Three Little Lies Page 25

  There’s so much crap up here. I don’t even know what some of it is. I have a sudden urge to sort through it, to declutter. Maybe it will be liberating, cleansing – paring our possessions down to the things we truly need. There’s no time like the present. Better to make a start, do something positive, than to go back downstairs, finish the bottle and sink into the inevitable self-flagellating hole.

  I pick a corner at random, kneeling down, heedless of the thick, sticky grime under my shins. The first box I open is Daniel’s old school books. Once I’ve established that, what I should do is put them firmly into the ‘chuck’ pile. No one is ever going to look at them. Nobody cares. This thought, though, gives me such a pang that I begin leafing through them. He spent time and care on this work. As I read, I am taken back to the days before New Year’s Eve 2006, when one of my greatest concerns was to what standard he had done his homework, or whether he would pass his exams. These books are mostly maths, and as such largely incomprehensible to me. There’s a music book too, though, with a composition that I find myself singing, my voice cracking with dust, and pity, and love. When I’ve worked my way through, I put the box in a pile in the middle that I have allocated for the ‘undecideds’.

  I must throw some things away. Knees creaking and complaining, I crawl over to the furthest corner. There’s a black bin bag here, the corner of a hardback book poking out through a hole. I rip it further and see it’s one of a pile of Tintin books. I put the bin bag in the charity pile and move on to the boxes behind it. The first one houses a collection of seemingly random items, none of which ring a bell: a deflated football; two mugs; a satchel, its faux leather peeling off; an untouched notebook. I don’t even know who these belonged to. I put the box into the throw pile and move on to the next, which appears to be filled with ancient football magazines. I flick through quickly, assuming it will be simply more of the same. I’m about to put the whole box in the chuck pile when I catch a glimpse of something unexpected, near the bottom of the pile. Something pale pink and shiny. Satiny. I lift the magazines out and place them on the dusty floor beside me. I stare in confusion at the inside of the box. I am looking at a scrap of rose silk, with little lace flower buds sewn into it. I am looking at a pair of knickers.

  Ellen

  September 2017

  He steps towards me, reaching out, and I flinch.

  ‘No, sorry… it’s just, you might want to mop that up before it goes everywhere.’ He gestures at the lake of milk.

  Something in the movement takes me right back to that courtroom: the smell of furniture polish, the smooth grain of the wood under my fingers as I stood in the witness box. I shudder. He walks past me and pulls several sheets of kitchen paper from the roll on the side and starts soaking up the milk. I take a step back, watching in stunned silence. When the paper is sodden he gets more, and grabs the cloth from the sink to finish the job. I am rooted to the spot, suspended in this completely bizarre scene that, from the outside, looks like domestic harmony, and from the inside feels like a horror film.

  ‘That’s better,’ he says, rinsing his hands in the sink and drying them on a threadbare tea towel. ‘Now, we need to talk. Shall we go through and sit down?’

  I follow him out into the hall, taking a snatched look at my bag, which contains my phone, and into the lounge, where we sit opposite each other.

  ‘I’m sorry to barge in like this, Ellen,’ he says, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. I shrink back further into the sofa. ‘I didn’t think you’d see me otherwise.’

  Too right I wouldn’t. I still haven’t spoken, and I’m not sure if I can. The moisture has drained from my mouth, and it’s all I can do to keep breathing in and out.

  ‘So the police have been sniffing around. I gather that’s thanks to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper. ‘Sasha…’

  ‘I know, Sasha’s gone missing. But Ellen, I don’t know anything about that. You’ve got the wrong man.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘I let myself in while you were out. You don’t spend five years in prison without learning a thing or two. You wouldn’t have let me in if I rang the buzzer.’

  ‘What… what do you want?’ I manage, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth.

  ‘Ha! There’s a question, Ellen. What do I want? What I want is to go back eleven years and choose differently, choose better. I can’t do that, though, can I? So what do I want now?’ he goes on. ‘I want the same as you. I want to know where Sasha is. I want the police to stop wasting their time hassling me when they should be trying to find her. You’ve dragged me into this. I was living a quiet life before you told the police about me. Building bridges with Mum and Dad. Trying to get a bit of life back. But not any more.’

  ‘The only reason I told the police about you was because Karina had seen you in London. So had my mum.’

  ‘Is it? The only reason?’ He narrows his eyes, appraising me. I look down. ‘Or did you think of me straight away when Sasha disappeared? Did you think of Daniel the rapist?’

  I shake my head, not trusting myself to speak.

  ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree, darling.’ His voice is different, rougher around the edges. No longer the posh boy who went to the Royal College of Music. Has that been gradually worn away by whatever he’s experienced over the past ten years, or was it deliberate, an attempt to fit in with his fellow prisoners? ‘Was it not enough for you to ruin my life the first time around? Are you intent on doing it again?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I told the truth.’ I need to hold on to this.

  ‘And what about Karina? And Sasha? Were they telling the truth too?’

  ‘Yes.’ They were. I’m sure they were.

  ‘And you think you know everything that was going on back then, do you?’

  ‘Maybe not everything.’ I think of Karina in the pub with Sasha two weeks ago, deep in conversation; Karina sitting on her bed earlier, hinting that not everything was as it seemed; telling me I didn’t know Sasha as well as I thought I did.

  ‘No, not everything, Ellen. For example, I’m assuming you don’t know that Sasha and I were in a relationship in 2006.’

  ‘What?’ All the breath leaves my body. I feel like a fish that’s been pulled from the water to flounder on the deck. ‘No. You’re lying.’ But my voice is weak and I’m not even convincing myself. I remember the way I caught them looking at each other, way back at that first party when Daniel was playing the piano; how he stormed past me out of her room on New Year’s Eve 2006; her face when I walked in.

  ‘Thought you knew everything about her, didn’t you?’ He sits back, self-satisfied. Why does everyone take such pleasure in pointing out how little I know Sasha? ‘We fell in love eleven years ago, when we lived in the corner house. Nobody knew, it wasn’t only you,’ he adds, as if this will somehow make it better.

  My mind spins, trying to grasp what he is saying, trying to slot the pieces into this new pattern. Trying to come to terms with the fact that, yet again, Sasha has lied to me. This is the worst yet. I am Rip Van Winkle, waking up after twenty years to find everything changed.

  ‘But… Karina… What…?’

  ‘I didn’t rape Karina. Everything I said in court was true.’ He leans forward again, his eyes boring into mine. ‘Sasha and I… things didn’t end well between us. We had a sort of… fight that night, New Year’s Eve. Something happened that meant it was over for good. I was so low, so pissed off with her and with everything, and drunk. Karina was there, and she wanted me, and I didn’t try too hard to fight her off. She consented, though. I wasn’t drunk enough not to be able to tell. And neither was she.’

  ‘But the cuts on her legs, the blood…’

  ‘I don’t know what happened to her or how those cuts got there, but they weren’t there when she left my room. All that stuff about me having a relationship with Karina for three months, none of it was true.’

  I try to ignore the small voice in my head that
says he is telling the truth. These are the same lies he told in court. I heard him with Karina in his room. I need to focus on how to get him out of here. I try to remember the things I’ve read about these kinds of situations. Keep them talking – I’m sure that’s the advice.

  ‘But Sasha… she saw you and Karina together, that day before Christmas.’

  ‘She was lying.’ His face hardens. ‘Like I said, something had gone wrong between us. She was angry with me. And to be fair to her, I think she believed Karina then. She thought she was doing the right thing.’

  ‘Believed her then? What about now?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ellen. Where is she? Maybe she knows Karina lied.’ Daniel stands up and wanders over to the window, staring out of it, then turns to face me. ‘Like you lied. Like she did.’

  ‘I didn’t lie.’ The fear I felt when he first appeared had abated, but it roars back now, making my skin tingle all over.

  ‘That day you came round to the house on your own, you said you heard me and Karina having sex in my room. That never happened.’

  I don’t speak, I’m too frightened, but I remember a banging noise, grunting. Karina saying, You’re hurting me.

  ‘If you really heard someone with Karina,’ he goes on, ‘it was somebody else. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘They were in your room,’ I whisper. ‘It was you. It had to have been you.’ If it wasn’t, then what the hell have I done?

  ‘It wasn’t me, Ellen.’ He comes and sits down next to me on the sofa this time. ‘I need you to believe me.’ He takes my hand but I let it lie there, limp and unresponsive. His is clammy. ‘If you don’t believe me, you’ll never find Sasha, because you’ve got everybody looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘But… if Karina wasn’t with you in your room that day, who was she with?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He sounds uncertain, and for the first time I can see the boy he was ten years ago, still there under the hard shell of the man he has had to become.

  ‘That’s why the police should be talking to Karina, not to me.’

  ‘But if you’re right and she lied in court, she’s not going to tell the police now, is she?’

  ‘No, probably not. She might talk to you, though. Even if you can’t persuade her to go to the police, she might tell you something that could help find Sasha. If there’s even a chance of that, Ellen, you have to try.’ Something in the way he speaks tells me that, unbelievably, he still feels something for Sasha. Something that has lasted through years of incarceration, through what is, if he is right, a shockingly unforgivable betrayal. I can’t waste emotional energy on that now, though. There’s something I need to know.

  ‘What were you looking for, last Wednesday night?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When you broke in, in the night. What were you looking for?’

  ‘I’ve never been here before, I swear.’ He looks me full in the face. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Somebody was in the flat, in the middle of the night. I heard them. They were going through Sasha’s things.’ The terror I felt that night still lingers, like the smell of onion on my fingers after cooking.

  ‘It wasn’t me, Ellen,’ he says simply, and like everything else he’s said today, it has the disturbing ring of truth. ‘Look, I have to go now, but take my number – call me if you find anything out, anything at all.’

  I tap his number into my phone numbly, unsure how he expects me to find anything out. When he’s gone, my brain skips round and round in circles, trying to get to grips with what Daniel has told me, getting nowhere. Daniel and Sasha were in love. I think of the spin the bottle night when Daniel pressed a chaste kiss on Sasha’s lips as we all watched. I run all the conversations I have ever had with Sasha through my mind, reconfiguring them in the light of this new information. I remember every look she and Daniel shared, every time I found them laughing together, and I begin to wonder how I could have been so stupid.

  I have been smothered in her lies, like someone buried in the snow for whom death comes not quickly and painfully, but so gradually and peacefully they don’t even know they are dying at all.

  Olivia

  September 2017

  I place the knickers carefully on the floor, not knowing what to make of them, fearful of giving it too much thought. Underneath, there are a couple more books: scrapbooks, by the looks of them. Something inside urges me to throw them away without looking at them, pretend I never found them, but I can’t. The strands of the past are unravelling, as I always knew they would, and I am powerless to stop them.

  I pick the first one up and open it. I’m confronted by a page of photos of Sasha, simple family snaps that ring a faint bell in my memory. Perhaps Daniel put these together, before our… discussion on the morning of New Year’s Eve 2006. They could be innocent, these photos, as far as their relationship could be described in that way.

  I turn the page and my stomach contracts, bile rising in my throat. I clap a hand to my mouth to prevent myself from crying out. These photos are different. They have been taken apparently without Sasha’s knowledge, while she was sleeping. Some are close up on her face, revealing every pore, every blemish, every fine hair. In others, the worst ones, the duvet has been pulled back and the photos are of her naked body, her face out of shot. There are close-ups of her breasts, her private parts. Did Daniel take them covertly, or did Sasha know he had these pictures? I knew they had fallen for each other, but naïvely I didn’t think things had gone this far. I thought I had put a stop to it.

  I put the book on the floor, as if I could catch something nasty from it, unable to banish the image from my mind, the day I first walked in on them.

  July 2006. One of those hot, airless days when you can’t believe you’ll ever be cool again. I’d been rehearsing all morning in a stifling room with no air conditioning. We’d thrown the windows open but it was so still and hot that it made no difference. Every time I mopped my face with a handkerchief, sweat formed again immediately, beading on my upper lip, my forehead, even in my hair. I drank glass after glass of lukewarm water; the pipes must have been near the surface because however long you ran the tap, it never got truly cold. We were all cranky and argumentative, so as things otherwise were going well with the show, and it wasn’t going out until September, the director let us go at lunchtime. She advised us to lie in a darkened room and gird our loins for the following day, which was predicted to be even hotter.

  I floated along the road, light-hearted at the prospect of an unexpectedly free afternoon, a very slight breeze making me feel instantly cooler. As I got closer to the house, I saw that Sasha’s window was open. Faint strains of music floated out into the shimmering heat, and below, a buzz of conversation and laughter. One of the boys was in there with her. My heart lifted even further; I carried the worry of Sasha around with me in a different way then, and the sound of her being happy, particularly within the family, allowed that worry to recede a little. That was probably the last time I was able to think of her with any equanimity, to associate any positive emotion with her.

  I let myself in and put the kettle on, then went upstairs to see if they wanted a cup of tea. I knocked on the door, but didn’t wait to be asked in. I just pushed it open. I froze. They were both lying on the bed. Daniel was on his back with Sasha sitting astride him. They were fully clothed, and he was holding her wrists as if they’d been play-wrestling. They were both facing me, their expressions a perfect synchronicity of horror. We all stayed in our positions, like some frightful tableau, for a few seconds. Then Sasha jumped off the bed as if she’d had an electric shock, straightening her clothes, and Daniel sat up and smoothed his hair down. I stood there, mouth opening and closing, a pantomime of someone in shock. It was their faces that gave it away. Otherwise it could have been innocent – they weren’t naked, after all, weren’t even kissing. But I could tell exactly what was going on, and they knew it. When I’d recovered myself enough to speak, I told them to follow me down to
the kitchen when they were ready, the word dripping with disgust.

  I didn’t think it could get worse than that. I knew Sasha’s history, what she’d been through with her mum. She’d turned out perhaps better than could have been expected, but she was still trouble: mercurial, temperamental. No good for a boy like him. He was such a talented pianist; he had a chance to make it. Not like Tony, the second bassoon, or even me. He had something really special. Getting involved with Sasha at this point would have been a terrible mistake. She was so demanding, so needy, underneath her cool exterior. I saw how she played those girls off against each other, drawing them into her orbit and pushing them away when they got closer than she wanted. That was the last thing Daniel needed. And anyway, Sasha was living under our roof, and she was only seventeen. I wanted them to be close, but like brother and sister, not like this. I had always striven to be the cool parent, the one who was a friend, not a dictator. But that day, I had to be firm. I had to tell them they couldn’t have a relationship, not while they were living under my roof. Neither of them said much, sitting at the table, not looking at each other, faces burning.