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

by Isabel Ashdown

  As the sun shifted in the sky beyond the copse, I stole one last glance at the place where she lay, swallowing a scream when, to my horror, I saw her fingers twitch. I thanked God that I hadn’t fled the scene immediately, that I had, by some chance of good fate, stayed long enough to witness the flicker of life that remained. It was a terrible thing, but the rock was still in my hand, and I knew it was the kindest thing to do. If she were a rabbit in a trap I would do the same, wouldn’t I? I kneeled beside her, momentarily blinded by the piercing evening rays as they descended through the trees, and I brought the rock down on the back of her skull, again and again, with such force that I believed my shoulder might slip its socket. When I stepped away, her hair, like my hand, was crimson, and with one last look at her broken body I fled through the trees, towards the sound of the babbling brook.

  Had I intended to kill her? In this instance, and this one alone, I believe perhaps I had.

  24. Katherine

  Have I killed her? Have I? The sight of Martha lying there, slumped face-down in my gloomy hallway, was nearly enough to stop my heart, and the deafening flood of remorse was overwhelming. I hadn’t wanted this to happen. I’d wanted to help Martha; I wanted her to be my friend. I stared at the crystal ashtray in my hand and saw its corner tainted with Martha’s blood. What would my mother say? It’s been in our family for years, and, the moment I’m responsible for it, something like this happens! I wiped the blood away with the tea towel I was clutching in my left hand, and carefully placed the ashtray on the table beside the front window where it best catches the sun. Forcing myself to look again, I couldn’t bring myself to approach Martha and check for a pulse, in case she really was dead. I couldn’t bear to touch the skin of a dead person. Not again. And so instead I made a snap decision, and I hurried to my bedroom to gather my things. From the top room I saw Carl’s supermarket van slowly moving away up the street, and I hurriedly threw a few items – a toothbrush, a change of knickers – into my shopper bag and located John’s key at the bottom of my jewellery box. Back downstairs I yanked on my winter coat and grabbed up my laptop, shoving it into the bag along with my phone and chargers, desperately trying to work out if there was anything else I might need. The sound of my heartbeat roared in my ears, and while I struggled to think straight, my actions came quickly, and I knew I had to get out of there. This was bad. This was so very bad.

  Now, as I breathe in the calm air of the Regent’s Canal, I turn the key in John’s padlock, and I’m thankful of the space to gather my thoughts and consider my next steps. Although the panicky feeling remains deep down in my stomach, my heart rate has levelled, and I am at least able to string a sentence together in my head. With a little shove of my shoulder I push open the door to the houseboat and hurry down the few wooden steps to shut myself inside before any of my riverside neighbours notice me.

  The peace envelops me instantly. Everything is exactly where it should be. The red enamelled kettle sits on the gas hob, the bench cushions are neatly arranged, the wooden table is clear but for the woven placemats and gas lantern, the dark floral curtains are drawn. I have so many good memories of this place, and for a short while I just sit, sliding myself on to the bench and resting my head on the table. I just need to close my eyes for a while before I decide what to do.

  During my mother’s sad moments, this was a place we’d often come, Dad and I. John was elderly, an ex-army veteran, and, Dad said, one of the first people to offer him the hand of friendship when he moved here as a young man. He had moved on to the houseboat twenty years earlier after separating from his wife, and as he had no children of his own he was always glad to see me on our visits, ready to pull out his curled-up old pack of snap cards and challenge me to a game. But Mum couldn’t stand him. ‘He’s so tatty-looking, and ugh, that enormous ginger beard,’ she’d say. And, ‘Why would a seventy-year-old man be interested in spending time with a young girl, David?’ she would badger Dad whenever I suggested calling in on John. ‘It’s not right. It’s suspect.’

  Dad insisted that John’s friendship was with him, and that he was just a nice old boy who liked our company. Even though I wasn’t sure what Mum meant, I knew her tone suggested something horrible, something dirty. And so our visits became secret visits, and that suited me just fine. Dad and I would stop at the houseboat at least once a week for a cup of tea and a cherry bakewell, and as I got older I’d sometimes drop in on my own when Mum needed time to herself. In my mind, I’d pretend to be an ordinary girl on my way home from school, wandering along the towpath in the sunshine, tossing my hair and smiling back at the boys who looked my way. If the weather was bad I’d pick up a packet of biscuits from the corner shop and knock on John’s door, asking if he fancied a game of cards. He never, ever turned me away, and I told myself he was my long-lost grandpa, all the way from Derbyshire where my dad had grown up. I’d barely met any of the Crown family, so it seemed perfectly possible to me, perfectly feasible. Perhaps that was why Mum didn’t like him, having fallen out with the family years earlier, as so often happens on the TV dramas Mum likes to watch. Estranged. John was my estranged grandfather. I liked the sound of it, and fantasised about describing him that way to the friends I’d bring to have tea with him. Sometimes the imagined friends were characters from books I’d read; sometimes they were the teenage girls I saw walking along the canal path in matching school uniforms, or cycling past wearing the Square Wheels tabards my Dad handed out to his volunteers. When I met them for real, albeit briefly, I stored up their names for future fantasies, pulling them out as I ambled alone in the direction of the canal. ‘John, this is Juliet,’ I would say on their first meeting. Or, ‘Meet Martha, she’s one of my schoolfriends.’ Or, even better, ‘John, these are my best friends – Martha, Juliet and Liv.’ And he’d say, ‘Goodness, KC, I had no idea you were so popular!’ and he’d fill the red stove kettle and we’d all have tea and bakewells and sit out on the deck until the sun went down.

  KC was John’s special name for me, and so it was easy to choose a new name when I started again. Casey. Am I Katherine, or am I Casey? Who knows now?

  I feel the gentle movement of the water around the boat, hear the soft slap of its motion against the moorings. I wish John were here now, to talk me through this, to tell me what I should do. It was with John that I learned to cook bacon and eggs, to wash and dry up, to sweep the wooden decks and squeegee the windows. I learned to sing ‘Do Your Ears Hang Low?’ and ‘My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean’. On deckchairs in summertime, he taught me how to tie a slip knot and a reef knot and a bowline and a rolling hitch, while singing his favourite ballad together: Oh no, John, no, John, no, John – Oh no, John, no, John, no! Sometimes Dad was there, sometimes he was at work or along the path at the Square Wheels hut, preparing sandwiches and tea. But Dad trusted John to be alone with me, and he was right to, because John was a good man. When Dad had gone I was broken, of course, but I still had the secret of John and the houseboat to escape to when things got too much at home with Mum. But then, two years ago, around the time that Granny – my mother’s mother – died, so did John. And I thought my heart would break in two.

  The small living area of the houseboat is in near darkness, and I hook back the corner of a curtain to see that late afternoon is falling over the canal. As I blink out at the fading light, I know I must return to Stack Street to check on Martha. If only I hadn’t lost my temper like that.

  If only Dad hadn’t got mixed up with that girl.

  25. Martha

  Martha wakes in a hospital bed, bathed in the clammy sweat of a nightmare. It’s not a new dream, but a recurring one in which she awakes in her normal bed, at home in her apartment, overwhelmed by the sense that something is deeply wrong, that someone has broken into the flat. The room is silver and black, the noir tones of a 1940s thriller, and, although she knows she’s dreaming, the emotions feel so real. There’s the toxic smell of stale breath and decay in the air, a taut anticipation of something about to happen,
a caught gasp of uncertainty in the rooms around her. Terrified, she leaves her bed to tiptoe through the darkness of her room, where she checks on her sealed windows and finds the handles all gone. The other rooms are the same. She slow-sprints through them in the broken half-glow of the moon, running her fingers around the window frames, over the doors between rooms, the spaces on the walls where the light switches should be. She must have it wrong, she keeps telling herself, feeling across the empty spaces over and over until she cannot deny that it’s true. The realisation engulfs her that she can’t escape. And that smell – that terrible smell intensifies, drawing her against her will, back into her bedroom, where she is halted by the stark outline of a man laid out beneath her bed sheets. No, she wants to scream out. She wants to scream and run and leave this all behind, but still her feet move over polished wood floors, propelling her onwards, onwards, her reluctant hands reaching out to gently peel back the covers and reveal his face. It’s a dead face, always. Eyes open, but not seeing. The colour drained away to a ghostly grey, its lines furrowed deep like healed cuts traced across hollowed cheekbones. And this is where the dream always ends, leaving Martha with the question: why here, a place he has never set foot inside? Why has he come here to die?

  Because he has nowhere else, is the whispered refrain.

  Toby’s face is pale and unsmiling as he draws up outside the hospital in his Mini, a deep line embedded between his brows as he jumps out to help Martha into the passenger seat.

  ‘What are you thinking, discharging yourself so early?’ He sounds angry as he fastens his own seatbelt, shaking his head and biting down on his bottom lip. ‘You could have died back there, Martha. You should be in there right now, being monitored. This isn’t safe.’

  As he pulls away Martha shoots him an I-don’t-know-what-all-the-fuss-is-about smirk that she regrets immediately as pain radiates from the point of impact with every muscle movement. Toby slams on his brakes at the edge of the hospital roundabout.

  ‘No, Martha! You don’t get to laugh this one off! I’m serious. You might not have noticed but I actually care about what happens to you, even if you don’t. I haven’t slept a wink, and just as I’m setting off to visit you I get a text saying you want picking up. What did the doctors say? They seemed concerned enough last night – one of the nurses told me you’d be in for a couple of days.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she says, chastened. ‘Honestly, they said it was fine for me to go.’

  He stares at her face, scrutinising her expression. ‘You’re lying. They didn’t want you to go yet, did they?’

  Martha rolls her eyes and turns to look out of the passenger window. She knows he’s right, but she doesn’t have time to hang around waiting to be given the all-clear. Martha is under no illusions that she hasn’t just had a lucky escape. If Katherine Crown hadn’t left the door ajar in her hurry to leave, if the grocery man hadn’t returned and tried to deliver again, if she’d taken the blow to her skull just an inch to the left – well, it could all have turned out quite differently.

  ‘Alright, no. But honestly, I feel absolutely fine – and I promise to let you know if that changes at any point.’ She looks back at him, but he doesn’t move, just glares back. Is it her imagination or are there tears in his eyes? ‘I promise! Now, drive! We don’t have any time to waste, Toby. Just drive, OK? First stop, my place. I need to freshen up and change out of these clothes.’

  They travel the rest of the short journey home in silence, and Martha is glad of the quiet space to think, to move things around inside her mind, reorganising her earlier ‘facts’ and filing a new set of questions to follow up on.

  Back at the apartment, she showers, leaving the bathroom door ajar so she can hold a conversation with Toby. She feels strangely invigorated despite the constant headache, almost manic with energy as her mind jumps around the many implications of this latest revelation about David Crown’s daughter. Toby has softened a bit since they arrived home, and she’s left him sitting at the breakfast bar with his notebook and a pile of toast, asking him to fill her in on everything he’s discovered since last night.

  ‘So did you phone Finn Palin?’ she calls out through the steam of the bathroom. It’s the last thing she recalls asking him to do last night, when he visited her hospital bedside soon after she’d been taken in by the paramedics.

  ‘Yes. He said that they’ve put out a wanted alert for Katherine Crown. They haven’t got a recent photograph, but he said they’ve got something going out on the London evening news. Radio and TV. Finn also said you’ve done the investigation a bit of a favour, getting hit over the head like that, as the police have to follow it up, what with it being a serious assault. And with the attacker being the daughter of our number one murder suspect.’

  Typical Finn, Martha thinks. She can almost hear the humour in his voice as he said this to Toby.

  ‘I can’t believe we missed the detail of David and Janet Crown’s daughter. How did we miss it, Toby?’ She leans her head out of the steaming shower, just making out the figure of him over at the breakfast bar, a pen held loosely between his teeth.

  ‘Well, she did make out her child was dead.’

  ‘Yes, but since when do we take important information like that at face value? We should have probed further. Was there any mention of Katherine in the original investigation, did Finn say? Did you ask him?’ She steps from the shower and wraps a towel around her hair, wincing at the tender bruising at her crown, the tightening surgical stitches now free of caked blood. The doctors have told her to avoid washing her hair for a while, until the gash has started to heal a little, but there’s no chance of her taking any notice of that. She feels better already, through the sheer power of soap and water.

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ Toby replies. ‘Katherine was mentioned in the police notes, and – get this – she was even interviewed by the police during that visit to David Crown’s home the morning he went missing.’

  Now Martha pulls back the door to the bathroom, a larger towel wrapped around her body, forgetting her state of undress in her eagerness to hear more. ‘They spoke to her? To Katherine Crown? How old was she?’

  Toby looks up at Martha then quickly down at his notes, a blush rising to his cheeks. Martha steps back into the bathroom, re-emerging seconds later in a floor-length white bathrobe.

  ‘She was seventeen years old.’

  ‘The same age as Juliet – the same as all of us? Wouldn’t we have known something about her if we were all the same age?’

  ‘Finn told me her statement was important in reinforcing Mrs Crown’s version of events – Katherine was able to corroborate what time David Crown came home, and how he had seemed at the time. Everything she said backed up what David and Janet Crown had told them.’

  ‘Well, of course her version was the same as theirs – she was a seventeen-year-old girl, being questioned at the same kitchen table as her parents. She would have simply agreed with their version, wouldn’t she?’ Martha fetches fresh orange juice from the fridge and pours herself a large glass. ‘And what about the remains found at the school – any news from Finn on that?’

  ‘No, they clamped down on the security soon after you left the school yesterday. Finn couldn’t tell us any more either – except to say that apparently they were still on site late last night.’

  ‘So when will they be able to confirm that it’s Juliet’s body?’ She can barely believe that she’s saying these words. Juliet’s body. After all these years of not knowing, of fearing the worst. Will Juliet’s father – her family, her friends – be able at last to say goodbye?

  ‘No guarantees,’ Toby replies, ‘But Finn reckons forensics will be done tomorrow afternoon. Apparently there’s quite a backlog of current cases in the system and they’re only just getting to Juliet today.’

  ‘And Charlotte Bennett? The missing girl? It’s been, what, five days since she was first reported? Any news there?’

  Toby shakes his head. ‘Nope, and the M
isPer chat-room thread has gone silent. Juney even tried adding her own comment to the conversation, to see if it provoked a response. But nothing – and no more info on this mystery Ethan fellow either. Apparently the girl’s parents are adamant that it wasn’t their daughter’s hair in that package. The mother seemed to think the hair sent to the police was dyed, while Charlotte’s was – is – natural.’

  Putting her glass down on the counter, Martha riffles through the case notes and brings out the Square Wheels photograph, placing it between her and Toby. She rests her finger beside the face of Katherine Crown, the thin, neutral girl to the left of David. Her face is a blank page, neither smiling nor sad, neither pretty nor unattractive. Her dark, straight hair is extraordinarily long, yet there’s an unremarkable quality that borders on invisibility, quite unlike the vibrant energy possessed by the handsome man at her side – her father.

  ‘I can’t believe this is the same girl as the woman I met yesterday, Toby. And you know, since that bang on the head it’s started to come back to me – I’m pretty sure she was one of the volunteers helping out when we were working on the Garden of Reflection that day. I can picture her in the Square Wheels hut too, helping David with the sandwiches. She used to talk in a whisper, so you could barely hear what she was saying. I just thought she was a bit shy, and I had no idea she was his daughter. How do people change so entirely? She’s big now, really big, but it’s not just that. Everything about her is different. Then, she seemed timid; now she seems damaged.’