The Lying Room

by Nicci French

  Neve had no idea where to begin. She felt entirely without a core, her mind lurching between all the possible meanings of her discovery.

  ‘Mabel.’ Her voice came out scratchy. ‘I found the bangle in your room. And I found the hammer.’

  Mabel whirled around. ‘So?’ she said. She looked almost triumphant.

  ‘Why were they there?’

  ‘Mother, mother,’ said Mabel with a malicious playfulness that made Neve flinch. ‘What do you think?’

  What did Neve think? Looking at Mabel now, with her face full of hatred and fear, she could imagine her bringing that hammer down on Saul’s head. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied simply.

  ‘I know,’ Mabel said. ‘I know everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything.’ She looked wild now, and her face, which a few minutes ago had seemed like the face of a child, suddenly looked old and spiteful.

  ‘Mabel, listen. You have to tell me why the bangle and hammer were in your room. I have to know.’

  ‘No. You listen. Everyone thinks you’re so wonderful. My friends say I’m lucky to have a mother like you. They have no idea that you’re just a lying slut.’

  ‘Please. Tell me what you’ve done.’

  ‘What I’ve done. That’s a laugh. I’ve known about you for ages. You thought you were being so clever but it was obvious. So I followed you. I saw you go into the place. I saw you.’ She was breathless and there was spittle on her chin. ‘You said you were with Tamsin or Renata or whatever. How could you? What about Dad? What about us? You’re our mother.’

  ‘Mabel.’ Neve spoke sharply, trying to get hold of her daughter’s attention. ‘I know you’re angry with me and probably hate me right now—’

  ‘Fucking right I do.’

  ‘I know what I’ve done has been damaging and wrong—’

  ‘Then why? You’re nearly fifty, for fuck’s sake?’

  Yes, thought Neve, she was not so far off fifty. She had a husband who was more or less unemployed and on and off depressed; a job that had ground her down; financial worries. And she had a daughter who for years had turned her life inside out and upside down. She thought of saying, it was because of you. But of course she didn’t, and of course that wasn’t true, or not the only truth. And yet there had been times when she’d thought she would go mad with grief and anxiety, and her affair with Saul had been like a gulp of fresh water, reminding her that she still had a self, a sliver of life that belonged only to her. And even now, in the middle of this ruin, she had a small flash of memory: Saul smiling at her, holding out his hand. She could feel the pressure of his warm fingers.

  ‘You disgust me,’ Mabel was saying. ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘Stop.’ Neve held up her hand. A woman ran past them, her beautiful face glistening with sweat. Neve waited for her to be out of earshot before speaking. ‘We must talk about all this. But before anything else, I need to know what you’ve done.’

  ‘You’re just trying to make this about me, but it’s about you. You cheated on Dad.’

  ‘Yes. But this has to wait.’

  ‘Over and over again.’

  Neve nodded.

  ‘Who loves you and has never done anything to hurt you.’

  Neve didn’t reply to that.

  ‘Didn’t you mind about him?’

  ‘Of course I minded.’

  ‘Not enough to stop you, though.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you so besotted?’

  Neve wasn’t sure how she was still standing, keeping her eyes on Mabel’s.

  ‘It was fresh and new,’ she said. ‘An adventure, perhaps.’

  ‘Mid-life crisis.’ Mabel’s voice was ugly with sarcasm. ‘I thought that’s what men were supposed to get.’

  Neve wasn’t able to reply to that.

  ‘Does Dad know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘All I can tell you is that I’ve tried to keep it secret.’

  ‘Creeping around at night like a thief. Yes. I know. And if I knew . . .’ She trailed off.

  ‘I don’t think Fletcher knows.’

  ‘Or suspects?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She didn’t add that Fletcher had stopped looking at her, seeing her, attending to her. If he didn’t know, it was because he no longer noticed her. Mabel said he loved her – but did he?

  ‘Do you still love him?’

  ‘These are things I should be talking to Fletcher about, not you. Not like this, as though I’m on trial.’

  ‘You don’t then.’

  ‘I do love him. But it’s difficult.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Marriage is difficult.’

  ‘Blah blah. Poor you. Are you ashamed of yourself?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. I’m ashamed of you as well.’

  ‘Now we’ve established that we’re both ashamed of me, can we get back to what happened? You had the hammer. You went there.’

  ‘So did you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Neve.

  ‘You got a text from him and you went.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so did I.’

  ‘Mabel, what did you do there?’

  ‘Why are you asking me? You fucked another man. I saw you go in. I was there.’

  ‘Where?’ Neve remembered being in the flat, hearing sounds, the tingle in her spine. Had Mabel been there all along, waiting for her to leave so she could take away the hammer? Neve couldn’t keep her thoughts in order.

  ‘I saw you coming out with your bin bag, looking like a criminal.’ Her voice cracked. ‘And you are a criminal.’

  ‘I didn’t want them to find out,’ said Neve, lamely.

  ‘You deserve to be caught and sent to prison because you’ve ruined everything. Everything in the world. And I’m a criminal too and it’s all your fault. And I hate you and I’ll never forgive you. I want to die.’

  ‘Are you telling me . . .’ Neve could barely bring herself to utter the words. ‘That you killed him?’

  ‘I’m not telling you anything.’

  Mabel suddenly turned from her and broke into a shuffling run, head down. Neve ran after her, caught up with her, put a hand on her shoulder to bring her to a halt. They were near the park now. Ahead she could see the allotments spread out in a crazy patchwork.

  ‘Talk to me,’ she said.

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Mabel. ‘You look so ordinary, but you’re mad. And you’re trying to send me mad as well. You’re supposed to be protecting me, not protecting yourself. Isn’t that what mothers do?’

  ‘I want to protect you. What did you do? Why were you there? You can tell me anything,’ said Neve. ‘Literally anything.’

  ‘Says the woman who’s had this dirty little secret for weeks and weeks.’

  ‘Obviously you went into the flat after me, to take away the hammer and bangle. Did you go in before me as well?’

  Mabel lifted her head and stared at her mother. For a moment, they both stood frozen on the pavement.

  ‘I know what you’re doing,’ said Mabel at last. ‘You lie and you lie. Your whole life’s a great fat lie. Now this.’

  ‘Mabel, my darling—’

  ‘Shut up. Shut the fuck up. I can’t.’ She put her hand to her temples and bent forward. ‘What have you done to us all?’ she said.

  Neve took her by the elbow and steered her into the park. The river lay ahead of them. She sat Mabel down on a bench, whose little metal plaque memorialised a woman called Kitty, who used to love this place.

  They never did make it to the allotment. Neve waited while Mabel rocked back and forth on the bench with her hands clutching her belly, occasionally wiping her snotty face with her grubby sleeve. At last she sat up on the bench and turned towards Neve.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I’m going to tell Fletcher.’

  �
�Are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Mabel. ‘It would destroy him. You’re strong and you’ve got loads of friends but he hasn’t. He’d just go to pieces without you. Which is why what you’ve done is so monstrous.’

  Neve stared out across the park to the allotments and imagined her patch, choked with weeds, bolting cabbage, rotting marrows, and the fruit rotting on the bushes.

  ‘I still don’t know what happened in that flat,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to say it out loud? OK. Let’s get this charade over with. It wasn’t me,’ said Mabel. ‘I was doing it for you. Satisfied?’

  Neve looked at her steadily and Mabel held her gaze for a few seconds and then looked away. It was all she was going to get from her daughter.

  ‘In which case,’ she said, ‘I should go to the police.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Then Fletcher would know about everything.’

  ‘I’ll just have to live with that.’

  ‘You can’t. If the police find out I took things away, I’ll be in trouble. My life will be ruined.’

  ‘They won’t find out.’

  ‘So you’ll be lying to them all over again?’

  ‘I think I need to speak to a lawyer,’ said Neve.

  As they walked slowly home, Mabel said, ‘One last question.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Did you love him?’

  Neve looked at her daughter, small and thin, with a grubby tear-streaked face, shadows under her eyes, bitten nails.

  ‘No,’ she said, turning her face away, seeing Saul opening the door and pulling her inside, out of the crush of the world. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Yes, she had said, brimming over with joy and betrayal. Yes I do.

  Less than an hour later, Neve was sitting in the living room of the one friend she had from school who had become seriously rich and was still her friend. Amanda Fitzgibbon was a lawyer and her husband Rudi was a lawyer. Mandy was a solicitor, but not the kind that arranged the sale of your house or drew up your will for you. Not unless your will involved setting up trusts and foundations. And Rudi did a sort of law in the City of London that Neve had never quite understood. But she did understand what it had bought them.

  They lived in Hackney, just ten minutes’ cycle ride for Neve, but it felt like a world away. It was a large Georgian house with high ceilings and large windows and an impossibly big garden that backed on to other impossibly big gardens. The ground-floor rooms were full of mirrors and huge soft sofas and oak floors. Sometimes it felt like the sort of life she had always dreamed of and she had found herself being envious. But she had also spent many evenings in that house with a glass of wine, clutching Mandy’s hand while the tears rolled down her face because Mandy’s problems with her two daughters had been even worse than Neve’s problems with Mabel. At least until now.

  Out of her work clothes, in a light blue sweater, jeans and espadrilles, Mandy looked almost like any other of Neve’s friends, but everything about her from her dirty blond hair to the bracelet around her wrist added a little tweak that signalled money, discreetly spent. Neve, meanwhile, was still in her allotment clothes: grubby trousers, ancient shirt, scuffed walking boots. The two of them sat on one of the sofas with a mug of coffee each and a cafetière and a plate of ginger oat biscuits that – infuriatingly – Mandy had baked herself.

  She already knew about the murder but Neve filled her in on the details that hadn’t been in the newspaper.

  ‘I feel a bit bad about this,’ said Neve. ‘I’ve got this cousin who’s a doctor and friends are always phoning him up on Sunday morning saying that their child has an earache and what should they do about it. Here you are on Saturday with the smell of baking and a nice day outside and I’m talking about work stuff.’

  ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ said Mandy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It. The murder.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t do it.’

  Mandy laughed. ‘I was only joking. However, if you did do it, go and confess. You’ll feel better.’

  ‘But as it happens, I didn’t,’ said Neve.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. And by the way, don’t feel guilty. I’ve spent the last couple of days working on the most boring merger in the history of the universe. It’s nice to hear about some good old-fashioned criminal activity.’

  She looked at Neve and her expression changed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘We’re talking about a colleague of yours. It must be awful for you. So what can I help you with?’

  Neve took a deep breath and told Mandy about Renata, about her misleading the police and then owning up. As she talked, she looked at Mandy’s face. By the time she had finished, Mandy looked like a different person. Suddenly Neve saw her in her office, doing a real job.

  ‘So she came to her senses,’ said Mandy.

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  ‘It’s the only way of looking at it.’

  ‘But won’t she get into trouble?’

  Mandy shook her head. ‘Obviously she’s committed an offence, but I imagine the police will just be grateful she’s come forward.’

  There was a pause and Mandy looked at Neve with renewed interest. ‘Is that the question you wanted to ask?’ she said.

  Neve hesitated. She had so many thoughts, so many questions, but she found it difficult to say them aloud.

  ‘I forgot to mention that Renata told me about it last night. I think that talking to me was a part of why she went to the police.’

  ‘Then you did her a great favour,’ said Mandy.

  Neve paused once more. ‘Can I put a hypothetical question to you?’

  Mandy gave a slow smile but Neve didn’t find it reassuring. It was the smile of someone who knows something about you that they’re not meant to know. ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I think I know this one. Is it the one that starts with: “I’m asking for a friend”?’

  Neve tried to smile back. ‘This isn’t about me. Renata told me that she had been to the murder scene days before, maybe even weeks. She’d been there several times because she and Saul had a brief affair. But what if that wasn’t quite the whole truth? What if she had been there just after the murder?’

  ‘You mean, if she was still lying about it?’

  ‘More than that. If she had been there just after the murder and she had cleared up a bit.’

  ‘Why would she have done that?’ Mandy asked slowly.

  ‘To clear away the traces of their affair.’

  ‘Did she tell you that?’

  ‘I think it would be best to treat it as hypothetical,’ said Neve.

  Now Mandy thought for a long time. She didn’t seem to be finding it funny anymore. She reached for the cafetière and refilled her mug and took a sip. She pulled a face. It had gone cold.

  ‘If you ask a lawyer for legal advice . . .’ she began.

  ‘Which I’m not doing.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mandy, ‘but when – hypothetically –’ she raised an ironic eyebrow as she said that, ‘someone asks a lawyer for advice, the lawyer will generally tell them to obey the law.’ She turned and looked at Neve with an almost fierce expression. ‘Perverting the course of justice is really serious. Disposing of evidence is a particularly serious way of perverting the course of justice.’

  ‘What do you mean by serious?’

  ‘I’m not a criminal lawyer,’ said Mandy. ‘But I know criminal lawyers. The maximum sentence for perverting the course of justice is life imprisonment.’

  ‘What?’ said Neve, startled.

  ‘Yes, but nobody ever gets that. So far as I know, the range is something like six months to three years. If your hypothetical friend did the sort of thing you described, then I am pretty certain that she – or he – would be in prison for closer to the three year end of that range.’

  ‘But would they get sympathetic treatment for coming forward?’

  ‘Three years would be
the sympathetic treatment.’

  Neve didn’t reply immediately. She was thinking about Mabel and her dull-voiced denial of murder. What if it wasn’t just about perverting the course of justice? For a moment, she felt cold, as if autumn had suddenly turned to winter as she sat there. She knew there must be lots of questions to ask but she couldn’t quite think of any of them just then. She didn’t even want to meet Mandy’s eye.

  ‘Wait,’ said Mandy suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  Mandy got up and walked out of the room. Neve heard a clinking sound and then Mandy came back into the room holding a bottle of white wine and two large glasses.

  ‘It’s a bit early in the day for me,’ said Neve.

  ‘You’re going to need this,’ said Mandy. ‘Come with me.’

  At the far end of the living room was a door that opened on to a wrought-iron spiral staircase that led down into the garden. Neve followed Mandy down the steps. At the bottom there was a section of the garden paved in beautifully weathered Portland stone. Neve recognised the stone because she had seen it in a builder’s yard once when she was planning her own garden and then had seen the price. Mandy twisted off the screw top and poured wine into the two glasses and then put the bottle down on to a table that also looked expensive. Everything in the garden looked expensive. Even the flowers. Neve took a sip of the wine. It tasted expensive as well.

  ‘Nice,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not an expert,’ said Mandy.

  ‘You mean about this wine?’

  ‘Well, I’m not actually an expert on the wine, but that’s not what I meant. I’m not an expert on criminal law. It’s funny. When I was first studying law I had this idea that I’d be sitting in police interview rooms telling my client to say “no comment”. It never quite worked out that way. What I actually do is sit in an office going through the small print so that rich people can minimise their tax burden and defer earnings. I’ve never even been in a police cell.’ She took a sip of her wine and then looked at the glass. ‘You’re right. It is rather nice.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Neve. ‘I’ve taken up too much of your time.’

  ‘You’re going to take up just a little bit more of it. First, I want to say that a part of me is hoping that this hypothetical person of yours really is hypothetical and you’ve come round here for a philosophical discussion. But that doesn’t seem very likely. I don’t know whether we’re talking about your friend Renata or a friend of Renata’s or a different friend of yours.’ Mandy took another sip of wine. When she next spoke it was with a care and deliberation that felt quite different from anything she had said before. ‘Or about someone else.’