The Good Liar

by Denise Mina

Genres: Family Life; Siblings

Synopsis

In this provocative mystery from beloved crime writer Denise Mina, new evidence in an old murder case leads a forensic scientist to an impossible choice: Would you still do the right thing if you knew it would cost everything you loved?

Doctor Claudia O’Sheil is approaching the podium at an elegant fundraiser, where she is expected to give a speech about how her forensic science evidence helped convict the brutal killer in her most famous case: The Incident at Chester Terrace, a sensational double-murder that ignited the country just one year before.
 
But the research has moved on, the evidence Claudia gave was junk science, used to put William Stewart away for the murder of his father and his girlfriend. Because of her an innocent man is in prison, and she didn’t act alone—some very powerful people have an agenda she is only beginning to understand. This speech might be her last chance to reveal the truth and catch the real murderer. But admitting her mistake will cost Claudia: her reputation, her career, her home, security for her two sons, the esteem of her colleagues, and the pride of a nation obsessed with her success. In this breathless upmarket suspense novel, interwoven with the present-day framework is a past narrative that slowly reveals what actually happened the night of a devastating double-murder in a wealthy family.
 
As Claudia steps toward the microphone, she revisits the murder investigation, desperate to understand what went wrong before her chance is gone. What speech will Claudia give? And what really happened at Chester Terrace that night? 

Release date: June 3, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

The sweetness of the elderflower cordial and rising scent of daphne caught the back of Claudia’s throat. She felt a little sick. This was her first party since she was widowed. She didn’t want to come but was here to support her new boss at the forensic analysis company, ForSci Ltd. Sir Philip Ardmore had been so supportive of her since James died. Attending the opening ceremony of a building project he’d been instrumental in was the least she could do.

The warren of glass and concrete was on the edge of Regent’s Park and something of a miracle in the Central London conservation area. Planning regulations had been circumvented somehow or other. She thought the sheer social heft of the board might have something to do with that. Tonight was the opening party and they were all there: all the MPs and MBEs, the landed and the lords. She would have been anxious about the company if she wasn’t still a little numb. The lingering shock of James’s sudden death lent her an air of disinterested sangfroid.

Her doctor refused to prescribe antidepressants. They won’t work for you, he said, grief is a rational reaction to your husband dying. The depression is natural, not something that can be washed away with chemical sunshine. You’ll just have to wait until the gnawing awareness of the frailty of life recedes, which it will. I’m sorry.

Claudia was sorry too but functioning in low mood gave her a new perspective. It wasn’t insight so much as a world drained of colour, stripped back to clean lines with all the dissembling and distractions beyond her grasp. It had been four months and one week ago and Claudia had been absolutely still, watching the world move around her.

Her face still moved in expression-making ways. Her body went to work, came home, cooked, moved from their crappy cramped house in Battersea to an even shitter flat in Lambeth, attended meetings with pastoral care teachers concerned about her boys. But Claudia was frozen, watchful, waiting for the black to lift, to thin, for the shock to lessen. Adrenalin trilled through her body every waking moment. She felt as if she had woken up at the top of Nelson’s Column and was expected to act as if nothing had changed.

All she wanted to do was sit and smoke and sob. But she didn’t. She couldn’t afford to.

Ironically, she had been steeply promoted during this time, achieving an income she’d never managed when James was alive. She wondered if her detachment looked like wisdom from the outside, if it was a precondition of her success and why Sir Philip supported her rapid advancement in an area she had so little experience in.

She was coping, she kept reminding herself, countering the voice in her head that insisted she couldn’t cope. You are coping. Look at the evidence.

This evening she must have seemed less capable than usual though, because Philip had been following her around like an anxious nanny. That worried her. It didn’t do to look weak.

They were in an open space at the heart of the building, the Botanical Courtyard where, according to the newspapers, ancient poisons and hallucinogens were being grown under government licence. This wasn’t true. No one knew where the rumour started, but there had already been several attempted break-ins even before the official opening. Now brand-new cameras were trained on every corner.

A figure slid in front of Claudia, coming in from her blind spot, standing close, filling her field of vision with a large chest and broad shoulders. A woman with a domed forehead haloed by a velvet Alice band.

‘Claudia?’ Her head was tilted to the side, ‘Dr Claudia Atkins O’Sheil? Remember me? I’m Dr Kirsty Parry.’

Claudia didn’t think she did recall the woman but Kirsty was standing too close to focus on her face properly. ‘I’m terribly sorry…’

‘Organic Chemistry at Merton. Different year from you, two below, obviously you remember me.’

‘Oh, yes,’ lied Claudia, ‘of course, yes.’

Kirsty looked around the courtyard and the groups of people clustered around the heaters, ‘Odd time of year to have a party, isn’t it?’

Claudia hadn’t organised the party. ‘Is it?’

‘I mean January, really? People are barely back from skiing.’

‘Oh, I suppose so. Quite nice to be outdoors with the heaters on, isn’t it?’

Kirsty was looking down her nose at Claudia, sceptical, ‘You really don’t remember me, do you? We met at James’s service.’

‘His funeral?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Kirsty shook her head as though Claudia had said the wrong word and she wanted to shake it out of her ears. People unfamiliar with loss often behaved as if death was a vulgar mistake other people made.

‘Sorry,’ said Claudia, ‘it was a fairly hectic day, I’m sure you appreciate…’

‘Yeah yeah yeah. James and I, families knew each other. Ski school.’ She widened her eyes with surprise as if astonished at herself.

There was an edge to Kirsty, as if she wanted something but resented asking. She was wearing the bad tribal outfit of James’s class but she was a fine-looking woman underneath it, with a good long face, wide blue eyes and a poise that belied her head-girlishness. ‘We were only thirteen, yeah?’

Claudia didn’t know what she was being asked to affirm. The best she could come up with was, ‘Gosh!’

James had told her about ski school. His parents were quite old and had sent him away over Christmas thinking it would be a treat to be with other young people. But James was too young to be away, read the trip as rejection and cried all week.

‘Thirteen is so young! Too young,’ said Kirsty, not specifying for what and trundling on, ‘but, obviously, we knew each other since we were very little, kiddie parties and so on. Families…’ She sipped her drink, blinked twice and looked away.

Claudia gave a non-committal hum and tried to sidle off but Kirsty followed her. ‘Got kids, haven’t you? Boys?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ages?’

‘Thirteen and sixteen.’

‘Yeah. I didn’t work much when mine were little but I’m keen to get back into it.’

She stared at Claudia, unblinking, as if the ball was now in her court. ‘Back into what?’

‘Forensic reporting. D’you know of anything? I mean, I’ve got a doctorate from Oxford too, so…’

So juries will believe me, is what she meant, so judges will defer, so benefits-of-the-doubt will follow me all the days of my life.

‘James used to say how sinister it was that the red-brick universities corralled all the most ambitious young people together and crammed tradition down their throats as if they were showing them that change is impossible.’

Kirsty blinked and a weak smile wavered on her face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And Merton is lovely.’

Claudia sighed. She missed James a lot.

She came from a lower-middle-class home in Glasgow and arrived here via Oxford and a good marriage. She sometimes felt like an anthropologist among the Maasai, deciphering gestures and measuring heads, comprehending only a fraction of what was said, but even she could see that there was a hierarchy of belonging and some, like Kirsty Parry, might be in the group but were very definitely at the bottom.

‘Well,’ said Claudia. ‘I know Hamilton Analytics are looking for someone to run their low copy DNA lab. They’ve probably got work in other fields. What’s your specialism?’

Kirsty answered quickly. ‘That.’

They grinned at each other. Kirsty must want work badly enough to wing it and Claudia liked that.

‘Hubby’s between jobs at the moment, city… I’m feeling like I’d like to dip the toe…’

She was desperate for work. Claudia guessed that the husband had been sacked or had a breakdown, maybe their mortgage was overdue.

‘Well, you could do reports on the low copy job or, hear me out, something you actually know about. Was your DPhil research or theoretical?’

‘Research. Professor Dale’s project on haemolymph clotting in caterpillars. But I did tutor on the Forensic Science Masters.’

‘What did you tutor?’

‘Ethics in ancestry DNA sampling, blood spatter analysis and probabilities, all that stuff.’

‘Blood spatter? That’s my area—’

‘Oh, I’m well aware of that,’ said Kirsty, as if Claudia had taken a job that had been promised to her. ‘I tutored on the use of the O’Sheil Blood Spatter Probability Scale, actually. Specifically on your 3D reconstruction model.’

The Blood Spatter Probability Scale was Claudia’s seminal work, partly developed during her DPhil but never properly monetised because the university owned part of the copyright for her thesis. Her system fed all the blood spatter information from a crime scene into a computer programme which then created a 3D model reconstruction of the events. It had been groundbreaking and she was proud of it. After James died, Philip showed Claudia how to separate out the parts owned by the university and use the rest. He helped her register a worldwide licence on the BSPS. The effort had started to pay off now: it was so persuasive that it was being used by defence lawyers in every case that could afford the technology.

‘Well, Hamilton Analytics are always looking for analysists who can talk coherently on the stand. Believe it or not, most experts aren’t great at public speaking.’

‘Okay. Cheers for that. I saw Steve Hamilton earlier.’

‘Oh, you know Steve?’ Claudia had spotted him across the party. He had a distinctive head of hair that looked like a very expensive toupee but wasn’t.

‘Of course. Everyone knows everyone,’ said Kirsty, looking around for him.

Kirsty was right, this was an unusually narrow social tranche. They were all born rich or, like Claudia, were as driven as Tam O’Shanter fleeing Old Nick, running twice as fast as everyone else to feel they were keeping up. In her own middle-class Catholic Glaswegian background everyone knew each other, met at mass and attended the same schools, but the additional factor here was money and the worry that people who didn’t have any were trying to get theirs. Fear made the bond hermetic.

Kirsty was looking at her. It was probably Claudia’s turn to say something. ‘Small world,’ was the best she could come up with.

Kirsty was delighted by this. ‘Oh!’ she said, as if this was an earth-shattering observation, ‘Terribly small!’

Philip slid a shoulder in between the two women. ‘Kirsty Parry…’

‘Sir Philip Ardmore!’ Kirsty brightened at his presence. ‘We were just saying what a small world it was.’

Claudia could see that Kirsty found Philip terribly attractive. A lot of women did. He was tall and drole and always well dressed. Claudia liked small, angry men like James. It may have been her disinterest that made it possible for them to be friends.

He and Claudia were so closely associated that her assistant, Rob, had nicknamed them ‘Mop ’n’ Bucket’. They were as close as anyone could be with their boss: Philip confided sometimes, about work frustrations, how his divorce from his chaotic wife, Mary, was going, about his love life. He was cryptic about it. He currently had a crush on someone he called ‘L.B.’. Claudia reciprocated the confidences a bit but always held a little back. He was her boss after all.

Kirsty wandered off, absorbed into another group nearby.

Philip shook his head, ‘I knew I should come over when I saw you talking to Kirsty Parry.’

‘Doctor Kirsty Parry,’ corrected Claudia.

‘Oh yeah, she’s terribly keen on the titles. Called me ‘Sir’ eight times in one sentence earlier.’ Philip was still a little queasy over his recent knighthood, granted in the last New Years Honours list.

‘She said “everyone knows everyone” as if I was trespassing on the gene pool.’

‘An odd fish,’ he frowned. ‘That hairband screams fifth place at the gymkhana. Oh God, look who she’s talking to now.’

They looked over at Kirsty, now standing with a group of people listening to Sir Evan Evans murder an anecdote. Something about his shoes being Italian! From a little man in Perugia! Wooden lasts hanging up all over his teeny, tiny little shop! You had to go in sideways!

Evan Evans was the dullest man in London. He routinely began a story and forgot where he was going with it, not because he was old, but simply from the sheer habit of being listened to when he shouldn’t have been. His money was as old as his face was red. Claudia thought people were so open in their dislike of him because he was what they feared they might be: rich and dull and only invited out of obligation because he donated to everything.

‘I can’t abide that braying fool.’

Claudia watched Kirsty nodding over Evan Evans’ shoulder at his audience, as though he was delivering their conjoined thoughts. She quite liked Kirsty. She trusted people with clumsy social skills.

‘Oh, my little stubby legs are aching.’ Her stubby little legs were fine but she wanted to move the conversation on from bitching because it was a downer. ‘Let’s sit down, shall we?’

They looked around and found a bench.

It was a relief to get out of the rolling howls of heat from the mushroom heaters, nice to feel the crisp evening air wash across their faces. Darkness was falling softly and the lights from inside the building glowed upward, warm and flattering. She sat down and gave a little groan. Her shoes were formal and pinched.

‘I must be getting old,’ she said. ‘Tonight has wiped me out.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you’re not even forty,’ said Philip, sitting down. ‘Wait ’til you’re my age. My knees pop so loudly they wake me up at night.’

He was trying to cheer her up, it was sweet, but she must have been looking miserable for him to try so hard.

‘Anyway,’ she tipped her glass at the lovely setting. ‘Here’s to a job well done, Philip, to getting this built, setting up ForSci and all the charity work you do. A knighthood well deserved.’

‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘Here’s the catch. I’ve been working up to telling you all night. I’ve been asked to chair the Forensic Ethics Committee. We’re drawing up a protocol on what is and isn’t admissible, stop phrenology and palm readings getting into court, but I’d have to divest myself from ForSci.’

That sounded ominous. ‘And will you?’

‘Thinking about it, yes. I have a buyer looking at the company. A conglomerate have been making increasingly wild offers for nearly a year. Will they be impressed? It’s all going quite well?’

She said yes, they were getting lots of commissions, doing a high volume of court reports under the new system.

Forensic testing had recently been taken out of public ownership and privatised. Companies like ForSci and Hamilton Analytics commissioned tests and submitted a Streamlined Forensic Report to the court, bringing all the results together in a concise single page that was easy to digest. The defence could accept the test results in the report or dispute it, in whole or in part. Mostly they accepted the report and the case proceeded on an agreed set of scientific facts. It was saving the courts a lot of time.

ForSci Ltd were at the forefront of this new market and Claudia’s Blood Spatter Probability Scale was their calling card. It was Claudia’s idea to pay their staff commission for each bid submitted and work was flooding in.

‘Want to buy my stake?’ he said, serious for once.

He didn’t know that Claudia’s finances were still dire, that James had left nothing but debts. ‘Still reeling from James, to be honest. I think I should avoid big decisions for a while.’

‘All right, well, I have a potential buyer but I’ll have to step aside as Clinical Director. Would you take the position? It’s a lot more money and there’s a house because the director has to live in central London.’

‘A house?’

‘It’s draughty but a nice part of Belgravia.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘No. It belonged to my grandma, actually, but it was sitting empty. I signed it off to the company as a tax write off.’

James was a lawyer. He would have asked more about that but James was gone.

‘Is that usual?’

‘Oh, yes. The office needs to be near the courts, you need to live near the office. Perfectly usual. You’re a great asset.’

A house. She was currently roaring through her savings paying the rent on a cramped ex-council flat in Lambeth.

‘Let me think about it?’ But she was going to say yes. ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow. How’s L.B.?’

He was having an affair with someone, possibly married, definitely secret.

‘Oh, you know,’ Philip smiled and a soft blush broke high on his cheeks, ‘little evenings here and there. Christmas is always difficult.’

A mobile phone rang out, muffled.

Panicked at vague thoughts of her boys falling, fleeing, fighting, Claudia flattened her hand on her handbag to feel for vibrations. Nothing. Relieved it wasn’t hers, she looked at Philip. He stood up, patted himself down and pulled his buzzing mobile out.

‘Hello?’

He had pressed speaker by accident and the glass behind him amplified snippets of the voice on the other end. It was a woman’s voice, flat-toned and urgent: ‘Sir Philip Ardmore? Chester Terrace. Come at once… Two dead… We have the place surrounded.’

Philip froze. ‘Bixby?’ His face glazed over and he stared blindly into the middle distance.

‘Get here right now,’ demanded the voice. ‘We cannot have another Lucan.’

Philip caught sight of himself in the mirrored glass and his hand startled open in surprise. The phone dropped, spinning through the air until the corner met the concrete and the glass face shattered to opal. The phone spun on its edge, tottering like a hero cop shot through the heart, until it fell onto its back, dead.

Philip stared down at it, open mouthed.

Claudia stood up. ‘What?’

His eyes were vacant and wide, his breathing shallow.

‘Who was that? Philip? Sit down.’

Eyes unfocused, Philip reached for the bench to sit but then remembered suddenly he had to leave and jerked away, missing the paving stone, his ankle buckling and righting itself as she caught his arm.

Claudia tried to pull him back to the bench, ‘Come – sit down for a minute.’

He mumbled something about driving.

‘You’re not driving anywhere alone,’ she said, wishing someone had done this for her when they called about James. ‘Not in that beast of a car. And you’ve been drinking. I’ll come. I’ll drive.’

A deep velveteen dark ebbed through the trees in Regent’s Park, rare enough in central London to make night itself feel expensive. They were sitting in Philip’s Aston Martin DB9, parked on double yellow lines on the Outer Circle, looking across a private garden to Chester Terrace, a long white façade of very grand townhouses, each worth tens of millions. The tedium of the white frontage was broken up with runs of Corinthian columns and pediments but the houses behind were uniform, all tall, impassive, haughty.

Except for one.

Flashing blue siren lights washed across the face of number 10. On the first floor a knocked-over lamp shone straight out of the window, slicing into the dark like a blitz-era searchlight. Uniformed police officers stood guard at the front door with their thumbs hooked into the armholes of their hi-viz stab vests, watching the road, on high alert behind crime-scene tape strung across the steps.

The street in front of the house was one way, single lane, but police cars and incident vans had driven into it from both sides. Several vehicles had doors left wide open where the occupants had run into the house.

Claudia recognised the armed response vehicle. An active shooter must have been suspected but officers guarding the door meant the scene had been cleared. The biggest scene-of-crime van was there. Multiple bodies.

Something very bad had happened.

The house itself looked cherished. It had window boxes of pink and purple cyclamen hanging messily over the sills and curtains open on windows dressed with ornaments on the ledge inside, a classic move to foreground the gaze of passersby and stop them peering into the occupied rooms. This house was loved and lived in. It stood out because so many of its neighbours were sterile, metal bars over dark windows and corporate curtains. A lot of London property sat dark: the city was the new Casablanca, a non-place where dark money could hide and fester in the warm.

In the car beside her Philip’s breathing was fast and shallow. Soft yellow and pink lights from the dashboard uplit them both.

She was waiting for him to ask her to drive up to the house. He’d barked at her to stop here, just for a moment, please, he couldn’t quite stand to go there yet. This was why they were parked on double yellow lines watching the house across a dark private garden, a fenced-off strip of lawn with big rhododendron bushes that blocked the view from the public road. Still, a smattering of passersby had gathered to gawp. A man out walking his dog and a cyclist chatted amiably, silhouetted by the bright lights from the house. Further along a figure was standing on an upturned plastic crate, watching the house through a long-lens camera.

Back in the car Philip’s hands were clamped tight between his knees. He was tense, sitting like a small boy waiting to be told bad news about home. She had never seen him look vulnerable. She felt oddly at home in the middle of this unfolding catastrophe. Her heart rate had slowed, her blood pressure dropped. It was as if she was built for calamity now.

Philip leaned forward to look past her and she read the movement as a sign he was thawing.

‘Shall we go on up now?’

‘A little longer?’

‘Sure.’

‘Sorry, Claudia, you need to get back for the boys.’

‘It’s fine, Philip, my sister is there.’

‘Gina’s still here?’

‘Still, yeah.’ She touched his forearm and felt him bristle. It was too intimate. She withdrew her hand. ‘Are you worried about being photographed?’

‘No, I’m just trying to catch my breath. The people who live there. Friends.’

She thought suddenly it might be L.B. ‘Close friends?’

‘One is a school friend. Since we were seven. At school. They want me to identify the bodies.’

‘Isn’t there someone else who could do that?’

‘Yes, but it’s better if it’s me.’

Identification was always a priority. No one wanted the wrong family notified of a horrific event.

She understood now why they were waiting in the dark, why he had dropped his phone and was too shaken to drive. They saw scarring sights all the time at work, bloody images and haunting details, but they all developed techniques for dealing with that: covering a victim’s face, looking only at the injury instead of the whole person, avoiding biographical details. These things all helped them do their jobs dispassionately. Identifying the remains of someone they had known in life was a very different thing and Claudia knew how bad it was. She. . .