This Story Is a Lie

by Tom Pollock

  An alarming trouser-wards shift in circulation warns me: Don’t. Think about. That.

  Think about how we got here instead. Think about what we need to do. After all, this plan has a lot of moving parts, a lot of wheels and cogs, big, toothy cogs you could very much get caught in and chewed up by, so focus, Petey.

  Focus.

  Last night: we were just about to break the tree line when I dragged Ingrid back. She lost her balance and sprawled onto the leaves.

  “Pete, what the hell?”

  “Wait a minute,” I panted. Peering between tree trunks, I could see the road. It was deserted under the orange glow of the streetlights, the semis on the other side as neat and quiet as dollhouses. “They left a gap in their cordon.”

  “I know. That’s what we’re heading for.”

  “But wouldn’t they expect us to do that? I mean, if they catch Bel and we’re not with her, wouldn’t they immediately assume this was our escape route?”

  Frankie’s words from earlier in that endless day bobbed to the surface of my mind like mines on water. Four hundred thousand CCTV cameras in this city . . . We had to assume 57 had access to them all. I imagined their lines of sight spread out across the whole of London, an invisible net to snare us. There was no way we could avoid all of them. Two bloodied, exhausted teenagers stumbling around the streets of South London with nowhere to go and no place to hide; 57 would be on us in a heartbeat.

  “You have a better idea?” Ingrid asked. “We can’t stay here.”

  I looked back towards the familiar edifice of the school, bulked against the night, and though I could almost hear my past self laughing hysterically at the idea, school was as close to friendly territory as I could think of right now.

  “You know what? Maybe we can.”

  It was a nervy retreat. Making it to the edge of the woods had taken less than three minutes; retracing those steps took nearly forty-five, wary as we were of every loose stone and dry twig.

  Night seemed to teeter eternally on the edge of dusk, then fell full and sudden. The wood became a dense nest of overlapping shadows. We listened to the small sounds of it, the rustle of animals, the inquisitive peeps of birds. Two heart-seizing cracks that might have been gunshots echoed in the distance, then another two, then one farther off, and a vague hubbub of shouting before the firefight moved on. I comforted myself with the memory of Bel’s grin, its vicious confidence. She’d be okay. She had to be. I checked my watch: it was 8:20 p.m.

  “Come on,” I said when the sound died down. “Inside, before they come back.”

  The school had alarms, but the 57 agents had broken in to look for Bel, so they must have disabled them. There were cameras, but I’d been dodging them for years. We were careful to close doors behind us and kept our ears pricked for footsteps in case the agents decided to make another sweep, but the minutes ticked by, and no one came. With luck, they’d followed our trail to the edge of the woods and assumed we’d run for it.

  First stop was the school shop storeroom. Our skins and clothes were covered in a stinking laminate of blood and terror sweat in a style that could best be described as “postapocalyptic abattoir worker” and that was unlikely to pass unnoticed on the street tomorrow. We smuggled stolen uniforms, scarves, and anoraks to the boys’ changing room.

  Without a word, Ingrid began to struggle out of her clothes. It took a second and a half (bloody shirt slapping to the floor) for me to realise what was happening, and another three-quarters (bra unclipped and hanging dangerously from her shoulders, back arched like a swimmer ready to dive) for me to twig that this was an invitation. I blushed hard, hesitated, babbled three gibberish syllables, and then turned my back, just catching a glimpse of her exasperated expression as I fought not to lose my balance and impale myself on my own erection.

  I was ridiculously, unaccountably horny. My sex drive had kicked up about eleven gears, which, given I’m a seventeen-year-old boy, put it at escape velocity. I’d read about libidos spiking in the wake of a big adrenaline hit, but I’d never experienced it before. It’s really weird: your brain chemistry shouting contradictory instructions at you like a war-movie drill sergeant.

  Private Blankman! ATTENTION! Run! Hide! Run again! Good! Now you’re no longer in immediate physical danger, father as many offspring as possible in the next sixty seconds, in case the threat comes back! AT THE DOUBLE, YOU MISERABLE MAGGOT!

  I stood with my back to the showers, hearing the water run, my face on fire, feeling like I’d just fluffed the biggest opportunity of my likely-to-be-foreshortened life. So why did I hold back? If Ingrid had asked, I would have tried to rationalise, said our relationship was already as complicated as the Riemann Hypothesis and didn’t need to be any more so. But she didn’t need to ask. She knew the ridiculously predictable truth: I was scared.

  Scrubbed and dressed, we crept through the corridors and the ivy-covered cloisters, their unfamiliar emptiness making them feel cavernous. Next stop was the kitchens for dinner (panic yawned in my gut at the sight of the huge cellophane-covered tubs of ham and coleslaw in the fridge, but the need for secrecy held me back and I took only a little from the top of each). Then came the computer lab, where we liberated a boxy laptop whose IP address couldn’t be linked to either of us.

  The adrenaline that had coursed through our bodies for so much of the day drained from us, leaving us shivering and exhausted, but there was still work to do. Eventually, when we had everything we needed, we bedded down in the staff common room on cushions dragged off sofas and traded jokes about the headmistress’s portrait on the wall. For a moment, it was as if time had stopped. There was no past and no future; only the bubble of present, and I really could have believed my best friend and I were just sneaking around school after hours for a laugh. But then Ingrid stretched and turned over, and the only sound was the ticking of the mantelpiece clock. I lay awake, counting the seconds that my murderous, hunted sister was having to survive out there in the dark.

  After eight hundred and sixteen of them, I gave up on trying to sleep and went to the window. The night was calm and moonlit, a breeze carving parabolas in the grass. Even after showering, I could still feel the slipperiness of the bloody knife under my palm. The fresh blood belonged to the agents Bel killed in front of me, but underneath, dried into the grooves of the engraved letters on the blade, was my mother’s. Mum. Blood throbbed in my temples, and with every thud, I heard the beep of Mum’s breathing machine.

  Bel. It was you. You stabbed Mum.

  And Bel’s shrug as she said, She made me mad.

  You and the whole world, sis, because nothing makes sense now.

  What if I never saw her again?

  What if Mum died?

  I felt alone then. Truly alone. Like I’d fallen down a well and worn my throat hoarse from shouting for help that wouldn’t come. When I turned back towards our makeshift bed, Ingrid’s eyes were open, watching me. She didn’t need to say anything. Ingrid was my best friend. She knew what I was thinking, knew me better than anyone, but that didn’t mean she could make it better.

  Please, please don’t be dead, Mum.

  Don’t make Bel your killer.

  Don’t be dead.

  At 5 a.m. I woke with Ingrid’s hand over my mouth.

  “Cleaners have just arrived,” she whispered in my ear. I could hear the faint whir of a vacuum down the hall. We rose quickly and silently, reset the cushions, and slipped into this boiler closet, where, for the last eleven and a half hours, we’ve been sweating and waiting. I’ve prayed to all the gods I can think of that the school’s central heating wouldn’t need maintenance today, all the while listening to the shouts, laughter, and swearing of the school day playing out around us like a radio play.

  I check my watch over Ingrid’s shoulder.

  “Ready?” I mutter to Ingrid. “We’re going to have to time this just right.”
<
br />   “Yep, I . . . Wait, Pete, listen.”

  I freeze, thinking she’s heard footsteps, or worse, the creaking of the cupboard’s hinges, but then I catch it—the rattle of raindrops against the windows in the corridor outside. I can’t see Ingrid’s face, but I know her grin matches mine as we pull our anorak hoods up.

  “Finally,” she whispers, “some good luck.”

  An instant later the end-of-day bell goes, clanging like a fire alarm.

  “Now,” I mutter.

  Ingrid fumbles for the doorknob behind me, and we spill out into the corridor about a fifth of a second before it floods with chatting, laughing, uniformed figures. We separate, as we’d discussed, catching each other in the corners of our eyes without looking directly at one another, letting the pressure wave of schoolkids carry us down the steps and out into the rain. I hunch my shoulders and duck my head against the downpour, smiling as I see others around me do the same.

  A security camera peers down from atop the main gate, but all it will see is a tide of undifferentiated blue-grey-clad students, the same as it sees every day at 4:30 p.m., the same as every traffic and CCTV camera on every street for the next five blocks will see:

  Noise around the signal.

  A little knot in my chest loosens; this might actually work.

  We meet up about a half mile from the school gates. The rain has doubled, falling in freezing, drenching sheets, but Ingrid and I eschew the buses that throw gull wings of water from the gutter as they growl down the road. It takes fifty-five sock-squelching minutes to walk to Streatham.

  “Just so you know,” I tell Ingrid, blowing rain off my top lip and squaring up to the front door of 162 Rye Hill like an opponent in a wrestling match, “if this goes horribly wrong, if there’s an alarm we can’t shut off, or a dog we can’t calm down, or if Anita Vadi’s dad is some kind of psycho mad scientist and has the welcome mat wired up to fry intruders with sixty thousand volts, I’m blaming you.”

  She gives me a long, level look.

  “Me?” she says evenly. “This was your idea.”

  “Yeah, but I was relying on you, as the professional spy in this partnership, to come up with something better.”

  “What can I tell you, Pete?” She shrugs. “Sometimes an idea can be the best on offer and still suck enormous elephant balls.”

  The idea, which so manifestly sucked, was born last night between dinner and lights-out, when, randomly trying door handles, I found the school office unlocked and pulled Ingrid in behind me.

  “Those mad leet hacking skillz you’re always on about?” I asked as I flicked on the computer and brought up a password screen. “They just talk, or do you reckon you can break into this?”

  “Bit of an odd time to fix your physics grades, isn’t it?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “My physics grade is stellar, as you well know,”

  She peered over my shoulder. “Try ‘Wuffles2012.’”

  I frowned, but typed. The log-in box changed to an egg timer.

  “Holy shit, you really do have mad leet skillz.”

  She held up her right hand. A yellow Post-it was stuck to the index finger with a password scrawled on it in tiny writing.

  “The madness,” she said drily. “The leetness.”

  I flushed and hammered in the password. I clicked through a few of the folders on the desktop until I found the school roll. I scrolled down through the names, reading the notes next to them.

  My heart seized a little as I went through the Rs: fear muscle memory, even though I knew Rigby wouldn’t be there. Goading me off the roof of the senior block was pretty well Ben’s last act at Denborough College before his family moved up to Edinburgh. Rumour was, his mum was in a psych ward up there. I remembered the shudder that had passed through my body when I’d heard: of relief, but also of pity. If my mum was locked up in an asylum, I’d thought, maybe I’d be a bullying prick too.

  “This one,” I said at last. “Anita Vadi. Know her?”

  “Tall girl, year below, good in jujitsu, and I’ve got the bruises to prove it. Why?”

  “Her parents have pulled her and her little sister out of school for this whole week to go to a family wedding. We’re going to need somewhere to crash where your former colleagues won’t think to look. What do you reckon the odds are the Vadi house is empty?”

  “Peter, that’s criminal. I’m impressed.”

  I glowed. Even though she’d been a cuckoo in my life the whole time I’d known her—Ingrid’s approval still mattered to me. I was startled by just how much.

  Thank the gods of stochastic weather patterns for the rain. Only three people pass by on the street, and none of them brave the deluge long enough to enquire after the two schoolkids loitering under the porch of the handsome redbrick house.

  “I’ll keep watch,” Ingrid says. “You knock in the bottom right pane in the door.”

  “Shouldn’t it be the other way round?” I counter.

  “Why?”

  “You could pick the lock or something.”

  “That’s burglars you’re thinking of. I’m a spy.”

  “So your skill set’s more ‘get other people to do incriminating things against their better judgment’?”

  “Bingo.”

  When I reach inside for the latch, no alarm sounds, and there is no dog, but a tiny ginger guard cat does come bounding up the hall and rolls ferociously over to have its tummy rubbed.

  “Cats are such sluts,” Ingrid observes disapprovingly. She’s always been a dog person. The post piled up against the door is a good sign, but Ingrid still insists on checking upstairs to confirm that the house is empty.

  When she comes down again, I’ve set up at the kitchen table. But the first thing I did was pull off my belt, thread it through the fridge door handles, and tie it shut. Ingrid cocks an eyebrow at it.

  “A reminder to myself,” I say. “An extra couple of seconds to think. I don’t want to leave any signs we were here, and Hurricane Pete’s trail of devastation through Grandma’s special quiche would definitely give the game away.”

  Ingrid nods. We all have our tics; she knows that better than anyone. Her hands are bare and the scars on the back of them are pink where she’s been scrubbing them. I thought I heard the water run. She pulls up a chair and flicks on our contraband laptop.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “It’s more what you’re doing.”

  She spins the laptop towards me.

  “The Police National Computer? What the fuck, Ingrid?”

  “We need to get our report card.” This earns her a blank look. She sighs. “My old firm is long on influence but short on bodies, and if we really have lost them, they’ll have dragged in the local bobbies to lend a hand in the search.”

  She nods at the laptop.

  “The PNC’s based on UNIX servers and the infrastructure’s embarrassingly old. You might even be able to use that back door that hit the dark web in August. I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t closed it yet.”

  Casting a wary look at her, I start to type. “This’d go faster if you did it,” I grumble. “You’re better at this than I am.”

  “But then how would you learn, young padawan?”

  She watches over my shoulder and smiles as the log-in box gives way to a loading icon. She sits, spins the laptop back to face her, and hammers some keys, and her smile stretches to a grin.

  “Congratulations, Pete,” she says. “Not just the Met, but every police force in the country has been alerted to arrest you on sight.”

  She scrolls down a bit more.

  “Aaaand me too. Although nobody had better recognise me from that; that’s a terrible picture. I look like a middle-aged accountant after a disappointing orgasm.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Not a chance
.” She shoves me playfully back into my seat and keeps tapping.

  “Bloody hell,” she mutters. “They’ve even put Interpol on notice. You pulled off a world-class vanishing act, White Rabbit. They think we might even have left the country.”

  The relief in her voice is audible, but I can’t share in it, not yet.

  “Bel?” I ask.

  More keystrokes. Her smile falls.

  “No mention of her.”

  I shove myself away from the desk, filled up suddenly with disappointment and dread. Before I know what I’m doing, I’m tugging at the belt on the fridge door, a gaping vacuum yawning in my belly. I have to feed the maw.

  Before I can get the belt undone, a scarred hand’s on mine, warm, gently pulling me away.

  “It doesn’t mean they have her,” Ingrid says softly. I can feel her breath on my ear. “It doesn’t mean she’s caught. It just means they haven’t told the police.”

  “Why?” I demand, staring at the black-and-white-tiled floor. I’m suddenly stubborn and childish. “Why wouldn’t they tell them?”

  There’s a catch in Ingrid’s voice when she answers, and I know she’s thinking of the bodies fallen among the leaves.

  “Who on earth would you send to arrest her?”

  I slowly relax my death grip on the belt. I let Ingrid lead me back to the table, and my gaze falls on the laptop.

  “We’re on the police network right now?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “Can we pull old case files?”

  “Top left.” She indicates an icon. I click on it and a search form pops up, and I start to fill it out. Looking over my shoulder, Ingrid asks, “What are you looking for?”

  A slow frost creeps up the skin of my back as I answer. Sometimes hearing the crazy shit I’m thinking aloud is enough to convince me it isn’t true.

  But not this time.

  “Unsolved murders, from March two years ago.”