The Lying Game Read online

  ‘Did you really destroy all the pictures your dad did of us?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kate says. Her face is wretched. ‘I swear it. But not –’ She stops, and suddenly I don’t want to hear what she’s about to say, but it’s too late. She presses her lips together in a white, bloodless line. ‘But not straight away.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I couldn’t bring myself to burn them right after he died, I meant to, but I just – I don’t know, I could never find the right time. But one day I went up to his studio and someone had been there.’

  ‘What?’ I don’t try to hide my shock. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Years ago. Not long after it all happened. There were paintings missing, and drawings, and I knew someone had been in there looking. I burned them all after that, I swear it, but then the letters started.’

  I feel coldness drip through me like poison.

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘It was just one at first,’ Kate’s voice is low. ‘I sold a painting of Dad’s. The auction was reported in the local press along with what it sold for, and a few weeks later I got a letter, asking for money. It didn’t make any threats, just asked for a hundred pounds to be left in an envelope behind a loose panel in the Salten Arms. I did nothing, and few weeks later the letter came again, only this time it was asking for two hundred and there was a drawing enclosed.’

  ‘A drawing of us.’ My voice is flat, sick. Kate nods.

  ‘I paid up. The letters came again, every now and again, maybe one every six months, and I paid and paid, but at last I wrote a letter saying that was it, I couldn’t pay any more – that the Mill was sinking and Dad’s paintings were gone, and they could ask all they wanted but the money just wasn’t there. And the letters stopped.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘About two or three years ago. I didn’t hear anything after that, and I thought it had stopped, but then a few weeks ago they started again. First it was the sheep and then …’ She swallows. ‘Then after you left, I got a letter saying Why don’t you ask your friends? But I never dreamt –’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Kate!’ I stand up, too full of nerves to keep still, but there is nowhere to go and I sit again, picking restlessly at the frayed material of the sofa. I want to say, why didn’t you tell us? But I know why. Because Kate has been trying to protect us, all these years. I want to ask, why didn’t you go to the police? But I know that too. I want to say, they’re only pictures. But we know – we both know – that’s not true. The pictures don’t matter. It’s the note with the sheep that tells the whole story.

  ‘I keep wondering …’ Kate says in a low voice, and then stops.

  ‘Go on,’ I prompt her. She twists her fingers together, and then gets up and goes across to the dresser. In one of the drawers is a sheaf of papers, bound together with a piece of red string, and right in the middle of the sheaf is a letter in an envelope, very old and creased. It’s a letter that makes my heart stutter in my chest.

  ‘Is that –?’ I manage, and Kate nods.

  ‘I kept it. I didn’t know what else to do.’

  She holds it out to me, and for a minute I’m reluctant to take it, thinking of forensics and fingerprints, but it’s too late. We handled that note seventeen years ago, all of us. I take it, very gently, as though using the tips of my fingers will make it harder to trace back to me, but I don’t open it. I don’t need to. Now that the letter is in my hands, the phrases float up through from the deep water of my memory – so sorry … don’t blame yourself, my sweet … the only thing I can do to make things right …

  ‘Should I give it to Mark Wren?’ Kate asks huskily. ‘I mean it might stop this whole thing. It answers so many questions …’

  But it raises so many more. Like, why didn’t Kate go to the police with this note seventeen years ago?

  ‘What would you say?’ I ask at last. ‘About where you found it? How would you explain it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could say I found it that night, but I didn’t tell anyone – I could say the truth, basically, that Dad was gone, that I was afraid of losing the house. But I don’t have to involve the rest of you – the burial, everything else, I could leave that out. Or I could say that I only found it later, months afterwards.’

  ‘God, Kate, I don’t know.’ I scrub my fists into my eyes, trying to chase away the remnants of bleary-eyed exhaustion that seem to be stopping me from thinking properly. Behind my lids, lights spark and dark flowers bloom. ‘All those stories, they seem to be asking more questions than they answer, and besides –’

  And then I stop.

  ‘Besides what?’ Kate says, and there’s a note in her voice I can’t quite read. Defensiveness? Fear?

  Shit. I did not mean to go down this route. But I can’t think what else to say. Rule Four of the Lying Game – we don’t lie to each other, right?

  ‘Besides … if you give them that note they’ll want to verify it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Kate, I have to ask this.’ I swallow, trying to think of a way to phrase it that doesn’t sound like I am thinking what I’m thinking. ‘Please understand, whatever you say, whatever happened, I won’t judge you. I just have to know – you owe us that, right?’

  ‘Isa, you’re scaring me,’ Kate says flatly, but there’s something in her eyes I don’t like, something worried and evasive.

  ‘That note. It – it doesn’t add up. You know it doesn’t. Ambrose committed suicide because of the drawings, that’s what we always thought, right?’

  Kate nods, but slowly, like she’s wary of where I am going.

  ‘But the timings are all wrong – the drawings didn’t turn up at school until after he died.’ I swallow again. I think of Kate’s facility for forgery, for the paintings she faked for years after Ambrose’s death. I think of the blackmail demands she has been paying for more than fifteen years, rather than go to the police with this note – demands she has concealed from us, though we had a right to know. ‘Kate, I guess what I’m asking is … did Ambrose definitely write that note?’

  ‘He wrote that note,’ she says, and her face is hard.

  ‘But it doesn’t make sense. And look, he took a heroin overdose, right? That’s what we’ve always thought. But then why were his works all neatly packed up in the tin? Wouldn’t he have just shot up and dropped them beside his chair?’

  ‘He wrote that note,’ Kate repeats doggedly. ‘If anyone should know, I should.’

  ‘It’s just –’ I stop. I can’t think how to say this, say what I’m thinking. Kate squares her shoulders, pulls her dressing gown around herself.

  ‘What are you asking, Isa? Are you asking if I killed my own father?’

  There is silence.

  The words are shocking, spoken aloud like that – my vague, amorphous suspicions given concrete shape and edges hard enough to wound.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. My voice is croaky. ‘I’m asking … I’m asking if there’s something else we should know before we go into that police interview.’

  ‘There is nothing else you need to know.’ Her voice is stony.

  ‘There’s nothing else we need to know, or there’s nothing else full stop?’

  ‘There’s nothing else you need to know.’

  ‘So there is something else? You’re just not telling me what?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, please stop asking me, Isa!’ Her face is anguished, and she paces to the window, Shadow feeling her distress and pacing with her. ‘There’s nothing else I can tell you – please, please believe me.’

  ‘Thea said –’ I start, and then feel my courage almost fail, but I have to ask it. I have to know. ‘Kate, Thea said Ambrose was sending you away. Is that true? Why? Why would he do that?’

  For a minute Kate stares at me, frozen, her face white.

  And then she makes a noise like a sob and turns away, snatching up her coat and slinging it on over her pyjamas, shoving her feet into the mud-spattered welling
tons that stand beside the doorway. She grabs Shadow’s lead, the dog anxiously following at her heels, its gaze turned up to Kate’s trying to understand her distress – and then she’s gone, the door slamming behind her.

  The noise sounds like a gunshot, echoing in the rafters and making the cups on the dresser chink with indignation. Freya, playing happily on the rug at my feet, jumps at the noise, her small face crumpling with shock as she begins to wail.

  I want to pursue Kate, pin her down for answers. But I can’t, I have to comfort my child.

  I stand for a minute, irresolute, listening to the howling Freya, and the sound of Kate’s footsteps hurrying away across the bridge, and then with a growl of exasperation I pick Freya up and hurry to the window.

  She is red-faced and kicking, full of a woe out of proportion to the sudden noise, and as I try to soothe her, I watch Kate’s retreating silhouette disappearing up the shoreline with Shadow. And I wonder.

  I wonder about the words she chose.

  There’s nothing else I can tell you.

  Kate is a woman of few words – she always has been. So there must be a reason. A reason why she didn’t just say, There’s nothing else to tell.

  And as I watch her, disappearing into the mist, I wonder what that reason is, and whether I’ve made a huge mistake by coming here.

  WITH KATE AND Shadow both out, the house is strange and quiet, the sea mist spattering at the windows and the puddles from last night still drying on the dark, damp-stained boards.

  In the mist, the Mill feels closer to the sea than ever, more like a decrepit, waterlogged boat run adrift on a bank than a building meant to be part of the land. The mist seems to have crept into the wooden boards and beams in the night, and the place is cold, the floorboards chilly with damp beneath my feet.

  I feed Freya, and then, setting her back down to play on the floor with some paperweights, I light the wood-burning stove, watching as the salt-soaked driftwood flares blue and green behind the sooty glass, and then I curl on the sofa and try to think what to do.

  It’s Luc I keep coming back to. Does he know more than he is letting on? He and Kate were so close, and now his love for her has turned to such bitterness. Why?

  I press my hands to my face, remembering … the heat of his skin, the feeling of his limbs against mine … I feel suddenly like I am drowning.

  It is late lunchtime when Kate comes back, but she shakes her head at the sandwiches I’m making, and takes Shadow up the stairs to her bedroom, and there’s a part of me that’s relieved. What I said, the suspicions I voiced, they were close to unforgivable, and I’m not sure if I can face her.

  When I go up to put Freya down for her nap, I can hear her, pacing about on the floor above, even see her shape occasionally through the bare gappy boards as her silhouette passes across a window, blocking out the slivers of grey light that filter down through the cracks.

  Freya is hard to get to sleep, but at last she’s slumbering, and I go back down to the living room to try to sit at the window, watching the restless waters of the Reach. It is not quite four o’clock, and the tide is almost at its height, an exceptionally high tide, one of the highest since we’ve been here. The jetty is awash, and when the wind blows off the Reach, water comes lapping in beneath the doors to the seaward side of the Mill.

  The mist has lifted slightly, but the sky is still cloudy and chill, and it’s hard to remember the heat of just a few weeks ago as I sit, watching the iron-grey water slapping at the boards outside. Did we really swim in that estuary earlier this month? It seems impossible that it could be the same place as the warm, balmy water where we floated and swam and laughed. Everything has changed.

  I shiver, and wrap my jumper around myself. I packed badly – shoving stuff into my shoulder bag without looking, and I have too many pairs of jeans and lightweight tops, and not enough warm clothes for the weather, but I’m too cowardly to ask Kate to lend me something. I can’t face her, not now, not today. Tomorrow, perhaps, when all this has blown over.

  There’s a pile of books on the floor by the window, the covers curling with damp, and I walk across and pick one at random. Bill Bryson – Notes from a Small Island. The cover is neon-bright and incongruously cheerful against the muted colours of the Mill, damp-stained wood and bleached cottons. I go across to the light switch to try to brighten the place up – and it fizzes against my hand, making me jump. From somewhere behind me there is a loud bang, and the light flashes once, unnaturally bright, and then goes dead.

  The fridge gives a shuddering groan, and stops its imperceptible hum. Shit.

  ‘Kate,’ I call cautiously, not wanting to wake Freya, but she doesn’t answer. I hear her feet pacing back and forth, though, and a check in the movement as I call, so I think she has heard. ‘Kate, a fuse has blown.’

  No answer.

  There’s a cupboard under the stairs and I put my head inside, but it’s pitch black, and although there is something that looks like it could be a fuse box, it’s not the modern installation Kate mentioned. It’s black Bakelite mounted on wood, with what looks like a tar-stained hank of cord coming out of one side, and some Victorian lead wiring coming out of the other. I don’t dare to touch it.

  Fuck.

  I pick up my mobile, and I am about to google ‘how to reset a fuse box’ when I see something that makes my heart stutter. There’s an email from Owen.

  I click, my heart in my mouth.

  Please, please, please let it be an apology for our quarrel – anything would do, any kind of halfway house that would enable me to climb down from the high horse I’m on. He must know, in the cold light of day, that his accusations were ridiculous. A bunch of roses and a trip to see an old friend equating to an affair? It’s paranoid, and he’s surely realised that.

  But it’s not an apology. It’s not even really an email, and at first I don’t understand what it’s saying.

  There’s no ‘Hey love’, or even ‘Dear Isa’. There’s no self - justification or grovelling pleading. In fact there’s no text at all, and for a minute I wonder if he’s sent me an email meant for someone else.

  It’s a list of offences, dates and locations, without any names or context attached. There’s a shoplifting offence in Paris, joyriding in some French suburb I’ve never heard of, aggravated assault in a seaside resort in Normandy. At the beginning of the list the dates are twenty years ago, but they become more recent as I scan down, though there are long gaps, sometimes spanning several years. The later ones are all in southern England. Drunk-driving near Hastings, a caution for possession in Brighton, taken into custody after a brawl somewhere in Kent but released without charge, more cautions. The last incident is just a couple of weeks ago – drunk and disorderly near Rye, a night spent in the cells, no charges. What are they?

  And then suddenly I understand.

  This is Luc’s police record.

  I feel sick. I don’t even want to know how Owen got hold of all this, and so quickly. He knows people – police, MI5 officers – and has a senior position in the Home Office in his own right, with high-level security clearance, but this is a gross violation of professional conduct however you look at it.

  But it’s not just that. It’s the fact that this shows he is not climbing down, he still believes Luc is the reason I’ve come down here. He still believes I am fucking another man.

  I feel anger flood through me, making the skin on the back of my neck prickle and my fingers tingle with fury.

  I want to scream. I want to phone him up and tell him he’s a bastard, and that the trust he’s broken may never be mended.

  But I don’t. Partly because I am so angry that I’m not sure if I can trust myself not to say something unforgivable.

  Partly, though, because I know, and a small part of me is ready to admit that fact, that he is not completely to blame.

  Yes, he’s to blame, of course he is. We’ve been together for almost ten years, and in that time I’ve never so much as kissed another m
an. I’ve done nothing to deserve being treated like this.

  But Owen knows I am lying to him. He’s not a fool. He knows it – and he’s right.

  He just doesn’t know why.

  I crush my phone in my fist until it makes a faint complaining buzzing sound to tell me I’m holding it too tight, and I force my grip on the plastic to relax, and flex my fingers.

  Fuck. Fuck.

  It’s the insult I can’t stand – the idea that I would reel straight from his bed to Luc’s – and if he wasn’t Freya’s father, that alone would be enough for me to end it. I’ve had jealous boyfriends in the past, and they’re poison – poison to the relationship, and poison to your self-esteem. You end up looking over your shoulder, second-guessing your own motives. Was I flirting with that man? I didn’t mean to. Did I look at his friend like I wanted some? Was my top too low, my skirt too short, my smile too bright?

  You stop trusting yourself, self-doubt filling the place where love and confidence used to be.

  I want to phone him up and tell him that’s it – if he can’t trust me, it’s over. I won’t live like this, suspected of something I haven’t done, forced to deny infidelities that exist only in his mind.

  But … even aside from my own part in all this, can I do that to Freya? I know what it’s like, living without a parent. I know only too well, and I don’t want that for her.

  There is a thick blanket of cloud covering the sky, and the Mill feels dark and chilly, the stove burning low behind its little door, and suddenly, as I hear Freya stirring from above, her wakening whimper drifting down the stairs, I know I have to get out. I will go to the pub for dinner. Maybe I can find something out, talk to Mary Wren about the police investigation. Whatever, it’s plain that Kate isn’t about to come down any time soon, and even if she did, I’m not sure if I could face her, if I could sit there over dinner, exchanging small talk, with the spectre hanging between us, and Owen’s email like poison in my phone.

  I run upstairs to the bedroom and wrestle Freya into a coat. Then I make sure the rain guard is packed beneath the pram, and push her out onto the sandy shore, the wind in our faces as we turn to begin the walk to Salten.