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

by Isabel Ashdown

  I remember my first year at infant school with clarity. I was four, one of the smallest and youngest in my class, and even now I can recall the overwhelming sense of being on the outside, separate from the other pupils in some unspeakable way. They slotted together naturally, even those who came from other places, the ones who arrived speaking in different words and accents, handicapped by language, perhaps, but not by character as I was. I am aware how harsh on myself I sound, but these are simply the facts. Of course, I didn’t know it at the time, but many of these children were already acquainted from playgroup or nursery or from simply living in the same neighbourhood. That was always going to count against me, wasn’t it, being a newcomer? And even if those children were previously unknown to each other, there was a thing – a ‘sameness’ about them that I lacked. A straightforward, easy-talking child-ness about them. It was a thing that allowed their arms to rest easy at their sides, their eyes to scan a crowd without fearful anticipation. A gift that let them be both noticed and blissfully unnoticed all in the same moment. I have never possessed that gift, then or since. Somehow I manage to be both invisible and horribly stand-out all at once. I sometimes think this lack in me is the source of everything that is wrong in my life, every lurch of anxiety, every seizure of fear. How do you acquire that good, ‘easy’ thing? Is it something you can be taught? Is it something I could learn now, given a fresh chance to mix in the world?

  To begin with, despite my awkwardness, the other children were pleasant enough. They were so young, and looking back it seems to me now that a child’s default setting is probably one of kindness – just like those adorable Heathcote twins – until someone steers them off that path. In those first few days, some of them even tried to coax me into their playtime games of horsey or chase, but I must have put them off somehow, giving off that scent of discomfort and fear that popular children sniff out so quickly. All it had taken was one child to call me out – a beautiful boy with deep almond eyes – and I was marked as ‘the one’. After all, I know, there always has to be a ‘one’, doesn’t there? This is what we see in films and on television, what I read in my paperbacks and magazine short stories. Every group needs a ‘one’ – an imperfect person to shine light upon their own perfections, an ugly person to hold up a mirror to their beauty. Well, I was the one. ‘Poopy Head!’ was that boy’s war cry in the concrete playground of St John’s infant school, and he ran from me, archly pinching his nostrils and whooping a loud, ‘Poo-poo!’ as he went. Others joined in his dance, and soon there was a small army of them waiting for me in the playground at each break, prancing at my rear like merry shadows, plucking at their noses and giggling to the chorus of ‘Poo-poo!’ It stuck. If the teachers or playground monitors noticed, they showed no sign, and so it went on for weeks and months in its various guises, only stopping when my mother removed me from the school at the end of the academic year, never to return again. Thank goodness for Mum. She was hopeless in so many ways, but there’s no denying she rescued me from that particular hell. She stepped up to the challenge when it really counted. ‘We don’t need them,’ she told me as we marched back home on that last day, her back straight, her aquiline nose raised to the sky. That evening we sat at the kitchen table and made plans for my home schooling, my mother growing more excited with every jot of her pen, every plan that she hatched. ‘And we’ll have school trips to the science museum, and the planetarium – and Sea Life!’ she told me, as Dad cooked spaghetti bolognese and wordlessly laid out the cutlery around us. ‘Just you, me and a packed lunch for two!’

  Mum looked lovelier than I’d ever seen her. She loved me so much that I thought she might explode with it, and me with her.

  I stretch my leaden arms high above my head, easing out my aching limbs. I must stop dozing on the sofa like this; it plays havoc with the weakness in my neck, and taking painkillers only aggravates my delicate tummy. Shunting up to the edge of the cushions, I lift the lid on my laptop, resolving to do a bit more research on the girls. I’ve been building up a scrapbook of details, saving them to a special Pinterest board where I can view them as a whole. It’s a bit like one of those police wall charts you see on TV, where the investigating officers stick up photographs of suspects and pieces of evidence, scrawling arrows and connectors between Post-it notes, building up momentum towards the inevitable eureka moment. My Investigation Wall is virtual, and visible to me alone. Already I’ve managed to track down a Year Ten photograph from a Bridge School alumni page I discovered on Facebook, although I’m struggling to work out which of the girls is Olivia. So many of the girls have that same generic nineties look: heavy-fringed and sulky, their ties worn short and stubby, loose at the neck. Martha I recognised straight away, so familiar am I with her famous face and that thick, flowing hair – though of course she wears it darker now, cut in a sophisticated bob – and Juliet, well, it was impossible not to notice her, so strikingly beautiful was she at fifteen. Like Martha, her hair is worn loose and gently wavy, a light honey-brown against so many bottle-dyed blondes and Morticia blacks. She is a natural beauty. Hers was the first face I was drawn to, and images from historic newspaper reports were easily found online to confirm it was her. I feel a sudden urgency to track down more details for them all, to further populate my Investigation Wall, to build up my case. I’ve always harboured secret ambitions to write a crime novel and I think perhaps all this research will serve me well as practice! At any rate, if Martha does get back to me, I need to make myself useful, to come up with some nugget of information she’ll appreciate – something that will make me indispensible. It’s vital that Martha continues to believe this is Liv she’s talking to, that it’s Liv she’s confiding in. I’ll start with a bit more digging on Martha and see where it takes me.

  Just as I type the words ‘Martha Benn’ into the search bar, an email alert pops up in the top right-hand corner of the screen. ‘From Martha Benn’ it announces. Well, what are the chances of that, I marvel, and already I’m wondering if it is evidence of a connection deeper than either of us could ever know. I switch screens, hovering over the message for one delicious, tantalising moment of hesitation, enjoying the pain, before I click Open.

  6. Martha

  The email from Liv had taken Martha by surprise yesterday morning. She hadn’t expected a reply so quickly – Liv’s family might have moved on from her childhood address long ago – but the pleasure of the quick response had been dulled slightly by its formal tone. Martha had at least thought she might recognise something more of the old Liv in it. Olivia Heathcote had been the joker of their group, the one most likely to swear and tell dirty jokes and scribble graffiti on the toilet walls at school. She was the daring one, the chancer, the one who had made her and Juliet take themselves less seriously.

  Liv’s family had been big and noisy, a world of difference from the hushed void that was Martha’s home after her mother’s departure. Liv had complained endlessly about lack of privacy, having to share with an older sister, and then – the horror – having to give up her bed for a confused grandmother who called out in the night as Liv slept on the camp bed across the room. ‘In the pantry!’ Nanna had taken to shouting in the night. ‘The eggs are in the pantry with the plums!’ Liv’s impersonations were hysterical. Every morning as they walked to school, she’d update Martha and Juliet on the previous night’s nocturnal wakings, clutching at their sleeves and rolling her head back in a pose of fitful sleep. ‘Me smalls are on the line!’ she’d shriek. ‘I’ll ’ave ’is guts for garters if ’e don’t sort the sink out!’ Sometimes Liv’s stories could leave Martha and Juliet gasping for breath, the joy of their laughter enough to eclipse the loneliness Martha had left a few streets away in Stanley House. Thank God for Liv and her crazy family.

  ‘Gordon Bennett,’ she groaned one morning in a mimic of her mother. ‘The twins are toilet training at the moment. Mum left Frankie on the potty while she made the porridge, but he got off it when her back was turned and laid one down on the bottom
step of the stairs.’

  ‘No!’ Juliet and Martha screamed, neither of them having experience of so big a family.

  ‘All of a sudden Nanna shouts from the hall, “Joyce! What the ’ell are you feeding them? Could’ve broke my neck on it! Slippery as a whelk!” Right up between her toes, it was. Dad had to leave his breakfast half eaten, he was retching that bad.’

  Martha recalls having to stop on a bench, laughing so hard she thought she would actually wet herself, and the three of them sat for a while, catching their breath and sighing before sprinting the rest of the way to school to avoid missing the bell. Slippery as a whelk became their catchphrase, to be called out to one another over the toilet cubicles at school, a code for anything stinky or ugly or grim. When cauliflower cheese was on the canteen menu, Liv would make vomit fingers at it, silently mouthing, ‘Slippery as a whelk.’ When Gina Norris brought her ugly little baby to show off outside the school gates in Year Eleven, the three of them whispered to one another that only a mother could love a face like that, what with it being ‘as slippery as a whelk’.

  Martha misses that laughter, the camaraderie of a well-worn joke, the ability to communicate with another human being in so few words. There’s only her and Liv now; surely they owe it to one another to rekindle their friendship? She can’t have forgotten, can she? Not when they shared so much. Liv and Juliet were more than just her best friends; they were the closest thing she had to family.

  The message had come through during Martha’s meeting with Toby yesterday, and she’d had to read it over several times, hardly able to believe she was so easily back in contact with her old friend. When Toby had returned with their coffees she’d handed him her phone, inviting him to read it too. ‘That’s great,’ he’d said, and at the time she had agreed, yes, it was great that Liv was happy to help them. But something had unsettled her all the same. She supposed it wasn’t unimaginable that Liv’s formality was simply her unease making its way into her written words. Certainly, Liv would be shaken up by her letter, so it was natural her tone might be a bit off-key. But did Liv harbour any ill feeling towards Martha? Their relationship had all but evaporated with the disappearance of Juliet. Was it possible that Liv held Martha in some way responsible? Or was this just Martha’s own guilt rearing itself, making her question herself and everyone around her?

  She had slept on it, and by the time she rose at five this morning she’d got it straight in her head. Of course Liv sounded different: eighteen years was a lifetime ago. I’ve changed, Martha told herself. Liv has changed. Everything has changed.

  She had tapped out a brief response, purposely warming up her own tone, trying to inject something of their old dynamic into her words:

  Liv! So great to hear from you! I can’t tell you how relieved I am that my letter found you. So you’re a bereavement counsellor now? Wow, that really is impressive, though it doesn’t surprise me at all. You always were a good listener. Totally understand about your work commitments, so yes, why don’t I put together some starter questions and send them over to you in the next day or two? Perhaps we could meet up when you’re back in the country? Mart xx

  Mart. No one but Liv and Juliet ever called her Mart. She hated it if anyone else tried to abbreviate her name in the same way; it sounded over-familiar coming from anyone but her best friends. With them it had been different. Olivia was Liv, Juliet was Jules and Martha was Mart. Martha feels reality tip every time she allows herself to voyage deeper into the memories of that era, and her breath catches as the train she’s now travelling on comes to a halt and Toby nudges her to get off.

  Toby has made contact with Juliet’s father, and together Martha and he have taken the Northern line as far as Archway, following Toby’s mobile app to navigate the twenty minutes to Mr Sherman’s new home on foot. It’s a ground-floor flat in a good terraced street, but not a patch on the nice detached place Juliet’s family owned when the girls were growing up. Martha feels a rush of relief that they made the decision to hold off on the camera crew until they’d had this first interview with him; it would seem so wrong, turning up here mob-handed to rake over his tragic past. Martha has been dreading this meeting more than any of the others they hope to line up over the coming days. So far they have been able to establish that Mr Sherman – Alan, as he asked to be called when Toby and he spoke on the phone yesterday – took a sabbatical from his work as a bank manager around five years after Juliet’s disappearance, to return to the family home and care for his ex-wife. It was a late diagnosis of breast cancer, for which she refused any kind of treatment, and so after four months Mr Sherman had found himself a widower of sorts, living alone in a four-bedroom house, with no income. A year later, the old family home had been sold, and he had moved here.

  ‘How did he sound to you?’ Martha asks Toby as they stop outside the front door, her finger poised over the button labelled ‘Sherman’.

  ‘He sounded like a nice guy,’ Toby replied, pushing at the roots of his hair. Martha suspects this is something he does when he feels uneasy. ‘But profoundly sad. Like a man who’s had years to become that way, if you know what I mean? Lonely, perhaps. He seemed happy to talk.’

  Martha presses the buzzer and they wait for only a few seconds before Alan Sherman opens the door, shakes them by the hand and gestures to the back of the hall where the door to his flat stands open. Martha is struck by the reduced size of him. Her memory of him was as a tall man, straight-backed and broad-shouldered, always in a shirt and tie, even at weekends. She would never have recognised this man as Juliet’s father. This man is stooped, all-over grey, dressed in shapeless tan cords and a brown V-neck jumper, and as she walks along the hall she wonders if she can make out anything at all of the Mr Sherman she once knew. It seems as though his illness has altered him almost beyond recognition. But when she enters his tidy little home and he closes the door softly behind them, he turns and she sees it there, unmistakable. The same haunted look in his eyes that she saw on their very last encounter, a day eighteen years ago when he’d stood on her doorstep, pleading with her to tell the police if she knew who Juliet had been seeing. To think that that look has never left him; that Juliet’s disappearance has haunted him across the years, and lives on in him still.

  ‘We want to find out what happened to Juliet, Mr Sherman,’ Martha says. This is not how she had planned to start this conversation, this interview, but it seems suddenly imperative that she’s clear with him about their intentions. She has to say this now, now that she perhaps has the power to do something, to change something. ‘We want to find her. We won’t sensationalise it, I promise. The show … well, the show will simply give us a louder voice. It’ll make people listen.’

  The three of them are standing close in the small space of Alan Sherman’s living room. He scrutinises them each in turn, like a man deciphering another language, and then he unclasps his hands from where they rest at his sternum and pulls Martha towards him in a fierce embrace. From nowhere, a sob rises up in her chest and she’s a teenager again, stifling the sound against Mr Sherman’s woollen jumper, grateful for his arms around her, mourning more than just the loss of her best friend. They all lost so much that winter. In losing Juliet, they lost their connections to one another, and over the years they must have forgotten what those connections really meant. They must have forgotten, all of them, otherwise why else would they have let them go so easily?

  Mr Sherman had always been kind to Martha. There had been an unspoken acceptance that he knew how things were for her at home, having unintentionally witnessed Martha’s family at its worst one Friday night when he’d called by to pick up a textbook of Juliet’s that Martha had borrowed. Martha’s dad had been on one of his benders, roaring his rage from the far end of the flat as Martha fled through the front door, straight into the chest of Juliet’s father before he’d even had a chance to knock. Even now, she recalls the shame of that collision, the lies that poured from her mouth as she tried to explain that her parents were ju
st mucking about, that it wasn’t a real argument, just a bit of harmless fun. Behind her the fury continued, audible even through the closed door, and she had steered Mr Sherman away, agreeing to walk back to Juliet’s house and join them for their fish and chip supper.

  It wasn’t always like this, she’d wanted to say. Remember my old house? Remember when Dad wasn’t so bad?

  ‘The textbook can wait,’ Mr Sherman had said, and even at thirteen she had understood the kindness he’d shown in just those few words.

  ‘I’d forgotten …’ Martha starts to say as she pulls away, but she doesn’t know where she’s going with the sentence and she trails off with a shake of her head.

  Mr Sherman gives a small nod as he releases her, and indicates for them to take a seat while he puts the kettle on for tea.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Toby whispers when they’re alone, but Martha waves his sympathy away with a flick of her hand, telling him to get his notes out. Stiffly, she sits beside him on the pale leather two-seater.

  The room is warm, the heating on at full blast. Martha loosens the collar of her shirt and shrugs off her jacket. I can do this, she tells herself, drawing strength as the adult Martha returns, the grown-up, primetime Martha. It’s something she unwittingly mastered in childhood, the ability to go from broken to unbreakable in a matter of minutes, to present a smiling mask of resilience to the outside world while beneath the surface all might be far from well. I can do this. Within moments she is focused again, and quietly she and Toby run through the questions they have prepared, ready for Mr Sherman when he returns with the tea tray. He places it softly on the coffee table between them, and takes the armchair opposite, sitting on the edge of his seat as he pours tea and offers them biscuits. It’s such a civilised scene, slow-moving, punctuated by the soft ticking of a wall clock, that it seems wrong to launch into questions of so dark a nature. But that’s what Martha is here for, and she fixes her gaze on his face, anchoring herself to the job at hand: the task of finding Juliet. A momentary flash comes to her: the tabloid suggestion that Juliet’s father was responsible for his daughter’s disappearance. Why had they suggested that? He must have gone in for questioning early on and, after all, didn’t police always treat the parents with suspicion until they could be clearly ruled out? But it had made it to the newspapers, and she can see the headline in her mind’s eye – Missing Juliet: Does Dad Know Where She Is?