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

by O. C. S. Francis

  Kay shrugs again. ‘I didn’t really know him. But his reputation was hardly a secret.’

  ‘Sure, but from friends, gossip… what did you ever hear?’

  ‘Look, the thing about Benny… He was only ever about himself.’ The flippancy is finally gone from Kay’s voice. She gives a fast, hard sigh. ‘I only met him a few times. But, well, Freddie once said to me you could always have a mighty time with Benny, but that he never really cared so long as he was having one. Not sure he ever gave much thought to the people he hurt along the way.’ She glances momentarily off the road and catches Amber’s eye. ‘But you know this already, don’t you?’

  Amber doesn’t answer, just looks down.

  ‘So, am I surprised that someone might have wanted to kill him at some point in his life? ‘No, I’m not. But neither would I be surprised by the idea he killed himself rather than face a difficult end and dealing with the pain of the people who loved him. I’d guess he never changed, right up to the end.’

  Kay stops, her lips pursed as if holding in an unexpressed emotion. When she speaks again, there is irritation in her voice.

  ‘I’m not exactly sure what it is you think I can tell you about him, sweetie, but you do need to tell me what the hell is going on.’

  ‘I don’t know that I can. Not all of it. I don’t know all of it. If I did tell you, you’d understand why I couldn’t. But you said whatever I needed to say, you’d listen. And I need you to trust me, and I need to trust you. You’re the only person who knows about me and Benny that I can talk to, and I need your help.’

  ‘Then I’ll help you,’ Kay says solemnly.

  It gives Amber a feeling that Kay might not judge her too harshly if she knew the whole truth. She might just be someone who would protect Amber’s secret. But two decades of silence are hard to break. So Amber speaks slowly and carefully, weighing again which truths to tell, and which lies.

  ‘During our affair, Benny told me he’d been attacked by a man and killed him in self-defence. And he kept it a secret — as far as I know, for the rest of his life. But after he discovered he was terminally ill, he also talked about a confession, about letting everything out into the open. But then he was killed. And, honestly, Kay, I know there are decades between those things, but I just can’t help but think it’s all connected.’

  The car slows a little, as if Kay is having difficulty concentrating on the driving and listening to Amber. She lets out a slow whistle.

  ‘That’s a bold pitch, sweetie, I’ve got to say. Can I ask why you’ve not gone to the police with all this?’

  ‘Because I don’t have any proof. Because I’ll seem like a crazy person. Because… I think Genevieve might be involved in this somehow.’

  ‘Huh. Look, Amber. That Bayard woman, I wouldn’t trust her to look after my pint while I took a piss. But you really think she killed him?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only…’ Amber’s voice falls away, unable to find the words to express her fragmented suspicions. There doesn’t seem any way of explaining everything without revealing her part in it all. ‘What do you mean, you don’t trust Genevieve?’

  Kay waves a hand away from the steering wheel. ‘Ah, nothing.’ But her mouth is twitching like it isn’t nothing.

  Amber starts to think about Freddie. About her chaotic mind and strange fixations; about her dislike of Genevieve and her ideas about the Bayard Foundation. Amber tries to explain it to Kay, but becomes lost in the telling, unable to fit the pieces into the puzzle.

  Kay shrugs. ‘Freddie has her ideas, y’know. But I’ll tell you, I’ve covered every crime you could imagine. People do foolish, terrible things. People get themselves in so deep that they can’t see a way out. People do things because they have to. And it’s those people that the law goes after, because they’re easy to catch, and they have victims that are easy to see. But when was the last time you saw a banker go to jail, hmm?’

  Kay has become increasingly animated as she talks, and she shakes her head as if clearing something from her mind. ‘But, honestly, Amber, what’s any of this got to do with you? I’m still not sure why you took the job doing the archive. Friend to friend, I think you need to take a break. Christ, why am I even driving you to his house?’

  ‘Because I need to look through the archive some more. I think I can find something there. He kept everything. It was like he was obsessed with not throwing away a single image. There’s got to be something. Maybe not something that will mean enough on its own, but if I can put it together with…’

  She tapers off, aware she is pushing the limits of what she is prepared to reveal about her own guilt. Kay has slowed the car. They have left the town and are on the country roads, heading towards their destination, but Kay has spotted a layby and pulls over into it.

  ‘At what point do I get to say I’m worried about you, sweetie?’

  ‘I’m worried about me.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind me telling you you’re chasing shadows here. You’re the one sounding like a conspiracy theorist. You’re looking for evidence you don’t know exists for a crime that you don’t know happened.’

  ‘I’m not crazy.’ The words come out raw and angry. But she doesn’t fully believe them. She does feel half-crazy. For all the things she knows are true, she can’t help but admit that Kay is partly right. ‘I’m sorry, I just needed to stop feeling so alone in all this. Can you drop me off, and maybe not go too far? Just be on the end of your phone if I need you. In case anything…’

  Kay makes a throaty huffing noise. ‘If you’re worried for your safety, then I should come in with you.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to create suspicion. I’m still meant to be doing the job there. Just be at the end of the phone. Will you do that for me?’

  Kay is shaking her head. She starts to drive off, looking sharply behind her, as if preparing to turn across the road.

  ‘Don’t you dare take me back to Oxford. If you do, I’m just going to get a cab. I thought you would be someone who would help me.’

  Kay grits her teeth in displeasure, but keeps driving. ‘Are you completely sure about this?’

  ‘Yes, completely. Please.’

  Another shake of the head. ‘Okay.’

  They move on through the winding roads in silence, their speed picking up again, Kay’s aggressive driving giving away her frustration at Amber. They get close to the farmhouse, and Amber asks to stop at the top of the driveway. She starts to get out, and feels Kay’s hand on her arm.

  ‘Please don’t try to stop me.’

  ‘I just want you to think about what you’re doing.’

  ‘I’ve done too much thinking.’

  Kay’s eyes fall. ‘Look, just be careful. You mean a lot to silly old Kay, you know.’ Then she unclips her seatbelt and leans across to Amber and hugs her. The hug lingers, and Amber lets it, absorbing all the comfort she can get from it, thinking about her own isolation, about Kay’s loneliness, about the first time they met, about how she is gripped by a sense that this might be the final time she sees Kay, how she feels if she steps past the threshold of the Raine farmhouse, she might never leave.

  She uncouples and lets herself out of the car before she has the chance to change her mind.

  45

  Benny

  Sunday, 11 November 2001

  The farmhouse was quiet the day I came back after the cottage. A dark Sunday afternoon, and all the builders’ tools lay silent. A dead time.

  I didn’t expect Gen back till late, maybe not till Monday. She had been away on a last-minute trip she had to make to Paris to sort out some family business. The way she’d talked about it, it sounded as if someone might get murdered if she wasn’t there to broker the peace.

  I went to my study. My camera felt heavy as I took it out of my bag and placed it on my desk. There was no need to lock it away. I miss those days when you couldn’t tell what was in the camera just by looking at its back, when you couldn’t download and share the images at the click
of a mouse.

  If anyone looked at that camera that afternoon, all they would see would be all its marks of age and wear, a technology coming to the end of its life. And if anyone opened the camera’s back, the images would be gone forever in a second.

  I nearly did it myself. I nearly flipped open the back and let the light from my desk lamp burn it all up.

  The house was freezing. I lit a fire and sat cross-legged on the floor right up close to it and smoked cigarette after cigarette. I could still sit cross-legged then and get up without using my hands.

  I liked this place when it was quiet. I was reminded why we had bought it — well, Gen had bought it. But when we first moved into it that summer, nothing was finished, everything was chaos. Builders and noise were everywhere. I had just wanted to take some time off. I had been working non-stop, and I was exhausted. It was a summer when I didn’t want to do anything, or talk to anyone, or think about anything. Just sit in the sun and drink. But I couldn’t get a moment’s peace.

  I know I can’t blame the building. I can’t blame Gen or Amber. I knew who was responsible for what had just happened.

  Gen came home earlier than I expected. She sat down beside me by the fire and kissed me. I was all ready to give my invented excuse for the archipelago of bruises spreading down the side of my face from my forehead, but strangely she said nothing about them till much later that evening. Even so, I felt the events of the weekend radiating off me, as if they might penetrate Gen’s mind if she stayed too close for too long. Eventually, she said:

  ‘You should stop smoking, my darling.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, I know.’

  ‘What if I gave you a reason to?’ She reached over to her handbag that had been lying on the floor next to her, and slid out a small plastic wand with a blue tip and a frosted oval window in its middle. There were two bars in the window.

  At the time, I barely remember feeling anything. I made all the right noises, but I was numb, angry, confused. The conversation I’d had after leaving Amber at Norwich was still running round and round my head.

  The full sensation came later. A child coming into our life was like a loud noise waking me from a bad dream. With it came a growing hope that I could put everything behind me, that somehow our daughter could be a shield against everything that had happened before she arrived.

  Over the years, though, that feeling has left me too. At times, I have loved her so much that it hurt, and we’ve had immense fun. But I don’t think I’ve been a decent father any more than I’ve been a decent husband.

  Yvey and I are too alike, too wilful, too hard to tie down, too stubborn. I think Gen did her best, but I don’t know. There have been so many times I just wasn’t there to see.

  So I can’t blame Yvey for all the money we’ve spent on child psychologists. And I would be a hypocrite to lament all her lying. The varied, creative and compulsive lying. Maybe part of me admires her for how adept she is at it. She will make a wonderful novelist perhaps. Or a politician. I can’t even hold too much against her what happened at her last school. Perhaps the relationship she developed with that teacher was something about the absent parent in her life. Perhaps the lurid stories she told her about Gen and me to gain her sympathy had, for her at least, a nugget of truth in there.

  The violence in her, though, I can’t account for that. To attack that teacher in her street in broad daylight. I’m guilty of a lot in my life, but violence isn’t one of them. No, I’m not sure that’s true, not if I’m honest with myself. I can see now that to wish violence into being is itself part of the act. It’s just violence coated in cowardice. I’ve seen the faces of soldiers, and there’s more honesty in them than in the people who send them into battle.

  We were grateful at the time that Yvey’s teacher could be persuaded not to press charges, but now I wonder if the teacher wasn’t as innocent as she liked to claim. Perhaps violence was all Yvey felt she had access to. Sometimes I think we should listen more to her lies. I think sometimes, in a funny kind of way, they’ve been her attempt to tell us the truth.

  Sure, the boy cried wolf, but in the end there really was a wolf.

  46

  Amber

  ‘Oh, hello, Amber. Hadn’t expected to see you till Monday at the earliest.’ Sam is a little prim in his greeting, as if she has upset his precise plans for the day. Then he sucks his teeth. ‘Unless we’re all confined to quarters by then, I suppose.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry to descend on you.’ Amber is willing a casualness into her voice, but it sounds fake and scratchy in her head. ‘I got a bit ahead with my other projects. Thought I’d pop over and get a head start. That’s okay, isn’t it? And I was hoping I could spend a bit more time handing over with Mika before he’s off.’

  ‘Yuh, Mika, he called in sick yesterday.’ There is a slight wither to the way Sam says Mika’s name, and the word sick hangs with scepticism. ‘Not heard from him today.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Nothing serious, I hope.’ Amber’s voice is blank, but the thought going through her head is the figure running away from her house into the darkness, and now Mika’s sudden, convenient absence. ‘Is Genevieve here?’

  ‘Not currently.’ The curt answer is all Sam has to say.

  ‘And Yvey? Does she have classes this afternoon, or is she around?’

  ‘Yvey?’ There is the flicker of a frown on Sam’s face, as if the question has been inappropriate. ‘I’m afraid keeping tabs on her is rather above my pay grade.’

  Sam smiles weakly, and in the silence that follows, Amber can just detect a sub-bass vibration in the house, like muffled music through doors. She has a momentary instinct to go past Sam up the stairs to find Yvey’s bedroom, but she pushes the idea away.

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll be out at the studio,’ she says to Sam, trying to match his tone.

  ‘I’ll have to unlock it for you.’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he says, in a way that suggests he does.

  They walk together through the house and along the woodland path. It is already mid-afternoon, and the light is low, slanting through the branches, pulling out long shadows from the trees across the path. When they get to the clearing and the studio, Sam stops and looks at Amber.

  ‘I’m sure it’s none of my business, but can I ask, are you all right? You seem a little…’ He waves his hand non-specifically.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ And she doesn’t say anything else, turning Sam’s brevity against him.

  He gives a thin smile and lets her into the studio. She watches him as he retreats towards the house, not moving from the glass until she is sure he is gone. But then she finds herself filled with an urge to follow him, as if she might somehow be able to spy on him without being seen.

  She presses the button on the windows to turn off the world outside, goes through the door at the back of the room, and climbs the stairs to the archive.

  When she first came here, she discovered there was no easy system for the contents of this room. It has not been neatly organised by date or by subject or theme. But she did get a sense of the pockets of chronology here and there — rows of boxes and files that grouped around certain years.

  She looks first for anything from the months and years immediately before that weekend in the cottage, telling herself over and over that there must be something to find. At the same time, she is filled with a deep sense of desperation, of the creeping acceptance that Kay is right, that there is nothing to see, that she is inventing imaginary evidence.

  She cannot find the energy to take boxes up and down between here and the lightbox in the studio, so she sits on the floor, holding the negatives up to the angled light from her phone, hoping to illuminate their subjects. But she cannot see enough. She has not been able to see enough this whole time. There are huge vistas inaccessible to her.

  She goes on searching, rifling and reordering, spreading files across the floor in between the shelves. Benny’s words at the
cottage echo in her mind, about all the enemies he could have made in his life.

  She pictures his visceral despatches from Northern Ireland in the late seventies. The years he spent in Central and South America in the eighties with the drug gangs and paramilitary warlords, sometimes dodging their bullets, sometimes insinuating himself into their circle. She thinks of his part in shining a light on the war crimes in the Balkans in the nineties, of the searing images of concentration camps and mass graves.

  There could be a dozen, scores, hundreds of people on Benny’s list of enemies. Unless she can find the man she killed, a photograph of any of these other people will not help her.

  She opens a box and finds it full of personal films from the late nineties, this time prints, not negatives. It’s portraits of family and friends in punchy Kodak colours. At first, it’s of people she doesn’t know and has never seen before. Then she finds one of Genevieve, her head thrown back in laughter in a way that feels at odds with the persona that Amber knows. And there is one of Freddie in the heyday of her strange beauty. Her hands are piling up her red hair on her head, and her face is a little dipped, her eyes burning into the camera. What is that look? A sort of defiant sultriness. Freddie the woman who introduced her to Benny. Freddie at the funeral. Freddie still close to the family, but with strange unresolved feelings for Benny and against his wife.

  And in amongst all these, Amber is surprised to find one of Kay leaning against a green door, a sardonic half-smile on her face, a cigarette in her hand. Like Genevieve, she looks different. Facial features that are sharp on the woman Amber knows look fine, almost delicate. Her eyes, which are now ringed with crow’s feet, are clear and bright in the photo. Amber hears Kay’s voice in her head from their conversation in the car, and wonders if there was an edge of pain when she spoke about Benny that didn’t quite match with a glancing acquaintance.

  A guttural sound comes out of Amber’s throat, desperate at the suspicion she now has for everything and everyone. She is grasping, helpless. She lies back on the floor, surrounded by everything and by nothing, close to tears, her energy sapped.