Someone Is Lying

by Jenny Blackhurst

  ‘I see what you’re getting at but Felicity and I had nothing to do with Mary-Beth going missing! It’s hardly the way I wanted things to turn out.’ Peter wanted to get out of there, the walls were closing in on him, Allan’s questioning harsher than it had been before. This was all wrong.

  ‘But if Felicity knew that podcast was going to come out, that your secrets were no longer safe . . .’

  Peter stood up. ‘We’re done here,’ he announced, waving a hand at DC Allan. ‘And if you want to speak to my daughter, you’ll need to contact my lawyer.’

  60

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Karla asked, passing Felicity a mug of tea.

  Her friend sighed. ‘Okay, I mean we both know it could have been worse. But I don’t suppose it makes things any easier for Peter. He was furious last night, I’ve never seen him so angry. It scared me a bit.’

  ‘Does he know who the podcaster is?’

  Felicity shrugged. ‘If he does, he hasn’t told me. But I’m starting to think there’s a lot he isn’t telling me.’

  ‘Funny,’ Karla mused, wrapping her hands around her own mug. ‘Because I thought the same about you last night.’

  Felicity groaned. ‘I’m so sorry, Karla. I wanted to tell you of all people, but it wasn’t just my secret. Peter didn’t want anyone else knowing before Mary-Beth. He really was going to tell her, I think, and he thought it would be twice as hurtful if other people knew before her.’

  ‘Erica knew, though. How do you think she found out?’

  Felicity shook her head. ‘That woman watched everything . I caught her hiding behind my bins once – she said she’d dropped something. If Mary-Beth even so much as hinted she thought Peter was hiding something, Erica would have wanted to know what it was. She was relentless.’

  ‘I know,’ Karla scowled. ‘Of all the people to find out about Marcus’s mother it had to be her. If it had been anyone else, they would have assumed she was a friend or business associate – but Erica wasn’t happy until she knew everything about everyone, was she? Although it seems like there’s perhaps something even she didn’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  Karla gestured her head towards the hallway, where Mollie and Amalie were colouring in the playroom. ‘He never gave away who their dad is. Perhaps Erica didn’t know.’

  ‘I think she did,’ Felicity admitted. ‘But I think she’d only just started her investigations, maybe she hadn’t had time to put it all in her disgusting burn book.’

  ‘What makes you think she knew?’ Karla sat up a bit straighter. If she played this right, she might just be about to find out the answer to the question that had been bugging her for two years.

  ‘Something she said about my age. Oh, don’t look like that, Karla, I’m going to tell you it all now, aren’t I? The thing is, I’m not twenty-nine, like I said. In fact, I’m not even close. I’m twenty-three.’

  Karla nearly dropped her mug. Of all the things she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.

  ‘Why the hell would you lie about that? Most women around here lie to make themselves younger not – oh, wait, twenty-three? Which means you had the twins when you were—’

  ‘Eighteen,’ Felicity confirmed. ‘But I was still seventeen when I got pregnant.’

  ‘And their father?’

  ‘Wasn’t. He was a long way off seventeen, actually. Closer to thirty. He was married.’

  ‘I see . . .’ Karla didn’t really see. What difference did it make that Felicity had been a teenage mum?

  ‘You don’t look like you see. Maybe because you’ve never been looked at with disgust in the street, or in the doctor’s surgery. Maybe your babies have never been mistaken for your siblings. When we moved away, I started learning how to dress older, how to wear my make-up so that I looked mature not trashy. I put on as much weight as my frame could take. And when I first met people here – Erica, as it would happen – she seemed so ready to look down on me that I lied and said I was twenty-seven. Still a young mum, but no younger than she was when she’d had Max. Once I’d lied about my age once, it was easy to do it again.’

  ‘And the girls’ father?’

  ‘Had nothing to do with any of us. I think he might have wanted to, had the circumstances been different. He wasn’t a bad guy, but no one could ever know he’d got me pregnant.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just leave his wife? If he loved you? You were legally old enough, he wouldn’t have been in trouble.’

  ‘Well,’ Felicity looked down into her mug. ‘He would have really. He was my teacher.’

  ‘Holy fuck!’ Karla spat, then looked quickly at the door to the kitchen. No tiny faces appeared. ‘Sorry. I just – your teacher?’

  ‘I was in sixth form, he wasn’t my school teacher. Although he had been. I went to one of those schools where the upper sixth is just part of the secondary school, so he’d been teaching our PE lessons – yes, I know, cliché alert – since I started. But he never even so much as looked at me sideways, or any of the girls, until I was seventeen. I was one of the oldest in my year so I was coming up eighteen. If he hadn’t been my teacher, no one would have been bothered.’

  ‘But he was, Fliss. He massively overstepped the mark. I’m pretty sure he could have gone to prison.’

  ‘That’s what my mum said. It’s why we moved. I didn’t want him to get into trouble – my mum wanted to go to the police but I told her if she did I’d leave and she’d never see me or the twins again. She wasn’t happy, but she also didn’t want her teenage daughter’s name dragged through the press. So we left.’

  ‘You just let him off the hook?’

  ‘Not exactly. He sends me money every month – I’m not sure if his wife knows about that but I wasn’t so proud that I could afford to turn it down. A few years ago I decided that if the twins weren’t going to have a father, I wanted them to at least have a grandad. So I set out to find Peter.’

  ‘And you found him here.’

  ‘Yep. And look where that got us all.’

  61

  There was no point in trying to sleep. Too many thoughts crowded Karla’s mind, too many images of Erica falling through the air, hearing the sickening crunch as she hit the ground. What was going on in Severn Oaks? Where were Mary-Beth and Tristan?

  To make matters worse, her husband was periodically omitting grunts and snorts so ferocious that Karla was certain she felt the bed shudder with each one. With a sigh, she pushed herself out of bed and lifted a jumper from the clean washing pile on the chair. Pulling on some tracksuit bottoms, she gave a low whistle to Gigi who lifted her head, gave an almost amused snort and flopped back on her pillow. ‘Come on, you,’ Karla muttered, scooping the pup into her arms. ‘Don’t you know misery loves company?’

  The night was cold and crisp, so Karla pulled Marcus’s walking jacket from the cupboard and slipped it over her small frame. Fixing Gigi’s lead to her, Karla gave a sharp tug. ‘Come on, dopey. Let’s take a walk. Clears the head. Not that your head is full of anything but chasing rabbits anyhow.’

  A flat, round moon lit up the street. Security beams from the houses flicked on one by one as Karla passed by. The houses themselves were cloaked in darkness, all except the Pattersons’, where their twenty-year-old son was missing from his bed. Karla shivered at the thought of Tristan’s mother and father sitting side-by-side on the sofa, waiting for their son to come home. A picture of Brandon and Zachary, snuggled up in their own beds, flitted through her mind, panic rising as she imagined Brandon’s bed crumpled and empty. Her husband and boys were her life, she couldn’t conceive of not knowing where any of them might be, not knowing if they were alive or dead.

  Gigi gave a tug at the lead, desperate to stretch her little legs now that she had been dragged unceremoniously from her bed. Karla reached down to unclip the lead from her collar. Gigi was allowed to run free, Karla was confident that she wouldn’t go too far – she knew which side her bread was buttered.

  Tonight she skittered ahead, b
olting off to sniff at fallen leaves and then returning to Karla’s side. They rounded the corner together, but the moon wasn’t as bright at the far end of Severn Oaks, and Karla’s chest tightened at the sudden darkness that seeped in around her.

  ‘Come on, Gigi,’ Karla called. ‘Let’s go and get some more milk and watch trash TV. Hopefully that will put me back to sleep.’

  Gigi glanced back and gave a snort. She trotted towards the gate of number seven and began to sniff at the post.

  ‘Fine,’ Karla muttered, shaking her head. ‘You do your business, I’ll wait here.’

  Karla shoved her hands deep into the pockets of Marcus’s coat, her eyes straying to the window of the Pattersons’ house, to the bedroom windows where the curtains remained open. No one would sleep in that house tonight.

  A twitch of the downstairs curtains made Karla snap her head back to where Gigi had been sniffing around.

  Gigi was gone.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Karla muttered, sorely regretting her decision to get some air. Even lying in the darkness listening to Marcus’s impression of a freight train was better than trespassing in her neighbours’ gardens looking for her dog. Not that she had seen the old woman who lived next door to the Pattersons for a while, now she thought of it. Brenda had hardly been the most sociable of the residents of Severn Oaks, but she had sometimes bumped into her walking her own dog, a jumpy Dalmatian called Edwin.

  ‘Gigi,’ Karla hissed, leaning over the fence. ‘Gigi Kaplan, get here right now.’

  The house was in darkness, no car in the drive, but still Karla felt reluctant to open the gate and go into the garden. Six months ago, she’d have thought nothing of it – everyone had been so open and friendly that you knew that if someone was in your garden at midnight they would have a good reason for it. And of course the estate was gated. They were safe behind the gates. That was before the secrets, the lies and the disappearances. Before Erica began exposing them all, even from beyond the grave.

  Still, she had to retrieve Gigi somehow, and the dog wasn’t responding to any of her low, urgent calls, so she leaned over the gate and flipped open the latch.

  ‘Right, you.’ Karla marched over to where Gigi was sniffing. She leaned down to clip on the lead and spotted something silver lying on the grass. A phone. Karla reached out automatically, then withdrew her hand. She stared at it for a second, not knowing what to do. She shouldn’t touch it, not if it might be evidence. But evidence of what? Could this be Tristan’s phone? Probably not – more likely to be Brenda’s – it was in her garden, after all. And she was old, she probably didn’t know anything about Find My iPhone. She nudged it with her foot. It was a new iPhone in a silver case, a black skull on the back. Not exactly Brenda’s style.

  There was only one way to know if this was Tristan’s phone, and it was the last thing Karla wanted to do. Or, she supposed, there was secret option two – she could take Gigi home, crawl into bed beside her snoring husband and try to get back to sleep until morning came, when she could knock on Brenda’s door and let her deal with it. If it wasn’t her phone, she should be the one to decide whether or not to call the police.

  Karla looked up at number seven, at the single lit window in the street, and imagined how Tristan’s parents would be sitting, waiting for any information about their son. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They were clearly awake. She would have to go and speak to them.

  God, she wished Miranda was here. She would love to get involved, insert herself into the drama any way she could. She’d be banging on every house in the street, waving the phone at them, demanding to know who the owner was.

  Dragging Gigi reluctantly behind her, Karla approached number seven. How was she going to bang on the door, knowing that, for even the tiniest second, Janet was going to think her son was home? Or perhaps she would be expecting it to be the police, bearing bad news. Good God.

  ‘Karla?’

  While Karla had been staring at the door, the living-room window had opened a crack.

  ‘Janet. I’m so sorry, I just . . .’

  ‘Wait there.’ The window closed, and Karla waited. A few seconds later the front door opened.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Tristan’s mum looked awful. Angry red bags under her eyes stood out on her pasty white face and her hair hung limply around her cheeks.

  ‘It’s late, Janet. I didn’t know whether or not to come over but I thought you should know.’

  ‘Know what?’ Janet looked confused. ‘Do you know where Tristan is? Did Brandon tell you something?’

  ‘What?’ Karla started at hearing her son’s name. ‘No, sorry. I found a phone in Brenda’s garden. It’s probably Brenda’s but it’s an iPhone and—’

  ‘Show me,’ Janet said. She stepped out of the house and pushed the door almost all the way closed. ‘Mike has fallen asleep on the sofa. He is, we’re both . . .’

  ‘Exhausted,’ Karla finished. ‘I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have disturbed you.’

  ‘No, I want to come and have a look. Show me.’ She followed Karla down the path, not seeming to notice that she hadn’t put any shoes on.

  ‘It’s there, see? I didn’t touch it.’ Karla pointed at the grass where the phone still lay.

  Tristan’s mum drew in a breath.

  ‘It’s his,’ she said, a hand to her mouth. ‘That’s Tristan’s phone.’

  62

  It started with one police car turning into Severn Oaks slowly, as if they had all the time in the world. It had been nearly an hour since Karla had first spotted the mobile phone in Brenda’s garden. Janet had woken her husband immediately and he had insisted they call the station, there and then, glad that Karla had managed to convince Janet to leave the phone where it was until the police arrived. She’d hung around nervously on the front doorstep until Janet had roused her husband and then, feeling like a gratuitous voyeur, she had taken Gigi back home and woken Marcus.

  ‘What is it?’ he’d asked, his eyes snapping open instantly. ‘Bran?’

  ‘No,’ Karla had soothed, ‘the boys are fine.’ She sat on the end of the bed and told him what Gigi had found in the garden next door to number seven.

  ‘Your hands are freezing,’ he said, taking her hands in his and rubbing them. ‘What were you doing in Brenda’s garden anyway? Why were you out at this time?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep, so I took Gigi for a walk. Look . . .’ She pointed out of the window to where the two police officers were knocking on the door of Brenda’s house to no avail. ‘No one’s answering.’

  ‘Well, they’re not going to, are they?’ Marcus replied, pulling himself out of bed and shrugging on his dressing gown. ‘Brenda’s ill. She moved in with her daughter about a month ago. That house is empty.’

  63

  DS Harvey stood by the body sprawled on the floor below the balcony, dried blood pooled beneath the head. There were thirteen houses in Severn Oaks and there had been two deaths here in eleven months, both falls. Coincidence? Harvey knew the old cliché, cops in films who said, ‘I don’t believe in coincidences.’ But he’d seen plenty of them in his time on the force, and read about some of the most interesting co-incidences in history. Mark Twain’s birth and death both occurring on the same day as sightings of Halley’s comet, Edgar Allan Poe predicting the cannibalism of poor Richard Parker and – perhaps the most startling – the Simpsons predicting Donald Trump’s rise to President of the United States. If it hadn’t been for everything else they had found in this house, he might believe this was a coincidence – after all, it was hardly the sinking of the Titanic written years before it happened, or the accidental absence of the Twin Towers put down to terrorism in a video game.

  But a young man was dead here, a young man not much older than his own son. And as much as DS Harvey wanted to believe that Tristan Patterson had fallen from that balcony, the way he had determined eleven months ago that Erica Spencer had fallen from that tree house, he couldn’t make the same
mistakes this time around.

  ‘Sir, the coroner is here.’

  ‘Thank you, Allan. The family?’

  ‘Have been taken back to the house. Family liaison are with them. There is a unit at the gates keeping the press back, but we are going to have to give them something.’

  ‘I’m not issuing anything until the morning. Show Thomas through, then start knocking on every door in this bloody place. Let’s find out what happened to this lad.’

  64

  The Severn Oaks Six all watched as the SOCO units and the blue lights descended on their once peaceful, tranquil world. Felicity stood alone on her doorstep, jigging from foot to foot, her giant fluffy dressing gown wrapped around her. She still couldn’t believe that the man – boy? Tristan was barely in his twenties – who had been serving her coffee every morning for God knows how long had lied to her about living in Severn Oaks, or that she hadn’t recognised him. Although he was on the other side of the curve – the street behind them was quieter, less social and no one could take the time to meet absolutely everyone – she’d only been there two years. She thought back to the day when he’d told her his ‘friend’ Tristan lived there. Had he been testing the waters? Seeing if she’d recognise him? He obviously knew who she was, she just couldn’t figure out why he would pretend he didn’t live half a street away. What was he trying to hide?

  Peter, the man she had counted on for two years to be there for her, couldn’t face going outside to comfort her – instead, he watched from the window of his missing wife’s office, waiting to see what the police brought out of the empty house at the end of the road.

  Eight-year-old Emily Spencer sobbed into the chest of her father while her older brother slept soundly upstairs.