Читать книгу Beautiful Liars - Isabel Ashdown - Страница 12

4

Martha

She’s been here before, recognizes the still-water tang of the moonlit path, the creaking murmur of houseboats and wooden decking moored along the frozen bank. It’s a shortcut home, one they’ve always taken in warmer months, but to be avoided alone after dark for fear of unseen dangers lurking in the shadows. To her right the frosted path meanders alongside the black water, disappearing into nothing as it stretches beyond the bridge. Her shallow breaths billow out in hot, white clouds, misting her vision. To her left a homeless pair sit huddled beneath sleeping bags on the wooden bench, not looking in her direction, more interested in the sandwich packet and steaming tea they’ve just been handed. You’re an angel, one of them says to no one in particular, his hand raised like that of a stained-glass saint. You’re an angel. The swishing burr of bicycle wheels; the ticker-tacker rush of air as they pass—six, eight, ten, twelve—it’s hard to know how many there are, but the riders are all young—teenagers, sixth-formers—hair and knitted scarves streaming, ivory teeth gleaming through the darkness, handlebars festooned with wicker baskets bearing fruit.

Juliet! a voice calls out from the followers, a voice chasing after the beautiful girl at the front. Jules! Wait! And Martha realizes it’s her own voice she’s hearing, she who is calling out, the urgency knotting her stomach like rope burn.

Incapable of movement, she watches the cyclists turn sharply where the path grows dim, and they nose-dive, bikes and all, one after the other, disappearing like fish from a bucket through the glittering surface of the Regent’s Canal. A fracture skitters across the frozen crust, breaking the waterway in two, causing the houseboats to tip and sway. She can’t bear it, the motion of the water undulating beneath the nearest boat, the brightest of them all, and she sprints over the crunchy grass and reaches out for its wooden rails, desperate to steady the boat’s movements, to silence the night. Her smooth school pumps slip on the frosty bank, and she feels herself disappear into the water, fish-like herself, the ice closing up behind her.

It’s a dream she’s had before, or at least a version of it. Sometimes she’s the one on the bicycle, and it’s Juliet and Liv sitting on the wooden bench, eating sandwiches. Other times she’s watching, helpless, as Juliet floats by, trapped under ice, her eyes wild. And then there’s the version where nothing happens; where Martha roams back and forth along that lonely path, looking, looking, looking, and finding nothing—seeing nothing, hearing nothing. In some ways, that’s the worst dream of them all, infected as it is with the intangible qualities of helplessness and guilt.

I should have walked on with her, Martha tells herself, running her hands up and over her sleep-softened face, willing herself to rise from her position on the sofa, where she had sunk into sleep within moments of arriving home this evening. If Martha had walked on with her that night as she’d planned to—if she hadn’t changed her mind and left her standing on that towpath alone—would Juliet be alive today?

She’s been in the library all afternoon, going back over old newspaper articles about Juliet’s disappearance, rereading the media speculation, the sound-bite quotes from “close sources.” Her head is full of it, the loose ends and unasked questions pressing against the inside of her mind, and she fears she is destined to dream of Juliet forever, at least until she finds the answers she seeks.

Wrung out, she glances around her living room, a study in contemporary design: a dash of minimalism here, a nod to the Baroque there. When she’d signed the papers, Martha hadn’t even asked about the décor—it was enough to know it would be new, stylish, and easy to care for. Safe. It’s a gated community of sorts, the kind Martha would once have scorned as pretentious, but she likes it: She’s grateful to be locked in and secure. It’s a long way from the damp-curled rooms of her childhood home in Hackney, social housing long since demolished to make way for gentrification. The clock on the far wall tells her it’s nine-thirty p.m. God, she’ll never sleep now, she knows. She’s been out cold for nearly two hours.

When her mobile rings, Martha cries out, and without thinking she grabs it from the side table, bringing it to her ear with a brusque “Hello?”

There’s a rustling sound at the other end, the suggestion that the caller has dropped the phone and is trying to retrieve it. “Shit,” the voice says, gravelly, fumbling, his breath labored and apologetic as he finally sorts the handset out. “Shit. Sorry, Martha. Shit.”

Dread sinks through her like a weight. Why didn’t she check the caller ID before answering? She finds herself frozen, much as she had been in her dream, the sense of helplessness returning like a memory, and her words won’t come. Outside, the city roars past and the world keeps turning, life continuing on as ever.

“Martha?” At first his tone is soft and persuasive, but it takes only seconds for impatience to materialize, to betray itself as the stronger emotion. “Come on, love,” he says, and his words are mashed. Drunk. Growing singsong nasty. “I kno-ow you’re the-ere. I can hear you. I can hear the traffic. I can hear you breathing. Martha? Martha? Martha! Answer me, you hard-nosed cow!”

At his roar she snaps into movement, jerking the receiver from her ear and pressing the red end-call button. It’s been months since she last heard from him, a year even. What does he want with her? She made it clear she was done with him, done with that chapter in her life. She’d given him money, hadn’t she? More than enough to set himself up, to make his own way. What more could he possibly want from her?

* * *

The following morning Martha and Toby are meeting at the café in the British Library, and when she arrives five minutes early she finds him already seated at a wall table with two coffees steaming in front of him. She started the day in a bad mood, having heard from Juney that they’re still unable to establish the name of the girl at the center of David Crown’s school allegation, as it was never formally reported on at the time. Apparently no public records exist. Surely it shouldn’t be so difficult to get this kind of information? How hard has Juney actually tried? But perhaps Martha is being unfair: How can she expect Juney to access information that doesn’t exist in the public domain? For that, Martha needs an insider. Perhaps it’s time to call in a few favors. She’ll phone Finn Palin when she’s finished here, see what he can do for her. Of course, he’s retired now, but Martha knows how the old boys’ network operates inside the police force; she’s certain he’ll be able to track down that girl’s name without too much fuss. He owes her that much at least.

Toby rises as she approaches, and she hates him for arriving ahead of her.

“I take mine decaffeinated,” she says, nodding toward the drinks as she removes her winter gloves. The wall lights cast a clean pool of white around him, like a halo, and she catches an amused look on his face as he clocks the spotty Dalmatian print of her gloves before she stuffs them in her bag.

“Decaf?” Toby replies. “That’s what I ordered.” He’s unflustered, unflappable, gently pushing the white cup across the small table and taking his seat. “I got us a flapjack to share too—in case you’re hungry?”

Martha could eat a horse, having skipped breakfast to make it here on time, but still she shakes her head. God, she hates herself sometimes.

Giving no acknowledgment of her bad attitude, Toby places the case files on the table between them and flips open his reporter’s notebook to reveal a page annotated with small, neat handwriting. He pushes at his floppy fringe. “Well, I’ll save you half anyway—in case you get peckish. So,” he says, taking a sip of his drink, “yesterday seemed to go quite well, don’t you think? The production meeting. I reckon Glen Gavin has put together a really good team—Juney is an excellent researcher. She’s given us quite a lot of useful stuff already.”

Us. Jeez. Out of the Cold is not some kind of bloody partnership; Martha is the lead on this project. Toby Parr is her deputy. He’ll get what, five or ten minutes of airtime if he’s lucky, and here he is behaving as though he’s her copresenter rather than some pipsqueak who’s been foisted upon her by management. She eyes him coldly, trying to unbalance him, willing him to drop his cheery posh-boy mask and show what he really thinks of her. That she’s just an estate girl made good, a poorly educated nobody to clamber across on his trouble-free, well-heeled way to the bloody top.

“Can you give me a summary of what we’ve got so far?” she asks him. It’s a test, and from his change in expression he knows it.

“OK.” He pulls his notebook closer, studies it for a moment. “First off, Juney has been in touch with the Metro, to place that “Can You Help?” ad you drafted. Should go in tomorrow at the latest, to run for five days.”

“Good. I don’t hold out much hope of anyone useful coming forward, but you never know.”

Toby returns to his notes. “To summarize: We have Juliet Sherman, age seventeen, goes missing at around nine p.m. on a Friday night in January 2000, on a towpath beside the Regent’s Canal. Last-known person to see her alive is you, Martha Benn, seventeen-year-old school friend. That evening she’d also been with your mutual friend Olivia Heathcote and her own brother, Tom Sherman, at the Waterside Café bar, where you’d all had two, maybe three alcoholic drinks before Juliet had to leave for her voluntary job at Square Wheels. You walked with her along the canal, with your bicycles—it was dark, but lamplit—halfway to the Square Wheels cabin, before leaving her to walk the remainder alone as you returned to the bar for your forgotten bag. The roads nearby were fairly busy, with it being a Friday night, and you said you saw a number of other walkers and cyclists along the path and that Juliet was in good spirits when you parted. As far as we know, no one else saw or spoke to her before she disappeared, but we don’t believe she can have gone much farther, because her bicycle was found the next day only meters from the spot where you’d parted. The person of interest is David Crown, leader of Square Wheels and local landscape gardener, who vanished a day after Juliet went missing, having withdrawn a large sum of money. Ultimately, the police concluded that Juliet and David had been involved in a secret affair and that they left together of their own accord.” Toby pauses, looking for Martha’s approval.

“Which is, of course, bollocks.”

“We know that the police interviewed everyone who saw Juliet that night, including her parents and David Crown before he disappeared—but no one could shed any more light on the mystery. We now also know that there was a previous sexual assault allegation made against David Crown when he was a teacher, but that it was dropped and written off as a pupil’s fabrication.” Toby runs his finger down his list. “Have I missed anything?”

Martha gazes past him toward the busy foyer of the library café. “Olivia and Juliet fell out earlier that night,” she says, bringing her focus back to Toby.

“Really?” He looks back at his notes, frowning as though he might have overlooked something.

“It wasn’t reported on, because Liv didn’t mention it in her interview.”

“But you knew about it?”

“I heard them—it was just before Juliet set off for work and the two of them had left the café ahead, while I said good-bye to Tom and a few of the others. When I got outside, I saw them round the corner—Juliet was unlocking her bike—and they were having a heated argument. Really heated. Liv was trying to stop Juliet from leaving, grabbing her coat, but Jules shook her off, pushed past. It stopped the minute they saw me.” Martha can see their panicked faces now, their rage quickly shutting down to avert her questions.

“You didn’t mention this in the meeting yesterday.”

“No. And I didn’t tell the police at the time either. Liv asked me not to.”

Toby’s eyebrows furrow. “Really? Didn’t you think it was important to let them know? It could have been vital to the case.”

“Bloody hell, Toby. Were you ever a teenager, or were you born fully grown? We were seventeen—our best friend had just vanished, and we were terrified and guilty and grief-stricken. Liv didn’t want anyone to know that they’d argued, because she was just so ashamed that her last moments with Juliet were bad ones.”

“Do you know what the argument was about?” Toby asks.

“No,” Martha replies. “I asked Juliet at the time—as we were walking away from the bar—but she dismissed it. Said Liv was just being a drama queen and it would blow over. She made it clear the subject was closed, so I didn’t push it.”

Toby looks unconvinced.

“I was fine about not telling the police they’d been arguing. I mean, I knew Liv didn’t have anything to do with Juliet’s disappearance. But it always bothered me that Liv never told me what the argument was about. Those two—Juliet and Liv—their relationship was always just that bit tighter than it was with me. They went back further, they’d known each other since primary school—I met them at the start of secondary. Of course, they bickered from time to time, but it never got serious or nasty. I don’t think I’d ever seen them exchange cross words before that night.” She picks up her coffee cup. “Or ever again.”

Toby adds a few neat lines to his notebook. “You’ve written to Liv, you say? We really need to speak to her next, don’t we? Find out what they were arguing about—see what else she might know. That’s got to be a priority.”

“I’m on it,” Martha replies, suddenly irritated, sensing a suggestion that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Scowling, she adds, “And I’ll give the orders, thanks, Toby. You do know I’m the lead here, don’t you?”

There’s a moment’s silence as she stares him down, challenging him to disagree.

“Martha,” he says in a soft voice. “I think we need to get this out of the way, don’t you? Look, I really want this to work, and I really want to do the best I can for the show—for you. But it’s going to be hard if you’re going to pick on me for every little thing. It feels as if you don’t trust me.”

“You have to earn someone’s trust,” she replies, feeling her cheeks flush as she realizes how uptight and clichéd she sounds. “How can I trust you when I don’t even know you?”

He smiles, not unkindly. “But that’s not true, is it? And even if it were, would you be as hard on someone who, well, who came to the job without any connection to you at all? Some graduate, or a junior from outside the team?”

She feels shame creeping beneath her collar, and she hides behind her coffee cup, stalling for time to think.

“Is it because of my connections on the board? Because everyone else seems to have gotten over that particular elephant in the room.” He gives a small laugh, self-conscious to have brought it up.

“Have they?” she replies, reaching across the table to break off a corner of the untouched flapjack. “Everyone knows you leapfrogged several perfectly capable junior researchers to take this role—most of them women, I might add—and there’s not a person on this project who thinks you got that job purely based on your qualifications or experience.”

“And there’s not a person on this project who thinks you got this job without sleeping your way to the top.”

Martha would have made a show of alarm if Toby hadn’t beaten her to it.

He clamps his hand to his forehead and curses, a whisper of a word. “Crap. Martha, I’m sorry. That was a low blow.”

Now it’s her turn to laugh, and she’s not even sure whether it’s relief or embarrassment she’s feeling. “So that’s what people think, is it? That I slept my way to the top? Do people actually say that?”

Toby shrugs, looking as though he’s about to retract his words, then shrugs again, defeated. Well, I got what I wanted, Martha thinks with no sense of victory. Good boy Toby tells it like it is.

“I’ve heard it said,” he murmurs, his shoulders dropping, his eyes downcast.

Wow, Martha thinks, she really has knocked the wind out of his sails. At once she feels like the school bully, and she hates herself all over again. “So, exactly how many executives am I supposed to have shagged to reach these lofty heights?” She allows a humorous lilt to break through, a show of forgiveness perhaps. Something.

Toby’s eyes flicker up beneath his furrowed brow, and Martha sees the slightest glimmer of hope reignite.

“One?” she ventures. “Two? Five? Ten?” He doesn’t answer, but a slow smile starts to spread across his features as the number rises. “More?!” Martha demands, breaking into incredulous laughter and slumping against her chair back in disbelief.

Recovered, Toby stands and picks up their empty cups. “Just the one,” he replies.

Martha rolls her eyes and snaps off another piece of flapjack, nibbling the corner of it like a petulant teenager. She blanks him, scrolling her forefinger down her phone, checking for new messages.

“I’ll get us a refill,” Toby says, and if she didn’t know better she’d think he was stifling a laugh. “And then—please can we agree to a fresh start?”

He has her in the palm of his hand, Martha knows. What’s the expression? Kill them with kindness? Well, he’s slaughtered her. And despite herself, she finds she likes him, and she has no choice in the matter when she agrees. “OK. Fresh start.”

Ignoring the chime of an e-mail alert on her phone, Martha picks up the rest of the flapjack and takes a bite. “What are you waiting for?” she asks through a full mouth. “Fuck off and get those coffees. We’ve got work to do.”