The Liar's Room

by Simon Lelic

  “Adam,” she says, daring to smile—

  —but then there is a sound Susanna is not expecting, and the door into her office bursts open. It takes Susanna as much by surprise as it does Adam. Incredibly, Susanna is the first to realize what is about to happen.

  She feels her eyes go wide, her voice welling from her aching stomach.

  “No! Ruth, don’t!”

  But Ruth is already in motion. She has taken in the scene before her and she lifts the fire extinguisher she is carrying above her head. It is on its way down by the time Susanna emits her cry.

  There is a scream—Susanna’s?—and then a crack: a sound like the snap of breaking shell.

  And then, just like that, it is over. Ruth drops panting to her knees—and Adam slumps lifeless to the floor.

  EMILY

  14 SEPTEMBER 2017

  15 SEPTEMBER 2017

  16 SEPTEMBER 2017

  17 SEPTEMBER 2017

  18 SEPTEMBER

  There is a chill in the house that has nothing to do with the shifting seasons. She has been carrying it with her for days, since before the summer finally died. It seems to emanate from deep within her, from the place that contains her broken heart.

  Emily’s bedroom is the coldest room of all, yet Susanna finds herself drawn here. Three days since Adam—four days since Emily went missing—it feels as though she is no use anywhere else. She has told the police everything she can, which they all know is frustratingly little. She has called everyone she can think of, on a pay-as-you-go phone the police provided, in order to keep her regular mobile clear. But she has found out nothing, contributed nothing, and all the while the phone has remained obdurately silent. Susanna’s only comfort has been Ruth, who—despite being under threat of prosecution for manslaughter herself—has sat stoically in Susanna’s kitchen, making cup after cup of extra-strong tea. In her way she has been more useful than Susanna has, serving refreshments to the flow of police officers until that flow slowed to a trickle. Eventually—yesterday? The day before?—the flurry of activity moved on somewhere else, and now even Ruth has gone—to see her solicitor, at Susanna’s insistence—leaving Susanna in the house by herself.

  She waits.

  It is all she can do.

  She can’t eat, can’t sleep, won’t drink unless someone forces a glass of water into her hand. Her right, because her left clutches her mobile and nothing short of a crowbar could force her to let go of that.

  Emily’s room isn’t how it should be. Susanna sits at the end of the narrow single bed and surveys the leftovers of her daughter’s life. She perches lightly, tentatively, wary of disturbing anything that might yield a clue. But of course the police have already been through everything, including Emily’s computer, and have found no hint as to where she might be. Hence the disarray. The room isn’t messy as such. No messier than it is normally. But it is a different type of mess—a subtle shift in familiarity that betrays the recent presence of strangers. Cushions out of place, books returned to their shelves in the wrong order, a desk drawer left slightly ajar.

  All the police found of any relevance, however, were Adam’s fingerprints. Which by themselves told them nothing, other than at some stage he’d been there. In Susanna’s home. In her bedroom too apparently, and Susanna recalls how casually Adam mentioned the books on her bedside table, judging her choice of reading and gloating at her surprise at his supposed insight. But he cheated. Of course he cheated. It isn’t a shock, shouldn’t be, but even so it makes Susanna angrier. That is, when she has the space to feel angry. Most of the time she can’t think about Adam at all, nor about anything other than her missing daughter.

  Susanna looks at her phone, and the black, bottomless screen. She presses the home button to ensure the phone is working, and that she hasn’t somehow missed a call—from the police, from Emily—but of course she hasn’t. The volume is set to maximum and anyway she would have felt the vibrations in her aching palm.

  She runs a hand across Emily’s bedcovers, smoothing them flat. Once she starts she finds she cannot stop, and soon she is also fluffing the pillows, as though preparing Emily’s bed for her imminent return. Even at fourteen years old, her daughter has a special soft toy—a bug-eyed, multicolored thing, as close to a kitten as anything, won that day Susanna spent with Emily on Brighton Pier—and Susanna tucks it beneath the head end of the duvet. She straightens the items on Emily’s nightstand—a hairbrush, a tub of hand cream, a well-loved copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank—and then casts her eyes around the rest of the room.

  Her clothes. Susanna should refold Emily’s clothes. There are some in a heap on the chair, and Susanna knows the police have been through Emily’s chest of drawers as well. Emily wouldn’t care what state her clothes have been left in but Susanna does. All of a sudden she does, almost frantic that she hasn’t thought to set her daughter’s room straight sooner.

  She places her mobile on top of the chest of drawers, checking the display again first, making sure the volume is still turned up, then starts with the chair, hanging the assorted jumpers, tops and pairs of jeans in her daughter’s wardrobe. She tidies the bottom of the wardrobe too, straightening Emily’s innumerable pairs of trainers. After that Susanna turns to the chest of drawers itself. She begins at the top, folding underwear, T-shirts, hoodies, until she kneels to address the final drawer. She is just about to pull it open when she notices the rings in the carpet: depressions where the chest of drawers has been moved.

  Odd. Not necessarily that the chest of drawers has been moved. Rather, that it appears to have been moved more than once. Fairly regularly, from the look of things. One of the rings is deeper than the others—the place where the piece of furniture has been positioned most often—but both to the left and the right there is another mark that is almost as deep.

  Susanna stands, her eyes never leaving the rings in the carpet. She turns, to check the marks left by Emily’s bed, but here there is nothing unusual. It is just the chest of drawers that has lately been wandering.

  She moves to one end of the unit and gives a push, and the feet of the chest of drawers slide easily into their accustomed position: the deepest of the overlapping rings. But as they shift, there is a thunk—swiftly followed by the drumbeat of Susanna’s heart.

  This time she pulls, heaving the chest of drawers toward her. But it is too heavy, or she is too weak, so she dips and uses her shoulder. It takes all of her strength—all of her hope—but she manages to drive it fully toward the window, uncovering the patch of carpet beneath it and revealing . . .

  Nothing.

  Just dust, a marble, a forgotten hairclip—and, beside the skirting board, a loose thread of wool. There are scratch marks on the skirting as well, so light Susanna might easily have missed them.

  Emily has been prying up the carpet.

  In her scrabble Susanna breaks a nail. It rips to the quick but she barely feels it. She is pulling, tugging, her fingers repeatedly failing to find purchase, until finally the edge of the carpet comes free and lifts so suddenly Susanna almost topples backward.

  She hears that thunk again, and this time she sees what caused it. A floorboard. A loose floorboard. And as she gropes to pull it up, Susanna is sobbing in anticipation and despair.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ten minutes later she is in her car. She runs a red, has her mobile to her ear and is drunk on a sudden surge of hope. Susanna has never driven this way in her life. It is as though she is making up for years of obeying the traffic laws by breaking as many as possible in one go.

  “Pick up,” she mutters. “Pick up, pick up, pick up.”

  But Ruth’s mobile goes to voice mail, and Susanna yells out in frustration.

  The police then, even though explaining will take longer.

  With one eye on the road, the other on the screen, she fumbles to bring up the call list, an
d scans for the number the detective inspector who is in charge of Emily’s case gave her. His personal mobile. Call me anytime, he told her. Day or night. But just as her busy eyes pluck the number from the list, the screen changes to indicate an incoming call.

  “Ruth! Thank God.”

  “Susanna? What is it?”

  “Listen, Ruth. I need you to do something for me. I need you to call . . . everyone. The police. Detective Inspector Bannon. Everyone.”

  “Why? Is it Emily? Has something happened?”

  Susanna tells her. About the warehouse, the old perfume place. About the lockups. About the unit with the yellow door. All the details Susanna discovered in Emily’s diary. It was there all along, in its hiding place beneath the floorboards, only ever inches from sight. And Susanna had bought it for her. She didn’t know Emily even used it, but she should have thought. She should have looked!

  The diary is on the passenger seat beside her now and, once Ruth has hung up, Susanna tosses her mobile down beside it. She is not a confident driver and she needs to concentrate. She needs to get to Emily in one piece.

  As she drives, she attempts to make sense of the story she read so frantically in Emily’s diary, to fill in the gaps where her eyes hastened on. How Emily and Adam met. How she fell for him. How, in the end, he planned to hurt her.

  Was this what Adam was about to tell her? Susanna wonders. The lockup. The trap he set. Was that what he would have revealed to her before he died?

  Susanna tries to quell the voice inside her head that insists it was actually something else. That Emily was in the lockup at first but now she’s gone. That she is there, but Susanna is already too late.

  She takes a wrong turn. There is a one-way system around the train station, and in her impatience Susanna has veered right too early. If she follows the road she is on now, she will be funneled back the way she came, wasting minutes she knows she doesn’t have.

  She doesn’t hesitate. She jerks the car into reverse and slams her palm on the horn. There is another car behind her but Susanna puts her foot to the accelerator as though the road were clear. From reckless driving, Susanna has graduated to a high-speed game of chicken. Fortunately the other driver senses her resolve and steers his own vehicle onto the curb. He is too shocked to even gesticulate as Susanna hurtles past.

  She backs onto the main road, ignoring the blare of horns behind her, then arrows the car toward the turning that will take her where she needs to be.

  The gates of the perfume factory are old but they look solid. Susanna brings the car to a ragged halt right in front of them and doesn’t bother to close the door when she gets out. She runs straight up to the gates, rattling the bars like a prisoner desperate to escape her cell. There is a thick chain binding the gates together, and Susanna knows there is no way she can break it. Could she climb? But the gates must be fifteen feet high, with a roll of barbed wire at the top and no discernible footholds to help her up. Maybe she should have driven her car at the gates after all.

  And then she remembers. The diary.

  She has to search for a moment but soon enough she finds what she is looking for: the gap in the fence Adam told Emily about. Susanna shoves her way through it, ignoring the undergrowth that scratches her cheek and the jagged wire that claws at her clothes. She half falls to the other side, and then she is up, running, following Adam’s directions to the letter. Around the back, past the entrance to the main building, toward the row of lockups. The yellow door. The unit with the yellow door. The yellow . . .

  There.

  “Emily!”

  She is screaming her daughter’s name even before she is certain she is heading for the right lockup. There are dozens of storage units all in a row, maybe forty in total, half on one side of the alleyway, half on the other. The door Susanna has spotted isn’t yellow as such—it is the brownish hue of French mustard—but it is more yellow than any of the others. And even before she reaches it, Susanna can see the padlocks. Most of the other doors are broken, crumbling, rusting. The lockups, like the factory itself, have clearly long been abandoned. But on Emily’s door—please, God, let Emily be behind it—the padlocks are a freshly minted silver. Even the bolts have recently been renewed.

  “Emily!”

  Susanna hammers on the heavy wooden doors. She pauses, holding her breath, alert for a response from within. A voice, a cry, a whimper—anything.

  But there is nothing.

  She hammers again. She tugs the padlock, uselessly, and works her fingertips into the gap between the doors.

  “Emily! Are you in there?”

  It’s no good. She cannot break the lock and she cannot prize the doors apart. If Emily is in there, she might as well be a thousand miles away.

  “Madam?”

  Susanna spins. At the end of the alleyway, striding toward her, are two police officers. One male, taller; the other female, broader. It is the man who spoke.

  “Madam?” he repeats. “May I ask . . .”

  Are they here because of Ruth? Or because of the way Susanna was driving? She doesn’t care one way or the other. She interrupts the male police officer before he can finish speaking.

  “Please!” she insists. “My daughter. She was kidnapped. She’s in there. I know she is. Behind those doors. But I can’t . . . They won’t . . .” She turns back to the doors and pounds on them again. She wrenches at the lock with all her might, only letting go when her hand slips and blood flows from something slicing into her palm.

  “Madam!”

  The policeman rushes forward, alarmed, and attempts to draw Susanna away. His female colleague, meanwhile, hasn’t once moved her eyes from Susanna’s.

  “Stand back,” the policewoman says. She dips and picks up a piece of concrete, the size of a misshapen football. Susanna sees what she intends to do and allows the policeman to pull her to one side.

  The first blow on the padlock has no effect. On the second the block of concrete breaks in two, and the pieces tumble from the policewoman’s grip. But she retrieves the larger portion, her determination matching Susanna’s, and on the third blow the padlock visibly buckles. On the fourth, it clatters to the ground.

  Susanna is free in an instant. She slips from the male police officer’s hands and is past the policewoman before either of them can stop her. She yanks open the lockup door, bursting through it as irrepressibly as a breaking wave. Briefly the stench knocks her back, the darkness too, but her eyes adjust quickly to the lack of light.

  And then she sees.

  Adam’s plan. Emily’s body.

  Susanna, in that instant, sees it all.

  AFTER

  The sky is the color of Susanna’s soul now: not gray exactly, not white, but blank. It extends unbroken to every horizon and it reminds her how big the world is, how lost it is possible to feel so close to home.

  The ground is soft underfoot and a mist lies shimmering across the grass. Ordinarily this would be Susanna’s favorite time of year. As the leaves turn and the days shorten, she’s always had a sense of the world snuggling up. She even likes the spiders, the nets they build to catch the falling dew. And here, high on a hill overlooking the town, the view of the roofs, the roads, the graceful machinations of everyday life would ordinarily stop her short. Ordinarily.

  She walks past the row of headstones, toward the grave that cradles her child.

  She carries with her a single sunflower. She didn’t know what to choose but the flower’s vivacity, the connotation of light—it seemed appropriate. Others have brought flowers recently too, she can see, for loved ones buried near her own, but today it seems she is the first. It is still early and there are no tracks showing on the sheen of grass, no footprints for her to follow along the path. As she walks she thinks she hears movement beside her but when she turns it is just a sycamore bowing to the breeze.

  The grave is ahead of her
.

  It has changed, inevitably, since the day of the funeral. The pain is the same, though. The sorrow, the grief. And that, for Susanna, is all that counts now.

  She lays the sunflower on the earth and turns to check she is still alone. There is nothing, no one, and for a moment she allows her eyes to close. She is so tired. So, so tired. And it is a tiredness she knows sleep, if she could catch it, wouldn’t alleviate. Is this it now? she wonders. Is this the way she will feel through the postscript of her life? She should know, given what she’s been through. But the reality is nothing she can predict.

  “My poor child,” she says aloud. “My poor children.” And she kneels on the cold, damp ground and runs her finger across the name written on the headstone.

  Her son’s name.

  Her little lost boy, who Susanna prays will help bring back her little girl.

  * * *

  • • •

  It is hours later when she comes.

  Susanna has retreated to a nearby bench, and sits watching from the cover of shadows. The sun is peering through the clouds, its pool of warmth reaching as far as Susanna’s ankles. She has been sitting here for so long, her trousers—sodden before from when she was kneeling—have almost dried.

  The graveyard has remained empty all morning, and so at first when Susanna hears movement she assumes it is the wind once again worrying the trees. But when she glances her gaze sticks. She finds herself tucking her feet beneath her, physically trying to make herself small. She is like a hunter who has stumbled across a deer and for several moments as she watches she forgets to breathe.

  Emily is following the same path Susanna did. She moves slowly but it is clear she has been here before, just as Neil said she had. According to Susanna’s ex-husband (husband, Susanna corrects herself, because the truth is they were never divorced), Emily has been coming here every morning since the day she came to stay with him. Susanna had to navigate her way to Jake’s grave, reminding herself of the markers on the way. But then, it is her first time back here since the morning of Jake’s funeral eighteen years ago. Emily, in contrast, knows her route across the graveyard precisely, her eyes fixing on Jake’s headstone long before she reaches it.