Those Who Lie: the gripping new thriller you won’t be able to stop talking about

But the silence was short-lived. She could hear his heavy footsteps making their unwieldy way up the stairs. Oh no, she thought. Please, no.

She sensed her bedroom door open. She heard him lurch into the room and flick the switch. The room was instantly flooded with light. Her heart began to hammer harder and faster. She huddled further into her covers, trying to gain a little more respite. Closing her eyes tight, she pretended to be fast asleep, although she’d tried that before and knew it wouldn’t work. She could visualise him looking at her from across the room. It made her skin crawl.

He weaved his way over to her bed, and practically collapsed on top of her. She lay still and tried to swallow down the lump in her throat even as the tears squeezed out from behind her firmly shut eyelids.

‘I love you so much, Emily.’ Her father’s voice was slurred and his smell – a mixture of sweat, alcohol and tobacco – invaded her nostrils and made her feel nauseous. ‘You make me love you so much.’

One evening, he’d passed out before he could begin. Perhaps that would happen tonight. But she realised this was just wishful thinking as he pulled back the covers, unwrapping the cocoon she’d enveloped herself in.

She didn’t move a muscle as he pulled up her nightie and opened the belt of his trousers. She remained immobile – there was no point in fighting. Instead, she concentrated on the place in her mind she always retreated to when this happened: the beach at Woolacombe.

In one of her happiest memories, she was at the beach with her sister, her parents and her mother’s parents. She was little then and this was long before she’d made her father love her too much. They must have gone to the beach often during the summer months and she was never sure if this was just one memory or a mixture of many trips to the seaside.

They were all eating Mr Whippy 99 ice creams with chocolate Flakes. Granny and Granddad said they didn’t like the Flakes so Amanda and Emily could have two each. Afterwards, the girls swam in the sea with Mum and Granddad. They stayed in until their lips turned blue and their arms and legs had goose pimples all over them. As the tide was so low, it was a long walk back to the place where their father and Granny were dozing on deckchairs. Their mum made them run to warm up. Panting with his tongue out like a dog, Granddad pretended to be too old to jog.

It was hard to find the right parasol at the top of the beach because they’d drifted along in the current while jumping over and ducking under the waves, and so they were several metres too far along the beach. Emily was the one who finally spotted the blue and yellow parasol. Granny wrapped a beach towel around her, and then another one around Amanda. Someone had taken a photo – it must have been their father because he was the only one not in the picture, and Emily had kept it. It was in a frame on her bedside table.

She turned her head and focused on this photo now as the familiar pain seared through her. She could almost feel the teddies’ cold, glassy eyes on her, and from the open pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, both the March Hare and the Hatter stared at her. It was as if they were all watching her, daring her to find the courage to put an end to this. Only the sleepy Dormouse had his eyes closed, as though averting his gaze out of consideration or turning a blind eye to what she was going to do.

As her father’s shudder and moan signalled that this was nearly the end for tonight, she reminded herself that there was only one way this would ever stop. She freed her hand from where it was pinned under her father. I have to do this, she thought. I have to do it now, or it will be too late.

Before she had time to think through what she’d really intended to do, the gun went off.

Long after her father’s lifeless body had collapsed onto her for the last time, soaking her in blood and almost crushing her beneath its dead weight, the shot continued to ring in her ears.

Chapter Three

~

Oxford, August 2014

As Josephine Cavendish swings the car into the driveway of Emily’s Victorian home in leafy Summertown, narrowly avoiding the gatepost, Emily thinks that it’s a miracle she hasn’t been involved in another car crash on the way home. She realises she has been pressing her right foot down hard on the floor as though she has an emergency brake on the passenger’s side. The five-mile journey from the hospital seemed interminable.

Gently levering herself out of the car, she blanches as her broken ribs protest. She’ll take some more of her prescribed painkillers as soon as she’s inside the house, she decides. She tries to lift a bag from the boot of the car.

‘Go on inside,’ her mother says firmly. Peering at Emily over the top of her glasses, which have slipped down her nose, Josephine shoos her daughter away. Emily knows better than to argue with her mother. ‘I’ll carry these,’ Josephine says, hoisting the holdall onto her shoulder. Then she grabs the plastic bags containing clothes, which Amanda brought to the hospital for Emily, as well as the bunch of flowers and another one of grapes.

As Emily walks slowly up the drive, out of the corner of her eye she catches sight of her next-door neighbour. Mrs Wickens seems to be engrossed in her geraniums, but Emily suspects she’s burning with curiosity and ready to pounce on them. Anxious to avoid the elderly woman’s questions, Emily keeps her head down and escapes, but Josephine isn’t so lucky. Snippets of their conversation reach Emily’s ears as she takes her house keys from her handbag.

‘… a car accident … Mr Klein? … so sad … your elder daughter … she fed the cat …’

Entering the hallway, Emily lets the front door swing closed behind her, shutting out their voices. Mr Mistoffelees pads towards her, mewing. She tries to bend down to stroke the cat, but it’s too painful, so she stands still while he weaves himself in a figure of eight around her legs.

Looking around her, she spots several pairs of Greg’s shoes and his umbrella. A thought hits her like a punch in the stomach and hurts far more than her injuries: this is no longer their home, but only her home. Everything around her looks the same: the light grey walls, the mirror, the rug, Greg’s antique furniture incongruously juxtaposed with her own modern paintings. Something old, something new, Greg would often joke. And yet, despite the familiarity of her surroundings, Emily doesn’t feel at home. Everything looks the same, but everything has changed, she realises with a jolt. She has the strange impression that she has just stepped into someone else’s life.

She remembers Greg carrying her over the threshold when they came home after their honeymoon in Venice ten years ago. It had been so romantic, they were happy, and the unfortunate incident at their wedding had practically been forgotten. Emily hadn’t wanted to think about that, anyway. She’d needed to forgive Greg and build up trust in him again.

Greg spun her around in his arms – both of them giggling – and then set her down in the same spot she is standing in at this very moment. She imagines now that she can hear his laughter echoing in the hall. He’d always laughed louder and longer than everyone else; she’d found his enthusiasm contagious on many occasions. He’d been so full of life. It just doesn’t seem possible that he’s dead.

Oh, Greg. You can’t die. You can’t leave me. I didn’t mean to—

Emily’s thoughts are interrupted when Josephine opens the front door and hauls in the carrier bags, roses and fruit, not without some difficulty. The strap of the holdall has slid down from her shoulder to her elbow. She dumps everything on the rug.

‘Come into the kitchen, Emily. I’ll make some tea,’ her mother says, leading the way.

Emily kicks off her shoes and heads for the kitchen. ‘No, I’ll do it, Mum,’ she argues. ‘I need something to do.’

‘You’ll do no such thing. I’ve come to stay for a while, and I intend to take care of you until you’re feeling a bit stronger. Now sit down.’

Once again, Emily does as she is told. She notices the fridge is full when Josephine opens it to take out a carton of milk. She makes a mental note to thank her sister for her thoughtfulness. She studies her mother who is click-clacking her way clumsily around the kitchen in her high heels.

Having lost a lot of weight when she gave up drinking, Josephine is more discreet physically, but Emily finds her more sociable now, and less withdrawn. Her mother has always been slightly sharp-tongued, though, and this doesn’t appear to have changed. She keeps up an endless stream of chatter as she opens and closes the cupboard doors. Emily fixes her gaze on the kitchen table and tries to respond when it seems appropriate until her mother turns to face her and says something that catches her full attention.

‘If you need something to do, we could start clearing out Greg’s clothes and things.’

Emily is horrified at the suggestion. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, not yet.’

‘Well, I could do it for you.’

‘No! Don’t do that, Mum. I’m not ready. He…’

Emily had been about to say that Greg might still come back, but she closes her mouth as Josephine places a mug of tea in front of her. The tea looks as if it has been made without a single teabag. Emily blows gently across the steaming cup and sips at the hot drink. Her hands are unsteady, so she puts the mug down, making a face as she does so. The tea tastes as disgusting as it looks. She is staggered by her mind’s ability to think like this when she has just lost her husband. I’m a widow, she reminds herself, but it hasn’t sunk in yet.

‘That’s all right,’ Josephine says. ‘All in good time.’

Emily smiles weakly and asks her mother for some water to take her tablets. She holds the cool glass to her head for a while and closes her eyes. In her mind, she sees an image of herself as a patient, not in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington from which she has just been discharged, but in the hospital of her nightmares. The one she stayed in for just one week as a child. It was a long time ago, but the memory still haunts her. She opens her eyes again to make the image disappear.

Just then the phone rings, making Emily jump. Her mother rushes out to the hall, unsteady in her high heels. Then she teeters back into the kitchen with the handset pressed against her ear.

‘Well, I don’t know if she’s well enough to talk…’ Josephine’s voice trails off as Emily nods, holding out her hand for the telephone.

‘Hello? Emily Klein speaking.’

‘Sergeant Campbell, here.’ Emily immediately regrets taking the call. She has had a strong mistrust of the police ever since she was a teenager. And she has already taken a strong disliking to Campbell. ‘PC Constable and I would like to ask you a few more questions, if we may, about the crash,’ the sergeant continues, sounding almost friendly, much to Emily’s surprise.

‘Yes?’ she says expectantly. She starts to chew one of her nails.

‘Not now. Tomorrow. If you’re not feeling up to coming in to the station, we could come to your house. At three p.m.-ish?’

‘Fine,’ Emily hears herself agreeing while a knot of anxiety twists in her stomach. ‘What sort of questions?’

‘Just corroborating the statement of an eyewitness to the incident. It would be easier to do it in person. Tomorrow at three.’

‘OK. I’ll see you then.’ Emily tries to keep her voice even, but she can hear it quaver. Hopefully, Campbell can’t. ‘Do you need the address?’

But the sergeant, true to her original form, has already hung up. Emily becomes aware of the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and realises she has bitten her nail to the quick.

Why did Campbell say ‘incident’? Emily wonders disconcertedly. Surely she’d meant ‘accident’?

‘Was that the nasty ginger policewoman you told me about?’ Her mother doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘What did she want?’

Emily is still asking herself the same thing. ‘She and her colleague want to ask me some more questions,’ she says. ‘They’re coming round tomorrow afternoon.’ She picks up her mug and holds it to her lips, but she can’t bring herself to drink any more of it.

Emily wants her mother to reassure her; she wants her to say that this is normal police procedure after a traffic accident. After all, Greg died in this crash. And Emily was driving. She has been trying to shut that thought out, but she knows the grief and guilt will catch up with her.

Instead Josephine says, ‘I thought you couldn’t remember what happened. What’s the point in bothering you about it?’

‘Sergeant Campbell said she wanted to follow up a report by a witness.’

‘I still don’t see how you can help with your amnesia.’

Josephine pulls out a chair and sits down opposite her daughter at the kitchen table.

‘I’m not really suffering from amnesia, Mum,’ Emily says, avoiding her mother’s eyes and staring instead at the mark left by her mug on the table. She puts her mug down, placing it exactly inside the wet circle. ‘I’ve just blanked out the accident itself and what Greg and I were argu…um…talking about. That’s all.’

‘What did they say about that at the hospital? Will you get your memory back?’

‘I haven’t lost my…’ Emily begins, but gives up mid-sentence. Unbidden, the image of her car about to crash into a tree replays in Emily’s mind. She blinks and focuses on her hands gripping the mug. ‘They said it might be due to the concussion, or, more likely, the emotional trauma of the accident. I may never remember exactly what happened in the car. According to the doctors, that may be just as well.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s not the first time you’ve forgotten something important.’

Emily snaps her head up and looks into her mother’s cold, blue eyes. They appear magnified behind her glasses, but Josephine’s expression is inscrutable. Emily thinks she knows what her mother was referring to with that barb, but she doesn’t know what reaction she was hoping to provoke, so she ignores it.

‘And it’s not the first time the police have questioned you about a suspicious death.’ Emily is still holding her mother’s gaze and it takes her a split second to realise Josephine hasn’t spoken. This remark has come from a voice in her own head. Deep down, this is what she’s afraid of. What if Campbell and Constable don’t think it was an accident? If they find out anything about my past, anything at all, they won’t believe me, no matter what I tell them, she thinks.

Emily sighs. She feels irritable and overwhelmed. Her mother opens her mouth to say something, but Emily doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to talk any more.

‘Mum, I think I’ll go and take a shower and then sleep for a while,’ she says, adding, ‘if that’s all right with you.’

‘Yes, that’s fine, Emily. I’ll potter around down here and make something for dinner later.’ Josephine slurps her tea loudly. Then she gets up to busy herself in the kitchen as Emily leaves the room.

Minutes later, as Emily lathers her body with soap under the scalding jet of the shower, she wonders how long her mother plans to stay. She immediately berates herself. Her mother is trying to be helpful. And, anyway, does she really want to be alone right now? As she rinses the shampoo from her hair, a line from the end of Perfect Blue Buildings, one of her favourite songs by The Counting Crows, comes into her head. But she can’t think of the tune.

Stepping into the master bedroom from the en suite bathroom, she notices Greg’s red jumper. It’s slung over the back of the antique chair next to his side of the bed. He wore it recently when they went out as it was rather chilly for a summer’s evening. They ate at a nice restaurant, then went to a concert at the Sheldonian Theatre. A few bars from the Schubert Sonata that the pianist performed begin to play in Emily’s head. She and Greg both thoroughly enjoyed themselves. When they arrived home, Emily recalls, Greg wanted to make love, but Emily pretended to be too tired. She regrets that now.

She wraps the towel around her head, pinning up her shoulder-length hair, and walks over to the wooden armchair to pick up his jumper. She buries her face in it and inhales deeply. She feels weak as she breathes in Greg’s cologne mixed with the faint scent of the laundry detergent that he liked her to use to wash his woollen jumpers. There’s also the odour of beeswax and polish that permeated all of Greg’s clothing. It’s a smell Emily would usually find comforting, but in this instant it symbolises everything she has just lost. Her legs give way beneath her and she sinks onto the worn, unwelcoming cushion of the chair.

In spite of herself, Emily presses the jumper harder against her face and breathes in again. This time she can detect the hint of a more floral fragrance. She stiffens as a memory hovers at the back of her mind, but it stays stubbornly out of reach. The smell is vaguely familiar, but disturbing at the same time. As the towel slips from her hair, releasing her chestnut curls, she tells herself it’s just her conditioner, her own smell mixing with that of her husband. Her late husband. Tears start to stream down her cheeks as she clings to the jumper, rocking her body backwards and forwards.

Emily doesn’t remember getting up from the chair, but when she wakes up an hour or so later, she finds she’s lying in her dressing gown on Greg’s side of the bed, still clutching his sweater. She gingerly raises herself to a sitting position, grimacing. She stays on the bed, in a daze, gently rubbing the faded scars on her right forearm with the fingertips of her left hand. It’s an unconscious gesture and as soon as she realises she’s doing it, she stops and tugs her sleeve down. She can hear the muffled noises her mother is making in the kitchen downstairs, but she doesn’t want to join her just yet.

Scanning her bedroom, she notices that most of the things in it are hers. Her paintings are displayed on the walls; her perfume bottles, hairbrushes and make-up are on the dressing table; her ornaments are lined up neatly on the shelves. The antique armchair, on which Greg’s clothes were always strewn, was his. She has always found it ugly and uncomfortable, but suddenly she feels fond of it.

Her eyes fall on her MacBook Pro on top of the chest of drawers. Greg bought it for her because she wasn’t very computer-literate and he said it was user-friendly. But really Josh, the computer whizz she’s employing to set up a website for her artwork, uses her laptop more than she does.

Emily remembers how much Greg had loved new technology. He and his friend Charles would sometimes talk about computers for hours on end, which she found intensely annoying. Thinking how much she would love to listen in on one of those conversations now, a lump comes to her throat. She remembers spending evenings sitting next to her husband, losing herself in the novels on her Kindle while Greg, who had never been much of a reader, was on his laptop or smartphone replying to emails or searching for antiques on the Internet or catching up with friends on Facebook. She makes an effort not to start crying again.

It dawns on her that although all of Greg’s close friends and family know he has lost his life in a car crash, several of his old classmates from school won’t have heard about it. Now she comes to think of it, many of his work contacts won’t know either. She decides to type a short message on Facebook to tell them. She brings her laptop over to the bed, props up the pillows behind her and, sitting with her legs out straight and the computer on her thighs, she boots it up. She knows Greg’s password, so she brings up his account. She mulls over each sentence, but in the end she’s satisfied with her announcement.

It is with deep sadness that I inform you that my husband Greg passed away on 1st August following a road accident. His funeral was held last week. I’m very grateful for the support I’ve received at this tragic time. Emily Klein.

Although she doesn’t go on Facebook much, Emily does have an account, and she tags herself so that the message will appear on her Timeline, too. Wondering if some people will find an obituary on Facebook distasteful, she hesitates briefly. Then she posts her comment, logs out of Greg’s account and connects to her own to check that the message has appeared on her Facebook wall.

Just as she has logged in, she hears the four notes of the message notification sound. She clicks to open the message. The first time, she reads it without fully taking in the meaning, staring uncomprehendingly at the screen. As she rereads the words more carefully, she feels dizzy and struggles to breathe.

Alice, I don’t know what’s going on. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

The blue and white bar at the top of the Facebook page seems to flash as if in warning. Then the message becomes an illegible blur. Emily pushes the computer off her lap and jumps up from the bed. The pain in her side is excruciating. The room begins to spin so fast that she feels herself falling. It can’t be. That’s impossible. That’s the last thing that goes through her mind before she faints.

Even if the sender’s name hadn’t appeared in bold at the top of the message, Emily would have known it was from him. Only one person has ever called her by her middle name.

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