The Last Lie

by Alex Lake

  ‘Claire,’ Alfie said. ‘Let me—’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Let me finish. It took me a while to figure it all out. I couldn’t understand what I was reading, at first. There was this series of messages from Henry Bryant to me – except it wasn’t me, it was you pretending to be me.’ She shook her head. ‘That much was clear, but I couldn’t work out why – I thought maybe you were trying to make it look like I was having an affair so you could divorce me, but that was crazy. I’d have denied it, and it would have been easy to prove. So it had to be something else. And then I read the messages from Pippa.’

  She toyed with the handcuffs. Alfie didn’t say anything. He watched her, weighing her up.

  ‘I read the message in which you dumped her. And I remembered Jodie talking about it. Henry Bryant was Pippa’s boyfriend, the one who’d dumped her by text. Which meant you were Henry Bryant. How am I doing so far, Alfie?’

  ‘Not bad.’ There was no point denying it now. ‘You’ve got most of it.’

  ‘But why? Why were you pretending to be Henry Bryant?’

  Alfie shrugged. ‘I was bored,’ he said. ‘Bored of the stupid little life you led. Bored of your tedious friends and your twee, sheltered lives. You’re all so obsessed with being perfect, with having the latest skinny jeans and beige walls and haircuts that you see in magazines and just have to have.’

  She flinched; his words were hurting her. He allowed himself a smile. He was enjoying this. He’d wanted to say it for a long time.

  ‘You’re all fucking sheep,’ he said. ‘You do the same things in the same way and you call it living. But life is messy and dirty and I couldn’t bear missing out. So I created Henry Bryant. He could have some fun.’ He looked at her. ‘Even then I couldn’t bear living with you.’

  ‘Was I really that bad?’ Claire said.

  Alfie laughed. ‘Worse, Claire. At first it was OK. There were the holidays in the South of France, the cars. The money. It was enough to distract me. A bit boring, but I could take it. The sex was good too, at first. You lay there giving out your little gasps and moans and squeaking Yes, Alfie, I’m coming, but it got old pretty quick. It was bearable, I suppose. Not unpleasant. I started to think of it as glorified masturbation. But after a while I started to really hate you. I was so trapped in your little world. I wanted more, so I created Henry. He was me. He lived his life with passion and lust and struggle. And it kept me sane. It was the only way I could do it, Claire. I’d like to say I’m sorry, but I can’t. It’s your own fault for being so fucking mediocre.’

  She sat, blinking. There were tears in her eyes, but she wiped them away. Her expression hardened.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Very wrong. I loved you, Alfie, and that made the world amazing. I didn’t need passion and lust and struggle, because I had love. That’s what you lack, and it’s why you’re so woefully misguided. And I’ll have it again, with someone else, and with the children that I’ll cherish every day I’m with them. But that doesn’t matter for you. What matters for you is that I figured out you were Bryant, and I figured out what you’d done to Pippa. And then I realized why you were creating this fake affair between me and Bryant. You planned to kill me, didn’t you, Alfie?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alfie said simply. ‘I did.’

  ‘Why not divorce me, if you hated me so much?’

  ‘Because I hated you so much,’ Alfie said. ‘I wanted to see the expression on your face when you understood what I was doing. And I wanted the money. Think about it. You’d be dead, murdered by the man you’d been having an affair with. I’d be Alfie, the poor cuckold who’d lost his wife. And then off I’d go, with all your cash, to enjoy the rest of my life. But then you found out about it. And all because you wanted a baby, and you wouldn’t give up on it. That fucking doctor couldn’t keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it,’ she said. ‘You didn’t want a child because it would ruin your life, and in the end, it was the lies you told Dr Singh that caught you out.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Alfie said. ‘But I’ll kill that little fucker when I get out of here. There is one other question, though. I get everything. You found out about the vasectomy, you saw the phones, you worked out what I’d done and what I was planning to do. But what happened with the other Henry Bryant? Who was he? And why did he abduct you?’

  Claire smiled. ‘You know, Alfie, you’re not quite as smart as you think you are. And that’s what led to this.’ She gestured to the bed. ‘You want to know who the other Henry Bryant was?’ She leaned forward. ‘I’ll tell you.’

  Street

  PC Street sat behind the wheel. In the passenger seat was PC Angie Clifford, just arrived for her shift. He’d given her a hasty and garbled account of his conversation with DI Wynne and then hurried her to the squad car.

  ‘Hold on a second,’ she said. ‘What’s going on, Dave?’

  ‘That’s kind of the problem,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘What do you know, exactly?’

  ‘You remember that story about the women in London who were abducted? And one escaped? Well, she’s here.’

  ‘What do you mean, here?’

  ‘In Cartmel. Her family have a place there. She used to spend her summers up here. I know her. She was Claire Stewart then. Now she’s Claire Daniels. She’s here with her husband.’

  ‘And there’s a problem?’

  ‘So the London cop said. She wants us to go there and detain the husband.’

  ‘The husband? What for?’

  ‘So she can arrest him when she gets here.’

  Angie Clifford folded her arms. She was the daughter of a sheep farmer and had forearms like Popeye.

  ‘She’s coming all this way to arrest him? Did she say what for?’

  ‘No, but if she’s coming here from London, it’s not for an unpaid parking ticket.’

  Twenty minutes later, they turned off the main road and on to the quiet lane that led to Cartmel.

  ‘No sirens?’ PC Clifford said.

  Street shook his head. ‘Don’t want him to know we’re coming.’

  ‘You think he’s dangerous?’ Clifford asked.

  ‘If he’s got cops coming from London,’ he said. ‘I’d say so.’

  PC Clifford nodded slowly. ‘You want to call the Armed Response team?’

  ‘Maybe. Let them know what we’re doing, at least.’

  Clifford grabbed her radio and spoke into it. As she did, PC Street slowed. They were approaching the cottage.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘If anything does go wrong in there they won’t be here in time to do anything about it.’

  ‘Want to wait for them? We can observe the house. Make sure no one leaves.’

  Clifford thought for a second. ‘The London cop asked us to go in?’

  Street nodded. The car came to a halt.

  ‘Then we go in,’ Clifford said. ‘You the front, me round the back. Ready?’

  Claire

  He had a strange look in his eyes. Up until that point he’d looked relaxed, confident even. She’d been amazed at how unemotional he was; at first she’d thought he was putting on a brave face, but now she understood it wasn’t that at all.

  He was unemotional because he had no emotions. He wasn’t seeing this in the same way she was, he wasn’t being pulled and swayed by what she was telling him. He wasn’t feeling sympathy for her or regrets for his actions. He was feeling nothing.

  Except now there was something. That strange look in his eyes was new, and she thought she recognized it.

  Not quite fear, but not far off.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘The other Henry Bryant?’ She stared into his eyes. ‘The other Henry Bryant was me.’

  He flinched as though he’d been slapped. ‘You? What do you mean it was you?’

  ‘I mean there was no other Henry Bryant. No one abducted me. I made it all up.’

  ‘But there were emails
,’ he said. ‘He sent you emails.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. I copied you, Alfie. I did exactly what you’d done. I established a fake account and emailed myself. You’d set it all up perfectly. When I disappeared, the police would think what you’d planned for them to think, that Henry Bryant had abducted me. But he didn’t. I used your plan.’

  He lay on the bed, staring at her. ‘So where were you?’

  ‘In the New Forest,’ Claire said. ‘Camping. It was quite fun, as it happens. Nice to be outside.’

  ‘But he did things. He came to the house. Drove past the café.’

  ‘All made up. None of it happened.’

  ‘But I saw him. I chased him.’

  Claire smiled. ‘No you didn’t. You chased someone, but not Bryant. Why do you think I spent so much time at that window? I was watching people pass by, waiting for a single young man I could smile at. He had to be in a hoodie, so his face was hidden. Then all I had to do was wave. Get his attention, get him to stop outside the house, and then call you.’

  She watched the disbelief spread over his face. It was very satisfying.

  ‘And the house appointment? You set that up?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Why?’ He closed his eyes. ‘Don’t answer. You wanted me to think he was really after me.’

  ‘Like the note at the theatre, and the text message to your Henry Bryant phone,’ Claire said.

  ‘How?’ Alfie said. ‘How did you do the note at the theatre?’

  ‘Two programmes,’ Claire said. ‘When I went to the bathroom I bought another one and put the note in it. I kept it under my seat. It was easy to switch. And I needed you to believe he was real, because if you thought he was real, I’d be able to do all this.’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘Well, here was my plan,’ Claire said. ‘Originally, I was going to kill you. One night I was going to suffocate you or slit your throat, and then call the police and tell them Bryant had been there and murdered you, but I’d disturbed him and he’d fled. They would find all the weird things that had been going on – the house appointment, the theatre note – and they’d believe me. But then I was worried they’d work out it was me, so I came up with this. We come here, expecting Bryant. I kill you, and say he was here, but ran away when Carl and Kevin came in.’

  Alfie laughed. ‘But there’s a problem. You’re going to kill me? Come on, Claire. You’re not a killer. Turn me into the police. That’ll do. I’ll be gone from your life. You don’t need to kill me.’

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘two weeks ago, I would have agreed. I would have said that, whatever anyone did to me, I wouldn’t be able to kill them. But I would have been wrong.’

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘What I learned, Alfie, is that we all have it in us. Some more than others, but we all have it. For most of us – me included – it’s a last resort. But the thing I came to understand is that a last resort is still a resort. And now, the time has come.’

  She reached into the chest of drawers and took out the knife she’d removed from the kitchen.

  ‘Get ready, Alfie,’ she said.

  Alfie

  When she said she was Bryant he knew it was bad, but he’d never thought it would get to this. He had assumed she would scare him a bit and then call her dad, or the police, and, when she did some opportunity would arise for him to get himself free and get out of there.

  But then she said she was going to kill him, and pulled out a knife. It was a long, heavy kitchen knife. Alfie recognized it; he’d used it the night before to chop some vegetables for the meal he’d made.

  It was sharp. Japanese steel, perfectly weighted. It was the kind of knife you could rest on a tomato and it would slowly sink through it, cutting it cleanly in two without the need for any pressure from the holder.

  He was under no illusions about what it would do to him.

  How had he missed this? It was clever; she had done it well. She had set him up and he had fallen for it. He hadn’t thought she had it in her, which was why it had been possible. He had misread her. Underestimated her.

  Ten minutes ago he would have laughed at the thought of her killing him in cold blood, but not now. Now he was starting to think Claire might be capable of it.

  Which was a real problem.

  ‘Claire, this is crazy. Think about it.’

  ‘I have. I’ve thought about little else.’

  ‘Then you’ll have considered what’ll happen after you do it,’ Alfie said. ‘You’ll be a murderer, Claire. A twenty-year prison sentence. You might be out in ten, but that’s still a decade, Claire. And it’s an important decade for you. You’ll be in your forties when you get out.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Too late to have kids naturally. And there’s no chance you’ll be able to adopt, not with a murder conviction. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. But I don’t have to worry about it, because it won’t happen.’

  ‘It will, Claire! Your prints will be all over the knife, you’ll be covered in blood. The cops will take seconds to figure out that you did it.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll tell them Henry Bryant did it. He was going to kill me, but then he fled.’

  ‘No,’ Alfie said. ‘There’ll be no evidence he was here, Claire. They’ll know.’

  ‘They won’t. When they find me, I’ll be handcuffed to the chair. I’ll tell them that Bryant came in while you were out, and, when you returned, hit you on the head and brought you up here. There’s a nice bruise on your skull to prove it. Then he handcuffed me and waited for you to wake up, so he could slit your throat with this knife.’

  ‘But your fingerprints will be on the knife.’ Alfie’s throat was constricting and he could feel panic gathering in his stomach. ‘If you’re handcuffed to the chair, how will they have got on the knife?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because I used it this morning. It’s my knife, Alfie. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that my fingerprints are on it. Besides, the knife is how I save myself from Bryant.’

  Alfie stared at her. This was not the Claire he knew. This cold fury, this methodical, relentless anger was something entirely new. It reminded him of him, and it was starting to scare him.

  To terrify him.

  ‘How do you mean, the knife is how you save yourself?’ he said, in a low voice.

  ‘Here’s what I’ll tell the cops. Maybe I’ll cry as I tell DI Wynne,’ Claire said. ‘After Bryant killed you – which left me distraught, obviously – he came towards me. As he got near, something happened – you made a noise, perhaps, as some gas escaped your dead and cooling body, which I will claim was your final loving act from beyond the grave to save me – and he turned to glance at you. That gave me the opportunity to grab the knife in my handcuffed hands, which I threw at the window.’ She looked at the old, brittle glass. ‘That’s what I’ll do, after I kill you, Alfie. I’ll throw the knife at the window and break it, then I’ll handcuff myself to the chair. That will alert Carl and Kevin and they’ll be here in seconds. In my story, I’ll say I told Bryant they were coming and he disappeared.’

  Alfie shook his head. He had to persuade her to stop this. ‘It won’t work. There’ll be forensic evidence they’ll expect Bryant to have left which won’t be there. They’ll piece it together, Claire. You have to see that.’

  There was a flicker of doubt in her eyes and he thought, for a moment, he was getting through.

  But then she stood up and took a step towards him. Any doubt was gone from her face, and all he saw was anger.

  Pure, unadulterated rage.

  And he knew then he couldn’t talk her out of this. This wasn’t about the most rational decision, about weighing the odds of getting caught against the odds of getting away with it and coming to a balanced choice.

  That was how Alfie approached things. Without emotion and ready to take the path that would get him what he wanted as easily and quickly as possible.

  This was something else entirely. This was s
omeone operating in a way he didn’t understand.

  And, finally, he realized he was out of options.

  Claire

  She watched the fear spread across his face as he understood what he was facing. He would never fully get it, would never know how she felt.

  Would never know how all she wanted, from the moment she’d found out what he truly was, was revenge.

  She remembered sitting on the Tube on the way home after she’d seen the messages and returned the phones to his desk, remembered staring at the window, barely aware of anything outside her own thoughts.

  She’d found out that her husband had been cheating on her. That he had killed one of the women he’d been sleeping with.

  And he’d been lying to her since the day they’d met.

  That was the worst thing. Their entire marriage was a sham. He’d fooled her into believing he loved her, that he wanted to have kids with her, that they were the perfect couple. She’d been so proud of their relationship, so proud of the way her friends were jealous of her. She and Alfie were the perfect couple, and she had allowed that to be the thing that defined her.

  And beyond the devastation, she saw what was coming her way.

  A messy divorce, Alfie on trial for murder, the whole world reading the details of what he’d done. She’d be a laughing stock. The humiliation would be total. There’d be no more smugness about her marriage; instead everyone she knew would be thinking Poor little Claire, she’s never had much luck with men, and here we go again, I feel so sorry for her.

  She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear even the thought of it.

  And that was when it started. It was just a thought at first, a little worm creeping into her mind.