The Lie (30 page)

There’s a woman I don’t recognise sitting beside the empty hospital bed. She’s got dark brown hair, cut into a neat bob, rosy cheeks and an engagement ring on the third finger of her left hand. She twists it idly as she watches Jeremy Kyle stride back and forth on the television. She jolts as I clear my throat and angles the TV away.

The base of her throat blushes a deep magenta. “Can I help you?”

“I was told this was Al’s room.”

“She’s in the loo.”

“Right.”

We stare at each other for a couple of seconds then I clear my throat again. The paramedic told me the smoke inhalation is unlikely to have done any lasting damage, but I might have a cough for some time.

“Are you Liz?”

“Emma?”

“Yes.”

The anxiety on her face fades instantly but it’s replaced by another emotion – anger. A porter with a trolley shouts “Beep, beep!” and I’m forced to step into the room. I keep a hand on the doorframe.

“I’m sorry, Liz.”

The fingers of her right hand return to her engagement ring. She twiddles it back and forth as though it’s a talisman warding off evil spirits as she gives me a long, lingering look – a look that says,
You abandoned her, again.
“She could have died.”

“She was breathing when I left her. I knew the ambulance and fire brigade wouldn’t be far away.”

“No, you didn’t.”

I look down at the shiny speckled floor. “No, I didn’t.”

Neither of us says anything more. On the TV, Jeremy Kyle makes a big song and dance about reading out the results of a lie detector test. He’s got the audience in the palm of his hand.

“What happened to the animals?” Liz asks.

“They’ve been moved to neighbouring sanctuaries while we try to fix the fire damage. We managed to round up all of the dogs, apart from Tyson. The boars are long gone, and we lost three of the older, sicker cats to smoke inhalation, as well as all the hamsters, rodents, and Freddy the parrot.” I stare up at the ceiling and blink back the tears that are pricking at my lower lashes.

“I’m sorry,” Liz says softly.

“All the staff at Green Fields are very upset.”

“No, not about that, though am I very sorry about the animals. I’m sorry for having a go at you, Emma. You had an impossible choice to make.”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek and shake my head. If I speak, I’ll cry.

“Emma.” I hear the squeak of a chair leg on lino as Liz stands up. I tense as she approaches but she doesn’t touch me. Instead, she stands over me, her hands knotted in front of her. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”

I shake my head again. I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed with Will and rung the ward to check Al was okay. He told me not to come. He said I was too shaken up, that I had to let him take care of me, but I refused. He was right, again.

“She’s right, Emma. It wasn’t your fault.”

Al is standing in the doorway in her bare feet, a fluffy baby blue dressing gown wrapped over her hospital gown, her hands in the pockets. Her face is still wan but it’s lost its deathly pale pallor. Liz takes a step back as Al pads across the floor towards me.

“Al.” I force myself to look her in the eye. “I’m so sorry, I’m so, incredibly—”

She pulls me into her arms before I can finish my sentence, and holds me as I cry into her shoulder.

“I’ll give you some time,” Liz says softly. Her shoes squeak on the lino as she leaves the room.

“A Valium overdose?”

“Yeah.” Al reaches for the jug of water beside the bed and pours herself a glass. “The doctors think she must have crumpled some tablets into the flask of tea she gave me when we arrived at Green Fields. They don’t think she meant to kill me …” She pauses to take a sip of water. “She was a mess, Emma. She told me that she started the fire at Ekanta Yatra. She waited two days for Isaac and Daisy to come back, and, when they didn’t, she became convinced that something was going on and everyone was keeping it from her. Isis and Cera tried to calm her down – they said Isaac and Daisy had probably gone to Pokhara together – but Kane, who was drunk, started winding her up. He told her that Isaac and Daisy had run off together and left her behind. She believed him, I don’t know why. She said she was the happiest she’d ever been at Ekanta Yatra, that she’d finally found her home, but maybe a part of her believed that would only ever be transitory. Anyway” – she shrugs – “she got really drunk and really angry that Isaac had used her just so he could sleep with her friends. She set fire to his study when everyone was asleep. She walked out of the gate with her passport in one hand and all Isaac’s money in the other.”

“Oh, my God. Was she in Pokhara when you were still in the hospital?”

Al nods. “Apparently so. We could have ended up on the same flight back to Kathmandu as her, but she said she decided to stay in Pokhara for a bit. She said she thought that Isaac and Daisy were hiding out from her, and she was determined to find them.”

“How long did she stay there?”

“About three months, she said. Then she met someone in a bar who told her that they’d heard about Ekanta Yatra burning down, and there was a rumour going about that Isaac was starting up a new one back in the UK.”

“So she came back?”

“Yeah. Emma, she was obsessed with him. She really wasn’t well. That’s why she was hospitalised. She used the last of Isaac’s money to fly to Aberdeen, then she started hassling his best friend, some guy the Salvation Army had put her in touch with.”

“I read about him in one of her emails.”

“Yeah, so she started hassling him and was arrested for putting a brick through the window of his car when he wouldn’t tell her where Isaac was. She was in such a state when the police interviewed her – hearing voices, threatening suicide, seeing things, that sort of thing – that they called in a doctor. And he had her sectioned. She said she liked the hospital. Everyone was nice to her, and no one judged her, and she made some nice friends, but then they decided she was well enough to leave and she felt like it was Ekanta Yatra all over again.”

“Her happiness taken away?”

“Yeah, and she convinced herself that you were the reason why. I didn’t realise that until we got in the car. She’d convinced me that Daisy was alive and she knew where she was. She started ranting the second we hit the motorway; it was as though she’d kept it all corked up inside her until then. She threatened to throw herself out of the car if I didn’t help her. She opened the door twice on the M4. I nearly crashed trying to yank her back in.”

“That’s why you rang me?”

“Yeah. She told me what to say to you. I was planning on pulling into a service station to call you from the loos, but she grabbed my phone and threw it out of the window. I had no choice but to keep driving. I thought that, once we got to your house, we could call for a doctor, or something, but she convinced me to go to Green Fields. She said there was a volunteer evening, that you’d be there.”

“And when she realised wasn’t …”

“She set light to it any way. She wanted to destroy everything you love.” Al pulled the dressing gown more tightly around her. “She knew a lot about you, Emma. She knew about your boyfriend, and your little girl.”

“Chloe is my boyfriend Will’s daughter.”

“Right, well she didn’t know that, but she was ranting about how you had the perfect family life and the perfect job and how it was so unfair that everything had turned out okay for you, while she had nothing. She blamed it all on you, Emma – Isaac and Daisy disappearing, Ekanta Yatra burning down, her hospitalisation. She was convinced that you were behind it all, that you’d single-handedly destroyed her life. That’s why she got in touch with me, I think. I think she thought I’d believe her when no one else would.” She looks at me steadily. “What I don’t get is how she managed to find me?”

“Same way she managed to find me, I guess. She just asked someone.”

“What do you mean?”

“She rang my mum. She still had my home phone number from back in uni, and she just rang up, said she was someone I went to school with – Mum can’t even remember the name she used – and said she was trying to organise a school reunion and did Mum have a contact number and an address for me?”

“And your mum just told her? Even though she knows you changed your name?”

I shrug. “Mum never understood why I did it. She told me I was being melodramatic and that I was insulting her and Dad by changing my name. I honestly don’t think she’ll have given it a second thought. I wouldn’t have found out at all if she hadn’t called the night of the fire. She saw it on the news and rang up to check I was okay, then casually said, ‘Did someone get in touch with you about your school reunion?’”

“Shit.”

“Once Leanne had my name and address, all she had to do was type it into Google and then she found out where I work. All the press stuff I’ve done for Green Fields is up there; there are photos and everything. Don’t forget how quickly I found you on Facebook, Al. It literally took me seconds.”

“God.” She leans back on the pillow and gazes listlessly at the TV. Jeremy Kyle has been replaced by
This Morning
, and Holly and Phillip are perched on the sofa, laughing uproariously at something their guest is saying.

“So what happens now?” Al says, still looking at the screen.

“CID have got Leanne’s mobile and laptop – they were in the bag she put in your car – and they’ve gained access to her bank account. DS Armstrong rang yesterday to say that she hired a car in Bristol the day before my hit and run. If it matches the car they found abandoned in the layby, that’ll prove she was responsible. They just need a bit more information and then they’ll close the case.”

“No.” Al looks me straight in the eye. “That’s not what I meant. What do
we
do now?”

“What do you want to do, Al?”

“Tell the truth.”

The enquiry lasted six months. CID worked with the Nepalese police, and there was a second sweep of the Annapurna range, but there was no sign of Daisy and Isaac’s remains. The undergrowth was too thick, the range too expansive. Al got angry. She accused the Nepalese police of doing a cover-up so that tourism wouldn’t suffer, and threatened to fly over there and look for them herself if they couldn’t do it properly, but Liz talked her out of it. The case was dropped a month later, and Isaac and Daisy are still officially classed as missing persons. Al’s still beating herself up about it. I think she was hoping she’d be tried for Daisy’s murder, even though it was an accident, just to rid herself of the terrible weight she’s been carrying around for the last five years.

If only it were that easy. There are still times when I wake up in the middle of the night, choking on black smoke and crying out Leanne’s name, only for Will to wrap his arms around me and Jack to bound into the bedroom and push his furry head between us. I adopted him after the fire. The court case against Gary Fullerton, prosecuting him for animal neglect as well as his involvement in the break-in, had been successfully concluded, and Jack was free to find a new home. I knew he’d struggle to settle into a new sanctuary, and he’d already had enough trauma to last a lifetime.

When Sheila returned from her holiday, three days early, and surveyed the blackened remains of Green Fields, I handed her my notice; but instead of accepting it, she sat me down at her kitchen table and listened for three long hours as I told her the truth about who I really am. The only time she showed a flicker of disapproval was when I told her the real reason Angharad had quit as a volunteer, but she seemed unperturbed when I warned her that Green Fields might suffer if Angharad kept to her word and ran a piece on me.

“So people will come to stare at you instead of the animals, for a change. If you can deal with that, Jane, then so can I.”

And they did – stare – for a while. And it wasn’t just the visitors. The staff kept a wary distance for a couple of days, and the staffroom fell silent everytime I walked in to get my lunch, but gradually, over time, talk returned to normal topics – like who’d be voted off
Strictly
, and who had tickets to see Elton John at the cricket ground, and whether Slimming World or Weight Watchers is better for weight loss – and the ugly shadow that the article had cast over me slowly faded away. I’m pretty sure Angharad was responsible for stealing the first letter Leanne had sent to me. She never admitted it, but she speculated in her article that the fire had been started by someone who had a grudge against me, and mentioned that she’d seen evidence to prove it.

There’s still a shadow hanging over me, but it’s not one that others see. The ghosts of Daisy and Leanne still haunt me. Neither of them deserved to die. Leanne was mentally ill and Daisy was drunk, blinded by love and manipulated into turning against me. I got in touch with Daisy’s dad after the CID closed their investigation, and asked if we could meet. I expected him to refuse, or scream abuse at me down the phone. Instead he said yes, and drove to Bude to see me. He sat at my kitchen table and listened as I told him what had happened in Nepal. I didn’t mention the knife when I described how Daisy and Al had tussled on the clifftop. I didn’t want his last image of Daisy to be of her with a knife in her hand, threatening her friends. As I ended the story, I expected him to cry or shout or run from the room. Instead, he sat very still, his hands on his thighs, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. Pain was etched on his face, not just from Daisy’s death, but also from the two other deaths – of his wife and younger daughter – that he’d had to mourn, many years earlier. When he said goodbye at the front door, he hugged me tightly and told me he’d be in touch, but I knew he wouldn’t.

I tried to phone Leanne’s mum, but she slammed the phone down. I tried a couple more times and then Will told me to stop. It wasn’t helping her and it wasn’t helping me. However Leanne’s mum felt about her daughter and Isaac, she didn’t want to share it with a stranger.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a photo of the four of us, taken in a bar in Soho two days before we left for Kathmandu. We all look so fresh-faced and hopeful in the photo, and we were. It was supposed to be the holiday of a lifetime. I was escaping from a job I hated, Al was escaping from a failed relationship, Daisy was tagging along for the adventure, and Leanne … well, she was looking for somewhere to call home. I often wonder what would have happened if Daisy had won the argument back in Leanne’s tiny studio flat in East London about where to take Al on holiday. Daisy would still be alive if we’d gone to Ibiza instead of Nepal, I’m sure of that. I’m not sure our friendship would have survived, though. Our relationship was too cracked and splintered, worn thin from years of petty arguments and hidden resentments. Would I have had the strength of character to call time on it? I’ll never know. I was a very different person back then.