Beautiful Liars_a gripping thriller about friendship, dark secrets and bitter betrayal

by Isabel Ashdown

  ‘In boys, perhaps not,’ says Toby. ‘But this was a man. David Crown was, what, mid-forties? Was he good-looking? Perhaps she saw something in him that she hadn’t seen in the lads of her own age? Perhaps she was attracted to his maturity. Girls often go for older men, don’t they?’

  Martha feels a rush of anger, hating Toby for what he’s suggesting about her friend – and, more specifically, what he’s saying about her. She knew he wouldn’t be able to resist a dig at some point or other, and she avoids looking up to see who else around the room has understood his meaning. She fingers through her papers and slides another photograph into the centre of the table. Backsides lift out of seats to lean in for a closer look, and noises of assent rise up into the room.

  ‘Thanks for that pearl of wisdom, Toby,’ she says, delivering her best patronising smile. ‘But, for the record, just being OK-looking doesn’t automatically make a man irresistible to every woman.’

  A ripple of laughter travels the room, which Toby deftly disregards as he brings his finger down on David Crown’s face. ‘Ladies, correct me if I’m wrong – but I’d say our Mr Crown is a bit more than OK-looking, wouldn’t you?’

  And to Martha’s irritation there’s not a person in the room who disagrees. Yes, Martha thinks, David Crown was attractive – but she and her friends had soon got over that, she’s certain, once they’d come to know him better. After Martha’s first few encounters with him, he had been just David, hadn’t he? They’d stopped noticing how handsome he was, because … well, just because. He was just David.

  Glen Gavin reaches out and pulls the photograph towards himself, holding it up high, gaining the attention of all.

  ‘OK, OK, so we’re agreed he’s an attractive man. But Martha, I think it’s fair to say you’re not convinced that your friend ran off with this man?’

  Thank God for Glen Gavin and his brooding presence.

  ‘No, I’m not. Speaking as someone who knew Juliet better than most, I am absolutely convinced that she came to harm that night. Now I don’t know if David Crown is behind it – up until that night I had always thought him to be a good guy too – but Juliet just running away like that, with no note, taking nothing, leaving her bike abandoned on the edge of the towpath? It’s out of the question. And, even if they had run away together, surely someone would have heard from them or seen them together in the years that have passed. David Crown never made another withdrawal from his account, and his passport was never used, so it’s as if he vanished from the planet too.’

  ‘Of course it’s possible there’s no sign of him because he’s dead, right? I mean, it has been eighteen years,’ Toby says, prodding away. He gives a shrug. ‘Just playing devil’s advocate.’

  Martha wants so badly for all these people to be on her side. Not just to make this documentary – but to at last find out what happened to Juliet. To find Juliet.

  ‘No, it’s a fair question,’ she says, maintaining her calm, tucking a strand of auburn hair behind her ear. ‘According to the original interviews, his wife believed that he ran away after the pressure of the police questioning – which she made a formal complaint about, by the way – because it brought back memories of a previous false allegation. It turns out that many years earlier he had lost his job as a teacher in Bedfordshire after a sexual assault claim from a female pupil. The girl’s claim was retracted completely, so no charges were ever brought against him, but Mrs Crown believes this later suspicion relating to Juliet pushed him into taking flight. She said he was fearful that the police would wrongly put the two events together and try to pin Juliet’s disappearance on him. The last time his wife was interviewed was, what, five years ago?’ Martha consults her notes. ‘Yes, five years ago – it was a local reporter doing a history piece on the Regent’s Canal. At that time, Mrs Crown said she continued to believe her husband had simply run away – by himself – and was afraid to return. She still lives alone in the same house, and it seems she’s never quite got over her husband’s disappearance. In the interview she said she lives in hope that he’ll one day come home.’

  ‘So he was a teacher,’ Toby says.

  Glen waves away Toby’s comment. ‘If he’s alive, surely someone would have heard from him over the years?’

  ‘Perhaps they have? It seems Mrs Crown is fiercely protective over her husband’s reputation. If she still loves him, I doubt she would let on that he’s been in touch. Especially if, in reality, she suspects he did kill Juliet.’

  ‘But if she thinks her husband is a killer, surely she would have turned him in?’ says Toby.

  Martha shakes her head, irked by his naivety. ‘People make all manner of bad choices in the name of love. She may have been in denial initially. Or she may have come to accept that he did kill Juliet, but justified it in her own mind. Whatever the truth is, I suspect she knows more than she’s let on up to now.’

  ‘And what about the schoolgirl who made the allegation?’ asks Juney. ‘Do you think David Crown was guilty of that assault?’

  Martha glances towards Glen, who is already familiar with her theory. She looks around the room, taking in the eight earnest faces – the researchers and assistants, Jay and Sally, the camera crew – and she says a silent prayer. Please, Liv, please answer my letter so I’m not alone in this.

  She nods in reply. ‘Yes. I think David Crown was guilty of assaulting that schoolgirl, and I think he was guilty of murdering Juliet – and I think he could still be out there right now.’

  3. Casey

  This dressing table came from my old bedroom, a gold-leaf and cream piece from the seventies, part of a matching suite my mother and Dad had bought when they were newlyweds, before passing it on to me when they updated their room. It has a swing mirror, with curling, swirling patterns up and around the glass, and even now I’m drawn to run my fingertip along it, travelling the meandering curves from one side to the other. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that I brought with me when I moved, along with Granny’s heavy crystal ashtray. As a child, I loved to watch its rainbow of colours on a bright day, when the sun would thread beams of light through the cut glass to dance upon the bedroom wall. The dressing table seemed to be the most important item of furniture to have, knowing how much it had meant to Mum, how many hours she had spent in front of it, rolling her hair, carefully applying her mascara and painting her lips. I would perch on the corner of my parents’ bed, watching each action with the greatest attention in case I might one day be asked to repeat the art, although now as I peer into it at my own reflection the idea seems laughable. Once, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I borrowed Mum’s crimson lipstick and applied it, just as I’d seen her do so many times, on my way out for a wander in the park to spy on a lad I’d seen there a few times before. As I passed through the living room, my mother did a double-take and laughed, a hard, flat ‘Ha!’, before calling my dad in to take a look. ‘She looks like she’s been eating jam doughnuts!’ she told him, her hand covering her mouth, and, although Dad didn’t reply, I could see in his eyes that he was furious with her. She was heading into one of her low moods, but that was no excuse for such cruelty. Dad saw my tears getting ready to spill over, and he put his arm around me and took me to the bathroom, where he helped me to blot the colour down until it was merely a hint. ‘You look beautiful,’ he whispered, and he indicated for me to go out through the back to avoid another confrontation. But I don’t want to think about that; I prefer the memory of sitting on the corner of their bed, the furrows of the pink candlewick bedspread soft beneath my fingers. I enjoyed the silence of those moments, but at the same time I think I yearned for her to speak, for us to talk and laugh together like all those mothers and daughters I’d seen on TV. I’d watch and wait for minutes on end, but so often she simply continued with her beautifying rituals and afforded me only the briefest of glances, an invitation in her immaculate raised eyebrow. ‘You look pretty,’ I would tell her, and then the room would brighten with the radiance of her smile.

&n
bsp; Now, I lean in and pull down my lower lids, fascinated by the map of veins I can magnify if I blink hard and bulge my eyes wide. My face is round and pale – I’m nothing if not honest with myself – entirely absent of make-up or artifice. Lately I’ve been noticing the ever-increasing ratio of grey to black in my hair – I must have at least fifty per cent grey hairs – but how strange that they have now started showing up in my eyebrows too. I wonder about down below. I wonder if later, when I’m undressed, I’ll be able to bend far enough forward to check there for any changes. It’s quite possible that my fat belly will prevent me from getting a good view – that or my bad back, which seems to creak and shriek more and more often these days.

  I pick up my bristle hairbrush and run it through my hair, one long stroke from forehead to tip, its length reaching as low as my thigh. ‘One … two … three …’ I count, automatically falling into the hundred-strokes habit Mum taught me in my early years, and as I gaze at my reflection my mind is once again on Martha and Liv, and the email I started writing this afternoon.

  Of course, it was easy enough to set up a fake email address for Olivia Heathcote, but knowing what to say in my reply to Martha was a much harder task. I had spent a good couple of hours Googling Olivia – or Liv, as Martha calls her – but there was surprisingly little to be found, only the briefest of mentions about her work as a bereavement counsellor for a local clinic. What I already knew about her was gleaned from the two encounters we’d had during the sale of the house more than a year ago, the first when I visited for an initial viewing with the estate agent, the second a follow-up visit I had requested on the pretext of planning my furniture requirements. In reality, it was not the house but Olivia I wanted to see. It wasn’t a crush by any means, but Liv had something about her, such a striking aura. Liv was the type of person who at school would have been popular with the other girls, would have been part of a tight group. She would have belonged. I had just wanted another look before I took over the house, and Liv and everything in her life disappeared from mine.

  Liv had two children, four-year-old twins called Arno and Jack. They were beautiful too, olive-skinned creatures playing quietly on the faded living room floor, building a world of block towers and animals. Their tawny hair was in stark contrast to Liv’s ebony bob and darker skin, but they shared her vivid blue eyes, and I thought how astonishing it was that a person like Liv could produce such fair children. She must have noticed me staring, because she laughed and said, ‘You never know how the genes will come out in the wash!’ And that’s how I learned she was adopted as a baby, taken into this very home at just two months of age by Mr and Mrs Heathcote and their large, boisterous family. Liv was the middle of five, the only adopted child, and the only one ‘of colour’, as she put it. At one point, she told me, their grandmother was living here too, along with an ever-increasing menagerie of animals and birds. ‘It was chaos most of the time,’ Liv had told me, laughing at the memory. ‘But happy chaos. We didn’t have a lot, but my mum and dad were the best kind of people, if a bit gullible. They couldn’t say no to anyone, so if someone in the street was threatening to get rid of some old pet or other we’d take it in here. “Hackney Zoo,” that’s what my friends used to call this place! Bonkers.’

  The house is only a three-up, two-down, and I couldn’t imagine for a moment how they had managed with so many children to care for in such a small space. But what colourful history! So unlike the details of my own small family, whose genealogy, my mother would proudly claim, went right back to the Domesday Book on both sides: English through and through. I loved that Liv’s world was so different from mine, and if I could have stayed there all day long, drinking coffee and asking her questions about her childhood, I would have. Now, in light of my new role as her substitute, I wish I had!

  When Liv introduced me to Arno and Jack they smiled so happily, as though greeting an old friend. How my heart had lifted in that moment! I couldn’t remember the last time a child had smiled at me with such guileless ease. I’m not the sort of person people smile at easily; I don’t have that special thing. On that final visit, I also managed to gather that Liv hadn’t been living in the house for more than a couple of years, having moved back in after her mother had died. There didn’t seem to be a husband or partner anywhere, but I supposed he was out at work or away on business – until Liv mentioned she was moving out of London altogether, ‘for a fresh start’. I took this to mean alone, just the three of them, and this pleased me no end, though now I struggle to understand why it should. That was the last time I ever saw Liv, and a month later I was moving my belongings in, clutching tightly to my very own set of newly cut keys. My solicitor had told me I was paying well over the market price for the place when I offered more to see off another buyer’s bid, but I knew I had to have it. And for heaven’s sake, I’d thought when he advised me not to rush, what else was I to spend my money on? This was the house I wanted.

  Today, after hours of staring into my laptop screen (and guiltily ignoring the bleeps of work emails dropping into my inbox!), I finally drafted a reply to Martha.

  Dear Martha

  How nice to hear from you. What a surprise. Of course I have seen you on the television and I have enjoyed watching your success. You must be so pleased. With regard to Juliet, I would be happy to help you in any way I can, but I am out of the country on business and will not return for another week. I am a bereavement counsellor and sometimes I have to travel. But if you would like to email me any questions you have, I can very easily email you back. I hope you are well, and that we can meet again some time in the future.

  With best wishes, Liv x

  I dithered over the kiss at the bottom for an age. Was it too much? I wondered if I should say where exactly it was I’d gone abroad, for authenticity – Italy, perhaps? Maybe Germany? No, better to be vague. Brevity is the key, I concluded, after deleting much of my earlier version – the details about my children, my happy place of work and devoted partner – and now I have this final draft, ready to go. I gave the message a final read through, aloud, in a clear, confident voice, and suddenly I was anxious that it might seem too eager if I sent it straight away. Martha might not believe it’s really Liv! Imagine, if it was all to come to an end now, simply because I got carried away with myself. So, I will send it early tomorrow morning, and for now I must be content with the anticipation.

  As I sit facing myself in the dressing table mirror now, the very thought of this adventure sends a jolt of adrenaline through my veins. This is the most exciting thing to happen to me in a long time, and I’m suddenly terrified it might be taken away. What if the real Liv were to turn up again, confronting my deception? I imagine inviting her in and offering her a cup of tea, before bashing her over the head with my crystal ashtray and burying her under the floorboards, just like old John Christie in Rillington Place. I blink at my reflection, and then I laugh, high and loud, clamping my hand to my mouth to hold in the madness of it all.

  4. Martha

  She’s been here before, recognises the still-water tang of the moonlit path, the creaking murmur of houseboats and wooden decking moored along the frozen bank. It’s a shortcut home, one they’ve always taken in warmer months, but to be avoided alone after dark for fear of unseen dangers lurking in the shadows. To her right the frosted path meanders alongside the black water, disappearing into nothing as it stretches beyond the bridge. Her shallow breaths billow out in hot white clouds, misting her vision. To her left a homeless pair sit huddled beneath sleeping bags on the wooden bench, not looking in her direction, more interested in the sandwich packet and steaming tea they’ve just been handed. ‘You’re an angel,’ one of them says, to no one in particular, his hand raised like that of a stained-glass saint. ‘You’re an angel.’ The swishing burr of bicycle wheels, the ticker-tacker rush of air as they pass – six, eight, ten, twelve – it’s hard to know how many there are, but the riders are all young – teenagers, sixth-formers – hair and knitted scarves stream
ing, ivory teeth gleaming through the darkness, handlebars festooned with wicker baskets bearing fruit.

  ‘Juliet!’ a voice calls out from the followers, a voice chasing after the beautiful girl at the front. ‘Jules! Wait!’ And Martha realises it’s her own voice she’s hearing, she who is calling out, the urgency knotting her stomach like rope burn.

  Incapable of movement, she watches the cyclists turn sharply where the path grows dim, and they nosedive, bikes and all, one after the other, disappearing like fish from a bucket through the glittering surface of the Regent’s Canal. A fracture skitters across the frozen crust, breaking the waterway in two, causing the houseboats to tip and sway. She can’t bear it, the motion of the water undulating beneath the nearest boat, the brightest of them all, and she sprints over the crunchy grass and reaches out for its wooden rails, desperate to steady the boat’s movements, to silence the night. Her smooth school pumps slip on the frosty bank and she feels herself disappear into the water, fish-like herself, the ice closing up behind her.

  It’s a dream she’s had before, or at least a version of it. Sometimes she’s the one on the bicycle, and it’s Juliet and Liv sitting on the wooden bench, eating sandwiches. Other times, she’s watching, helpless, as Juliet floats by, trapped under ice, her eyes wild. And then there’s the version where nothing happens; where Martha roams back and forth along that lonely path, looking, looking, looking, and finding nothing – seeing nothing, hearing nothing. In some ways, that’s the worst dream of them all, infected as it is with the intangible qualities of helplessness and guilt.

  I should have walked on with her, Martha tells herself, running her hands up and over her sleep-softened face, willing herself to rise from her position on the sofa, where she had sunk into sleep within moments of arriving home this evening. If Martha had walked on with her that night as she’d planned to – if she hadn’t changed her mind and left her standing on that towpath alone – would Juliet be alive today?