Beautiful Liars

by Isabel Ashdown

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Eighteen years ago Martha said good-bye to best friend Juliet on a moonlit London towpath. The next morning Juliet's bike was found abandoned at the waterside. She was never seen again.

Nearly two decades later Martha is a TV celebrity, preparing to host a new crime show...and the first case will be that of missing student Juliet Sherman. After all these years Martha must reach out to old friends and try to piece together the final moments of Juliet's life. But what happens when your perfect friends turn out to be perfect strangers?

Release date: June 25, 2019

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 289

Sample

It wasn’t my fault.

I can see that now, through adult eyes and with the hindsight of rational thinking. Of course, for many years I wondered if I’d misremembered the details of that day, the true events having changed shape beneath the various and consoling accounts of my parents, of the emergency officers, of the witnesses on the rocky path below. I recall certain snatches so sharply—like the way the mountain rescue man’s beard grew more ginger toward the middle of his face, and his soft tone when he said, “Hello, mate,” offering me a solid hand to shake. Hello, mate. I never forgot that. But there are other things I can’t remember at all, such as what we’d been doing in the week leading up to the accident, or where we’d been staying, or where we went directly afterward. How interesting it is, the way the mind works, the way it recalibrates difficult experiences, bestowing upon them a storybook quality so that we might shut the pages when it suits us and place them safely on the highest shelf. I was just seven, and so naturally I followed the lead of my mother and father, torn as they were between despair for their lost child and protection of the one who still remained: the one left standing on the misty mountain ledge of Kinder Scout, looking down.

I can see the scene now, if I allow my thoughts to return to that remote place in my memory. I watch myself as though from a great distance: small and plump, black hair slicked against my forehead by the damp drizzle of the high mountain air. And there are my parents, dressed head to toe in their identical hiking gear: Mum, thin and earnest, startle-eyed, and Dad, confused, his finger pushing his spectacles up his florid nose as he interprets my gesture and breaks into a heavy-footed run. Their alarmed expressions are frozen in time. There is horror as they register that I now stand alone, no younger child to be seen; that I’m pointing toward the precipitous edge, my eyes squinting hard as I try to shed tears. There are no other walkers on this stretch of path, no one to say what really happened when my brother departed the cliff edge, but the sharp cries of distress from the winding path far below suggest that there were witnesses to his arrival farther down.

It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your fault. This was the refrain of my slow-eyed mother in the weeks that followed while she tried her best to absolve me, to put one foot in front of the other, to grasp at some semblance of normality. “It wasn’t your fault,” she’d tell me at nighttime as she tucked the duvet snugly around my shoulders, our eyes never straying to the now-empty bed inhabiting the nook on the opposite side of my tiny childhood room. “It was just a terrible accident.” But, as I look back now, I think perhaps I can hear the grain of uncertainty in her tone, the little tremor betraying the questions she will never voice. Did you do it, sweetheart? Did you push my baby from the path? Was it just an accident? Was it?

And, if I could speak with my mother now, what would I say in return? If I track further back into that same memory, to just a few seconds earlier, the truth is there for me alone to see. Now at the cliff edge I see two children. They’re not identical in size and stature, but they’re both dressed in bright blue anoraks to match their parents—the smaller with his hood tightly fastened beneath a chubby chin; the bigger one, hood down, oblivious to the sting of the icy rain. “Mine!” the smaller one says, unsuccessfully snatching at a lemon sucker held loosely between the older child’s dripping fingers. This goes on for a while, and on reflection I think that perhaps the sweet did belong to the younger child, because eventually it is snatched away, and I recall the sense that it wasn’t mine to covet in the first place. But that is not the point, because it wasn’t the taking of the sweet that was so wrong but the boastful, taunting manner of it. “No!” is the cry I hear, and I know it comes from me because even now I feel the rage rear up inside me as that hooded child makes a great pouting show of shedding the wrapper and popping the yellow lozenge into its selfish hole of a mouth, its bragging form swaying in a small victory dance at the slippery cliff edge. The tremor of my cry is still vibrating in my ears as I bring the weight of my balled fist into the soft dough of that child’s cheek and see the lemon sucker shoot from between rosy lips like a bullet. “No!” I shout again, and this time the sound seems to come from far, far away. Seconds later, he’s gone, and I know he’s plummeting, falling past the heather-cloaked rocks and snaggly outcrops that make up this great mountainous piece of land. I know it is a death drop; I know it is a long way down. I can’t say I remember pushing him—but neither can I remember not pushing him.

So you see, I’m not to blame at all. From what I recall of that other child—my brother—he was a snatcher, a tittle-tattle, a crybaby, a provoker. Even if I did do it, there’s not a person on earth who would think I was culpable.

I was seven, for God’s sake.

What a morning! What a strange and wonderful morning. It had started so badly, when I woke early after a fitful night’s sleep, feeling fat and ugly as I stared into the mottled bathroom mirror, almost beside myself with stomach pains. My eyes were puffier than usual and bloodshot, and in the dawn light of the tiny room I actually wondered if I was getting a mustache. But that low feeling is now a distant memory, because the bright and magnificent thing that happened next quite banished it to the shadows.

I suppose I’m lucky living on this street, unexceptional as it is, in that the post arrives early each day. Not like at home—my old home—where the post didn’t come until well after midday, and the postman was a grumpy old woman with a crew cut and too many earrings. Postwoman, I should say. Or is it postper-son these days? I don’t know; these things change so often, it’s almost impossible to keep up. I only learned last year that it’s no longer considered acceptable to use the expression “colored,” but apparently that one’s been non-PC for years. I count my blessings for the television and the Internet, which educate me in these things, or else I’d be getting it wrong all over the place. Can you imagine how mortifying it would be to be caught out like that, to be accused of being a racist simply by not keeping up-to-date, for not knowing because nobody told you and you didn’t happen to read about it and it never occurred to you that these things might change while you weren’t paying attention? Not that I mix with a great variety of people these days, despite the fact that London is quite the cosmopolitan city. I don’t mean that I choose not to mix with them; it’s just that I don’t mix with any people very much, not since my teens anyway. Oh, but now that I think of it, there’s the chap behind the counter at the local post office, who I would guess must be Indian or Pakistani, although his name badge says HAROLD. His skin is a deep mahogany, and I can’t even begin to think what age he might be, though he seems both young and old at the very same time. Is it wrong of me to think of Harold as a white name? I suppose it is. Not that it matters at all, of course. I don’t mind who serves me at the post office, and Harold is always very helpful and polite. I’m proud to say I’ve never had a racist thought in my life.

Anyway, the postman who delivers to this street is young and male (and white, as it happens), and from the few exchanges we’ve had I’d describe him as quite the charmer. When I say young, I mean he’s about my age, midthirties, with the brightest green eyes and a mischievous smile that makes me blush from my collarbone to the roots of my hair. I don’t get too many parcels that won’t go through the letter box, so it’s rare for him to have to knock on the door, and the few bits of mail that I do get have usually landed on the mat before I can snatch a glimpse of him through the front window.

In the old days, my work documents would arrive in hard copy, thick bundles of A4 enclosed in padded envelopes, often requiring a signature on delivery. So I saw a lot of Ms. Crew Cut over the years at Mum’s. But in recent times things have changed for the humble proofreader, and now almost all my work comes via e-mail, a condition of my freelance contract being that I own a decent printer to run off documents myself. The whole arrangement seems a bit off to me because, while these publishers can’t be bothered to send a hard copy to me, they still demand that I return my corrected documents to them by post, so I have to go through the hell of a trip to the post office at least once a week, skirting the long way round to avoid passing the old house with its nosy neighbors and difficult memories. If it weren’t for my regular postal excursion, I don’t think I’d leave the house at all. And why would I? I love it here. I loved it from the moment I laid eyes on the place and decided I would have it. It’s never a cause for celebration when someone in your family dies, but without my recent legacy I would never be living here so happily. I’d been longing for my own space for years, and Mother’s money was a godsend.

Goodness, I’m still sitting here at the table in the front window, gazing out into the morning as my mind jumps about all over the place! I think perhaps it’s a symptom of living alone, although I fear it was probably the same when I was living with Mum. At times, when I struggle to focus like this, I will pinch the soft skin of my underarm until it makes my eyes water and forces me to concentrate on just the one thing. Well, the postman is in my thoughts, but of course he isn’t the main point of this excitement, delightful as it is to remember answering the door and finding him standing there. He was looking especially chirpy today, and he gave me a wink and made a pleasing cluck-cluck sound with his mouth as he walked away. “Have a good day, love,” he called back without turning, and he vanished into the next street on the corner of my terrace. I pressed myself against the door frame after he’d gone, trying to sustain the physical memory of him, glad that I’d brushed my long hair so diligently last night.

The parcel contained a gruesome biography I’d ordered online about the London killer John Christie, plus a new thesaurus to replace the one I spilled tea all over last week when I drifted off on the sofa. Delivered with the parcel were a few marketing flyers and, to my surprise, a handwritten letter addressed to the previous owner, Olivia Heathcote. How odd, I thought initially, that this was the very first piece of mail I’d ever received for my predecessor, but then it struck me that of course she must have put a forwarding arrangement in place and, now that twelve months had elapsed, any residual letters would start to fall through my door. I can’t say why exactly, but just holding that envelope in my fingers, with its curly handwritten address and its opening flap sealed by the tongue of a stranger—well, it rendered me quite breathless. I placed it down on the table and gazed upon it for a while, running my palms over my painful belly, trying to ease the bloating that had seized me in the night. I’m overweight, it’s fair to say, but today my stomach felt even more distended with trapped gas, gripping and twisting away inside me like a snake. I’d been forced to open the windows in my bedroom when I rose, just to let out the terrible whiff of it. It’s a curse.

Breathing deeply through my discomfort, I went over the logistics of returning the letter to the post office. I had two manuscripts parcelled and ready to go, so it would be no bother to return this item at the same time—but then, I countered, wouldn’t it be ridiculous to hand them an envelope absent of a return address? Surely they could do nothing with it! There would be no way of getting it back to the sender, and I’m quite certain it would have ended up in their recycling bin. Finally, I decided to open up the envelope and see if it contained a sender’s address within, and then return it. That, I swear, is what I intended to do.

Once I had read the contents, however, my thoughts were taken in an entirely different direction, and I realized I’d been handed a gift. And that is why an hour later I haven’t moved an inch, and I sit here clutching the letter, blinking in astonishment at the last few words: With love, Martha x

The morning sun casts fingers of light across the letter, picking out the dust bobs that float in the space between me and the net curtains to the street beyond. There’s a tremor running through me, a juddering reverberation like the one I feel when heavy trucks rumble up the road and rattle the glass panes. But this is different. This comes from within. I turn over the envelope, smoothing it out on the tabletop, running my thumb across the handwritten indentations of the address. My address, but not my name. Olivia Heathcote.

Martha Benn—the Martha Benn—thinks that I am Olivia Heathcote. She thinks she is writing to Liv Heathcote, and she wants her help in this unsolved case. It’s a case I recall only too well; it disturbed my mother terribly, the idea of that poor girl vanishing so close to where we lived, and for several weeks afterward she insisted I wasn’t allowed out alone, even in daylight hours. It made the national news for a while, until the police concluded that she had eloped with an older man. But I didn’t believe that for a minute—and I’m guessing that Martha doesn’t believe it either. I push back my chair and stand shakily, the names swimming across my mind like new friends: Martha, Liv, Juliet, David Crown. I must lie down; it’s all rather too much, and for the first time in an age I almost wish my mother were here to share in this excitement. I ease myself into the sagging sofa—my, how it sags—and position my neck against one armrest, catching a waft of body odor as I lug my legs up and over the other. Does it sound dreadful to confess I can’t remember the last time I took a bath? The shower hose is broken, but that’s no excuse, as I’ve always preferred a bath anyway. If I’m to meet up with Martha Benn—and it’s quite possible that this really could happen—I need to buck up my ideas. I’ll run a bath this afternoon, after I’ve had a little rest. I close my heavy eyelids, dropping swiftly into the darkness of slumber, allowing myself to imagine something new. How would it feel to be “Liv”? How would it feel to be someone else altogether?

The rest of the team is in the boardroom when Toby Parr turns up for the production meeting five minutes late, and Martha does all she can to keep the irritation from her face as he strolls through the door, pushing back his sun-kissed flop of hair and smiling broadly. She hasn’t seen him for eight or nine years, but still he exudes the youthful confidence of the privately educated, that self-assured aura of life membership that Martha dismisses as wholly unearned, awarded too freely. Does she feel like this just because of who he is, or would she resent him if they met under different circumstances? He’s almost a decade younger than her; he can only be in his midtwenties. But it’s not just that—after all, she’s only too grateful that older colleagues were willing to take a punt on her when she was younger and in need of a chance. Well, there you have your difference, she thinks: She needed a chance, and really, he doesn’t.

“Morning, all!” Toby says, too breezily for a newcomer, eliciting polite murmurs and tight smiles from around the room. Martha takes in the neutral faces at the boardroom table. Many of these people are senior to Toby, and yet there’s curious caution in their open expressions.

In the far corner of the room are a cameraman and a sound technician, there to record early footage for the piece. They will film the entire meeting, yet only seconds will be used in the final edit: well-chosen slices that add color and depth to the documentary, to the mystery. An earnest frown here, a studious turning of papers there. It’s not just a documentary they’re making. It’s entertainment. Martha has a sense of being somewhere outside of herself, looking in on this surreal scene. How is it that she should find herself here, star of a show that may unravel her own past, opening her up to the scrutiny of others? The world knows the Martha Benn she has become, the polished, glossy-haired, media-savvy Martha—queen of the prime-time talk show, go-to woman for serious reportage and debate. To her viewers she’s clean-cut, a poor East End girl come good. Respectable. Nothing more murky in her past than an early divorce and a couple of tenuous romantic links to minor celebrities. This morning at home, as she prepared herself for the day, she had gazed out across London, sipping strong black coffee—her one caffeinated drink of the day—and again she had been struck by the feeling that she was living someone else’s life. There she was in her twelfth-floor apartment, a glass-walled luxury abode overlooking the river, and she wondered how long it would be before she was ruined.

Sending that letter to Olivia Heathcote had only been the start of it, but reaching back in time like that has unsettled her more than she could ever have anticipated. If the letter has reached her, will Liv even respond? Perhaps, like her, Liv has moved on, reinvented herself; perhaps Liv would rather keep that particular box tightly sealed too. They’ve all got secrets to hide, of that much Martha is certain. Her new TV show, this investigation, could well be the catalyst to her unmasking. Not that she’s ever pretended to be anyone else, or gone out of her way to deceive. Martha Benn is the name she was given at birth; she kept it even during her brief marriage to Denny, much to his family’s distaste. And she’s never exactly lied about her past. But she also has not been open about her earlier life, having long ago become accustomed to skirting over her Stanley House years, skipping straight to the good bits, the bits she can talk about with ease. The life she has constructed is about to change; she knows this without a shadow of a doubt. And there’s nothing she can do about it, not if she’s determined to unravel the mystery of Juliet. And she is determined. Whatever it takes, whether Juliet is found dead or alive, Martha has to find out.

Now, at the top end of the table, executive producer Glen Gavin nods at Toby pleasantly, offering a help-yourself gesture toward the trolley bearing drinks and pastries, and rises to close the door and open the meeting. Glen is a lean man, his small frame nipped in by expensive suits, yet his presence is nonetheless large in the room, magnified further by the deep timber of his Scottish accent. Beyond him and the glass wall of their top-floor office, the London skyline fans out, bathed in the bright white sheen of a winter morning.

“Good morning, everyone.” Glen pauses, his eyes following Toby as he sets down his coffee in front of the one remaining seat and unbuttons his jacket, then slips it from his shoulders and places it on the back of his chair. It’s all done in such a leisurely fashion, Martha could scream—and a flash of flint in Glen’s eyes momentarily betrays his mixed feelings about the appointment of Toby Parr.

“So,” Glen says, “it’s hugely exciting to be gathered at the first planning meeting for Out of the Cold, and I for one am thrilled that we have managed to assemble some of our very best to turn this vision into a reality.”

He falls silent, and it’s only when one of the junior researchers releases an awkward “Woo!” that the rest of the team realize what’s expected. They fall into a wave of polite British handclapping.

“Now,” Glen continues, “let me summarize our overall plan. The pilot for Out of the Cold is provisionally scheduled to air six months from now, so the timings will be tight. It goes without saying that we’re relying on the success of this to help us secure the proposed series with the network. Our pilot needs to be a showstopper, and that, my friends, is why you’re all sitting around the table.” He rises from his chair and ambles toward the trolley, then picks out an apricot Danish, takes a bite, and chews slowly as he eyes each of the team in turn. When his mouthful is swallowed, he continues to speak, and he places the pastry on a napkin on the table before him, sliding his chair out to take a seat. He won’t eat the rest of it; it’s merely a prop. Martha’s gaze travels up from the pastry and finds Glen’s eyes locked on hers as he says her name.

“We’re very happy to confirm that the show will be fronted by Martha Benn, who you’ll all be familiar with from her work on ITV—well, across a number of the channels, in fact—with Toby Parr playing a key role as her associate program researcher.” Martha nods. Toby raises a hand, like a schoolboy receiving an award from the head teacher. She wonders, momentarily, what they all made of her sacking from morning TV last year, when she had been replaced by a younger, pregnant up-and-coming star. More relatable, was the way her female boss at the time had put it. Younger, was what she really meant.

Glen continues. “Our pilot episode will investigate the eighteen-year-old case of missing teenager Juliet Sherman, seventeen—who was last seen on a London towpath in January 2000, beside the Regent’s Canal, where her abandoned bike was later discovered. Juliet came from what you’d call a nice middle-class family. Dad was a bank manager, Mum worked part-time for a local firm of solicitors. Juliet had one sibling, older brother Tom who was back from university on his Christmas break at the time of her disappearance. All of them were interviewed at the time, but none of the family was ever considered a suspect. Within a matter of weeks, the police made the decision to scale back the investigation, ultimately concluding that she had run away with an older man—” Glen riffles through his papers, glancing toward Martha for help.

‘David Crown,” she offers. “Local landscape gardener and charity worker.”

‘Yes.” Glen nods slowly. “David Crown. All-around good guy.”

There’s a ripple of amusement around the table, and Martha bites down an urge to pound her fists on the table, to tell them all to show a bit of bloody respect.

“This is an interesting case, and one that will resonate with the public—not only in the light of recent high-profile abuse cases but also because our own Martha here was interviewed as part of the original police investigation.”

A murmur rises, a gasp; querulous frowns turn into pleased expressions of surprise.

“Martha, perhaps you’d like to take over from here?” Glen says, and he offers up his palms, gesturing for her to speak as he relaxes back into his chair.

She hadn’t expected the surge of nerves that courses through her body, the heart-thumping weight of responsibility she feels in this moment. “Thank you, Glen,” she says warmly, ever the professional, and she picks up a pen, tapping it lightly on the wrist of her other hand, a movement that apes her own private mindfulness exercises for calm. “Yes, I was involved in the original case.” Her mind is working fast, and she is careful to keep the emotion from her voice, to state only the facts and none of the profound sadness she still feels. “Back in 2000, I attended Bridge Academy in Hackney along with Juliet Sherman and another school friend, Olivia Heathcote—the three of us had been best friends for over seven years.”

The silence in the room is palpable.

“I think it’s important to say that the reason I suggested the new show, and Juliet’s case in particular, is because I recently read a local news article about her father’s desire to find out what happened to his daughter. He has terminal cancer, and his wife—Juliet’s mother—died a few years back, still not knowing. This is a family that has been beset by tragedy, and it feels like the right time to launch a new investigation. Time is running out for Alan Sherman. If we are successful, it will be a good thing we’re doing.”

Quite to Martha’s surprise, the room breaks into spontaneous applause.

She nods in acknowledgment, speaking quickly to move things on. “When Juliet went missing, Olivia and I were among the first to be interviewed, in part because of our close friendship with her—they wanted to know if we had any information about boyfriends or family disruptions at home—but more important because the two of us were among the last people to see her alive.”

Now Martha hands a photograph down the table for Glen to pass around. It shows the three friends, sitting on the grass on a school trip to London Zoo, taken perhaps a year or two before Juliet went missing. Juliet and Martha have a similar look, both wearing their light brown hair long with outgrown fringes, the difference in their height unremarkable when seated. In reality Juliet had been a good two inches taller than Martha, and, although there was a passing resemblance, Juliet was simply more beautiful, her skin more honeyed, her green eyes more flaming than Martha’s dull brown. Looking at that photograph now, she recalls just how much she followed Juliet’s lead; Juliet was always the first to risk the latest trend or hairstyle, and Martha invariably followed suit. Liv’s appearance was dark to their fair, and she was the smallest of them all. She’d been adopted at birth, and the little she knew of her heritage was that her mo. . .