All Your Lies: A gripping psychological thriller that will keep you guessing to the very end

by O. C. S. Francis

  But what else was on that roll? What other pictures did Benny take that she didn’t witness? There are still blanks, like spots of amnesia on her memory of that weekend all those years ago.

  Amber presses the switches on the smart glass. It all goes from opaque to transparent in an instant. She looks into the stripes of the trees, overlapping in layers till less and less becomes visible. There is something she cannot see. Something or someone who is here.

  Then she is moving again, through the door at the back of the room, and up the stairs to the archive. She looks at the rows of shelves, boxes and negatives, packed dense and unknown. The feeling at the funeral comes back to her — that illogical desire to be there to know that Benny has died. To see that coffin resting in the church. To know that he has gone and his secrets have gone with him.

  She knows that he is dead, but it does not feel anymore that he is gone.

  18

  Benny

  Saturday, 10 November 2001

  I tried to reason with Amber as we retraced our steps back along the beach. She was adamant it was the same car she’d seen before. There was no point trying to argue her out of that, because I recognised the car too. But I told her she had to get out of her head the idea it meant someone was following us. She needed to stop building something sinister out of a coincidence.

  ‘So it’s the same car. That’s not very surprising. He was going in the same direction as us.’

  ‘But… back there on the beach as well. I wasn’t imagining it.’

  ‘Imagining what?’

  ‘I’m sure there was someone…’

  ‘Someone what?’

  ‘Someone watching us.’

  ‘You sound… honestly you’re sounding a bit…’ I was going to say crazy, but I censored myself. It was too late, though. She knew where my thought pattern was going.

  ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare use what I went through against me. I shouldn’t ever have told you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just want us to try to enjoy this time we’ve got together.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’ But she didn’t sound it.

  ‘What is it you’re worried about?’

  ‘Honestly, it’s not just the car. I’m worried about everything about this. About your wife, about Johnny. I’m sorry I’m jumping at shadows. I’m sorry I’m so stressed. I don’t think I’m very good at this.’

  ‘At what?’

  ‘At having affairs with married men.’

  ‘Men? There’s someone else you’re fooling around with? Why didn’t you tell me?’ I cracked a smile, and she mirrored it, but without meaning. I reached out for her hand and held it. She let me, but didn’t really hold it back, just let it hang in my palm.

  The sun had set by the time we got back to the car park. There were only half a dozen cars still in the big dirt square. In the far corner, the dancing shadows of a couple and their large energetic dog played in the gloom. My car was in the middle of the car park, with no others around it. But it wasn’t entirely on its own. There was someone next to it, half stooping to look casually through the window. It was something I’d seen enough times before. People liked to have a nose around the old thing.

  I didn’t break my stride, and I didn’t look at Amber. I just kept on towards the car. The man saw us and straightened. With a twist on his heel he was walking away. He was in shadow, at a distance, and wearing a thick coat. Even so, I got a sense of him: tall, broad across the shoulders. He moved with a slight roll to his walk.

  We went to the car and got in in silence. Amber didn’t even look at me. It was as if she already knew what I was going to say if she said anything about the man. I didn’t speak to her either. I didn’t tell her about the small dark worm of a thought that had started to wriggle at the back of my mind.

  19

  Amber

  On the surface things appear normal for the rest of the Saturday, but Amber feels a heaviness in the air like a thunderstorm coming.

  She makes a point of leaving the studio before it gets dark. The only thing she hears as she moves quickly back to the house is the voice inside her head repeating over and over:

  I see you.

  No demand, no threat. No indication of how much more they know, or which of the other pictures on the roll of film they have seen. She expects something else — another message, a signal from someone — but there is nothing.

  Almost nothing. When she gets back into the house, Sam is there, and she wonders why he would be working on a Saturday evening. He and Genevieve stop their discussion abruptly as she comes into the kitchen. Sam has a folder in his hands, and he slowly closes it. He is dressed down, but still immaculate and fashionable.

  Amber looks at him and can’t place his age. When she met him the previous day, he struck her as someone in his mid-thirties, but now she isn’t sure. In different aspects, he seems to flash an older face, like a trick of the light.

  Amber manages to make small talk for a few minutes before the pair leave. They move upstairs to Genevieve’s office, and Amber is the one left feeling shifty, loitering on the curve of the stairs like a furtive teenager spying on her parents. The door opens, and Amber scampers down and attempts to look casual, leafing through the catalogues on the front desk.

  ‘Be seeing you,’ Sam says as he leaves, a polite smile without much warmth.

  Genevieve stays in her office, and the quiet calm of the house sits heavily. Amber wants to leave, but knows she can’t do anything to raise suspicion or show alarm. She must retain the smallest amount of control that she can.

  For dinner, on Yvey’s request, they order pizza and all eat in front of a fire, even though it’s a mild evening. Genevieve and her daughter seem less distant from each other, at one point remembering Benny to each other.

  ‘You know it was here, this very spot, that I told your father I was expecting you?’

  ‘Too much information,’ says Yvey, her voice all teenager. But she is almost smiling.

  Amber feels overwhelmed by the crushing conviviality of it. She makes an excuse and goes to bed early. Johnny, taking the wrong cue, follows her up. He takes a shower and comes out of the bathroom naked, his brown body shining, standing proud. He slides in next to her, his hands playing across her stomach.

  She feels distant as they make love. Not disembodied, but rather the opposite, shrunk right down within her physical body, like hiding in a box in a small room of an echoing mansion.

  When she finally sleeps, she has the same uneasy dream she has had sporadically for years. She is in an empty open space — a vast flat expanse with no colour or texture. She is being followed. Sometimes she can see her follower; sometimes she just knows she must keep going or the relentless dread will be upon her. Sometimes she can run, sometimes she is stuck, held by invisible hands or ropes. There is never any resolution to the dream. She does not get away and is not caught. It plays like a looped piece of music: again, again, again.

  On Sunday, Amber is glad to be leaving. At breakfast she asks Genevieve to come to the studio. As they walk down the path through the woods, she is convinced she is going to tell Benny’s widow she cannot take the job. But as the two women stand in front of the rows of boxes, she knows she has no choice but to. She cannot leave this place — its photographs, its people — unexplored.

  ‘I need a week to tidy up a couple of projects, but I can start the following Monday.’

  ‘So soon? Are you sure? There’s no real hurry. I thought you might need…’

  ‘The money would be welcome,’ she replies quickly, telegraphing to Genevieve the sense of this being a practical decision. It feels like enough cover to ask what she asks next. She has been looking at the scanner, thinking about the errors Mika made with its setting. She sees his face in her head — the bright blueness of his eyes and his lighthouse hair. ‘Shame Mika isn’t sticking around.’

  Genevieve doesn’t respond, and Amber works hard on the casualness of the next question.

  ‘How di
d he come to assist for Benny?’

  ‘Oh, through an agency. Benny arranged it.’ Genevieve flicks her hand as if swatting off a fly, and there is a finality to her voice. It is not something she wants to talk about.

  ‘He’s no Sam, clearly,’ Amber says, trying to find a way to probe indirectly about the other man in this house.

  ‘Well, quite. I don’t know what I’d do without Sam.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘Oh, he’s been with us forever. Very loyal.’ Again there is a sense of closure in the voice, as if this is a topic Genevieve doesn’t want to explore.

  Amber isn’t sure what she was expecting to learn about these two men’s identities, their histories or how much they could be trusted. She has half a question in her head about the other people who work on the property and with the Foundation, but it dies on her tongue. Because as she looks at Genevieve, the thought that has been worming its way around her head since she woke crawls back to the top. It’s that it wasn’t Mika or Sam who brought her here. Or anyone else. It’s that the only person who had the power to pull Amber back into Benny’s afterlife is the woman standing in front of her.

  20

  Amber

  There has been no sign of Yvey all morning, but as Amber is loading her bag into her car, she comes skipping out of the house, childlike again, dressed in her giant onesie.

  ‘Do you mind if I give you my number, Amber?’ she asks, like a shy girl asking a boy on a date. ‘I’d like to.’ She looks down at the ground.

  ‘I’d like that as well,’ says Amber, smiling. ‘You can have mine too.’ They exchange numbers, Yvey’s thumbs flashing over the keys on her phone like lightning. Again Amber wants to hug her, but feels forbidden. Suddenly, Yvey is hugging her. Not a lingering hold, just arms thrown around her neck and a tight, fast squeeze.

  ‘Sorry… I…’

  ‘Don’t apologise.’

  Yvey looks at her feet, a little lost, and runs inside.

  Amber and Johnny leave the house in their separate cars: his rental, hers the dull little hatchback that used to belong to her mum. They never needed a car when they lived in London, and here they are, absurdly, with two. The eight-year-old Amber — full of dreams about saving the planet — would not be impressed.

  The empty-eyed and twisting sculptures follow Amber’s retreat from the farmhouse. As she leaves the drive, there is a man standing there dressed in green overalls. She makes eye contact with him as she slows to turn out into the road. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t look away, stares straight into the car, expressionless. Perhaps she is imagining it. Perhaps he doesn’t see her at all through the strong light reflected on the glass. But she cannot suppress a physical shudder, and she is glad that Johnny is not with her.

  Half a mile later, she wishes he was. Driving home separately makes her feel uneasy, and dark thoughts crowd her mind about accidents, and illogical ones about reaching home and finding that Johnny has vanished en route. So she accelerates to catch up with him, and tails him closely along the country roads, not wanting to let him out of her sight.

  They reach home and park in the large gravel layby at the end of their potholed lane. Because, although they live right on the edge of the country, they don’t even have space outside their house to park a car. Their front garden is tiny, with no room for a drive, and the surrounding land belongs mostly to the big house next door. Until recently, there was a large, noisy family living there. Now it is empty, shrouded in scaffolding and plastic awnings.

  Their own house doesn’t have space for a large family. Amber sometimes wonders if it even has space for a small one. It’s not so much an objective lack of rooms, more the way that her and Johnny have spread out to fill every corner since they moved here from their rented London flat eighteen months ago.

  It was Amber’s mum’s sudden deterioration that prompted the move, and they hadn’t really planned to stay. They both miss London and their friends, but the prospect of moving back to the city to have their baby didn’t appeal. Amber likes being surrounded by so much green and open space. It makes her feel she might survive maternity leave — such that it is for a freelancer. And she likes being twenty minutes from a big teaching hospital. She has the route well mapped in her mind. The thought of being anywhere remote or clogged with traffic scares her. Even at the Raine farmhouse, she took a few moments to calculate the journey straight to the hospital. She knows if things go wrong, a few precious minutes could make all the difference.

  Over lunch, Amber watches the news twitchily: the drumbeat rumours of lockdown, the fear that it is only a matter of time before the health service becomes overwhelmed and unable to care for her and her baby.

  She thumbs through emails on her phone, distracting herself by reading a long and excited pitch for a new project with her frequent collaborator Ed Kapoor. Ed is a journalist with a great nose for a good feature and an uncanny knack of finding interesting people to photograph. He’s the one who introduced her to Luiz and his friends, and she’s always felt a little guilty he got none of the credit. But Ed doesn’t mind. It’s all about the story for Ed.

  She can’t muster the focus or enthusiasm to reply and, seeing the time, gets ready to go out again. This afternoon, she has arranged to visit her mum in the care home.

  When she gets there, the home feels different since her last visit. It is more like a hospital: an increased disinfectant regime, more staff behind masks, and the communal rooms half-deserted.

  Her mum seems far too young for what is happening to her. She is only in her early seventies. She lived on her own for so long, in her little rut of existence, that the early signs went unnoticed by others, and were wilfully ignored by her mum. Then came the sudden deterioration: the kitchen accidents, the furious outbursts, being found wandering in her nightdress across Port Meadow, looking for Amber’s father.

  Today, in the home, she seems calmer than she has been. The dramatic decline has levelled out into a slower process of wastage, like the fading of an old photograph left too long in direct sunlight.

  Amber sits down by her bed and can see that her mum knows her and doesn’t know her, the awareness flickering in and out like a radio scanning for stations. Amber tries to tell her again about the baby, but she doesn’t think it registers. She is glad her brother already made her mum a grandmother three times over, when she was still able to experience and remember the joy.

  So they sit in silence with each other, one mind lost, the other wandering. Amber finds herself thinking about Genevieve’s elderly mother, and how Genevieve was visiting her the night Benny died. Her thoughts wrap round again to how awful it must have been for Yvey to receive that morning knock from the police. And, if Genevieve is right about it being suicide, she wonders what sort of man Benny was to kill himself on a night he knew his daughter would be alone. She shouldn’t have to wonder this. She knows exactly the sort of man he was. But still. She thinks about Genevieve’s absence and hears Yvey’s words about Benny in her head. He wouldn’t do that.

  Amber gets up to leave. Her mum smiles at her and tells her that her daughter is coming to visit. There is nothing pleasant about the way her mum is falling away from awareness and from life, but sometimes, when she is peaceful like this, Amber feels a strange pang of envy. She wishes that many of her own memories were not always with her, bearing down on her.

  And now, since she found the negatives, since she received the strange WhatsApp message, it feels as if the memories themselves have escaped from her head and are threatening her.

  Her phone buzzes. It makes her skin tingle. She hardly dares look. She pulls it quickly out of her pocket, like plunging her hand into cold water.

  It’s a number she knows, and she relaxes.

  You still alive? Coffee tomorrow? K.

  Kay Hamilton. Amber knows she can’t put her off any longer.

  21

  Amber

  ‘C’mon, what’s up?’

  Kay leans a little towards Amb
er as she speaks. They are sitting on a bench in the shadow of what used to be Oxford’s prison, but is now a posh hotel. Amber pulls her takeaway coffee close to her, feeling its heat radiate towards her chest.

  Sitting with her mum, Amber really wanted to see one of her closest friends. But Hal is in London, Ryo is in Cambridge, and they’ve both got troubles of their own. The person Amber most wants to talk to is Grace, but she is in New Zealand. Grace, the keeper of secrets, and Amber’s only confidante during her affair with Benny. One of only two people who knows about the affair at all.

  The other person who knows about Benny — at least that Amber is aware of — is Kay Hamilton.

  Amber stands up. ‘Can we walk for a bit?’

  Kay springs to her feet, the way she always does. She has one of those straight-up-and-down, athletic bodies, and there is never any slowness to her.

  They walk out of the hotel complex onto the main road. The city is still and quiet, its usual tourist hordes thinned out by a world that is closing.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m fine, really. Just been a strange few weeks.’

  Kay and Amber have been meeting for coffee on and off since Kay stopped working a year ago. She calls it early retirement, but Amber knows she was laid off in one of the periodic decimations that have swept through newsrooms in recent years. Kay sold her London flat and moved out to a little village east of Oxford.

  Amber and Kay’s last coffee meetup was supposed to be just after Benny’s funeral, but Amber made an excuse. She didn’t want to hear Kay’s opinion on whether she should take the job — or whether she should visit the Raine farmhouse at all. But Kay is a terrier, and there are only so many times you can put her off without making her nose twitch.