Someone Is Lying

by Jenny Blackhurst

  ‘His mum has checked with all the friends she knows of, and we’ve followed up. She, um . . . she feels there may have been a connection to Mary-Beth King in some way.’

  ‘A connection how?’

  ‘Like there may have been something going on between them. Tristan was last seen the night before Mary-Beth disappeared, and he hasn’t been seen by any of his friends or by his parents since.’

  ‘Right. Anything else linking them together?’

  ‘Nothing, sir.’

  ‘Fine. Anything else?’

  The podcast sat between them like a clandestine affair.

  ‘I don’t think we can ignore the links to Erica Spencer, sir.’

  ‘What links would those be, sergeant?’

  His voice held a hint of steel. The last name DCI Barrow wanted to hear was Erica Spencer’s. It was the same voice Harvey had heard his DCI use less than twelve months ago when he had encouraged – and that word was being generous – a keen trainee PC Harvey to submit an accidental death report to the coroner. We don’t need a scandal involving the Kaplans.

  ‘Erica Spencer pulled Tristan from a river three years ago – we are still looking into the circumstances as to how they were both by the river at the same time. Then there’s the podcast—’

  ‘Fuck the podcast,’ DCI Barrow said, his voice even. ‘It’s just some idiot who knows nothing about the investigation that went on into the original incident. Have we got any actual evidence that Erica was pushed?’

  ‘No, sir, but—’

  ‘But what, DS Harvey?’

  He had never heard his name spoken like a threat before.

  ‘There were the inconsistencies at the time, if you remember, sir. The photograph that showed Erica wearing flat pumps when she was found in heels, the blood found in the tree house that matched Erica’s—’

  ‘A tiny amount of blood that was probably transferred there by the investigating officer,’ Barrow said. The implication was clear – Harvey had been the investigating officer. ‘And what woman do you know who doesn’t change constantly? My wife changed outfits twice during our New Year’s Eve party. Neither of those things on their own warrant a full criminal investigation, and the media circus that surrounds it. That was your conclusion, was it not?’

  Harvey took a deep but unnoticeable breath. He knew that arguing was futile. And yet, if DC Allan had the courage to question every decision he made, why could he not do the same to his superior? Was Allan just ballsier than he had been?

  ‘Under your instruction, sir. I now believe that we may have been too hasty in closing the case. I’m recommending that we open a new investigation into Erica Spencer’s death.’

  Barrow looked as though he’d just eaten something disgusting. ‘Reopen the investigation? On the strength of some podcast? We’d be a fucking laughing stock, and you know it, you fucking idiot. Every dickhead with a computer and a microphone would be demanding we reopen cases from years back – and when I say we I mean the rest of the team, because none of us would be here to see it. I don’t want,’ DCI Barrow rose from his desk, ‘to hear you so much as think loudly that we made a mistake on the Erica Spencer death, am I clear on that? Because if I do, you will be back in uniform faster than you could fall from a tree house.’

  Argue back , a voice told him. Make your case. Be a fucking man.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he heard himself say. ‘I understand, sir.’

  48

  Peter stared at the phone in his hand. It felt warm, although he knew that was impossible – it hadn’t been used in weeks. He was desperate to turn it on, he had been weighing up the pros and cons in his mind constantly all morning. He needed to know if his wife had left any links to Tristan Patterson, and her phone seemed like the only way to find out. He’d searched her office and come up with nothing, her social media equally as unyielding. They hadn’t been friends – he’d never even seen them speak to one another, save for holding up a hand as the young lad drove by. Felicity had been genuinely shocked that she’d never made the connection between the young barista serving her every morning and their neighbour, although she had no reason to know him. Like typical teenagers, Tristan had avoided any get-together that involved spending time with his parents, and Felicity had moved into the community in the winter – a time when the sociability of the summer months was swapped in favour of early nights in front of the fire. She’d only spent one summer in Severn Oaks before this one, and had probably never been introduced to the boy who would turn their lives upside down.

  Would the police be able to track it if Mary-Beth’s phone was turned on, even for a second? He was fairly sure that they could only get a location if he actually made a call from it – he’d listened to Serial , so he knew about the unreliability of phone tower evidence. The problem was that his only experience of these kinds of things was from programmes like CSI , where they knew within seconds if the perpetrator made a mistake. He was fairly confident that, in real life, policing didn’t work like that; it was a slow, arduous process without all the special effects. But not sure enough to risk his freedom. There was another option, of course.

  He could feel the eyes of the street on him as he got into his car. The house at the end of the street was still cordoned off but no police presence remained there now. The curtains of Tristan Patterson’s house were closed, the house shrouded by an air of grief.

  Cameras flashed as he pulled out of Severn Oaks, viperous faces shoving themselves against the passenger windows, microphones held outstretched, their owners desperate for any comment from within the walls. Peter kept his eyes fixed ahead as he accelerated steadily until he was away from the prying eyes, then put his foot down.

  He didn’t know where he was going but as the car whipped past the Cheshire countryside, still a luscious green, he began to feel himself relax. The further he drove from Severn Oaks – those claustrophobic walls, the police cars and suspicious eyes – the more he felt the heavy sensation inside his chest dissolve. When all this was over, he decided, he was leaving Cheshire for good. Would Felicity come with him? Maybe not before all this – she wouldn’t have wanted to uproot the girls from their school or leave the home and business she had worked so hard for. But now? Possibly. If they both came out of this unscathed and un-incarcerated, which was looking less likely by the day.

  The ringing of his mobile cut in over the sound of the radio, making him jump. There was no name on the console – number withheld. The police. Peter cut the call off guiltily, as if DC Allan could see what he was doing right now.

  He did feel bad about DC Allan. While DS Harvey seemed suspicious of everything he said, Allan seemed to actually believe him, and want to help.

  He couldn’t think about that now. He had to drive as far away as possible and turn on Mary-Beth’s phone to find out what, if anything, there was to discover on it.

  Peter drove for nearly forty minutes before pulling into the grounds of a disused garage off the main road. He felt certain there would be no CCTV here, the place was a wreck. The glass front was completely smashed, the paint almost completely peeled away from the rotting boards. The road had a 60mph speed limit, and traffic going past would be travelling too fast to notice anything about him.

  Pulling the phone from under the passenger seat, Peter took a final glance around and pressed the power button. The Samsung logo appeared on the screen, then the excruciating wait while the phone loaded and scanned for a signal.

  Within a couple of minutes the phone was beeping almost continuously. Messages from friends, missed-call alerts, emails, all flooded in. Peter opened the message folder and began scrolling through, careful not to open any of the new messages. He saw names he recognised: Karla, Felicity, Alina, Mum, Hannah. Nothing out of the ordinary. He wanted desperately to click on the messages from Hannah, intimate musings from daughter to mother that Peter imagined must have turned into desperate pleas for her mother to get in touch. That was the real reason why he had let Mary-Beth’s mum look after
the children – yes, he was constantly busy with the police, and home wasn’t the best environment now – but the real reason was that he didn’t want to see his children’s faces, he didn’t want to look into his daughter’s eyes.

  Peter wiped away a tear with the back of his hand and took a deep breath. He had to get this done quickly. He clicked on the contacts in his wife’s phone and scrolled until he got to the T’s. No Tristan there, although of course she could have saved his number under any of the names in there. Going back to the messages, he scrolled down to the ‘read’ ones from before Mary-Beth went missing. There were several texts from his wife to an unknown number.

  I KNOW IT’S YOU.

  YOU HAVE TO STOP.

  WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?

  There was one reply.

  WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?

  Then nothing more.

  Peter clicked on Mary-Beth’s emails but found nothing but work stuff and PTA nonsense. If any more exchanges between Mary-Beth and the unknown number existed, he couldn’t find them. He turned off the phone and tossed it out of the window, started the car and drove over it – one, two, three times – until only pieces of his wife’s phone remained on the tarmac.

  49

  ‘Any news on Patterson’s car yet?’ Harvey asked, not needing to look up to know that the shadow across his desk was DC Allan. Mainly because the man never seemed to go home.

  ‘None, sir. We’ve had the email and bank record reports back – nothing on there that suggests where he might have gone. No hotel bookings or car hire, and his cards haven’t been used since the Sunday he was last seen. It’s not looking good, sir.’

  ‘Sit down,’ Harvey gestured to the seat opposite him, ‘this is all good work, thanks, constable.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘No, I mean it.’ Harvey cleared his throat. ‘I realise I might have . . . well, I . . . perhaps I gave the impression that Mrs King’s disappearance wasn’t important. When of course it is. And what with the podcast, and Tristan Patterson disappearing, I suppose I’m just trying to say that I appreciate the time you’re putting in.’

  DC Allan looked like he might puke with pride and Harvey was glad he’d said it. As much as his tenacity frustrated Harvey sometimes, DC Allan was a good officer, and he still remembered how it felt at the start of your career, before you realised that police work was as much politics as it was actual investigation.

  ‘Do you think he might be with Mary-Beth King?’ Allan asked.

  Harvey sighed. ‘Honestly? Until we spoke to his mum and dad there was no indication from anyone that Mary-Beth was seeing anyone else – let alone a young lad. I find it hard to believe that they would have been able to carry on an affair, and none of their neighbours knew about it – not in a place like Severn Oaks. But I’ve seen it before, people carrying on with their brother- or sister-in-law, husband’s best friend, and no one being any the wiser. Besides, the people in Severn Oaks have never been forthcoming with their information – they are the kind of people who would lie to your face to protect their own backs.’

  ‘If Tristan and Mary-Beth were having an affair then Peter King would be the number one suspect in their disappearances, right?’

  ‘Either that, or they’ve done a runner together. But in the real world people don’t just get to disappear and start a new life without leaving a shred of evidence. They slip up, call their family – she has children, for Christ’s sake – or use their bank cards. In the days or weeks leading up to the disappearance you’d usually find increasing withdrawals from bank accounts, and bookings for hotels or a ferry or whatever. If they have run away together, they are two of the cleverest runaways I’ve ever come across.’

  ‘Do you think they just might be the cleverest runaways you’ve come across?’

  DS Harvey shook his head. ‘Between you and me? I think we’ll be opening a murder inquiry by the end of the week.’

  50

  ‘The search continues for missing Severn Oaks resident, Tristan Patterson. Tristan was reported missing by his mother after he failed to return home from a friend’s house where he was believed to be staying. Severn Oaks, home to celebrity couple —’

  ‘Oh God, turn it off.’ Miranda paced the room, stopping every few seconds to twitch the living-room curtains, which were still closed. She could only just see the corner of the street where a police car now sat outside the Patterson’s house.

  ‘Not going to go and confess to that one as well then?’ Alex snapped, but he flicked off the TV as requested.

  Miranda had been waiting for this. They had barely spoken two sentences to one another since Alex had picked her up from the police station nine days ago when she had been – shudder – released on bail. Following her confession, Miranda had been arrested for administration of a noxious substance and released pending charges. Her solicitor had advised that there was still a slight chance that she could be charged with manslaughter, but it looked unlikely. The police would have to prove that Erica had been entirely unaware that she was drinking alcohol, and that the alcohol given to her by Miranda specifically caused her to fall out of the tree house. At this point, he’d suggested, it was impossible to prove how much alcohol Erica had drunk of her own accord, as well as how much – if any – of the spiked drink Miranda had served her. He argued that it was entirely possible that Erica had known that Miranda had given her alcohol and drank it anyway, in which case all she was guilty of was serving a drink. Erica might even have thrown it away. All they had was an anonymous voice on a podcast to suggest that Erica had given up alcohol, and no evidence to support the claim. All in all, it was unlikely the police would press any charges at all.

  She was relieved, in a way, that he had finally brought it up now. He’d been sullen, only speaking to her when the children were around, and it had been almost unbearable. She’d spent most of the time in her bedroom – the room that Alex hadn’t been sharing since her arrest.

  ‘Very funny. Are you going to stay mad at me for ever? It was stupid of me to spike her drink, I know that.’

  Alex looked at her, his mouth half open. ‘You think that’s why I’m mad at you? Because you got someone drunk at a party?’

  ‘Why else?’

  Alex stood up. ‘Perhaps because you went to the police to confess to murder without even talking to me first? They could have locked you up, Miranda, you thought they were going to charge you with murder. Didn’t you think for a second what that would do to the kids? What it would do to me? To have you taken away from us and locked up for God knows how long? I would . . . I wouldn’t . . .’ He shook his head and made a strangled noise in his throat. ‘And you didn’t even bother to tell me.’

  ‘Because you would have convinced me not to go,’ Miranda said, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘Of course I bloody would!’ Alex looked livid. ‘What good does it do for you to tell the police after all this time? Did it bring Erica back? It didn’t change anything for anyone other than us.’

  ‘Not us,’ Miranda whispered. ‘You . I went for you. I thought that once the police had my confession they would stop, the podcaster would stop.’

  ‘And what difference would that make to—? Oh fuck, no, Miranda. You thought . . .’ His handsome face creased in pain. ‘You think I killed Erica? That’s why you wanted the police to stop investigating, so they would stop looking for me?’

  Miranda didn’t speak, she didn’t need to. This was it, Alex knew now why she’d done what she’d done. Her marriage was over.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be furious that you think I could push Erica out of a tree house, or flattered that you’d confess to murder to cover up for me.’ He paced the floor. ‘Why the hell would you think I’d do something so horrific? What was the motive you dreamed up for me?’

  This was the bit Miranda had been dreading. Because the minute she told him the reason why she’d confessed, she’d have to see his face, and she’d know the truth – and he’d know that she knew
Erica Spencer was carrying his baby. Right now they could still pretend – while it was unspoken – but not once it was out there. She’d have to demand to know how long it had been going on, and – however painful – if he’d loved her. If he’d been in love with the woman across the road who was pregnant with his baby. Then she’d have to forgive him, if he even wanted her forgiveness, but she would be left wondering if he was only with her because Erica was dead. Nothing would ever be the same.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Because of the baby,’ she said, her words barely audible. ‘Because of Erica’s baby.’

  ‘But what does Erica’s baby have to do with . . .?’ Realisation dawned. ‘You think it was mine?’ He looked disgusted and heartbroken. ‘Is that what you think of me?’

  Miranda was stunned. She’d readied herself for a denial – of course she hadn’t expected him to just come out and admit that the baby was his – but she hadn’t expected his denial to be so convincing.

  ‘Cynthia Elcock said . . . and I thought everyone knew . . .’

  Alex crossed over to her and held out his arms. Miranda folded herself into him, too relieved to speak.

  ‘I love you, Mim,’ he said, using the special nickname only he had ever called her by. ‘I might be working a lot to keep your nails looking perfect, and I might drink too much at parties and make jokes like I’m a stupid hormonal teenager, but I thought under all that exasperated tutting you liked me like that. I thought it was boyish charm.’

  ‘You were listening to that podcast and I heard you, Alex – you were crying! And you came home early stinking of alcohol. Because you’d found out about the baby . . .’

  ‘I lost my job, Miranda.’ Alex let out a breath, and his face crumpled.

  Miranda couldn’t understand. ‘You what? Don’t be ridiculous, that was ages ago, and you’ve been going to work every day.’