They feel invisible and it scares the shit out of them. It’s Monday, but some of them have already got that Friday look – tired and jumpy, like shaken bottles of fizzy pop ready to explode.

  He used to think of them as kindred spirits; that’s what drew him here. He was brought up on a miserable council estate himself, never knew his father, was bullied by his classmates and then by his alcoholic nan who babysat while his mum worked as a night cleaner at the Longbridge car factory. He knew what it was like to fail at school, to have low expectations. Only his drama teacher, Mr Nellis, had time for him. He recognised his talent, encouraged him to join a youth theatre. There was no way he could afford to go to drama school – you couldn’t get grants for places like RADA in those days; you had to be rich. So when he left school, aged sixteen, with a couple of unimpressive O levels, he took a job at the large Woolworth’s in the Bull Ring. Youth theatre on Wednesday nights was the only thing that kept him going; it broke his heart when he turned eighteen and had to leave.

  Mr Nellis kept in touch; looking back, Jay realised the man probably fancied him, but, all credit to him, he never made a move. They’d meet up for a drink every now and then, in the pub behind the Alex Theatre, where the actors went after the show; necking pints before last orders. Jay and Mr Nellis loved to watch them laughing in their rich fruity voices, charming the bar staff and taking the merry piss out of each other. It was a performance in itself. Mr Nellis always brought The Stage with him so that Jay could scour the small ads for vacancies. The job had to be in Birmingham, because he couldn’t afford digs. He couldn’t play an instrument or sing, so pantos and musicals were out. He wasn’t abnormally tall or short, horribly ugly or stunningly good-looking. Most proper jobs were beyond his reach, because he didn’t have an Equity card and no hope of getting one. The union was all-powerful then; it was a closed shop. So when he saw the advert for Purple Blaze, his heart danced in his chest. Small new experimental theatre company needs brave, exciting actors for profit-share Birmingham tour.

  ‘That’s the one for you,’ said Mr Nellis, taking his red pen out of his inside jacket pocket and circling the advert. ‘Got your name on it.’

  Jay enters the college and nods a grudging hello to Saf on reception as he swipes his ID card through the barrier. His first class of the day starts in two minutes, but there’s no need to rush; it’s not as if the students will be lined up eagerly outside the drama studio. As he walks down the corridor – white breeze-block walls covered in framed photos of past productions – only two students are waiting. Another couple emerge from the shadows as he unlocks the door and turns on the lights. The studio – your typical black box with no windows – is cold after a weekend of inactivity, but it still smells faintly of bare feet. He walks in, taking his coat off and hanging it over a grey plastic chair to dry. Over the next few minutes, five more students wander in, talking to each other or preoccupied with their phones. Nobody so much as acknowledges him.

  ‘So where is everyone?’ Jay looks around accusingly at the assembled throng, as if they’ve captured the others and disposed of their bodies. Silence. ‘Okay, we’ll give it another five minutes…’ He sits back in his chair and crosses his leg, his thigh twitching nervously. Then Santianna Makepeace, a large black girl with super-long painted fingernails, enters the room and walks straight up to him, a purposeful look on her face.

  ‘That play was banging! You know what one I’m on about, dat play you took us to?’ She looms over him, flinging a lump of backcombed hair over her hefty shoulder. ‘It was like, real, you get me? Real life, like it was me up there! So I’m thinking, maybe I could do an audition piece from that. There’s a character in it I could act so good. Is that bless? Be so much easier than this Chekhov shit. No one cares what he’s on about anyway, man. So I was thinking, yeah, would it be cool if you asked them? You know that director woman who made that looong speech for tiiime? You could try get a photocopy off her or suttin’?’

  That. Director. Woman.

  ‘I don’t want to hear another mention of that fucking bitch,’ he says, forgetting he’s not supposed to swear in class.

  ‘Wagwan with you, sir?’ Santianna puts her hands on her hips. ‘Why you swearin’ at me? I’m a bitch, yeah?’ She turns to the others. ‘Did you lot hear dat? He’s a teacher man, he can’t call me a fucking bitch.’

  ‘Not you,’ he says irritably. ‘I didn’t mean you.’

  ‘Who the fuck then? You was talking to me!’

  ‘I wasn’t, Santianna. Not everything’s about you, okay? I was talking about the director woman.’ God, he can’t take much more of this. He stands up, hands in pockets, and walks into the centre of the room. ‘Isobel Dalliday is a fake. She doesn’t give a shit about you lot. All she cares about is herself. Oh, she’ll throw a few free tickets your way on press night to make it look like “lovely black people” go to the theatre. She might even let you ponce about on the stage once in a while, as long as you’re doing a show about racism or gangs or drug abuse. People like the great, wonderful, award-winning Isobel Dalliday, they do it for themselves, not you. It’s all an act. Believe me, I know. I know the truth about Isobel Dalliday.’

  Santianna raises her thick black inked-on eyebrows. ‘Oh my daiz, you know Isobel Dalliday?’

  ‘Jesus Christ – do you ever listen to a word I say?’ He charges back to his chair, scooping up his coat and grabbing his bag, nearly spilling papers onto the floor.

  A couple of the students exchange a glance but most of them look down at their feet, embarrassed, trying to suppress their laughter. He knows he’s making a fool of himself, but he doesn’t care. He shoves his way past them, banging open the heavy black doors and stomping down the corridor.

  An hour later and he’s been summoned to see Isatu Clarkson – their new head of department. She got the job over three internal candidates, includin
g him, although that’s not why he resents her. He never really wanted to be HoD, just fancied the status and the pay rise. Isatu is young, mid-thirties at most, and dresses like she works in the City; wears her hair in thick oily plaits coiled at the back of her head like venomous snakes ready to rise up and bite anyone who dares to contradict their mistress. Too smart, too ambitious, too full of PC jargon. And she’s on to him. Not that his disaffection is a big secret. She was probably warned about him by the previous incumbent – ‘Watch Chris Jay, he’s on a knife edge. Washed up, burnt out and any other cliché you can think of… If you get a chance to get rid of him, take it.’

  ‘So you’re not denying you lost your temper with the students?’ Isatu says, her pen poised to write a note on some form.

  ‘That wasn’t me losing my temper,’ he replies. Not by a long way, he thinks. You have no idea what happens when I’m really angry.

  ‘It was inappropriate behaviour at the very least. And you can’t just walk out of a lesson because you’ve lost control. You’re supposed to set an example, be a role model. These young people have enough violence and bad language at home to deal with; they don’t need it when they come here.’

  He shrugs. ‘It’s just bullshit. All this – it’s bullshit.’

  ‘What do you mean, exactly?’

  ‘Pretending they can make something of their lives, that they can escape, be actors. It’s all total bullshit.’