Three Little Lies Read online

  What if he’s back? it says. What if he’s had enough of his new life in Scotland? What if he’s been waiting, biding his time, lulling us into a false sense of security? Waiting for one of us to let our guard down, to slip up? What if he was waiting for her outside work? What if he followed her down the street, cornered her in a dark alley, bundled her into a car?

  No. She’s gone out somewhere, her phone’s out of battery, that’s all. She’ll be back soon, smelling of wine and cigarettes; she’ll take me in her arms, hug me, affectionate and silly, slurring her words, full of gossip, indiscreet as ever. We’ll sit and talk late into the night as we often do; in the morning I’ll take her in a cup of tea and we’ll half-watch Saturday Kitchen on the telly in her room while we look at clothes online, planning an afternoon shopping trip.

  It’s almost completely dark now, but still I sit here. I haven’t turned the kitchen light on, so I am able to see outside rather than staring at my own reflection. The pavement is more or less empty, just the occasional latecomer from work, head down, speeding along, or groups of friends on their way to the pub, chatting and laughing. Meanwhile I sit here, watching, waiting; trying to stop the voice that forces its way into my brain, seeping around the walls and locks I have constructed to keep it out, reverberating through me. The voice that reminds me that ten years ago, Daniel Monkton was sentenced to ten years, five of which he spent in prison, and five on probation, his every move scrutinised. The voice that tells me Daniel Monkton is free to go where he pleases now, and contact who he likes. The voice that says Daniel Monkton is back, and he wants to make us pay for what we did.

  Ellen

  July 2005

  The day the new family moved in to the house on the corner, Karina and I sat pretend-casually on the front garden wall of Karina’s house opposite. Karina was painting her nails a vivid shade of electric blue, the bottle balanced precariously on the uneven brickwork, as I leafed through a copy of one of her mum’s magazines.

  The summer holidays had only begun that week, and already they promised to be the most boring since records began. Yet again we weren’t going anywhere on holiday. Lilly Spencer’s mum and dad were taking her to Dubai, and she hadn’t stopped going on about it for weeks. We weren’t even going to Bournemouth.

  The corner house had been empty for years. I’d heard my dad saying they wanted too much for it, it was too big for the street and no one who had the money they were asking for it would want to live round here. I didn’t really understand what he meant, but the house was certainly bigger than any of the two- and three-bed terraces and semis that lined the rest of the street, and its corner plot meant the garden was huge compared to mine and those of my friends. It even had a garage, unlike any of our houses. Karina and I had got into the garden one day a few years ago, through a gap in the fence. The grass was up to our knees and it soaked the bottom of our jeans until they clung wetly to our legs. We’d peered in through the windows at the empty rooms with their high ceilings and bare wooden floorboards. One of the windows was loose and Karina had wanted us to pull it open and go inside but I wouldn’t. Instead we had explored the garden, our early-teen self-consciousness preventing us from playing the game of hide and seek it really demanded. In the end we had climbed the mulberry tree right at the bottom of the garden, and imagined lives for the people on the top deck of passing buses.

  The removal van arrived first. The new family must have given them the key because they started unloading straight away. It wasn’t normal stuff, though. The first thing I saw come out of the van was an ornate birdcage, the kind of thing you’d see in an old film on the telly. No bird. Then box after box, marked in big, bold letters: BOOKS. So many books.

  ‘Do you have a lot of books in your house?’ I asked Karina. I mean, I’d been there obviously, and hadn’t seen any, but I didn’t know where people who had a lot of books kept them. Maybe they were in her mum’s room. We weren’t allowed to go in there.

  ‘No,’ said Karina. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No, hardly any. My mum’s got these old cookery books with pictures of weird stuff that no one would want to eat. She never cooks out of them, though. And we’ve got the Bible, I think.’

  ‘Do you think they’ve read them all?’ she said. The removal men scurried back and forth, getting redder and sweatier each time.

  ‘Dunno. Maybe they’re teachers?’

  She sniffed. Neither of us thought much of teachers.

  A second van drew up, smaller than the first. Specialist Removals, it said on the side. Two men got out, one old and bald, the other younger with curly hair and glasses.

  ‘What’s this?’ said Karina, settling herself more comfortably on the wall and screwing the top back on the nail varnish, her fingers splayed out like claws.

  The two men went into the house and we could hear them talking to the normal removal men, although we couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  ‘We’ll have to go round the back, through the French windows,’ the curly-haired one said as they came back out of the front door and started opening the van. Karina and I waited, holding our breath, to see what was going to come out.

  ‘Oh,’ said Karina, as the younger man backed slowly out of the van, down a ramp, wheeling something on a trolley. It was huge and wrapped in a blue blanket. The older man gripped the other end as though his life depended upon it. ‘What is it?’

  As they manoeuvred it carefully up the kerb and through the garden gate, there was a faint plinking noise.

  ‘It’s a piano,’ I said, in wonder. ‘One of those big ones. They must have taken the legs off. I wonder when the family will get here.’ I was impatient to see the exotic creatures who owned all this stuff.

  ‘It might not be a family,’ said Karina. ‘I think it’s a weird, old professor who lives alone.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, trying not to stare too obviously at what might come out of the truck next. Whatever it was, we never saw it because our attention was drawn to a rusty old car that had pulled up behind the removal van. I clutched Karina’s arm and hissed, ‘They’re here.’

  The first one we saw was the dad. He unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and stood by the car, yawning and stretching. He was tall and broad-chested, with wavy dark hair swept back from his face. He was wearing a navy jumper with a paisley scarf knotted artistically around his neck. I tried to imagine my dad wearing a scarf like that, but I simply couldn’t do it; I kept getting a picture of him with the grey, woolly one my mum had bought him for Christmas last year. I didn’t think he’d even worn that.

  ‘Ooh, Ellen, he’s good-looking,’ said Karina.

  ‘Good-looking?’ I whispered. ‘He’s about forty-five!’

  ‘So what?’

  I struggled with these conversations with Karina about boys, and whether they were good-looking or not. We were late starters, both of us having had our first kiss in the summer term, at Tamara Gregg’s party. Since then, Karina was forever demanding whether I would get off with such-and-such a boy, and debating the merits of all the boys in our class. Part of me longed to reply that I’d rather die than get off with any of those smelly idiots, but I didn’t. Even though I had turned sixteen just before her, Karina had a way of making me feel young and stupid when it came to stuff like this, so I joined in, usually agreeing with her assessments. I’d only kissed that boy at Tamara’s party so people at school didn’t think I was a total freak for never having got off with anyone. Karina always ended up concluding that the one she most wanted to go out with was Leo Smith. Leo had hair the colour of golden syrup and dark brown eyes. He wasn’t the coolest, best-looking boy in our year, or the star of the school football team, but there was something about him. He was clever, but it didn’t seem dorky on him like it did on some of the others, the nerdy ones who spent all their spare time in the computer room. I didn’t fancy him, exactly, not like Karina did, but sometimes I imagined having meaningful conversations with him, in which he truly understood me like no one else
ever had.

  Next out of the car were two boys, dark-haired like the dad. One looked about our age, the other a bit older, maybe eighteen. They were both wearing Converse trainers with jeans. The younger one had a grey T-shirt with a long-sleeved white top underneath, and the older one was wearing a shirt with a skinny tie. They lounged out of the car, heads down, muttering to each other, toes poking at tufts of grass sticking up between the cracks in the pavement. I felt the heat from Karina as she pressed her leg into mine; I could almost hear her brain computing their suitability as potential boyfriends. In complete contrast to their languor, the mum came bursting out of her side of the car, a whirl of embroidered purple material, jangling silver bracelets and flowing, dark hair. She rhapsodised over everything: the house, the sunshine, the size of the garden.

  The four of them started up the garden path. Karina drew breath, and I readied myself for an exhaustive dissection of the two boys, but then the car door opened again at the back, and a head appeared. The first thing we noticed was her hair, a shining sheet of bright gold all down her back that made me think of the shiny paper around chocolate coins. Then it swung round like a cloak and we saw her face, heart-shaped and perfect apart from a thin, red scar on her right cheek. I heard Karina gasp and I knew I’d done the same.

  As if she’d heard us, the girl swung her head around and gave us a scornful, challenging glare. I dropped my eyes guiltily and Karina became absorbed in her fingernails, blowing them dry as if her life depended on it. The girl let us wither for a moment more, before flicking her hair around again and sauntering into the house without speaking a word to the mum, who was standing just inside the front door, wittering on about the size of the bedrooms and the views across the London skyline. As the front door shut behind them, the mum’s voice was abruptly cut off, leaving Karina and I staring at each other in the sunshine.

  ‘Did you see…?’ Karina whispered.

  ‘Her face. Yeah.’

  ‘What do you think happened to her?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Karina shuddered theatrically. ‘God, Ellen, imagine having that on your face. I wonder if it’s permanent. She’s really pretty, too.’

  ‘I know.’

  The removal men continued their work, swarming back and forth like worker ants, but we had lost interest in the family’s possessions, our imaginations caught by this beautiful, disfigured stranger, peculiarly romantic, like a character in a fairy tale.

  As we went back into Karina’s, I turned for one last look at the big house, my gaze drawn skywards to the bedrooms. There was no one at the bay window on the right, but at a smaller window on the left I saw the blonde girl. She wasn’t looking at me; she was resting her forehead against the glass and staring out across the rooftops. Somehow, though, I didn’t think she was admiring the view.

  Ellen

  September 2017

  I wake early, still in my clothes from yesterday, sticky-eyed and thick-headed. I spent a fitful night where every cell of my body was alert for the click of her key in the door, the creak of the loose board in the hallway, the peculiar groan of the kitchen tap. I go straight to her room, even though I know I would have heard if she’d come in during the night.

  As always, it’s a mess. I’m reminded of her usual joke – that if the police came to our flat for any reason, they would assume her room had been broken in to. Fear rises in me at the thought, and I give a little half-sob. There are clothes all over the floor and spilling out of drawers. The wardrobe is half-open, bursting at the seams as ever. She has a mirror propped on the chest of drawers behind a mishmash of make-up, tangled necklaces, half-drunk glasses of stale water. There’s a magazine open at a page detailing how to achieve perfect contouring, smudges from her fingers evident on the shiny paper. She was here yesterday morning. Her perfume lingers in the air, infused into her clothes, her unmade bed.

  The leaden feeling in my stomach deepens, and the panic I’ve been trying to suppress begins to swirl through me. Something is wrong. I know it. She would have called me if she was going to be out all night. We always let each other know where we are. It’s one of our things, always has been. When we first lived together after university and she was forever rolling home with some man or other, she never forgot to text me. Still alive! Her message would often say, or Not dead in a ditch! Only then could I go to sleep, safe in the knowledge that she was OK. I joked once that I was like her mum, but her face darkened and I quickly changed the subject. There are a few topics that, despite our years of closeness, she won’t ever discuss, and her mother is top of the list, closely followed, of course, by the Monktons.

  We’ve never discussed the trial, not properly, not even at the time. Not even when the letters came. We were together the day we got the first one, written and posted the morning he was due to be sentenced. Sasha was living with us by then. I’m sure Mum had been secretly counting down the days until she went to university in the October – Mum’s heart had never been in it, although even she could see that Sasha couldn’t have continued to live with the Monktons, not with Daniel out on bail and living there. I’d padded down in the morning to make Sasha a cup of tea, leaving her asleep on her back on the fold-out bed in my room, arms neatly by her sides, a marble statue. Unreachable. I almost ignored the post on the mat, but Mum had been on at me to do more around the house, to take notice of the little things that needed doing every day, so I picked it up. The top letter was handwritten, which was unusual enough to make me take a second look. It was addressed to me and Sasha. I chucked the rest of the post down on the mat and scurried back upstairs, all thoughts of tea banished from my mind. She was awake, and I laid the letter carefully on the bed in front of her.

  ‘That’s Daniel’s writing,’ she said. We both stared at it, as if it might grow teeth and bite us. There was a full-length mirror on the wall and I glanced into it at the same time as she did, our scared faces reflected in the silence that lay between us.

  ‘Shall I…?’ I reached out a tentative hand. Sasha nodded. I slid my thumb under the thick, creamy paper of the envelope and tore it open, pulling out a sheet of Olivia’s monogrammed notepaper. I was probably imagining it, but I thought I could smell her distinctive musky perfume. There were a few lines scrawled on it, and I read them aloud to Sasha, my throat constricted by fear.

  To Ellen and Sasha

  Today I will find out if I will spend the next few years of my life in prison, or whether I am free, found innocent, as I should be. If I go to prison, it’s not only that liar Karina that won’t be able to sleep easy.

  You both lied in court. You chose to do this to me, and I will never let you forget that. You will pay for this one day.

  Daniel

  I think about that letter now, every word of it burned into my brain. Sasha kept it, as she did the others that came later, after he was released from prison. We had five years of blissful silence, of knowing exactly where he was. Either he didn’t write during those five years or his letters were confiscated by the prison before being posted, considered too threatening. Then five years ago, when he was released on licence, it began again. Where are those letters now? I leaf through her bedside drawers, subduing the guilty, snooping feeling by telling myself she wouldn’t mind, not under the circumstances, although I’m not sure this is true. I sift through old birthday cards, out-of-date medications, dried-up nail varnishes and broken jewellery. I find her passport, but there is no sign of the letters. I take everything out from under her bed and go through every file, every box, but I do not find them. I look in every battered shoebox in her wardrobe, each old bag hanging on the back of her door; I take her clothes out of the drawers, even pulling each drawer out to look on the back, as if she might have taped them there in the manner of a bad TV movie, but there’s nothing. She has kept all her old school essays and notes, appointment diaries going back to her university days and earlier, clothes and shoes I haven’t seen her wear for years, and yet she doesn’t appear to have kept these letters.
It’s not so much that I want to read them – I can remember every accusatory word, every expression of hatred, every threat – I just need to see them, to satisfy myself that they are here. In the end, I admit defeat, slumping on her bed and looking around me. If anything, the room looks tidier now I’ve methodically searched every inch of it, replacing things as I went. My phone trills from the bedside table and I snatch it up. It’s Jackson, and as I answer, I pray she has turned up at his flat, contrite and armed with a reasonable explanation.

  ‘Have you heard from her?’ he says without preamble.

  My heart sinks. ‘No. So you haven’t either?’

  ‘Shit. Where is she?’ He sounds more worried than angry, and my stomach turns over with a painful flop. It’s not only me that’s scared now. ‘Do you think we ought to call the police?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know, Jackson. She hasn’t even been gone twenty-four hours. They won’t do anything, will they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose we should call around first, see if anyone’s heard from her? And maybe call the hospitals?’