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

by Isabel Ashdown

  As I approached the cabin, I spotted Dad through the small side window and it looked as if he was there on his own, packing up the last few things before shutting up for the night. I leaned my bike against the hedge and turned the corner, about to call out to him, when I realised he wasn’t alone at all. Martha was there too, perched on the corner of the worktop, swinging her legs and watching him clear up. I was surprised to see her there, as I knew she’d given up volunteering a good few months ago. I stepped back into the shadows to watch. Something in her demeanour, the way she swayed, that sleepy, sad smile on her lips, the way she eyed him so directly, told me she was drunk.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here, Martha,’ Dad said. His voice was friendly, concerned. ‘Come on, love. You’re in no state to cycle home alone. I’ll walk you back.’

  He held out his hand to help her off the table, but instead of dropping down she yanked his arm so that he fell against her, his chest to hers. Then she pressed her lips to his, bringing her fingers up and into his hair, cradling his head with her hands. It was a moment of such unfettered passion that I nearly cried out in astonishment. I had never seen Mum kiss Dad in that way. But the moment lasted no more than a second, because now Dad was pulling back, holding Martha by the shoulders and telling her to stop it, to take a look at what she was doing.

  ‘Martha!’ he insisted. ‘It’s me – David! You don’t want to be kissing me, love! Come on, let’s get you home.’ And with that he led her, with her head hung low, out of the cabin and on to the path.

  Around the corner, I waited long enough for them to disappear from view, and I cycled home in a whirr of excited shock. Martha! Kissing my dad! I could hardly blame her, of course, he was so lovely, but rather than making me feel mad at Martha, it made my anger towards my mother even greater, as it proved what I had known all along. My dad was a wonderful man – a good, kind and caring man – and my mother didn’t appreciate him.

  I shouldn’t have done it, I know it now as I knew it then. But I couldn’t help myself, when I arrived home and found my mother glaring and cold at the kitchen sink, spoiling for a fight. I couldn’t hold back the bad feelings that had been building in me for the past eighteen years.

  ‘I just saw Dad kissing one of the volunteers,’ I said plainly. I wanted to see her pain; I wanted to watch her cry.

  ‘Who?’ she demanded, and to my dismay I saw that she was neither hurt nor surprised. This was what she’d been waiting for: proof of his bad nature.

  ‘I don’t know her name,’ I lied. ‘But she looked lovely. About my age, tall and slim with golden-brown hair. It’s no wonder he couldn’t resist her!’

  I didn’t stay around to see her reaction. I just walked away, shut myself in my room, and lay in bed, breathlessly waiting for Dad to return and the fireworks to explode. But they never did. Not that night, nor the following day, nor the day after that, and soon I came to fear the worst. She hadn’t confronted him. I’d given her this knowledge, and now, I knew, she would use it against him when it suited her best. Like the stupid fool that she’d always thought me to be, I’d handed her all the power.

  Martha looks as though she’s taken a punch to the stomach.

  ‘You were drunk,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think you meant to do it – and Dad was really fine about the whole thing. He stopped you, and then he walked you home. Remember?’

  I want her to remember – I want her to tell Mum just how wrong she is.

  Slowly, Martha nods her head, and I see tears springing to her eyes as her fingers grasp for Liv’s. I want a friendship like that; I want a friend I can reach for when I need support. Could Martha or Liv be that friend to me?

  Mum is shaking my arm, forcing me to look at her. ‘You said it was that other one! Katherine, you said it was Juliet!’ Her eyes look wild, and I can see just how crazy this is making her, the idea that she got something so wrong – that it was all for nothing.

  ‘No, I didn’t, Mum! I never said it was Juliet! I just told you what she looked like – I never said her name!’

  Martha’s face shifts in waves of understanding. ‘Our hair,’ she says, ‘it was practically the same. Janet, did you—’

  But Mum’s on her like a wild animal, hooking her fingers into Martha’s hair, slamming her cheek against the table, the knife held vertically at the nape of her neck. Martha’s hands lie either side of her head, palm down, white with fear. She’s too weak to fight back.

  ‘You!’ Mum screams. ‘All these years I’ve been watching you on the television, Martha Benn! There I was, enjoying your television shows, and all along, it was you? You’re the reason I lost David? You’re the cause of all of this?’

  I’m frozen. How has this all gone so wrong? I can’t see Martha’s face now, but Liv looks terrified, her hands clasped to her chest, and I watch her cast a panicked gaze around the cabin, trying to find a way out of this, a way to get away from my terrible mother. Maybe I should let them go? But then what? What happens then?

  ‘Mum, please,’ I try, but the look she shoots me is so furious that I don’t know what else I can say.

  ‘Don’t you dare, Katherine. You’re as much to blame as this little prick-tease.’ She sees me flinch at her coarse language, and she purses her lips. ‘Do you think it’s right that this little slut has been free to walk around unpunished all these years, while I’ve suffered the life sentence of a world without your dad?’

  I stammer, trying to get my brain to work as fast as my heart rate. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Good,’ she says, and she lifts up the knife and brings it down hard through Martha’s hand.

  I scream as she tears it away again, returning the bloodied blade to rest on the nape of Martha’s neck. Blood seeps between Martha’s fingers, pooling around her hand like an abstract image.

  ‘Good,’ she says again, and now she smiles at me as though I’m on her side. ‘We need to finish this, Katherine.’

  With those words, I feel the blinkers drop from my eyes, and everything makes sense. We’re not on the same side, Mum and I. All these wasted years, when I thought that she was protecting me from the world, from what happened that night. But now I realise, with a clarity that swells inside me as strength: she wasn’t protecting me.

  She was protecting herself.

  35. Martha

  She realises now that she’d never really forgotten what had happened between her and David Crown on that winter night, but shame and embarrassment had pushed it to the far recesses of her mind. Slumped here now as she is, her face pressed against the table, a knife at her neck, jumbled recollections stream past her inner eye in a rush of information. She’d had a crush on him, one that had started months earlier, on the day of the summer boat trip – the day that had marked the end of Martha’s working at Square Wheels. After their trip, they’d returned the boat to its owner, and the others – Juliet, Liv and Tom – had all headed off home for supper. But Martha, as ever, was in no rush. It was Sunday, Dad’s worst day for drinking, and she wanted to stay with David, wanted to delay the moment she’d have to walk in through the front door of Stanley House. Apart from that, she was still bruised by what she’d seen on the riverbank: Juliet and Liv, their faces so close they were almost touching, whispering, leaving her out. When she’d asked them about it, they’d told her she was imagining things. Now, in the stark light of this new revelation, Martha sees it for what it really was. It wasn’t a secret they’d shared behind that tree: it was a kiss.

  ‘I’ll walk with you, if that’s OK,’ she had said to David, who was on his way to the cabin to make preparations for the evening’s Square Wheels drop.

  ‘Sure,’ he’d replied, and he’d handed her the empty picnic hamper to carry. It was August, and the sun was making its slow descent overhead, a pink hue tinting the breezeless sky. She felt happy just to be there beside him.

  Inside the cabin, David set about wiping down the worktops, counting out paper beakers and filling the steel urns for boiling wate
r. ‘Hadn’t you better get home, Martha?’ he’d asked, looking back to where she stood gazing out of the small window, watching a family of ducks plopping down the canal bank and into the water. ‘Your dad must be wondering where you’ve got to.’

  ‘I’d rather stay here with you,’ she replied, breathing in the freedom of this quiet space alone with him. She watched as he counted out paper bags and napkins. His shoulders were broad, his movements fluid, relaxed. ‘You’re much better company.’

  He’d laughed. ‘Don’t be daft!’

  ‘I could stay and do an extra shift,’ she’d said then, moving away from the window, and quite out of nowhere she’d imagined herself crossing the cabin floor, putting her hands to his face.

  ‘No need, love,’ he had answered without looking up. ‘It’s been a long day – I expect your dad’s got your supper waiting for you back home?’

  Martha didn’t reply; she didn’t know how to reply. She stood, stuck to the spot, and stared at the side of his head, trying to find words. And then she saw the subtle shift in him, the tiniest flinch of regret as he realised the unlikeliness of what he’d said. Which meant that he knew. That somehow he knew Martha’s dad was a waster. That there would be no hot meal waiting at home for her tonight or any night.

  David put down his butter knife and turned towards her, leaning against the worktop. Martha was stranded in the centre of the dimly lit hut, unable to speak. She was adrift, like a boat cut free of its moorings.

  ‘Who told you?’ she asked, a whisper.

  He ran the heel of his hand over his brow, apology and, worse, pity in his expression, and Martha wanted to die. ‘No one told me – no one had to tell me, love. Your dad stopped by here one night, not long after you’d started volunteering. He wanted to check out who his daughter was spending time with, quite rightly. But he was, well, you know …’

  ‘Pissed?’ Martha offered.

  David nodded, and to her deep embarrassment she felt her face collapse into a rush of unexpected tears, and she slapped her palms to her eyes, wishing she could vanish. What would he think of her now? her mind screamed behind the darkness of her hands. Of course he’d rather she went home than stay and help him. Why would he want to be around someone like her? Nobody wanted her. Juliet and Liv had each other, more so since that bloody Venice trip than ever before, and dad was always so out of it that she might as well not exist. Even her mother had fucked off before the job of parenting was done. Why did she keep on screwing up like this?

  Without warning, his arms were around her – David’s arms – warm and anchoring, and he was stroking the hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear and saying, ‘Shush, Martha. Shush. Come on, now.’ Through his cotton T-shirt she could smell the lingering warmth of the sun’s rays on his skin, the subtle tang of boat grease and long grass. She wanted to stay there, stay in the heat of his embrace; she wanted to know how it might feel to be kissed by a man like David …

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I really do.’

  Suddenly angry, she pulled back, swiping at her tears. ‘How can you understand?’ she demanded. ‘No one can. None of you.’

  David’s hand still rested on her upper arm, his face soft, forgiving. ‘My father was the same, Martha, love. My dad was a drinker too. Believe me, I understand.’

  But, rather than feeling a kindred connection with him, a fresh sensation of crashing exposure washed over Martha and she knew she had to get out of there. It was bad enough that her best friends suspected her problems at home, but the fact that they could only imagine was of some comfort at least. They couldn’t know how bad it was, how it made her feel – not just about her father, but about herself. But this was different. David Crown knew. Suddenly it was as though he could see right down inside her – could see that she was a fraud, that the neutral face she presented was a lie, that the smile was fake, the laughter forced. He knew, because he’d been there too.

  Martha pulled away, apologising through her tears, and ran.

  That night she sat in her room drinking her dad’s vodka, and vowed she would never return to Square Wheels again. And she very nearly kept that vow, apart from that one spontaneous night to come in late December when, following a fight with Dad, she would stumble, cold and drunk, into David’s cabin, only to be rejected. The night that Katherine would see them. The night that would ultimately lead to Juliet’s death.

  It was her fault, Martha realises now. Just as she’d feared – only not in the way she had always believed. Now, she had no choice but to put things right for her friend. She had to get out of here alive, and she had to see justice served. She owed it to Juliet.

  ‘So, it was you, Janet?’ she says now. Her voice is thick, her movements constrained beneath Janet Crown’s dry palm.

  The woman doesn’t deny it, just lifts her hand momentarily to slap it back down on Martha’s ear, sending a clap of pain running through the tight stitches nestling in the back of her head. From her restricted position, Martha has an obscured view through the windows at the front of cabin, and in the distance she can see them coming. They’re running along the towpath, a group of four, and as they draw closer she can make them out more clearly: Toby, Jay, Sally and Finn. The closer they get, the more afraid Martha is that Toby will come charging in, provoking Janet Crown to carry out her threat to plunge this knife straight through her vertebrae and out the other side. She wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Beside her, Liv is silently shaking, and Martha can almost hear the cogs of her mind turning, searching for some way to distract Janet and get Katherine on side.

  Out on the path, the group are gaining ground, but in a flash they’re out of sight again, passing the window, moving on to the far side. Will Toby know she is inside the boat? Will he notice her spotty glove and know that it marks their location? Or will he miss it entirely and continue along the towpath, oblivious to their presence?

  Janet Crown’s grip is surprisingly sturdy for one so frail. Right now, she’s the most dangerous of risks: a woman with nothing to lose. Katherine is completely out of Martha’s view, but she knows her best hope is to appeal to the younger woman, her contemporary. She senses that Katherine isn’t a bad person but a damaged soul, and Martha knows something about that.

  ‘Katherine, did you know that your mother killed Juliet?’

  There’s a long delay, before Janet cries out, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Katherine! Speak up! You’re not a mouse!’

  ‘Yes,’ Katherine murmurs. ‘I saw her do it,’ she says, but there’s no pride there, no shared victory.

  ‘You poor thing,’ Liv says, her voice clearer now, and in an instant I know what she’s doing. She’s applying her psychology training; she’s bringing Katherine over. ‘That must have been traumatic. How did you cope?’

  Janet reaches over Martha and smacks Liv around the side of her head. ‘Shut. Up.’

  ‘It was horrible,’ Katherine says, but then she’s silent again.

  Martha’s thoughts flash and whirr. If she’s going to kill me, she reasons, I might as well get the truth out of her now. Someone will come out of this alive, even if it isn’t her. Someone will be able to testify to Janet Crown’s confession.

  ‘So, Janet, here’s what I don’t understand,’ she says, her voice challenging. ‘If it was you who killed Juliet, why did your husband go on the run? Why not you? Did David help you to dispose of the body? Was it David who buried Juliet under the Garden of Reflection?’

  ‘Ha!’ she laughs, harsh and loud. ‘That girl’s not buried underneath the garden!’

  ‘What?’ This is not the response Martha had anticipated.

  ‘Juliet Sherman is not hidden under that patio, you fool. Some investigator you turned out to be.’

  ‘Then who is?’ Liv and Martha ask at once.

  There’s an almighty crash as the wooden door at the top of the steps splinters and falls in, followed by the sound of feet rushing down into the cabin. Martha can’t see who it is, or how many, but when she hea
rs Finn’s voice she releases the air from her lungs in one long breath.

  ‘Alright, Mrs Crown. You can let Martha go now. Don’t make things any worse for yourself. The police are just along the bank – so there’s nowhere to run. Mrs Crown?’

  Janet’s hand presses harder on the side of Martha’s face, the knife tip jabbing at her neck, and it’s plain she’s not going to give up that easily.

  ‘Martha!’ Toby cries out, and just knowing he’s alright, that he’s here, is enough to give her a new surge of courage.

  ‘Janet!’ she says, raising her voice. ‘What do you mean, it’s not Juliet under that patio?’

  ‘Mum?’ Katherine asks, and it’s clear she’s crying now. ‘Mum, why is she asking you?’

  Martha’s impatience breaks through the fog of sedation. She doesn’t care about anything more than she cares about this: she has to find out what happened to Juliet. ‘Just tell us!’ she screams, silencing the room.

  There’s a lingering hush, and the room is so quiet that for a few seconds all Martha can hear is the thump of her own pulse. Finally, it’s not Janet Crown who speaks, but Finn.

  ‘She’s not lying, love. The forensics team just confirmed it – the remains from the Garden of Reflection aren’t Juliet’s.’

  Uselessly, Martha tries to push back against Janet Crown’s hand. ‘But, Finn, if it’s not Juliet, who is it?’

  ‘It’s David Crown, love. The remains belong to David Crown.’

  With a frenzied scream, Katherine Crown swipes up the iron kettle and swings it against her mother’s head, knocking her from her feet, sending the blade slashing across the back of Martha’s neck. Toby is at her side in a second, rushing past Katherine and pressing a clean handkerchief to the wound. Finn is attending to Janet Crown, who now lies crumpled beside the sink, a dark and bloodied bruise already forming at her temple. Katherine sits balled on the floor in the far corner, her hands clasped around her knees, the kettle at her feet.