The Lies You Told

by Harriet Tyce

  “Are you OK?” a man’s voice says, and I look up. It’s Andrew. Not Robin. And the disappointment fells me.

  My estranged husband and my best friend help me through to the kitchen. Zora takes herself off upstairs, muttering something about having a shower.

  Andrew slumps down, glancing around. “This place needs some serious work.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’ve made it comfortable, you know. It feels more like a home than it ever did before. Or it would if…” He doesn’t finish his sentence. I can’t breathe properly, the air sucked out of the room by all the things we’re not saying.

  “We’re not here to talk about home improvements. What’s going on, Andrew?” I say. “I saw the news report, the arrests. Why are you here?”

  “For Robin,” he says. “For you.”

  “You’re fucking that other woman. You don’t care any more,” I say, my voice flat.

  “That’s what I needed you to think. So that you’d go.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I wanted to explain. When I called…”

  “Right,” I say.

  “I know it hardly matters now. But I hope it will, soon. I needed to get you out of the country safely. You and Robin.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a big fraud—you saw that, from the arrests. They’ve nicked all the top bosses. The investment company, it’s a Ponzi scheme. I didn’t realize to begin with, but over the last few years it’s become increasingly obvious to me. I’ve been gathering evidence, cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “I knew it was going to blow. There were going to be arrests, a lot of publicity. I thought I might be arrested too, at least to begin with. I was worried about visas… the lot.”

  “Who the hell was that woman, then? All those mysterious phone calls?”

  He looks at me pleadingly. “She was my attorney. The only person I was allowed to speak to about any of it without fucking up the investigation. They wouldn’t let me tell anyone. Your mother’s legacy… well, to begin with, of course,

  I thought it was a terrible idea. But that was before I realized the full extent of what was happening at work. It started to look more and more like a lifeline. And when the place for Robin came up… I knew I’d never be able to persuade you.

  I had to get you to leave me—it was the only way.”

  “You did all of that on purpose? Cut me off, wouldn’t look at me for all those months? Made me think you were sleeping with someone else. That you’d take Robin away from me?”

  Andrew nods, his face ashen. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the worst thing anyone has ever done to me. How am I meant to believe anything you say now? Why couldn’t you just tell me?” I look at him, only the other side of the kitchen table but he might as well be a thousand miles away. He puts his head in his hands and his shoulders shake. I make no move to comfort him.

  He looks up at me at last, his cheeks wet. “I couldn’t. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. I did this for your own good, I promise. I just wanted to protect you both.”

  There is no room for this anger right now, but through the fear for Robin that’s all-consuming, I have a cold certainty that if we ever get to the other side, Robin safe back with me, there will be a reckoning, and my rage will be mighty.

  I don’t say anything else. I’ve no interest in anything other than where Robin is. Andrew isn’t even real to me right now; I’m numb to all the hurt he’s caused, though I know that underneath the thought is starting to grow that if he hadn’t done all of this, Robin wouldn’t be missing now…

  Zora comes back downstairs and joins us. She explains the situation in full to Andrew while I keep checking my phone. When she’s finished we sit for what feels like hours more, the silence beating heavy around us, walking to the front room to look out of the front window, back again. At last I receive a call from Nicole.

  “I’m at the hospital with Daisy,” she says. “Why don’t you come in and see us so we can talk properly?”

  I relay the conversation to Zora. I don’t look at Andrew. “I can’t go, though, can I? What if something happens here? The police told me to stay put.”

  “I think you should go,” Zora says. “You might find out something useful. I promise I’ll call if there’s any news at all.”

  Daisy is still in the same room in the hospital that I visited before, the same machines still beeping around her, the mask obscuring her face. Nicole is sitting beside the bed, Pippa with her. The moment that I walk into the room, Nicole leaps up and runs over to me, grabbing me in a hug. I hug her back. We embrace for a moment before Nicole lets go.

  “I’ll never forgive myself,” she says. “I should never have let Robin get in the car with Julia. I should have realized what kind of a state Julia was in.”

  I look at her closely. This thought has come into my mind more than once, too, how much blame I should attribute to Nicole. But at the same time, what Julia is accused of doing is unthinkable.

  “How was this to be predicted, though?” I say. “You couldn’t have known Julia was so crazy that she’d drug her own daughter and try to take out the competition.” As I say the word competition, I start to shake, the reduction of Robin to this, solely a barrier to someone else’s ambition, to be knocked down at will.

  Nicole hugs me again. “I’ll never forgive myself,” she says into my hair. “I’m so sorry.”

  I sit down on a chair at the end of Daisy’s bed, next to where Pippa is sitting. Pippa is looking hunched and cold, muffled in an oversized hooded top. She’s clutching something in her hands and I look more closely to see it’s a small stuffed bear, the fur worn at the edges. Despite all my own sorrow, my heart goes out to the girl. She’s sitting here beside one friend, unconscious in a hospital bed, and waiting for news of another one.

  “How are you doing?” I say to her.

  Pippa twitches. She looks up at me, only briefly, and then turns her concentration back again to her bear, twisting it in her hands. Her hair is greasy, the marks of a comb through it visible near her parting. As I’m watching, she reaches her hand up and starts scratching at her scalp, worrying away at something. Eventually she brings her hand down and I’m horrified to see that where she’s been scratching, there’s a bloody patch now visible, dark against the blonde hair.

  “Your scalp,” I say. “It’s bleeding. Are you OK?”

  Pippa hunches even more over her bear, her face stricken. She doesn’t reply. Nicole moves beside her and puts her arm around her, looking down at her.

  “She’s fine,” she says. “Pippa just picks a bit at her scalp when she’s unsettled, that’s all. It’s been a difficult time for her. For us all.”

  I nod. There’s nothing I can say to that. Watching Nicole holding Pippa, I want to cry. There’s nothing I want more than to be able to hold my daughter, too. I can almost feel Robin’s solid warmth, smell her hair.

  Nicole is looking over at Daisy. She doesn’t realize I’m watching. Something in her face shifts, a sharpening of her features. She looks completely unlike herself for a moment, a stranger to me. Then she turns and smiles, the warmth returning as suddenly as it left, the sudden contrast giving emphasis to the bleak darkness that was in her eyes before.

  A man walks into the hospital room, his footsteps loud.

  “Paul,” Nicole says. “How are you doing? Daisy’s been OK. No change.”

  Paul. Julia’s ex-husband. I look over at him. I remember the way that Julia talked about him, an uncaring, unfeeling man who treated her with such cruelty, a monster who drove her to court in the end to get a proper financial settlement for her and Daisy.

  It’s not how he comes across. He looks comfortable and tweedy, a geography teacher rather than the investment-banker shark I’d been led to expect. Still, I know better than to judge by appearances. He might look pleasant, but that gives no assurance as
to what he’s really like. As he comes further into the room, I can see distress on his face, deep-set bags under his eyes from many sleepless nights.

  “This is Sadie,” Nicole says, introducing me. “She’s Robin’s mum. You know, the girl who…” She doesn’t finish the sentence. It’s clear she doesn’t need to. Sympathy has swept across Paul’s face and he’s taken my hands between both of his.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. “You must be going through hell.”

  I’m warmed by the empathy in his voice. He knows what I’m going through. Even if his daughter is here physically in the bed, she’s lost too, her return as uncertain as Robin’s.

  “I feel so sorry for both of you,” Nicole says.

  Paul takes Nicole’s chair, nearest to Daisy, and Nicole joins me down at the bottom of the bed. Pippa goes and sits on the floor in the corner of the room, picking up a book. I squint over in idle curiosity. Hard Times. I blink, surprised.

  “Is there any news?” Nicole says. She doesn’t say about what, but it’s clear that she means Julia.

  Paul nods. “I’ve just spoken to the police. The search of the house has turned up packs of both modafinil and diazepam, with her fingerprints on them. They’ve charged her with administering drugs to Daisy. I can’t get my head around it. I had no idea she was so worried about Daisy getting into the senior school. Or that she cared so much about the scholarship.”

  “Nothing about Robin? She’s not said anything?” I burst out.

  “I’m so sorry, Sadie. She won’t speak at all,” Paul says, and the kindness in his voice nearly breaks me. “But there’s something else, too. They’re also looking into a death that happened eighteen months ago, a little girl who drowned.”

  My head jerks around. He must be referring to Zoe. Jessica had said Julia was there.

  “The parents have never been fully satisfied about the circumstances surrounding her death. And Julia was on that holiday. Now that some motivation has been established, the police are asking her about it.”

  “That was so terrible,” Nicole says, her voice very low. “Pippa was on holiday with them too when it happened, though she slept through the whole thing—Zoe sneaked out at night, to practice her swimming. That’s what they reckoned, anyway.” She looks pale at the thought. Then she shakes her head, as if to throw it off, looking over at Pippa sitting on the floor with her book. “Pippa, sweetheart, you’ll wreck your eyes reading in the dark like that.”

  Pippa gets up, stretches. “I’m hungry, Mum. Can we get something to eat?”

  “I’ll take her down to the canteen if you want,” I say. Desperate as I am for information, I’m more desperate, suddenly, to get out of there, away from all the intensity of emotion. If I don’t escape the room I’ll explode, the pressure in my head unbearable.

  “Oh no, it’s fine. I’ll take her,” Nicole says, and she stands up ready to leave. At that moment, however, a doctor comes in. She wants to speak to Paul about Daisy. He turns to Nicole.

  “Would you stay with me? I don’t always keep all the details in my head—it can be a bit overwhelming.”

  Nicole looks from Paul to the doctor to Pippa, then to me. She shrugs her shoulders as if in defeat, then looks at me. “Would you mind taking Pippa down, after all?”

  53

  Pippa’s starving. She eats all of her cheese and ham sandwich before I’ve even touched my coffee, and she nods enthusiastically when I ask if she’d like another one. She’s halfway through that, too, before she speaks for the first time.

  “Thanks,” she says. “We didn’t have time for supper last night. It’s been really strange.” She doesn’t elaborate, opening the can of Coke I added to the order and taking a large swig. I watch her as she eats. Even though Robin has been friends with her from the start of term, this is the first time that I’ve ever looked at her properly. She always faded into the background when Robin and Daisy were around. Funny, almost, that the one who sparked the least life is, at this moment, the one with the most. I shudder at the thought, fear for Robin overwhelming me once more.

  “It was a fun day on Saturday,” Pippa says. “I liked having Robin around. I was sorry when I woke up and she wasn’t there.”

  I blink. I can’t believe I’ve not thought to question Pippa sooner about it. Stress is making me slow, stupid.

  “What do you think happened, Pippa?” I say, as gently as I can. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “I don’t know, really. We spent all day running round on the beach, riding up and down on bikes. No work, for once. Then we had supper and Robin went to sleep and Mum carried her up to bed and I went to sleep, and when I woke up she wasn’t there.”

  Asleep on the sofa. That must have been the point when Nicole took the photo and sent it. Unusual for Robin, though. But not unheard of.

  “Do you remember seeing Julia at all?” I say.

  Pippa looks blank.

  “Daisy’s mum?” I prompt.

  “Oh yes. She had supper with us. Mum says she left early in the morning. Before I woke up and saw that Robin was gone, too.”

  Nothing new. Nothing to cast any light on the situation. “Did anything unusual happen when she was there? Anything at all?” I ask, unwilling to give up hope that the girl might have at least some clue as to Robin’s whereabouts.

  Pippa shrugs. “It was such a fun day,” she says again. “Mum even let us go in the secret house.” A long pause, and Pippa’s face slowly flushes, tears starting up in her eyes. She picks up her Coke but her hands are shaking and she drops the can and it falls over sideways onto the table, spilling what’s left. Pippa picks up a handful of napkins and tries to mop it up but she’s being inept about it, the mess spreading further.

  “What’s the secret house, Pippa?” I say. The world has stopped moving around me. Everyone has vanished, just the girl in front of me and the long, dark trail of liquid on the table, dripping slowly onto the floor.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s a secret.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone,” I say. “But I do love secrets. Especially secret houses. It sounds really exciting.”

  Softly, softly…

  “Mum found the key, finally,” Pippa says. “It’s been missing for years. Nearly as long as I’ve been alive. But she found it and we all went in and looked, but we went out again really fast because it was full of dead flies.”

  “Where is it, this place?”

  “You promise you won’t tell?” Pippa says.

  “I promise,” I say. I have no intention of keeping it. Nothing is more important than Robin. “Please, tell me where it is.”

  “It’s at the back of our house by the sea. It looks like a garage, but it isn’t. It’s like a little house inside.”

  Very carefully, I check whether Pippa wants anything else to eat or drink. I take her upstairs, not rushing her, not doing anything to show that she’s said anything of any importance at all, chatting to her about tests and Christmas and any other subject I can think of while we wait for the lift, keeping my voice soft and calm. It seems to work. Pippa chatters away to me all the way back up to the seventh floor, where I deliver her to Nicole.

  “I’m going home now,” I say. “Andrew texted, and he’s sounding terrible. I need to go and be with him.”

  “But we haven’t had a chance to catch up,” Nicole says.

  “Why don’t you pop round later?” I’m backing out of the room, trying not to look as if I’m rushing. Nicole is smiling at me, hugging Pippa close to her, the model of a loving friend, a loving mother. There’s nothing I want more than to believe that she’s as kind as she looks, but every instinct I possess is telling me to get out, now, and find out what the hell the significance of the secret house is.

  Paul smiles at me too, a friendly smile, and he comes over and hugs me quickly.

  “I’m so sorry about your daughter,” he says. “I’m thinking about you all. Wishing for her safe return.”

  I look at the small figure
in the bed. “I’m thinking about you too,” I say. As soon as I’m out of the door, I’m running, straight for the lift.

  54

  I call the police on the way home, telling them I’ve essential information. They take it seriously. And after a journey that lasts only minutes, but feels like hours, finally I’m home, through the door, face-to-face with the detectives, Labinjoh and Hughes, Andrew and Zora hovering behind.

  “I’ve just talked to Nicole’s daughter,” I pant. “She says there’s a separate part of the house. A hidden part. She called it the secret house. Have you checked there?”

  They look at each other, back at me. Hughes speaks.

  “I can’t say that we have,” she says. “This is not information we had before.”

  “But don’t you think it’s worth checking out? Maybe Robin’s in there.”

  They look at each other again. “It all seems a bit tenuous,” Labinjoh says. “But…”

  “Tenuous? What’s fucking tenuous about it? I thought you said you’d leave no stone unturned.”

  “If you’ll let me finish,” Labinjoh says, “we’ll put out a call to the local police now. And we’ll drive up there, too. Just in case.”

  I’m so keyed up that I open my mouth to shout at her again before realizing what she’s said. “Oh, OK,” I say. “You’ll go.”

  “We’ll go now.”

  They march down the path, purposeful. I suddenly run after them. “Can I come too?” I say, trying not to plead. “If Robin is there, she’ll need me.”

  “Get in,” Hughes says, gesturing to the back of their unmarked car, an unremarkable saloon. With no hesitation, I do what I’m told, slamming the car door behind me.

  The car may be ordinary in appearance, but it’s clearly had something done to soup up its performance. Labinjoh drives it fast, cutting through the traffic of north London, gliding along the North Circular and out onto the A12 with little trouble. Hughes asks me to repeat everything that Pippa said and she relays the information down her phone.