The Lies We Told

by Camilla Way

  I made myself take a deep breath, my mouth horribly dry. “What you heard in the kitchen earlier, sweetheart, it must have sounded so crazy, so silly,” I began, my smile so forced it hurt my face, my voice shrill. “We were just playing a silly game, that’s all! That was Mummy’s friend and we were pretending we were in a film or something!” Hannah continued to watch me silently. I licked my lips. “The thing is, darling, it needs to be a secret. What you heard, what you heard Mummy and her friend saying, the game you overheard, you mustn’t mention it to anyone. Do you see? You mustn’t mention it to anyone at all, not even Daddy. Do you promise?”

  Hannah blinked, her face without expression as she considered me. And then she turned over and closed her eyes, leaving me to stare silently down at her, cold with fear.

  TEN

  LONDON, 2017

  As Clara walked to the police station, a memory came to her of a year or so before, when she had fallen and badly twisted her ankle. Fearing that she’d fractured it, Luke had taken her to the hospital, where they’d waited long into the afternoon to be seen. It had been unbearably hot, the waiting area full to bursting with the sick and injured, a palpable cloud of frustration and boredom hanging in the stuffy air.

  She’d sat, her leg propped up on a chair, while she’d waited to be seen, Luke pacing to and fro like a caged tiger. When she’d finally been called to X-ray, she’d returned some time later to find him engaged in a noisy conversation with several waiting patients, including a very drunk man with a tattooed face, a middle-aged woman with a black eye, a couple of pensioners, and a teenager who reeked of weed. They’d all laughed uproariously as she approached, Luke clearly in the midst of a long and apparently hilarious story about how he’d broken his leg as a teenager. It seemed that the pall of wretchedness had entirely dissipated, a party spirit in the air now.

  She hadn’t broken her ankle, but the pain was still eye watering. “Wait here a moment,” Luke had said, and off he’d vanished, only to appear five minutes later with a wheelchair.

  “Are you sure we can take this?” she’d asked, looking at it doubtfully.

  “Yep, all sorted,” and he’d raised his hand to wave at a nurse at the other end of the corridor. “Bring it back tomorrow, Sue!” he’d called, and she’d rolled her eyes good-naturedly and nodded. Out on the street he’d pushed her sensibly for a few minutes, before picking up pace and stampeding down the pavements, pretending to careen into lampposts and bushes, veering away at the last moment, and as they’d headed toward the nearest pub at breakneck speed, she’d shrieked and laughed so much she’d forgotten all about her throbbing ankle. Later he’d made her favorite dinner and invited her best friend, Zoe, around with a bottle of wine to cheer her up. That was the thing about Luke: he could turn any bad situation into something fun. He made everything feel like a party. She looked up to see the police station ahead of her and, taking a deep breath, pushed the memory away.

  DS Anderson ushered her past the front desk and through to a large and busy area where several officers worked, either on phones or tapping away at computers. Nobody glanced up as she arrived, and Anderson led her to a corner desk and nodded for her to sit. There was something different about him today, she thought: a businesslike briskness, a grim purposefulness that made her uneasy. She sat without a word, bracing herself for whatever was coming.

  Taking a seat next to her, he pressed the mouse of his computer and the screen flickered into life. “Okay,” he said. “This is CCTV footage of—”

  “Duck Lane,” Clara finished for him, peering closely at the screen. The slightly hazy, bleached-out film showed the narrow dead-end road off Broadwick Street that ran behind the string of office buildings, shops, and cafés lining Brindle Press’s part of Wardour Street. It was used by delivery vans to off-load their supplies to the various businesses’ back entrances—as well as being where Brindle employees came to smoke, make private phone calls, or take part in periodic fire drills.

  “Okay, so this is footage from seven thirty-six on Tuesday evening,” Anderson went on. “If you watch, you’ll see Luke leave the building and walk toward Broadwick Street.”

  The sudden shock of seeing Luke’s image, his posture and gait so familiar, so loved, triggered such a rush of longing that her eyes swam. She stared hard at the screen, watching as he left Brindle and turned to call something over his shoulder, giving a brief wave. “George,” she murmured. “He’s waving good-bye to George, the security guard.”

  Anderson nodded. “Okay. Keep watching.”

  At that moment, a blue van appeared, approaching Luke from behind. The second it passed him, it stopped, obscuring him from view. She glanced up at Anderson in confusion. “What . . . ?”

  “Wait,” he said. “The van stops for eight seconds. . . . Okay, now it’s moving off again.” Sure enough, the van continued on its journey to the end of Duck Lane, whereupon it turned right and disappeared from view. Next, Anderson leaned forward and with a few clicks of the mouse called up a different camera angle, this time giving a view of Broadwick Street. “As you can see, Luke doesn’t reappear, either just before, during, or at any time after those eight seconds that the van stopped for.”

  “Well, didn’t he just turn right?” she asked. “Toward Wardour Street, I mean?”

  Anderson shook his head. “We’ve checked all the CCTV footage and Luke doesn’t reappear again anywhere in the vicinity, on any of the surrounding streets.”

  Clara stared at him. “So . . . he got into the van?”

  “There’s nowhere else he could have gone.”

  Her mind raced. “Then it must have been a friend of his driving—or at least someone he knew?”

  “Possibly.” Anderson leaned back and folded his arms. “The van stops for eight seconds. We have no way of knowing why Luke got inside.” He paused and looked at Clara. “What we do know is that the van was stolen from a business address in Ealing, late on Monday evening.”

  “Stolen? But . . .”

  “We managed to track its onward journey as far as the M20, but we lose ANPR coverage of it shortly after it leaves the motorway and heads in the direction of the Kent Downs, not far from Dover.”

  She tried to make sense of what he was telling her, mentally searching for possible explanations, but found none. She shook her head. “Sorry, I don’t . . .”

  Anderson switched off the computer and took the seat next to hers, his eyes focused on her face. “We’re doing everything we can to find the van, Clara. And we will find it. But in the meantime we’re appealing for witnesses who might have been in the vicinity when Luke disappeared.”

  Panic climbed in her chest. “What about the e-mails?” she asked at last. “Do you have any idea who sent them?”

  “Not yet, no. We’ve traced them to several different servers belonging to various Internet cafés across London. Not one of them had working CCTV, which might be coincidence but probably isn’t. We still have no way of knowing whether the person who sent them is connected to Luke’s disappearance. What we do know is that Luke hasn’t withdrawn any money from his account since last Tuesday, nor did he take out any significant sums in the days leading up to his disappearance, which indicates that he hadn’t been planning to go anywhere for any length of time. As you know, he didn’t take his passport or credit card.”

  It was only then that she remembered Luke’s sweatshirt. “I saw something,” she said. “In my neighbor’s flat.”

  Anderson listened patiently as she told her story. “It might not have been his, of course,” she added, “but it’s pretty distinctive.” Her eyes searched the detective’s face uncertainly. “I don’t know if . . .”

  “We’ll look into it,” Anderson told her as he got up, and nodded at her to follow. “We were intending to speak to your neighbors again anyway. I’ll let you know what we find out.”

  And then that was it. She was alone again
, standing in the street, looking back at the black bricks of the police station. She turned and began to walk home. Had Luke known the driver of the van? If not, why did he get in it? If it was someone he knew, had he known the van was stolen? It just seemed so unlikely—Luke wasn’t the lawbreaking type, and as far as she was aware, he didn’t know any criminals. But if he hadn’t known the driver, then why did he get in the van? Had he been forced to? In central London, while it was still fairly light out? That didn’t seem likely either. She jumped from possibility to possibility, but came up with nothing.

  The quiet emptiness of her flat seemed to close in on her as she restlessly paced its rooms. It was Friday evening, the end of the third day without Luke, and the weekend stretched ahead of her interminably. She thought suddenly of her parents, and realized guiltily that she hadn’t yet told them what had happened, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to ring them. Quickly she ran to fetch her phone. But returning to the sofa, she sat staring down at it for a long, silent moment before eventually letting it fall, unused, to her lap.

  She was an only child, a late and unexpected baby born in Penge to a medical secretary and a bank clerk in their mid-forties. It had always seemed to Clara growing up that Linda and Graham Haynes had never quite acclimatized themselves to the arrival of a child. Clara’s presence seemed to constantly take them by surprise, and she spent much of her childhood playing quietly alone, or trailing after them while they visited garden centers, or car boot sales, not entirely sure they had remembered she was there. They hadn’t been unkind, not at all, and they seemed to love her, in their way, yet she felt that she had always remained a puzzle to them. They’d looked on, nonplussed, while she devoured books or spent hours writing stories, and were clearly baffled when she won a place at university—the first in the family to have done so. They’d retired to the Algarve the moment Clara had entered halls and, in their mid-seventies now, were quiet, private people, prone to anxiety, fond of their familiar routines and their own company, though they dutifully phoned their only daughter every other Sunday without fail.

  When she’d moved in with Luke, she had sensed their relief—that she was now settled, and no longer their responsibility, and they needn’t worry about her anymore. The idea of bothering them with news of Luke’s disappearance was not one she relished. She realized she also felt obscurely guilty, as though she’d let them down somehow. She suspected too that the second she admitted it to her parents, the nightmare would lose its sense of unreality: the possibility that she still secretly clung to, that this was all some terrible mistake, would disappear.

  She gazed around herself at the quiet normality of her flat, its sense of hopeless waiting, her chest tightening and tightening as the silence grew ever louder. She could not stay here; she couldn’t stand it.

  Her friend Zoe picked up after the third ring. “Clara? Is there any news? Are you okay?”

  She closed her eyes in relief. “Zo, I know it’s not the best time for you, what with the baby and everything, but can I come and stay with you tonight? I—”

  “Of course,” Zoe said at once. “Of course you can.”

  Clara burst into tears. “I just can’t . . .”

  “Come over.” Zoe’s voice was firm. “Right now. Put some things in a bag, get in the car, and come.”

  * * *

  —

  Zoe lived in a small end-of-terrace house in East Greenwich with her husband, Adam, and their new baby, Oscar. Clara knocked and stood on the doorstep, listening to the sound of Oscar wailing from somewhere within, and tried to suppress a fresh, dizzying panic, gripping onto the wall to steady herself. Come on, Zo, she thought desperately. Please answer. The door opened and there was Zoe; the sight of her, the relief of it, almost undid Clara. She was dressed in dungarees that were covered in something that looked like porridge, her auburn curls tied up in a messy topknot, her face lined with tiredness, her hand reaching out to her as she said, “Clara, oh, sweetheart, come here. It’s all right; it’s okay.”

  Later, in the warm and untidy living room, its floors strewn with baby paraphernalia, Clara finally stopped crying long enough to look up and see six-month-old Oscar watching her from his mother’s lap, his big brown eyes wide with fascination. She gave a shaky laugh. “Sorry, Ozzy, you must think your godmother’s a loon.”

  “Oh well,” Zoe said mildly. “Makes a nice change from your own dramas, doesn’t it, Oz?” She leaned over and, squeezing Clara’s hand, said gently, “Tell me what’s been going on.”

  So Clara told her, about Luke’s cheating, the conversation with Sadie, the blue van and the CCTV footage, the strange woman who lived upstairs. As she talked, she felt the knot in her chest gradually loosen fraction by fraction. Despite their lives taking such different directions, despite relationships, careers, motherhood, and all the other myriad experiences that over the years had slowly altered both the people they’d once been and the friendship they’d once had, there still remained between them the closeness and ease they’d known since primary school, and for the first time since Luke had disappeared, she felt her churning panic subside a little.

  “Holy fuck, Clara,” Zoe said when she’d finished. She shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Clara rubbed her eyes tiredly. “I know he’s a cheat and a liar and all the rest of it, but I can’t walk away from it all and let the police deal with it. I can’t let Rose and Oliver cope with all this by themselves. And I can’t just turn off my feelings for Luke. He’s in danger and I don’t know what to do to help him. I don’t know how to help his mum and dad, who’re going through hell. I don’t know what the fuck to do about any of it.”

  To this, Zoe said firmly, “Okay, well, right now you don’t need to do anything but drink a very large glass of wine—and one for me too,” she added, “because I’m still bloody breastfeeding.”

  Clara was on her third glass when she murmured, “I must have been blind not to see it.” She shook her head in wonder. “What a stupid, stupid idiot, thinking everything was wonderful, when it was going on right under my nose. I mean, what kind of moron doesn’t even suspect, doesn’t even have a clue that her boyfriend’s shagging the office sex bomb?”

  “Not stupid,” Zoe said, “just in love. Just absolutely besotted.” She paused, stroking Oscar’s head thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Maybe this is a wake-up call, that Luke isn’t the perfect man you’ve always had him pegged as. No one can live up to that. Don’t get me wrong,” she said hurriedly. “It’s in no way your fault it happened—the blame’s totally on him—but . . . my God, you fell for him hard. Suddenly there was nothing else in your world but him, and I was happy for you, I really was, but . . .” She hesitated.

  “But what?” Clara demanded.

  She shrugged. “You were so enthralled by him, by his whole family. All I ever heard was how incredibly clever Oliver was, or about the amazing work Rose used to do for Médecins Sans Frontières, or how fantastically well Luke’s career was going. . . .”

  “Sorry if I bored you,” Clara muttered.

  “Oh, you didn’t, of course you didn’t! I got it, I really did—I understood why you grew so close to them all. But what happened to the novel you were going to write? Your own career? Suddenly I stopped hearing about that—it was all about Luke: his job, his talent, his amazing family. As if you didn’t deserve him, as if you couldn’t believe your luck. But you are amazing. You are. He was the lucky one. I only wish you realized that.”

  They were silent for a while as Clara digested this, until she put her head in her hands and said, “Christ, Zo, what am I going to do? I’ve got to find him. I can’t bear the thought of him being hurt or in danger—it makes me physically sick!”

  Zoe nodded sympathetically. “You know you can stay here for as long as you like, don’t you?” She got up, gently shifting an almost asleep Oscar higher on her chest. “Adam’s away at a work t
hing tonight. I’m going to put Ozzy to bed, then I’ll order us a takeaway. I won’t be long. Pour yourself another glass.”

  Clara sat back and closed her eyes, the wine she’d gulped swilling queasily now in her empty stomach. At that moment, her phone began to ring. It was Anderson’s name flashing across her screen, and her heart instantly leaped as she picked it up.

  “Clara? We’ve found the van,” he told her.

  She sat up. “Where?”

  “It was abandoned in a car park on the edge of the Kent Downs.”

  She could scarcely breathe. “And Luke?”

  “The vehicle was empty. Luke and whoever was driving were long gone. However . . .” He paused. “I have to tell you we found a significant amount of blood on the passenger seat.”

  She closed her eyes, the floor seeming to pitch and roll beneath her.

  “It will take us a few days to confirm that it’s Luke’s blood, but—”

  “Oh God, oh my God.”

  “Clara, we—”

  “Is he—do you think he’s . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word.

  There was a pause. “The amount of blood suggests a significant flesh wound, but it’s impossible to tell whether it was a fatal one. We also found blood on the ground within a few feet of the van, which indicates that Luke may have been moved to another vehicle.”

  Anderson’s words seemed to be coming from somewhere far away. The room felt entirely airless. “I have to tell you that we are assuming the blood to be Luke’s, Clara. The Major Incident Team will be handling the case from now. Which means more officers working on it, a televised appeal, an intensifying of the search . . .”

  “You think he’s dead, don’t you?” Clara blurted. “You think he’s been murdered.”

  “No. That is not what I’m saying at all. But we have to consider it a possibility, which is why we’re escalating the search. I will, of course, remain your first point of contact, and if you need to speak to either me or DC Mansfield, please . . .”