Someone Is Lying

by Jenny Blackhurst

  But none of those things had physically hurt anyone. They were small, petty acts of revenge – no one had died.

  Except, this time, someone had.

  She twisted the hem of her shirt around and around in her fingers, wrapping the thin material about her index finger until the tip went pink. Every time the door swung open, clanging against the wall and making such a noise she thought it was coming off its hinges, Miranda’s head snapped up. The final time she looked up, the pretty PC with the blonde hair was walking through.

  ‘Mrs Davenport, I’m told you have some information regarding the death of Erica Spencer.’

  ‘Yes, I, erm . . .’ Suddenly this didn’t feel like such a good idea. In fact, it felt like a terrible one.

  The woman looked at her and narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t say anything here,’ she instructed. ‘Come with me.’

  She turned so sharply that Miranda had to leap to her feet to follow her. Where were they going?

  You’re going to be interviewed, arrested probably. Take a good look around, Miranda. This might be the last thing you see as a free woman. She wished with a sudden ferocity that she had said a proper goodbye to her children. That she had kissed them for so long that they would remember the touch of her lips for ten to fifteen years. She’d barely spoken to Alex on the way out of the door, afraid that she would blurt out that she wasn’t going to the shop, that she was turning herself in. Would he have tried to stop her? Would he have cried, knowing what she was doing for him? How different would all this have been if she had just been honest?

  The PC had picked up speed now, apparently oblivious to the fact that Miranda had no clue where they were going. She hurried after her, down a long thin corridor, like the one in that film the kids used to love, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory , a corridor that got thinner and thinner until it pressed in on you from all sides and you couldn’t breathe.

  Miranda couldn’t breathe.

  37

  The September sunshine shone brightly through the trees, making Felicity squint every time Amalie came back down to earth. Felicity gave her daughter a hard push, and she sailed up into the sky again. ‘Higher, Mummy!’ Amalie squealed with delight. ‘Higher!’

  ‘How has this week been?’ she asked Karla as she gave Amalie another shove towards the sky.

  Karla sighed. ‘Zach’s been really quiet this week.’ She watched Mollie digging with her hands in the dirt underneath the tree at the bottom of the garden. ‘I’ve asked him if there is anything wrong, but he won’t talk to me. I get the feeling it must be something to do with the podcast. I bet all the kids in his class are talking about it and his murderous parents.’

  Felicity sighed. ‘I feel so lucky that the girls are too young to know anything is going on,’ she said. ‘Although, unfortunately, that isn’t the same for the mothers. Did you hear about what happened to Miranda? I heard one of the other mothers say that she’d been forced to park on the street with the rest of the commoners. She was practically gleeful about it.’

  Karla nodded. ‘I heard too. It’s like everyone’s just been waiting for something like this to happen. I also thought we were part of the community there, even though we lived in here. That’s what I liked about this place. We just always felt like part of the family. Now it seems like everyone I thought was my friend was just waiting for us to be torn down in one way or another.’

  ‘It’s human nature, I’m afraid. I’ve been lucky to miss most of it because the girls go to breakfast club so early, but at pickup I still get the sense that every time I walk over to a group of people, they’ve been talking about it.’

  ‘They need to find something else to talk about,’ Karla snarled. ‘But to tell you the truth, if it weren’t happening to us, we’d be talking about it too.’

  Felicity shrugged in agreement. ‘You’re right, I know you’re right. It just seems so unfair. No one is willing to ask us outright what they want to know. It’s like we have no right of reply. We just have to be accused of these awful things, and we can’t put our side across, for fear of looking even guiltier.’

  ‘Actually,’ Karla started, concentrating all of her attention on the nail she was chewing off, ‘in the spirit of just asking, there was something I wanted to ask you. Something about the last podcast . . .’

  ‘It’s about the girls’ father, isn’t it?’ Felicity looked as though she’d been waiting to have this conversation, ready for the moment someone asked. ‘I wondered if anyone had noticed that, should have known it would be you. You want to know if I know who he is.’

  ‘You always just said that he was a one-night stand,’ Karla said, looking uncomfortable. ‘But the podcast made it sound like you know. I know that he’s just clutching at straws. If you tell me you don’t know who their father is, I’ll believe you.’

  Felicity sighed. ‘I wasn’t exactly truthful about not knowing who he is.’ She sniffed and pulled her cardigan closer around her chest. The sun was shining but the day was still cold, or maybe she was just cold. Maybe this whole subject gave her chills. ‘I know his name. In fact, I know everything about him. It wasn’t a one-night stand, Karla, it was an affair. He‘s married.’

  Karla nodded as if she’d been expecting as much. ‘Why didn’t you just tell me?’

  ‘It was a mistake, a huge mistake. The worst kind. The kind that could ruin everything for a person. I just wanted the girls to grow up without the stigma of their father being some kind of liar, and cheat, and awful person.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

  Felicity said nothing.

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Karla said quickly. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to, I mean, I just thought you might want to talk about it.’

  ‘I don’t understand how this person could know.’ Felicity looked at her girls; Amalie was still laughing in delight and demanding to be pushed higher and higher, and Mollie seemed to be looking for Australia. They weren’t listening, and even if they were listening they probably wouldn’t understand, adult relationships were beyond their comprehension at their age. They were too young, too innocent to know that grown-ups could make mistakes.

  ‘I can’t,’ She said, her voice full of regret. She wanted nothing more than to tell someone everything about it, about that whole awful period of her life where she had made so many mistakes. But it wouldn’t just be her life she was ruining. It wasn’t just her secret to keep. ‘He was married, and it was a mistake, that’s all I can say. I came here to start again, to give him another chance.’

  ‘Another chance at what?’ Karla asked.

  ‘Another chance at the life he should have had. Another chance at being a father without the stigma of what we’d done.’

  ‘And how is that working out for you?’ Karla asked, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s not, is it?’ Felicity replied. ‘It just feels like sometimes you can’t escape your past mistakes, no matter how hard you try. You’re just doomed to repeat them, over and over again, until someone finds out. Until someone puts you on trial.’

  ‘You’re not on trial, Felicity,’ Karla said. ‘You made a mistake, you haven’t done anything a million other people haven’t done before you.’

  ‘If only that were true,’ Felicity replied. ‘If only—’

  A shout from the front driveway cut her off mid-sentence.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Karla crossed the garden to the back gate. ‘Alex?’

  ‘Hi, sorry to interrupt.’ Alex appeared in the opening, looking dishevelled and slightly frantic. ‘Have you seen Miranda? She went out this morning, and she’s not answering her phone.’

  ‘No, sorry.’ Karla glanced at Felicity, who had stopped pushing Amalie and shook her head in agreement. ‘Where was she going?’

  ‘To the shops, she said. But that was six hours ago. I’ve called her at least ten times. Do you think I should call the police?’

  Karla and Felicity exchanged worried looks, both clearly thinking of M
ary-Beth.

  And then there were four , Felicity thought grimly. ‘Yes,’ she said out loud. ‘I think you should.’

  38

  ‘So if you could just tell us what time it was that you picked up the woman you now believe to be Mrs King?’

  The man nodded with more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary – it wasn’t as if he’d actually found the woman. ‘Yes, yes, I’ve got it all written down here . . .’ He fumbled in the back pocket of the too-tight jeans that sat uncomfortably underneath a beer belly massively out of proportion to his short, stocky frame. Pulling out a piece of paper folded so many times it should resemble a swan, he smoothed it out on the table in front of him, obscuring the flecks of rolling tobacco clinging to whatever sticky substance coated the surface.

  ‘Here, I wrote it down off the system. It was seven p.m. on Monday the 20th.’

  ‘And where did you pick her up from?’ DC Allan leaned forward and squinted at the paper, but it might as well have been written in Orcish with the state of the hand-writing.

  ‘Cherry Grove Primary School,’ he announced proudly, as though this was some great achievement.

  ‘On Chapel Lane?’ Allan wondered if DS Harvey would try to deny the significance of Cherry Grove Primary School’s location to their case. Would he use this as proof Mary-Beth had run away? From what the taxi driver was saying, Mrs King wasn’t coerced into getting in or out of the taxi in any way.

  ‘That’s right. She was waiting outside the school. I remember because usually I hate going anywhere near them – schools, that is – on account of the roads always being crammed with arsehole parking. Sorry . . .’ He flushed, as if DC Allan hadn’t heard the word ‘arsehole’ before. The detective was just thankful it wasn’t being directed at him, for once.

  ‘No problem. You were saying?’

  Jeff looked confused for a second, then nodded. ‘Oh, yeah. Well, it was okay at that time, wasn’t it? So the road was empty, except for her waiting.’

  ‘And you’re sure it was this woman?’ DC Allan pushed the picture towards Jeff again. He’d had the taxi driver make an identification the minute they had walked into the shoebox taxi-rank office, but he got the impression Jeff had barely looked at it. He’d already convinced himself he had picked up ‘that woman they were all looking for’.

  ‘Yeah, that’s definitely her,’ he said, glancing at the photo briefly.

  ‘Right, thanks. And where did you drop this woman off?’

  ‘Like I said when I called, that’s how I was so certain it was her. She wanted dropping at Dalton campsite. That’s where she’s from, isn’t it? That fancy estate isn’t far from there, right? Severn Oaks?’

  ‘You’ve been really helpful.’ DC Allan stood up. ‘One more question, did the office take a name with the booking?’

  Jeff nodded so vigorously that Allan worried his head would pop off. ‘She said her name was,’ he peered at his origami notes, ‘Spencer. Erica Spencer. That’s not what they called her on the news, though, is it?’

  ‘Let me get this straight – the woman this guy picked up from Chapel Lane said her name was Erica Spencer?’ Harvey ran a hand over his face. ‘Fucksake. The press are going to love this. It doesn’t go any further for now – understood?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Allan, I’m still your superior. Now am I understood?’

  ‘Understood, sir.’ DC Allan nodded, biting his lip.

  Harvey sighed. He felt about ten years older than he had two weeks ago. ‘And he positively ID’d Mary-Beth King?’

  ‘Well, he did the first time, sir. The second time he positively ID’d Jennifer Lopez.’

  Harvey scowled. ‘So we don’t even know that it was her.’

  ‘Except the places he picked her up and dropped her off, they fit, don’t they? Chapel Lane is just a thirty-minute walk from where Mrs King’s car was found at the weir. And Dalton campsite is less than a half-hour walk from Severn Oaks, ten minutes’ drive. Although I don’t understand why she would dump her car and then get a taxi back to where she started.’

  ‘Unless she wanted it to look like she’d jumped in the bloody river. Is this woman having us on? Or is someone else taking the piss out of us?’ He felt like kicking something. Or someone . Allan was the closest. Unfair , he thought. He let out a sigh. ‘All right, good job, Allan. Do you think you could get onto this campsite, see if they have anyone renting a caravan there under the name Spencer, or King – and if there is, tell the receptionist not to alert her. She might have been under our noses the whole frigging time.’

  The door opened and the front desk PC appeared, her cheeks pinkish as if she’d run all the way from the front desk. ‘Sir,’ her breath caught in her throat, ‘there’s someone downstairs confessing to the murder of Erica Spencer.’

  DS Harvey’s heart plummeted into his stomach.

  So here it was, the end of his short career.

  39

  The room was small, with filthy grey walls that looked as though they hadn’t been painted since the days when suspects were allowed to smoke in interview rooms. Miranda wished she could smoke now.

  She sat at the fake pine table, picking at the loose skin around her thumbnail. She was alone in the room, DS Harvey having gone to call the lawyer whose number she had given him when he’d first shown her into the room. She hadn’t even considered that she would need a lawyer, although it seemed apparent the moment he’d asked her if there was anyone she wanted him to inform of her presence. It was as if, with the utterance of the word ‘representation’, the magnitude of her situation had hit her. She was going to be charged with murder.

  Was it murder, though? She’d watched enough TV shows to suspect that her lawyer might argue manslaughter – after all, she’d had no intention of killing Erica Spencer. In fact, she’d had no intention that any harm should come to the other woman at all – but then she hadn’t known a year ago what she strongly suspected today. That her husband was the father of Erica’s unborn baby. In fact, she hadn’t even known there was a baby, and when the news had come via that horrific podcast, she hadn’t for a second suspected that her husband might have had anything to do with Erica or the child. It wasn’t until Cynthia had made her scathing comment that she had realised she must be the last person to know – her husband and Erica were having an affair. And that was when another shocking thought had come to her. What if Erica had told Alex she was pregnant at the party? Would the dawning realisation that his lies were about to be revealed have forced him to do something stupid?

  It was the thought of her husband following Erica into that tree house. Perhaps she had told him that there was something to discuss, or maybe – and this thought made her feel sick – they had arranged to meet for sex, when she uttered the words, ‘I’m pregnant. And it’s yours.’ Miranda could even see the look on Alex’s face, that stupid but beautiful expression he got when he was struggling to compute something she’d said – as if he was trying to work out 3,520,042 ÷ 75 in his head.

  She could picture the scene now.

  They begin to row, Alex yelling at Erica that she’ll have to tell Jack the baby is his. Erica refuses – she’s going to tell everyone what they have been up to. There is a fight and Alex, her husband, the love of her life, shoves Erica. She stumbles backwards, arms flailing, trying to grab hold of something before losing her footing, the alcohol in her system making it impossible for her to regain her balance.

  That was the vision that had propelled her to the police station this morning.

  ‘Miranda?’

  Miranda jumped to her feet, her hip smashing against the table. ‘Oh!’ Her face crumpled and her eyes filled with tears. It didn’t even hurt that much, but the combination of the sudden pain to her hip and the arrival of their family solicitor, a friendly face in a hostile environment, was too much.

  ‘Rob, thank God you’re here.’

  Robert Lavistock sat down next to her and laid his briefcase on the table. H
e pulled out a yellow pad and looked Miranda square in the eye.

  ‘You’re better off getting the duty solicitor,’ were the first words out of his mouth. Miranda went to object, but he held up a finger. ‘I’m not a criminal lawyer. They told me on the phone you’re here to confess to a murder? Does Alex know about this?’

  Miranda shook her head. ‘No. I don’t want you to leave me. Will you stay with me for the interview?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rob admitted. ‘I’ve sat in on a few interviews before, but it’s crucial I advise you to get proper representation. Tell me everything, and I’ll decide if I can get you out of this mess.’

  40

  ‘Peter, it’s DC Allan.’

  The words made him feel sick. Despite the fact that DC Allan had been updating him regularly on the progress of the investigation into Mary-Beth’s disappearance, this time his voice sounded different.

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. But we’ve had a lead that I want your help to look into. Do you know any reason why Mary-Beth might have gone to the Dalton campsite?’

  ‘The one just down the road?’ Peter shook his head, then remembered that the officer couldn’t see him. ‘No, why would we go there? If we were going to have a holiday, we would hardly drive ten minutes down the road for one.’