All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end
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All Your Lies
OCS Francis
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Amber
Chapter 2
Benny
Chapter 3
Amber
Chapter 4
Benny
Chapter 5
Amber
Chapter 6
Amber
Chapter 7
Benny
Chapter 8
Amber
Chapter 9
Amber
Chapter 10
Amber
Chapter 11
Benny
Chapter 12
Amber
Chapter 13
Amber
Chapter 14
Amber
Chapter 15
Amber
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Amber
Chapter 18
Benny
Chapter 19
Amber
Chapter 20
Amber
Chapter 21
Amber
Chapter 22
Amber
Chapter 23
Benny
Chapter 24
Amber
Chapter 25
Amber
Chapter 26
Amber
Chapter 27
Amber
Chapter 28
Amber
Chapter 29
Benny
Chapter 30
Amber
Chapter 31
Amber
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Benny
Chapter 34
Amber
Chapter 35
Benny
Chapter 36
Amber
Chapter 37
Benny
Chapter 38
Amber
Chapter 39
Benny
Chapter 40
Amber
Chapter 41
Amber
Chapter 42
Amber
Chapter 43
Amber
Chapter 44
Amber
Chapter 45
Benny
Chapter 46
Amber
Chapter 47
Amber
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Amber
Chapter 50
Amber
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Amber
Chapter 53
Amber
Chapter 54
Benny
Chapter 55
Amber
Chapter 56
Benny
Chapter 57
Amber
Chapter 58
Amber
Chapter 59
Amber
Chapter 60
Amber
Chapter 61
Amber
Chapter 62
Amber
Chapter 63
Amber
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Inkubator Newsletter
Rights Info
Prologue
There’s a bright moon. I could do without that. It feels like a searchlight. Like they know I’m coming.
I tell myself over and over there’s nobody else here. Just me and them. I can see a few specks of light, but they’re a long way off. No witnesses, no one to get in the way. Just like the plan.
Except it doesn’t feel like the plan. The plan was just an idea, almost like a joke at first. But now it’s real, and now I’m locked into it.
I tell myself it’ll be easy. It’ll be fine.
I approach through the trees, my boots crunching underneath me. I stop and listen. Nothing. Silence.
Come on, come on.
I keep going, out of the trees and across the grass. Then I can see someone approaching. I freeze. I almost run. Then I understand. I’m just looking at my own reflection, perfectly captured in the dark glass of the building in front of me.
I step forward a few more feet, watching the way mirror-me moves. It gives me an out-of-body experience. Like I’m just watching all this. Like someone else is going to do it. Then I know I can go through with it.
I feel the weight of the rock in my hand, and the switchblade in my pocket against my leg.
It’s time to finish this.
1
Amber
Benedict Raine is dead.
Amber feels a lurch in her stomach. It dips and dives. It’s a sensation full of colour and contrast.
Benny is dead.
She raises her head from her phone, looking out across the low, flat sweep of Port Meadow. It is a perfect carpet of faded green beneath the thin blue of the evening sky. She looks back at the headline.
Photographer Benedict Raine dies aged 62.
A small herd of horses grazes a little way in front of Amber. As if as startled as she is, one of the animals breaks from the group, trotting away and shaking its head. It accelerates into a canter, and another horse follows. Then another and another until the whole group is off, a blur of legs and flow of manes.
There is something primal about this wild space so close to the city. Something free and open when everything else feels as if it is closing in.
Amber had stopped for a moment just to take it all in, reaching into her bag for her camera. But her hand found her phone first, and absentmindedly she started checking messages, flipping through Instagram, then scrolling down the headlines.
There it was: Benny is dead.
She finally plucks up the courage to click on the headline.
Celebrated photographer Benedict Raine has died at the age of 62 after a road accident, reads the first line after today’s date — 1 February 2020.
Next is a short statement from his family and a brief résumé of his career that makes him sound as if he personally won a series of wars rather than just having photographed them. Finally there are some tributes that are already flowing in from Twitter.
Everyone’s your best friend once you’re dead, thinks Amber. A road accident, though. A lifetime in wars, riots and revolutions, and that’s how Benny went. Amber finds herself hoping it was quick, hoping he had no realisation of how he was dying. Benny would have hated the banality of it. She isn’t sure where that sympathy has come from.
Towards the bottom of the news article is the one photograph by Benedict Raine that everyone knows, even if most couldn’t name the photographer. It’s of a Lebanese boy, the survivor of a sectarian massacre, staring into the lens with his Kodachrome blue eyes. It was on the cover of National Geographic, and if it didn’t make Raine as a photographer, over the years it cemented his myth. The look on the boy’s face is one of fear and devastation. But there is something else in that expression too: a righteous anger and a seed of vengeance.
Amber puts away her phone and tries to absorb the news for a few moments. It bounces around off her insides. She walks on, looking up at the sky, vast and empty. She pauses at the edge of the meadow and pulls out her camera. She flicks through the pictures she’s taken today. It’s a displacement activity, something to dislodge the tumbling feeling in her stomach. She h
as been in town photographing the climate change protests, and is pleased with the shots: the parade of painted faces, the mouths wide in dissent, the clutter of waving placards.
As she looks at all these people, she has a flash of a different face in her mind’s eye. It’s a face she can neither forget nor fully remember. Deep, strong blue eyes and a lost look. That’s all she has left of that face now. It’s a fragment that always comes back to her when she thinks about Benedict Raine. Of all the faces she has photographed, this is the one that won’t ever leave her.
The house is empty when Amber lets herself in. A clutter of clothes on the bedroom floor tells her Johnny is out for a run. She is glad of that. She is still feeling startled and raw from learning the news about Benny. It isn’t something she wants to talk to Johnny about.
She goes to her computer, downloads the photos from the day, and imports them into her editing software. She starts to sort them, but the activity can’t hold her. She knows what she wants to do. It would be better not to, but she does it anyway. It’s an itch that has to be scratched, a wound she can’t help picking.
She types Benedict Raine’s name into Google. The results fill her screen, and she drinks it all in. About the man, about his death. She wishes this could be the end of it — that after this she could look away forever. And she wishes the fragment of that face in her memory would go now too.
The past is supposed to be small and far away. But Amber’s memories often feel more like viewing a scene through a long lens. The object in view is large, filling the frame. Everything else — the background, the context — is blurred and harder to see. It is not like the wide angle of the present, with everything crowding into frame and focus at the same time.
The last thing she watches online before shutting it all off is a clip on YouTube. It is an interview Raine did with a minor TV arts show just a few weeks ago. The studio is dim around his pale, brightly lit face. The interviewer is half in shadow, an exaggerated distance away. It gives the sense of an interrogation.
Benny looks a little reduced from the man she remembers in the flesh. He is slimmer than any of the slightly saggy portraits that fill up the image search. He sounds different as well. His voice is weaker than she remembers. It still has that smooth drawl and that manner that would seem supercilious if not undercut by humour and self-awareness. But it is a little tired, hoarse, and occasionally cracking. His slightly crumpled glamour is still all there: a linen suit, open-neck white shirt, a wave of blond hair flopping down on his forehead, and the careful stubble on his chin with a grey glisten to it.
The interviewer asks him about retirement. Raine gives a snort and reaches for a glass of water. It is strange to see him drinking anything other than whisky. He puts the glass down and looks hard at the interviewer.
‘I’d be lucky to make it that far,’ he says very seriously, his voice all gravel. He breathes in and smiles. ‘In my line of work, that is.’
‘Time at least for a memoir?’
Raine pauses before he answers, the fingertips on one hand rubbing together. ‘I think, perhaps, it’s time to tell it all. Let it all out into the open.’
‘Warts and all?’
‘Warts, boils, melanomas.’ Raine laughs, but his eyes look deadly serious. ‘But that’s not for a memoir. That’s probably for the confessional. I think it would be cleansing to confess everything.’ He puts a slow weight into the last two words. But then he cannot hold the look of the interviewer, who raises his eyebrows.
‘Confessional? Haven’t you always been an avowed atheist?’
Benny takes a second or two to gather himself. Then, as if glad of the tangent, he begins a long and circuitous answer about his views on matters of faith.
Amber has seen enough. She closes the browser and flips the lid down on her laptop, sitting in the silence for a moment.
She is glad Benny’s death came so soon after the interview. Glad he didn’t follow up on his promise to tell it all. Because among all the feelings that have been crawling around inside her, there is one that now surges to the front. Among the guilt and fear and disgust, the strongest feeling she has now is one of relief. A sense of freedom. The knowledge that the one other human who knows the truth about what she did all those years ago is now dead.
Then the feeling flips on its head. She is thinking about her phone glowing with notifications in the small hours two nights ago. The message, the missed call.
She is thinking: What if Benny has already told the truth?
2
Benny
Monday, 22 January 2001
It would be hard to forget the first time I met Amber Ridley. Except apparently I did forget that. I’m told I met her when she was nine and then eleven. I have no memory of either occasion. Well, I suppose she made more of an impression aged twenty-one. I know, I should be ashamed of myself. I was forty-three after all. I suppose I am ashamed, a little anyway.
I do remember when I first properly laid eyes on her, when I really noticed her. Nineteen years ago now. It was one of those moments one wishes one was holding a camera. A perfect capture, then it’s gone.
She was sitting in the corner of a café on the South Bank, the low winter sun coming in through the window, throwing perfect Rembrandt lighting on her face — half glow, half shadow. She had a hand up to her forehead, a freshly lit cigarette between her fingers. The smoke floated up, drawing curves in the sunlight.
I was pleased to see she was a smoker. So many young people were such puritans. They’re even worse now, I think: full of righteousness and moral certainty. She didn’t strike me as that type. It was partly my projection, of course, but her brow held a restlessness to it, framed in long dark hair flowing freely onto her shoulders. I noticed a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist. I wanted to touch that skin immediately.
The moment was broken by Florence MacRory calling my name across the room.
‘Benny!’ She waved in that animated way of hers, her head going back a little and her disobedient auburn curls bouncing.
‘Hello, Freddie, how are you?’
Florence was Freddie or Fred to just about everyone who knew her, and had been since I’d met her as a student. I can’t even remember why. She didn’t care about the misunderstandings it sometimes created. In fact, I think she revelled in them.
We exchanged our usual social kisses, and I turned my attention to the woman beside her.
‘And you must be Amber.’
Amber’s posture changed — I detected a slight tensing of those shoulders. A little nervousness at meeting me? Perhaps. If it was, it didn’t show fully as she stood and shook my hand.
‘Delighted,’ I told her. ‘The prof here has told me a lot about you. Nice to finally meet.’
That was when she told me, a little pointedly, that we had in fact met before. Twice. It had been through her father. He had been a middle-distance colleague of mine for a few years, but I didn’t remember him well. Amber told me about our second encounter. It had been a garden party. I had a sudden flash of a shy girl in a patterned dress clutching a camera being thrust towards me, but that could have been my mind’s invention.
I offered a deliberately exaggerated apology. Amber laughed. A little with me, a little at me. No, there was no doubt that we would get along.
‘I enjoyed your talk,’ she said.
‘That’s very kind of you to say.’ I’d delivered a guest lecture on her course that day. Freddie had twisted my arm to do it, then told me there was a student of hers she wanted me to meet. She was someone very promising, in her final year, in need of a little mentorship.
‘I loved what you said about thinking of a photo as part of a story. About it not just being a moment, but the way it can hold all the things leading up to that moment, and sometimes even following it. I’m sorry, you put it better than that.’
‘Oh, I was probably quoting someone else. I can’t claim to be a natural with words.’ This was awful false modesty, but as modesty goes, I find
this is the best type.
At this point, Freddie made one of her left-field interjections, the sort that would usually have engaged me. But I can’t remember anything about this one — it sailed in and out of my head without touching the sides. I was paying attention only to Amber now.
Her eyes caught mine. It was just the quickest look, half a smile, the flicker of an eyebrow. I felt we already understood each other. Then Freddie tailed off, losing her way without anyone to join her, and Amber and I got a better chance to talk.
She started by asking me some questions about myself, but I batted them off. I was much more interested in her — in her work, that is. She’d even brought a small portfolio along. Freddie provided a little running commentary, as if keen to let me know she should take some credit for her student’s development. But they really were good, strikingly so. Amber had an eye, and I could tell she already had courage. She didn’t flinch from beauty or ugliness.
I gave her my card as we left. I told her I’d be very happy to offer whatever advice she needed about the industry, even provide a little mentorship when I could find the time. I was just about to head off to Beijing, but I hoped to be back in a few weeks. I knew we would both be very glad to meet without her tutor present.