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

by O. C. S. Francis

  What happened to Amber after her father’s death was so real, and remains so vivid, that she has never had to invent a syllable of it. When she went to college, she tried to hide it, wipe the slate clean. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about the blind panic of that day on the beach, or the sweat-soaked, dream-harassed nights that followed, or the explosions of anger and despair. She told herself — and almost believed — that she had beaten it. It was the past. The future was blank and new.

  But when she first met Johnny, there was something about him that made her want to tell him everything. Maybe it was the way he didn’t pry, didn’t want to understand her trauma, wasn’t like those people who tilted their head on one side and spoke in a soft therapy voice as if she were a bit simple. No, Johnny was just unflappably cool about it, as if what she had been through was something of the least consequence about her, like her bad teenage taste in music.

  ‘All the best people are a bit cracked,’ was how he put it, reeling off a list of tormented musicians.

  In a way, it was easy in the months after she came back from the cottage, to blame her behaviour on a recurrence of her teenage mental health problems brought on by the stresses of starting out in a competitive career. She could talk about the situations she had to face as a photojournalist, the aggressive macho culture of the newsroom, the precariousness of her contract. It didn’t matter that in reality, none of this on its own accounted for her mood swings, her panic attacks and nightmares, her flaring temper. Because she always had that first true horror to hang it all on, that primal past.

  Johnny had no reason to disbelieve her, but with that came a gnawing, compound guilt. It was not just that she was lying to Johnny, but that she was sullying the memory of her dad to use him as cover for what she had done. These two smoking black holes in her life were connected, but not in the way Johnny thought. Not in the way that anybody knew.

  It was only slowly that she learned to lock the guilt away. Both the guilt about the act, and the guilt about the lie she told to cover for it. Like boxes inside boxes, secrets within secrets.

  And now, that old lie is ready to be taken out again.

  Amber finishes brushing. Reaching automatically for her pregnancy multivitamins, she finds the bottle is almost empty. She still suspects they just give her expensive wee, but she can’t leave anything to chance, not this time. So she forces herself to get dressed and go out of the house, across the meadow and to the pharmacy in Jericho.

  She felt imprisoned in the house, and outside feels like a fugitive. She glances around and walks quickly. Past the pub she’s not been out to in months, past the slightly ropey curry house that’s been a fixture here since she was a teenager, past the café where she and Kay sometimes get their coffees.

  It’s then she sees the man in a long blue coat, his hands in his pockets, looking into the window of a small art gallery, oddly static. It’s only a small sense of familiarity, a little glitch in her brain, but she thinks he looks like Sam. She wrestles with herself to stop from going back to the art gallery to check.

  But she loses the fight and goes on over, all manner of thoughts going round her head about spotting him so close to her house. Then her phone starts ringing. It’s a withheld number. She lets it go on ringing. Maybe it’s one of those spam calls. She keeps going towards the art gallery, but can’t help but answer it.

  ‘Hi, Amber, Sam here.’

  Her brain misfires. She is staring in through the gallery window at someone who must be a complete stranger. And the more she looks, the more the resemblance to Sam falls away. The odd coincidence gives her a cold feeling, as if she is slipping between a real and a dream world. She realises she hasn’t spoken for several seconds, and Sam’s insistent voice on the phone pulls her back into reality.

  Sam says he is calling to talk about arrangements and contracts, but he peppers his talk about rates and invoicing with questions about her work and recent past, as if he is trying to build a fuller picture of her in his mind. It feels like a subtle sort of interrogation, comparing her answers against what he might already have found out about her online or through Genevieve. Due diligence for his boss.

  Because she can suspect Sam all she wants, hallucinate his presence in the high street, worry about is inquisitiveness, but he is only a cog in a machine. All of Amber’s thoughts again lead back only to Benny’s widow. That is the cold logic of this spiral of threat. All the things that have been happening have started not since Benny’s death, but since she was invited to the funeral and then to the farmhouse.

  On the surface, Genevieve has been as she always was: professional, deliberate, unemotional. But underneath? Never present when those WhatsApp messages buzzed on Amber’s phone. Not there in the kitchen on that night Amber fled through the trees. Not at home the night Benny died.

  At the same time, Genevieve is almost too visible in all this. Why bring Amber to the farmhouse at all? Why not simply send the images and messages? Because the person sending them seems almost to be willing a confrontation. A confrontation like the one that happened almost two decades ago.

  Amber starts to feel as if she has been looking at this from the wrong perspective. She has been thinking about this from where she stands, not from where Benny did, not from where the people around him stood. The same scene can look very different from an alternate angle. She is gripped by the need to talk to someone who knows Genevieve now and knew her all those years ago.

  She looks in her phone, scrolling down to see if she still has a number in her contacts. There’s nothing there, but it only takes a moment on Google to find what she needs. Sometimes it seems nothing is hidden about anyone anymore. She looks at the number — a landline at Amber’s old London college. Before she can stop herself, she dials, almost hoping for no answer or a machine to pick up. But after a few seconds, there is a click, the rustle of paper, and a short cough. Then a voice, out of breath.

  ‘Hi… sorry… hi… just a sec…’

  ‘Is that Florence MacRory?’ She doesn’t know why she uses her full, formal name. ‘It’s Amber Ridley.’

  27

  Amber

  The new campus building near Paddington station is bright and cavernous, half modern art museum, half corporate headquarters. It ranges up over several open-sided floors that intersect over one another, and wide wooden staircases flow up the centre from the foyer. The place mills with fashionable young students and hums with excited chatter, oblivious to talk of social distancing or lockdowns. It’s a world away from the grubby brutalist buildings that Amber remembers from when she was a student.

  When she sees Freddie, her old tutor stands out, but not in the way she had at Benny’s funeral. While her bright attire had contrasted with the sombre mourners, in this sea of youth she looks like someone stranded from another time. Her slightly hippyish clothes are poorly matched, and her hair looks messy rather than extravagant. Even her striking features seem a little diminished. She looks tired and irritated.

  Freddie was nothing but light on the phone. She was sorry she’d not caught up with Amber at the funeral, and had been hoping she might make contact. Freddie seemed to have no idea Amber had moved out of London, so when she suggested a coffee the next day, Amber didn’t protest. It was only an hour on the train, and the gaps in Freddie’s knowledge put Amber at ease for their meeting. It said to her that Freddie had not been keeping tabs on her, not watching her.

  Amber was still not entirely sure what she was hoping to gain from seeing Freddie. She felt half in need of an ally — someone who might have information from inside the Raine household — and still half-suspicious about what Benny might have told his closest friends.

  Trapped between these urges, Amber is at a loss for what to say as they sit down with their coffees. So she is glad, at first, that Freddie has always been someone who will fill any silence. It seems she has something she wants to get off her chest. Before any attempt to catch up on the years since they’ve seen each other, Freddie is rantin
g about the university administrators and their petty demands. Her voice is usually a pleasant one to listen to — still full of the Ulster lilt of her youth. But now it sharpens up around the invective and gallops through a list of grievances. It’s not entirely out of character for Freddie to run off on a tangent, but Amber finds the barely pent-up rage disconcerting.

  ‘Not tempted by retirement?’ she interjects when Freddie draws a breath, hoping to get her off the topic of work.

  Freddie throws a conspiratorial look around her. ‘I think they’d like me to retire. But they can’t get rid of me. Like a bad smell. Though I’m only teaching two days a week now, not always in the big smoke…’ And she goes on, telling Amber about how she thinks the department heads have been trying to force her out, and how she got sick of London anyway, so commutes in now from High Wycombe.

  Amber can instantly see the geography, as if looking at a satellite image in her mind. High Wycombe: a large market town surrounded by the Chiltern Hills.

  ‘So you’re near the farmhouse?’

  ‘The farmhouse?’

  ‘Benny’s place.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Freddie sounds annoyed, but Amber cannot tell if it is in reaction to the question, or just residual bad temper from her tirade against the university administrators.

  ‘Did you go there a lot? I mean… did you see much of Benny… towards the end?’

  Then Freddie’s shoulders drop, and she is uncharacteristically silent for a moment. The irritation that has been seething around in her seems to lift, leaving her frowning and uncertain.

  ‘Did you know he was ill?’

  ‘It made sense afterwards, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Freddie doesn’t seem to want to answer. The gaps in her speech become long and considered. ‘I only saw him once or twice in the last year. But the last time… He seemed, I don’t know, preoccupied. He kept asking me about my regrets.’

  ‘Your regrets?’

  ‘Oh yes, but I knew he was talking about himself. He was never the most emotionally literate person, was he now?’ Freddie shrugs and looks up at the high atrium above them. ‘But all of us have things we regret, don’t we?’

  Amber is glad Freddie isn’t looking at her when she says that, because the words set up a small twitch that runs across her shoulder blades. She shakes out the feeling. When Freddie does make eye contact again, her old tutor is smiling, but as if to cover sadness.

  ‘But how are you?’ she says to Amber, forcing the words out.

  It is enough to pull the conversation into a different space, and they begin to catch up on the missing years. Amber tells Freddie about the pregnancy, her career, Johnny’s music, their move out to Oxford. She doesn’t mention anything more about the Raines, and for a few minutes it is as if she has forgotten what has propelled her to this meeting.

  It’s only when she takes the plunge and tells Freddie about the archive job that her old tutor’s manner flickers. It is the specific mention of Genevieve that provokes the reaction — a sense that Freddie is fighting to suppress something she wants to say. It isn’t much, but it’s a tell. Freddie always wore her emotions on the outside, bright and loud like her clothes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ach, nothing.’

  ‘No, really. The way you looked when I mentioned Genevieve…’

  Freddie adopts her slightly faraway look, as if searching for someone in the sea of faces around them. ‘Just make sure you get paid and keep your receipts,’ she says curtly.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Amber leans forward, forgetting her fear. She feels almost excitement, as if she has landed on something here that might begin to explain what is happening to her.

  Freddie shakes her head. ‘Did you know that over that marriage, Benny lost control of everything? He was never any good at hanging onto money, always spending, never saving. That’s who he was. Everyone said Gen was the kind of person he needed to add a bit of sense into his life. Someone with a bit of acumen. I thought that too for a while. But it’s not right. Benny was a free spirit. He needed someone to be free with. And you know what I found out? By the end, all his rights and royalties, even his income, everything… it all ended up being controlled by that Bayard Foundation.’ Freddie lets out a snort and repeats the word foundation. ‘I think it’s why that woman married him, not that stockbroker — I don’t think she could have controlled him in the same way.’

  ‘Which stockbroker?’

  ‘You know that, surely? Hardly a secret. Yeah, Gen was engaged to some Swiss stockbroker when she met Benny.’

  Amber wants to ask more, but Freddie doesn’t let her. She seems almost annoyed about the interruption and swings back round to the Bayard Foundation. It’s clear it is this that Freddie wants to talk about, and it’s not long before she’s adopted that same manner she used to talk about the university administrators.

  She tells Amber that the Foundation is linked to the Panama Papers — that international scandal of offshore finances. She talks about money laundering, dodgy deals, even investments in the arms trade. Then she goes steadily off-piste, drifting towards talk about international finance, bankers and political control, as if she has forgotten completely what prompted the diatribe.

  The more Freddie talks, the more Amber recognises a familiar language and mindset. Freddie wants her to know how things aren’t reported in the mainstream media, and about a nebulous them who are controlling things behind the scenes. She leans into Amber as she speaks, as if she is in possession of privileged information.

  The phrase Deep State falls out of Freddie’s mouth, and then the coronavirus somehow makes its way into her ranting. That threat that is heading inexorably towards them, waiting to infect these crowded spaces.

  ‘You think any of it is real?’ Freddie declares loudly as if she wants everyone around them to hear. ‘You don’t think it’s just about fear, about another way to control us?’

  A cold feeling runs through Amber. She has the sense of not fully recognising the person in front of her. The woman whose anti-establishment takes Amber used to enjoy — used to agree with — has been replaced by an altered version. Amber knows she should argue with what Freddie is saying, but it feels futile. Driven by her own fear, she has come here hoping for facts. But she has found only someone gripped by their own paranoia.

  Amber finishes her coffee quickly while Freddie continues to talk. Then she makes her excuses and leaves. As she walks away, she glances back. She sees Freddie reaching around and gathering up her belongings, which have become scattered around her. She looks small and old and a little lost.

  28

  Amber

  On the way back to Oxford, Freddie’s words rattle around inside Amber’s head in time with the motion of the carriage. She is feeling sad and a little bemused by the state of her old tutor. Still, she can’t help herself from going over and over everything Freddie said, trying to pick apart the facts from the delusion, examining every phrase and gesture for unstated meaning.

  She thinks about Freddie’s talk of regret — Benny’s, and perhaps her own. And when Freddie said Benny needed a free spirit, was she talking about herself? Did she hold a flame for him for a long time?

  She thinks about Genevieve and her jilted Swiss stockbroker— how she must be no stranger to infidelity herself. And she thinks about Freddie’s accusations of Genevieve’s control over Benny.

  By the time the train pulls into Oxford, Amber even finds herself mulling on Freddie’s lurid accusations about the Bayard Foundation, as if somehow international webs of financial corruption might hold the key to all this. Amber feels no saner, no more able to grip the truth, than Freddie was.

  She sits on a bench at the station and gets out her phone, diving into Google to pick through the bones of Genevieve’s life. But she finds little else. Genevieve Bayard-Raine’s presence on the internet is like everything else about her — professional. Notes on her family’s business dealings, her ed
ucation at the Sorbonne and Oxford, her early career in auction houses without a real need for an income, and the work of the Bayard Foundation. Not a hint of scandal, and no mention of her stockbroker.

  These disjointed facts tumble around as Amber walks home. At one moment they feel significant, the next worthless internet flotsam. The tumble in her head doesn’t stop as she turns the key in the front door, preparing a normal face for her husband, gripped again by the feeling that soon she will have to lie to him again.

  Soon turns out to be now. The moment is waiting for her with him in the hallway.

  ‘Where have you been?’ His voice is worried.

  ‘I told you I was having coffee with a friend.’

  ‘You’ve been gone hours, and you know I have to get going to Manchester this afternoon…’

  She looks at her watch. It is later than she thought. Her fraught mind has become unfocused on how much of the day has gone. It makes her want to look at her phone again. Too much time has gone without another message. She fears it, and she wants it to come.

  ‘Sorry… it was in London.’

  ‘London?’ He says the word as if it is an exotic, far-off place.

  ‘Yeah, you know London, J, the place we lived for most of our adult life before ending up in…’ She throws her arm around their small and peeling hallway.

  ‘Jeez, babe, I hope you didn’t go anywhere crowded.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Coronavirus, that’s what. You know it’s worse in London.’

  ‘There’s been like a couple of hundred cases there. It’s a big city. Chill out.’

  It’s a weaponised phrase to use against Johnny, given the knot of fear in her own stomach. And she hears in her voice the echo of Freddie’s dismissal of what’s happening in China, in Italy, what will inevitably happen here soon. Her own fear feels compounded. But she doesn’t back down.