Little White Lies

PHILIPPA EAST grew up in Scotland and originally studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. After graduating, she moved to London to train as a Clinical Psychologist and worked in NHS mental health services for over ten years.

Philippa now lives in the Lincolnshire countryside with her husband and cat. Alongside her writing, she continues to work as a psychologist and therapist. Philippa’s prize-winning short stories have been published in various literary journals. Little White Lies and was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2020.

Little White Lies

Philippa East

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020

Copyright © Philippa East 2020

Philippa East asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2020 ISBN: 9780008344023

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 Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008344016

For Dan

For the longest time, the police could only find fragments of her, despite all our search posters, all our appeals; a few seconds of grainy, jerky CCTV footage, the tiny handful of frames they retrieved from the hundreds of thousands they trawled. An image of a little girl who stands on the up-bound escalator of a Tube station, her pointed chin raised towards the top of the staircase, her face tilted towards the bright lights.

For years I had hardly anything but those fragments. Those fragments, our memories and a bruising gap. As a family, we floundered in a stubborn, hopeless hoping, with jobs and school and birthdays and Christmases all waterlogged with her loss.

That’s how it was before at least, for those seven years that she was missing. It was when that was over that all the rest began, all that led up to that night on the bridge.

When I had to account for everything I had done.

And, ultimately, everything I had not.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Extract of Safe and Sound

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Chapter 1

Monday 27th May:

Day 1

ANNE

They discovered me in my daughter’s bedroom, elbow-deep in boxes. It had been twenty-five minutes from that single, surreal phone call to the moment my husband and the twins arrived home: plenty enough time for me to go wrong. I heard the front door bang and them pound up the stairs, Robert’s heavy boots kicking the carpet and the twins’ feet scrambling behind.

‘Anne?’

‘Mummy?’

‘I’m so sorry about the vase,’ was the first thing I said, before they could even say anything about the miraculous news. ‘It slipped, a complete accident.’

In the doorway the boys stood breathless and wreathed in chlorine. They had been swimming but now their swim had been cut short.

‘The vase?’ said Robert.

‘Downstairs,’ I managed, unable to tell him straight the awful thing I’d done. With the officer’s voice still ringing in my ears, I’d picked up the roses – the crystal vase of glowing red flowers, my husband’s nine-year anniversary present to me – lifting them to sit on the living-room mantelpiece. Perhaps I’d been in shock, still hardly thinking straight, but the one idea in my head was to place them there as a glowing symbol to welcome her home because this was everything I had ever wanted, everything I had dreamed of and hoped for, ever since she was eight, ever since she went missing, through seven long and painful years. Now my heart was bursting and all I wanted was a beautiful sight for her, all I’d wanted was for it to be perfect. Instead the vase had snagged on the lip, and one moment I’d had the precious flowers in my hands and the next there’d been a crash, an explosion of glass and rose stems strewn all over the hearth.

Now the pieces were in the bin and the bruised roses in the sink, but all that mattered was that Robert was coming forward to hug me, kneeling down on the floor and taking me in his arms, an outpouring of happiness and relief that she was found.

The twins pushed in beside us, all anxious, curious blue eyes. ‘But what are you doing?’ Laurie said. Gently Robert released me. Now he could take in the papers scattered at my knees. The phone call had come when I was alone, so out of the blue, so completely unexpected, a voice I didn’t recognize, a local officer I didn’t know telling me this information that was so impossible, unbelievable, that I’d had to ask him again and again to repeat it, with that single, impossible fact.

Dead? She isn’t dead?

No, Mrs White. No…

Kneeling in her room I must have looked a mess – flushed and unravelled, my hands grimy with dust from the papers – but I was so sure of what I wanted. I scraped my hair behind my ears. We hadn’t been in this room for months but all the evidence was in here, a paper trail leading all the way back. ‘Can you help me?’ I said. ‘I can’t have her room looking like this. Please, Robert, not this way.’ I wanted a home, a sanctuary, not a display of everything that had gone wrong. I couldn’t let it be like that now.

Sam and Laurie knelt on the floor beside me too. ‘But are you sure she won’t want these?’ Sam was saying. I leaned forward to bring blood to my head; there was so much crammed into this small space. For so long we hadn’t known what to do with her room. Change it, leave it, even my sister Lillian hadn’t been able to say, my sister who always had the answers to everything. To begin with, we’d tried to leave everything untouched, ready for her to come back to, but it was so hard to see her room like that, the toys, books, clothes a constant reminder that she wasn’t here. I think it started with the photos the police needed for the posters and news bulletins, the school portraits we’d laid out on her bed. Small changes at first, small additions. Over time though, year after year, we’d hoarded so much in here that by now it resembled an incident room: the cork board above her desk cluttered with the small, flat cards the officers had kept handing over at the end of every meeting saying, If there’s anything you need, anything else you think of, just call; the walls covered with newspaper articles about her own and other abductions that might somehow shed light; then the computer composites of how she might have looked, at nine, ten, twelve, my beautiful daughter; the boxes and boxes of posters Robert used to print up every year, all symbols of our search for her.

But I didn’t want her to be faced with all this, so much pain and desperation and loss. It was a home she needed, her family to welcome her: normality, happiness, the hurt over now.

I steadied myself with a palm against the floor and looked up at Robert, my husband, standing upright again now. ‘Please can you bring her things down from the loft?’ I asked him. All the things we’d put away up there. ‘I want her to see, I want her to have them.’ Without saying anything, without questioning me or hesitating, my husband went to unclip the loft ladder. The thought of his goodness almost closed up my throat and I had to swallow my mouth dry to make it pass. This was all we’d ever dreamed of and Robert had stood by me all the years in between, so why was I terrified that it might all change now?

Laurie bumped my arm with a stack of papers he’d collected up and I added them to the almost-full box beside me. Did they really understand what we were doing here? How much had Robert been able to explain? Their sister who they had barely known was coming home – had they really grasped that fact? To them she’d been little more than a name, photographs, memories, but now their missing sister would be here, in the flesh. I looked down at them, my sons, the children Robert and I had made together, creations that had cemented our relationship. How good our family had been like that, and now we’d be five again, our whole family rejoined. And her room, my daughter’s room, would be filled with her presence.

My phone shrieked; my shoulders jerked. I dragged my mobile from my pocket, Lillian’s name flashing on the screen. Lillian, my sister, whom I’d called even before I’d rung Robert. The person I always called in my life, six years older, my sister who knew me, who helped me, who always, always knew what to do. I had left her a message – a garbled, frantic, delirious message – and now she was calling me back. My hands slipped on the screen as I swiped to answer. Above me, I could hear the loft floorboards creaking.

‘Lillian?’

‘Annie.’

‘The police, down in London. They’ve found her.’

‘I know, I heard. I got your message. But Annie, are they sure?’

‘It’s her, Lillian. They said she’d been… that she’d been—’ But I broke off. There was so much that it threatened to overwhelm me; I had to focus on what mattered, all that counted: she was coming home. Right now she was still with police in London but home – Lincolnshire – was no more than three hours’ drive away.

‘We’re going to come over,’ I told Lillian. ‘In just a few hours, is that still all right? If we come over and leave the twins with you?’

‘Of course, Annie. We can make whatever arrangements you’d like.’

There were so many fears that were crowding my brain, but she made it all sound so simple and it should be simple; why couldn’t it be? We would make this perfect, we would make everything right. As I fumbled the phone to hang up, already Robert was coming back down from the loft.

‘Do you want these?’ he was saying as he appeared in the doorway. His arms were heaped with clothes – a pile of tiny skirts and dresses. We had kept them, but hidden them away: a missing child’s clothes. But she wasn’t missing any more.

‘Yes, yes, put them in the drawers.’ I stood to open the dresser for him, wrenching the tendon of my knee.

‘All right, Anne. Steady.’

But I had to be ready. ‘What do you know? What did he tell you?’ I had asked the detective to call my husband too; I had needed Robert to know everything I did – I couldn’t trust myself to relay the facts to him myself.

‘As much as he could. Everything they know.’

‘So did he say,’ I couldn’t seem to stop the shaking in my legs, ‘about how she just walked into the London police station, and about the house, and the little girl Tonia, and that she didn’t – that Abigail never…’

I caught myself, stemming my words, glancing down at the twins, busy on the floor picking Blu Tack off newspaper clippings, so small and innocent in the face of this news. Robert laid the pile of clothes in my arms and I pushed them into the empty drawer. There was no way she would fit them now, but I didn’t know what else to do with them, and all I wanted was to get this right. And it would be all right. Robert was here, beside me, helping me. I made myself slow, I made myself breathe, taking in Robert’s scent, the woody, musky deep smell of him, this man I loved and who loved me, who had brought such goodness into my life. We were a family, we had survived these seven years: me, my husband and our beautiful twins. But even as I held her clothes, knowing in a matter of hours she’d be here with us too – real, alive, home – I couldn’t stop other words, other images coming. ‘But the man, Robert—’

‘I know.’

‘Robert,’ my breath snagged in my throat, ‘they don’t know where he is, he’s still out there, somewhere, he could be anywhere—’

The drawer stuck on its runner and gave a shriek as I tried to push it closed. Robert caught my hand, his strong grasp steadying mine.

‘Anne.’ He turned me towards him so that I was looking directly into those warm, straightforward, honest eyes. I forced myself to hold his gaze and for the millionth time I wanted to tell him. He believed in me, he always had.

‘Anne,’ he said. ‘I understand, I’m overwhelmed too, but they’ve found her, she’s safe. Whatever has happened to her, you and me, we’re in this together, and all of us are going to be just fine.’

I wanted to fall, to sink into his words and let them embrace me, hold me, make everything okay.

But he could never have said that, if he knew about the lie.

Chapter 2

Monday 27th May:

Day 1

JESS

I heard their car outside, the growl of the engine turning over in our road. ‘They’re here!’ I said. We’d been sitting, waiting, bolt upright for what felt like hours.

I didn’t wait for my aunt to ring the doorbell. I couldn’t wait indoors any more, I had to go out, never mind the gloom and the drizzle coming down. A grey, rainy May half term. I hopped in the hallway tugging on my trainers and got outside just as Uncle Robert was pulling up next to the kerb. Mum and Dad were right behind me.

My Auntie Anne and the twins got out first, Sam and Laurie, my seven-year-old cousins. Her half-brothers, only babies when she’d gone missing. It hit me right then – they were almost the age that Abigail was then. She had been eight and I had been eight, but that was seven years ago now. Now I and my cousin would both be fifteen.

The boys stood clutching their backpacks like parachutes, their hair getting wet in the rain. ‘Thank you,’ Auntie Anne said to Mum – her sister – pushing them towards her. ‘They said we couldn’t all go at once. Even family.’

Now Uncle Robert got out of the driver’s side, levering his square frame up. He wasn’t Abigail’s real father, only her stepdad, but I knew he loved her the same as any of us.

‘Of course,’ said Mum, reaching out an arm to the twins. ‘They can stay here as long as you need. Fraser and I will do everything we can.’

‘They thought it would be too much,’ my aunt went on. ‘They said she was agitated and—’ She broke off, glancing down at the pale faces of the twins. My uncle stood with the engine turning over and the rain falling on his wide shoulders. He gave a reassuring smile. ‘She was just confused,’ he said. ‘They meant at first. When they had to explain everything to her.’

The car was lit up inside, shedding its glow onto the ring of our faces. Agitated, confused – I couldn’t understand what my aunt and uncle meant. I wrapped my arms around myself and jigged on the pavement. I only had a T-shirt on and it was unseasonably cold. ‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t I come with you?’

‘I’ll come back here to collect the boys,’ Uncle Robert was saying. He hadn’t heard me over the engine. ‘Once Anne and I have driven back home with Abigail.’

My cousin. Back home.

‘They’re driving her up from London now and opening a victim suite specially. ETA is ten-thirty p.m.’ It didn’t answer my question though.

‘What about me?’ I said again. I hugged myself. I imagined hugging her. ‘She’ll want to see me.’ I was remembering when we were six and Abigail broke her arm. A slip on a wet climbing frame, wood chips hard as tarmac from that height. Uncle Robert scooping her up, zooming her to the A&E in Lincoln, and she came home with a bright pink cast on. Then for the whole two months it took for her arm to heal, my arm ached from elbow to wrist. It had always been like that between us. Thinking what each other thought. Feeling what the other felt.

My cousin Laurie was rummaging for something in his backpack. Mum stepped forward. ‘You have to wait, Jess. One thing at a time.’

‘When, then?’ I looked again at my uncle, his stocky frame, his big, shaved head. In the shadows, his expression was all mixed up. I chafed my bare arms where they prickled with a damp chill.

Dad checked his watch. ‘You’re going straight there?’ he said, keen as always to know every detail. ‘To this place – this victim suite?’ It was barely a quarter past nine.

‘We have to, Fraser,’ said Auntie Anne. ‘If they brought her and we weren’t there!’ Another car came growling up the street. ‘There was a man,’ she continued. ‘A man had her all this time.’

For a moment the approaching headlights blinded me. I had to cover my eyes from the glare. A man? But they’d got her away from him now. They were driving her home, she was perfectly safe now.

‘What else do you know?’ said Dad. ‘What else did they tell you?’ Even with the twins there, it was all coming out.

Auntie Anne turned back to the car, digging in the footwell of the passenger seat. ‘Only to bring something,’ she said. ‘Something she might know, that we could talk about. Something she would remember.’

She held out a slim packet, the kind you rarely saw these days. Inside, a handful of photographs.

‘Daddy, my book!’ Laurie was still rummaging in his bag, but nobody seemed to be paying attention.

As my aunt lifted the flap, the glossy prints almost slipped from her grasp. ‘We chose the best ones,’ she said. ‘The happiest ones.’

‘Daddy!’ Laurie’s small voice was shrill. He was getting upset that no one was listening. ‘I haven’t got it.’

My aunt held the pictures out to show us, but it was too dark to see properly and the streetlights made everything look orange.

‘This too.’ My aunt drew something else from the car, something small and soft and blue. My heart did a tuck jump. Of course. I recognized it at once – Abigail’s flopsy. With it, another swarm of memories came: us running races neck and neck, every grazed knee she ever had. Running, playing, sleeping like reflections of each other. Dad was always amazed at how vivid my memories were and I’d tell him, because there was nothing that came after, because for me there’s been nothing between then and now.

‘We kept him,’ my aunt said. But of course, I thought. What else would you have done?

‘Daddy,’ said Laurie, ‘the one you were reading me—’ We were all so preoccupied and he was so little, unable to understand the enormity of this.

The little blue stuffed rabbit looked so small in my aunt’s hands, smaller than I remembered as I reached out to touch it. Auntie Anne wrapped her hands around mine, pressing the soft toy between us. ‘Jess – do you have something, anything else we could take with us? I think the more we can take, the better.’

I stared at her. Better for what? We were all here, Abigail’s family, ready and waiting. Why would she need any more than that?

‘Daddy! I’ve forgotten our book!’ Laurie’s words seemed to get swallowed up in the rain.

Now Uncle Robert came round the bonnet of the car. Dad met him with a kind hand on his shoulder. ‘Thanks, Fraser,’ my uncle said. Auntie Anne was still looking at me, her question hanging and the thrum of the car engine was going on and on. ‘Jess,’ she said again, ‘can’t you think of anything?’

The fur of the rabbit suddenly made me feel shivery, like someone was running a finger up the back of my neck. Mum was standing, watching us all.

And then Laurie’s hand slipped on the strap of his backpack and all the contents went tumbling to the pavement.

‘Laurie,’ moaned Sam, ‘look what you’ve done!’

Mum reached out, too late to catch the clothes as they fell. The pavement was wet, everything was getting soaked. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dad, ‘it’s fine, it’s fine.’ Both my cousins looked so desperate. But Uncle Robert smiled, a hero’s smile, and crouched to scoop up the pyjamas, the toothbrush, the little pair of socks. ‘It’s all right, Laurie, we can read it tomorrow.’ Mum helped him slide it all back into the bag. He lifted Laurie off the ground, then Sam too in his strong arms. ‘It’s all right. Everything’s all right. Be good, boys, and I promise we’ll see you very soon.’

My aunt was still looking at me. I still had the flopsy in my hand.

‘Anne, love,’ said my uncle, ‘we have to go.’

She nodded but she still didn’t move. Mum reached out to the twins – ‘Come on, come inside’ – and now Uncle Robert was re-opening the car door. Dad touched my elbow. ‘All right, Jess. Come inside.’

I pressed the flopsy back into my aunt’s hands. ‘You don’t need any more things,’ I told her. ‘You’ll be there. She’ll have you.’

It should have been enough. She should have known it was enough. Instead my aunt looked past me, her eyes searching out Mum’s face in the dark. ‘But Lillian, what do I say to her? What on earth am I supposed to say?’

Chapter 3

Monday 27th May:

Day 1

ANNE

In a puffy chair with a heart-shaped tea stain on the arm, my hands shaking, I tried to study the printed pages the detective had given us, one for me, one for Robert: Reunification. Remain calm and speak in a soothing voice. Remain calm, remain calm, but I kept thinking we should never have come so early because now we’d spent nearly an hour in this claustrophobic suite with a detective who put my whole being on edge, and for every minute on the clock that we sat here, I felt the past crawl one step closer and my anxiety rise yet another inch.