Three Little Lies Read online

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I’ve been so preoccupied with my private fears I haven’t thought of these simple things. ‘Will you do the hospitals, and I’ll try her friends?’

  ‘OK. Call me if you hear anything, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. You too.’

  It strikes me when I cut off the call that I don’t know Jackson as well as you might expect someone to know their best friend’s boyfriend. They’ve been together a year, it’s not as though he’s some fling. I’m not sure if it’s because I haven’t made the effort, or he hasn’t, or whether Sasha has kept him at arm’s length for some reason.

  I decide to start with Rachel, Sasha’s friend from university, who I’ve got to know in the years Sasha and I have lived together in London. We form an uneasy threesome, spending evenings hanging out in the Forresters, our local pub, and Saturday afternoons going up to Oxford Street or Covent Garden clothes shopping. They often try and persuade me to buy things I’ve tried on for fun but can’t afford. Neither of them have much understanding of the tight budget I’m living on. Rachel has a well-paid job as a management consultant, and as well as her job in marketing, Sasha owns this flat outright, paid for by her mum. She only charges me a peppercorn rent – I couldn’t move out even if I wanted to.

  The three of us went on holiday together once. They wanted to go to Thailand but there was no way I could afford it, so we settled for a week in Malaga, Rachel and I taking it in turns to be the spare wheel.

  I have a sneaking feeling Rachel wishes she had the friendship with Sasha that I have. What she doesn’t understand is that it’s borne out of years of shared experience, and no amount of drunken nights out, girly days shopping or getting her nails done with Sasha can ever replace it, or even come close. We’ve been through things together, Sasha and I. Things we can’t even begin to explain to Rachel, or to any of our other friends. Rachel will relish being the first to be called. She’s always going on about how Sasha is her ‘3 a.m. friend’, the one she can call on in an emergency, any time, no matter what. She’s not Sasha’s, though, I am, and she is mine. Every heartbreak, every drama, I’ve been the one she calls on, on the other end of the phone when we were at separate universities, and in person ever since we’ve been living together. Whether I like it or not.

  I suppose Karina was that type of friend too once, years ago. But I always knew I wouldn’t be able to stay friends with her, not after everything that happened. We both needed to move apart, to move on. To try and find a way of living with what had happened, to knit our ripped-up lives back together.

  Rachel picks up on the first ring.

  ‘Hello!’ she says, sounding surprised, and I realise how rarely I call her. ‘Is everything OK?’

  I briefly wonder why she thinks it might not be, but don’t have time to give it more than a second’s thought. ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Have you seen Sasha? I mean yesterday, or today.’

  ‘No, I was at work yesterday, then I came straight home,’ she says, as if providing an alibi. ‘I haven’t been out yet today. Why?’

  ‘Jackson came over here last night looking for her. He’d been to meet her from work.’

  Rachel snorts. She has no time for Jackson’s jealousy and paranoia.

  ‘Anyway, apparently she hadn’t been at work all afternoon, and she didn’t come home at all last night.’

  ‘Have you tried phoning her?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I snap. ‘I’m not completely stupid.’ I suspect Rachel thinks I’m a flake, not having what she sees as a proper job. She’s always flying off to Paris or New York in a fancy suit at a moment’s notice. If I presented on Classic FM or Radio 3 she’d probably be impressed, but she sees Simply Classical as lame – an indulgence, barely more than a hobby – and has probably never even read any of the articles I’ve had published in the classical music press.

  ‘Yes, I know, sorry,’ she says soothingly. ‘Maybe she… I don’t know, bumped into someone, and they ended up going out, and she stayed over at theirs?’

  ‘Who, though? Anyway, she would have phoned or texted. She always does.’

  ‘Perhaps she forgot this time.’ She struggles to keep out a note of triumph at the idea that Sasha and I are not, as she suspects, as close as I think we are. ‘Or she’s out of battery.’

  This is the only explanation that doesn’t scare me, and I’ve been clinging to it like a limpet to a rock. ‘Will you do me a favour, Rachel? Call around anyone you can think of and see if they’re with her, or if they’ve heard from her.’

  ‘No problem,’ she says, instantly efficient. We divide up all the friends we have phone numbers for and agree to call each other the minute we have any news of her.

  Ten minutes later I’ve worked my way through my list with no joy, and five minutes after that I get a text from Rachel: No one has seen her. Police???

  Do you think? Or wait a bit? I text back.

  There’s a hiatus, during which Rachel evidently decides she doesn’t want the responsibility of making this decision, because she replies: Up to you. x

  I curl my feet under me on Sasha’s bed, trying to stop myself picking at the raw skin around my fingernails. I don’t want to make the decision either. I’m aware of my tendency to catastrophise, and it makes it hard for me to know how realistic my fears are. Will the police laugh at me if I call now? She’s a grown woman, after all; she doesn’t have to tell anyone where she is. Or if I leave it, am I placing her in more danger? Will the police be angry if I don’t tell them straight away? But she might be back later, or at least have let me know she’s OK. I don’t want to waste their time. A text from Jackson to say he’s called all the London hospitals and none of them has any record of Sasha confuses me further. In the end, I pick up my phone and do what I always do when I have a decision to make.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ she says. Straight away I feel calmer. Mum and I grew apart during what I think of as the Monkton years, but ever since the aftermath of New Year’s Eve 2006, it’s been her I turn to for comfort. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not great, actually.’ My voice wobbles. ‘It’s Sasha. She’s… gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’ Along with thankfulness that I haven’t been in an accident, or diagnosed with some terrible disease, there’s a tiny hint of irritation. Although she had been pleased at first that I’d found a new friend, it hadn’t lasted long. As I had begun to spend more and more time at the Monktons’ house, Mum had sensed she was losing me. She couldn’t even encourage me to hang out with Karina more, because she was round there every chance she got too, both of us seduced by a life so different from the one we knew in our own homes. My hackles rise as they always do when I sense criticism of Sasha by people who don’t know her as I do.

  ‘She’s disappeared,’ I say bluntly. ‘No one’s seen her since yesterday lunchtime.’

  ‘Oh!’ She wasn’t expecting that, and I experience an uncomfortable throb of self-satisfaction that reminds me of our former prickly relationship. ‘Maybe she’s met someone, or… I don’t know, taken herself off somewhere. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?’

  I know what she’s referring to. Summer 2006. Sasha disappeared without warning, causing no end of worry for twenty-four hours, until she called Olivia to say she’d bumped into some old friends and taken off to France with them on the spur of the moment. I was devastated. We’d planned to go on holiday together, but I was left to endure deathly dull days working in the Body Shop and evenings cloistered in my bedroom in the stifling heat, listening to Olivia singing on my hi-fi and wondering what Sasha was doing.

  ‘She would have told me, Mum, honestly. She’s different now.’ Or at least I have to believe that she is.

  ‘I’m sure she is. I haven’t seen her for… goodness knows how many years. She certainly never visits the Monktons.’

  ‘Of course she doesn’t, she hasn’t seen them since… Hang on, how would you know, anyway?’

  ‘I can see their house from our front
window, can’t I? Not that I’m looking, particularly.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I say, smiling. Not for nothing do her friends call her a one-woman neighbourhood watch.

  ‘Nicholas, now, he does visit. I suppose he’s the only one they’ve got left, poor things.’ She can afford to be magnanimous now that Olivia and Tony’s lives have played out so badly. ‘Although…’ She trails off, as if she’s thought better of whatever she was going to say.

  ‘What?’ I pounce, knowing it’s something I would want to know, but that she thinks it would be better if I didn’t.

  ‘It’s probably nothing, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, just tell me, Mum.’

  ‘Well… the other day, I happened to be looking out of the window and I thought… I thought I might have seen Daniel.’

  The room blurs before my eyes and I swallow hard, concentrating so fiercely on staying calm that I can’t speak.

  ‘Ellen?’ Mum says cautiously.

  ‘When?’ I manage.

  ‘Last weekend, I think it was,’ she says vaguely.

  ‘And when you say you thought you saw him…’

  ‘It was getting dark, and he came from the other direction, rather than past our house, so I didn’t get a really good look at him. It could have been Nicholas, I suppose; they were very alike, weren’t they? I don’t think so, though – it was something about him, the way he was walking, maybe.’

  My heart is thumping and I try to breathe deeply, the phone burning hot against my ear. If Daniel really is back, then I have no choice but to call the police. You will pay for this one day. I pretend there’s someone at the door and say a quick goodbye to Mum.

  Alone, I lie down on Sasha’s bed, burying my face in her pillow, wrapping her duvet around me, trying to bring her back to me. It doesn’t warm me, though. Nothing can, because lying here surrounded by her things, breathing in the scent of her, all I can think about, ice creeping through me, is Daniel Monkton.

  Ellen

  September 2005

  Karina wasn’t in school. It was the third day back after the summer holidays, our first term as sixth-formers, and she’d been off sick for all three of them, making me realise how much I relied on her. We were the only two girls who had gone on from our primary school to this school, and having her there had made me lazy about making other friends. I got on OK with everyone, it’s not that I was bullied, or even unpopular, but I wasn’t part of any of the little groups that had formed over the five years we’d been at secondary school. And usually that was OK, because me and Karina were our own gang. She lived down the street from me, and we’d been in and out of each other’s houses for as long as I could remember. It wasn’t so much that we had chosen each other – in fact, sometimes it felt more as if we were stuck with each other – but it seemed too late, somehow, to change things. Karina and I weren’t studious, A-grade students, we weren’t sporty, and we certainly weren’t part of the cool group who went out drinking at the weekends and hung out with the good-looking boys. There was nothing about either of us that would encourage new friendships, so we tried to feel grateful that we had each other, at least.

  By the Wednesday, I was running short on people to hang out with, so after gulping down my lunch alone in the cafeteria, I headed to the library where, although I would still be alone, at least no one would see me except those who had their own problems to worry about. I was passing one of the maths classrooms, near the library, when Leo Smith barrelled out, bumping into me as he did so.

  ‘Oh God, sorry,’ he said, putting his hands on my shoulders. ‘Are you OK?’ His palms were warm, his eyes dark chocolate pools. A hint of a thrillingly masculine fragrance lingered around him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘No problemo.’ No problemo? I groaned inwardly.

  ‘Great,’ he said and sped off down the corridor.

  I tried not to stare after him and was about to walk on, when I saw the girl from the corner house standing by the open window of the classroom, her golden hair lifting in the breeze. She held her hand to her face, the tip of her finger stroking the place where I knew the angry red scar was, although it was either fading or she was so skilful at hiding it with make-up that it was barely visible. I hesitated at the door, torn between my natural shyness and the curiosity that had been growing inside me since the day Karina and I had watched her family moving in.

  We had come to an unspoken agreement over the summer that meant we had spent much of our time sitting together on the seat in the bay window in her front bedroom, pretending to read or play board games, our heads whipping round at any sign of movement opposite. With the windows open, we could hear the faint strain of music floating through the still, summer air; sometimes the piano, sometimes what must have been the mum singing opera, sometimes a musical instrument we couldn’t identify. We watched the boys loafing off in the direction of the station, and the mum and dad coming and going, sometimes separately and sometimes together, at all sorts of different hours, and in a variety of outlandish outfits. The dad was often holding a black case that we could only suppose contained the instrument. We were fascinated by them. My dad left and returned at exactly the same time every day, wearing the same cheap suit and carrying a bag with his sandwiches in, as had Karina’s before he died a couple of years ago. Our mums worked part-time, a remnant from the days when we needed to be collected from school every day. They rarely went out in the evenings.

  Of the girl we had seen very little. She didn’t often leave the house, and when she did, she walked swiftly down the street, sunglasses on, head down, as if she was in disguise, or trying to escape something. The boys had friends over, arriving in jostling groups holding carrier bags clinking with beer cans; the scent of barbecuing meat would float across to us, mixed with cigarette smoke and sometimes the sweet tang of marijuana. On those days I could feel the longing to be in that garden oozing out of Karina like blood from an open wound. I was happy to be observing from our vantage point in her bedroom, heat rising to my face at the mere thought of having to make conversation with all those strangers. We couldn’t see the main part of the garden at the back, but the boys and their friends would sometimes spill into the scrubby patch of grass at the side of the house by the garage, where we would get tantalising glimpses of them, and catch scraps of snatched conversations. More than once we heard the boys refer to their sister as ‘Lady Sasha’, and you could tell from the way the conversation often turned to her, and from their clumsy jokes, that their friends were taking more than a passing interest in her. She never joined them, though, as far as we could tell. Once or twice on the days when the garden was crammed with people, the parents moving easily among the teenagers in a way I could never imagine my parents doing, we saw her face at the window where we had seen her that first day, staring blankly out across the London skyline.

  Today in the classroom she was also staring out of the window, her lips pressed together as if she was trying not to cry. I turned to go, but the movement must have caught her eye and she looked round at me, her face hard.

  ‘Sorry, can I help you?’ She was well-spoken with a back note of Estuary English.

  ‘No, I… I was just passing and…’ I twisted my hands together, the rough skin on my palms crackling like paper. ‘Are you OK?’

  There was a silence, and all the possible answers to that question hung in the air between us.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, wiping a finger under each eye where her mascara had smudged; because what else could she say to someone she’d just met?

  I nearly walked away then. I was desperately intrigued, but I could tell already that there was an edge to her; in fact, she was all edges. I was used to the comfortable familiarity of my friendship with Karina, where neither of us had to try too hard. But the pull of that house – the books, the music, the exotic parents, those dark-haired boys – I couldn’t resist.

  ‘You live in the big house on the corner of Stirling Road, don’t you?’<
br />
  ‘Yeah,’ she said, frowning. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I live down the road from you. I saw you moving in.’ I tried to sound casual. I didn’t want her to know that Karina and I had maintained a surveillance operation worthy of the Metropolitan Police on her and her family all summer. ‘My friend lives opposite.’

  ‘Not that girl who’s always staring over at us?’ Ah. She had noticed, although thankfully she didn’t seem to recognise me. Karina must have been putting in extra hours when I was at home. ‘Daniel and Nicholas think it’s hilarious.’

  ‘Daniel and Nicholas?’ I said, trying to hide any trace of excitement, while storing away their names to tell Karina on the phone later. ‘Are they your brothers?’

  ‘God, no.’

  I waited for her to elaborate but it soon became clear she had no intention of doing so.