Beautiful Liars_a gripping thriller about friendship, dark secrets and bitter betrayal Page 9

  Mrs Sherman popped her head out of the living room to give a little wave. ‘There’s fish pie keeping warm in the oven,’ she called as Martha turned away. ‘Enough for both of you!’

  Martha had cycled down to the canal, following the darkened path towards the Square Wheels cabin, lit up like a beacon in the distance. It was a ramshackle old place, a basic garage-type construction, donated by a retired tradesman who no longer needed the space for his carpentry work. Its corrugated sides were decorated with an artwork of salvaged bicycle wheels and a hand-painted wooden sign similar to those you’d find attached to the sides of houseboats along the waterway. As Martha drew nearer, she noticed just two bikes leaning up against the adjoining railings, and she recalled how Juliet had told her that volunteer numbers always dropped off during the holidays, just when they were needed the most. Although Juliet hadn’t meant it as a dig, Martha felt ashamed to be one of those winter drop-outs, and as she approached the cabin she was feeling nervous about seeing David Crown again for the first time in months, worried what he might think of her for disappearing as abruptly as she had the summer before. She’d hate him to think badly of her.

  Her brakes squeaked loudly as she came to a clumsy halt outside the open workshop doors, the noise causing David Crown and Juliet to look up from what seemed to be a close embrace. There was shock in Juliet’s tear-streaked face, but not in David’s, and for a moment Martha was utterly confused, seeing something that seemed so clear, before it vanished like a wisp of smoke. David smiled warmly, entirely without malice or guilt, inviting Martha in with an incline of his head, before smoothing the hair from Juliet’s damp face and saying, ‘OK?’

  That was all. OK? When Juliet bent to retrieve her bag, David Crown turned his gaze on Martha again and he gave her a wink – not a slimy or suggestive wink, but one that said, I’m glad you’re here, Martha. See your friend home safely, will you? It made her feel good, that wink. It made her feel useful, grown-up, worthwhile.

  As they left Juliet gave David a small shrug of her shoulders and she slung her rucksack over her arm and steered her bike around to walk back along the canal path at Martha’s side.

  Once the cabin was out of earshot, Martha asked, ‘What was that all about, Jules? Why was he hugging you?’ Was she jealous? Worried? What was it she had been feeling? She had no idea, but there was anger there, or something similar. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Juliet replied, glancing behind, then back at Martha sheepishly.

  Martha glowered. ‘What d’you mean, you can’t tell me? You were … you and him … were you—?’

  ‘No!’ Juliet hissed before Martha’s words were even out. ‘Don’t be stupid, Mart! Oh, my God, no! We were just, you know, talking. He’s a really good listener. We were packing up and he asked me if I was alright because I’d been a bit quiet tonight, and like a complete idiot I burst into tears. He was just comforting me, that’s all.’

  Martha gave her another suspicious look, before realising she hadn’t even asked Juliet why she was so upset. God, did she always have to be so selfish? Perhaps her father was right, she did always think about herself first, didn’t she?

  ‘Soz, Jules,’ she said now. Everything felt so wrong these days – her dad, the drinking, her crappy school, the uncertainty of her future. Everything felt off-kilter, and Juliet’s weirdness tonight only added to her hopelessness. ‘I don’t know why I said that. Jules? Sorry. But why can’t you tell me? I thought we told each other everything?’

  Juliet’s eyes moved along the inky line of the canal, before turning back to Martha. ‘Alright. Look, I can tell you what, but not who.’

  ‘O-kay,’ Martha replied, and she bit down on her lower lip, preventing herself from complaining further.

  ‘I’m seeing someone.’ Juliet waited for Martha’s reaction, and got no more than Martha’s unblinking stare pressing her on. ‘It’s been a few months now, since the end of the summer holidays, actually, and, well …’ She brought her thumb up to her mouth, nibbling on its nail as she gathered her words. ‘And we love each other.’

  Martha was stumped, completely at a loss for the right reaction. For the briefest of moments it occurred to her that the end of the summer was when she had stopped volunteering at Square Wheels. Was it someone Juliet had met there? Was that how she had managed to keep this a secret from her for so long? Juliet had never had a boyfriend before, nothing more than mild flirtations with fellow pupils. Liv had had plenty, most of them fleeting and uncomplicated, and she had a wicked way of reducing their significance with her tell-all humour, quick as she was to kiss and tell. Martha had had a few fairly innocent hand-holding relationships at school, followed by a series of drunken and shameful encounters over the past year, after losing her virginity in the alleyway by the Waterside Café to a boy called Jamie, whose subsequent phone calls she refused to answer. But Juliet? Nothing. She’d never talked in that way. Martha had even begun to wonder if she was one of those people who just wasn’t interested in sex or romance at all.

  ‘So what’s the problem? Why all the secrecy if you love each other?’

  Juliet shook her head. ‘It’s not that straightforward, Mart. My parents wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘Do I know him?’

  She didn’t answer and Martha swallowed her hurt. ‘Why wouldn’t they approve?’

  Still no reply.

  ‘What is it? Is he older? A bit rough? A druggie? What’s so bad that your parents would disapprove?’ When Juliet silently started up along the path again, Martha lost her temper. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jules! I thought we were friends! Best friends! Does Liv know? Have you told Liv?’

  Juliet shot her a glance, and there it was, that look. Caught out. She’d told Liv all about this mystery boyfriend, but she couldn’t tell Martha. Even David bloody Crown seemed to know more about it than she did. They stood together at the opening to the pavement where their routes divided, their bicycles nose to nose, the rage blooming between them. Martha didn’t want to go back home tonight, whether it be to face her father’s alcohol-fuelled fury or the morose silence of his post-pub slumber. But nor could she return to Juliet’s now, despite Mr Sherman’s invitation, not with this between them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Juliet whispered, the tears flowing freely again, and she climbed on her bike and rode off into the distance.

  Martha gazed after her, before pushing away and cycling in the direction of the Doe Street corner shop, where they’d serve alcohol to anyone with money, no matter how young they looked.

  Martha consciously halts the memory here; there’s no point trying to remember an evening that almost certainly ended badly. Staring at the palms of her hands, she plays the scene over and over in her head, until the nuances of the evening are as clear as a recent memory. Where was Liv in all this? Had Martha later pressured Liv into telling her Juliet’s secret? She certainly would have tried. And yet she can’t retrieve the scene of it at all.

  ‘Where the hell are you, Liv?’ she says into the empty space before her.

  As if in answer, Martha’s phone alerts her to a large number of backed-up emails, and nestled among them is one from Olivia Heathcote, marked as high priority, with the subject header: ‘Re: Initial Questions’.

  At last, Martha thinks. Perhaps now the pieces will start to slot together.

  11. Casey

  I wasn’t always this sad, introverted soul. And I wasn’t always fat. I often wonder how things might have turned out if I’d had a sibling or two, someone else to help care for Mum so that I hadn’t had to do it alone. These days, I lie in my bed some mornings, running my hands over the mounds and folds of my flesh, and I barely recognise myself, even though I’ve been this way now for more years than I care to think about. I try to recall what it was like to feel the firm set of my hipbones beneath the skin, the tracks of my ribs, the dips of my collarbones. Sometimes I try to fool myself into believing that perhaps I am still that thin young woman, merely trapped inside this
soft covering of flesh, but I know that’s not true because I don’t care enough to take steps to return to that body. I never diet, or deny myself, or exercise or exert. This is who I am now. ‘Obese,’ the doctor said six months ago when I visited to discuss my irritable bowel. ‘At risk.’ I laughed when he said that, putting my hand to my mouth to shield my teeth, and the doctor looked at me as though I was quite mad. He examined me behind the vinyl curtain of his clinic room, and as he pressed firm fingers against the dough of my stomach, I allowed myself to imagine him slipping them below my elasticated waistband and inside my underwear. Was it wrong of me to have those thoughts? I asked myself later as I lay in the bath reliving the moment, my own fingers moving in the way I had imagined his. Was it wrong to think of a stranger in that way? But his touch, as professional and curt as it had been, was the first physical contact I had had in a long time, and it had released something unexpected in me.

  My mother would have been disgusted to hear the inner workings of my mind. She despised any talk of that kind, berating the slipping of standards on British television, the anything goes attitude of today’s youth. ‘Filth,’ she would utter if she inadvertently tuned in to Hollyoaks or some unexpected erotic scene on TV, and if ever homosexuality was alluded to, or, worse, portrayed in a programme, she would tut breathlessly and switch channels. Goodness, if she could have seen my thoughts, which are certainly far worse than anything she’d ever seen on the telly! She would have thought me a sex maniac – despite the fact that I have never actually been with a man. I haven’t even had a boyfriend, though I like to think I’ve come close. Since I’ve been on my own, I’ve been pondering on it more and more, how I should be open to the idea of new experiences, and I suppose this is why Martha’s appearance in my life has become so profoundly important to me. Of course, Carl visits once a week too, and he features highly in my waking dreams, as well as my sleeping ones. I fantasise that one day he will deliver my shopping, as he does every Friday, and with the final bags he will push the front door shut and turn to me, taking me by the hand and leading me upstairs to the bedroom. I’ll be shy, telling him it’s my first time, but he’ll reassure me with gentle hands, stripping me of my clothes, laying me across the bed like a sacrifice, legs brazenly apart, my small breasts rising and falling. For a while he’ll just stand there, looking at me, enjoying the expanse of me, before sliding his rough hands over the soft creases of my thighs towards my secret place. When we make love, he’ll keep his uniform on, and afterwards he’ll tell me I’m beautiful, and finally he’ll leave me there, draped across the bed, spent and glorious in my nakedness. Lately I’ve been imagining the scene with lovers other than Carl. Sometimes it’s the postman; sometimes it’s that nice man from daytime TV. Just lately I’ve even allowed myself to imagine it’s Martha. I’m thinking these thoughts when Martha’s next email comes in, sounding out from my laptop on the dressing table across the room, forcing me from my bed when I might easily have lain here all morning.

  Now downstairs, I sit in my dressing gown at the small table beside the front window and open my inbox. There’s a fine drizzle trickling down the windowpane, obscuring my view to the street, where the rest of the world carries on: the workers, the schoolchildren, the dog-walkers and runners. It strikes me how separate I am from that place beyond the doorstep, how the few rooms inside my little terrace have become my universe. To my delight, Martha has responded to my last message with more observations and questions, but best of all she attaches two photographs of Juliet and her friends at Square Wheels, taken not long before she disappeared. The first, Martha’s message tells me, is taken from a local article about the Square Wheels charity, showing David Crown with Juliet Sherman and her brother Tom, and two other volunteers, one of whom is ‘possibly called Karen’. The second is a more relaxed image, of four teenagers picnicking beneath a tree alongside the waterway: Juliet, Martha, Liv and Tom. Martha believes that David Crown took this picture, though she confesses she can barely recall the occasion.

  Do you remember that boat trip along the canal, Liv? she asks in her email. Juliet’s dad says he thinks it was a reward trip, something to do with helping David Crown out one weekend on some gardening project. I have a feeling it was something to do with the school pool renovation? I’m struggling a bit – I thought you might be able to tell me more about it?

  She goes on to tell me that before he became a landscape gardener he was a teacher in Bedfordshire. Well, this is news to me, and I’m annoyed at myself for not having known. I should have known that. How could I have missed something so vital to his history? Martha tells me she’s spoken to the head teacher of his old school, where an allegation had been made against him in the 1980s but later retracted by the pupil in question. This old colleague of his was apparently adamant that it was completely unfounded, though ultimately it led to his leaving the school and giving up teaching altogether. Poor man, I think. People are always so ready to think there’s no smoke without fire.

  Martha has also been speaking with a ‘source’ from the police force. When she tells me this information is ‘strictly between the two of us’ and that his identity is a secret, I could cry with happiness! Look at me, I tell the spectre of my mother, look at me in my new, exciting life. Best friend to television’s Martha Benn; collaborator; insider. They have yet to convince the police to reopen the investigation to Juliet’s case, Martha explains, and she’s getting nervous that the television network will pull the plug if she doesn’t present them with something more compelling in the next week or so. The thought throws me into such a flap that I spend the next hour researching further – visiting social media groups, newspaper archives, family databases – looking for anything that I might present to Martha as a means of keeping the project afloat. It doesn’t have to be the truth, it just has to keep them interested. Fortunately I’m able to find a few more nuggets of information to add to my private Pinterest board, and subtly I weave these into my reply to her.

  This time my answers come swiftly, with a fluid certainty they lacked before. The very fact of Martha’s difficulty in remembering gives me the freedom to expand on my replies with no fear of getting the details wrong!

  Dear Martha,

  Gosh, it sounds like you’ve had a busy week! Thank you for those photographs and oh yes, the boat trip! From what I recall we helped David Crown with some weekend digging work at the old school swimming pool, where they were building a new garden. I think his project was running behind, so he asked us four to help out with the groundwork to bring it back up to speed. The boat trip was his way of thanking us. I recall he brought a picnic along – sandwiches, crisps, apples, and even a can of Coke each – and he borrowed the boat from a man at the canal. He was quite friendly with some of the houseboat residents, what with him having the Square Wheels cabin there. I remember we paddled in the water – I think you and Tom even swam – and it was getting dark by the time we got home. It was such a good day (apart from getting sunburnt on the tops of my shoulders!).

  You asked what I can tell you about Juliet’s ‘secret boyfriend’. I honestly can’t think of anything at all. I’m certain I would have said something to the police at the time if I had known. Are you sure you’ve got it right? Like you said yourself, Juliet never had boyfriends, did she? It is such a long time ago! Perhaps she was pulling your leg or saying she had someone just to impress you or make you jealous? You’re not thinking of Ethan, are you, one of the homeless men she used to talk to on volunteer nights?

  Yes, of course, I’d love to meet up with you now I’m back in London. Just let me take a look at my diary and come back to you.

  Hope to hear from you again soon.

  Love, Liv xx

  I shut the lid on my laptop, pleasantly exhausted. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to put Martha off about meeting in person, but I’ll worry about that later. I’m very pleased with my invention of ‘Ethan’, as it’s bound to divert her, and may be just what she needs to keep the TV bo
sses interested. Right now I feel strangely perky – mischievous, even – strengthened by my insider knowledge of Juliet’s story. The answers to Martha’s questions had come to me so effortlessly, so convincingly, that I almost believed I was there in that photograph, sunning my legs, laughing up at the gangly boy hanging from the branches above. I head into the kitchen to fetch the family pack of cheese puffs that Carl delivered on Friday, and return to bed, where I daydream the afternoon away with thoughts of that boat trip along the waterway. It’s so very real, I can almost feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, the cool water at my toes.

  Tomorrow I may share with her a photograph of David Crown I recently uncovered, the one of him in his teenage years, arm draped around his girlfriend’s shoulder, cigarette in mouth, the great plateau of Kinder Scout rising up behind them. It’s 1970, but the girl wears a rather old-fashioned dark beehive, a classic sixties shift dress and neck scarf; he’s in baggy trousers and braces, his shirt sleeves rolled up casually to reveal sinewy, tanned arms. It took a lot of digging to find this one, and I know Martha won’t have seen it before. I’ll tell her that David gave it to me when we were volunteering at Square Wheels, and see where that little lie takes us!

  12. Martha

  Toby offers to drive the four-hour journey to Castledale so that Martha can read through their progress notes and plan the next steps. It’s a Sunday, but with the hours they’ve been putting in lately, the significance of weekends has all but vanished.

  Last night he tried to call again, leaving a sorrowful message on her voicemail, telling her he loved her through slurred vowels, begging her to get in touch before it was too late. Had he told her? he asked. He was dying. ‘No bullshit this time,’ he’d said, resignation in his voice. ‘I really am dying.’

  Does she believe him? She doesn’t have a clue what to believe, she thinks hopelessly, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. Is he telling the truth, or is it just another one of his lies, one of his wretched cries for help that come when he knows his tactics of bullying or persuasion have failed? How can she ever know? The man is so wedded to self-delusion, his ability to separate truth from lies so terminally broken, it’s no wonder she sees his every plea as a ruse, a trick. The last time she actually responded to one of these SOS calls was over a year ago, and she went to him, perhaps hoping to find comfort, to give comfort. But all he’d wanted was money. He hadn’t wanted her care or affection or love; he’d barely hugged her back before getting down to the real business of his call. He wanted her money, and a lift to the nearest off-licence.