The Friend Who Lied

by Rachel Amphlett

‘Why?’

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us.’

  I can’t think straight. Why would David do that? ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, let me put a theory to you,’ says Forbes. She shuffles in her seat, clasps her hands together on top of the folder. ‘It’s our belief that David thought Rebecca knew something. Something that could harm him. Knowing the delicate frame of mind she was in from both losing money to her ex, Simon Granger, Granger’s death, and being held for questioning here, he decided to tip the balance in his favour. He leaked the story to the journalist knowing it’d probably cause Rebecca harm, and everyone else would believe that she’d try to take her own life.’

  My throat is dry as I listen, my insides twisting as her words sink in.

  ‘Then,’ she says, ‘David enters her house – he knows where the spare key to the back door is hidden – and hears her in the bath. While he’s taking a knife from the block in the kitchen, he notices that Rebecca has been looking at old photographs from when you were all at university. What does the name Greg Fisher mean to you?

  I gasp, but I can’t get the words past my lips. How does she know about Greg? Has Bec told her? Did Hayley break her silence?

  Forbes shrugs at my silence, then continues. ‘While she is relaxing in the bath listening to music, David enters the room and holds her underwater until she stops breathing. Then he uses the kitchen knife to slice open her wrists. Afterwards, he runs back outside, hollering for the neighbours to help him, and calls triple nine. By the time the ambulance turns up, he’s hauled her out of the bath and is pretending to attempt CPR.’

  ‘But she lived.’

  ‘She’s a very lucky woman, according to the paramedics,’ says Forbes. ‘They were only two minutes away when the call came through, on their way back to their base. She was seconds away from dying.’

  ‘But you have to charge him, right?’ I spin around to face the solicitor. ‘They have to charge him, yes? I mean, he’s attacked me, tried to kill Bec—’

  I turn back to Forbes as a thought punctures through my tirade. ‘Did he kill Simon, too? Is that why we’re here?’

  She watches me, her gaze unwavering, and then—

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, is it, Lisa?’

  51

  Lisa

  I could hear David’s teeth chattering as he emerged from the water.

  Hayley ran towards him with his clothes, and he used his scarf to towel off the worst before pulling his sweatshirt over his head.

  He had one leg in his jeans when he turned back to the lake.

  ‘Where’s Greg?’

  Our excited chatter froze.

  ‘He was in front of you, wasn’t he?’ Simon shoved his boots on his feet but didn’t lace them up. He moved to the edge of the grass and peered into the darkness.

  ‘He stopped swimming on the other side of the island,’ said Hayley, her brow furrowed.

  ‘He slowed down. Said he had cramp.’ David’s voice notched higher as he paced back and forth. ‘I stayed with him and we trod water for a bit, but then he said he was all right, so we struck out.’

  ‘Maybe he’s cramped up again,’ said Bec. She linked her arm through mine, and kept her voice upbeat. ‘Come on, Greg!’

  I couldn’t swallow. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and I gagged.

  ‘Greg,’ I managed. ‘Where are you?’

  Hayley began to cry softly, until Simon turned to her and told her to shut up.

  ‘I’m trying to listen,’ he said.

  We drifted apart, fanning out along the side of the lake, and I tried to squint through the darkness.

  ‘Greg?’

  I could hear the echo of my voice across the water, and clamped my mouth shut.

  I sounded scared.

  ‘Maybe he reached the island,’ said Bec as we met back at the same spot where the boys and Hayley had entered the water. ‘Maybe he’s stranded there.’

  ‘Greg!’ Simon cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled. ‘You there?’

  We were still standing under the trees ten minutes later.

  By then, I was crying.

  ‘What do we do?’ said David. ‘Should we tell someone?’

  ‘And get kicked out of university after we’ve just started? No, thanks.’ Simon stood at the shoreline, his eyes wide. ‘We can’t. I need to graduate. We all do, right?’

  David leaned over, tied his bootlaces, and then straightened and turned to us. ‘Okay, this is what we have to do. This never happened. This never gets spoken of again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t!’

  I looked at Bec and Hayley, saw the shock in their eyes, and turned to David.

  ‘I can’t believe you said that. We need to do something.’ I pulled out my mobile phone. ‘Fuck, there’s no signal here.’

  ‘The pub will still be open,’ said Bec. ‘We can raise the alarm and get someone to call the police.’

  ‘Wait – David’s right,’ said Simon. ‘If we do that, we’re finished. Greg agreed to it. It’s not like it’s our fault. If they find his body, we say we argued with him after leaving the pub and he walked off in a temper. We don’t know where he went.’

  ‘We have to all stick to the story, no matter what questions we get asked,’ said David, nodding. ‘What happened here was an accident. It’s not our fault.’

  Hayley staggered, her hand to her mouth. ‘They can’t blame us for this, can they?’

  ‘They might,’ he said. ‘How do you think it would look? He knew the dangers.’

  I stood, stunned, as Simon began to walk away, and then one by one we drifted after him, David and me bringing up the rear.

  David placed his arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. I could smell the lake on him; a rotten, stagnant sweetness. He scowled at me when I pulled away, and I held up my hands to ward off his harsh words.

  He shook his head, then shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Lisa. I tried to help him.’

  In the days and weeks that followed, we closed ranks.

  Shock turned to guilt, guilt turned to a quiet terror.

  Terror that someone would find out what happened. Terror that something so stupid had turned to tragedy.

  Terror that Greg’s body would float to the surface.

  But it never did.

  It’s why none of us moved away. We daren’t. We had to be sure.

  We would take turns to visit the lake, every few weeks. Walk the perimeter, peer into the reeds, pray that he would stay down there, lost forever.

  After the police filled the Common with patrol cars and sniffer dogs, after we’d held our breath while divers searched the three lakes in the park, after his parents made an impassioned plea for information from their home in Glasgow for their son to contact them, and after they made a special trip south to visit the university to meet his fellow students, it fell silent.

  The lake kept its secret. They never found his body.

  And, once a year, on that same date, we would congregate under the trees and silently raise a glass of whisky to him, and hope we never, ever saw his face again.

  Except in our nightmares.

  None of us could prevent that.

  52

  Lisa

  I shake my head, force myself to focus on the present.

  ‘What does this have to do with—’

  I pause mid-sentence, my jaw slack, and then turn to the solicitor beside me.

  He says nothing, merely jots a note on the A4-sized notepad in front of him, and clears his throat.

  I turn back to Forbes, my eyes wide. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘David tried to kill Rebecca because he was afraid that she was going to come back to us and tell us the truth,’ says Forbes. ‘The truth about what happened to Simon Granger. The truth about what happened to Greg Fisher.’

  Next to her, Mortlock shifts in his seat but says nothing.

  Forbes pushes her chair back and walks to the door, opens it
and takes a laptop that a younger detective in a suit hands to her. She nods her thanks and comes back to the table. She flips open the laptop and turns it around to face me.

  The recording is paused, the camera pointing at a table of five individuals who are laughing and joking between themselves, oblivious to the fact they are being taped.

  ‘This is a video from one of the CCTV cameras in the Ragamuffin Bar, taken on the day Simon died. Can you identify the people in the image for the purposes of the recording please?’

  I lean forward, a fleeting twist of surprise tearing at my gut. ‘That’s Simon, with Bec, Hayley, David – and me. When was this taken?’

  ‘At twelve thirty-five. Before you went across the road to the escape room, you all met here for drinks first. Do you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  I splutter a nervous laugh. ‘I think I’d remember that. The prices are astronomical.’

  And then I realise I’ve seen a transaction on my online bank statement for that day, but it wasn’t listed under the name of a bar. It was something like Flatt and Adams. Was that the company who owned the bar Forbes is talking about?

  Forbes presses on regardless and hits the play button.

  ‘This is from a second camera that’s in the corner to the left of the table you were all sitting around. Watch closely.’

  I sit, my eyes fixed on the screen as the recording plays out, and then I raise my gaze to hers after two minutes. ‘What?’

  Forbes rewinds the recording and moves around the table so she’s standing between me and my solicitor. Mortlock joins us, his curiosity piqued. Evidently, he hasn’t seen this recording before, either.

  Forbes provides the commentary as the recording starts again. ‘You leave the table here – I presume you’re going to the toilet.’

  I disappear from the camera’s view, and a few seconds later Forbes taps her forefinger against the screen. ‘Here, when Simon leaves the table to go to the toilet as well. Watch David.’

  We do, in silence.

  He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tiny plastic bag – it’s only just visible on the video, but it’s there.

  ‘Notice how neither Bec nor Hayley seem to question what he’s doing,’ says Forbes.

  David opens the bag, removes something from it and holds his hand above Simon’s drink. He glances over his shoulder. Then he looks at each of them in turn.

  Bec nods.

  Hayley nods.

  David’s fingers open, and then he picks up the glass and swirls the drink around a few times, placing the glass back on the table.

  I gasp, the sound echoing off the interview room walls and sit back, my mouth open.

  ‘Keep watching,’ Forbes tells me.

  Next, Hayley reaches into her handbag and pulls out a bottle of water. David repeats the action with that, then hands it back to her. Hayley screws the cap back on, shakes the bottle and then puts it in her bag as Simon returns to the table.

  Forbes reaches out and hit the stop button. She leaves the laptop open, the image frozen on Simon sitting back on his bar stool, and reaches into the manila folder for another document.

  She scans the contents while my heartbeat thuds in my ears, and then she reads out the name of a substance from the report.

  ‘Known as a date-rape drug,’ she says, ‘because it leaves the system after a few hours and can’t be easily traced at post-mortem. Nor did anyone pick it up during the transplant process. However, if it’s mixed with alcohol in large enough quantities, it can kill. It induces a heart attack. We went back to the escape room before the bins were emptied by the council last week and found the bottle that contained traces of the water Hayley and David spiked.’

  The solicitor lowers his head and scribbles furiously across his notebook.

  ‘I didn’t kill Simon,’ I say, my voice is shaking. ‘I would never have condoned that. You said it yourself. Hayley and David were the ones who put the drug in his drinks.’

  ‘Oh, I saved the best part for last,’ says Forbes. She hits the play button once more.

  At that moment, I appear on screen from the same direction Simon went in. I sit on a chair with my back to the camera.

  There’s no sound, but I watch as Simon points to the drink before him, makes some sort of comment – probably to the effect that he suspects his friends have done something to his drink for a prank – and we all shake our heads, laughing.

  Then I reach out and pick up his cocktail. I take a huge swallow of the stuff, then slam it back on the table in front of him.

  Simon takes the hint and downs the rest in three gulps, and much cheering takes place.

  ‘It’s why you can’t remember what happened,’ says Forbes. ‘What with the painkillers you were on, that single gulp of drink contained enough of the date-rape drug to tip you over the edge. The rest of it killed Simon. You were the one who encouraged him to drink it.’

  ‘I didn’t know!’ I turn in my seat to face my solicitor. ‘You saw what happened – I wasn’t there when they spiked his drink. I didn’t know what they put in it. I must have thought it was something harmless, that it was just for a laugh.’

  Forbes ignores my outburst. ‘We’ve interviewed the owner of the escape room. The lights going out at that part in the game was part of the script. It was only bad luck on Simon’s part that the effects of the date-rape drug kicked in then. Bad luck, because the cameras in the room didn’t pick up enough detail on the night vision setting for the owner to raise the alarm until you all started panicking and banging on the door to be let out.’ Forbes closes the laptop. ‘What they did manage to find for us was footage of Hayley passing that bottle of water to Simon as you all played the first game, and Simon drinking from that bottle. Rather than rehydrate him, of course, it topped up the levels of the date rape drug in his system, killing him.’

  I’m frozen in my seat, my hands clasped together, knuckles white.

  ‘I think Bec had second thoughts after we interviewed her,’ says Forbes. ‘I think she was going to come back to us and tell us what really happened. I think the guilt was getting to her with what happened to Simon and – who knows? – maybe she was contemplating coming back and telling us about Greg as well. Except David got to her first. He went around to her house to find out what her intentions were, but when he got there and found her in the bath he decided it was an opportunity he couldn’t miss. He tried to silence her permanently.’

  ‘But she lived.’

  ‘Like I said before, she’s a very lucky woman. He didn’t mean for her to survive. He didn’t hold her under the water long enough, and despite his best efforts he didn’t slice through any major arteries. It’s why the paramedics were able to save her, and why it looked like a pitiful attempt to take her own life, rather than the attempted murder it really was, especially after he’d leaked the story about her arrest to Scott Nash. Everyone was to assume she’d taken her own life after the news story broke. We originally wanted to re-interview her in the hospital about what she remembers of that day.’ Forbes shakes her head, a sense of wonder in her voice. ‘Rebecca decided to tell us a lot more. I guess a second chance at life meant a lot more to her than it did to you.’

  I recoil at the dig, but say nothing.

  Mortlock’s heard enough. He shuffles in his seat, and then I hear him inhale before he begins to speak.

  ‘Lisa Ashton, you do not have to say anything …’

  53

  Lisa

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  * * *

  The steel door shudders into place, and a moment later the rattle of a bolt and a key turning in the lock reaches my ears.

  I sink onto the thin mattress and stare at the wall opposite my bunk bed as the sounds of a prison being secured for the night echo around me.

  It’s the waiting that’s been the worst.

  Mortlock and Forbes arranged for police divers to search the lake again as soon as they’d corroborated my
statement with those of Bec and Hayley.

  I couldn’t answer the question of why we didn’t tell anyone at the time what had happened.

  I’ve tried to reason with myself that we were in shock, terrified, but as the weeks have passed I’ve realised that the fear didn’t stem from the police finding out – it was what David or Simon would do if we went to them in the first place.

  When Greg disappeared into the cold dark water of the lake that night, I became a recluse. I shunned attention from other men for years because I ached for him, longed to talk to someone about what had happened.

  Except I didn’t, because David had forbade it, and then it was too late.

  Too much time had passed.

  Our biggest mistake in all of this was underestimating him. As our group contracted and we shut ourselves away from anyone else all those years ago at university, David became the keeper of secrets.

  Simon was impossible to talk to – sullen, bitter, and regretful that he’d backed up David and never allowed us to admit to what had happened all those years ago. He always believed it was his fault for suggesting the swimming race in the first place.

  So, David became our confidant when we thought life was treating us unfairly. He was the quiet one, who didn’t gossip and always offered a shoulder to cry on when things went wrong.

  We trusted him.

  Except he banked that information and waited. Waited until the right moment came to execute his plan.

  During Hayley’s trial, her solicitor informed the jury she had been blackmailed by Simon, who threatened to reveal her shoplifting habits. She claimed she had no choice. She had confided in David, who had bided his time, waiting to turn that fear into something he could use to his advantage.

  Such as murder.

  When he found out I was dying and that he would never have me for his own unless Simon donated a kidney, David sought out Hayley’s help first.

  Reasoning that her pent-up need for revenge would make her an easy target, he set in motion a plan that had been in the making for years.