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

by O. C. S. Francis

  When she finishes, no one can say anything. Genevieve looks shell-shocked. Yvey is shifting uncomfortably. The facts of Benny’s death, his infidelity, the man Amber killed at the cottage two decades ago — all of it seems too big to grapple with.

  Genevieve’s gaze swings towards her daughter, who is standing now, propped up against the desk where the computer sits. While Amber has been talking, Yvey has quietly slipped the envelope back into her satchel bag. She holds it now in one hand at her hip.

  ‘Yvette, could you give Amber and I some time alone?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere. Don’t you get it? I’ve been right all along. Dad was going to tell everyone about what happened at the cottage, but got killed before he had the chance. And why else was I mugged for my phone? Because someone’s worried about what I know.’

  Genevieve is lost for a response, as if still fighting with everything she has learned. Then abruptly she stands and in a quick motion grabs onto Yvey’s satchel bag. But her daughter won’t release it, and they are both pulling at it.

  Yvey is shouting No! over and over like a stuck record. The bag slips from her hand, and she only has a hold on the thin strap. She tries to strike out at Genevieve with one hand, but it just lets her mother get a better grip.

  Then Yvey is kicking, unbalanced. Genevieve gives a last tug and has the satchel. She backs off, putting the table between herself and her daughter. Yvey is looking around for something, a wild look in her eyes.

  Then the girl is still again. Not defeated, but no longer on the offence. She stands with her legs apart, her breath beating up and down in her chest.

  ‘Don’t look. You can’t.’ She is defiant, but with an edge of pleading.

  ‘Enough!’ It’s like a bark that comes out of Genevieve. And with it, all of her tense, poised control and gritty patience is gone. It is as if the shock wave of everything that happened all those years ago is only just now reaching her. ‘Don’t you ever tell me what I can and can’t do.’

  Yvey gulps at a response, but can’t find anything. Then she is in motion again, running across the studio floor. She goes past Amber through the open doorway, half bouncing off the frame, the glass vibrating. Amber starts to go after her.

  ‘Leave her!’ Genevieve commands, and Amber freezes. Genevieve opens the satchel sharply and pulls out the envelope. She spreads its contents across the lightbox and turns it on.

  There are strips and strips of negatives, perhaps a dozen films’ worth. Genevieve is sliding her hands through them, then leaning into a strip to examine it. Then another and another. Frame after frame after frame.

  ‘Bastard!’ she breathes. She takes a handful of the negative strips and throws them out in front of her. They twist and flip in the air, falling to the table. Then she stretches out her hands into the fallen film and swipes them all off the table with a wordless shout.

  The silence that follows thrums in the cold studio. Genevieve sits down at the desk and slumps forward a little.

  Amber reaches down to the floor for one of the negatives and examines it on the light box. It is of a naked woman. Amber drops it and picks up another. Another naked form. She tries one more and already knows what’s on it before she even looks. And there is something she notices about the poses. They are all just that — poses. Their faces are towards the camera. They are sitting, standing, stretching out in front of the lens. They all have in them what Benny’s photos of Amber did not — that willing participation. She knows Yvey will have seen the difference too. She knows it will have fed her fevered questions and theories.

  ‘Did you… did you have any idea? About all this?’

  ‘I’m not a fool.’ There is the cut of venom in Genevieve’s voice. ‘I knew what Benny was like. Everyone knew what he was like.’ She shrugs as if all of secrecy is dead now. ‘I wasn’t always a perfect wife either. But we were a team, you know. Always a good team. You understand that, don’t you?’

  Amber nods, feeling a pang, wanting Johnny here with her, glad that he is not.

  Genevieve waves a hand at the envelope still on the table. ‘But that he collected them. It’s just so humiliating. And the things he did to you and made you do. How do you grieve someone you love and hate all at the same time?’

  ‘Did you never suspect about me and Benny?’ Amber asks, a small flicker inside her clinging onto the idea that Genevieve has always known and has already forgiven her.

  ‘Not you, no. I didn’t put it past him. But you, Amber, no, I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘That’s what Benny thought. He said you liked me too much to suspect.’

  Genevieve grunts unobligingly. ‘Huh. No, it wasn’t really that. I did like you, that’s true. But I’ve liked other women Benny liked. No, it was you and Johnny. I trusted that. I didn’t think you’d betray him.’ Her words twist in Amber. ‘I thought you were…’

  ‘Better than that?’

  ‘Smarter than that.’ Genevieve breathes out slowly through her nose, her lips pursed.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Stop apologising. I don’t want your goddamn apology.’ The fight inside her is all over her face — a moment of searing grief and anger. But Amber recognises another feeling in there. It is a desire to know the truth about what happened all those years ago, and whether Yvey is right, that someone did kill her husband.

  Genevieve gets up from her chair and starts to collect all the negatives together. She begins to lay them out on the lightbox again, examining them more closely this time. There is a methodical patience to how she seems to be recording each face. Amber doesn’t doubt that there are friends of hers in here, enemies too. A portfolio of betrayal.

  ‘Please, don’t do this to yourself.’

  Genevieve gives her a sharp look. ‘You don’t see, do you? I only just realised, but it’s very clear now. It was late 2001, you said, at the cottage. The second weekend in November. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that sounds right.’

  ‘And it was a last-minute invitation, yes?’

  ‘Uh… I guess. It was always last-minute with Benny.’

  ‘That Sunday was the day I told Benny I was pregnant with Yvette. That’s why I remember the date so clearly. It was me who was supposed to be at the cottage that weekend. Yes, he took me there too, you know.’ She shakes her head. ‘But I had to go away at short notice. I remember now when I saw Benny, he had bruises all over the side of his face. Some story about falling off a ladder, which was believable enough, given what a state this place was in. But the way you described what happened, how the intruder punched Benny away, then went for you. If he wanted to kill Benny, he wouldn’t have done that. You can see that, can’t you?’

  Amber does see. The intruder had not knifed Benny and sought to make his escape. He had not killed Benny, then attempted to silence her. She sees the rest of the piece now, even before Genevieve says it out loud.

  ‘That man Finn. He wasn’t trying to kill Benny or you. He was trying to kill me. And he thought you were me. And my darling husband, that absolute shit of a man, was in on the plan. That was what he wanted to confess.’

  54

  Benny

  Thursday, 23 August 2001

  I was drunk, and I was angry with Gen. It’s not a defence, but it’s something you should know. Did I mean what I said that night? I meant it for the seconds I was saying it. I could imagine it. But there’s a difference between meaning something and doing it. All the same, I did say the words.

  It was months before it happened, before that weekend at Tim’s cottage. Late August 2001, the end of that summer when nothing seemed to happen in the world. Before that day in September that burnt it all up.

  I was drinking at a secluded little bar where no one I knew went. I was with an old friend. Drinks with her had become a quiet little fixture. She always said yes when I asked and never stood me up. I enjoyed the honesty I had found with her — in a relative sense of the word.

  When I’d first known her, there ha
d been a certain flirtation to our relationship, but it was an unemotional dalliance, as if every entendre had a layer of irony over it.

  It was true we had slept together a couple of times in the first few years I’d known her. Careless, drunken couplings. After the second time, she had made a faltering suggestion we might make a regular occasion of it, but we both laughed it off when I reminded her I’d just got engaged. And we went back to how we were. I appreciated that kind of unusual constancy in my life.

  I got another round in. The more I drank, the angrier I got about Gen. I’d had another stupid argument with her about that bloody farmhouse. I didn’t even want to be talking about her, but my friend kept asking, probing into the state of my marriage. I should have left it alone. Because when Gen and I weren’t living on top of each other, it worked well. We were a good team. But that summer, our lives were crushing together. I felt like one of those Japanese watermelons being grown in a box to force my well-rounded life into an ornamental square. I was becoming part of one of her collections.

  And then there was Amber.

  Nothing had happened with her by August. I had mostly seen her in company: those long boozy London dinners with that stringy would-be rock-star boyfriend of hers. But there had also been a few times of just her and me. Coffee, talk of photography and careers, aimless walks along the South Bank, neither of us admitting what we were feeling underneath.

  I couldn’t get her out of my head.

  That night in the bar, I was trying to obliterate the feeling with alcohol. I must have thought it was also a good idea to obliterate it with sex. I know they say you shouldn’t sleep with your friends, but I’ve always found it depends on the friend. I’ve found a lot of them can be remarkably civilised about it. The friend sitting opposite me certainly had been on previous occasions.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  ‘If it’s really so bad,’ my friend was saying, leaning forward a little in her chair, waving the end of her cigarette, ‘you should divorce her.’

  ‘She’d take me to the cleaners, leave me with nothing but my debt. You don’t inherit what Gen has unless your family is good at hanging onto money.’ I made my hand into a claw.

  ‘Well, if you can’t divorce her and still want in on that inheritance…’ She took a long sip of her vodka, then held the glass at her lips and stared at me over it.

  Looking back, it feels almost as if she was willing me to say it, but that’s only with the benefit of hindsight. We were the last people in the room, save for the bar staff and my own reflection looking back at me from a mirrored wall at the end of the room. I said it as half a whisper.

  ‘I could kill the bitch, I suppose.’

  My friend lay next to me on the hotel bed. We were both on our backs, staring at the ceiling. I find it best not to make too much eye contact in these situations. The prelude to what had just happened was uncomplicated. We had stumbled from the bar and fallen into a cab. There had been little in the way of flirtatious overture. It was a simple offer, simply accepted.

  ‘You could, you know,’ she said now, lying on the bed.

  ‘I could what?’

  ‘What you said about your wife.’

  I laughed hard. The idea felt like a release from my thoughts and my awkward sudden soberness.

  ‘How would you do it?’ my friend asked, barely missing a beat.

  I propped myself up on the pillow, leaning into the grimness of the moment. ‘I dunno, take her up to Tim’s cottage for a weekend, kill her and dump her in the sea.’ I thought for a moment, trying to visualise it. The thought gave me a heady mix of revulsion and catharsis. ‘Kind of puts me in the frame.’

  ‘Who’s to say you have to do it?’ She rolled onto her side and looked squarely at me. ‘Everything’s outsourced these days.’

  I almost came back with a quip about how outsourcing was Gen’s department and maybe she should commission her own assassination, but I kept the thought inside. The conversation and the serious, intense look on my friend’s face were making me feel strange.

  I rolled away, looking at the wall for a few moments, then heaved myself out of the bed. My head hurt, and the room rocked around me. I dressed in silence and made for the door.

  My friend was still lying in the bed, still naked, nothing covering her slim form. She looked into me.

  ‘See you soon? We’ll do this again?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I already knew I had made a mistake. I just didn’t know how bad it was.

  55

  Amber

  Genevieve continues to sort through the negatives, laying them out in front of her like a strange game of patience. There is something a little missing in her face, as if the last few minutes have broken something inside her. Amber sits there dumbly, almost too frightened to speak. Genevieve breaks the silence.

  ‘You can see now why my husband was so determined to cover up the murder. Not so I wouldn’t find out about the affair, not because he was trying to protect you. Yvette was right. Benny was talking on the phone to someone he’d shared a secret with all this time.’

  ‘But if he was expecting that man, why bring me to the cottage? If he knew about a plan to kill you, why not call a halt to it when you couldn’t come? And Benny wanting you dead? Why not try again? You’ve been married for all this time.’

  Genevieve shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t explain. Back then, we were at our lowest. We would fight for days. It all felt like a terrible mistake. I’m sure even I threatened to kill him at least once. But I didn’t mean it. Of course I didn’t mean it. I never thought he might. But when I told him I was pregnant, he changed. He really did.’

  Genevieve touches her stomach, as if her pregnancy with Yvey was only yesterday. ‘Or I thought he did. But he loved our daughter. I’m sure of that.’ But she doesn’t sound sure and is close to tears again. She pulls it back, clamping down control on her emotions. ‘So whatever he had cooked up went disastrously wrong. And afterwards… remorse, learning I was pregnant, I can’t say…’

  The emotion wins over again, and her whole body starts to shake, like someone shivering after a plunge into cold water. She hunches down over her knees for a second. Then, as if by a great force of will, her body stills itself.

  Amber gestures at the negatives. ‘Do you think the person Benny was talking to that night was one of these women? Is there someone you suspect?’

  Genevieve looks defeated. ‘I don’t know what I was expecting to find.’

  ‘But some of them are people you know?’

  ‘A few. But you’ve seen them. They’re all like you were. Young and stupid.’ There is more sadness than venom in her words. She looks away from Amber, out towards the clearing — or rather just at their reflections in the glass, darkness now all around them. ‘I shouldn’t have let Yvette go off like that.’

  ‘We have to call the police, don’t we? About all of this.’ Amber knows it is only a matter of time now. The process they are going through to try to find a grain of truth in these pictures is just putting off the inevitable.

  ‘I am sorry, Amber.’ Genevieve is shaking her head, but her tone is inconclusive. She gets up and walks towards the studio door. ‘I can give you a little more time.’ She casts a hand towards the computer and the scanner as if she is batting off a fly. ‘But I’m finished here. There’s nothing else I want to see. I need to find my daughter.’ She goes out into the night, closing the door behind her as if sealing a tomb.

  Amber sits in the silence, Genevieve’s words echoing around her. A little more time. What did that mean to her? Amber has had so much of it: all these years and she’s said nothing. What is she supposed to do with a few more minutes or hours? Run? Warn the people in her life what is about to happen to her? Take the same way out Genevieve used to believe Benny did? All of the years, all of the lies, all of the secrets are crushing down on her.

  Slowly she starts to tidy up around her, as if sorting the archive is still her job. This displac
ement is all she can do to stop herself from collapse.

  When the table is almost clear, she finds two more strips of negatives from the film Benny took, although she doesn’t realise at first they are of her: there is no clear figure in them.

  She holds them against the lightbox, her eye on the magnifier. Then she sees. They are of her body, but not all of her. They are taken from every angle and position, closer and closer, more and more intrusive. They are anatomical, like an autopsy or crime scene photographs. Benny has dismembered her with his camera.

  She sits back, wanting to throw up. But there are two more pictures at the end of the last strip, these ones not of her. The first she immediately recognises as the hasty hip-level snap of Finn Gallagher.

  After that, there is just one more. This one is less clear in negative — a series of geometric shapes. Amber quickly puts it through the scanner and sends it to the computer. It is a photograph of a door at the top of a short flight of steps. Off-kilter and imperfectly focused. Not a door Amber knows. It is not the cottage, not the farmhouse, not Benny’s London pad. It is not the capture of a vanishing moment meant for eternity. It is just the last on the roll, haphazardly clicked.

  Amber takes out her phone, trying to think what to do next. What is there left? In her notifications, she sees a message has come through whilst she was playing out the grim theatre with Genevieve and Yvey. It is Kay.

  How you getting on? You need backup?

  Amber puts the phone away, unanswered. There is nothing she wants to say to Kay, and no help her friend can give her.

  She goes to turn the computer off for a final time. The last photograph is still there on the screen: fat white balustrades leading up to a door, and a thick white arch above it. The mid-grey tone of the black-and-white photograph could be any number of colours. There is a door-knocker at its centre, with a touch of Art Deco about the design.