Lies Read online

  I wondered, briefly, how we had gotten to this point.

  “And then,” I said, studying her face, “the top of Martin’s head cracked open, and an alien climbed out.”

  Mel nodded slightly, a piece of Peking duck poised in the chopsticks an inch from her lips as she scrolled up the screen.

  “Yeah?”

  “And then the alien sang ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in E-flat major.”

  She smiled and held up her phone to me. “Look at this. It’s from Ben—seems like he’s all right.”

  It was a post on Facebook.

  * * *

  Ben Delaney

  1 hour ago

  Needed to get my head sorted; it’s been good to get away. And I’ve always loved it when everything starts falling into place.

  “The truth of the battle is whatever the victor deems it to be…”

  * * *

  “That’s great,” I said. “Beth will be so relieved. You should let her know. And that policeman. Did you look at the comments?”

  Mel shook her head, and I selected the comments.

  * * *

  Claire Pridmore

  39 minutes ago

  Where you been Ben? xx

  Sally Ashmore

  31 minutes ago

  Sounds like you’re up to something lol xox

  Tom Parish

  14 minutes ago

  Very cryptic buddy. I’m intrigued, tell me more …

  * * *

  I handed the phone back to her. Still smiling, she touched the screen and put it to her ear.

  “Bee? It’s Mel. Yeah, I’m fine. Alice is fine. Yeah. Have you looked at Facebook this evening? Ben’s posted—have a look. Says he just needs to get his head sorted. No. Has he phoned? You OK? That’s good. See you in a bit. Probably about ten. You too. Bye.”

  She put the phone down and looked me in the eye for the first time since the main course had arrived.

  “That’s a bit of a relief. What were you saying before? About the school trip?”

  “I was just … oh, nothing. How’s Beth doing?”

  “Better. Sounds like she’s calmer than this afternoon. She’s tidied up the mess he made the other night.”

  “Ben’s not come home yet?”

  Mel shook her head and went back to Facebook, leaving a comment on Ben’s update. I couldn’t see upside down what she was typing. Her phone sounded with a text message alert and she read it, smiled, responded.

  “Who’s that from?”

  “Beth, saying thanks.”

  She went back to Facebook. Most of her Peking duck was still on her plate, cooling and untouched. Mine was two-thirds gone.

  “Mel?”

  “Yes?” She didn’t look up.

  “Why don’t you put the phone in your handbag for five minutes?”

  She looked at me like I’d asked her to shave her head. “Alice might call. If something’s wrong with William.”

  “You’ll still hear it ring. And nothing’s going to happen to Wills. He’s in bed, at home, asleep, front door locked, babysitter on duty.”

  “I won’t hear a text.”

  “If there’s a problem, she’ll call.”

  “All right, Mr. Grumpy.” She made a show of putting the phone in her handbag, looking around the restaurant as if seeing it for the first time. Her eyes came back to me.

  “What do you want to talk about, then?”

  * * *

  Alice was watching Time Team when we got back, archaeologists digging bones out of some ancient burial ground. The novel she’d brought with her was in her lap: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

  She stood up and turned the TV off when we walked in, as if she’d been caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

  “Was William all right?” Mel asked.

  “Fine. He shouted out once, and when I went in, he was turned around in his bed. Couldn’t find his pillows, but he was still asleep. I just turned him back the right way, settled him down, and he went off again.”

  Mel reached into her handbag for her pocketbook. “You’re so good with him. He’d love to have you as his big sister, you know.”

  Alice smiled shyly and shrugged. “He’s no trouble at all.”

  I said, “Did you have something to eat?”

  We always left cookies and chips out for her, but for some reason, she never touched them.

  “Wasn’t really hungry. Thanks.”

  Mel took a five and a ten from her pocketbook and handed the notes to her.

  I picked up my car keys. “Right, then. I’ll run you home.”

  Mel said, “How many beers have you had?”

  “Two. Plus one earlier. Feel all right, though.”

  “I’ll take her. I’ve only had one glass of pink.”

  Alice looked embarrassed, like she didn’t know where to look. “I could get a taxi,” she said in a small voice.

  “Of course not. Don’t be silly,” Mel said.

  After they’d left, I checked on William. He was sleeping soundly, so I fetched a bottle of beer from the kitchen and collapsed on the sofa in front of Match of the Day. The beer was cold and tasted good on the back of my throat. It had been a crazy forty-eight hours: first I thought my wife was having an affair, then I thought I’d put someone in hospital and might lose my job, my marriage, my liberty.

  But instead, here I was on a Saturday night, with a beer on the sofa, and all three were still safely intact. I toasted Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer on the TV.

  “Cheers, gents.” I took a long pull on the bottle and settled back to watch Man City versus Arsenal.

  I woke with a start as the Match of the Day theme music played at the end of the program. For a second, I was disoriented and couldn’t work out what was going on, then sat up groggily, blinked, kicked over an empty beer bottle, and turned the TV off. The central heating had gone off, and the living room had grown cool while I dozed.

  The house was utterly quiet around me as I moved into the hall.

  “Mel?” I said softly.

  No answer. The hall clock said it was a few minutes to midnight.

  Mel’s car was still not back on the drive. But there was a text message on my phone, from an hour ago.

  Dropped Alice OK. Beth having a bit of a meltdown again. Going to stay for a cuppa, see you in a bit. x

  I texted back a short reply, opened the fridge, and contemplated another beer. Decided against it. Contemplated the pile of essays waiting to be marked on the kitchen counter. Decided against that too. Did a final check of all the doors and windows, then climbed the stairs slowly, my legs heavy. William was sleeping on his back, his duvet kicked down the bed and both arms flung over his head like a surrendering soldier. I tucked him in and kissed him on the forehead, closing his bedroom door as quietly as I could. He was a light sleeper.

  My last thought as I put my head on the pillow was about all the ways someone might be able to break into our house. Maybe I should double-check again, I told myself. Should have checked it twice. What if Ben comes around the back? Did I take the key out of the door? Should have taken the key out.

  And then sleep took me.

  SUNDAY

  20

  The Stratford was half-pub and half-split-level soft-play area with slides, ball pools, and crash mats, red-faced parents trying to follow their offspring across rope bridges, squeezing through obstacles they were too big for, ignoring the smell of sweaty socks and disinfectant. William loved it. I had spent twenty minutes in there with him as he charged around, but now we’d come out and I nursed a pint of Guinness as we waited for our food to arrive. He was busy with a box of crayons, coloring the sky orange on his paper place mat. Mel had posted about lunch at the pub on Facebook, and her phone pinged periodically with comments from friends.

  Our friends Adam and Kate had the table next to ours. Their twin five-year-old girls, Phoebe and Sophie, had both come today as the same character from Frozen—in blue-and-white sparkly dresses
and tiaras. Right now, though, their table was empty. Adam was in the soft-play jungle with their girls—his pint of lager abandoned, untouched on its coaster—and Kate was outside making a phone call.

  There wasn’t a good way to introduce the subject, so I just came out with it.

  “You know, Thursday night,” I said to Mel, lowering my voice, “when you met Ben?”

  “Yes.” She was looking at the puddings on the menu. “What about it?”

  “I just felt really stupid about it. I shouldn’t even have been there. It was really weird, seeing you and Ben. And then when you denied it later, denied meeting him, it felt like…”

  “Like what?”

  Just say it.

  “Like the worst day of my life. Like everything good was suddenly coming to an end, everything good about my life.”

  “Because you thought we were having some kind of secret rendezvous?”

  “Talk about jumping to conclusions … I added two and two together and made seventeen.”

  She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, blushing. “I’ll allow it, considering what happened at that wedding reception.”

  “That wasn’t really your fault. Could’ve happened to anyone.”

  “Daddy?” William said.

  “Hang on, Wills.”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Not you,” she said. “You wouldn’t have done something like that.”

  “Daddy?” William said again. He was staring out of the pub window.

  “What’s up, big man?”

  “Look. That man’s smoking.”

  Out in the parking lot was a hugely bearded homeless man sitting on the low wall, surrounded by plastic bags full of his possessions, puffing hungrily on the nub of a cigarette burned almost down to the filter.

  “Yes, he is, Wills.”

  “Smoking makes you die, doesn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Look,” he said, his nose almost against the glass. “He’ll be dead in a minute.”

  Mel and I exchanged a smile. Our son dealt in absolutes, in the here and now. He lived in the moment. Smoking was bad and it killed you—which meant it killed you right away.

  “Well, you’d best keep an eye on him then, matey.” I turned back to Mel, talking quietly. “Who knows how any of us would react in that situation? Lots of booze. Everybody loved-up at a wedding reception. It’s not your fault. Sometimes this stuff happens.”

  “It was just so stupid.”

  “It was.” I smiled. “He’s too short for you, for a start.”

  “I know. Ridiculous.”

  “Much too short.”

  She smiled back, and my chest buzzed with a rush of love.

  “Rich, though.”

  “Still too short.”

  She put her hand over mine on the table. “Can you really forgive me, Joe?”

  “Pick up the tab for lunch and I’ll think about it.”

  “Deal. You’re just having the cheap starter, right? No main, no pudding, no booze?”

  “Actually, I went for the rib eye steak and the Bollinger. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Just this once I’ll let it go. Just this once, mind.”

  Kate returned to the table next to us and sat down. “Bolly, is it?” she said brightly. “Count me in.”

  “Mel’s buying,” I said, giving her a grin.

  William turned away from the window. “That man’s still not dead yet,” he said solemnly.

  I squeezed Mel’s hand. “You OK?” I said to her quietly.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You look tired. Is it work?”

  “Work. Life. You know.” She shrugged. “Everything.”

  Our meals arrived—Caesar salad for Mel, chicken nuggets for William, steak-and-ale pie for me—and attention turned to the food.

  William studied his plate. “Don’t like peas.”

  “Just leave them, Wills. Eat the rest.”

  “Don’t like peas.”

  “Just push them to the side.” He stared sadly at his mother, pointing at his plate with a small index finger. “Peas are touching chips.”

  She picked up his plate and scooped the peas onto mine. “Look. Daddy will have them.”

  She put his plate back and began cutting his chicken nuggets up, each one twice so that he couldn’t choke. She was a good mother, and William was a great kid. Becoming a father had been the best thing that had ever happened to me. I’d always thought we should have another baby, but for some reason it had never happened for us.

  William picked up the biggest chip and bit it in half. “Can we go back to soft play after?” he said, chewing.

  I contemplated my half-drunk pint of Guinness. “Sure.”

  Mel said, “It’s my turn. I’ll go.”

  Adam returned from the soft-play area, a sheen of sweat on his face, his daughters pulling him along, one hand each. He slumped down in his chair and blew out a breath.

  “I do love a nice relaxing Sunday at the pub,” he said with a smile. “Putting my feet up with a couple of pints and the papers, watching a bit of footie, taking it easy. Recharging the old batteries before the start of the working week.”

  I’d known Adam since college, and we’d been best mates ever since. He had joined the civil service fast track straight after graduating and now had a sensitive and fairly secretive job somewhere within government that he only discussed in the most general terms. Kate was a teacher, the deputy head of one of the local feeder primary schools for Haddon Park.

  “Nah,” I said to him. “You’d be bored with just sitting and reading the papers now.”

  “I guarantee you, Joseph, I wouldn’t be bored.”

  “And besides, chasing the girls around soft-play areas is the only exercise you get.”

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. “Not true. I ran for a bus the other week.”

  “Did you catch it?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  I smiled and picked up my cutlery. “That’s a no, then.”

  The steak-and-ale pie smelled good, beefy and rich. William was continuing to feed chips into his mouth one by one. He would eat all of them first, then all the nuggets. Never a mixture. He was going through a phase of tackling the things on his plate one food type at a time. He was very particular about it. I turned back to Mel.

  “How’s your salad?”

  “Good, thanks. Could do with a bit less salad and a bit more Caesar, but on the whole—”

  She stopped, her gaze rising over my shoulder like she had seen someone she recognized behind me. Her eyes widened a little. Then the recognition changed to something else.

  Fear.

  My back was to the door, so I couldn’t see immediately who’d come in. But my first thought was: Ben. He came looking for Mel. And now he’s found her.

  Protect Mel. Protect William.

  I turned and looked to see who it was, pushing my chair sideways to shield my son.

  Surely Ben wouldn’t do something in such a public place. Not in a pub full of people. There must be fifty witnesses in here.

  But it wasn’t Ben.

  It was Beth. Dressed all in black, dark hair tied back, her mouth a hard, flat line. Red-rimmed eyes shifting from left to right and back again as she searched every face in the pub.

  She looked the opposite of serene; she looked furious. There was something metallic in her hand.

  Protect them both.

  She saw us, marched straight over, and slammed a cell phone down on the table.

  Spoke in a voice that was loud enough for everyone in the pub to hear.

  “You fucking bitch!”

  21

  Her words went off like a bomb inside the busy pub.

  I had never heard Beth say fuck before. I’d never heard her swear before, or even raise her voice. She was the kind of woman who flinched when her husband dropped the F-bomb in polite conversation. For a second, I couldn’t process it, any of
it, and I sat there staring up at her as she leaned over the table at my wife, hate in her eyes. Something is happening. Something bad. In the space of a second, a kind of sound vacuum had grown around the four of us. Around Beth. She had sucked all the other sound out of the pub with a single word.

  And it seemed like now she’d started, she couldn’t stop. “Fucking whore! How could you?” Her cut-glass Home Counties accent only increased the impact of her words. The anger was coming off her in waves.

  Every other conversation in the pub had ceased; all eyes were on us. Phoebe and Sophie stared at Beth, open-mouthed.

  Mel had shrunk back in her seat, trying to get as far away as possible. She looked terrified. William’s mouth was turned down, and I knew he was about to cry.

  Don’t swear in front of my boy.

  I stood up, my chair scraping loudly in the silence. Adam stood up too. If Beth had been a man, I would’ve asked her to step outside for what she’d just said about my wife. But as it was, I didn’t quite know how to respond.

  “Beth—” I said.

  “Shut up!” she snarled at me. She jabbed a finger at Mel. “Tell me again what you told me yesterday.” Her normally calm, quiet voice was high and brittle and horribly loud in the silent pub.

  Mel looked blank. “What?” she said in a small voice.

  “Tell me again! Tell me my husband isn’t the type to have an affair!”

  “He’s not … that kind of man.”

  “Really?”

  “What do you—?”

  “Then presumably you can explain these pictures.” She picked up the cell phone she’d slammed down on the table—a Samsung with a big screen—and hit the keypad. A picture appeared on the screen. She showed it to Mel, and I peered around to see who or what it was. There was a lot of flesh. It looked like a topless picture of a woman. I peered closer.

  It was a topless picture of my wife.

  It looked like she was standing in our kitchen, taking a selfie. Leaning forward and giving a coy little smile to the camera, one arm under her breasts.

  For a moment, my brain struggled to process it. That’s my wife. But she’s naked. I’ve never seen that picture before. I had a cold, acid feeling in my stomach. Helplessness.