The Truth-Teller's Lie (7 page)

When I replay things you’ve said and hear your voice so clearly in my mind, I feel like a dying animal. It can’t be over. I have to be able to see you again. There are two days to go until Thursday. I will be at the Traveltel at four o’clock. As usual.

Yvon nudges me with her elbow. ‘Probably I should keep my big gob shut,’ she says. ‘What do I know about anything? I married a lazy alcoholic because I fell in love with the summerhouse in his back garden and thought it’d be ideal for my business. Got what I deserved, didn’t I?’

Yvon lies about her romantic history all the time, making herself sound worse than she is. She married Ben Cotchin because she loved him. Still does, I suspect, despite his aimlessness and his drinking. Yvon and her business, Summerhouse Web Design, now live in the converted basement of my house, and Ben’s summerhouse, if Yvon’s spies are to be believed, is used primarily as an extra-large drinks cabinet.

We are nearly there. I can see the police station, a blur of red bricks in the distance, getting closer. There is a large obstruction in my throat. I can’t swallow.

‘Why don’t we go away for a couple of days?’ says Yvon. ‘You need to relax, detach a bit from all this stress. We could drive up to Silver Brae Chalets. Did I show you their card? I could get us a chalet for next to nothing, being well connected, you know how it is. After you’ve done whatever you need to do at the police station, we could—’

‘No,’ I snap. Why is everybody talking about bloody Silver Brae Chalets? Detective Sergeant Zailer quizzed me about it, after I stupidly gave her the card by mistake. She asked if you and I had ever been there.

I don’t want to be reminded of the only time you’ve ever been really angry with me, not now that you’re missing. It’s funny, it never bothered me before. I forgot it almost as soon as it had happened. I’m sure you did too. But this one bad memory seems to have taken on a sudden significance, and my mind swerves away from it.

It can’t possibly have anything to do with you being missing. Why would it make you decide to leave me now, four months after it happened? And everything has been fine since then. Better than fine: perfect.

Yvon had a pile of those wretched cards lying around her office and I picked one up. I thought you needed a proper break, far away from Juliet and her leech-like demands, so I booked us a chalet as a surprise. Not even for a whole week, just for a weekend. I had to negotiate a special rate on the phone, with a rather ungracious woman who sounded as if she actively didn’t want me to boost her profits by staying in one of her cottages.

I know you don’t like being away overnight as a rule, but I thought that if it was just a one-off, it’d be okay. You looked at me as if I’d betrayed you. For two hours you didn’t speak—not one single word. Even after that, you wouldn’t get into bed with me. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ you kept saying. ‘You should never have done it.’ You withdrew into yourself, drawing your knees up to your chest, not even reacting when I shook you by the shoulders, hysterical with guilt and regret. It’s the only time you’ve been close to crying. What were you thinking? What was going on in your head that you couldn’t or didn’t want to tell me?

I was distraught all week, thinking it might be over between us, loathing and cursing myself for my presumptuousness. But the following Thursday, to my amazement, you were your usual self. You didn’t refer to it at all. When I tried to apologise, you shrugged and said, ‘You know I can’t go away. I’m really sorry, sweetheart. I’d love to, but I can’t.’ I didn’t understand why you hadn’t just said that straight away.

I never told Yvon, and can’t tell her now. How can I expect her to understand? ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t mean to snap at you.’

‘You’ve got to get a grip,’ she says sternly. ‘I honestly believe Robert’s absolutely fine, wherever he is. It’s you who’s cracking up. And, yes, I
know
I’m in no position to lecture you. I’m the proud owner of the shortest marriage on record,
and
I’m extremely precocious when it comes to ballsing up my life. I got divorced while most of my friends were taking their A levels . . .’

I smile at the exaggeration. Yvon is obsessed with the fact that she is divorced at thirty-three. She thinks there’s a stigma attached to having a failed marriage behind you at such a young age. I once asked her what was an okay age to get divorced and she said, ‘Forty-six, ’ without a moment’s hesitation.

‘Naomi, are you listening? I’m not talking about since Robert did a runner. If you ask me, you were cracking up long before then.’

‘What do you mean?’ All my defensive impulses kick in at once. ‘That’s bullshit. Before Thursday I was fine. I was happy.’

Yvon shakes her head. ‘You were staying every Thursday night at the Traveltel on your own while Robert went home to his wife! There’s something sick about that. How can he let you do it? And since he’s gone on the dot of seven, why don’t you just come home? Shit, I’m ranting. So much for being diplomatic.’

She turns left into the police-station car park. No running away, I tell myself. No last-minute changes of mind.

‘Robert doesn’t know I always stay the night.’ It might be crazy, my Thursday-night routine, but you are not implicated.

‘He doesn’t?’

‘I’ve never told him. He’d be upset, thinking of me there on my own. As for why I do it . . . it’ll sound mad, but the Traveltel is
our
place. Even if he can’t stay, I want to. I feel closer to him there than I do at home.’

Yvon is nodding. ‘I know you do, but . . . God, Naomi, can’t you see that’s part of the problem?’ I don’t know what she’s talking about. She carries on, her voice agitated. ‘You feeling close to him in some grotty, anonymous room while he’s at home with his feet up watching telly with his wife. The things you don’t tell him, the things he doesn’t tell you, this strange world the two of you have created that exists only in one room, only for three hours a week. Can’t you see?’ We are driving up and down rows of parked cars. Yvon cranes her neck, looking for a space.

I might one day tell you that I stay at the Traveltel alone every Thursday. I’ve only kept it from you out of mild embarrassment— what if you would think it’s too extreme? There may be other things that I happen not to have told you about myself, but there is only one thing I really want to hide from you, from everyone. And I’m about to make that impossible. I cannot believe that I have ended up in this situation, that what I am about to do has become necessary, unavoidable.

Yvon swears under her breath. The Punto jerks to a standstill. ‘You’ll have to get out here,’ she says. ‘There are no spaces.’

I nod, open the passenger door. The sharp wind on my skin feels like total exposure. This can’t be happening. After three years of meticulous secrecy, I am about to tear down the barrier I’ve built between me and the world. I am going to blow my own cover.

4

4/4/06

ON HIS WAY to the Haworths’ front door, Simon stopped in front of what he assumed was the window Naomi Jenkins had been looking through when she had her panic attack. The curtains were closed, but there was a small gap between them, through which Simon could see the room Naomi had talked about. She’d been remarkably precise about the detail, he realised. Navy-blue sofa and chair, glass-fronted cabinet, a perplexing number of tacky ornamental houses, a picture of a seedy old man watching a half-dressed boy play the flute—it was all there, exactly as she’d described. Simon saw nothing untoward, nothing that could explain Naomi’s sudden extreme reaction.

He made his way round to the front door, noticing the untidy garden, which was more of a junk yard than anything else, and pressed the bell, hearing nothing. Were the walls too thick, or was the bell broken? He pressed again, and once more just to be on the safe side. Nothing. He was about to knock when a woman’s voice shouted, ‘Coming!’ in a tone that implied she had not been given a fair chance.

If Charlie had been here, she would have held up her badge and ID card, ready to greet whoever opened the door. Simon would have had to follow her lead and do the same or he’d have stood out in a way he didn’t like to. Alone, he only showed people his ID if they asked to see it. He felt self-conscious, almost parodic, whipping it out straight away, shoving it in people’s faces as soon as he met them. He felt as if he was acting.

The woman who stood in front of him with an expectant look on her face was young and attractive, with shoulder-length blond hair, brown eyes and a few faint freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her eyebrows were two thin, perfect arches; she had evidently spent a lot of time doing something to them that must have hurt. To Simon they looked unpleasant and unnatural. He remembered Naomi Jenkins had mentioned a suit. Today Juliet Haworth was wearing black jeans and a thin black V-necked jumper. She smelled of a sharp citrusy perfume.

‘Hello?’ she said briskly, making it a question.

‘Mrs Juliet Haworth?’

She nodded.

‘Is Robert Haworth in, your husband? I wanted a quick word with him.’

‘And you are . . . ?’

Simon hated introducing himself, hated the sound of his voice saying his own name. It was a hang-up he’d had since school, one he was determined no one would ever get wind of. ‘Detective Constable Simon—’

Juliet Haworth interrupted him with a loud guffaw. ‘Robert’s away. You’re a policeman? A detective? Bloody hell!’

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘In Kent, staying with friends.’ She shook her head. ‘Naomi’s reported him missing, hasn’t she? That’s why you’re here.’

‘How long’s Mr Haworth been in Kent?’

‘A few days. Look, that slut Naomi’s several ciabattas short of a picnic. She’s a bloody—’

‘When will he be back?’ Simon interrupted her.

‘Next Monday. Do you want me to bring him into the police station? Prove that he’s still alive, that I haven’t clubbed him to death in a jealous rage?’ Juliet Haworth’s mouth twitched. Was she admitting to jealousy, Simon wondered, or mocking the idea?

‘It’d be helpful if he could come in and see me when he gets back, yes. Where in Kent is he?’

‘Sissinghurst. Do you want the address?’

‘That’d be useful, yes.’

Juliet appeared irritated by his answer. ‘Twenty-two Dunnisher Road,’ she said tersely.

Simon wrote it down.

‘You know that woman’s bonkers? If you’ve met her, you must know. Robert’s been trying to cool things off for months, but she won’t take the hint. In fact, this is good, you turning up like this. I should have been the one to get the police involved, not her. Is there anything I can do to stop her coming here all the time? Can I get an injunction?’

‘How many times has she been here, uninvited?’

‘She was here yesterday,’ said Juliet, as if it were an answer to Simon’s question. ‘I looked out of my bedroom window and saw her in the garden, trying to run away before I got downstairs.’

‘So she’s only been here once. No court would issue an injunction.’

‘I’m thinking ahead.’ Juliet seemed now to be attempting a conspiratorial tone. She narrowed one eye as she spoke, a gesture that was halfway to a wink. ‘She’ll be back. If Robert doesn’t make any overtures towards her, which he won’t, it’ll be no time at all before Naomi Jenkins is living in a tent in my garden.’ She laughed, as if this were an amusing rather than a worrying prospect.

At no point had she taken a step back into the house. She stood right on the threshold. Behind her, in the hall, Simon could see a light-brown ribbed carpet, a red telephone on a wooden table, a scattering of shoes, trainers and boots. There was a mirror, its glass smeared with some sort of grease in the middle, propped up against the wall, which was marked and scratched. To the right of the mirror, a long, thin calendar hung from a drawing pin. There was a picture of Silsford Castle at the top and a line for every day of the month, but no handwriting. Neither Robert nor Juliet had made a note of any appointments.

‘Mr Haworth’s lorry’s parked outside,’ said Simon.

‘I know.’ Juliet made no attempt to hide her impatience. ‘I said Robert was in Kent. I didn’t say his lorry was.’

‘Does he have another car?’

‘Yes, a Volvo V40. Which—I’ll tell you now, to save you some unnecessary detective work—is parked out there as well. Robert went to Sissinghurst by train. Driving’s his job. When he’s not working, he tries to avoid it.’

‘Do you have a phone number for where he is?’

‘No.’ Her face closed down. ‘He’s got his mobile with him.’

This sounded wrong to Simon. ‘I thought you said he was staying with friends. You haven’t got their number?’

‘They’re Robert’s friends, not mine.’ Juliet’s curled lip suggested she wouldn’t have wanted to share them, even if her husband had offered.

‘When did you last speak to Robert?’ Simon asked. His contrary streak had kicked in. Because Juliet Haworth was impatient for him to leave, he felt inclined to linger.

‘I don’t mean to be rude, but why is that any of your business? Last night, okay? He rang me last night.’

‘Naomi Jenkins says he isn’t answering his mobile phone.’

Juliet seemed to find this news invigorating. Her features became animated and she smiled. ‘She must be spitting feathers. Reliable Robert not returning her calls—whatever next!’

Simon hated the way jealousy turned people into savages. He’d been that sort of savage himself, more than once; humanity disappeared, was replaced with beasthood. An image of Juliet as a predator, licking her lips while her prey bled to death in front of her, flared in his mind. But perhaps that was unfair, since Naomi Jenkins had admitted she wanted Haworth to leave Juliet and marry her.

Naomi had written down Robert Haworth’s mobile number yesterday. Simon would leave a message later, ask Haworth to call him back. He’d make sure to inject some man-of-the-world levity into his tone. I’ll pretend I’m Colin Sellers, he thought.

‘Do me a favour, will you?’ said Juliet. ‘Tell Naomi that Robert’s got his mobile with him and it’s working fine. I want her to know that he’s got all her messages and is ignoring them.’ She pulled the front door closer to her, restricting Simon’s view of the inside of her house. All he could see now was the small semicircular telephone table immediately behind her.

He gave her his card. ‘When your husband gets back, tell him to contact me straight away.’

‘I’ve already said I will. Now, can I go? Or rather, please can you go?’

Simon could imagine her bursting into tears as soon as she’d closed the door on him. Her manner, he decided, was too brittle, slightly artificial. An act. He wondered if Robert Haworth had gone to Kent in order to make his final decision: Juliet or Naomi. If so, it was no surprise that his wife was on edge.

Simon pictured Naomi sitting tensely at home, trying to apply logic to the problem of why Haworth had abandoned her. Love and lust had no respect for logic, that was the trouble. But why was Naomi Jenkins the one Simon suddenly felt sorry for? Why not the wronged wife?

‘Naomi thought I didn’t know about her,’ said Juliet, with a snide grin. ‘Stupid bitch. Of course I knew. I found a photograph of her on Robert’s phone. Not just her. A picture of them together, with their arms round each other, at some service station. Very romantic. I wasn’t looking—I found it by accident. Robert had left his phone on the floor. I was putting up Christmas decorations and I trod on it by mistake. There I was, pressing buttons at random, panicking because I thought I’d broken it, and suddenly I was staring at this photo. Talk about a shock,’ she muttered, more to herself than to Simon. Her eyes had started to look glassy. ‘And now I’ve got the police on my doorstep. If you ask me, Naomi Jenkins wants shooting.’

Simon stepped away from her. He wondered how Robert Haworth had managed to keep up his weekly meetings with Naomi, if Juliet had known about the affair since before Christmas. If she’d only found out last week, that might have explained Haworth’s hasty departure to stay with friends in Kent.

There was a half-formed question lurking in the recesses of Simon’s mind, but before he had a chance to knock it into shape, Juliet Haworth said, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and closed the door in his face.

She wasn’t the only one. Simon raised his hand to ring the bell again, then decided against it. To ask any more questions at this stage would be prying. He returned to his car with much relief, turned on the engine, and Radio 4, and had forgotten about Robert Haworth’s sordid little love triangle by the time he reached the end of the street.

Charlie marched into the bar of the Hotel Playa Verde and slung her handbag down on a bar stool next to her sister’s. At least Olivia had followed her instructions and waited, instead of rushing to the airport and booking a first-class flight to New York as she’d threatened to. God, she looked out of place in that black off-the-shoulder dress. What had Liv expected? This was a four-hundred-pound, last-minute deal.

‘There’s nothing,’ Charlie said. She took off her glasses and wiped the rain off them with the hem of her shirt.

‘How can there be nothing? There must be a million hotels in Spain. I can’t believe they aren’t
all
better than this one, every man Jack of them.’ Olivia examined her wine glass to make sure it was clean before taking a sip.

Neither she nor Charlie spoke more quietly than usual; neither cared if the barman heard. He was an elderly man from Swansea with two large, navy-blue butterflies tattooed on his forearms. He’d moved here, Charlie had heard him telling a customer earlier, after working for twenty years as a driving instructor. ‘I don’t miss Britain,’ he’d said. ‘It’s gone to shit.’ His sole concession to his new country of residence was to tell everyone who approached the bar that a jug of sangria was half price and would be until the end of the week.

Charlie and Olivia were his only customers this evening, apart from an overweight, orange-skinned couple with a huddle of suitcases around them. They hunched over six peanuts in a silver dish, occasionally poking at them with their thick fingers, as if hoping to roll one over and find something remarkable beneath it. ‘You Wear It Well’ by Rod Stewart was playing very faintly in the background, but you’d have had to strain to hear it properly.

All four walls of the Bar Arena were covered with green, red and navy tartan wallpaper. The ceiling was nicotine-stained Artex. Still, it was the only place to be if you were unfortunate enough to be in the Hotel Playa Verde, since at least it served alcohol. There was no minibar in the tiny room Charlie and Olivia were sharing. This came as a shock to Olivia, who opened every drawer in the cupboard and bent to peer inside it, insisting, ‘It must be here somewhere.’

A net curtain that stank of old cigarettes and grease hung at the bedroom’s narrow window. It couldn’t have been washed for years. The bed Olivia chose because it was closer to the en-suite bathroom was so close that it actually blocked the doorway. If Charlie needed to go to the loo in the night, she would have to climb across the bottom of her sister’s bed. She’d made the effort this afternoon and found dried toothpaste stuck to one of the two plastic glasses by the basin, and a stranger’s soggy hair clogging the bath’s plughole. So far the fire alarm had gone off twice for no noticeable reason. Each time it had been over half an hour before someone had had the gumption to turn it off.

‘Did you look on the Internet?’ asked Olivia

‘Where do you think I’ve been for the past two hours?’ Charlie took a deep breath and ordered a brandy and dry ginger, once more refusing the barman’s offer of half-price sangria, moulding her face into a false smile when he mentioned that she had until the end of the week to take advantage of this one-off special rate. She lit a cigarette, thinking that smoking couldn’t possibly be bad for your health in situations like this, even if it was the rest of the time. The end of the week seemed very, very far away. Plenty of time to kill herself, then, if things didn’t get any better. Perhaps she ought to suicide-bomb the shitty hotel.

‘Trust me, there was nothing you’d have approved of,’ she told Olivia.

‘So there
were
places with availability?’

‘A few. But either they didn’t have pools or they weren’t right on a beach or they had no air conditioning or only a buffet in the evenings . . .’

Olivia was shaking her head. ‘We’re hardly going to need air conditioning or a pool at this rate,’ she said. ‘It’s cold and rainy. I told you it was too early in the year for Spain.’

A tight ball of heat began to expand in Charlie’s chest. ‘You also said you didn’t want a long-haul flight.’ Olivia had suggested going away in June, to avoid what she called ‘hot-weather anxiety’. Charlie had thought it a good idea; the last thing she wanted was to have to watch her sister leap out of bed every morning at six, run to the window and howl, ‘I can’t see any sun yet!’ But Detective Inspector Proust had put the kaibosh on the plan. Too many people were going to be away in June, he’d said. There was Gibbs’s honeymoon, for a start. And before that Sellers had booked an illicit holiday with his girlfriend, Suki. The official story was that he was going away with CID on a residential team-building trip. Meanwhile his wife Stacey would be in Spilling, not unlikely to bump into Charlie, Simon, Gibbs, Proust—the people Sellers had told her he’d be swinging on ropes and crawling through mud with in the depths of the countryside. Charlie was amazed Sellers’ double life had lasted as long as it had, given that his lies were so ill-thought-out.